tragos: Archive

“As for politics, ‘the author’s portrayal of the parties of the period lacks moderation.’ This is a key phrase; it always signals a defender of the status quo in society as well as in the realm of thought. Moderation may be a virtue in action, because the consequences of action are irreversible and can rarely be modified, but when we read, what we require from an author is that he should make his point, sharply and clearly; we can modify it ourselves if need be. But Sainte-Beuve wants moderation in thinking: he doesn’t want an author to write vigorously about important matters that touch everyone. He wants everything said with so many qualifications that when he closes the book he will find his brain in exactly the same state as when he started reading. He doesn’t want his mind tampered with while relaxing with a book, and he wants you to be left similarly undisturbed: at most you may acquire new ideas about unimportant subjects which do not reflect on how things are arranged in the world. In short, he doesn’t want you to think at all.

Great realistic fiction is liberating because it portrays individuals in the light of their abilities and actions and ranks them according to their intrinsic worth rather than their position in society. In this sense all true fiction is subversive.” —Stephen Vizinczey, Truth and Lies in Literature: Essays and Reviews (1986), University of Chicago Press, 1988, pp. 294-295. From the section of the title essay dealing with a 1984 reedition of Proust’s By Way of Sainte-Beuve (Contre Sainte-Beuve). Vizinczey is discussing here Sainte-Beuve’s cowardly appraisal of Stendhal’s The Red and the Black. (via msodradek)

Author Kay Hymowitz asks the question: what does the extended life of pre-adulthood mean for 20-something men and the women who (no longer) love them?

Feb 25, 20115 notes

“This [Enlightenment] tradition of the novel is fundamentally secular – coincidence or human machinations, not God, order destinies. It is a form that is plural, forgiving, profoundly curious about other minds, about what it is to be someone else. On its central characters, high or low, rich or wretched, it manages, by a sort of divine authorial attention and focus, to confer respect on the individual.” —
“Ian McEwan on winning the Jerusalem prize” in today’s Guardian.

Feb 24, 20119 notes

#lit #literature #words #history #novels

“…I’ve always had this feeling that the ability to speak freely, in two different languages, gives you a kind of freedom with respect to yourself, a freedom given by no other means.” —

Raymond Aron, Le Spectateur engagé. Éditions de Fallois, p. 54, my transl.

[“.…j’ai toujours eu le sentiment que la capacité de parler librement, dans deux langues différentes, vous assure une espèce de liberté par rapport à soi-même, qu’aucun autre moyen ne donne.”]

Although I certainly love the challenge of engaging other languages, I grew up in a very monolingual household, and every bit of linguistic flexibility I’ve gained is incomplete and suspect. But I do feel like I’ve been given at least limited vantage into the kind of freedom the great political theorist Raymond Aron (whom I’ll be discussing much more over the next while) believes bilingual experiences spawn in ourselves.

What I feel is that attempting to speak, read, or write in another tongue forces you to realize how the quality of languages holds sway over your thoughts. Once you recognize how easy it is to read newspapers in other languages, and how often specific phrases and ideas recur in them, you start to gain a greater appreciation for the poetry, plays, novels and essays in your own language.

Sometimes I feel that languages don’t so much give you freedom in respect to yourself, as much as they do freedom from yourself. It’s the liberty a Halloween costume supplies, a respite from the reflexive unthinkingness of your given identity.

But here is what I don’t know, trapped as I am in my own parochial ignorance. What is it like to be bilingual in actuality, to speak two languages as if they were your first? Aron learned German as a young adult, and so can hardly serve as witness to the experience of inherited polyglotism. Same with me. I’ve very much struggled to learn languages as an adult and therefore I approach them from an insuperable remove.

Does actual bilingualism provide different kinds of freedom? Is Aron’s opinion the result of encountering foreignness in his own brain, a foreignness I assume (maybe stupidly) true bilingualism does not afford, or affords in radically different ways?

Again, it is frustrating to feel as trapped as I do by my own inherited monolingualism, and I would love to hear about your experiences with other languages, in whatever form they take.

Feb 24, 201120 notes

#languages #words

On Science Fiction in Ancient Greek Literature

The very funny classicist Eush is answering questions tonight. She received one recently about the presence of science fiction in ancient Greek and Latin literature. I thought I would weigh in on this issue, mostly because I can’t help myself.

Did you know that the first instance of robots in ancient Greek literature—possibly in any literature, so far as I know (little)—is in Homer’s The Iliad?

It’s in Book 18, when Achilles mother Thetis petitions the god of fire and work Hephaestus to make her son a set of divine arms.

Here is the quotation:

“At once he was helped along
by female servants made of gold, who moved to him.
They look like living servant girls, possessing minds,
hearts with intelligence, vocal chords, and strength.
They learned to work from the immortal gods.”

[Translation Ian Johnston, Malaspina University-College, Nanaimo BC, available online in its entirety here. Book 18, lines 516-520 (415-420)]

Feb 23, 201135 notes

#science fiction #robots #classics

Feb 23, 201129 notes

#Turkey #food #places #GPOYW

Feb 23, 2011519 notes

#animals #water #air #photography

world-shaker:

If a computer can win at “Jeopardy,” can one grade the essays of freshmen? At George Mason University Saturday, at the Fourth International Conference on Writing Research, the Educational Testing Service presented evidence that a pilot test of automated grading of freshman writing placement tests at the New Jersey Institute of Technology showed that computer programs can be trusted with the job. The NJIT results represent the first “validity testing” — in which a series of tests are conducted to make sure that the scoring was accurate — that ETS has conducted of automated grading of college students’ essays. Based on the positive results, ETS plans to sign up more colleges to grade placement tests in this way — and is already doing so.

No, no, no, no, no. Unless that machine understands nuance, style and well-formed arguments, NO.

Actually, I do think a computer can grade college essays, provided those essays are the usual Procrustean five paragraph exercises in putting socks and underwear in the right drawers.

The ease with which computers probably can grade these essays shows how much we should rethink college writing assignments. A fresh reading of Michel de Montaigne’s Essays is a great place to start. In inventing the form, Montaigne thought of the essay as an attempt, rather than an answer (from “essayer,” “to try”).

I myself don’t know what it would mean, exactly, to assign a “Montaignesque” essay to college students (though I’ve tried, with varying degrees of success). What I know, if only from experience, is that the five-paragraph-with-a-thesis-and-supporting-arguments is not only an arbitrarily chosen form…it makes it easy for intelligent students to get easy ‘A’s, for other students to cheat, and for everyone to sink under the weight of sheer pedantry.

I can’t help asking a few questions about the idea of the essay today. Such as:

What do we want students to get out of writing an essay?
Is the emphasis on “evidence” too beholden to models of knowledge better suited to the social sciences or natural sciences?
What is the genealogy of the current five-paragraph essay? Who started it? Why? Why is it so dominant?
What kind of writing would bring out the best that the humanities has to offer? In other words, if the humanities are exceptional in their ability to ask us to think about the subjunctive mood (i.e., wishes, desires, and statements contrary to fact), what form of writing would draw on this ability best?
What form of writing would most naturally inspire undergraduate students to ask themselves further questions? In other words, how writing would spawn rather than stifle curiosity?
What do we mean when we use the word “critical”? Usually, I assume the word is meant to evoke the standards and practice of moral, aesthetic, and philosophical judgment. If so, or at least if so, to some degree, what writing will be best suited to exercise of these forms of judgment?

Feb 23, 201120 notes

#education #computers #writing

soupsoup:

Here is an english translation

Feb 23, 2011196 notes

#News #politics #Libyra

theatlantic:

Libyans fleeing across the country’s western border to Tunisia reported fighting over the past two nights in the town of Sabratha, home of an important Roman archeological site 50 miles west of Tripoli. Reuters reported that thousands of Libyan forces loyal to Col. Qaddafi had deployed there.

“The revolutionary committees are trying to kill everyone who is against Qaddafi,” said a doctor from Sabratha who had just left the country, but who declined to give his name because he wanted to return.

There were also reports of fighting in Misurata, a provincial center 130 miles to the west of the capital. A witness said that messages being broadcast from the loudspeakers of local mosques were urging people to attack the government’s opponents, following Colonel Qaddafi’s call in a defiant television address Tuesday night for citizens to assist in eliminating opponents of his regime. A local radio station that had been broadcasting opposition messages was reported to have been attacked.

In Rome, meanwhile, Italian Foreign Minister Franco Frattini on Wednesday estimated the death toll in Libya at 1,000. Noting that the situation was chaotic, Mr. Frattini told reporters that he also believed estimates that more than 1,000 Libyan civilians had been killed in the clashes in recent days “appear to be true.”

Read the rest at the New York Times.

Feb 23, 201121 notes

#News #politics #human rights

Feb 23, 2011959 notes

#animals

Feb 23, 20111,654 notes

#photography #transportation

“As finite creatures who think and feel, we [humans] can create islands of meaning in the sea of information.” —

Freeman Dyson, theoretical physicist and mathematician, reviews James Gleick’s new book, The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood in the The New York Review of Books.

Dyson’s review is appropriately circumspect about the implications of this recent “information explosion” we’re hearing about so often these days. This phrase, “islands of meaning,” is intensely but merely suggestive.

There seems to be a slew of books recently published that discuss the disparate meaningless of information as we find it online. My experience both belies and confirms these alarmist takes on the abstraction that is “information”.

I really can’t help being ambivalent about the ideas, facts, and phenomena I encounter in the cyber-hinterlands. Sometimes online information seems the boon of a lifetime, and sometimes its bane. For this reason, my own attempts to fashion my own “islands of meaning” are faltering and inconsequential.

What I wonder is this: how do you all take the gigantic salmagundi of information you find here on the very wide world of the web and make it work as something like an “island of information”? And what tools and ideas do you think would help in such an effort?

Feb 22, 201110 notes

#information #people #ideas

“Islam, politics, economics: choose two.” —

Turkish historian H. A. Karasar’s exam question, as quoted by Norman Stone in Newsweek’s article, “Egypt Isn’t Turkey.”

Stone explains why Egypt will never follow Turkey’s model: in short: Egypt lacks an Atatürk.

Feb 22, 20111 note

#Turkey #politics

Feb 22, 201192 notes

#water #animals #photos

“One must not fall into the mistake of turning a blind eye to the people’s demands for democracy and freedoms. The Libyan administration must not commit such a mistake.” —Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan warned Libyan authorities against making the “mistake” of ignoring the people’s demands for democracy and freedom. More: http://aje.me/ggNFV2 (via aljazeera)

Feb 22, 201181 notes

#Turkey #human rights #politics

“Books are pleasant, sure. But if we lose our happiness and health—our best parts!—while indulging the habit, it’s time to quit.” —

Michel de Montaigne, “Of Solitude,” Les Essais, Livre I, Édition de Pierre Villey, p. 245, my transl.

[“Les livres sont plaisans; mais, si de leur frequentation nous en perdons en fin la gayeté et la santé, nos meilleures pieces, quittons les.”]

Feb 21, 201115 notes

#paroles #la vie

tragos

February 2011

125 posts