And isn't this a lovely tribute to the literature Nobelist who's found her way into a few of my posts?
There are some writers who rearrange your vision so that other things look as though they are influenced by her mind. That may be what Carson did to Jack and it may be what Carson did to me. Maybe I am picking out different things to blog or finding excerpts in some new way, framing the post differently, and maybe Jack is reading these things differently.
Don't you want writers to shake up your world? Don't you want to live in the enchanted world where dogs send you messages that psychics step up to translate?
Carson says some things about dogs. Like this, from page 142 of the Kindle edition of "Wrong Norma" (commission earned): "I don’t know much about dogs. Big black-and-tan fellow and what a barker. You could hear that dog all over town. Short Pants and I staked out the property a few days to get the pattern. Generally the dog slept till 7 or 7.30 a.m. when the judge came out in his Nikes, whistled three times and called the dog’s name. The dog would explode from his sleep place and off they go down the street to the path by the lake. Short Pants had no trouble mastering the whistle and call. His talents go beyond mere mimicry — a firefly after all can mimic another firefly by some mindless reflexive chingchingching of cranial circuitry but to impersonate a ninth-circuit court judge so competently that his own dog can be induced to wake him with ecstatic cries at 4 a.m. nine days in a row required not only conscious and complex manipulation of all the musculature of Short Pants’ throat but a philosophical awareness of the aims of human speech. Weekdays I waited in the schoolyard till I heard the barking then went home to lay out toast on the railing. Nine days of this and then the weather turned. Rain of an extreme nature was predicted and hurricane-force winds."
Yeah, it's threatening to rain around here. And it is quite windy. Time to get some errands done. I hate errands. But when 3 errands pile up and you see a path to tick them off in a row, they're doable. Suddenly, it's sunny, threatening to divert us into a walk in the woods. But it's windy, and the trees have revealed their idea of murdering us some windy day. Not through psychics, however. They've revealed it by throwing down life-ending branches quite near us. And every one of those trees will fall in the end. And here we are, testing our luck by walking in the woods every day.
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41 comments:
Shouldn't this get a "Men in Short Pants" tag?
Google points to this Anne Carson leture on Goya's dog.
Yes I said Yes I do Yes Yes
“And isn't this a lovely tribute to the literature Nobelist who's found her way into a few of my posts? ”
Erm…not quite what I had in mind. I just meant it seemed a bit scatterbrained.
“Don't you want to live in the enchanted world where dogs to send you messages that psychics step up to translate? ”
Well, I have tried shrooms a couple of times, but they didn’t seem to do anything for me. Maybe I need stronger ones or something.
Dogs aren't that hard to read that a psychic is required. What amazes dogs in fact is that you can read them. That means you added language to their repertoire.
I like yer moxie, prof.
I thought I was suffering from that thing which causes you to not be able to read sentences...
I will leave it to Smilin'Jack as to whether Carson "influenced his mind." She has not influenced mine, except to wonder what the hell some people are thinking.
Dogs are like young boys (and girls, I suppose, but I was never a girl so I don't know) who are completely and totally fascinated by something, to the point where you have to know everything about it, and everything is real and important.
When I was a kid I was like that about baseball; I read everything I could find about it, knew the batting averages and home run totals for the top 10 players in the league, knew all the rosters and studied baseball history, learning about Cy Young, Christy Matthewson, Home Run Baker and Rocky Colavito. Everything relating to baseball was very important to me. I was hyperfocused on baseball.
Dogs are like that about humans. They watch us and know more about us than we know about ourselves. They are hyperfocused on us.
Copilot's Conclusion [to the Anne Carson lecture linked to by Rh @ 11:51 AM]
“HIK: Hesitation.” The central idea is that hesitation is not merely indecision or blockage, but a meaningful state of attention, waiting, openness, and encounter with the unknown."
"Carson ends by arguing that ignorance is unavoidable and that hesitation may be an appropriate response to mysteries we cannot fully understand. Rather than rushing to certainty, she suggests we pause, attend, and remain open to what lies beyond our understanding, whether in art, animals, other people, or the world itself."
Copilot is a Microsoft AI. (It says it's content may be incorrect.)
“ Erm…not quite what I had in mind.…”
It would be funny if you did!
“ Shouldn't this get a "Men in Short Pants" tag?”
Ha ha. I actually thought about that.
Is Short Pants a parrot?
"Is Short Pants a parrot?"
Good guess. A crow.
Writing as Shaking kaleidoscope
Excluding the video, the posts today are alternating good job/bad job posts.
"Good guess."
Not exactly a guess, a deduction from the evidence, though I'm surprised SP is a corvid. While most of that family can mimic human speech (the jays being a notable exception) the Psittaciformes are generally better at copying human intonation. However, since the mimicry is a whistle rather than strictly speech, let's leave the Canary Islanders out of this for the moment, then I suppose its possible for a crow to impersonate a human whistle sufficiently to fool a dog. Dogs have good hearing compared to humans, but they're not known for their auditory acuity. In face, as natural predators of many bird species, they can be fooled by sound. It is likely that the remarkable auditory mimicry of birds evolved to distract predators and to confuse or intimidate rivals. Parrots are great mimics, but they take a backseat compared to the Menurides.
Typo alert: In fact, as natural predators of many bird species, they can be fooled by sound.
The Muscicapoidea, thrushes, starlings, oxpeckers, and mockingbirds are superb mimics, though most lack the tonal range range to faithfully copy human speech, a notable exception being the mynahs.
In late summer, red-shouldered buzzards stop feeding their offspring to force them to hunt for themselves. Being cut off from parental largess, the young often use their "feed me!" vocalization incessantly through the daylight hours for three to four days during the last of July. The they stop begging and start hunting, mice and voles mostly, but song birds are also taken. However, people report hearing the begging call into September, but they are being deceived just the dickie birds clustered around Mrs. Smith's birdfeeder. The call is being made by a hidden mockingbird planning to claim the feeder for himself alone. (Most call them red-shouldered hawks, but they are buzzards. Trust me. Buzzards are not vultures, btw. So the bird an American is like to call a buzzard is not a buzzard.)
What amazes our dog is that i can read at all. She disapproves of my syntax and thinks it quite illiterate.
It's great to see someone engages with the classics get the Nobel.
My dog gets fooled by audio from the TV all the time. I don't. I do get fooled by jays from time to time.
Whistling like a judge is no big deal. It doesn't take much. Judges are not that special, their own opinions notwithstanding.
Chance the Gardener. Banalities disguised as profundities.
And if that is "the classics," we have not come very far.
"Buzzards are not vultures, btw. So the bird an American is like to call a buzzard is not a buzzard."
I grew up on Buzzards Bay. A lovely place. Very few vultures; a few buteos. The "buzzards" were osprey. Gosnold didn't know birds.
The osprey were largely missing in my younger days, but have made a wonderful comeback. The environmentalists should take a bow, but they are more interested in telling us how everything is going to hell because of "capitalism." 50 years on and the environment is so much better. U.S. GDP has grown to 12 times as much as 50 years ago. That's 1200 percent growth. the osprey population has grown roughly tenfold. that's 1000 percent growth.*
Maybe we can learn something?
*There have been recent declines in the Chesapeake. This is attributed almost universally to the unregulated harvesting of menhaden, the primary foodsource for osprey and rockfish (striped bass) in Virginia waters. Why Virginia, a state controlled by liberal Democrats, doesn't put a stop to this is is a mystery for which the only answer is money. Not "capitalism." Graft.
Another thing killing ospreys are wind turbines.
"There are some writers who rearrange your vision so that other things look as though they are influenced by her mind."
I looked at her biography on Wikipedia. She is a professor of the classics.
There is a book that Quaestor has read, that I have also read: The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind.
This morning I had a dream. I was in an apartment building, and I was visiting different rooms. In some of the rooms were people I knew. . The last room I visited was the top floor of the building which I thought was a public observatory, but instead it was someone's room. That person was an old enemy, someone with whom I'd had a physical fight.
At first I considered that I had entered my enemy's room without his permission, but then I realized, no, it was my room. I asked him, "whose room is this", and he said correctly, "This is your room because it's in your mind". And I realized I was in a dream, and I also realized that if I could see one of my enemies in my dreams, I could see others.
There's one enemy I do not want to see in my dreams.
On the stairway back down I stopped and started yelling, I know this is a dream, I want to wake up. I don't want to dream anymore, wake up, wake up! I could not wake up, but my dream shifted, and I met no more enemies in my house.
Our houses are private places unless we open them to our guests. I've opened part of my house to the entire world today. I guess a mind is not really a house, but's a close alternative, sort of an alt-house.
And a question of grammar considering my typo: "but's a close alternative", I wrote "I'd had" as short for "I had had" so why couldn't I just use: I'd'd as short for that?
I wrote "I'd had" as short for "I had had" so why couldn't I just use: I'd'd as short for that?
I would not dare offer a definitive answer, except to note a conclusion I have reach from my miserable studies in linguistics: Language precedes grammar. A language must have a long-standing history of common usage before grammarians can derive from it a coherent body of rules. Consequently, they frown upon innovation. Hwæt?
"I thought I was suffering from that thing which causes you to not be able to read sentences..."
Ha ha. I know what you mean.
"His English mastiff was dying, so he hired her to read its mind. But when she met the man with the messy hair, he kept apologizing for his casual outfit." Makes you feel as though you've experiencing transitory alexia, like the time I had to go to the emergency room because I couldn't read "The Story of the Foul-Mouth Parrot Andrew Jackson Once Had."
And speaking of parrots, Quaestor, above, asked "Is Short Pants a parrot?"
Is he too harking back to my bout with alexia?
"Excluding the video, the posts today are alternating good job/bad job posts."
Cool idea, but I think it works better if you don't exclude the video. The crane flying did a good job and so did the hero dad. But then you have to see Anne Carson as a bad writer.
(Assuming I understand the idea!)
"Dogs are like that about humans. They watch us and know more about us than we know about ourselves. They are hyperfocused on us."
They don't "know." They're like AI. They are using what we give them and reflecting it back to us. They have their own agenda, which we only know because it's so simple: They need us to keep them fed. Fed food. They feed us all manner of bullshit they've learned will keep us feeding them, and we lavishly consume their bullshit.
But with AI, we know to maintain our critical thinking and to be on guard for bullshit. With dogs, we willingly enter and stay within the fantasy that what they are feeding us is true.
I say "we," but I don't have a dog. I've been around some dogs, for short periods and I have appreciated them (some of them), but I've never had a love relationship with one. I've never owned a dog. I've considered getting one but ultimately avoided that relationship. I affirmatively do not want it. I decline the love relationship that is central to the deal (unless it's some sort of working dog).
"Not exactly a guess, a deduction from the evidence, though I'm surprised SP is a corvid...."
Yes, and why didn't Edgar Allan Poe have a parrot saying "Nevermore." Would have been a lot more believable.
Things I asked Grok at 4 in the morning: "Rewrite Poe's "The Raven" but make the bird a parrot. Change the words accordingly. I want a parody, that is, a 'parrot-y.'"
It ends:
Then the Parrot cocked his head and, with a squawk that shook the door,
Added brightly, just to spite me: “Polly want a cracker? Nevermore!”
"I guess a mind is not really a house, but's a close alternative, sort of an alt-house."
Ha ha. Thanks.
Great dream. Thanks for sharing it.
When I originally adopted the name "Althouse" for this blog — a process described here, something like that was the second of my 6 reasons: "It has the word 'house' in it, which makes it seem like a place, and a blog is a sort of place."
(I really like having "house" as part of my name!)
Polly wanna cookie... no make it four.
Disney has the House of Mouse. We have the House of Louse.
What an an itchy predicament.
"Is he too harking back to my bout with alexia?"
Of course I am. All parrots are fowl-mouthed.
Alexia. What a word. I predict that before Thanksgiving, someone is going to register a new-born daughter as Alexia.
I think we're all going to shortly experience a reading crisis. Almost daily I encounter a concatenation of Roman letter that make little sense in English, mostly in online news sites. The explanation seems to be a vast conspiracy aimed at fostering a Big Brother-style banishment of useful, clear-meaning words, particularly the pronouns he, him, his, she, her, hers, it, and its -- all to be replaced with a non-descript, grammatically obscene they, them, or theirs. Just a few days ago I encountered a news item on the BBC website about a mauling incident at a private zoo (in Derbyshire?). The animal was a Bengal tiger, and the mauled victim was a young autistic man who deliberately climbed into the cat's enclosure. After a few clearly written sentences that clearly established the five Ws of journalism, the item descended into anti-factual chaos that did rhetorical violence to the story and to our exquisitely evolved English grammar by a hailstorm of unwarranted theys, thems, and theirs.
I'm getting heartily sick of it to the point of murderous intent toward the poltroon who typed that excrement into the internetwork data stream.
The Argentine president employs a dog psychic to tell him what's on his pets' minds. Much of the job could be a "mentalist" thing of picking up on the animal's body language to get an idea of what they might be feeling. No "mind reading" is necessary.
You could turn the "dog psychic" phrase around. Dogs with their hyperacute sense of smell could tell us things about ourselves and our surroundings that we don't know ourselves. Unfortunately, they haven't been able to communicate their insights to us -- so far.
Somewhere in the world there is a Sra. Ocasio-Cortez who, meaning to name her daughter Alexa, comes up with Alexia by mistake.
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