JOLLY DAYS, an artist's journal

Christopher Hitchens’ sad rhyming with the malady that did in his father — esophageal cancer — was brought to the fore movingly, and in that strange manner of contemporary life, publicly, as Hitchens almost appeared to be making the rounds in this dire moment. He was on video at CNN, at the Atlantic, and discussed at length on Charlie Rose by Martin Amis.

Amis has a natural gravitas and, as usual, was beautiful in his use of language. Hitchens is lucky to have Amis as a friend. We have both our experience, which we define as our life, but also the spirit existence that our presence inhabits in the memory and thoughts of others. Amis’ mental universe provides generous accommodation to Hitchens. Amis made clear how dear a loss Hitchens’ passing would be for him.

Their friendship goes back. Hitchens regards Amis as the greater of the two — Hitchens is the self-described smaller fish. Hitchens is right. Amis is a novelist and artist and Hitchens is a commentator. A wonderful commentator, and fine writer, but still the field delimits the achievement. Hitchens is only 61, far too young for a prognosis he indicates is little likely to be longer than five years. Of course, it is always too young, always too soon.

Hitchens himself, it is gratifying to say, is still at his best in a short, beautifully written recent essay @Vanity Fair about his experience.

On the land of the sick,

Everybody smiles encouragingly and there appears to be absolutely no racism. A generally egalitarian spirit prevails, and those who run the place have obviously got where they are on merit and hard work. As against that, the humor is a touch feeble and repetitive, there seems to be almost no talk of sex, and the cuisine is the worst of any destination I have ever visited.

Hitchens had been a long time smoker and as many who work on their own, at home, driven by a heartless boss,

I suppose, I have been “in denial” for some time, knowingly burning the candle at both ends and finding that it often gives a lovely light. But for precisely that reason, I can’t see myself smiting my brow with shock or hear myself whining about how it’s all so unfair: I have been taunting the Reaper into taking a free scythe in my direction and have now succumbed to something so predictable and banal that it bores even me.

On receiving chemo,

You feel swamped with passivity and impotence: dissolving in powerlessness like a sugar lump in water.

Hitchens can be alternately abrasive and oily, true to his upbringing, with a mother who wished he be part of the upper class “if there is to be one,” and a father who disliked the upper and working classes equally. Hitchens brings a respectability and artfulness to dispute and made the debate more meaningful. By nature he is not a rebel, as Amis would have it, but a provocateur. But Amis is correct in saying Hitchens is a brave man.

I write this as if he were gone, but he is here, and if not “fighting a battle,” a phrase he points out is unique to cancer, he is hardy in spirit both in the videos and his writing — may Hitchens have many years before him to contribute and thrive.

In an interview I once heard with a successful scientist he said that one of the more important characteristics of good scientists is conviviality. In order to advance in the field and to advance the field itself, a scientist needed to receive and communicate information freely. Once you hear that, it makes sense. How else would you keep up with the latest research and understand the thinking of colleagues in related fields?

In this discussion at MIT, Robert Horvitz instantiates the affable characteristic. Horvitz won the Nobel Prize for his work on apoptosis — the mechanism of programmed cell death. Horvitz stumbled into biology after meeting a charismatic teacher/mentor.

It is worth listening to the hour long discussion just to hear his description of epigenetics (the heritability in gene expression) — a “larger” genetics. He describes the structure of DNA and histones (yielding order to DNA); it makes you wonder how this incredible complexity could have been sorted out, especially when you take into account that the structural presentation of the DNA also has impact.

One point Horvitz emphasized was the importance of basic research. That is, research with no immediate pragmatic application. Horvitz studied a lint sized soil worm. He was told such a focus would lead to career death. However the little digger helped Horvitz prove them wrong; with its 900 genes and short life cycle, this little worm provided some of the deep secrets of Nature and snagged for Horvitz and colleagues a Nobel.

In an online discussion about the science of immortality, which I heard some time back, a theoretical scientist made some surprisingly convincing arguments. A book has been written about the theorist, Aubrey de Grey — a perfect name, right out of Poe — and here is the NYT review by a professor of internal medicine.

The theorist feels that since aging is essentially the entropy of a system (healthy body) Nature has evolved, it is simply required that we learn to clean out the refuse the entropy accrues.

The beauty of this view is that “curing” aging requires no special knowledge of design, or any understanding of just how the cellular junk got there in the first place. It only requires that we get rid of it.

The article doesn’t mention it, but Aubrey de Grey is speculating about a boundless future in good health, at a reasonable stasis age for continued productivity. In the online discussion he had worked out the steps — the disease cures necessary and probable, as one big issue — for this prospect to be considered. The many social issues: population growth, endless wealth accrual, well the arena is large and just goes on, but at the very least the idea of immortality as a possibility provides a pragmatic spur to gain some context for our delimited lives.

The arguments made by de Grey are so logical, and his optimism so infectious, it is difficult to reject out of hand, as natural skepticism might have it. Especially since one might already be predisposed — as biological beings are enamored of life (and forget the pain so easily — a state of punctuated amnesia).

Eternal life? Why not? There is a worm in the apple though. Like a Twilight Zone episode, that old bugger unexpected consequences would most likely rear its head. The Twilight Zone episode which comes to mind is the one about a man with terrible vision who just wanted to read but his Xanthippe wouldn’t let him; he survives a nuclear exchange, finally getting to read in peace, only to lean forward for his beloved books and breaks his glasses.

You have to give credit to someone who will make a movie about a font, but that is what the documentary Helvetica attempted. I’d heard positive things about the film and finally decided to sample it via a Netflix stream.

In some ways this is a documentary about taste and about consensus. The Helvetica font was settled upon by large institutions, as an acceptable, non-offensive, bridge from modernism into the contemporary. Helvetica expressed bland authority and unquestioned entitlement.

In some ways, the Helvetica font is the Trajan font of our age — the font you see on Roman buildings and governmental buildings in America — invisible by its ubiquity. A cold and anonymous typeface whose chief attribute is legibility — although Trajan has an authentic beauty of form Helvetica does not. That said, I am sympathetic with the designers who feel that typefaces deliver content but aren’t the content. So Helvetica does its utilitarian job.

The array of designers commenting on the font had its own interest. One overwrought designer likened Helvetica to a glass of fresh water on the desert of awful, terrible, horrible 19th century design. Personally, I like much about 19th century design, although Helvetica is okay as well. It would take an effort to get too worked up about this peripheral realm of design.

One other designer pointed out the push/pull in Helvetica — a Hans Hofmann, abstract expressionist idea — the tension between ground and figure. The sharp insight was that Helvetica had a perfect fit between ground and typeface. Helvetica is of the grid and the machine and it locks in place visually.

The problem with Helvetica is that it is dead, drained of human interest, and purely utilitarian. The strange conflation of ideas that images are always conjuring: Helvetica is both socialist in its aspirations and corporate in its manifestations. Helvetica is not personal, but astringently impersonal. On the other hand, minimalism works very well in graphic and industrial design: witness Apple.

Macbeth struggled with the milk of human kindness; current evolutionary theory is predisposed towards the mechanical survival mechanism as paramount in explaining compassion. If kindness is there, it is there for a purpose, so they say.

In this NYT article about a study of empathy in the young it is suggested that the young are hollow careerist vessels…

In a decisively everyone-for-themselves manner, [the young] are less likely to agree with statements like “I often have tender, concerned feelings for people less fortunate than me” and “I sometimes try to understand my friends better by imagining how things look from their perspective.” …
Previous studies have documented an increasing narcissism among college students since the late 1980s. And Americans in general perceive decreases in other people’s kindness and helpfulness.

Given that studies like this are at the edges of what could even loosely be called science…and so might only be an expression of a general despair about the way things are going in this age…we can still speculate about the general proposition:

…these days, a transference of empathy is apparent: people love their pets with a fierce empathy. Then again, those pets might not be the real focus, but the extension of ego that the pet represents. A proxy narcissism. And pets aren’t people, which is the real target of meaningful empathy.

…there is tribal empathy: people show empathy towards and make excuses for those they see as members of their affinity group — in our time, conformist partisans are particularly prone towards enabling. But aren’t they affirming the tribe, and their group membership, not their fellow tribalists? Look at what nastiness ensues when the tribal conceptual bond is broken, even slightly. Thought police always lurk in partisan climes, always ready to ostracize and expel from the hive.

The milk of human kindness appears of no benefit in a competitive society — although the appearance of kindness can have its cynical value. But that would not be an empathic insight. Or would it?

I had always been disappointed that Helen Vendler, a wonderful writer about poetry, did not use a more conversational voice in her book about Shakespeare’s Sonnets, which is linked in the navigation column on this page.

Her writing over the years for the NYRB was always accessible, without the lingo of academia, which often obscures more than reveals. Her deep understanding of the mechanics, and she would probably argue, further appreciation therefore of the value of what she discusses, wasn’t for me a great read.

But she is a subtle thinker, an insightful critic, and no small issue, has her own value system which won’t be subsumed to fashion. So even the Shakespeare book had great interest.

In this NYT review of a book by a poet filled with enthusiasm for his subject, Walt Whitman, Vendler once again offers sharp and helpful remarks (the poet C.K. Williams is Vendler’s reference),

Although Williams calls him “compulsively gregarious,” Whitman could hardly have composed his monumental poems without spending a good deal of his time not being gregarious, but rather sitting, thinking, reading, writing, revising.

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Williams knows that the real meat and drink in Whitman’s work lies in the poet’s unprecedented assembling of rhythm, sound, language and images.

But in the end, for Williams, the didactic trumps the aesthetic: we are brought back to the poetry’s moral demand that we be “greater than we are.”

This, however, cannot be the purpose of poetry, which necessarily subsumes even the ethical under whatever it has set up as the aesthetic law governing a particular construction. Ethics — like landscape, or anecdote, or history, or psychology — is part of the raw material of some (but not all) poetry. Like other ingredients it plays a necessarily subordinate part.

Wonderfully said, Helen Vendler. What Vendler calls, “the aesthetic law governing a particular construction,” is what I would call the poet’s sense of the world and ability to express that overriding sense; to weave it into meaning that is felt.

I write this book to disembarrass my soul of certain notions that have hovered about in it too long for my comfort. I do not seek to persuade anybody. I am devoid of the pedagogic instinct and when I know a thing never feel in myself the desire to impart it to others. I do not much care if people agree with me. Of course I think I am right, otherwise I should not think as I do, and they are wrong, but it does not offend me that they should be wrong. Nor does it greatly disturb me to discover that my judgment is at variance with that of the majority. I have a certain confidence in my instinct.

I must write as though I were a person of importance; and indeed, I am—to myself. To myself I am the most important person in the world; though I do not forget that, not even taking into consideration so grand a conception as the Absolute, but from the standpoint of common sense, I am of no consequence whatever. It would have made small difference to the universe if I had never existed.

You can tell, not only from the way the ideas are expressed, but from the ideas themselves, that this was written by someone from another age. The perspective, modesty (but with substantial ego), and wisdom, suggest it was written at another time.

It was written by Somerset Maugham in “The Summing Up”. I read that book a long time ago but it really left an impression.

The modern memoir is another deal entirely…

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Christopher Hitchens has written a self-described memoir. The NYT has a brief review which scatters such phrases as, “[Hitchens] has a moving personal story and is a pasha of vice”. A pasha of vice.

The review says there is nothing much new in Hitchens’ memoir but it is hard not to like the guy. Damned by faint endorsement.

(In fact, the NYT is steadily drifting from the pop culture’s version of a “newspaper of record,” to yet another tabloid expression of contemporary junk culture.)

To see the full bloom of the latter you can read the Q&A, in which Hitchens bats the sludge back with some dignity,

Q.Your mother committed suicide, in a pact with a lover, in I973. Did she suffer from lifelong depression?


A. No. I think she was having a bad menopause, and she was losing her looks, which were pretty impressive.

Hitchens is a bracing, unpredictable thinker. People like Hitchens (and there are only a handful) should be given awards just for shaking things up — the hive mind being what it is: smug and intolerant. There is nothing less allowed than trying to work out an issue for oneself. Hitchens’ unfortunate affirmation of his “consistency” in the Q&A is less a bragging point than his efforts at his own brand of honesty, which will often result in honorable contradictions.

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The review is titled, “Do I Contradict Myself?” Perhaps unknowingly meant to be snide (no surprise at the NYT); perhaps knowingly, quoting,

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)
—Whitman

This NYT article about the Human Genome Project says,

…after 10 years of effort, geneticists are almost back to square one in knowing where to look for the roots of common disease.

The expectation that knowledge equates to resolution is part of the contemporary mindset, where concept equals expression.

… with most diseases, the common variants have turned out to explain just a fraction of the genetic risk. It now seems more likely that each common disease is mostly caused by large numbers of rare variants, ones too rare to have been cataloged…

The problem arises in raising hopes and playing to the crowd (media), which causes scientists to overstate the potentials of their enterprise and diminish the difficulties. In some ways this diminishes science itself.

The public wants hope, the media wants a feel good sound bite, so some scientists will abide. Hollywood’s “high concept” approach to pitching films has permeated the culture.

The value of understanding, even if we are currently powerless to do much, is still of value though:

The slowly emerging explanation is that humans and other animals have much the same set of protein-coding genes, but the human set is regulated in a much more complicated way, through elaborate use of DNA’s companion molecule, RNA.

What this scientist says about genome mapping and hopes for cures could be a useful credo:

“One can prefer to be an optimist or a pessimist, but the best approach is to be an empiricist.”

Scientists at Fermilab have found suggestive evidence that might help answer an age old mystery. The scientists working at the National Accelerator Laboratory,

…found that the fireballs produced pairs of the particles known as muons, which are sort of fat electrons, slightly more often than they produced pairs of anti-muons. So the miniature universe inside the accelerator went from being neutral to being about 1 percent more matter than antimatter.

The question why there is something rather than nothing sounds philosophical. But the way science has been going: more abstract, more conceptual rather than intuitive, more mathematically derived rather than observational, makes the question no longer solely a resident in the dominion of philosophy.

I doubt that the answer scientists provide to the great questions will be any more authoritative than that offered by philosophy — or even satisfying. But science is still hanging onto some credibility in a world that challenges common sense. So the discovery might be a revelation of sorts, explaining the mechanics of creation itself. And with knowledge comes hope.

[ via Lifehacker.com ]

The above video discusses in an entertaining way the ideas currently in fashion about economics. The premise, that we are irrational beings deluding ourselves of our reasonableness, is confirmed everyday in the news. But this clear presentation is still interesting.

I would change the wording, but in summary, the presentation notes that money and achievement are not related.

What motivates people if not the carrot of money and the stick of unemployment?

• Play. What the presentation calls Autonomy. If you are allowed to play you collect the best of yourself. One company allows its engineers one day a week to do whatever they want, with the sole stipulation that they show the results to the company.
• Learning. What the vid calls Mastery. People want to grow. It is a blessing of human nature. If we grow we are happy. Surprise. It isn’t looks, status, money — they all help of course given our biological predispositions — but it is the desire to be better and fulfill our capabilities that satisfies in the long run. Life is short and learning is long.
• Purpose. I’ll agree with this word. It is really the social impulse, the religious impulse, the tribal impulse. Something larger than ourselves to which we can contribute.

Human beings really aren’t so bad — despite what you see on the evening news. It is the structures we erect, often with good intent, that force us into a self-made Procrustean bed, where we lose control and become the servant of some system, destroying our natural impulses to grow, learn and contribute.

You can find online a study guide to Cognitive Biases.

The descriptions of the biases themselves leads one to think of comedy. Seinfeld could have done, (and by indirection often did), storylines illustrating these irrational paths we all follow in trying to arrive at a rational decision.

Here are some of the biases which could be attributed to those engaged in the partisan wars — apply this to whatever affinity group you wish — they will fit like a glove:

Outgroup homogeneity bias
Individuals see members of their own group as being relatively more varied than members of other groups.
False consensus effect
The tendency for people to overestimate the degree to which others agree with them.
Just-world phenomenon
The tendency for people to believe that the world is just and therefore people “get what they deserve.”
Hyperbolic discounting
The tendency for people to have a stronger preference for more immediate payoffs relative to later payoffs, where the tendency increases the closer to the present both payoffs are.
Negativity bias
Phenomenon by which humans pay more attention to and give more weight to negative than positive experiences or other kinds of information.
Illusion of control
The tendency for human beings to believe they can control or at least influence outcomes that they clearly cannot.
Framing
Using an approach or description of the situation or issue that is too narrow. Also framing effect – drawing different conclusions based on how data is presented.
Moral credential effect
The tendency of a track record of non-prejudice to increase subsequent prejudice.
Bias blind spot
The tendency not to compensate for one’s own cognitive biases.
Bandwagon effect
The tendency to do (or believe) things because many other people do (or believe) the same. Related to groupthink and herd behaviour.
Wishful thinking
The formation of beliefs and the making of decisions according to what is pleasing to imagine instead of by appeal to evidence or rationality.
Reactance
The urge to do the opposite of what someone wants you to do out of a need to resist a perceived attempt to constrain your freedom of choice.
Disregard of regression toward the mean
The tendency to expect extreme performance to continue.
Overconfidence effect
Excessive confidence in one’s own answers to questions. For example, for certain types of question, answers that people rate as “99% certain” turn out to be wrong 40% of the time.
Authority bias
The tendency to value an ambiguous stimulus (e.g., an art performance) according to the opinion of someone who is seen as an authority on the topic.

So, we are irrational creatures. Not out of ill intentions, but out of heuristics: the mental shortcuts we use to make decisions. The best we can do is to find the particular errors to which we are most prone and try and compensate.

Social function clicks in though. If you are struggling to be fair and objective and others seem unconcerned, but out of ego are pursuing their irrational goals, you have lost some edge in the argument. But then your own thinking was similarly distorted, so you may be wrong as well and it is ego that drives the argument, on both sides.

This is why the arts deal with ambiguities and not declarations of conceptual truth in trying to express the human condition.

There is no objectivity, in the humanities or even in the sciences, where at one time, it seemed, science was the sole oasis of objectivity.