Notes and Links

* I will be moving to a new apartment over the next few days; I don't know how that will affect posting.

* Philosophers' Carnival LXXVII is being hosted by Kenny Pearce.

* Speaking of which, Kenny is doing some guest blogging at Houyhnhnm Land; his first post, on Berkeley's account of ordinary objects is a good one, and it looks like it might receive some good discussion. Go over and join in.

* Also, I'm looking for other guest bloggers at HL; the posts have to be on some facet of early modern thought (or approaches thereto), but just about anything falling under that label would work. I'd love, for instance, to get historians of all kinds, literary scholars, and the like adding their two cents; I'd also love specialists from outside the early modern period looking at how later periods viewed the early modern period or how earlier periods prepared for it; and so forth. With Houyhnhnm Land I really am trying to break into new ways of doing history of philosophy, taking it to new heights through new interactions, new methods, etc. But, however clever I may be, doing that successfully requires more than myself alone. So if you're interested, let me know what you have in mind.

* St. Jerome on educating little girls. Fascinating stuff; some commentary here.

* Yup'ik Tundra Navigation. How the Yup'ik navigate the frozen wastelands. A quite sophisticated set of methods and rules of thumb, as you might expect. (ht)

* Michael Flynn on his short story, "Quaestiones Super Caelo et Mundo," an alt-history science fiction tale toying with the idea of a scientific revolution in the Middle Ages due to a counterfactually early translation of Philoponus. (It's quite a good story, if you haven't read it and are interested in medieval philosophy; you can find it in some issue or other of Analog.) Incidentally, and I do mean 'incidentally', since it is entirely tangential, I don't think I've mentioned Flynn's book In the Country of the Blind
before here; I highly recommend it, and think it Flynn's best work so far (much as I like Eifelheim). You would certainly like it if you like psychohistory or Analytical Engines.

* D.G.D. Davidson reviews the Girl Genius comics. Girl Genius is online. It's pretty decent if you like long story arcs and fiction in the style of steampunk; although the authors call it 'gaslamp fantasy' in order to mark out the fact that it diverges from standard steampunk tropes. You really do have to read it from the very beginning to make sense of much; but you can get a taste from the short stories page.

* But you shouldn't hold it against Girl Genius that it's praised by someone who can write a post on the strengths and weaknesses of the first season of Battlestar Galactica and not only not mention Laura Roslin's quiet yet ruthless awesomeness, but say nothing more favorable about her than "moderately tolerable." Moderately tolerable!

* Michael Liccione on whether freedom is the ability to choose rightly.

* YouTube Finds:
Al Stewart, Merlin's Time.
David Gray, Ain't No Love.
Tsofnat, Umbrella (Rihanna cover).
Tapio Heinonen, Vanhe Tie.
Blind Willie Johnson, John the Revelator.
Billy Joel, Pressure.
Golden Earring, Twilight Zone.
Logic gates using toys.
Dr. Kamala Krithivasan has a series of lectures on logic (computer science) for her Discrete Mathematical Structures course. Part 1: Propositional Logic, Part 2: Propositional Logic (cont'd), Part 3: Predicates & Quantifiers, Part 4: Predicates and Quantifiers (cont'd), Part 5: Logical Inference, Part 6: Resolution Principles & Application to PROLOG, Part 7: Methods of Proof, Part 8: Normal Forms, Part 9: Proving Programs Correct, Part 10: Sets, Part 11: Induction, Part 12: Set Operations on Strings Over an Alphabet, Part 13: Relations, Part 14: Graphs, Part 15: Graphs (cont'd), Part 16: Trees, Part 17: Trees and Graphs, Part 18: Special Properties of Relations, Part 19: Closure of Relations, Part 20: Closure of Relations (cont'd), Part 21: Order Relations, Part 22: Order Relations and Equivalence Relations, Part 23: Equivalence Relations and Partitions, Part 24: Functions, Part 25: Functions (cont'd)

Logic and Science

The sad thing is that you can find people who reason that way.

If you don't at least occasionally read the Girl Genius webcomic, you are missing out on some great panels. If you've never read it at all, of course, you should start at the beginning sometime when you have a few hours free.

Phoenix Requiem is another good story-arc webcomic, too; it has a sort of fantasy alternative-Victorian feel to it. (It's also a bit shorter, and its story arc is completed, and not extending apparently into infinity like Girl Genius with its ten-thousand-member ensemble cast.) Precocious is another one; it handles the long-arc problem by breaking things up into smaller stories. But all these are long-time survivors; I don't know of any good recently new ones.

Notes and Links

* Carnivalesque #50 is up at "Mercurius Politicus".

* The 91st Philosophers' Carnival is up at "sevenlayercake". None of the posts were particularly striking this time around, at least to my taste, but the host blog is a fairly interesting philosophy blog I hadn't come across before.

* Scott Gilbreath has a nice post on St. Bede, patron saint of historians.

* Very cool: the mathematics of language change:

Lieberman, Michel, and colleagues built upon previous study of seven competing rules for verb conjugation in Old English, six of which have gradually faded from use over time. They found that the one surviving rule, which adds an "-ed" suffix to simple past and past participle forms, contributes to the evolutionary decay of irregular English verbs according to a specific mathematical function: It regularizes them at a rate that is inversely proportional to the square root of their usage frequency.

In other words, a verb used 100 times less frequently will evolve 10 times as fast.

* Also cool: the Espresso Book Machine. It will probably make less of a change than one might think, but it's still an awesome bit of technology.

* I've never been much of a reader of graphic novels, but I've read a few onlines recently. Girl Genius I've already recommended; another good one is The Phoenix Requiem, by Sarah Ellerton; it's a much quieter and slower story than GG, although it makes up for the latter by having a much tighter story and shorter arcs of plot. It's a fantasy with broadly Victorian inspirations -- in effect, it's a sort of modern Victorian ghost story, although the events don't actually take place in Victorian Britain. Some of the artwork is exquisite.

* Harvet Ismuth's 42 Essential 3rd-Act Twists.

* I think much of the hubbub over Sotomayor has been blown out of proportion, for reasons I won't go into here. However, I haven't seen any discussion of the fact that Sotomayor, if her nomination gets approved, would bring the Catholics on the Supreme Court to six out of nine. (All the evidence is that Sotomayor is a pretty minimal Catholic, but still attends Catholic church on major holidays and when visiting family.) That will leave Stevens as the only Justice who is neither Catholic nor Jewish. This strikes me as an odd situation; do Catholics really so overwhelmingly dominate high-level judicial circles? Even as recently as Alito's nomination there were concerns about the Court tipping Catholic; given the political lay of the land, I doubt that this will be a major concern this time around, but it's curious that Catholics are so massively overrepresented on the Court in comparison to the general population. Steven Waldman notes that on the big political issue that always comes up we don't actually know anything about Sotomayor: that is, her record does not give any indication of whether she is pro-choice or pro-life.

* Here and there over the past few years I've seen a great many Christians who are of the opinion that argument with the so-called New Atheists should be a major priority among Christians, and I recently saw another instance of this. They don't generally ask my advice, but whenever people do, I always suggest that this is exactly the wrong way to go. The fact of the matter is, however important they may seem to themselves, and however visible they may be, they are of extraordinarily minute importance in the vast concerns of the Church. Our relations with Jews, Muslims, Sikhs, Hindus, and Buddhists are all vastly more important, and our relations with our fellow Christians more important still. And of all the foes we fight in our fight against the World, the darkness of the Zeitgeist, the New Atheists are puppy dogs; it is foolish to spend our time focusing so much on the little pups that we ignore the wolves. And of all the problems we face, we ourselves are more of a problem for us than they are; particularly the absurd ease with which we all are distracted from what is truly important by the fact of who happens to have made it to the bestseller list recently, or by some other utterly frivolous thing. And what is truly important, of course, is clear: Love God and neighbor, and when we somehow fail to do so, set out again and again until with God's grace we succeed. Everything else is hobby.

The Best Online Comics?

I was thinking recently about some of the best examples of online comics (I'm thinking about single-strip comics rather than story-arc comics like Girl Genius).

One example would be xkcd's "Duty Calls," which perfectly summed up internet culture in a single panel. And obviously xkcd has a lot of potential examples.

Another would be Saint Gasoline's "The Allegory of the Trolley Problem Paradox," which is a nearly perfect philosophy comic.

What are some others?

Mark Twain, Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc, by the Sieur Louis de Conte

Introduction

Opening Passage: This is one of those books that has no strict opening passage, since it purports to be a translation of a historical work, and thus has its fictional translator's preface, plus the prefatory material of the quasi-fictional narrator, as well as the work itself. But this is the first paragraph of Book I, Chapter I:

I, the Sieur Louis de Conte, was born in Neufchateau, on the 6th of January, 1410; that is to say, exactly two years before Joan of Arc was born in Domremy. My family had fled to those distant regions from the neighborhood of Paris in the first years of the century. In politics they were Armagnacs—-patriots; they were for our own French King, crazy and impotent as he was. The Burgundian party, who were for the English, had stripped them, and done it well. They took everything but my father's small nobility, and when he reached Neufchateau he reached it in poverty and with a broken spirit. But the political atmosphere there was the sort he liked, and that was something. He came to a region of comparative quiet; he left behind him a region peopled with furies, madmen, devils, where slaughter was a daily pastime and no man's life safe for a moment. In Paris, mobs roared through the streets nightly, sacking, burning, killing, unmolested, uninterrupted. The sun rose upon wrecked and smoking buildings, and upon mutilated corpses lying here, there, and yonder about the streets, just as they fell, and stripped naked by thieves, the unholy gleaners after the mob. None had the courage to gather these dead for burial; they were left there to rot and create plagues.

Summary: Personal Recollections is the story of Louis de Conte, a quasi-fictional character based on occasional mentions in historical documents of Joan's page. He is, in effect, country gentry who grows up with Joan in Domremy, as the above opening suggests. He, along with two others, Edmond Aubrey, usually called by his satirical nickname, "the Paladin", and Noel Rainguesson, end up attending Joan on her incredible journey first to the King then to victory, then to her capture and trial. Especially with regard to the latter, Twain makes an effort at sticking to the evidence, but this is not a cut-Joan-down-to-size exercise; for one thing, Twain himself actually admires Joan, and his narrator adores her (Twain occasionally has to bring in the fictional translator to defend Louis's accuracy), and for another, we're talking about a seventeen-year-old girl who took control of the armies of France and turned a losing war into a winning one, despite having no military background, so trying to treat her as unremarkable is going to fail, regardless. But Twain's Joan is also in many ways a plausible seventeen-year-old girl. She hates fighting; she's just not afraid to do it. She weeps for the deaths of enemies as well as the deaths of friends. She doesn't want to fight wars; she wants to be done with it and go home, and is sometimes impatient with the fact that people keep delaying her. The only reason she is there is because the Archangel Michael, and Sts. Catherine and Margaret, told her to do it. It turns out that she has a natural talent for it: she has the 'seeing eye' and can thus estimate very well what a man can do in battle or where the weaknesses of an enemy are. And much of her success is purely military in nature. One of France's problems was that its command was highly disunified, and she suddenly brings a unified command. Her popularity with ordinary people increases military recruitment massively, and sometimes additional funds. Other aspects of her success lie simply in the fact that she is a peasant girl: she sees immediately what the nobles, whether French, Burgundian, or English, miss, namely, that as far as the majority of people are concerned, what really matters is legitimacy. All the nobles on both sides are so concerned with territory that they simply don't realize until after the fact the sheer devastation to the English cause of Charles being anointed King of France in the right place and in the right way, because until that point they were fighting merely one possible contender for the throne, and after that point they are fighting a person widely recognized by the peasantry as the legitimate King of France. Most of what Joan does is not miraculous, but just talent and shrewdness. But she never claimed to be performing miracles; from her perspective, she was just following the advice of her Voices who, being saints in heaven, could be counted on to know what to do. And Twain captures this very well.

Twain does not stint on the arts of storytelling here; he pulls out at one point or another almost every tool in the toolbox. We have brutal, ghastly description, like the opening scene of Paris with rotting corpses. We have hilarity, in the form of the buffoonery of the Paladin, the perpetual exaggerator, who can never tell a story again without making it even bigger than it was previously. The story is structured not just by plot, but also by narrative voice, by recurring themes, by symbolic images. One of the more interesting cases is Twain's use of the Fairy Tree, which we know of from Joan's trial. It is used to capture her childlikeness, and her peasant roots, and also her ability to be somehow ordinary and extraordinary at the same time. It gets a lot of discussion at the beginning, and only occasional mentions afterward, but it is not a minor feature, even later: whenever it is mentioned something very significant is happening. It is a sign of the Something More, the Legendary in Real Life, of which the common people have always had a sense, however much courts and scholars may try to exorcise it.

Twain's book seems to me to be a model of how to do historical fiction well. His fictionalizations and historical details are both carefully chosen, he adapts his language to the occasion without jarring shifts, he knows when to tell and knows when to show, he is profoundly aware of the importance and dangers of the particular narrative voice one uses, he gives the reader more to look at than museum pieces while not turning the history into mere background, and, perhaps most important of all, he genuinely loves the story he's telling. George Bernard Shaw accused Twain of being infatuated with Joan, but this is not definitely the flaw he assumes it is (how flawed the storyteller who can only tell of things he does not profoundly love, and how flawed the reader who cannot stand to read of things that are so loved!), and even Shaw was forced to concede that, however he might dislike the goody-goodiness of Twain's Joan (which he exaggerates), she shows the marks of having been written by a storytelling genius, someone capable of taking a character who could easily have been implausible and making her very credible. But, of course, it is Twain's love of Joan that makes her story so vivid, and makes him take such care in writing it. This is a crafted story, and it is told in a way that gives us the illusion of having the full experience of those who were there, from the brutality of war to the humor of the pub to the piety and blasphemy of the camp to the smooth unreliability of the court. Sometimes this diversity gives us a bit of a disjointed picture, it should be said -- but this is inherited from the material, and the disjointed character of France itself in the fifteenth century.

Where Twain most succeeds, I think, is that he gives us a Joan of Arc capable of becoming JOAN OF ARC. It is clear from things that Louis says that Twain realizes fully that this is the standard a tale of Joan of Arc must achieve. It is one that is rarely achieved, due to modern flaws. Despite modern contempt and dismissal of hagiography, historical figures don't get hagiographies for no reason. Twain's tale is not a hagiography, but his Joan is one that someone might write hagiographies about. Despite the modern love of characters stuck in the banal, a banal Joan would not have taken charge of the armies of France; Twain's very plausibly could. Many modern portrayals make her too bland to lead, or too hardened to be loved, or too delusional to be shrewd; Twain avoids them all, because, wonder of wonders, he actually likes Joan and is not out to 'uncover' her dark secrets or hidden flaws. And the inevitable result is that Twain's Joan makes much more sense as a character, and seems much more vivid and real, like a real person, however extraordinary, than all these supposedly knowing portrayals. Perhaps the ultimate sin of the historical novelist is thinking that there is no mystery to history, that he has it all figured out, that extraordinary people don't exist and astounding events never happen. Even if this were true in fact (which it is not), it is not what historical evidence, layered and multifaceted as it is, actually gives us; it is not the way anyone actually approaches their own history or the history of their nation; and it is not what makes us think that history has stories worth telling. The inevitable result of approaching historical fiction this way is that you lose the richness that makes historical fiction worth writing and reading in the first place: instead of full-bodied history, such a novelist gives us a cardboard diagram of it, and, even worse, tries to pretend that this flat diagram was all there ever was to the matter, when we know that even our own lives are not that flat and one-note. The historical novelist who is worth his or her salt gives us characters and events that can deliver as promised, gives us a story that is as rich as history must be to be the kind of thing making all the stories possible, does not confuse 'historical novel' and 'hatchet job'. Twain manages it, and he manages it because he loves the story he's telling and is out to convey what he loves about it; but he loves it enough that he's honestly trying to let it speak for itself, to show its wonderfulness on its own, which is what we do when we truly love something and are trying to tell others about it. God have mercy on historical novelists if they ever forget such a thing; and God have mercy on us if we ever lose the ability to appreciate it.

Favorite Passage: There are a lot of good ones, especially humorous ones with the Paladin or serious in some of the descriptions of battles, but most are too long to put here. This (somewhat brutal) one gives a good sense of the better serious ones, in which we are fully confronted with the fact that we are actually in a war that is often taking place in and around the homes and farms that surround the cities:

At eight o'clock all movement ceased, and with it all sounds, all noise. A mute expectancy reigned. The stillness was something awful—because it meant so much. There was no air stirring. The flags on the towers and ramparts hung straight down like tassels. Wherever one saw a person, that person had stopped what he was doing, and was in a waiting attitude, a listening attitude. We were on a commanding spot, clustered around Joan. Not far from us, on every hand, were the lanes and humble dwellings of these outlying suburbs. Many people were visible-—all were listening, not one was moving. A man had placed a nail; he was about to fasten something with it to the door-post of his shop-—but he had stopped. There was his hand reaching up holding the nail; and there was his other hand in the act of striking with the hammer; but he had forgotten everything—his head was turned aside listening. Even children unconsciously stopped in their play; I saw a little boy with his hoop-stick pointed slanting toward the ground in the act of steering the hoop around the corner; and so he had stopped and was listening—-the hoop was rolling away, doing its own steering. I saw a young girl prettily framed in an open window, a watering-pot in her hand and window-boxes of red flowers under its spout—but the water had ceased to flow; the girl was listening. Everywhere were these impressive petrified forms; and everywhere was suspended movement and that awful stillness.

Joan of Arc raised her sword in the air. At the signal, the silence was torn to rags; cannon after cannon vomited flames and smoke and delivered its quaking thunders; and we saw answering tongues of fire dart from the towers and walls of the city, accompanied by answering deep thunders, and in a minute the walls and the towers disappeared, and in their place stood vast banks and pyramids of snowy smoke, motionless in the dead air. The startled girl dropped her watering-pot and clasped her hands together, and at that moment a stone cannon-ball crashed through her fair body.

Recommendation: An underappreciated bit of Mark Twain at the top of his writing game. You cannot go into it, however, expecting uproarious humor -- it is a very serious work, although attempts to treat it as completely atypical Twain are unconvincing (it is notable that in Twain's lifetime it was attacked both for not having enough of Twain's humor and for having too much of it), and the interactions between the Paladin and Noel are sometimes hilarious. For the most part it's more along the lines of what one gets in The Prince and the Pauper, but less whimsical, and the humor occurs largely in the side-lanes of the story. Most of the criticisms of this work, which has nonetheless always had its fans, are due, I think, to readers who cannot reconcile it with their preferred images of Mark Twain, not because of anything in the book itself; and, frankly, having read more of these criticisms in the past two weeks than I would ever bother with otherwise, they largely show the general stupidity and incompetence of critics and scholars discussing Twain, since they often seem to be incapable of grasping very elementary points of symbolism, theme, or plot, and in particular those that are involved in serious historical fiction. I don't recommend the critics, in general; if you haven't noticed, they've done very little more than stir up my impatience and make me roll my eyes. But the book itself is definitely recommended.

Maria Edgeworth, Belinda

Introduction

Opening Passage:

Mrs. Stanhope, a well-bred woman, accomplished in that branch of knowledge which is called the art of rising in the world, had, with but a small fortune, contrived to live in the highest company. She prided herself upon having established half a dozen nieces most happily, that is to say, upon having married them to men of fortunes far superior to their own. One niece still remained unmarried—Belinda Portman, of whom she was determined to get rid with all convenient expedition. Belinda was handsome, graceful, sprightly, and highly accomplished; her aunt had endeavoured to teach her that a young lady’s chief business is to please in society, that all her charms and accomplishments should be invariably subservient to one grand object—the establishing herself in the world:

“For this, hands, lips, and eyes were put to school,
And each instructed feature had its rule.”


Mrs. Stanhope did not find Belinda such a docile pupil as her other nieces, for she had been educated chiefly in the country; she had early been inspired with a taste for domestic pleasures; she was fond of reading, and disposed to conduct herself with prudence and integrity. Her character, however, was yet to be developed by circumstances.

Summary: Belinda is a young woman who lives with her aunt, Mrs. Stanhope, who as a woman of the world prides herself on being a 'catch-matchmaker', having set up all her other nieces with very nicely lucrative marriages. She sends Belinda to the lively and witty Lady Delacour so that she can get a better sense of the world. The association with Mrs. Stanhope, however, will cause her some problems; everyone assumes that Belinda is herself a worldly girl out to seize some money-laden bachelor with money, including the handsome and somewhat frivolous Clarence Hervey, who otherwise gets along well with her. She discovers very quickly that Lady Delacour's marriage is less than ideal, with both Lady Delacour and Lord Delacour constantly engaged in a kind of petty warfare with each other, and that Lady Delacour herself, despite being friendly and charming, often stretches the bounds of propriety with her friend Mrs. Freke (who likes dressing up as a man and doing shocking things for no other reason than that it is a "frolic" and bit of fun). It takes a bit longer for Belinda to discover a more serious secret: Lady Delacour is so frivolous and even superficial in her ways because she is hiding the fact that she is dying from cancer, and she would rather go out mocking the world than being pitied by it. Due to gossip, both malicious and unthinking, Belinda is several times suspected of rather seriously bad things by Hervey, by Lady Delacour, and by others, and will have to protect her reputation, and perhaps win through to a marriage that whether or not it is a good marriage in Stanhope terms, will be one that is genuinely good.

Just summarizing the plot makes it sound like the heart of the story is the potential romance between Belinda and Hervey, but in fact the novel is a story about the friendship between Belinda and Lady Delacour, two very different people who like each other and -- slowly, and occasionally with difficulty -- learn how to do each other the best good. While Hervey and other episodes take up quite a bit of the book, they are all occasions for the development of their friendship. A great deal of the work can be read as revolving around the theme of how our relationships with others are a considerable part of how good we are and how good are lives can be. Belinda and Lady Delacour both grow through their friendship, of course. In some ways the marriage between Lord and Lady Delacour is an even better example. They don't hate each other; they've just both, through foolishness and pride, descended into a cycle of pettiness. When, through Belinda's help, they reconcile, things change considerably. The exact same people, with the same strengths and weaknesses, the same decencies and flaws, are infinitely better in a healthy marriage, which amplifies their strengths, than they were in a degenerating one, which amplified their flaws. And I think that's very much it: our friendships, our marriages, even at times our relationships of mere acquaintance, take what we are and amplify either the good or the bad in us, sometimes subtly and sometimes in ways that make a vast difference.

Favorite Passage: Mrs. Freke conversing with Belinda:

“You read, I see!—I did not know you were a reading girl. So was I once; but I never read now. Books only spoil the originality of genius: very well for those who can’t think for themselves—but when one has made up one’s opinion, there is no use in reading.”

“But to make them up,” replied Belinda, “may it not be useful?”

“Of no use upon earth to minds of a certain class. You, who can think for yourself, should never read.”

“But I read that I may think for myself.”

“Only ruin your understanding, trust me. Books are full of trash—nonsense, conversation is worth all the books in the world.”

“And is there never any nonsense in conversation?”

“What have you here?” continued Mrs. Freke, who did not choose to attend to this question; exclaiming, as she reviewed each of the books on the table in their turns, in the summary language of presumptuous ignorance, “Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments—milk and water! Moore’s Travels—hasty pudding! La Bruyère—nettle porridge! This is what you were at when I came in, was it not?” said she, taking up a book in which she saw Belinda’s mark: “Against Inconsistency in our Expectations. Poor thing! who bored you with this task?”

Recommendation: Highly Recommended.

Robertson Davies, The Salterton Trilogy

Introduction

Opening Passage: From Tempest-Tost:

"It's going to be a great nuisance for both of us," said Freddy. "Couldn't you make a fuss about it, Tom?"

"If your father said they could use the place, it's no good for me to make a fuss," said Tom. (p. 3)

From Leaven of Malice:

It was on the 31st of October that the following announcement appeared under "Engagements", in the Salterton Evening Bellman:

Professor and Mrs. Walter Vambrace are pleased to announce the engagement of their daughter, Pearl Veronica, to Solomon Bridgetower, Esq., son of Mrs. Bridgetower and the late Professor Solomon Bridgetower of this city. Marriage to take place in St. Nicholas' Cathedral at eleven o'clock a.m., November 31st. (p. 251)

From A Mixture of Frailties:

It was appropriate that Mrs. Bridgetower's funeral fell on a Thursday, for that had always been her At Home day. As she had dominated her drawing-room, so she dominated St. Nicholas' Cathedral on this frosty 23rd of December. She had planned her funeral, as she had planned all her social duties and observances, with care. (p. 481)

Summary: In the small town of Salterton, Ontario, the local am-dram group is putting on The Tempest with the help of Valentine Rich, a professional director. She has her work cut out for her, as she has to deal with the self-important members of the troupe (Professor Vambrace, who, of course, thinks he knows everything about Shakespeare, and Nellie, who is the all-organizing all-busybody social climber), and with the obsessives (Major Pye the set guy, Cobbler the musician), and the inevitable tumult of the guys (Solly, Roger, Hector) mingling with the girls (Griselda, Pearl). Tempest-Tost is very entertaining (the character-work is excellent), but it is also very oddly structured. It ends quite abruptly, and has a number of features that make it seem as if Hector were the main character (we get much more of his backstory, and he is the mover of the major final crisis), but other parts don't. I've read somewhere that it may have originally been conceived as a play, and it does in some ways read like a play about Hector that has been filled out by description and occasionally following other characters in such a way that the author just adds whatever interests him. But the humor is constant, and sometimes surges into funniness.

Leaven of Malice moves us forward a bit, and focuses on journalism. The editor of the local newspaper, Gloster Ridley, is in a bit of trouble when a false announcement of a marriage between Solly Bridgetower and Pearl Vambrace appears in his paper. The histrionic Professor Vambrace is livid over the matter, as is Bridgetower's overbearing mother. This work has much more of a coherent structure than the first; it is structured plainly as a mystery story, although a somewhat unconventional one. A little leaven of malice can change almost everything.

In A Mixture of Frailties, Solly and Pearl (now preferring to go by her middle name, Veronica) have married and are dealing with the death of Solly's mother, who continues to be as overbearing in the grave as she was in life. In her will, Mrs. Bridgetower, who was quite well-to-do, leaves almost everything to Solly on a set of conditions that guarantee that he will have to struggle for some time. The most significant is that all of the money is to be used to fund the education of an artist until such a time as Solly and Veronica have a baby boy; and, in the meantime, if he is to get the legacy at all, he must maintain his mother's large house and her two servants on his professor's salary. The artist chosen by the Bridgetower Trust is Monica Gall, a girl with a lovely voice who sings on the radio for her fundamentalist church. She is sent to London, where she takes various lessons with teachers set up for her by the conductor, Sir Benedict Domdaniel; in the course of this she meets the brilliant young composer, Giles Revelstoke, and falls in love. Her musical education, I think, is well depicted, as is her overall education; Davies is very good at capturing the mix of real maturing and nonsensical bluster that characterizes growing up. This work is the best written of the three, although Salterton is really only used as a frame for the story of Monica Gall, which in most ways could simply be a novel standing on its own. But it is all tied together fairly well.

Of the three, Tempest-Tost, despite its odd character as a mix of unblended things, is easily the most entertaining. Part of this is probably that amateur actors are by nature more entertaining than journalists or professional and semi-professional musicians. Part of it, though, is probably the lavish attention paid to characterization; while the characterization is good all through the works, Tempest-Tost develops its characters in a leisurely and rich way. Much of the interest of the more organized Leaven of Malice is simply in seeing what happens to the Vambraces and Bridgetowers whom we met in Tempest-Tost; while you could read Leaven alone, I think it benefits massively from being read specifically as a sequel. Mixture partly foregoes this advantage; yes, we get some of the characters carrying over, but in a small amount and in such a way that they are little more than an occasion for the story to open and then later to close. It's technically a sequel, but for the most part its sequel-ness is incidental to the story it is telling. I also had the difficulty with Mixture of not being impressed by Revelstoke. The fundamental difficulty with writing about volatile musical geniuses is that writing only conveys all of the volatility and very little of the actual musical genius, so while in real life we might give some leeway to brilliance excusing or at least counterweighing bad behavior, in a literary context we get nothing more than the bad behavior in full view and a sort of rumor that maybe there is a brilliance that partly compensates for it, which is not the same thing.

All three of the books were great reading, though; the 800 or so pages of the omnibus edition were remarkably easy to get through, while nonetheless being richly written. To manage a kind of writing in which one can either just follow through with the flow of the story or stop and savor the writing at almost every point is a significant talent, and Davies certainly has it.

Favorite Passage: From Tempest-Tost:

The Torso was a silly girl, and a hoyden, and unseemly in her desire for the attentions of the male. But like many silly, hoydenish, man-crazy girls, she had a great charity within er. One of her admirers had said that she had "a heart as big as a bull", and if this special enlargement carries with it a certain sweetness and generosity of nature, the phrase may be allowed to stand. She ran up the stairs after Pearl. What she did cannot be related here, but in ten minutes they were both in the drawing-room, drinking sherry, and Pearl looked better than she had ever looked in her life; if there was any makeup on her face, it had been applied with The Torso's artful hand.... (pp. 190-191)

From Leaven of Malice, in which the classicist meets the Freudian:

"Professor, let's get down to brass tacks. I'm only here because I want to help. I want you to understand right now that my job is simply to understand, not to accuse. Now, you're an intelligent man, so I don't have to beat about the bush with you. We can take the gloves off right at the start. I take it that you've heard of the Oedipus Complex?"

"I am familiar with all forms of the Oedipus legend."

"Yes, but have you understood it? I mean, as we moderns understand it? Have you got the psychological slant on it?"

"Mr. Yarrow, I should hardly be head of the Department of Classics at this University if I were not thoroughly acquainted with all that concerns Oedipus."

"But the Complex? You know about the Complex?"

"What Complex are you talking about? All art is complex." (pp. 419-420)

From A Mixture of Frailties:

Ripon solemnly removed his hat. "This is a sacred moment," said he. "Sacred to me, anyhow, as a student of literature. You have just made the great discovery that behind every symbol there is a reality. For years you have accepted holly as a symbol of Christmas, unquestioningly, like a true Anglo-Saxon believer. And now, in a flash, you know why it is so. It is because, in this land which gave you your Christmas, holly is at its finest at this time of year. Perhaps we should cause a carved stone to be erected on this spot, to identify forever the place at which, fo rone human being out of the whole confused race, a symbol became a reality." (pp. 630-631)

Recommendation: Tempest-Tost is Highly Recommended; Leaven of Malice and A Mixture of Frailties are Recommended.

*****

Robertson Davies, The Salterton Trilogy, Penguin (New York, 2011).

Alexander Pushkin, Eugene Onegin

Introduction

Opening Passage:

"My uncle always was respected;
But his grave illness, I confess,
Is more than could have been expected:
A stroke of genius, nothing less.
He offers all a grand example;
But, God, such boredom who would sample?--
Daylong, nightlong, thus to be bid
To sit beside and invalid!
Low cunning must assist devotion
To one who is but half-alive:
You smooth his pillow and contrive
Amusement while you mix his potion;
You sigh, and think with furrowed brow--
'Why can't the devil take you now?'"

Summary: Eugene Onegin, a spoiled city boy, inherits an estate from his uncle; he is at this point about twenty-five or so and the wild sociality and dissipation in which he has spent his life has begun to pall into cynicism. In the country he becomes friends with an eighteen-year-old poet, Vladimir Lensky. Lensky is affianced to a girl named Olga Larina, and takes Onegin to have dinner and meet her. There Onegin is introduced to Tatyana Larina, who begins to fall in love with him. She eventually writes a love letter to him and he lectures her on the impossibility of their having a relationship. Lensky manages to lure Onegin to a country ball under false pretenses; the irritated Onegin flirts and dances with Olga. Lensky, outraged, demands a duel. Onegin kills him and leaves the country. Tatyana, who manages to get in and look at Onegin's library and the marginalia in his books, comes to the conclusion that he is little more than a Byronic imitator. The book ends with Eugene and Tatyana meeting later in life; Tatyana is a princess, married to an old prince, and Eugene realizes the value of what he took for granted.

As I have said before, the problem has to be solved in order to have good narrative verse is to reconcile the apparent inconsistency between the movement of narrative and the stillness of verse. Prose at least admits of being more narrative-friendly than verse because in prose the form of the language can take a secondary place to merely informing. Attention does not have to linger on details of how things are said; it can keep the story flowing by moving on to the next bit of information. This is not the case with verse; with verse, every bit of language demands a bit of attention. In longer narrative verse there is a great danger of the narrative stalling. Pushkin's solution to this problem involves three elements:

(1) iambic tetrameter verse with a rhyme scheme that can carry a conversational sound
(2) an extremely simple story
(3) regular digressions

The first of these allows for a relatively quick verse. There is a great danger of this corrupting the verse into little more than a verse imitation of prose, but Deutsch, the translator in this case, manages to avoid this, so Pushkin certainly does.The second and third are somewhat more complicated issues. The story is a very simple one, but it would be a mistake to think that this means it moves swiftly. It is really rather remarkable; the book is rather less than two hundred pages long, written in verse stanzas, and in my edition rather heavily illustrated, but it still manages to move with that inimitable Russian glaciality. It would be interesting to compare Eugene Onegin on this point with Byron's Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, with which it otherwise has many similarities: more things happen in the first two dozen stanzas of Byron's poem than happens in the whole of Pushkin's poem. However, it keeps going, and part of this is that with a very simple story it's easier to avoid being bogged down in anything. Digressions are a somewhat paradoxical element; they constantly occur and technically slow the story itself down. But each digression actually contributes something, thus moving the story forward somehow, and the many digressions break it up in such a way that it does not seem monotonous -- and in verse, as with time, diversity makes things seem to go quicker. While the story moves slowly, then, it does not stop.

I can't speak for its accuracy, but the Deutsch translation in the Heritage Press edition I was reading was poetically quite good -- very few infelicities, and when I compared it to other translations found online, Deutsch's translation was fairly consistently better as poetry, or at least as narrative poetry. However, I have come to the conclusion that trying to replicate the Onegin stanza in English is an extraordinarily bad idea. The rhyme scheme for an Onegin stanza is AbAbCCddEffEgg, where the capital letters are feminine rhymes (respected, expected) and the lower-case letters are masculine rhymes (brow, now). The problem is that this means that there are three pairs of feminine rhymes in for every fourteen lines, and this is far too many for English. In English verse, feminine rhymes are only used for two kinds of tasks: variety and comedy. You will use feminine rhymes sparingly to give variety to a series of masculine rhymes. Or you will use them to give a humorous cast to the poem. To use them in this quantity in a long poem in English makes the poem sound like a mix between an endless series of limericks and Dr. Seuss, and no amount of ingenious vocabulary choice and felicitous expression is going to get around that. Onegin stanzas in English would be quite good for light comic verse. They simply cannot carry the weight of a serious poem of this length.

In Russian I have no doubt that things are quite different. From what little I've heard of Russian, I suspect that feminine rhyme stands out less. Also, I very much doubt that the Russian language has been built up in its use of feminine rhymes the way English has, simply as a matter of history. There was a great episode of Cheers in which one of the characters, despondent over an unfaithful lover, says that she used to take great comfort in translating Russian poetry, but that now even Karashnikov's "Another Christmas of Agony" doesn't lighten her mood: "Mischa the dog lies dead in the bog. The children cry over the carcass. The mist chokes my heart, covers the mourners. At least this year we eat." Part of the joke is that this really is a tiny bit like what Russian comic verse, indeed, Russian comic anything, usually sounds like to English speakers. I am not sure that 'light comic verse in Russian' is an oxymoron, but there is no possible way humor plays the same role in Russian language conventions that it does in English language conventions, nor is Russian literary humor, which tends dark and black, the same as English literary humor, which tends light and silly. As he was wrestling with this verse novel (which took him eight years to write) Pushkin said that he was choked with gall; the author of the introduction to my edition tries to take issue with this, but Pushkin is quite right. There is plenty of humor in the book, but it is very bitter and biting, vodka in strong coffee, not sugar in light tea. But with all the feminine rhymes it sounds like it's supposed to be lightly funny and silly that Lensky gets into a jealous snit and ruins everyone's life by getting himself killed. This is just not right.

So I would strongly recommend anyone translating this work in the future to avoid the temptation of a true Onegin stanza. This does raise the problem of what would work better. My first estimation would be that you could get something that would not be too far off, but would have an English sound that would fit the story better, if you changed the feminine rhymes into imperfect rhymes. Half-rhyme or slant-rhyme can get you much farther in English; it draws less attention to itself; and it doesn't have the extensive association with silly play that feminine rhyme does. Perhaps you could still allow feminine rhyme, but on a much smaller scale.

Favorite Passage: This is stanza xi from Chapter Five. I've given two other versions, to compare. The second is Johnston's, and the third is Roger Clarke's prose version.

She dreams. And wonders are appearing
Before her now, without a doubt:
She walks across a snowy clearing.
There's gloom and darkness all about;
Amid the snowdrifts, seething, roaring,
A torrent gray with foam is pouring;
Darkly it rushes on amain,
A thing the winter could not chain;
By a slim icicle united,
Two slender boughs are flung across
The waters, where they boil and toss;
And by this shaking bridge affrighted,
The helpless girl can do no more
Than halt bwildered on the shore.

She dreamt of portents. In her dreaming
she walked across a snowy plain
through gloom and mist; and there came streaming
a furious, boiling, heaving main
across the drift-encumbered acres,
a raging torrent, capped with breakers,
a flood on which no frosty band
had been imposed by winter's hand;
two poles that ice had glued like plaster
were placed across the gulf to make
a flimsy bridge whose every quake
spelt hazard, ruin and disaster;
she stopped at the loud torrent's bound,
perplexed... and rooted to the ground.

As she slept, Tatyána had an eerie dream. She dreamt that she was walking over an expanse of snow, encircled by a dreary fog. In front, among the snowdrifts, there swirled a seething torrent, whose dark and foam-flecked waters had not been clamped in winter's chains. Two sticks held together with ice had been laid across the stream to form an unsteady and perilous footbridge. Confronted by this thundering chasm Tatyána stopped short in utter perplexity.

Recommendation: The characterization is quite good and the story, while simple, is told well. Recommended, although you probably should read it at a more leisurely pace than was required for me to finish it in a week.

Radio Greats: High Noon (The Jack Benny Program)

In Back to the Future there's a clever joke that is missed by most viewers:

Dr. Emmett Brown: Then tell me, future boy, who's President of the United States in 1985?
Marty McFly: Ronald Reagan.
Dr. Emmett Brown: Ronald Reagan? The actor?
[chuckles in disbelief]
Dr. Emmett Brown: Then who's vice president? Jerry Lewis?
[rushing out and down a hill toward his laboratory]
Dr. Emmett Brown: I suppose Jane Wyman is the First Lady!
Marty McFly: [following Doc] Whoa. Wait, Doc!
Dr. Emmett Brown: And Jack Benny is secretary of the treasury.
Marty McFly: [outside the lab door] Doc, you gotta listen to me.
Dr. Emmett Brown: [opens the door to the lab] I've had enough practical jokes for one evening. Good night, future boy!

Jerry Lewis is well known. Jane Wyman was Reagan's first wife; in 1955 they would already have been divorced, so it continues the improbability. And Jack Benny as secretary of treasury is a touch of genius, because Jack Benny, the world-famous comedian, had a running gag in which he was the cheapest rich man on earth.

'Jack Benny' was a stage name; he was born Benjamin Kubelsky. He was a professional violinist who first made his name in vaudeville comedy acts, first with the fiddle and then with the jokes. At a Passover seder he met a girl named Sadie Marks in 1922; they married and she took the stage name Mary Livingstone and began helping Benny with his act. He tried to break into movies and failed -- while he got a few parts, the movies themselves flopped. Uncertain about radio, he nevertheless auditioned for a part, and the radio executives were very impressed by him -- so impressed, in fact, that they decided to give him his own show. And comedy was never the same again. While there have been funnier comedians, there has been no comedian in the English-speaking world who has had a greater influence on comedy. He did several different sponsored comedy shows for NBC. In 1949 he switched to CBS (there as a big scandal about CBS stealing NBC talent that year).

Part of Benny's talent was timing; he was famous for the hilarious pause. He was also excellent at impromptu, so that it's often impossible, if you don't actually see the script, to tell whether a particular break-the-fourth-wall joke was intentional or Benny turning a gaff into an impromptu jest. He also had a knack for portraying himself as the exact opposite of what he tried to be in real life: self-centered, miserly, vain.

But perhaps his best gift was the ability to see talent in others and let it work; he was one of the best people in Hollywood to work with because if he thought you had comic ability, he would let you use it. He was smart enough to realize that he would not be hurt if someone else was making his show funny. Thus his cast was one of the most brilliant casts of all time. There's Benny himself, of course, and Mary Livingstone -- who as a character plays a female friend rather than his wife. There was Don Wilson, the announcer, and Phil Harris the bandleader, who always managed to be just inappropriate enough to shock you and yet not inappropriate enough to be offensive (he eventually went on to do his own show). There was Dennis Day, the tenor, who sang the songs and presented himself as naive, oblivious, and without common sense. And greatest of all, himself one of the greatest comedians of the twentieth century, Eddie Anderson, playing Benny's valet Rochester, always three steps ahead of his boss and with such a distinctive voice (his vocal chords had ruptured as a child, giving him a voice somewhere between gravelly and crazy) that nobody could forget. Anderson got a minor part on the show, got asked back a few times, and then was given a permanent position, which made him the first African-American to have a regular role on nationwide radio, and eventually one of the most famous entertainers in the world. And later, when Rochester was far and away the fan favorite on the show, Benny stayed true to his principle: he supported Anderson all the way. And while there are here and there early jokes that don't carry well, it was quite groundbreaking, because Anderson was treated as an equal, and his character was intelligent -- smarter than Benny's character, in fact -- and the equality became more pronounced over time. That's just the regular cast, the ones best known; there were more minor characters coming and going all the time.

Comedy does not seem to age as well as drama and horror, so some jokes are a bit...obscure. One tricky thing about The Jack Benny Program, too, is that they do a lot of running gags; you can listen to them in any order and they get funnier the more you here because minor jokes that don't seem funny as stand-alone jokes get played in crazy variations that are funny all together -- you start looking for them. And there are lots and lots of episodes, so it's difficult to pick out any particular one, just because practically no one has listened to them all. But I've chosen as representative a fairly decent one, "High Noon". It's probably not the funniest episode -- the funniest I've heard are those in which Benny interacts with his neighbors, the normal and thoroughly baffled Cormans -- but it has a lot of the typical Jack Benny elements, the ones that made the show at least good for a few chuckles. It's one of the better movie parodies -- the show did quite a few of them, and they are wide mix (the Casablanca one I find mostly just baffling, but since most of the movies have been classics, many of the jokes have lasted longer than they might otherwise have) -- and we get the standard elements -- Rochester, Mary, Don, Dennis. It's missing Phil Harris, which is too bad; the bandleader is Bob Crosby, who had recently replaced Harris, although it does have a joke about him. We miss some of the more famous minor characters but we do get the gossiping switchboard operators, Gertrude and Mabel, who are usually funny, and we have the single most famous minor character: Mel Blanc, the man of infinite voices (he is, of course, most famous for being the voices for practically every major character in the Looney Tunes cartoons), whom we find in this episode first as a cow and then delivering one of his most famous lines: "All aboard for Anaheim, Azusa, and Cuc-a-monga!" We get a little bit of almost everything, in other words.

You can listen to "High Noon" at My Old Radio.

Fractal, Part IV

This is the fourth part of a short story draft. Part I. Part II. Part III.

I confess I was somewhat surprised when Morgan came through. Trisagion had a botanical research garden a few miles away, attached to a phytochemistry lab. The garden itself is quite lovely; they even give tours and hold events there, and that part of the research center makes an impressive profit, although dwarfed by the actual budget of the laboratory. Morgan arranged for a day's outing there. Because Morgan is Morgan, the security precautions were absurd, involving armed security guards and an armored van. But she was out of the lab, out in a garden, no less. I was happy to get out, myself, and even David was more like himself than he had been in a long time.

We walked along behind her as she rushed around from flower to flower like a little girl, sometimes literally skipping along. It was delightful to watch, but also very strange. I cannot remember Becky ever showing much interest in flowers at all.

I mentioned it to David. He was startled.

"Becky loved flowers," he said. "Especially tiger lilies -- you remember how many there were at our wedding. If I recall, you laughed at us because you said that no sane person has a wedding with that much orange."

"Yes," I said, "but there are always flowers at weddings."

"She used to love it when I brought home flowers. We also used to talk about having a flower garden, but never got around to it. That was a very long time ago." He was quiet for several minutes.

"Do you think we might get Stimson to get us a trip down to the marine laboratory? They have a nice beach."

"I doubt it. I was astounded he got us this. You know Morgan: generous when it does not matter and stingy when it does."

David said nothing, and we walked along as she skipped from flower to flower and, once, actually clapped her hands in delight over a butterfly. Our talked turned to research, and we were talking about iterative mapping, lost in technical details, when she came shyly up and, blushing, handed David a flower and skipped away as we both stared down at it. It was a tiger lily.

Everything had been obvious enough to that point, but it was only on the way back that I, stupid idiot that I am, saw it all plainly. The brain is an ecology, a climate, and cannot be copied exactly. I had always argued that. It is constantly adapting, shifting, changing, in myriad ways. All that you could possibly copy is an impression of similarity. Somehow David had gone far beyond what I had ever thought possible; the similarities, their specificity, were uncanny. But there was another problem I had never thought of before then. How do you know what you are copying in the first place?

There are objective tests, physiological and psychological, that can work as a guideline. But how much of you shows up in a test? If you put people with severe memory problems in a white room, they just sit there, not knowing what to do because nothing in their environment suggests any response; put them in a coffee shop, with the right resources, and suddenly they might well be as alive as anyone, doing the things anyone does in coffee shops. But the point is general. We are all different in different circumstances. You are sitting in a lab, hooked up to a machine, taking a test. How much of you is really there? And how much of you is dormant, latent, waiting to get back to friends and family and hobbies? No matter how good or thorough the tests, they are a framework, not the substance, the skeleton, not the life. Transfer it to a matrix and you do not have anything like a person, just a template, a portrait painting in code. To get more you would have to fill in the spaces between, the parts the tests cannot catch. These parts have to be extrapolated generically, from assumptions about the way human beings are, or they have to be put in by someone who knows you.

All this time I had thought I had such respect for David, and yet all this time I had underestimated his genius. Somehow he had done it, taken a person, and truly copied them over. But no human being knows any other perfectly, and no tests can compensate for it, and, each brain being different, nothing can be read with precision off of the brain. David had not copied Becky herself, but his idea of Becky. He had genuinely known Becky, so he had captured her correctly. Rebecca was Becky as David knew her, really and truly Becky. But Becky as David knew her was only a part of a person. Becky, throughout all her strange, manic swings of self-esteem, had always underestimated herself. Her character and temperament and life were far too rich to carry over; even David and I could not possibly do it.

When we had returned to Trisagion, and signed Rebecca back in, and David had gone home for the day, I remained, finishing my checklists in the matrix lab. It was slow going. I was only halfway through, and wondering whether, unbeknownst to me, Becky really did like flowers, or if, as I thought, she had merely liked David getting them for her, when Morgan Stimson walked into the lab.

"Charli," he said. "I'm glad you're here. Still doing your checklists?"

"It seems never to end," I replied, not really in the mood for talking with him. "I am seriously thinking of just not doing it any more."

He shook his head in a mock way, with a Stimson-fake smile, and said, "Your paperwork is always in perfect order; you are probably the only person around here who manages that. Always the careful one."

He hesitated and I looked at him. "Is there anything I can help you with?" I asked.

Still he hesitated a moment. Then he said, "Look, Charli, I know you can keep a secret" -- there was something about the way he said it that I found I did not like -- "so I will level with you. I am worried about David. I think he is going over the deep end."

I put down my clipboard. "What do you mean by that?" I said, in a tone more belligerent than I had intended.

He held up his hands, fake smile on his face. "Don't kill me," he said. "I know he's your friend -- who couldn't know it? -- and you've always stood up for him. But I need you to look past that. There is something going very terribly wrong with him."

"You have never liked David," I said. "You have been trying to get him out for years."

"I've never seen what you and Becky thought was so impressive about him, if that's what you mean," he replied. "But I've let him run. God knows that with your help, and Becky's, he's paid off more than a few gambles. You three always did make me look brilliant." Fake smile. Then it vanished. "But he's beginning to be unmanageable. He went to the president, over my head, and demanded changes to the project. Not unbelligerently, I might add. If he weren't worth so much to the company, and the president weren't terrified of a competitor snapping him up, he'd have been fired on the spot."

I looked at my hands. "I did not know that," I said, finally. "I think it is just that the success of the project has taken a lot out of him."

"That's what I told the president." Fake smile. "I think I made it pretty plausible, and after a success like you've pulled off, nobody is going to have any problem believing that he just needs some stress-relief. But he's off the project."

"You cannot do that."

"I have to," said Morgan. "Charli, for someone so smart, someone who has actually figured out how to make people, I don't know how you can be so clueless about them. You have to get past this blind loyalty. He actually thinks it's Becky."

I had nothing to say to that, and Morgan caught the fact. "You know I'm right. It's not a good situation. We need to nip it in the bud."

"He has been nothing but professional."

"Around you, perhaps. And nothing awful has happened yet. But he is not stable. His behavior is getting erratic."

"Just give him time. You do not understand what he is going through. This has all opened old wounds over the loss of Becky."

"I do understand, Charli," said Morgan. "I was Becky's friend, too, to the extent that you two let her have any friends at all...."

A curl of anger rose up inside me. "Excuse me?" I said.

"Oh, come off it, Charli. You two were always isolating her as if she were your special territory. I kept throwing things her way, things she could do herself, and she would never take them because it wouldn't involve you two. And the one time I managed to convince her to do something without David, you came around and browbeat her back. And all that '1, 2, 3, B, C, D' Three Musketeers nonsense, no one else allowed into the inner sanctum, and Becky never allowed out of it. I can understand you just not seeing it because of this inexplicable loyalty to David, but with David it was all intentional -- he just boxed her up and put her in storage...."

If I had had anything in my hands at that moment, I might have smashed his face in with it. "You know nothing," I shouted at him. "You have no idea what we were like. You have never been friends like we were friends. You have no idea how much we loved each other."

"You, maybe," said Morgan calmly. "David never loved her. David never did anything but make her feel like she wasn't good enough."

The curl of anger had become a knot in the chest and it was making it difficult to breathe.

"Get out," I finally managed to gasp. "Just get out before I throw something at you."

Morgan put his hands up as he had earlier and beat a retreat with one of his Stimson-fake smiles. When he left, I grabbed the clipboard nearby and threw it at the wall, where it broke.

***

to be continued

Dashed Off XXI

 This starts the notebook begun in November 2020. A lot of Hume on the external world in this batch.

"It is difficult to discern whether we know from appropriate principles, which alone is scientific knowing, or do not know from appropriate principles." Aquinas

Philosophy requires a double fidelity, an internal fidelity to its own principles and methods, and an external fidelity to the world as we find it.

Philosophical inquiry begins with what is shared -- with our environment, with other human beings, with God.

NB Hume's comment on challenge arguments at T 1.3.14.7 (SBN 159): "This defiance we are obliged frequently to make sue of, as being almost the only means of proving a negative in philosophy."

democracy : images :: oligarchy : bodies :: timarchy : abstract objects :: kallipolis : Forms

We only recognize constancy and conjunction causally.

constant conjunction as a sign of readiness to appear

If an entire society of blind men kept insisting that the color of scarlet was the same with the sound of a trumpet, and built much of their discourse around it, we would take them to mean something intelligible by it, even if we still had to search for what it was.

[final girl reacting to discovery of killer's identity] as visual trope in slasher movies

"Imperturbable wisdom is worth everything." Democritus
"Self-control increases joyful things and makes pleasure yet greater."

alethic, temporal, and locative forms of determinism

The Christian polity is much like the Christian person: still much sin, some of it even more brazen than in the less informed and fortunate pagan; much greater gap between reality and aspiration, most of the time; in many respects similar to the pagan but here and there run through with little threads that reach toward heaven.

The eyes can show that something continues to exist even when we no longer hear it, etc. This line of thought will be blocked if the only 'somethings' we can sense are proper sensibles; but common sensibles and per accidens sensibles allow it to go through.

We need love stories that are tragedies to show the sublimity of romantic love, just as we need love stories that are comedies to show its absurdities.

All sensory perceptions have a polarity, a from-ness and to-ness, that suggests that we are receiving something beyond us, and thus suggests, but does not establish 'double existence'.

Our sense of ourselves does not need to be very fixed and determinate to convey something like a distinction between ourselves and external objects.

Our sensible impressions are not all on the same footing; those directly concerning our own bodies clearly have a primacy.

the intimacy and nonintimacy of myself and the world

Hume, T 1.2.4 on the senses
The senses cannot give us
---- [1] continued existence (.3)
---- ---- because they cannot operate beyond their sphere
---- ---- ---- this would be a contradiction in terms;
---- [2] distinct existence
---- ---- which would have to be either
---- ---- ---- (a) as represented (.4)
---- ---- ---- ---- but they are singular perceptions
---- ---- ---- (b) as original (.5)
---- ---- ---- ---- which depends on our sense of ourselves
---- ---- ---- ---- ---- which is too abstruse for the senses
---- ---- ---- ---- ---- and would require an impossible deception
---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- which would have to be related to body for externality (.9)
---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- (1) but this leaves unexplained the same belief about body
---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- (2) and some perceptions have no such exteriority to the body (sounds, tastes, smells)
---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- (3) [Berkeley] on distance or outness
---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- and independency could not be an object of the senses (.10)
::: This is confirmed by the inability to differentiate primary, secondary, and tertiary qualities (.12, .13)
::: Note that Hume holds that continued and distinct existence imply each other (.2), so he has to eliminate the senses for both, since getting one gives the other.
::: The equal footing of impressions plays a significant role in this discussion.

Hume treats "consulting reason" and "weighing opinions by philosophical principles as equivalent, because his whole argument that belief in continued and independent existence can't be from reason is that the vulgar aren't doing philosophy and the latter would be paradoxical to them. (Shepherd, of course, argues that reason is broader than this, so it is found in nonphilosophers like children, peasants, etc.)

involuntary intimate
voluntary intimate
involuntary nonintimate
voluntary nonintimate
--- all cases of this last are mediated, and recognizably so.

the hypersuppositional mind

respect, nonmaleficence, beneficence, and fairness as essential principles of election law and its application

gnarus (skillful) -> gna (to know) -> narro (to tell) -> narrate (to tell a story)

Public trust in institutions can only be maintained by addressing concerns of the public.

Politics is the art of taking concerns seriously even when you think they are stupid.

identity : uninterrupted and invariable :: constancy : invariable

Hume claims that when unthinking and unphilosophical, we "never think of a double existence internal and external, representing and represented"; but no matter how unthinking and unphilosophical we may be, we all recognize the double existence 'I and that'.

While people do tend to assume that they see the very thing, it is implausible to say that they think the very thing is "intimately present to the mind" when they are seeing it from a distance or through a lens or in a mirror.

"Whatever He gives or permits us, whether pain or illness, in whatever way, he gives and permits it with great mystery, to make us holy and to give us what we need to be saved." Catherine of Siena (to Francesco da Montalcino)

T 1.4.2.44: Hume takes believe in continued existence to be prior to belief in independent existence (and it is the latter that causes the skeptical problems).

legislative power as having the proximate end of 'peace, order, and good government'

Fidelity is of immense importance to social life, and thus also the developed capacity for it. Religion is the most visible context in which this is found, which is why people (even atheists) are more likely to trust strangers who seem sincerely religious than they are to trust atheists; but it is visible elsewhere, too, which is why people will also trust atheists who are obviously devoted spouses in committed marriages, at least almost as well as they trust the religious.

All genuine intellectualism is much like mysticism, despite the difference in content.

As duplicate ideas can come from singular impressions, duplicate impressions can come from singular objects.

All our perceptions are dependent on our sensory organs only if our sensory organs have existence independent of any particular perceptions.

It is clear that the common view is that there are objects that we perceive; it is equally clear that the common view is not that our objects are perceptions.

While philosophical accounts often get their influence from vulgar accounts, it is often by explaining the incomplete and misleading character of the latter.

What Hume says of the relation between the philosophical and the vulgar systems is also true of the relation between his system and these two. By Hume's own principles, his system "is the monstrous offspring of two principles, which are contrary to each other, which are both at once embrac'd by the mind, and which are unable mutually to destroy each other." (It is recognizing this perhaps, that leads to his comments about skeptical malady.)

Much of the skill of writing free verse is writing like a child without writing childishly.

impressive : sublime :: charming : beautiful

Every election is a precedent for a future election.

conditions for customary law (Liguori)
(1) made by community, at least in its greater part
(2) reasonable so as to be consistent with natural and divine law
(3) continuous and enduring period of time involving repeated acts
(4) intention to obligate
(5) at least the general tacit consent of the principal legislator

the constancy theory of truth

T 1.4.3 explicitly assumes the falsehood of the 'antient philosophy' in the first paragraph; the purpose is not to argue for or against but to give a Humean explanation for belief in such a falsehood. NB that Hume is here doing, at a very general level, a psychological history of philosophy, and this is the case through Part IV.

The analogy to malady and health in T 1.4.4.1 can only work by thinking of imagination as having ends, manifested in its permanent, irresistible, universal principles.

We can distinguish sensation and reflection only relative to the self.

SBN 233: The argument here implies that, far from eliminating substance, Hume's philosophy treats every idea and impression as 'substances'.
Hume as the anti-Spinoza

Voting is not purely a matter of getting superior numbers; that is the notion of voting had by a churl and barbarian. Voting is also an act of negotiating with other groups.

The souls in purgatory wait on behalf of the whole Church.

the Christian response to politics: Let us not sleep, as the rest do, but let us stay alert and sober.

There is ultimately one li, the Grand Ultimate, but its manifestations are diverse.

"Qi is metal, wood, water, and fire; li is benevolence, righteousness, propriety, and wisdom." Zhu Xi
"When humans and things are generated, they receive an endowment of li, which constitutes the Five Virtues."
"If your will fixes on the bull's-eye, soon you will occasionally hit the target."

In investigating the principle of things, we look at that in things which in us would be virtue (or the beginnings of it, the potential for it). 

"We sometimes doubt of an external thing whether it is this or that; we do not doubt 'Is this the same I who saw that?'" Shankara

"Master the self by practicing ritual propriety." Confucius

Looking to providence, the Great Ultimate, our eye is dazzled; it seems a chaotic wilderness with no orderer; but all the order of things, of motion and rest, of activity and stillness, is within it, supereminently.

"If before their actual origination all effects are equally nonexistent in any causal substance, why then should curds be produced from milk only and not from clay also, and jars from clay only and not from milk as well?" Shankara
"Origination is an action, and as such requires an agent, just as the action of walking does. To speak of an action without an agent would be a contradiction. But if you deny the pre-existence of the effect in the cause, it would have to be assumed that whenever the origination of a jar, for instance, is spoken of, the agent is not the jar (which before its origination did not exist) but something else...."
"The nonexistence of external things cannot be maintained because we are conscious of external things."

Unutterable is the utmost.

jump-scare, skincrawl-scare, cringe-scare, chill-scare, inbreath-scare

Lying doesn't harm by annihilating trust but by significantly raising its costs.

to love, seek, win, hold, and embrace Wisdom itself

violence theater

Who worships no gods
has his passions as gods;
they are gods that are felt,
that are moving and real,
impersonal and enigmatic gods.

abstraction-genius vs imagination-genius
association-skill vs systematicity-skill

"The passions are not only affected by such events as are certain and infallible, but also in an inferior degree by such as are possible and contingent." Hume, SBN 313
"In sympathy there is an evident conversion of an idea into an impression."

A possibility depends on actuality and extrapolation therefrom; it makes no sense at all to say that anything could cause anything, because this is not even remotely what we find to be actual.

The technological, social, and organizational aspects of military history use different kinds of evidence for different ends, and their unification is not trivial.

classification : professional history :: storytelling : amateur history

As resources tend to be limited, specialization sequesters resources, especially institutional resources, away from dabblers and wanderers, leaving them only what they can scrape together.

A particle is a distinct small-enough measurable; what counts as distinct depends on the measuring and what counts as small enough depends on what you are doing.

Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus, The Lives of the Twelve Caesars

Introduction

Opening Passage: Strictly speaking, we don't have the opening passage of the work -- the first few paragraphs of the Julius Caesar section have not survived. This is the first bit that we have:

Caesar in the sixteenth year of his age lost his father. in the year following, being elected Flamen Dialis, he cast off Cossutia (of equestrian wealth but very wealthy) affianced to him during his childhood, and espoused Cornelia, the daughter of Cinna, who had been four times consul. She bore unto him soon after his daughter Julia; neither could he by any means be forced by Sulla the dictator to put her away. Thereupon, deprived of his sacerdotal dignity, losing the dowry in the right of his wife, and forfeiting all his heritage descended unto him from his lineage and name, he was reputed on of the contrary faction. Hence he was constrained to hide his head, and (albeit the quartan ague hung sore upon him) to change almost every night the hiding places wherein he lurked, yea, and to redeem himself with a piece of money out of the inquisitors' hands that made search for him.

Summary: The Twelve Caesars are Julius, Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, Nero, Galba, Otho, Vitellius, Vespasian, Titus, and Domitian. Having read the whole thing, it seems fairly clear that the point of covering these twelve is actually not found in any of the twelve themselves -- the point is, in part, to contrast with the relatively good emperors after them. After Julius and Augustus, the Julio-Claudian more or less collapses into depravity; we then have the Year of Four Emperors, in which military usurpers follow each other in quick succession; and then we have the Nerva-Flavian dynasty, which is a temporary, if not always perfect, recovery in Vespasian and Titus but a collapse again in Domitian. After Domitian, of course, and beyond the edges of the book, is the massive improvement of the Nerva-Antonine dynasty. We see something of this in the very last passage of the work:

And reported it is that Domitian himself dreamed how he had a golden excrescence rising and bunching behind his neck, and knew for certain that thereby was portended and foresigned unto the commonwealth a happier state after him. And so it fell out, I assure you, shortly after: such was the abstinent and moderate carriage of the emperors next ensuing.

Of course, we do have to keep in mind that Suetonius, despite his reasonable fairmindedness, is not an objective commentator, since Suetonius was favored by Trajan and was writing this book while working for Hadrian. But, on the other hand, Suetonius's assessment is not unique to him.

Suetonius follows a stable pattern: preliminaries (genealogy, birth, omens, if any, of greatness); path to power; character of rule in both good and bad (as he puts it succinctly in his account of Caligula, "Thus far forth as of a prince; now forward, we relate we must as of a monster"); omens of nearing death; death. Despite the formulaic nature, however, Suetonius's account makes each of the Twelve come alive. Reading his account of Caligula, for instance, it is breathtaking how the man managed to come up with so many cruel and terrible deeds in such a short time; reading of Nero, one gets a sense of the mingling of genius, megalomania, and psychopathy; reading of Vespasian, a sense of how balanced and levelheaded he was.

The great weakness of Suetonius is that he seems unwilling to distinguish essential from accidental; he is a historian more interested in the curious and striking than in a thoughtful account. Thus, as Moses Hadas rather bitingly notes in his introduction, we learn that Augustus Caesar liked wearing long underwear; or, to use another example, we learn that Domitian used often to spend an hour by himself skewering flies. This is actually quite emblematic of much of the work. History is often blamed for being all about dates and battles, but no one can blame Suetonius for such an imbalance; we learn almost as much about various equivalents of fly-skewering as we do about battles and matters of governance. The matter affects his reliability as a historian; for while he is certainly careful and balanced, and will often show a critical eye, wild gossip mixes with well documented deed without much more basis than that they are both what people have said.

Reading the work in Philemon Holland's 1606 translation (lightly modernized in spelling, punctuation, and, occasionally, vocabulary by Moses Hadas) was interesting. Holland is excellent reading, although the Elizabethan diction leads to slower reading. One gets the sense that he put a great deal into this work, to a considerable success. There is one humorous point that shows that the travails of the work may have sometimes worn even on so devoted a translator, though. After an extensive recounting of the sexual depravities of Nero -- raping a Vestal Virgin, cutting off a boy's genitals and marrying him as wife, an incestuous relationship with his mother Agrippina, dressing up as an animal and raping men and women tied to stakes -- Holland puts in a note with what can only be the exasperated sigh of the longsuffering translator:

"I wish that both Suetonius and Dio had in this place and such like been altogether silent."

Favorite Passage: Caligula and Nero vie for the wildest stories, being both so wicked that it passes into an almost comically stylish craziness, so here is one from each:

GAIUS CAESAR CALIGULA

Furthermore, he devised a new kind of sight, and such as never was heard of before. For, over the middle space between Baiae and the huge piles or dams at Puteoli containing three miles and 600 paces well near, he made a bridge, having gotten together from all parts ships of burden, and placed them in a course at anchor, with a bank of earth cast thereupon, direct and straight after the fashion of the highway Appia. Upon this bridge he passed to and fro for two days together.... But I remember well that being a boy, I heard my grandfather report and tell the cause of this work, as it was delivered by his own courtiers, who were more inward with him than the rest, namely, that Thrasyllus the great astrologer assured Tiberius when he was troubled in mind about his successor, and more inclined to his lawful grandson, that Gaius should no more become emperor than able to run a course to and fro on horse-back, through the gulf of Baiae.

NERO CLAUDIUS CAESAR

All religions whatsoever he had in contempt, unless it were that only of the Syrian goddess. And yet soon after, he despised her so far, that he polluted her image with urine; by occasion that he was wonderfully addicted to another superstition, wherein he continued and persevered most constantly. For he received in free gift a little puppet representing a young girl, at the hands of a mean commoner and obscure person, as a remedy, forsooth, against all treacheries and secret practices; and thereupon straightways chancing to discover a conspiracy, he held it for the sovereign deity above all, and persisted honoring and worshipping it every day with three sacrifices.

Recommendation: Recommended.

Animation Movie Meme

(From here)

X what you’ve seen
O what you saw some but not all of
Bold what you particularly liked
Strike-through what you hated

CLASSIC DISNEY
——————————-
[ X ] 101 Dalmatians (1961)
[ X ] Alice in Wonderland (1951)
[ X ] Bambi (1942)
[ X ] Cinderella (1950)
[ X ] Dumbo (1941)
[ X ] Fantasia (1940)
[ X ] Lady and the Tramp (1955)
[ X ] Mary Poppins (1964)
[ X ] Peter Pan (1953)
[ X ] Pinocchio (1940)
[ X ] Sleeping Beauty (1959)
[ X ] Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937)
[ O ] Song of the South (1946)

DISNEY’S DARK AGE
——————————-
[X] The Aristocats (1970)
[O] The Black Cauldron (1985)
[X] The Fox and the Hound (1981)
[X] The Great Mouse Detective (1986)
[X] The Jungle Book (1967)
[ ] The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh (1977)
[ ] Oliver and Company (1986)
[O] Pete’s Dragon (1977)
[X] The Rescuers (1977)
[X] Robin Hood (1973)
[X] The Sword In The Stone (1963)

THE DISNEY RENAISSANCE
——————————-
[X] Aladdin (1992)
[X] Beauty and the Beast (1991)
[ ] A Goofy Movie (1995)
[O] Hercules (1997)
[X] The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1996)
[X] The Lion King (1994)
[X] The Little Mermaid (1989)
[X] Mulan (1998)
[O] Pocahontas (1995)
[ ] The Rescuers Down Under (1990)
[O] Tarzan (1999)

DISNEY’S MODERN AGE
——————————-
[ ] Atlantis: The Lost Empire (2001)
[X] Bolt (2008)
[ ] Brother Bear (2003)
[O] Chicken Little (2005)
[ ] Dinosaur (2000)
[O] The Emperor’s New Groove (2000)
[ ] Fantasia 2000 (2000)
[ ] Home on the Range (2004)
[ ] Lilo & Stitch (2002)
[X] Meet the Robinsons (2007)
[ ] Treasure Planet (2002)

PIXAR
——————————-
[X] A Bug’s Life (1998)
[X] Cars (2006)
[X] Finding Nemo (2003)
[X] The Incredibles (2004)
[ ] Monsters Inc. (2001)
[X] Ratatouille (2007)
[X] Toy Story (1995)
[ ] Toy Story 2 (1999)
[X] Wall-E (2008)
[X] Up (2009)

DON BLUTH
——————————-
[X] All Dogs Go to Heaven (1989)
[X] An American Tail (1986)
[O] An American Tail: Fievel Goes West (1991)
[X] Anastasia (1997)
[X] The Land Before Time (1988)
[ ] The Pebble and the Penguin (1995)
[X] Rock-a-Doodle (1991)
[X] The Secret of NIMH (1982)
[ ] Thumbelina (1994)
[O] Titan AE (2000)
[ ] A Troll in Central Park (1994)

CLAYMATION
——————————-
[ ] The Adventures of Mark Twain (1986)
[X] Chicken Run (2000)
[ ] Coraline (2009)
[ ] Corpse Bride (2005)
[ ] James and the Giant Peach (1996)
[X] The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993)
[ ] The Puppetoon Movie (1987)
[ ] Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit (2005)

CGI GLUT
——————————-
[X] Antz (1998)
[ ] Happy Feet (2006)
[ ] Kung Fu Panda (2008)
[O] Madagascar (2005)
[X] Monster House (2006)
[X] Over the Hedge (2006)
[X] The Polar Express (2004)
[X] Shrek (2001)
[ ] Shrek 2 (2004)
[ ] Shrek The Third (2007)
[ ] Monsters vs. Aliens (2009)
[ ] How to Train Your Dragon (2010)

IMPORTS
——————————-
[ ] Arabian Knight
[ ] Back to Gaya
[X] The Last Unicorn (1982)
[ ] Light Years (1988)
[ ] The Triplets of Belleville (2003)
[ ] Persepolis (2007)
[ ] Planet 51 (2009)
[ ] Waltz With Bashir (2008)
[O] Watership Down (1978)
[ ] When the Wind Blows (1988)
[ ] Yellow Submarine (1968)

STUDIO GHIBLI/MIYAZAKI
——————————-
[ ] The Cat Returns (2002)
[ ] Grave of the Fireflies (1988)
[ ] Howl’s Moving Castle (2004)
[ ] Kiki’s Delivery Service (1989)
[ ] Laputa: Castle in the Sky (1986)
[ ] Lupin III: The Castle of Cagliostro (1979)
[ ] My Neighbors The Yamadas (1999)
[ ] My Neighbor Totoro (1993)
[ ] Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1984)
[ ] Only Yesterday (1991)
[ ] Pom Poko (Tanuki War) (1994)
[ ] Porco Rosso (1992)
[ ] Princess Mononoke (1999)
[ ] Spirited Away (2002)
[ ] Whisper of the Heart (1995)
[ ] Ponyo on a Cliff by the Sea (2009)
[ ] Panda! Go Panda!
[ ] Tales from Earthsea
[ ] Horus, Prince of the Sun

SATOSHI KON
——————————-
[ ] Millennium Actress (2001)
[ ] Paprika (2006)
[ ] Perfect Blue (1999)
[ ] Tokyo Godfathers (2003)

SHINKAI MAKOTO
——————————-
[ ] She and Her Cat (1999)
[ ] Voices of a Distant Star (2001)
[ ] The Place Promised in Our Early Days (2004)
[ ] 5 Centimeters per Second (2007)

OTHER ANIME FILMS
——————————-
[ ] Akira (1989)
[ ] Appleseed (2004)
[ ] Appleseed: Ex Machina (2007) -
[ ] Arcadia of My Youth (U.S. Title – Vengeance of the Space Pirate) (1982)
[ ] Cowboy Bebop: The Movie (2003)
[ ] The Dagger of Kamui (U.S. Title – Revenge of the Ninja Warrior) (1985)
[ ] Dirty Pair: Project Eden (1987)
[ ] End of Evangelion (1997)
[O] Gundam Wing: Endless Waltz (1998)
[ ] Fist of the North Star (1986)
[ ] Galaxy Express 999 (1979)
[ ] Ghost in the Shell (1996)
[ ] The Girl Who Leapt Through Time (2006)
[ ] Lensman (1984)
[ ] Macross: Do You Remember Love (U.S. Title – Clash of the Bionoids) (1984)
[ ] Metropolis (2001)
[ ] Neo-Tokyo (1986)
[ ] Ninja Scroll (1993)
[ ] Origin: Spirits Of The Past
[ ] Patlabor the Movie (1989)
[ ] The Professional: Golgo 13 (1983)
[ ] Project A-ko (1986)
[ ] Robot Carnival (1987)
[O] Robotech: The Shadow Chronicle (2006)
[ ] Silent Möbius (1991)
[ ] Space Adventure Cobra (1982)
[ ] Steamboy (2004)
[ ] Sword of the Stranger (2007)
[ ] Unico and the Island of Magic (1983)
[ ] Urotsukidoji: The Movie (1987) Never will I see this of my own volition.
[ ] Vampire Hunter D (1985)
[ ] Vampire Hunter D Bloodlust (2000)
[ ] Wings of Honneamise: Royal Space Force (1987)

CARTOONS FOR GROWN-UPS
——————————-
[ ] American Pop (1981)
[ ] The Animatrix (2003)
[ ] Beavis & Butthead Do America (1996)
[ ] Cool World (1992)
[ ] Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within (2001)
[ ] Final Fantasy: Advent Children (2005)
[ ] Fire & Ice (1983)
[ ] Fritz the Cat (1972)
[ ] Heavy Metal (1981)
[ ] Heavy Metal 2000 (2000)
[ ] Hey Good Lookin’ (1982)
[ ] Lady Death (2004)
[ ] A Scanner Darkly (2006)
[X] South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut (1999)
[ ] Street Fight (Coonskin) (1975)
[ ] Waking Life (2001)

OTHER ANIMATED MOVIES
——————————-
[O] Animal Farm (1954)
[ ] Animalympics (1980)
[ ] Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon The Movie (2007)
[ ] Batman Beyond: Return of the Joker
[ ] The Brave Little Toaster (1988)
[ ] Bravestarr: The Movie (1988)
[ ] Cats Don’t Dance (1997)
[X] Care Bears: The Movie (1985)
[X] Charlotte’s Web (1973)
[X] Fern Gully (1992)
[X] G.I. Joe: The Movie (1987)
[ ] Gobots: Battle of the Rock Lords (1986)
[O] He-Man & She-Ra: The Secret of the Sword (1985)
[X] The Hobbit (1977)
[O] The Iron Giant (1999)
[ ] Justice League: The New Frontier (2008)
[ ] Lord of the Rings (1978)
[ ] Little Nemo: Adventures in Slumberland (1992)
[ ] My Little Pony: The Movie (1986)
[ ] Pink Floyd’s The Wall (1982)
[X] The Prince of Egypt (1998)
[ ] Powerpuff Girls: The Movie (2002)
[ ] Quest For Camelot (1999)
[ ] Ringing Bell (1978)
[ ] The Road to El Dorado (2000)
[ ] Rock & Rule (1983)
[ ] Space Jam (1996)
[ ] Starchaser: The Legend of Orin (1985)
[ ] Superman: Doomsday (2007)
[ ] The Swan Princess (1994)
[O] Transformers: The Movie (1986)
[ ] Wizards (1977)
[X] Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988)
[ ] Wonder Woman (2009)
[X] Balto (1995)
[ ] Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron (2002)

ADDENDUM
[ ] 9 (2009)
[ ] The Ant Bully (2006)
[ ] Batman: Mask of the Phantasm
[ ] Bee Movie (2007)
[ ] Beowulf (2007)
[ ] The Chipmunk Adventure (1987)
[ ] Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs (2009)
[ ] Felix the Cat: The Movie (1988)
[ ] Flushed Away (2006)
[ ] Happily N’Ever After (2007)
[ ] Hoodwinked (2005)
[ ] Horton Hears a Who (2008)
[X] Ice Age (2002)
[X] Ice Age: The Meltdown (2006)
[ ] Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs (2009)
[ ] Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius (2001)
[ ] Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa (2008)
[ ] Open Season (2006)
[ ] Pokemon: The First Movie (1999)
[ ] The Princess and the Frog (2009)
[ ] Robots
[ ] The Rugrats Movie (1998)
[X] Shark Tale (2004)
[ ] Shrek Forever After (2010)
[X] The Simpsons Movie (2007)
[ ] Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas (2003)
[ ] Space Chimps (2008)
[X] The Spongebob Squarepants Movie (2004)
[ ] The Tale of Despereaux (2008)
[ ] Valiant (2005)
[ ] We’re Back! A Dinosaur’s Story (1993)

ADDENDUM II
[ ] Mind Game
[ ] The Secret of Kells
[ ] Shonen Sarutobi Sasuke (U.S. title “Magic Boy”)
[ ] Princess Arete
[ ] Urusai Yatsura: Beautiful Dreamer
[O] Cat Soup
[ ] Summer Wars