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Review! - In the Miso Soup

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In front of me there is a cup. Like all cups, it is extremely interesting.

When I put my tongue on one part of it, it is cool and smooth. This is true of the next five parts of the cup I put my tongue on, but not the sixth, on the lip, which is cool but not smooth, because the cup is chipped there.

Descending from this chip is a thin black fissure. If the fissure was a stem, the negative space of the chip could be a flower, maybe a poppy. Across the cup from this fissure is a real (painted) flower. Unlike the flower made of empty space, the painted flower has petals (twenty), and leaves (two) sticking out of its stem. But the petals are like petals from a sunflower, and the leaves are like leaves from an oak tree, so maybe it is not any more real than the flower made of negative space. Besides that, all round the inside of the cup its glaze is cracked with a pattern like a cicada's wing. D'Arcy Thompson would enjoy the correspondence I am sure.

When I first found the cup, it was a pregnant woman, because it was half-full of clayish dirt. But actually I suppose the clayish dirt it was full of wouldn't grow up to be a cup like its mother, probably it was the wrong kind of clay, so the cup is specifically like Angrboda, or at least Pasiphae, or maybe Mary Theotokos, but I have to be careful there, because that might be a heresy (the implied Christology, I mean). My point is that mysteriousness of embryology is quite underrated. It is one of our wyrdest and most numinous sciences, so keep up the good work embryologists, ditto to the cup makers and buriers.

On the base of the cup the words "MADE IN AUSTRALIA" are printed. Google tells me the cup was made by "Johnson of Australia" in the "1970/80's" in "Croydon", "Victoria". I did not find the cup in Croydon, Victoria. I found it with a tree root growing through its handle, half-buried in the bank of the Karuah River, which is near Monkerai, which is near Bulahdelah, which Les Murray wrote a poem about once. If you want to make a pilgrimage to the exact location where I found the cup, the coordinates are 32°16'44.4"S, 151°50'56.4"E. Do be aware those coordinates fall on private property, and also I had a pretty good look to check if there were any other cups there and I couldn't find any, so if you are just looking to get your own cup, going there is probably not worth-while. I did meet some friendly cows though. Worth saying hi to them if you're in the area.

It's often a good idea to leave people wanting more, so I won't tell you any more about my cup at this time.

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Yes… Ha ha ha… Yes!

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A certain kind of putdown works by pointing out someone's behaviour is driven by causes, not reasons. This was basically Freud's whole schtick, ditto for parts of Marx and Nietzsche. You can do this by uncovering facts about people's childhood, or worse, their adolescence. Lots of intellectual history does this. Categorising someone as a type of guy rather than an individual has a similar effect. Pathologizing as a rhetorical or political strategy works like this, e.g. calling people homophobes.

There are different names for this move. Hegel-via-Brandom talks about Niederträchtigkeit (baseness or ignobility) and Edelmütigkeit (nobility, magnanimity), where the niederträchtig person is someone who takes our actions to be caused and the edelmütig person takes them to be responding to reasons. Strawson talks about the participatory and objective stances in similar ways. There is a world of reasons, of moral agents, where you make moves like apology, resentment, forgiveness, and bargains, and a world of causes, of at-best moral subjects, where you can only explain, expect, and influence.

Weirdly, a similar split exists on certain vaguely-Buddhist views. On some understandings of the two truths doctrine there's a split is between conventional truth, the world of reasons and persons and their reason-giving games, and ultimate truth, the world of causes and conditions. Here the valence is reversed, its the world of causes that is in some sense superior to the world of reasons. On this version of the split, viewing people's behaviour (including your own) as being driven by causes, not reasons, is not an insult but a prompting to compassion.

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Could there be an equivalent naïve narrative art? What would it look like to bring an "equal accuracy to all details" in a narrative? Is it just a matter of describing the breakfast in as much detail as the boss battle? What is the equivalent of "distance from the observer" in the narrative? It could be relevance to the main causal or thematic arc. So irrelevant details are told in as much vivid detail as the "main" plot. Is Tristram Shandy then the best example of naïve narrative art?

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You ever listen to SACOYANS? They're pretty great. If you're ever in Osaka, and you find yourself on a rollercoaster called the Hollywood Dream, make sure to select the song "Osaka Lover" as your ride music. It's not by SACOYANS or anything, they're just both Japanese.

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I think minimalist UIs are condescending. They assume the user doesn't know what they want, and needs their attention directed to a pre-digested subset of visible menu options.

Minimalist UIs are a warning that someone is either trying to sell you something or sell you. There are way more words on any single internal page of a book than on its cover. The discrepancy was less stark in 17th century frontispieces.

How do conversational UIs (i.e. chatbots) fit into this?

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Most media is social media if you view your past and future selves as different "people" interacting across time. Your childhood journal is a small social media platform, it just has a weird, linear social graph.

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I've realised my poems naturally tend to be bad robert lowell impersonations, so I'll be doing bad ashbery and o'hara impressions as penance for the foreseeable future. e.g.:

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I think the fact the D-Day landings were successfully kept secret (despite involving so many people) makes complicated conspiracy theories more plausible.

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