Withdrawal and Sickness

When a heroin addict goes without heroin for long enough, he or she suffers a combination of cramps, chills, itches, vomiting, paranoia, delirium, and other physical and psychological symptoms. Most people call this condition ‘withdrawal’; drug users, however, call it ‘being sick.’ Why?

Population vs. news rank

On Wikipedia you can find a list of cities or metropolitan areas in the U.S. ranked by population. You can also find a list of newspapers in the U.S. ranked by circulation. It doesn’t take long to notice that they’re not the same list! Sure, they’re both dominated by New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago, but after that the order can vary. Why? What does it say about a city if its newspaper is more or less widely read than you’d expect from its size? That’s a good question, and we’ll get to it, but first let’s compare the size and circulation rankings.

Desire Paths

You can tell a lot about people from the paths they build.

Bad Jobs

Let’s define, for the moment, a “bad job” as one that’s not pleasant or fun, and doesn’t teach you any obvious skills that have any value outside the job itself. It might also be boring and/or dangerous. Outside of financial concerns, is there any value in having such a job?

The Flexible Vowel in English Negation

It’s often observed that “no” means “no,” but less noticed that so do “naw” and “nah.” Although in writing, the negative interjection is almost always spelled no, in speech a number of vowels can follow the n and still make for a correctly-formed negation.

The Nation and its Pieces

Nationalisms often employ stereotypical, one-dimensional descriptions of the nation’s subregions in their self-regarding odes. This has a function. Imagine a view of England, say, with the coal miners of Newcastle, the industrial Manchester area, the white cliffs of Dover, and so on. Or France, with the hardy Norman fishers in Normandy, Breton seafarers and ancient citadels in Brittany, medieval castles on the Loire, skiing resorts in the Alps, sunny beaches on the Riviera, red workingmen of Paris, etc. Or America, with the amber waves of grain in the Midwest, the diligent financial men in suits in New York, the decadent film industry camped out in Southern California, pot-growing hippies in Northern California, Southern hospitality and chivalry across the southeast, oil barons in Texas, etc. Each of these stereotypes, taken literally, is impossible; it’s crazy to imagine a Newcastle made of literally nothing but coal miners, or a Paris with only communist laborers, or a Midwest with nothing but cornfields. In fact it’s only possible to imagine at least minimally diverse places, with at least an elementary division of labor between classes and types. So if America is made up of the stereotypical North, South, Midwest, Texas, and Northern and Southern California, it’s only as a whole nation that it makes sense as a place—each part on its own feels incomplete. These stereotypical descriptions are thus both a result of and an encouragement to nationalism.

Cross-posted from Empire Avenue.

The Public Imperative and the Hortatory ‘Je’

In life, we are constantly surrounded by signs urging us to do or not to do things. In English, they are usually in the imperative mood: Stop, Take one, Cut along dotted line. In the case of interdictions, they might use the gerund: No smoking. In specific cases there may be other syntaxes, but in general these two, the imperative and the gerund, form what might be called the “public imperative” in English.

Not so in French.

Travelogue: Reykjavik

I recently spent a few days in Reykjavik, Iceland’s capital and only real city. Here are a few of my impressions.

Scarcity and Waste

Last night I watched Soylent Green, the 1973 Charlton Heston film set in an overcrowded future America. Like Citizen Kane it has, for some reason, become known for its twist ending. That twist is actually one of the less interesting aspects of the movie, which is reminiscent of Blade Runner in its ceaselessly pessimistic imagination of human nature and our human future.

Fear of Names

Don’t let your fear of hollow words give you a fear of names.

Deep respect for a thing (/idea/sensation/behavior/attitude/etc.), and distaste for hollow talk in general, can make you wary of naming it, because the more convenient the name, the more easily it can get caught up in hollow talk about it and distracting noise about the thing. But names are handles, they let you work upon the thing, manipulate it: think about it and fit it into its relations with other things. The name facilitates important work, both negative and positive, upon the thing: negative — finding the flaws and incoherencies and disadvantages of the thing when all its consequences and alternatives are considered; positive — understanding yourself, the value of your things, what you can build from them. Perhaps especially for things that are dear to you it is essential to do this in order to expand your world, or else you will stagnate in a constricting world of so few things, neither leaving them aside when they are no longer good for you nor using them to create and reach new things

So go ahead and taxonomize, and circumspectly trust your ability to carry the whole meaning of the thing when you grasp its handle, trust that you can preserve the meaning in your use of the name.