Beauty and Madness

 I've been reading some William Morris for a literature class on medievalism (both medieval literature and Victorian medievalism). This line, in particular, struck me:

 I was half mad with beauty on that day...

~ William Morris, "The Defence of Guenevere"

I've noticed that beautiful people, and people who create beautiful things, are often a little mad. (By "beautiful people," I mean people who have beautiful souls or minds, not attractive exteriors.) There's a sort of fragile beauty, the sort where you can hear the madness vibrating under the surface, like an impossibly light glass orb that might shatter if you touch it. It's the wildness of it, the thrill of unpredictability. It's the beauty of the endangered predator, the tiger that doesn't know it's one of the last of its kind, that can still kill you where you stand.

Madness itself can be beautiful, in its own way (hence the Gothic novel). There's a certain purity to madness, in that everything that affects a lunatic ultimately comes from within her own head (much of it is exhibited as response to stimuli, but the response is atypical -- i.e. not socially dictated). The greater part of the significance that literature assigns to madness is the uniqueness of its perspective.

Western culture idealizes individualism to an extent unmatched in other societies -- and that applies to Western intellectual culture as well. I think of it, sometimes, as the "genius in a box" phenomenon. People are attracted to the image of great ideas springing fully formed from the aether, like Athena from Zeus's head. They like thinking that geniuses are born, not made, and that they achieve their success purely through their own inscrutable methods. Of course, this construct doesn't quite reflect reality; as Newton once said, "If I have seen a little further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants." (His expression of the sentiment is the most famous, but not the first; the earliest known attribution is to Bernard of Chartres.) I actually just read, for a history of science class, an interesting book by Peter Galison entitled Einstein's Clocks, Poincaré's Maps, which argues (perhaps a tad overzealously) that Einstein, the quintessential representation of genius in modern Western culture, was inspired in the formation of his theories of relativity by the mathematician Henri Poincaré. One can't be a pioneer in one's field without having a good grasp of the work that preceded one's own. Genius is hardly ever as isolated as the romantic ideal would have it.

The thing is, genius is isolating only insofar as society renders it so. There were plenty of intellectuals throughout history who, in addition to being brilliant, were also scintillating conversationalists, consummate socialites and courtiers, and infamous Lotharios -- Renaissance men, as it were. It's terribly unfortunate that in the modern day, intelligence is seen as a social liability (that's probably a reflection on the state of American society, but we'll not go there tonight). But it's that isolation that makes it seem mysterious, unattainable -- and therefore beautiful.

A bit of a digression, I suppose. Perhaps not quite what Morris was going for, but that's how I read it.

NYTimes: What's in a Name?

Seeing as it's Thanksgiving -- a celebration of family and loved ones -- I thought that this would be an appropriate article to post; it's an observation on an inevitable quandary in naming trends, given recent (within the past several decades) developments in gender equality and increasingly diverse modern familial structures:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/24/fashion/babies-surnames-to-hyphenate-or-not.html?_r=1&ref=fashion?src=dayp

I've given this a fair bit of thought. As a heterosexual female, Western social customs would have me relinquish my surname in favor of my hypothetical husband's, if I were to marry at some point in my life. I'm not so keen on that, myself; I'm rather attached to my last name. It has a history behind it, a connection to generations of family and culture.

Ergo, one of my goals in life is to achieve a level of "success" (definition variable) such that if the time comes, it would appear to be logical (rather than vain or self-serving) to keep my surname. It's rather sad that society is still at a stage where a woman needs a reason to keep her maiden name, while a man may do so merely by virtue of his Y chromosome. I hope that someday, English-speaking society will have progressed such that women keep their own names as a matter of course, and some equitable system exists whereby children's surnames are evenly distributed between their sire and dam.

I'm not sure about hypothetical children (haven't given them much thought -- I'm many years too young for that!) but I imagine it would depend a lot on the ethnic origins of their father. Surnames in some languages lend themselves more readily to hyphenation than those in others. I'd want them to have a Chinese name, too. If the father were non-Chinese, I'd like to give them my own Chinese family name to use in contexts that would require it; phonetically deriving one from the father's surname seems a little cheap, next to a name with history and family.

Interestingly, in Chinese society, women retain the use of their maiden names throughout life; it's only when referring to them specifically as "wife of so-and-so" that they go by the equivalent of "Mrs." Gender equality is, in some respects (this is a pretty significant caveat), more apparent in modern Chinese society (i.e. beginning with my generation). I think it has a lot to do with the One Child Policy, in that if parents have only one child, they will give it the best they can in the way of opportunity and attention. There is much less opportunity for parents to favor sons over daughters (after the birth of the child; female infanticide is still a problem in some areas), because they typically only have one child to dote upon. The surname given to the child is still the father's, so it's not a perfect system, by any means, but in this specific practice, it's a bit closer to gender equality than in English-speaking countries.

Physics from Hell

Speaking of Galileo:



It's quite fascinating how this entire body of mythology developed as a way of rationalizing a historical document in light of scientific advances over the course of centuries. It led to some pretty interesting literalist interpretations, as shown above. (Obviously, Biblical literalism yielded some rather significant results, mostly through its loss of scientific credibility. Ironic, but not surprising.)

Brett's Non-Apple Apple Cake

Yesterday was Brett's birthday. So I baked him a cake -- a non-apple apple cake. That basically means it was a cake that looked like an apple, but didn't actually have apple in it (it was a simple pound cake with strawberry jam filling):

It's something of an inside joke, because Brett has a bit of an obsession with green apples (he used to go through about ten of them a day). Back when we ate at dining halls, he would purloin dozens of them from the cafeteria, stuffing his backpack full of them and stashing them in his desk. The filing drawer (you can picture the volume of those) was usually half-full of apples. It got to the point where our friends nicknamed him "Apples." So everyone who came to his showering (another Stanford tradition -- friends surprise the birthday boy/girl at exactly midnight of their birthday, and toss them in the shower) got a laugh out of the cake.

Poetry vs. the Inquisition

A thought on the power of poetry, or perhaps just the abstruseness of some of the stuff:

If Galileo had said in verse that the world moved, the inquisition might have let him alone.

~ Thomas Hardy

Of course, if Galileo had written the Dialogue in the style of Vergil, he might never have achieved the posthumous scientific success that he did. (Then again, there were Renaissance men in his day, scientist-poet-philosophers. I wish our modern education system allowed for that -- but that's for a different post all together.)

Hardy was himself a great poet, so he knows whereof he speaks.

BBC: Human-Induced Fires Sow Seeds of the Future

"Natural" selection at work:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-15674495

It's an interesting, if not surprising, case of observable evolution, much like the moths adapting to soot-stained England a century or two ago.

xkcd: Sail

Today's xkcd, which I thought was really cute and quite clever:

That is all.

Page One, a Documentary

I attended an on-campus screening of the documentary Page One: Inside the New York Times (co-sponsored by The Stanford Daily and the communications department, I think) today. It was, I believe, showing at a number of smaller theatres over the summer, as well as at Sundance. I enjoyed it -- it was at once realistic and optimistic, and quite well-made, besides.

The heavy focus on the advent of citizen journalism and the much-hyped "death of (print) newspapers" mirrors the self-publishing and e-book issues in book publishing today -- something that I know better than I do than the news industry. In both cases, it's a matter of negotiating relatively peaceful change, especially where technology is concerned, under threat of obsolescence. News media, methinks, is less hidebound than book publishing in that regard.

It was interesting to note that much of the citizen journalism going on today is responsive and aggregative -- that is, bloggers and websites responding to reporting by traditional media outlets, and aggregating material from professional news media. Citizen journalism is just not sufficiently reliable and or comprehensive, at least not yet -- and I'm not convinced that it will ever be, because consistent, good, and consistently good journalism requires infrastructure (which in turn requires the sort of resources that civilian journalists can rarely access) and training (which is usually acquired at journalism school and/or through working in the field, under the guidance of more experienced journalists). Certainly, there are isolated incidences in which passersby on the ground are first to gain access to material simply because the spontaneity of some news precludes real-time coverage. But on the whole, I think the documentary has proven that professional journalism is not dead.

The Stanford Daily: Gaiman and Palmer in SF

Neil Gaiman and Amanda Palmer performed a show in San Francisco last week, and I covered it for The Daily (pretty much exactly what it says on the tin, above):

http://www.stanforddaily.com/2011/11/04/gaiman-and-palmer-read-rock-and-talk/

It was awesome. I want a ukulele. 

Bonfire Toffee

Seeing as it's the Fifth of November, a few friends and I are watching V for Vendetta. I made Bonfire Toffee for the occasion, using a recipe from the BBC Food Programme:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/factual/foodprogramme_recipe_toffee1.shtml

It's really sticky and tastes strongly of molasses. I've tested it on my friends, and they like it!

A Transcendentalist Microwave

A picture of our microwave:



It's Lucas's doing. Not that I don't approve, of course.

Why I'm Not Doing NaNoWriMo This Year

It's November, which means it's the time of year when thousands of writers around the world buckle down and write a novel. In a month.

I've done it four times, and I've won it three (see the sidebar). But this is not a been-there, done-that kind of post. In fact, I've been quite excited by the novel I have brewing in my head -- it's been living there for a few months, so real that I could almost touch it. (I wonder if it wiggles, like Jello?)

Rather, it's to do with this post. It's my last year here, with all of these wonderful people, and I don't want to spend a month locked in my room away from them. I have the rest of my life to do that. I want to have more pie nights, and attend lectures, and play midnight Catan. The novel can wait another year. Stanford won't -- it'll whoosh past if I'm not careful. (That, ironically, reminds me of this Douglas Adams quotation.)

So that's that.