Three Minute Photoshop Makeover, the Music Video

I've watched this video a few times this week, in part because the music is catchy, but mostly because its message is powerful:



http://www.policymic.com/articles/79585/watch-this-woman-get-a-complete-photoshop-makeover-in-3-minutes-flat

Body image, especially that of young women, has become increasingly prominent in our social discourse over the past decade or so. There's been, at one end, greater awareness of eating disorders and related insecurities; on the other end, there's been significantly wider recognition of this country's obesity problem. The former is often associated with standards of beauty as dictated by media and peer interaction, while the latter is often a consequence of economics and the vulnerability of children who don't know any better than to consume what appeals to them in the short term (and the adults who were raised that way).

This video deals with the former problem -- that of media perpetuating impossibly exacting ideals, which millions of young women attempt to imitate in real life, without the aid of Photoshop. While a proportion of the changes depicted can be accomplished with cosmetics, other changes, such as altering the symmetry of the singer's face, is not something that women can physically achieve. And while humans are instinctively more attracted to symmetrical faces with higher contrast, one cannot expect a mathematical level of symmetry in our natural, imperfect bodies.

We are visual creatures. When introduced to a pair of images, we all have opinions as to which one we find more aesthetically pleasing. But we, through millennia of civilization and progress, are more than our basest instincts, more than our visceral reactions. We are rational and more evolved creatures who value each other for qualities greater than appearance. While it makes sense for us to make reasonable attempts to look pleasing to others, our society now has the tools with which to project images that are unreasonable to imitate. The crucial part here, then, is to ensure that we all recognize that it would be unreasonable to expect each other, and ourselves, to look like that.

We are none of us aesthetic ideals. Even models, actors, beauty queens -- even those we have collectively deemed the most attractive specimens of our species -- have their own insecurities. We must learn, in our most vulnerable and susceptible years, that we are valued not for how closely we conform to our society's standards of beauty, but rather, for our contributions in areas deeper and more within our power to shape. In appearances, we are limited by genetics, by environment, by the hand we are dealt. In what lies beneath, we are bound by fewer and less arbitrary constraints.

Moreover, we cannot take it with us. At the end of the day, it's all transport. We keep the engine primed and the moving parts oiled so that we might achieve more, and live more happily, in our time. The parts of us that are not flesh -- these comprise what we have made of ourselves.

On another note: this video is a testament to the power of activist art. Slogans and speeches will only get us so far, after all. In order to effect change, people must want the change themselves -- and one of the most effective ways to influence somebody's viewpoint is by creating empathy and emotional connection. As much as I believe in solving problems rationally and logically, there are many situations where the visceral reaction evoked by imagery is a more powerful motivator. As Lincoln famously said to Harriet Beecher Stowe, "so you are the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war!"

Carl Sagan Day

Happy Carl Sagan Day!

Carl Sagan was one of the first and most well-known American populist scientists. That is, he championed the worthy cause of bringing science (especially astronomy) to the non-scientist public. (For comparison's sake, he was a contemporary of Freeman Dyson, another such luminary, and the forefather of scientists like Brian Greene and Neil deGrasse Tyson.) Sagan is perhaps best known for his novel Contact, subsequently made into an eponymous film, and for the television series Cosmos. It's fitting that he should have his own day of celebration (he would have been 79 today), wherein people contemplate the great beyond.

In addition to popularizing science, Sagan was also one of the great advocates for SETI in his day, as well as a proponent of nuclear disarmament. He was, as were many great scientists, a profound humanist. He was the originator of the saying "We are all stardust," one of my all-time favorites. (If I were ever to get a quotation tattooed somewhere on my body, this would be a top contender. It helps that it's short.) In another life, I might have gone into astrophysics -- largely because I grew up reading books by people like him.

Addendum: the Library of Congress recently acquired Carl Sagan's papers, which include his reading lists. This is facinating stuff!

Reality, Relativity, and Light

I read José Saramago's The History of the Siege of Lisbon last week -- in translation, of course, since I don't read Portuguese. It's excellent, and somewhat stylistically and structurally unusual. But I was struck, in particular, by this line, spoken to the protagonist by his lover (the relationship is rather more complicated than that, of course):

Switch on the light, she said, I want to know if this is real. (p264)

The relationship between any two people -- even within family, even between people who might have known each other their whole lives -- is a fragile thing. Within that relationship, there are layers of reality, of perception. It's a sort of relativity, even -- one that isn't governed by any laws of physics. His reality and hers could be completely different, and each moment's reality different from the next. It's odd to think that we can never know what another person's reality looks like; the closest we can come is to achieve an understanding of how our reality compares to what we perceive to be their reality, with full awareness that our vantage point colours our reading.

This is especially relevant to the subject matter because the 1147 Siege of Lisbon, about which the protagonist writes, was a manifestation of a centuries-old clash of cultures and religions, a battle between two peoples who understood the same God through different scriptures and different prophets. Elizabeth I once said, in another century about another religious conflict, "I would not open windows into men's souls." Such windows can only be approximated, even in the best of circumstances.

I'm also taken by the Saramago's use of light in this scene -- something one normally associates with visual art rather than with prose. It's ripe with symbolism; the notion of shedding light on something intangible, that our eyes can tell us about reality between two people, &c. I'm reminded of two things:

Perhaps we may frighten away the ghost of so many years ago with a little illumination...
~ "The Phantom of the Opera," Act I, Scene 1

So many years after the events of "The Phantom of the Opera," the very chandelier that was associated with the disaster perpetrated by the Phantom is now a source of illumination -- both as a refurbished light fixture, and as a window into the murky past, the audience's introduction to the story. Because it is an inanimate object with a lofty vantage point, it is, in a fashion, the impartial observer of the story. And yet, it is also a crucial "participant" in the story. Its impartiality is not so much due to its placement, a lamp hanging high above the human characters, but rather because it has no free will, no desires or motivations of its own.

The second thing is Plato's Allegory of the Cave. Our understanding of what goes on inside another person's mind is rather like to the prisoners' understanding of the shadows on the wall. Another person's reality undergoes several layers of translation before it becomes comprehensible to us; the "truth" is distorted by their perception, interpreted by their mind, conveyed by their words, filtered by our ears, and only then is it analyzed by our minds. Plato's prisoners are eventually unchained, but there is no way for any of us to overcome this process of interpretation. The amount that must get lost in translation is mind-boggling. It makes me wonder what a society of perfect communication (of telepathy, essentially) would look like.

Edit: Soon after writing this post, I chanced upon an io9 article about philosophical thought experiments: http://io9.com/9-philosophical-thought-experiments-that-will-keep-you-1340952809@AnnaleeNewitz. The third entry therein, "The Beetle in the Box" (aka the Private Language Argument), is very much like what I discuss above. The second entry, "Mary the Colorblind Neuroscientist" (aka the Inverted Spectrum Problem), is also quite similar to the Allegory of the Cave. It's well worth reading.

Faulkner on Literature, Humanity, and Immortality

On Sunday, I had dinner with my friend Brett after an afternoon visit to the Met. I was telling him about an amazing, inspiring book talk I'd recently attended: it was a conversation between Adam Johnson, a Stanford English professor and this year's Pulitzer winner in fiction, and Fredrik Logevall, a Cornell history professor and the Pulitzer winner in nonfiction, moderated by their editor, David Ebershoff, of Random House.

Brett was reminded of (and sent me) this particular speech delivered by William Faulkner on the acceptance of his Nobel Prize in Literature in 1949:
http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1949/faulkner-speech.html

It's brilliant and quite worth reading (and not very long) -- so do actually read it! Faulkner's claim is, essentially, that literature -- the written word, storytelling, art -- is humanity's way of achieving some semblance of immortality. He writes not of the genetic "immortality" perpetuated by our biology, of course; I think one of the prerequisites of sentience is a consciousness of meaning greater than base instinct. Rather, Faulkner speaks to our legacy as a species -- the ideas, the intellectual and creative achievements by which humanity might define itself.

Literature is one such vehicle. I would hesitate to call it a record -- that term falls too much in the realm of historiography (which is itself an ambitious and meaningful endeavour, of course) -- but perhaps one might consider literature the pared-down essence of what it means to be human. In books, in art, we see reflected not only the best (and the worst) -- but also the deepest, truest, and most beautiful aspects of ourselves. In literature, we are immortal -- not only the writer, and sometimes not the writer at all (Homer is the example that comes to mind) -- but we, as a sentient species, are captured, burnished, chased in silver -- forever.

Shakespeare expressed a similar sentiment centuries earlier:

So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
(Sonnet 18, lines 13-14)

Erasmus, the Consummate Bibliophile

Story of my life:

When I get a little money, I buy books. If any is left, I buy food and clothes. 

~ Erasmus

To reassure those of you with concerns about my continued survival... I doubt I'd ever actually resort to such extremes. Library cards, after all, didn't exist in the fifteenth century.

And of course, Erasmus is one of my favorite Catholic philosophers, though admittedly, I admire him more for his humanism than for his religion. (Granted, his being Dutch -- as opposed to, say, Spanish -- during the Renaissance might have something to do with it.) In a day and age filled with all manner of extremists, he was a moderate -- a principled, rational, articulate moderate, and a champion of religious tolerance amidst rampant sectarian violence. It was all the books, of course! :-)

The Evolution of the English Language, as Demonstrated by Austen

I was reading the novel Emma for an English class, and happened upon the following phrase, which made me laugh:

A sudden freak seemed to have seized him at breakfast... (Vol. II, Chapter 7)

At first glance, it would appear that a character was kidnapped from the breakfast table by some sort of lunatic. (Yes, the use of "sudden" is a bit of a giveaway that something is amiss in this interpretation.) Not quite the sort of scene one would expect in a Jane Austen novel.

What "a sudden freak" actually means is more along the lines of "a capricious fancy."

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.

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.

The Marrow of Life

I don't normally read The Stanford Review, but something struck me about this particular article:
http://blog.stanfordreview.org/2011/01/28/the-intensely-lonely-world-of-stanford-students/

It's not breathtakingly profound, or even anything that hasn't been said before, but it does make me think, sometimes, about what I'm doing here at Stanford. In twenty years, I'm not going to remember my midterms, my problem sets, the paper I pulled an all-nighter trying to finish. I know, rather, that I'll remember the wonderful friends I made, the late-night conversations, and the random crazy stunts we pulled. Those are the memories I should be making in my last year here. As Henry David Thoreau once wrote:

I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life... (Walden, Chapter 2)

I've promised myself: I'll do something interesting, fun, and maybe unexpected every week (or even more than once a week, if I can). It might be something simple and solitary, like finding a good poem, or learning to cook something new. It might be a fun activity with friends, like attending a dance event, or having a long and interesting conversation with somebody. And I'll try my damnedest not to let the relative isolation of my dorm (Mirrielees, which does have its perks, like a kitchenette and a bathroom in each suite), or the scattering of my friends, or my rather demanding course load, stop me.

So, for those of you at Stanford, if there's something you think I'd like to try, or something you think I don't know much about, by all means, drag me to your event! If you just want to chat, stop by for dinner or tea. Chances are, I don't see you nearly as often as I'd like.

Snippets from Summer Reading (Just My Type, by Simon Garfield)

Something to live by:

By all means break the rules, and break them beautifully, deliberately, and well. That is one of the ends for which they exist.

~ Robert Bringhurst, The Elements of Typographic Style (Just My Type, p258)

Something to amuse (but nonetheless wise):

The good type designer ... realizes that, for a new fount to be successful, it has to be so good that only very few recognize its novelty. If my friends think that the tail of my lower-case r or the lip of my lower-case e is rather jolly, you may know that the fount would have been better had neither been made.

~ Stanley Morison, of The Times (Just My Type, p259)

It's an excellent book, besides.

Adverbs, and the Killing Thereof

A humorous take on the not-so-funny problems with the way writing is taught in American grade schools:

http://www.therejectionist.com/2011/02/dear-superior-person_25.html

I remember, vaguely (it was a decade ago), the extremes to which grade school instructors went in instilling "show, don't tell" into the repertoires of their unsuspecting charges. It is, as with most rules, best applied in moderation. Fancy verbs and superfluous adverbs are annoying and frilly, and often make the text that much less readable. Beginner mistakes, to be sure, but ones that are utterly preventable -- and indeed, wouldn't crop up in the first place, if it weren't for these notions about grade school writing.

Mark Twain said it best: "If you see an adverb, kill it!"

Dust to Dust

I'm writing a paper on T. S. Eliot's "The Waste Land" right now, and this is one of (in my opinion) the best and most evocative lines in the whole poem:

I will show you fear in a handful of dust. (line 30)

Simple, vivid, chilling.

It reminds me of "Ozymandias"; it strikes me as something a prophet might have said to that pharaoh, who desired to be great and enduring, and yet, like all other men, ended up fading and crumbling with time. Given that Ozymandias is actually a vague transliteration of what was Greek for "Ramses," that particular prophet would have been the Biblical Moses. Quite fitting, no?

This is why Hemingway is amazing

"Your blood coagulates beautifully." (p59, A Farewell to Arms)

That is all.

Edit: It reminded me of this.

Universality

I realize that this post must strike the readership as deeply ironic, given -- well, given me -- but I find myself somewhat vindicated in this quotation:

Everyone, in some small sacred sanctuary of the self, is nuts.

~ Leo Rosten

Yes, he was a humorist. (So what?)

It's rather true, I find; even beyond the people I tend to hang out with, who are admittedly a self-selected and odd crowd, most people are really weird in some unexpected way (and in some expected ways, too). It's just that some people try harder to hide it than others.

Boomerangs

Just something I found recently:

The game of life is the game of boomerangs. Our thoughts, deeds and words return to us sooner or later with astounding accuracy.

~ Florence Scovel Shinn

It's not a very complex thought; it's basically an eloquent explanation of karma, or causation. The line is most striking, methinks, in its use of language. There is a certain profoundness, a certain timelessness, to it, that is manifest in the use of that particular analogy.

Nationalism

I've spent the past quarter studying, in part, the development and evolution of nations in various classes. One of the recurring themes that really struck me was just how easy it was to get the masses to subscribe to, kill in the name of, fight and die for, an idea. On many occasions, it was the concept of the nation -- whether it was a piece of land or an ethnic group or a shared history. And then I found this quotation, which explains a whole lot:

Nationalist pride, like other variants of pride, can be a substitute for self-respect.

~ Eric Hoffer

It because many people want something to believe in, something to belong to, some higher purpose; we see it all the time with religious zealots and political extremists (the two often overlap). The nation is another such concept. People, I believe, can be good, or can think themselves good, if given even the slimmest chance to elevate their position. Nationalism is one such outlet.

There is such a thing as healthy nationalism, moderate and rational nationalism. It is only when people depend too much upon that one belief, when it becomes all that they live for, when they place all their hopes and dreams in it, that it becomes a vicious, dangerous force. Fanatics are the most dangerous sort of enemy, because they believe wholeheartedly that they are right, that they are defenders of the cause, that anyone who disagrees is mistaken at best, and evil at worst -- they are not easily dislodged by minor setbacks or lost battles. They become one with their purpose, so to speak, and are destroyed, heart and soul, with the defeat of their cause. It is a law of the nature to fight against one's own destruction, and laws of nature are more powerful than the laws of man.

Strangeness

I find this a particularly apt sentiment:

There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion.

~ Francis Bacon

We so often endeavour to attain perfection for ourselves and that which we hold dear; inevitably, all parties fall short of the mark, and therein lies dissatisfaction and despair. We are, after all, only human.

Accordingly, I strive for coherence, for completeness of being and richness of experience, rather than for perfection. I am, every day, honing the many pieces of me, that they might coalesce as a greater, deeper, and more beautiful whole than they were the day before. They, and I, need not be perfect -- only better.

This is a reminder, for whomever needs reminding, to take us as we are, as we shall be, rather than as you might wish we were. This is also a reminder, to all the strange, wonderful, imperfect people I know -- you are beautiful.

I am reminded, also, of the poem "Pied Beauty" by Gerard Manley Hopkins. Go read it; it's lovely.

MSNBC: Anne Rice No Longer Christian

For those of you unfamiliar with her, Anne Rice is a very well-regarded gothic novelist, one of the old-guard (pre-Twilight) vampire writers. Her Lestat drinks human blood, burns up in sunlight (for the majority of the series, anyways), and certainly doesn't sparkle.

Anyhow, she's personally had a diverse and contentious history with Christianity. She was raised in a Catholic family, renounced religion at eighteen, and returned to Catholicism in her fifties. She recently announced, however, that she is no longer Christian:

http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/38474711/ns/today-books/?gt1=43001

One of the most interesting points: Rice states that while she remains faithful to God, she has renounced the Church (and indeed, the label of "Christian") -- rather like a modern day Luther, actually. In his day, the grievances of the good Christian against the Catholic Church were primarily its sale of indulgences and its general corruption. The Church's problems in the modern day are more insidious; they consist of ideology-based discrimination, obstruction of human rights protections, and systemic degeneracy. Martin Luther was Christian but not Catholic in a world where Catholicism basically was Christianity; Anne Rice is following illustrious footsteps, indeed.

As Gandhi once said, so says Anne Rice: "I like your Christ. I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ." A vast generalization, to be sure (I know some very wonderful Christians, myself), but nonetheless, amen to that!

Two Sides of a Coin

Praise and flattery are two very similar, and yet wholly different, creatures:

Just praise is only a debt, but flattery is a present.

~ Samuel Johnson

I do not often think of it this way, but it is quite true. It reminds me distinctly of the two traditions in which I am steeped. Americans believe in forthright truth and are wary of flattery, believing that the prettiest words are the most deceptive. The Chinese, on the other hand, have elevated flattery to a high art, placing their faith in the social lubricant of fine speech and disdaining those without such silvered tongues as uncultured and uncouth. Similarly, the Western world operates on a system of transaction, of payment of dues (catalogued, countersigned, and otherwise assured), whereas the Chinese believe in a system of favors, where it is more desirable to grant a favor than to suffer one given, where one's public honor trumps one's true ability when pressed to choose.

Veritas aut honor. Truly a difficult choice.

Ink

Blood is rather a common theme in philosophy and literature, but I thought this quotation uncommonly inspired:

Blood is the ink of our life's story.

~Jason Mechalek

There are so many layers of meaning in these few words. There is the blood of lineage, which for most people plays a crucial role in the course of their lives, whether through acceptance of a legacy, or repudiation of the same, or some combination of the two. There is the blood of birth, of bringing into the world another soul, another bearer of a name and a history. There is the blood of death, whether natural or otherwise, which changes the lives of all who bear witness, and all whose hands are thereafter stained. There is the blood of faith, which is not blood, but rather the vine's best attempt at blessing, for which believers have themselves bled, and lived, and died.

It is strange, is it not, that a biological substance, one of many, should hold for us such meaning?