[PHOTO] Closer and closer

The railway tracks used by Via Rail pass cleanly through the downtown, through Union Station and just north of the CN Tower and the Rogers Centre sports/concert venue. Walking by on Spadina last Thursday, I happened upon a construction crew and I had the good sense to use my camera's zoom feature the better to pick up their image.

Closer and closer (1)
Originally uploaded by rfmcdpei

Closer and closer (2)
Originally uploaded by rfmcdpei

Closer and closer (3)
Originally uploaded by rfmcdpei

[FORUM] Do you anthropomorphize animals? and how ? and is it ever a good idea?

Yesterday, as I was scattering goldfish flakes over the surface of the aquarium, it occurred to me that I may be recognized as a gold-like figure by the goldfish. I feed them, I watch them, I periodically change the water, I sometimes add new plants, and they can always see me from my seat in front of this very desktop less than a metre away. Sometimes I even show my additional favour to them by giving them the goldfish delicacy of thawed shelled peas.

Goldfish look pretty but they are not smart. I can't imagine that their thought processes are any more complex than "Swim/swim/swim/food?/food!/swim/swim/excrete/swim/swim/sleep/. . ./swim/swim/swim/food?/food :-(/excrete/swim/. . . " They probably do have a sense of subjectivity, a sense of that they exist and have a relation to the environment, but by human standards it's so vanishingly attenuated.

Not necessarily so other animals. Leaving complex too-using aside, other primates lie, elephants mourn their dead, blue whales are changing the pitch of their songs for some non-material reason, Shakespeare is angry at me--or at least unwilling to respond to my affection--after I release from the Box of Fear (tm) once one commute or another is complete, and one octopus that I'd read about in Andrew Solomon's The Noonday Demon removed from its performances at a circus to a sanctuary became so depressed no one was paying attention to it that it tore its body open with its beak and died of the consequent infection. In these cases, I'm strongly tempted to say, someone--not something--is there. In that respect, they're human-like, sharing with us a consciousness that differs from ours only in degree, not in kind.

But am I right to think so?

Thoughts?

[LINK] McLemee on West

This post comes completely outside of my weekend posting schedule, but I have to thank mouseworks for pointing me in the direction of Crooked Timber Henry Farrell's link to Scott McLemee's evisceration ("Decline of the West") of American public intellectual Cornel West's latest book, Brother West. It might be worth noting that the book is published by Hay House, an American publishing firm that is--by its own words--"the international leader in self-help and transformational publishing." The amount of self-regard is

[H]is romantic life sounds complicated. Brother West is a reminder of Samuel Johnson’s description of remarriage as the triumph of hope over experience. One paragraph of musings following his third divorce obliged me to put the book down and think about things for a long while. Here it is:

“The basic problem with my love relationships with women is that my standards are so high -- and they apply equally to both of us. I seek full-blast mutual intensity, fully fledged mutual acceptance, full-blown mutual flourishing, and fully felt peace and joy with each other. This requires a level of physical attraction, personal adoration, and moral admiration that is hard to find. And it shares a depth of trust and openness for a genuine soul-sharing with a mutual respect for a calling to each other and to others. Does such a woman exist for me? Only God knows and I eagerly await this divine unfolding. Like Heathcliff and Catherine’s relationship in Emily Bronte’s remarkable novel Wuthering Heights or Franz Schubert’s tempestuous piano Sonata No. 21 in B flat (D.960) I will not let life or death stand in the way of this sublime and funky love that I crave!”

No doubt this is meant to be inspirational. It is at any rate exemplary. Rendered more or less speechless, I pointed the passage out to my wife.

She looked it over and said, “Any woman who reads this needs to run in the opposite direction when she sees him coming.”

Returning to the book, I found, just a few pages later, that West was getting divorced for a fourth time. Seldom does reader response yield results that prove so empirically verifiable.

It's a bad idea, as has been noted repeatedly in multiple reviews, for an academic writing an autobiography to have to--worse, want to--contract a ghost writer. It's a worse idea to have so many unnecessary multiply-redundant adjectives strung after so many nouns.

I really hope that, when I get my hands on a copy of Brother West, this review will turn out to be absurdly biased. (The other reviews, too.) But, wow, writers everywhere deserve this warning against letting purple prose infiltrate their work.