Isegoria

Jimmy Fallon & The Muppets perform an “impromptu” rendition of "One":

Despite my youthful interest in all things Japanese and my geek-requisite interest in the sanity-blasting horror of H.P. Lovecraft, I’ve never had much interest in their intersection — that is, in the long tentacle of H.P. Lovecraft in manga, where the New Englander’s distaste for slimy aquatic creatures meets up with the modern Japanese taste for shockingly violent and fetishistic entertainment.

Perhaps most shocking to me though is that classical Japanese artist Hokusai — of crashing-wave fame — has a claim to the tentacle-fetish genre, with his own 1820 woodcut, The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife. (East is East, and West is West…)

On a less creepy note, some elements of Lovecraft’s work don’t quite translate — or transliterate:

One curiosity of Japanese translations of Lovecraft is that, since the Japanese language is phonetic, Lovecraft’s intentionally unpronounceable alien names — R’lyeh, Cthulhu, N’kai, Shub-Niggurath, etc. — are unavoidably made pronounceable.

(The Japanese written language isn’t simply phonetic; its two syllabaries restrict writing to consonant-vowel pairs — ka, ki, ku, ke, ko, etc.)

Golf course architecture is one of the world’s most expansive but least recognized art forms, Steve Sailer claims:

Yet this curiously obscure profession can help shed light on mainstream art, sociology, and even human nature itself, since the golf designer, more than any other artist, tries to reproduce the primeval human vision of an earthly paradise.

What is that primeval human vision of an earthly paradise?

Research since the early 80s shows that humans tend to have two favorite landscapes. One is wherever they lived during their adolescence, but the nearly universal favorite among children before they imprint upon their local look is grassy parkland, and that fondness survives into adulthood.

Richard Conniff wrote in Discover: “In separate surveys, Ulrich, Orians, and others have found that people respond strongly to landscapes with open, grassy vegetation, scattered stands of branchy trees, water, changes in elevation, winding trails, and brightly lit clearings…”

In one amusing study, 1001 people from 15 different countries were surveyed about what they’d like to see in a painting. Then the sponsors of the research, conceptual art pranksters Komar and Melamid, painted each country’s “Most Wanted Painting.” Even though the researchers hadn’t mentioned what type of picture it should be, the consensus in 13 of the 15 cultures favored landscapes and 11 of the 15 looked surprisingly like golf courses.

All over the world, people want to see grassland, a lake, and some trees, but not a solid forest. And they always want to see it slightly from above. The project was intended to satirize popular taste, but it ended up revealing much about about human desires.

So golf courses look like happy hunting grounds, where one might expect to find tasty hoofed animals — with a touch of something dangerous:

The distinction Edmund Burke made in 1757 between the “sublime” and the “beautiful” applies to golf courses. The beautiful is some pleasing place conducive to human habitat — meadows, valleys, slow moving streams, grassland intermingled with copses of trees, the whole English country estate shtick. The sublime is nature so magnificent that it induces the feeling of terror because it could kill you, such as by you falling off a mountain or into a gorge.

Beautiful landscapes are most suited for building golf courses, since a golf course needs at least 100 acres of land level enough for a golf ball to come to rest upon. But golfers get a thrill out of the mock sublime, where you are in danger of losing not your life, but your mis-hit golf ball into a water hazard or ravine. One reason that Pebble Beach on the Monterey Peninsula is so legendary is because it combines sublime sea cliffs with beautiful (and thus functional for golf) rolling plains (My father, though, almost walked off the cliff in the middle of the eighth fairway at Pebble Beach and into the wave-carved chasm, which probably would have satisfied Burke’s theoretical rigor.)

Depression-era movies about rich people, like Philadelphia Story, are known as white telephone movies, Steve Sailer says, because only millionaires could finagle a non-black telephone out of the Bell monopoly back then:

Perhaps the contemporary equivalents made by Nancy Meyer (writer director of the aptly named What Women Want with Mel Gibson) could be called Viking range movies because they are heavy on high-end kitchen appliance porn.

Movie stars tend to emerge from tumultuous upbringings, Steve Sailer says:

For example, I don’t know how many current stars spent a couple of years living in hippie communes as children. [Meryl] Streep, in contrast, has always seemed like the supremely professional product of a proper upbringing. This perhaps made her less sympathetic when she was young in a sort of Jack Nicklaus-Peyton Manning way, but she’s enjoying the benefits of an improbably long career today.

It’s fitting that Avatar arrived at Christmastime, Ross Douthat says, because it’s a crass embodiment of capitalistic excess wrapped around a deeply felt religious message:

It’s at once the blockbuster to end all blockbusters, and the Gospel According to James.

But not the Christian Gospel. Instead, “Avatar” is Cameron’s long apologia for pantheism — a faith that equates God with Nature, and calls humanity into religious communion with the natural world.

In Cameron’s sci-fi universe, this communion is embodied by the blue-skinned, enviably slender Na’Vi, an alien race whose idyllic existence on the planet Pandora is threatened by rapacious human invaders. The Na’Vi are saved by the movie’s hero, a turncoat Marine, but they’re also saved by their faith in Eywa, the “All Mother,” described variously as a network of energy and the sum total of every living thing.

If this narrative arc sounds familiar, that’s because pantheism has been Hollywood’s religion of choice for a generation now. It’s the truth that Kevin Costner discovered when he went dancing with wolves. It’s the metaphysic woven through Disney cartoons like “The Lion King” and “Pocahontas.” And it’s the dogma of George Lucas’s Jedi, whose mystical Force “surrounds us, penetrates us, and binds the galaxy together.”

Hollywood keeps returning to these themes because millions of Americans respond favorably to them. From Deepak Chopra to Eckhart Tolle, the “religion and inspiration” section in your local bookstore is crowded with titles pushing a pantheistic message. A recent Pew Forum report on how Americans mix and match theology found that many self-professed Christians hold beliefs about the “spiritual energy” of trees and mountains that would fit right in among the indigo-tinted Na’Vi.

As usual, Alexis de Tocqueville saw it coming. The American belief in the essential unity of all mankind, Tocqueville wrote in the 1830s, leads us to collapse distinctions at every level of creation. “Not content with the discovery that there is nothing in the world but a creation and a Creator,” he suggested, democratic man “seeks to expand and simplify his conception by including God and the universe in one great whole.”

Today there are other forces that expand pantheism’s American appeal. We pine for what we’ve left behind, and divinizing the natural world is an obvious way to express unease about our hyper-technological society. The threat of global warming, meanwhile, has lent the cult of Nature qualities that every successful religion needs — a crusading spirit, a rigorous set of ‘thou shalt nots,” and a piping-hot apocalypse.

At the same time, pantheism opens a path to numinous experience for people uncomfortable with the literal-mindedness of the monotheistic religions — with their miracle-working deities and holy books, their virgin births and resurrected bodies. As the Polish philosopher Leszek Kolakowski noted, attributing divinity to the natural world helps “bring God closer to human experience,” while “depriving him of recognizable personal traits.” For anyone who pines for transcendence but recoils at the idea of a demanding Almighty who interferes in human affairs, this is an ideal combination.

Indeed, it represents a form of religion that even atheists can support. Richard Dawkins has called pantheism “a sexed-up atheism.” (He means that as a compliment.) Sam Harris concluded his polemic “The End of Faith” by rhapsodizing about the mystical experiences available from immersion in “the roiling mystery of the world.” Citing Albert Einstein’s expression of religious awe at the “beauty and sublimity” of the universe, Dawkins allows, “In this sense I too am religious.”

The question is whether Nature actually deserves a religious response. Traditional theism has to wrestle with the problem of evil: if God is good, why does he allow suffering and death? But Nature is suffering and death. Its harmonies require violence. Its “circle of life” is really a cycle of mortality. And the human societies that hew closest to the natural order aren’t the shining Edens of James Cameron’s fond imaginings. They’re places where existence tends to be nasty, brutish and short.

Religion exists, in part, precisely because humans aren’t at home amid these cruel rhythms. We stand half inside the natural world and half outside it. We’re beasts with self-consciousness, predators with ethics, mortal creatures who yearn for immortality.

This is an agonized position, and if there’s no escape upward — or no God to take on flesh and come among us, as the Christmas story has it — a deeply tragic one.

Pantheism offers a different sort of solution: a downward exit, an abandonment of our tragic self-consciousness, a re-merger with the natural world our ancestors half-escaped millennia ago.

But except as dust and ashes, Nature cannot take us back.

Erik Falkenstein found Avatar visually dazzling but totally cliché — and he has a few things to say about the superior virtues of a primitive, indigenous culture:

The funny thing is that everyone knows primitive indigenous white cultures, such as those in Appalachia (rural America), are backward: illiterate, racist, sexist, and homophobic. They have high rates of crime, drug use, and incest. Their religiosity is not admirable, it merely highlights their devotion to dogma.

However, given the current enlightened tribalism white trash has no analogue among brown, black, yellow and now blue hominids. I guess the marginal effect of education on rational self-interest is high only for Europeans; everyone else simply knows that ‘playing nice’ is an optimal strategy in dynamic interactions.

The Swedish Chef, Beaker, and Animal perform the Ringing of the Bells:

Asking a question like, Do balrogs have wings?, is one way to recapture the feel of medieval theological disputation:

However much fan art depicts it, for the true Lord of the Rings fanboy, there’s only one definitive source: the book itself. What does Fellowship have to say for itself?

Exhibit D:

‘His enemy halted again, facing him, and the shadow about it reached out like two vast wings.’

The Fellowship of the Ring II 5 The Bridge of Khazad-dûm

Exhibit E:

‘…suddenly it drew itself up to a great height, and its wings were spread from wall to wall…’

The Fellowship of the Ring II 5 The Bridge of Khazad-dûm

The relevant Encyclopedia of Arda article continues:

These are quite probably the most hotly debated words Tolkien ever wrote. This seems strange at first, because in fact most people agree that the meaning isn’t particularly ambiguous, and that it’s fairly obvious what the statement means. The dispute begins, though, with a curious fact: like an optical illusion, this quotation has two obvious interpretations. Whatever you think it means, and however sure you are, there are plenty of people who see it quite differently.

The two interpretations:

To one group of readers, ‘its wings were spread from wall to wall’ (2) relates to the immediately preceding ‘the shadow about it reached out like two vast wings’ (1). To them, it just reinforces the preceding statement, and says nothing about any other kind of wings. On the opposite side of the debate, ‘its wings were spread’ (2) is not related to the preceding statement at all. Instead, it’s a definite reference to the Balrog’s real, physical wings.

This is the heart of the debate. As Obi Wan was fond of saying, Luke, you’re going to find that many of the truths we cling to depend greatly on our own point of view.

I was not expecting to see a new book review of ‘The Complete Fairy Tales’ by Charles Perrault, published in 1697, in the LA Times, but a new Oxford University Press edition has just come out:

Perrault was an iconoclast, a rebel against the tyranny of classical education in the 17th century, who set out to prove that myths based on European folk tales could have as enduring and profound an appeal as the stories of the Greeks and Romans. A new translation of his little book, by Christopher Betts, proves him triumphantly right about that, if any proof were needed.

Parents who read fairy tales to their children know how terrifying they are. Most fairy tales have a happy ending, but it usually comes only after one or more characters have died a horrible death or spent a long time in durance vile. People who haven’t read them since they were children themselves will scarcely believe that such shocking, gruesome stories are permitted in the hands of the young: Fathers who want to marry their daughters, ogres that dine on little children and a serial killer who murders his brides and locks up their corpses in a secret chamber are standard fare.

And that’s exactly why the appeal of fairy tales has never diminished. Children are thrill addicts who relish imaginary gore — and have no interest in theories about why they do so. Only a child can hear the story of “Little Red Riding-Hood” and see it as a straightforward, “what happens next” narrative. We didn’t need Freud to tell us that there were powerful sexual currents in a story about a little girl who ends up in bed with a cross-dressing wolf, who amazes her with the prodigious size of various parts of his anatomy.

The most influential of modern fairy-tale theorists was Bruno Bettelheim, who propounded the thesis in “The Uses of Enchantment” (1976) that fairy tales are fantastic psychodramas that enact the real fears of children and end with the reassurance that all will be well in the end, when they grow up. Most American children slay their demons and satisfy their appetite for righteous mayhem with cartoons and video games, but in Perrault’s day, European children had direct experience with the horrors portrayed in fairy tales. In the reign of Louis XIV, France was ravaged by famines; thus the story “Hop o’ My Thumb,” in which the parents abandon their little sons to die in the forest because there isn’t enough food for all, wasn’t a bizarre, monstrous fantasy but a plausible reality.

Unlike the other great narrative traditions, fairy tales generally have been treated as anthropological phenomena more than as literature. There’s no such thing as a definitive text of the major stories; the books read by most children are modern retellings, frequently bowdlerized to protect the sensibilities of the parents. Betts’ integral, authoritative translation of Perrault’s “Histoires ou Contes,” which renders the prose tales in lucid, polished style and (for the first time, Betts writes in his introduction) the poetry in galloping rhyming verse, captures the full measure of the tales’ suspenseful power. No matter how many times we’ve heard the stories, we still long for Cinderella’s wicked stepsisters’ comeuppance and delight in Puss in Boots’ ingenuity in tricking the ogre into transforming himself into a mouse so he can gobble him up.

Yet much of the charm of Perrault’s versions lies in their depiction of life during the reign of the Sun King, delightfully captured in 26 engravings by Gustave Doré and reprinted in this edition. The grandmother’s rustic hovel in “Little Red Riding-Hood” could be a set for a pastoral ballet at Versailles; Perrault’s ogres are landed gentry in grand châteaux, who serve baked children at their tea parties. This gloss of Gallic charm domesticates the savagery of the enchanted world in a way that Disney would later emulate with a sentimental, distinctly American optimism.

Mr.B The Gentleman Rhymer provides thirty years of hip-hop history in five minutes of dapper rapping — with banjolele accompaniment.

(Hat tip to Patri Friedman, who says, Wow! It’s like reactionary nerdcore! I guess I’m now waiting for a good tweedpunk video.)