Obsidian Wings

What is like "Hamlet" for other languages?

by Doctor Science

I first read Hamlet in high school, and still remember that my first reaction was, "it's full of clichés!" -- because every page was full of hackneyed turns of phrase. And then I hit Hamlet's soliloquy, and every line was "a cliché", already familiar to me.

I realized, of course, that this was backwards: Hamlet isn't full of clichés, the English language is full of Hamlet. It was really startling to discover how much Shakespeare was woven into my usual speech, and to try to read Hamlet as though those well-worn phrases were new and fresh.

I was reminded of this because Sprog the Younger is reading Hamlet for AP Literature right now. My question, though, is for those of you who did not grow up in English-speaking schools, or who have deep knowledge of another language culture.

What texts do non-English speakers read for the first time in school, and feel like they're full of clichés this way? For Hebrew it's got to be the Bible, Homer for Greek, but I'm less certain about other languages. Is it Goethe's Faust for German-speakers, or something else? What is it for Francophones, or for Chinese or Japanese?

And to what extent do you-all think sheer random chance determines which texts sink in to this extent, so that they seem familiar upon first reading?

aha, while googling about for a picture to use on this post, I came across a link to Hamlet as explained to an anthropologist by elders of the Tiv people:

I had shocked my audience seriously. “For a man to raise his hand against his father’s brother and the one who has become his father—that is a terrible thing. The elders ought to let such a man be bewitched.”

I nibbled at my kola nut in some perplexity, then pointed out that after all the man had killed Hamlet’s father.

“No,” pronounced the old man, speaking less to me than to the young men sitting behind the elders. “If your father’s brother has killed your father, you must appeal to your father’s age mates: they may avenge him. No man may use violence against his senior relatives.” Another thought struck him. “But if his father’s brother had indeed been wicked enough to bewitch Hamlet and make him mad that would be a good story indeed, for it would be his fault that Hamlet, being mad, no longer had any sense and thus was ready to kill his father’s brother.”

There was a murmur of applause. Hamlet was again a good story to them, but it no longer seemed quite the same story to me.

-- proving that the writer is an anthropologist, *not* a scholar of literature. If you can't re-tell it, remold it, make into something that's a good story to you, then it's *not* a truly great work. And Hamlet *is*.
 
Direct YouTube Link

A scene from Kupenga Kwa Hamlet, from London-based Two Gents Productions. Set in pre-colonial Zimbabwe.

Conservatives' knowledge of Obamacare isn't

by Doctor Science

-- isn't knowledge, I mean.

One of the great frustrations I have in talking with people who get most of their information from the Right Wing Media (the Limbaugh-Fox News-Drudge axis) is that so much of what they know is untrue. Stories, data, ideas get repeated over and over, reflected in their Hall of Mirrors, but that has nothing to do with whether they're true. It's memes all the way down.

Speaking of memes and government, the good people at the Smithsonian's American Art Museum made this, based on Disputed Game (1850) by Massachusetts wildlife artist Thomas Hewes Hinckley.

The Case of the Invisible Diamonds

by Doctor Science

This week in the Dept. of Now For Something Completely Different: I've been wondering why, though diamonds have been popular among upper-class Europeans for centuries, they rarely appear in European portraits.

I can see you've got an open thread cued up, LJ, but since it's no longer Friday where you are I'm going to post this anyway. Feel free to use it as an open thread if you feel like it.

A "Conservative" Healthcare Market

by Ugh

Since the ACA has come up in so many threads lately I thought I'd ask what a functioning, "conservative" market in health care in the United States looks like?  It's not clear to me from comments what such a thing would be or how it would operate.

Do we all have insurance?  Do we treat it like any other market and do fee for service/good?  What role (if any) does the government have to play?  Is the current system just fine?  

I'm genuinely interested.  Thanks!

Update:  Other questions:  What is wrong with the current U.S. health care system, if anything?  How do we move from the current system to whatever is the preferred conservative alternative?

Why Is Lighter "Better"?

by dr ngo

My attention was drawn to an Indian forum on whether dark-skinned people face prejudice all over the world (with particular emphasis on the USA and India, unsurprisingly). My answer to the original Facebook query was, of Facebook necessity, brief:

Pretty much. If you look at it in terms of historical developments, "civilization" (the word itself comes from the word for "city") begins when a group of people - rulers and their entourage (priests, scribes, artisans) - are able to separate themselves from the majority of people who work outside, under the sun, every day. This elite then defines what is "good" (civilized, beautiful, superior) as what *they* are, which is less weatherbeaten/sunburned than ordinary farmers or herders or gatherers. Thus lighter = better. QED.

Let me expand somewhat. I confess to virtually no knowledge of Africa or the pre-Columbian New World, but in South Asia, East Asia, and (AFAIK) the Middle East, the “lighter is better” view seems to precede the domination of the globe by the West, whose preference for White Over Black has been extensively studied. This imperial domination, of course, reinforced the existing view in many cases (by making light-skinned Westerners the “ruling class” to be emulated) and also provided a modern ideology - “scientific racism” - to explain and justify the preference in general. See Frank Dikötter The Discourse of Race in Modern China, for example. So in no way should this post be considered disculpatory of the role of the West in the situation as it exists around the world today.

But the prejudice is, as suggested above, deeper-rooted in many places. It can be discerned, for example, in traditional iconography (via the visual and performing arts). Who are the darkest-skinned characters? Rubes, barbarians, and demons. In fact in some cases, when the Europeans first arrived, they were seen not as “white-skinned” but as what they were – weather-beaten mariners – whose complexion was depicted as reddish (not white) and thus barbaric! (Western men were also notably hairy, which tended to be associated in these societies with outsiders or barbarians - virtually animals - unlike the smooth-skinned local elites: hairy devils, they seemed.)

One apparent exception to this rule is the relatively recent trend prizing the “healthy” suntanned look, especially in America. (Take a bow, George Hamilton – I leave it to others to supplement this essay with the appropriate visuals.) This can also be explained by historical developments, however. Classic “color” prejudice dates to those millennia in which 90% or more of the population worked outside, so that only the elite could distinguish themselves by their indoor pallor. But in contemporary America, with far less than 10% of the population employed on farms, and the majority of the remainder employed inside in offices (or retail establishments or factories), an all-over tan marks someone as a person of leisure, and thus of affluence, and thus of worth, unless you are Zonker. Note that a “farmer's” or “truck-driver's” tan does not operate the same way – tanned arms with a whiter torso are still signs of the working class. Current revelations that the “healthy” tan is in fact unhealthy may undercut this niche preference somewhat, but the central principle remains – complexion can serve as an index to Who Is Better, one way or another.

There is, of course and unsurprisingly, much more complexity and diversity to “racial” prejudice than this. Given millennia of systematization of differentiation based on skin color, it is only to be expected that myths, theologies, and even “sciences” of such differences have developed, and with such systematization there inevitably arose contradictions and efforts to game the system. But the basic Out Of The Sun (so neener-neener to you serfs) Hypothesis seems a useful place to begin our diagnosis

The cure, however, is beyond not only the scope of this comment, but the range of this commentator, and will be left to others.

Please stop calling the Tea Party "crazy"

by Doctor Science

Speaking as someone with a mental illness, I'm getting really tired of people saying that the Tea Party wing of the GOP is "crazy" (e.g. the current issue of Bloomberg Businessweek). In the same vein, I'm pretty damn irritated by invocation of the Crazification Factor.

Just, no. You don't get to mock and dismiss the opinions of 27% (or so) of the population on the grounds that they're mentally ill or non-neurotypical. In the first place, they aren't all mentally ill. In the second place, those of us who *are* mentally ill[1] or non-neurotypical will start to think, not unreasonably, that you're prepared to dismiss *us* out of hand, too.

Tea Party Congresspeople aren't "crazy", they're market-driven performers whose job is to act out reactionary conservatism. Their core constituents aren't "crazy", either, they're responding to the information they've been given, inside their media hall of mirrors -- and that information's context is "politics is an exciting, existential struggle between Good and Evil", not "politics is sausage-making and compromise".

The Crazification Factor posits that, for about 27% of the population:

Half just have worldviews which lead them to disagree with what you consider rationality even though they arrive at their positions through rational means, and the other half are the core of the Crazification -- either genuinely crazy; or so woefully misinformed about how the world works, the bases for their decision making is so flawed they may as well be crazy.

The trouble with this formulation is that it assumes a non-crazy "you" who makes decisions largely on a rational basis. But that is not how human psychology works. Indeed, I would say that a person who uses *only* reason to make political decisions is probably not neurotypical -- many seem to fall along the Asperger's-autism spectrum.

Face it, even people who *are* on the spectrum aren't totally rational.[2] Humans *all* use emotions and values to make our political judgments. In the case of the Barack Obama-Alan Keyes contest from which the CF was deduced, I suspect most of the 27% are people who voted for Keyes on a tribal or party basis. Not just for emotional, my-party-right-or-wrong, reasons. But it's rational to expect that a Senator's votes are going to be party-line, so the personal qualities of the candidate matter a lot less than what the party will dictate. The question is whether you're going to be embarrassed by the person who's supposed to be representing you, during the times they're not just doing what the party tells them to do. This is a judgment call, not insanity.

There are really serious problems in US politics today, and calling people "crazy" because you can't understand what they're thinking is the opposite of helpful. Leave "crazy" for quilts.

Prize-winning Crazy Quilt made by Mrs. L.D. Wolven, Nebraska, 1880-1890. Crazy quilts are not insane or arbitrary, they are very carefully-planned asymmetries. The fashion for crazy quilting was inspired by Japanese designs from the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition, especially crazed ceramics.

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[1.] I have depression the same way I have high blood pressure: I have no *symptoms*, because I am taking appropriate medication. But the illness or disorder is still *there*, it's still something I can't ignore or say has been "cured" or gone away.

[2.] That's a joke, son.

Why we love the World cup Friday open thread

by liberal japonicus

Because you get lines like these:

but the team delivered when it mattered most, beating Montenegro on Friday before dispatching Poland on Tuesday behind goals from Wayne Rooney and the captain, Steven Gerrard.

Because you know it is do or die when you are facing Montenegro. Discuss.

Drinking the Double-Chocolate Stout of a Job Well Done

by Doctor Science

I'm back, eating french fries and a bacon cheddar cheeseburger (hey! I put heirloom tomato and lettuce on it, that totally counts as a salad) while drinking Young's Double Chocolate Stout as I check for results in the NJ Senate race.

Malle Babbe, by Frans Hals. Gemäldegalerie, Berlin.

It was a very good day in pollworker land, which means turnout was higher than expected. We get paid just the same if turnout is heavy or light, but (in my experience) pollworkers are happiest when there are lots of voters. We were expecting maybe 20% turnout -- I mean, a *Wednesday*. Only one race on the ballot. Booker strongly favored to win. We had resigned ourselves to a really slow day with long stretches of crushing boredom.

But in the event we were steadily busy all day, with a turnout of I guess 30%, maybe more. Aside from the fact that the weather was *perfect*, warm and dry, I suspect that the higher-than-predicted turnout was due to the shenanigans in Congress the last 2 weeks, which may have focused voters' minds on the differences between the parties and the need to have someone in Washington who will truly do the job you want, whichever one that is.

Eyeballing the results for my precinct, I see that it went for Obama 2:1 last year and was running almost 3:1 for Booker this year, so my crystal ball says Booker will win statewide. ... and there's Lonegan conceding. See you back at the polls in three weeks, New Jersey.

Speaking of idiots, I see the ball is back in the House's court if we're to avoid financial meltdown tomorrow. I will not relax until the orange guy sings, because I do not trust the House GOP to not snatch armageddon from the jaws of defeat.

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ETA: OK, now I can fall into a well-earned stupor. I really, really hope Congress can do something to make sure this never ever happens again, or so help me I will turn this Constitution around.

NJ Senate Special Election and US Default Watch

by Doctor Science

Tomorrow's another looooong day for me, as I work the polls for NJ's Special Election to fill the late Frank Lautenberg's Senate seat. I voted by mail more than a week ago -- for Cory Booker, of course. I can certainly understand why many of my fellow Jerseyites feel as though Booker's ambition for national prominence is a bit too obvious -- because it is. But given that Steve Lonegan is Tea Party, and can be expected to be part of the "we destroyed the full faith and credit of the United States to save it" caucus in the Senate, I don't see how there's much of a choice.

Turnout is expected to be light, so my day will probably be quite boring. I'm bringing:

The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo by Tom Reiss. It's a biography of Alex Dumas, the biracial father of Alexandre Dumas pere, who rose to the rank of general-in-chief in the Napoleonic army -- before he was imprisoned and poisoned. Looks good so far, with *fascinating* stuff about the shifting positions of non-white people in Europe in the 18th century.

Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much by Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir. I've only glanced at it, I gather it's along the same lines as Thinking, Fast and Slow but focused on problems of lack of time and lack of money.

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Don't burn the place down while I'm gone. LJ or others, please check the comments "spam" folder at some point and rescue anyone who doesn't belong there.

And let's all hope we still have an economy and government when I get back.

Not a bubble, a hall of mirrors

by Doctor Science

The last time we discussed the way conservatives tend to get all their news from Right-Wing Media (RWM), people mostly used the word "bubble" or "cocoon".

For me, both metaphors don't quite hit the nail on the head. The point about a bubble is that it's fragile, it inevitably pops. The point about a cocoon is that it's temporary, a place to be safe while you grow up. The teenagers I know call our town "The Bubble", because it's so sheltered compared to the wide world -- but they all know they're going to be leaving The Bubble very soon, breaking out of this cocoon to flutter free.

I'm still fumbling for the right metaphor, but for right now I think of the RWM ecosystem (noösystem?) as a hall of mirrors, where everywhere you look you see a reflection of yourself.

Mirror room built for the Da Vinci, the Genius traveling museum exhibition, based on one of his sketches. [source] The mirror room was just an idea for Da Vinci, a way to see all around an object (or one's self): the technology of his day couldn't come close to creating mirrors of this size. For all his genius, he probably didn't realize what the experience of being in such a room would be like, the dizzying way reflections of your reflection would stretch off to infinity.