mills

My name is Mills Baker; I write about love, culture, art, religion, mental illness, philosophy, memory, politics and the rather random.

My Photo Blog
Flickr / Videos
Facebook / Twitter
Email / Archive


“[Bertrand continued to the group]: ‘So I’m naturally anxious to strike while the iron is hot, if you’ll pardon the expression.’ Why shouldn’t they pardon the expression? Dixon thought. Why?”

In Lucky Jim, Kingsley Amis uses precise and subtle strokes to draw the ludicrous pretension in characters like Bertrand, whose automatic deployment of an absolutely empty phrase exemplifies his affectation. I love Dixon’s baffled response: “Why shouldn’t they pardon the expression?” Why indeed.

Over time I’ve become painfully allergic to nonsense in language, and not merely such automatic, stock phrases as “if you’ll pardon the expression” as used above. When they’re not merely purposeless, their principle effect is problematic enough: what is clichéd lulls us into stuporous imperception; in not awakening us, though the freshly smart shock of novel language, to the reality beneath them, it isn’t merely uninteresting: it conceals beneath the banal what ought to be striking.

(This has to do with the evolutionary basis for human cognition, incidentally: something must be new for us to see it, and dead language is therefore actually obscuring. When people say something “is a cliché because it’s true,” they’re right, but the truth of it isn’t the point: what is needed is a way for us to see and feel the truth, and clichés cannot help with that).

But worse than cliché is the senseless phrase: the adjective coupled to the noun that seems to modify it absurdly, the journalistic trope that reduces a very specific disaster with specific victims to just another disaster, the sentence structure that betrays that the author wrote as the thought coursed through him, without pausing to interrogate it for meaning, symmetry, clarity, mere logic. And so many little pairs of words that are never separated! So many objects destined never to be subjects (and vice versa)! So much automatic grammar, automatic diction!

My own writing is no different: gibberish filler, unexamined passages, modifications that make little sense or detract from the point, the lies of transitions and conclusions, lumbering language that is directed by habit and not consideration. I find these pitiful little clumps of thoughtlessness everywhere and I feel like Dixon, perplexed and irritable and scornful: Why? Why?

It always makes me laugh. I have a fantasy that someday, at a cocktail party, I will give voice to Dixon’s question when someone says something like, “Well, to be perfectly honest, I…” Were they otherwise to have been imperfectly honest? Or perfectly dishonest? Or imperfectly dishonest? What is perfectible about honesty?

Etc. etc. etc.

Fourth

It is a summer night, with all that meant in the best times of our earlier and still-unfinished youth. There are people at our house, and some will sleep here: they have changed into the clothes they will wear while they dream. The spirits and beerand cigarettes might be candy: though they seemed once to be accoutrements of adulthood, they now have the mildest effects, as though they are sticky taffies or Pixie-Sticks.

After the fireworks we came home. We have aged now back into childhood: we want the simplest things and laugh easily. Our domestic affairs are as settled as they were when they belonged to tall and deep-voiced adults talking in low tones in another room. We want nothing but to laugh, so we play games and feel the breeze in the air: it is like a gift from an Earth momentarily without catastrophe, at least so far as we know. Like children now, we read no news.

In the searing intensity of our early twenties sleep never came, or when it did it did so after some bender or in the early morning. Now we feel again like boys and girls who want to see the late television shows but cannot keep our eyes open: we fight yawning slumber as it moves over our minds, making everything seem dreamy and open and resonant; every sound has an echo, ever light a haloed glow.

It is so hard to stay awake in this beautiful summer night, but we fight to; and the fight feels good because we know that sleep will be a gift like the breeze: cool, soft, carefree.

Fireworks tonight in Baton Rouge with Will, Paul & Heather, and Spencer & Lauren. (More and better on Photophobia).
Fireworks tonight in Baton Rouge with Will, Paul & Heather, and Spencer & Lauren. (More and better on Photophobia).

This is one of my favorite pieces of writing, an almost-unbelievable instance of enabling limits I’ve discussed before: Christian Bök’s Eunoia, which you can see in its entirety here.

“Eunoia” is the shortest word in English containing all five vowels, and means “well mind” or “beautiful thinking”; it is also a medical term for normal mental health, and is, accordingly, infrequently used.

The work of that title is an exercise in extreme constrained writing (univocalics, specifically): Bök uses only one vowel per chapter, and each chapter must contain a specified set of scenes: an orgy, something at sea, a meal, etc.

It must be read to be believed; I think it’s very beautiful and have posted about it on occasion; Jack July, it should be said, is less of a fan of Bök’s. Above: the paragraphs from “I.” I hope you enjoy it.

I regretted not being able to see any JMW Turner while in London, particularly as I tried to imagine the Houses of Lords and Commons burning, as it is in his painting above. To conjure the image was difficult, for two reasons. First, the facade of the buildings strikes me as almost perfectly beautiful and suitably stately, and secondly it has, through reproduction over the years, become as iconic a symbol of immutable governance as any structure outside of Greece. To an American, the depth of European history seems almost eternal in comparison to our own brief efforts. The effect such scale has on one is interesting, and reminds me of what Distorte’s post on Turner called to mind some time ago: the relationship between scale, perception, and cognition. While in London, I spoke briefly with the groom of the wedding about the problem of cyan and noted that in Homer’s Odyssey and Iliad, one never encounters the color blue; it is as though the Greeks simply didn’t see it, describing the sea as “wine dark” and focusing their descriptions on “rosy-fingered dawn,” for example. Blue, I have read, is one of the last colors we have come to differentiate mentally, while red, black, and yellow were among the first. The groom, a classicist among other specialties, mentioned too that hues are never the focus of ancient texts; intensity is, so that darkness and lightness are described without reference to actual color. Of course, it is not biological change that has altered our perception but the development of our cognition: an amazing thing to consider. One often hears that dogs “see in black and white,” which is of course nonsensical: dogs’ eyes do not perform the rather artificial conversion of the visible light spectrum to grayscale; only recent inventions like chemical photography, television, and digital processing do. Instead, their eyes take in the same wavelengths that ours do but their brains do not seem to differentiate between them: just as your mind effortlessly fills in the gap left by true cyan on your monitor, theirs papers over the various hues and focuses on intensity (and other sense perceptions). The processing of sensory data, itself raw and natural, in the brain is driven less by biology than by something else, but it is hard to say just what: why did humanity become attentive to blue some thousands of years ago? Why were we previously not? It is as though the sky and sea in their infinity were too dull to differentiate: better to focus on the colors of the Earth. It is worth considering how visual art both reflects and alters the development of our perceptual capacities. Reading how people of the past related to their painting is astonishing: what to us seems flat and mannered and false to them seemed as real as a film; without a doubt, people after us will regard the succession of thirty still images each second, flashed two-dimensionally, as an absurdly unconvincing depiction of reality. What is impossible to imagine is what else, if anything, there is to see, what other gaps remain in our sense cognition, what colors remain perceived but unseen, taken into the eye but unassembled into the synthetic idea we experience as color.

I regretted not being able to see any JMW Turner while in London, particularly as I tried to imagine the Houses of Lords and Commons burning, as it is in his painting above. To conjure the image was difficult, for two reasons. First, the facade of the buildings strikes me as almost perfectly beautiful and suitably stately, and secondly it has, through reproduction over the years, become as iconic a symbol of immutable governance as any structure outside of Greece. To an American, the depth of European history seems almost eternal in comparison to our own brief efforts.

The effect such scale has on one is interesting, and reminds me of what Distorte’s post on Turner called to mind some time ago: the relationship between scale, perception, and cognition. While in London, I spoke briefly with the groom of the wedding about the problem of cyan and noted that in Homer’s Odyssey and Iliad, one never encounters the color blue; it is as though the Greeks simply didn’t see it, describing the sea as “wine dark” and focusing their descriptions on “rosy-fingered dawn,” for example. Blue, I have read, is one of the last colors we have come to differentiate mentally, while red, black, and yellow were among the first.

The groom, a classicist among other specialties, mentioned too that hues are never the focus of ancient texts; intensity is, so that darkness and lightness are described without reference to actual color. Of course, it is not biological change that has altered our perception but the development of our cognition: an amazing thing to consider.

One often hears that dogs “see in black and white,” which is of course nonsensical: dogs’ eyes do not perform the rather artificial conversion of the visible light spectrum to grayscale; only recent inventions like chemical photography, television, and digital processing do. Instead, their eyes take in the same wavelengths that ours do but their brains do not seem to differentiate between them: just as your mind effortlessly fills in the gap left by true cyan on your monitor, theirs papers over the various hues and focuses on intensity (and other sense perceptions).

The processing of sensory data, itself raw and natural, in the brain is driven less by biology than by something else, but it is hard to say just what: why did humanity become attentive to blue some thousands of years ago? Why were we previously not? It is as though the sky and sea in their infinity were too dull to differentiate: better to focus on the colors of the Earth.

It is worth considering how visual art both reflects and alters the development of our perceptual capacities. Reading how people of the past related to their painting is astonishing: what to us seems flat and mannered and false to them seemed as real as a film; without a doubt, people after us will regard the succession of thirty still images each second, flashed two-dimensionally, as an absurdly unconvincing depiction of reality. What is impossible to imagine is what else, if anything, there is to see, what other gaps remain in our sense cognition, what colors remain perceived but unseen, taken into the eye but unassembled into the synthetic idea we experience as color.

At the British Museum, there is a wonderful exhibit of clocks from various periods in history, some older than I thought possible; the mechanical brilliance of their construction attenuated, to a degree, notions of our contemporary technological supremacy. They also brought to mind one of my favorite metaphors: Karl Popper’s description of “clouds and clocks,” the two representations of determinacy and indeterminacy, which he uses to illustrate how those concepts interrelate in forms other than pure contradiction. I used to quote Popper often, and probably should get back to his work. Some of his assertions rank among the most important ideas I’ve encountered: simple, subtle, profound, and never in need of obscuring lexical complexity.

At the British Museum, there is a wonderful exhibit of clocks from various periods in history, some older than I thought possible; the mechanical brilliance of their construction attenuated, to a degree, notions of our contemporary technological supremacy.

They also brought to mind one of my favorite metaphors: Karl Popper’s description of “clouds and clocks,” the two representations of determinacy and indeterminacy, which he uses to illustrate how those concepts interrelate in forms other than pure contradiction.

I used to quote Popper often, and probably should get back to his work. Some of his assertions rank among the most important ideas I’ve encountered: simple, subtle, profound, and never in need of obscuring lexical complexity.

Lawnstar enters migratory cocoon

Lawnstar enters migratory cocoon

Taken by iconic London Underground sign

Taken by iconic London Underground sign

Seat's taken

Seat's taken

Inscrutable human art at British Museum

Inscrutable human art at British Museum

Relatives at the British Museum

Relatives at the British Museum

Watching cricket at Lord's

Watching cricket at Lord's

Enjoying some Indian Food

Enjoying some Indian Food

At a tequila bar in Whitechapel

At a tequila bar in Whitechapel

Hanging out with John Brissenden

Hanging out with John Brissenden

For Little Potato, I brought the lawnstar (Asterias sodametri from the Int’l Lawn Refuge) to London. Above are some of its memorable moments. Sadly, in the scrum of the city it was broken and now awaits the complex glue surgery required to restore it to life.
GPOYW. It emerges that it is not, in fact, an international tradition to wear light, summer suits to country weddings in June. Additionally, the men above and the women also present were among the most impressive people I’ve met: astonishingly accomplished academics and entrepreneurs and artists, warm and engaging and thoughtful, easygoing but capable of casually assembling a beautiful wedding, kind, witty, charming, and never dull. Ordinarily, around manifestly superior people I flush with awareness of my own disastrous flaws, but they were so friendly that they succeeded in temporarily tricking me into feeling comfortable around them. More photos to come.

GPOYW. It emerges that it is not, in fact, an international tradition to wear light, summer suits to country weddings in June. Additionally, the men above and the women also present were among the most impressive people I’ve met: astonishingly accomplished academics and entrepreneurs and artists, warm and engaging and thoughtful, easygoing but capable of casually assembling a beautiful wedding, kind, witty, charming, and never dull.

Ordinarily, around manifestly superior people I flush with awareness of my own disastrous flaws, but they were so friendly that they succeeded in temporarily tricking me into feeling comfortable around them.

More photos to come.

“Dixon was alive again. Consciousness was upon him before he could get out of the way; not for him the slow, gracious wandering from the halls of sleep, but a summary, forcible ejection. He lay sprawled, too wicked to move, spewed up like a broken spider-crab on the tarry shingle of the morning. The light did him harm, but not as much as looking at things; he resolved, having done it once, never to move his eyeballs again. A dusty thudding in his head made the scene before him beat like a pulse. His mouth had been used as a latrine by some small creature of the night, and then as its mausoleum. During the night, too, he’d somehow been on a cross-country run and then been expertly beaten up by secret police. He felt bad.”
Kinglsey Amis, describing a hangover as well as anyone I’ve read in the utterly hilarious novel Lucky Jim. Like most great comic writing, it’s very hard to find representative excerpts; the whole of it draws you into a world of absurdity in which the punctuated observations of the author are at once side-splitting and deeply true, but require all the context of that world to make full sense.
(See also). I can confirm, based on my experiences at the wedding in England and my meeting with John Brissenden, Mr. Error Gorilla, and Michelvis, that it is indeed a national characteristic of the British to be ludicrously generous in their estimations of others, indecently nice in their interactions, and astonishingly funny. I think I could perhaps cease therapy were I able to live there. As it is, I’ll have to content myself with visiting as often as possible and passing time with people who are as brilliant and delightful as their writing suggests, and who moreover believe that smoking isn’t a habit so much as a calling. The joy of being one of four serious smokers at lunch is hard to convey. In addition to being excellent conversationalists and game for some truly aimless itinerancy, they also helped me in a clutch moment find some suitable shirts after I’d mispacked my luggage, which I wound up leaving in London anyway. After seeing a bit of Westminister with John, I can say that I envy his students greatly. In addition to his erudition and insight, he is impossibly funny; so too were Mr. and Mrs. Gorilla (who are also masters of t-shirt style), and the three of them were as pleasant a set of companions as I’ve had. I regretted only that I had so little time. I hope to see them again, here, there, or elsewhere.

(See also).

I can confirm, based on my experiences at the wedding in England and my meeting with John Brissenden, Mr. Error Gorilla, and Michelvis, that it is indeed a national characteristic of the British to be ludicrously generous in their estimations of others, indecently nice in their interactions, and astonishingly funny. I think I could perhaps cease therapy were I able to live there.

As it is, I’ll have to content myself with visiting as often as possible and passing time with people who are as brilliant and delightful as their writing suggests, and who moreover believe that smoking isn’t a habit so much as a calling. The joy of being one of four serious smokers at lunch is hard to convey.

In addition to being excellent conversationalists and game for some truly aimless itinerancy, they also helped me in a clutch moment find some suitable shirts after I’d mispacked my luggage, which I wound up leaving in London anyway. After seeing a bit of Westminister with John, I can say that I envy his students greatly. In addition to his erudition and insight, he is impossibly funny; so too were Mr. and Mrs. Gorilla (who are also masters of t-shirt style), and the three of them were as pleasant a set of companions as I’ve had.

I regretted only that I had so little time. I hope to see them again, here, there, or elsewhere.

London

Two very brilliant and glamorous people who actually liked some of this blog asked me to come to their wedding in London and meet them and disrupt their nuptials and wreck their memories by taking awful, incompetent photos of the entire affair. The decision hinged on two values:

  1. X = How much I like meeting people, flying, adventures, novelty, the UK, these individuals (above all), and escape from ordinary life
  2. Y = How bad I’ll feel when I disappoint them and drop my camera as the bride says “I do,” the loud clatter obscuring her words and provoking a liturgical dilemma and general confusion which will coalesce into hostility towards me -the smallest, stupidest, most superficial person in this party, I can already tell- right as I realize that I broke the only damn camera I have and the SD card, too, although at least said card will not precisely be overflowing with great shots, since I don’t know what I’m doing.

My narcissistic mathematical model somehow resulted, after significant tinkering, in X being slightly larger than Y, so I’m headed to London for a short while. Please keep your collective eyes on Will; I worry he’ll do something crazy while I’m gone, like shave. I’ll return once I’ve ruined some wedding dreams!

(They won’t be the last ones, either).

Whether pumping iron at home, creating shareholder value at work, or bearing a parasitic organism amidst your entrails, RAYNOR-BRAND RINGS OF TECHNOMANTIC HYPERPOWER give you the edge. Choose between THREE EXCITING MODELS with specific powers suited to your needs: THE “BILLY” gives you INSTANT-ON MUSTACHE, INFINITE STRENGTH, and the ability to WIN PIANO COMPETITIONS IN THE YEAR 2006. THE “MILLS” lets you KILL THEM WITH KINDNESS, or BULLETS FIRED FROM THE RING if kindness fails. Special feature: AUTO-POWERPOINT GENERATOR. THE “SYD” puts the future of the human race very, very close to your bowels, allowing you to FEED AN INTRUDER IN YOUR TRUNK until it has sufficient strength to BURST THROUGH YOU AND TAKE OVER YOUR LIFE. Tired of getting beat up and having a naked upper-lip? Eager to micromanage employees until they weep tears of blood? Worried that the planet is running out of people? Get your RAYNOR-BRAND RING OF TECHNOMANTIC HYPERPOWER today! Available through any found Ragbag or by slaying one of the wearers above in battle. (GsPsOsYsWs, thanks to this).

Whether pumping iron at home, creating shareholder value at work, or bearing a parasitic organism amidst your entrails, RAYNOR-BRAND RINGS OF TECHNOMANTIC HYPERPOWER give you the edge. Choose between THREE EXCITING MODELS with specific powers suited to your needs:

  • THE “BILLY” gives you INSTANT-ON MUSTACHE, INFINITE STRENGTH, and the ability to WIN PIANO COMPETITIONS IN THE YEAR 2006.
  • THE “MILLS” lets you KILL THEM WITH KINDNESS, or BULLETS FIRED FROM THE RING if kindness fails. Special feature: AUTO-POWERPOINT GENERATOR.
  • THE “SYD” puts the future of the human race very, very close to your bowels, allowing you to FEED AN INTRUDER IN YOUR TRUNK until it has sufficient strength to BURST THROUGH YOU AND TAKE OVER YOUR LIFE.

Tired of getting beat up and having a naked upper-lip? Eager to micromanage employees until they weep tears of blood? Worried that the planet is running out of people? Get your RAYNOR-BRAND RING OF TECHNOMANTIC HYPERPOWER today!

Available through any found Ragbag or by slaying one of the wearers above in battle.

(GsPsOsYsWs, thanks to this).

Dogs even steal photographs from heroes and royalty; original photo, featuring more levity, by Little Potato.
Dogs even steal photographs from heroes and royalty; original photo, featuring more levity, by Little Potato.
“By default the mind is determined to find an external order with which it will meaningfully interact. Whenever I, whoever I am in relation to this mind, get small glimpses of the possible extent of the randomness and meaninglessness of the world and my ultimate isolation in it, it cripples me. I have to drag my mind and body through the world, pulling in pieces of the world, until some interesting pattern inspires the momentum that makes this movement effortless and self sustaining… I suspect that some people can continue to function while keeping this meaninglessness constantly present, but I don’t think I have met any of them. Have you? Is this the goal or the end of goals? I know that place with its absence of meaning exists in me, but for now I step carefully around it. When I stumble into it, I am never certain I will get back out again”
An amazing comment posted by Mumblelard in response to this.
It seems of note that we are generally incapable, in recollection or in recreation, to capture the entirety of what we perceive. What is as notable and is often demonstrated in amusing optical illusions is that our brains seem determined, almost like gently doting parents, to spare us from recognizing what is absent: diligently, the mind fills in blind spots and assigns depth and texture and calculates values not present, and this sort of automatic assistance accompanies everything from perception to cognition to emotion. Above is one of my favorite optical phenomena; the result is stunning and the gap it exposes almost embarrassing, particularly if you like to take photographs: called “The Eclipse of Mars,” it demonstrates that monitors, no matter their caliber, simply do not display any color like pure cyan. This iteration comes from Skytopia: “Stare at the white dot in the centre of the red circle for at least two minutes; stay focused on the white dot. You’ll start to see a thin rim of light around the edge. Don’t stop staring at the dot! Wait another minute, keeping your head perfectly still. After two minutes, very slowly move your head backwards, making sure to keep your eyes focused on the dot. The circle’s rim will glow brilliantly with true cyan! [Rephrased a bit]” The fact that there exists this color that your monitor cannot display (note the chart of ordinary cyan-to-blue below) is a mystery: have you ever looked at a photograph online and thought, “No, that’s missing a key color?” Don’t the landscapes and skies all seem totally complete, marvelous, rich, full? And yet they cannot have this crucial color, and your mind simply fills in what your medium lacks! This seems to me more than amusing. One’s mind is determined to conceal gaps in perception, thought, and emotion with whatever is at hand and to do so without, as it were, alerting you. Doesn’t this seem incredible, almost like a metaphor for pure ignorance and our natural aversion to it, proof that we cannot be relied upon to meaningfully see through, so to speak, our technologies and media?

It seems of note that we are generally incapable, in recollection or in recreation, to capture the entirety of what we perceive. What is as notable and is often demonstrated in amusing optical illusions is that our brains seem determined, almost like gently doting parents, to spare us from recognizing what is absent: diligently, the mind fills in blind spots and assigns depth and texture and calculates values not present, and this sort of automatic assistance accompanies everything from perception to cognition to emotion.

Above is one of my favorite optical phenomena; the result is stunning and the gap it exposes almost embarrassing, particularly if you like to take photographs: called “The Eclipse of Mars,” it demonstrates that monitors, no matter their caliber, simply do not display any color like pure cyan. This iteration comes from Skytopia:

  1. “Stare at the white dot in the centre of the red circle for at least two minutes; stay focused on the white dot.
  2. You’ll start to see a thin rim of light around the edge. Don’t stop staring at the dot! Wait another minute, keeping your head perfectly still.
  3. After two minutes, very slowly move your head backwards, making sure to keep your eyes focused on the dot. The circle’s rim will glow brilliantly with true cyan! [Rephrased a bit]”

The fact that there exists this color that your monitor cannot display (note the chart of ordinary cyan-to-blue below) is a mystery: have you ever looked at a photograph online and thought, “No, that’s missing a key color?” Don’t the landscapes and skies all seem totally complete, marvelous, rich, full? And yet they cannot have this crucial color, and your mind simply fills in what your medium lacks!

This seems to me more than amusing. One’s mind is determined to conceal gaps in perception, thought, and emotion with whatever is at hand and to do so without, as it were, alerting you. Doesn’t this seem incredible, almost like a metaphor for pure ignorance and our natural aversion to it, proof that we cannot be relied upon to meaningfully see through, so to speak, our technologies and media?