Time to get my hearing checked. This evening’s dialogue:
Husband: “Jacques Lacan is the thinker who merged post-Freudian psychoanalytic thought with Structuralism.”
Me: “Chaka Khan merged post-Freudian psychoanalytic thought with Structuralism?? …”
Jacques Lacan / Chaka Khan — some phonological similarity (same accentual pattern, shared medial /k/ and final /n/, initial /ǰ/ vs. /č/, differing only in voicing, vowels similar but not calculable here because of dialect differences in their quality), but then there’s /l/ vs. /k/), but largely the connection is through their being two relatively exotic proper names of cultural significance.
Yesterday’s Zippy has Our Pinhead imagining empathetically identifying with Grover Cleveland, Gwyneth Paltrow, Frank Zappa, Martin Van Buren, … and a (particular) squirrel:
(#1) The title of the set piece in Zippy’s dream — “Martin Van Buren, Feeding Nachos to a Hyperactive Squirrel” — uses a familiar syntactic template for describing scenes
This is the world of “Washington Crossing the Delaware” and “Aristotle Contemplating a Bust of Homer”.
Meanwhile, Zippy engages in a mental exercise that has absorbed philosophers of consciousness for about 50 years, as distilled in the title of an influential paper by Thomas Nagel: “What Is It Like To Be a Bat?”
A Dale Coverly Speed Bump cartoon (from 10/17/17) that appeared in a Facebook posting in this form:
(#1) The philosopher’s eternal question, en français
I wasn’t aware that the strip came in a French version, but evidently it does; I still don’t know where and how it’s distributed (and I now wonder if there’s a Spanish version too, though I haven’t found one).
From Karen Chung on her (public) Facebook group NTU Phonetics yesterday, this texty cartoon with a pun:
(#1)
The joke turns on the (perceptual) homophony of chants and chance, parallel to the cents / sense and prints / prince cases in my 3/27/19 posting “Two cents, common sense, incense, and peppermints”.
In the annual NYT Magazine “The Lives They Lived” issue (yesterday in print, 12/27 on-line), “Sylvain Bromberger: He theorized about not knowing — and he lived with it too” by James Ryerson, with a story of a mysterious escape from the Nazis and a distinguished career in philosophy.
The Scenes From a Multiverseof 10/9, entitled #NOTALLPLACES:
A riff on Michael Schur’s sitcom The Good Place, with Kristen Bell (as Eleanor, apparently sent wrongly to the place after her deathGood Plae modality is harsh.) and Ted Danson (as Michael, the designer of the place). Also a comment on social media (Twitter vs. Facebook). And of course on the nature of reality and our perceptions of it.
From the most recent NYT Magazine (in print 10/7, on-line 10/4), “The Ultimate Sitcom” by Sam Anderson, about Michael Schur’s sitcom “The Good Place”:
(#1) Ted Danson and Kristen Bell
“The Good Place” is not about philosophy in the way that “The Big Bang Theory” is about science — as a set of clichés to tap for silly jokes. A sitcom is not a grad school seminar, obviously, so the philosophy is highly abridged. But it is not insubstantial, and philosophical ideas actually determine and shape the plot.
I had been tangentially aware of the show (from its availability on Netflix), but didn’t appreciate its premise or its grounding in actual philosophy — a very specific brand of philosophy, as it turns out.
As embodied in a specific book.
By — moment of sheer astonishment — one of my oldest friends.
(Men’s bodies, frankly and openly presented as both objects of desire and objects of pride — but it is definitely Art. Use your judgment.)
Passed on by Arne Adolfsen on Facebook, this work by noted São Paulo artist Francisco (Chico) Hurtz, with accompanying (often baffling) text from philosopher Marilyn Frye — on heterosexual masculinity as male bonding, Bros Before Hos on a grand scale — supplied by Hurtz:
(#1) Untitled, ink on paper 2018 (here, and below, his men are faceless, but decidedly embodied)
” to say that a man is heterosexual implies only that he maintains sexual intercourse exclusively with the opposite sex, i.e. women. Everything or almost everything that is of love, most straight men reserve exclusively for other men. The people they admire; they respect; they worship and worship; they honor; whom they imitate, worship and with whom they create deeper ties; to whom they are willing to teach and with whom they are willing to learn; those whose respect, admiration, recognition, honor , reverence and love they wish: these are, mostly overwhelming, other men. In their relations with women, what is seen as respect is kindness, generosity or paternalism; what is seen as honor is the placement of the woman in a dome. Of women they want devotion, servitude and sex. Male heterosexual culture is couples; she cultivates love for men.” – Marilyn Frye
About the N bro, used first as an address term and then as a referential N with several senses, and available as an element in N + N compounds: as the first element in Bro Code and bro subculture, as the second element in code bro (roughly) ‘guy into coding’ and (hat tip to Tyler Schnoebelen) the academic-cool character named Philosophy Bro. Then, thanks to Ben Barrett on ADS-L (on May 23rd), on to crypto bro / cryptobro, which looks like it might be a portmanteau of cryptocurrency (or cryptocoin(age)) and bro, but is probably better analyzed as a straightforward compound of the clipping crypto and the N bro.
Via Esha Neogy on the Our Bastard Language Facebook group, this Andertoon:
(#1)
Sentence 1 asserts that some text is grammatically active, but sentence 1 itself is a grammatically passive. Vice versa for sentence 2. Each sentence shows a discordance between a grammatical voice as the topic of a text and the grammatical voice of the sentence about that text. Not actually a contradiction, much less a paradoxical self-contradiction, but a language prank that flirts edgily with these possibilities.
What it is like is the discordance of the Stroop effect, where a color name and the color the name is presented in are at odds, as in this New Yorker cover by the artist Saul Steinberg:
(#2) In my 6/15/17 posting “For Saul Steinberg”, a discussion of the effect
