I got in Monday night, about four hours later than originally planned after several delays and changed flights. It was aggravating to be sure, stuck in the dry grey limbo of air travel for a full day of my life, but I kept reminding myself that, historically seen, modern air travel is practically instantaneous and unfathomably inexpensive. I can lead a life that spans America, Germany and Japan without spending half of that life on a boat or being unreasonably wealthy. That's pretty cool.
Since I got here I've spent a lot of time playing Guitar Hero with my little brother (who is now significantly less little than I am). That game is ridiculously fun. Playing it bears about as much resemblance to playing a guitar as karaoke does to the national opera, but that's exactly the reason it's fun; it gets just enough of the experience right, and it makes you feel like a rock star.
While my brother was away at school yesterday I spent the whole afternoon at the neighbors' place. Andy and Sharon are a retired couple who I've known most of my life, and have been friends with since I was 14 or 15 and Andy first taught me to play Go so that he'd have a regular partner to whoop on. Visiting them is always amazing; they always have countless new stories of family and travel to share, and Andy always has two or three new hobbies to show me. When I was younger he filled his entire back yard with a vast, intricate model train system. Last time I came home, two years ago, he was alternating between teaching himself to blow darts with a professional blow gun and whittling. Now he's spending his time blowing glass, researching experimental architecture, and constructing immense automated marble tracks (where the marbles get carried up to the top by an elevator and then swoop around the track on the way back down into the hopper). It makes me excited for retirement.
Today I had an interview with a recruiting firm back in Germany (it turns out I'm not going to get my old job back after all), and I'll have lunch and dinner with old friends.
Life is good here.
Tuesday, December 16, 2008
Sunday, December 14, 2008
I'm on my way
The American Umlaut is returning to the motherland for the first time in two years! As soon as I have published this post, I will be out the door and on my way - in about 25 hours I will arrive home.
I plan to write up the next article about my theory while I'm there. Sorry about the delay on that - I'm still actually reading quite a lot, which means that I have a lot of new ideas to incorporate into my thinking.
And I'm off!
WHOOOOOSH!
I plan to write up the next article about my theory while I'm there. Sorry about the delay on that - I'm still actually reading quite a lot, which means that I have a lot of new ideas to incorporate into my thinking.
And I'm off!
WHOOOOOSH!
Thursday, December 11, 2008
25%!
My writing process involves writing an outline, then dropping cited information and quotes into that outline to form a skeleton that I then write into, gradually digesting the raw data and turning it into prose. That means I usually don't have a very good idea of how much I've actually written; at the moment my thesis file is around 40 pages long, but most of that is still raw notes, and since different aspects of my thesis are interesting to me on different days, the parts I've written aren't contiguous.
But I just copied out the sections that I've written and polished at least once (my criterion for making someone read my writing), and it's ten single-spaced pages! Since my thesis needs to be about 80 pages, double spaced, that means I've written a quarter of my master's thesis!
WOOOOOO!
But I just copied out the sections that I've written and polished at least once (my criterion for making someone read my writing), and it's ten single-spaced pages! Since my thesis needs to be about 80 pages, double spaced, that means I've written a quarter of my master's thesis!
WOOOOOO!
Wednesday, December 10, 2008
The hardest language I know
We'll begin with box, and the plural is boxes.
But the plural of ox should be oxen, not oxes.
Then one fowl is goose, but two are called geese.
Yet the plural of moose should never be meese.
You may find a lone mouse or a whole lot of mice,
But the plural of house is houses, not hice.
If the plural of man is always called men,
When couldn't the plural of pan be called pen?
The cow in the plural may be cows or kine,
But the plural of vow is vows, not vine.
And I speak of a foot, and you show me your feet,
But I give a boot - would a pair be called beet?
If one is a tooth and a whole set are teeth,
Why shouldn't the plural of booth be called beeth?
If the singular is this and plural is these,
Why shouldn't the plural of kiss be nicknamed kese?
Then one may be that, and three may be those,
Yet the plural of hat would never be hose.
We speak of a brother, and also of brethren,
But though we say mother, we never say methren.
The masculine pronouns are he, his and him,
But imagine the feminine she, shis, and shim!
So our English, I think you will all agree,
Is the trickiest language you ever did see. I take it you already know
Of tough and bough and cough and dough?
Others may stumble, but not you
On hiccough, thorough, slough, and through?
Well done! And now you wish, perhaps,
To learn of less familiar traps?
Beware of heard, a dreadful word
That looks like beard and sounds like bird.
And dead; it's said like bed, not bead;
For goodness sake, don't call it deed!
Watch out for meat and great and threat,
(they rhyme with suite and straight and debt).
A moth is not a moth in mother.
Nor both in bother, broth in brother.
And here is not a match for there.
And dear and fear for bear and pear.
And then there's dose and rose and lose --
Just look them up -- and goose and choose.
And cork and work and card and ward,
And font and front and word and sword.
And do and go, then thwart and cart.
Come, come, I've hardly made a start.
A dreadful language? Why, man alive,
I'd learned to talk it when I was five.
And yet to write it, the more I tried,
I hadn't learned it at fifty-five!
- Source unknown
But the plural of ox should be oxen, not oxes.
Then one fowl is goose, but two are called geese.
Yet the plural of moose should never be meese.
You may find a lone mouse or a whole lot of mice,
But the plural of house is houses, not hice.
If the plural of man is always called men,
When couldn't the plural of pan be called pen?
The cow in the plural may be cows or kine,
But the plural of vow is vows, not vine.
And I speak of a foot, and you show me your feet,
But I give a boot - would a pair be called beet?
If one is a tooth and a whole set are teeth,
Why shouldn't the plural of booth be called beeth?
If the singular is this and plural is these,
Why shouldn't the plural of kiss be nicknamed kese?
Then one may be that, and three may be those,
Yet the plural of hat would never be hose.
We speak of a brother, and also of brethren,
But though we say mother, we never say methren.
The masculine pronouns are he, his and him,
But imagine the feminine she, shis, and shim!
So our English, I think you will all agree,
Is the trickiest language you ever did see. I take it you already know
Of tough and bough and cough and dough?
Others may stumble, but not you
On hiccough, thorough, slough, and through?
Well done! And now you wish, perhaps,
To learn of less familiar traps?
Beware of heard, a dreadful word
That looks like beard and sounds like bird.
And dead; it's said like bed, not bead;
For goodness sake, don't call it deed!
Watch out for meat and great and threat,
(they rhyme with suite and straight and debt).
A moth is not a moth in mother.
Nor both in bother, broth in brother.
And here is not a match for there.
And dear and fear for bear and pear.
And then there's dose and rose and lose --
Just look them up -- and goose and choose.
And cork and work and card and ward,
And font and front and word and sword.
And do and go, then thwart and cart.
Come, come, I've hardly made a start.
A dreadful language? Why, man alive,
I'd learned to talk it when I was five.
And yet to write it, the more I tried,
I hadn't learned it at fifty-five!
- Source unknown
Monday, December 8, 2008
Noun meaning "government by hippopotami"
After all the fuss I made, now I find myself in a situation where I can't seem to avoid putting a German quote in my text. Alois Hahn writes "Fremdheit ist keine Eigenschaft, auch kein objektives Verhältnis zweier Personen oder Gruppen, sondern die Definition einer Beziehung."
The problem is, this sentence is dependent on a contrast between the words Verhältnis and Beziehung, both of which mean "relationship." The first refers to an objective, measurable relationship (like a ratio) and the second to a human relationship. Since there's no English word pair I can think of that expresses that contrast, a loose translation is the only way to go, and since a loose translation will lose so much of the original meaning, I think I have to leave the German in my text and provide the translation as a footnote.
The sentence, by the way, is my favorite from Hahn's text and expresses exactly what is so fascinating to me about the phenomenon of Otherness: "Otherness is neither a trait nor the result of an objective comparison between two persons or groups, but rather the definition of a relationship."
There are so many things in the human world that seem perfectly natural to us, but that, looked at objectively, are simply imaginary constructs that exist only to the extent that we perceive them. The state, the nation, money, marriage, property, privacy. Those are all nothing more than the definition of a relationship, and none of them has any objective reality, but most of our lives are defined by those very things.
The problem is, this sentence is dependent on a contrast between the words Verhältnis and Beziehung, both of which mean "relationship." The first refers to an objective, measurable relationship (like a ratio) and the second to a human relationship. Since there's no English word pair I can think of that expresses that contrast, a loose translation is the only way to go, and since a loose translation will lose so much of the original meaning, I think I have to leave the German in my text and provide the translation as a footnote.
The sentence, by the way, is my favorite from Hahn's text and expresses exactly what is so fascinating to me about the phenomenon of Otherness: "Otherness is neither a trait nor the result of an objective comparison between two persons or groups, but rather the definition of a relationship."
There are so many things in the human world that seem perfectly natural to us, but that, looked at objectively, are simply imaginary constructs that exist only to the extent that we perceive them. The state, the nation, money, marriage, property, privacy. Those are all nothing more than the definition of a relationship, and none of them has any objective reality, but most of our lives are defined by those very things.
Wednesday, December 3, 2008
Pontifications: The Other
Today I want to write about the concept of the Other - the sense we have that the world can be divided into groups into which we belong and into which we do not. The groups into which we belong are Us, and everything else is the Other.
The most fundamental question to me is always that of origin. Where do these groups come from? Ultimately, they are a side effect of how we construct our identities - or our identities are a side effect of how we construct our Others. Really, they're both the same thing. Every attribute you consider to be a part of your identity (I am male, I am American, I like science fiction) constitutes a line dividing the part of humanity that shares that attribute with you from the part that does not. And that line cannot be distinguished in any way from the one you draw when you use some attribute of another person to establish their difference from you (she is female, she is foreign, she dislikes sci-fi).
The idea that saying what you are and saying what someone else is are equivalent operations can be a bit hard to get your head around, but consider this how odd it would be for me to describe myself in the following way: "I am a human being. I live on the surface of the planet Earth and breathe air." The fact that no one constructs their identity using such characteristics is precisely because those characteristics are universal, and thus don't serve the basic purpose of an identity, which is to set up a boundary between what you are and what you are not.
The really interesting thing about all of these lines is that the ones we see and the ones we're blind to change constantly. In a crowd of female computer programmers, my maleness would constitute a clear difference separating me from the group, whereas if I were in a crowd of male and female theoretical physicists my gender would likely be unimportant but my education and profession would set me apart. Any number of factors, including simply what aspects of my own identity I consider particularly important, can have a huge impact on how I view my place within a group, and the reverse is equally true.
A society, being basically just a really big group, is no different, either in the arbitrary nature of the in-group's identity or the changes that identity can undergo - a few generations ago my "Irish" identity would have been seen as a basis for discrimination, today I am considered part of the "Caucasian" majority. Today, nationality has been constructed in many places as one of the most fundamental aspects of identity. We are encouraged to identify with hundreds of millions of other people whom we have never met and never will meet, regardless of significant differences between us that would otherwise preclude our ever considering ourselves members of the same in-group, because we share a nationality.
The senmin of Japan are fascinating to me precisely because of the purely arbitrary nature of the line that has been drawn between them and mainstream Japanese. They are labeled Other because they are seen as being different, and the basis of this perceived difference is the fact that they are labeled Other. The lack of any actual physical, linguistic or cultural difference between the burakumin and their non-burakumin contemporaries is as pure a form of discrimination as can exist, and thus it gives us a window into the purely arbitrary soul of human bigotry.
The most fundamental question to me is always that of origin. Where do these groups come from? Ultimately, they are a side effect of how we construct our identities - or our identities are a side effect of how we construct our Others. Really, they're both the same thing. Every attribute you consider to be a part of your identity (I am male, I am American, I like science fiction) constitutes a line dividing the part of humanity that shares that attribute with you from the part that does not. And that line cannot be distinguished in any way from the one you draw when you use some attribute of another person to establish their difference from you (she is female, she is foreign, she dislikes sci-fi).
The idea that saying what you are and saying what someone else is are equivalent operations can be a bit hard to get your head around, but consider this how odd it would be for me to describe myself in the following way: "I am a human being. I live on the surface of the planet Earth and breathe air." The fact that no one constructs their identity using such characteristics is precisely because those characteristics are universal, and thus don't serve the basic purpose of an identity, which is to set up a boundary between what you are and what you are not.
The really interesting thing about all of these lines is that the ones we see and the ones we're blind to change constantly. In a crowd of female computer programmers, my maleness would constitute a clear difference separating me from the group, whereas if I were in a crowd of male and female theoretical physicists my gender would likely be unimportant but my education and profession would set me apart. Any number of factors, including simply what aspects of my own identity I consider particularly important, can have a huge impact on how I view my place within a group, and the reverse is equally true.
A society, being basically just a really big group, is no different, either in the arbitrary nature of the in-group's identity or the changes that identity can undergo - a few generations ago my "Irish" identity would have been seen as a basis for discrimination, today I am considered part of the "Caucasian" majority. Today, nationality has been constructed in many places as one of the most fundamental aspects of identity. We are encouraged to identify with hundreds of millions of other people whom we have never met and never will meet, regardless of significant differences between us that would otherwise preclude our ever considering ourselves members of the same in-group, because we share a nationality.
The senmin of Japan are fascinating to me precisely because of the purely arbitrary nature of the line that has been drawn between them and mainstream Japanese. They are labeled Other because they are seen as being different, and the basis of this perceived difference is the fact that they are labeled Other. The lack of any actual physical, linguistic or cultural difference between the burakumin and their non-burakumin contemporaries is as pure a form of discrimination as can exist, and thus it gives us a window into the purely arbitrary soul of human bigotry.
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