I decided to play a bit with Wolfram Alpha. If I day traded, it would be a terrific resource. So far, that’s the only thing I have tried that has given me results that I knew what to do with. Now, it could very well be that WA is giving me results that are smarter than I am…
Here’s a trial search
Clicking on the link is just like visiting WA and typing in:
caterpillar cummins john deere
(Searching for makers of heavy equipment was the first thing that came to my mind.)
More than anything, this is for my friend Marcus:
First, the LED screen will not be there for long. Color e-ink with decent (enough) frame rates for watching video is on its way — or at least so I am told. Apple knows that this thing isn’t perfect, but I suspect they also saw that the technology in this category was lagging behind market interest and demand. iPad 1.0 is a placeholder in some ways.
Second, if I was 20 years younger, I would stop what I am doing now and immediately immerse myself in everything it took to develop native apps for this and the other devices that are going to copy it. This is the computing device that most people have wanted for a very long time. For better or worse, most folks are consumers, not producers. The IT revolution — Tim Berners-Lee core concept — was a blurring of that distinction. We have seen a lot of movement in that direction, and there are certainly a lot more people producing content than there was twenty years ago, but I think we are also seeing a flattening of the growth curve and a kind of stabilizing of who is going to do what for the time being. The iPad addresses that flattened curve very, very well.
I am delighted, and fascinated, by the emergence in the last few years of interest in the mechanical arts, for lack of a better description. Mechanics, machinists, and metal workers of various kinds (welders and fabricators among many others) suddenly find themselves in the spotlight. While only a few people are familiar with Douglas Harper’s classic study of a one-man agricultural equipment repair and fabrication shop, Local Knowledge, most will have seen Richard Sennett’s somewhat overly-romanticized The Craftsman as well as Matthew Crawford’s Shop Class as Soul Craft.
These books are, of course, joined by shows like the Discovery Channel’s Dirty Jobs and the Travel Channels Made in America (which is no longer in production). If you throw into the bargain the assembly-line porn that is Science Channel’s How It’s Made, which regularly re-runs on the History Channel I believe, and the Food Network’s Unwrapped, then what seems to have been revealed is huge thirst in America for, as our president put it in his inaugural address, “the makers of things.”
And, it seems, those makers seems to be folks with dirt underneath their fingernails.
It should come as no surprise, then, that in their discussion of “the new industrial revolution” that Wired chose for their cover the image of a wrench turning a nut … powered by a greasy hand, which is exposed to the world by the presence of a rolled-up shirt sleeve.
One of the dominant figures for “let’s get to work” is rolling up one’s sleeve. The arm and the hand go away, but the wrench remains in this Shell ad for “ideas into action”:
The abstracted wrench here transforms into a pencil, both emphasizing the “work of creativity,” of idea generation, and also the necessity of finding “ideas that work.”1
There is also, I would argue, a subtle reinforcing of the leveling of the playing field between hand-work and idea-work. In fact, a recent article in the Harvard Business Review makes precisely that argument. In “Restoring American Competitiveness”, Gary Pisano and Willy Shih argue that the rush to commoditize manufacturing — resulting in outsourcing — of contemporary corporations has resulted in a breaking of the link between the folks in research and development on the one hand and the folks on the shop floor actually making the products.2 What is lost is the productive conversation, the feedback loop, between those two groups, and that means ideas are lost. There suggestion is that the U.S. must encourage the rebuilding of an “industrial commons.” (Here’s a link to the article but be forewarned that it’s only to a summary page and that the download requires payment.)
My thanks to my colleague Mary Ann Wilson for loaning me her copy of The Atlantic. She noted: “The wrench poster reminds me of the WWII poster, WE Can Do It, of the working woman with her sleeves rolled up, and nothing but muscle — and brain — power suggested.” The Shell advertisement appears on page 45 of the February 2010 issue. ↩
Interestingly, it’s been Harvard itself, and HBR, which have led the attack on the MBA as the source of business problems and not the solution. Pisano and Shih argue that it’s MBAs who have led the charge to see manufacturing as a “low value” endeavor deserving outsourcing. Crawford’s argument is much the same, but he goes further to note that, in the end, many blue-collar jobs will be safe precisely because they must be local — your car mechanic, plumber, electrician — while many white collar jobs will eventually be outsourced, e.g. radiological analyses now being done in the Philippines. ↩
John Nash over at Adobe has published a great essay on his personal blog about the nature and status of Flash vis-a-vis web standards, functionality, and the iPhone (and now iPad) embargo:
I came to Adobe ten years ago to build an open standards (SVG)-based Web animation tool. I like standards, and I have some experience here. … Here’s a quick summary of my long piece below:
Flash is flawed, but it has moved the world forward.
Open standards are great, but they can be achingly slow to arrive.
Talk of “what’s good for standards is bad for Adobe” is misinformed nonsense.
Flash will innovate or die. I’m betting on innovation.
Note that Nash actually worked on Flash’s competitor — remember Flash was created by Macromedia, then Adobe’s competitor for authoring applications — and is well aware of its history and its limitations. Most importantly, it’s a thoughtful piece with lots of details. No screed. No paranoia. Not your typical internet.
The Apple tablet/slate computer is out as of yesterday and it’s called the iPad — despite all the terrible jokes using that exact same name. It’s a sweet looking bit of hardware, and the pieces of the presentation I caught reveal some terrific software, too.
I’m going to leave to others to work out all the various ups, downs, ins, outs, and assorted other debating points that emerge after any Apple product release or upgrade. One thing and one thing only strikes me as immediately worth thinking about and which yesterday’s presentation flirted with: the iPad as one’s only computing device.
This question popped into my mind because while the iPad intrigues me as an addition to my own setup, it is even more interesting to think about it for someone like my mother. Everyone talks about “typical users,” and I suspect that a fair percentage of those “types” are really parents. For me, it’s my mother. My mother does exactly all those things everyone talks about being 90 percent of “typical computer usage”: e-mail, web browsing, some digital snapshot work, and … and that’s about it.
Say … those are all things you could do with an iPad. Why exactly do you need another computer if that’s all you do? In the case of the iPad, the other computer becomes a fairly large docking station. My guess is that Apple already knows this and is working on a more full-fledged docking station where users will manage the contents of their iPad from their iPad and not from iTunes on the docking computer.
That makes a lot more sense. Imagined this way, Jon Gruber’s concern about packing a keyboard with his iPad when he travels is exactly the wrong direction:
I can totally imagine traveling to conferences (or events like this) without a MacBook, but rather with an iPad and a keyboard.
The keyboard is for home or office, the iPad’s built-in keyboard will be what you use when you are away.
At some point after the Saints won the playoff game against the Vikings I realized that that joke that regularly gets sent to me by a family member or friend suddenly had whole new possibilities. This bears watching, I thought to myself, maybe even collecting! And so was born the idea to collect various pieces of folklore relating to this rare historical moment:
For those who either have never seen the joke or who do not remember it, here it is:
A Cajun who died went to hell.
The devil assigned him the usual punishment…put him in the mass pit where the heat was melting others. The devil came back sometime later surprised to find the Cajun just sitting around, not even misting, much less sweating. “How come you’re not so much as sweating here where everyone else is screaming for relief from the heat?”
The Cajun laughed and said, “Man, I was raised in the bayous of Sout Looziana. Dis ain’t nothin’ but May in Morgan City to me!”
The devil decided to really put the Cajun through it. He put him in a sealed off cave in the pit with open blazes and four extra furnaces blasting. When he came back, days later, the Cajun was sitting pretty, had barely begun to bead up with sweat. The devil was outraged. “How is this possible!? You should be melted to a shrieking puddle in these conditions!.”
The Cajun laughed even harder than before. “Hey, man! I done tole you. I was raised in Sout Looziana. You tink dis is heat?! Dis ain’t nothin’ but August in Cow Island !”
So the devil thought, ‘Alright, a little reverse ought to do the trick.’ He put the Cajun into a corner of hell where no heat ever reached. It was freezing and to add to the Cajun’s misery, he added massive icebergs and blasting frozen air. When he returned, the Cajun was shivering, ice hung from every part of him but he was grinning like it was Christmas.
Exasperated, the devil asked “HOW!? How is it possible?! You’re impervious to heat and here you sit in conditions you can’t be used to…freezing cold and yet you’re happier than if you were in heaven. WHY?!”
The Cajun kept grinning and asked, “Don’t dis mean de Saints won da Super Bowl?”
Dear NFL Commissioner,
Sesame Street just called and said that they own the letters, “N”, “F”, and “L”. This message is being brought to you today by the Who Dat Nation, and the number 1 … !
E-mail subject line read “Recently seen in New Orleans”
Our Lady of Fatima is located in Lafayette, Louisiana
E-mail subject line read “Priest at Saint Louis Cathedral”
This essay might have also been titled The Coming Differentiation of Trust but that seemed like a really ugly slug.
Only on rare occasions do I wander into the territory of security, a domain I consider to be almost as complex as religious experience in America, but the recent scare on the Google Martketplace as well as the ongoing furor over the slow, and often byzantine, nature of app reviews at Apple’s iTunes Store has got me thinking about where the acquisition of apps might be going in the future.
For those who are not familiar with the news story, the gist (from USAA’s own press release):
USAA recently stopped a software developer from selling an imposter USAA application designed for use with Google’s new Android phone. The developer had posted it for sale within Google’s Android Marketplace, but USAA took immediate action and had the application removed.
The scary part, from the point of view of victims of this fraud is that it could have captured their sensitive banking data — user id, login, password, account information — without their realizing that there was anything wrong other than the app didn’t work correctly.
One possible response to this is that Apple’s App Store is better because applications there have to pass a vetting process. A number of stories — too many to link here; I leave it to my readers to search on their own — have revealed that (1) the app store reviewers are mostly looking for applications that misbehave within the context of the operating system or misbehave in terms of the content they deliver and (2) app store reviewers are incredibly overworked and prone to make mistakes as a result.
Is there an alternative to Google’s bazaar and Apple’s cathedral? I would argue that when it comes to applications, especially those that deal with sensitive data, there is: the vendor itself. That is, the very best place for me to download an application with which to do on-line banking is from my bank itself. Why would I want to risk either downloading from an open third-party site — be it Marketplace or VersionTracker (both fine places for software to be sure but not sites that can guarantee certain levels of trustworthiness — and nor should they be in that business)? My relationship is with my bank.
I can’t help but imagine that much the same thing would be preferable for other kinds of applications as well. After all, there already exists at least one decent platform for the on-line distribution of games. Why wouldn’t I want to use them as well for my iPhone games?
This suggestion is sure not to go over well with Apple. After all, it looks like everyone wants to be in the content distribution/delivery business. (The middle man always makes his/her money.)
But the promise of the internet was the disintermediation of middle-men. And I think we should continue to hold out that as an ideal. Buying my software and content directly from its producers means the producers get more money and could, as a result, potentially afford to sell to me for less.
At the same time, one of the things we’ve discovered during this initial foray into disintermediation is that curation is, well, it’s nice to have. Librarians add value. Middlemen, in fact, add value. They add value in the form of potentially being objective purveyors and reviewers of comparable apps that then must compete. Functionality and features increase in such an environment, where the relationship is the more complex producer-channel-consumer as opposed to the simpler producer consumer dyad — which always seems ideal.
Middlemen are bound to proliferate in some fashion as more devices — including now things like cars (see Ford’s Sync) for example — become capable of extending their functionality through software, i.e., apps. Middlemen offer us curation and the creation of certain kinds of trust but we are going to have accept that trust must now be differentiated: apps for my car should come from my car’s manufacturer and apps having to do with banking should come from my bank.
The flip side of “get your apps a lot of places” is the dangerous nature of just how easily people will download apps from a variety of websites or will swap things with friends and family. That is, we have not yet had a disaster of such scope and significance that most Americans practice any form of safe computing. Too many people are just too ready to click on PowerPoint slideshows or go to websites found in e-mails from people they don’t know. (Hi, mom and dad, thanks for all those PowerPoint shows! Really!)
Finally, my thanks to Jon Gruber for writing the way he does and encouraging people like me to stretch my legs a bit.
The title about says it all. The article that does the analysis is here and is published by the International Journal of Biological Sciences. The abstract states:
We present for the first time a comparative analysis of blood and organ system data from trials with rats fed three main commercialized genetically modified (GM) maize (NK 603, MON 810, MON 863), which are present in food and feed in the world. NK 603 has been modified to be tolerant to the broad spectrum herbicide Roundup and thus contains residues of this formulation. MON 810 and MON 863 are engineered to synthesize two different Bt toxins used as insecticides. Approximately 60 different biochemical parameters were classified per organ and measured in serum and urine after 5 and 14 weeks of feeding. GM maize-fed rats were compared first to their respective isogenic or parental non-GM equivalent control groups. This was followed by comparison to six reference groups, which had consumed various other non-GM maize varieties. We applied nonparametric methods, including multiple pairwise comparisons with a False Discovery Rate approach. Principal Component Analysis allowed the investigation of scattering of different factors (sex, weeks of feeding, diet, dose and group). Our analysis clearly reveals for the 3 GMOs new side effects linked with GM maize consumption, which were sex- and often dose-dependent. Effects were mostly associated with the kidney and liver, the dietary detoxifying organs, although different between the 3 GMOs. Other effects were also noticed in the heart, adrenal glands, spleen and haematopoietic system. We conclude that these data highlight signs of hepatorenal toxicity, possibly due to the new pesticides specific to each GM corn. In addition, unintended direct or indirect metabolic consequences of the genetic modification cannot be excluded.
I read the article to the best of my abilities, but that doesn’t mean I am in a position to evaluate it. GM crops seems like such a terrific thing, but it may be that the technology has outpaced our ability to understand its impact on complex ecosystems, including ourselves.
# Header 1 #
## Header 2 ##
### Header 3 ### (Hashes on right are optional)
#### Header 4 ####
##### Header 5 #####
This is a paragraph, which is text surrounded by whitespace.
Paragraphs can be on one line (or many), and can drone on
for hours.
Here is a Markdown link to [Warped](http://warpedvisions.org),
and a literal . Now some SimpleLinks, like
one to google (autolinks to are-you-feeling-lucky), a test
link to a Wikipedia page, and a CPU at foldoc.
Now some inline markup like _italics_, **bold**, and `code()`.
> Blockquotes are like quoted text in email replies
>> And, they can be nested
* Bullet lists are easy too
- Another one
+ Another one
1. A numbered list
2. Which is numbered
3. With periods and a space
And now some code:
// Code is just text indented a bit
which(is_easy) to_remember();
Text with
two trailing spaces
(on the right)
can be used
for things like poems
Some horizontal rules ...
* * * *
****
--------------------------
Please note that all pages having to do with Journal of American Folklore content are now links to JSTOR or Project Muse pages. The American Folklore Society receives royalties for such links and the individual downloads that occur. The Society receives no royalties, and perhaps just as importantly the service providers have no idea that folklore content has a readership, if I download the PDF and make it available in other ways. The better news is that beyond graduation, should you encounter an institution or organization that does not already have a JSTOR subscription, the Society makes it possible to subscribe at an incredibly good rate.
The links below are directly to the JSTOR URLs and should take you directly there if you are on a network with an institution that has a JSTOR subscription. If you are not on that network — if you are at home or otherwise away from the authorized network and its IP address — most organizations allow you to access JSTOR via proxy. (At UL Lafayette, you can do this by starting here).
Crane, T. F. 1888. The Diffusion of Popular Tales. Journal of American Folklore 1(1): 8-15.
Boas, Franz. 1888. On Certain Songs and Dances of the Kwakiutl of British Columbia. Journal of American Folklore 1(1): 49-64.
Fortier, Alcee. 1888. Customs and Superstitions in Louisiana. Journal of American Folklore 1(2): 136-140.
Fortier, Alcee. 1888. Louisianian Nursery-Tales. Journal of American Folklore 1(2): 140-145.
Mason, Otis. 1891. The Natural History of Folk-Lore. Journal of American Folklore 4(13): 97-105.
Lomax, John. 1915. Some Types of American Folk-Song. Journal of American Folklore 28(107): 1-17.
Thompson, Stith. 1938. American Folklore after Fifty Years. Journal of American Folklore, 51(199): 1-9.
Benedict, Ruth. 1934. The Science of Custom. Excerpted from Patterns of Culture, 1-20. New York: Houghton Mifflin.
Bunzel, Ruth. 1929. Excerpts from The Pueblo Potter: A Study of Creative Imagination in Primitive Art, 1-48. New York: Dover.
Bascom, William. 1954/1965. Four Functions of Folklore. In The Study of Folklore, 279-298. Ed. Alan Dundes. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall.
Thompson, Stith. 1955. Myths and Folktales. Journal of American Folklore 68(270): 482-488.
Utley, Francis Lee. 1961. Folk Literature: An Operational Definition. Journal of American Folklore 74: 193-206.
Redfield, Robert. 1947. The Folk Society. American Journal of Sociology 52(4): 293-308.
Bascom, William. 1953. Folklore and Anthropology. Journal of American Folklore 66: 283-290.
Bascom, William. 1955. Verbal Art. Journal of American Folklore 68(269): 245-252.
Jansen, William Hugh. 1959. The Esoteric-Exoteric Factor in Folklore. Fabula 2: 205-211.
Dundes, Alan. 1962. From Etic to Emic in the Structural Study of Folktales. Journal of American Folklore 75(296): 95-105
Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1955. The Structural Study of Myth. _ Journal of American Folklore_ 68(270): 428-444.
Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1978. Harelips and Twins: The Splitting of a Myth. In Myth and Meaning, 25-33. New York: Schocken Books.
Bascom, William. 1965. The Forms of Folklore: Prose Narratives. Journal of American Folklore 78(307): 3-20.
Burke, Kenneth. 1973/1941. The Philosophy of Literary Form. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Pp. 293-304. Link.
Jakobson, Roman. 1960/1988. Linguistics and Poetics. In Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader, 32-61. Ed. David Lodge. New York: Longman.
Bauman, Richard. 1972. Differential Identity and the Social Base of Folklore. Journal of American Folklore 84(331): 31-41. Also published as Towards New Perspective in Folklore. Ed. Americo Paredes and Richard Bauman. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Hymes, Dell. 1971. The Contribution of Folklore to Sociolinguistic Research. _ Journal of American Folklore_ 84(331): 42-50.
Hymes, Dell. 1981. Breakthrough into Performance. In “In Vain I Tried to Tell You”: Essays in North American Ethnopoetics, 79-141. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Bauman, Richard. 1975. Verbal Art as Performance. American Anthropologist 77: 290-311.
Gossen, Gary. 1972. Chamula Genres of Verbal Behavior. In Toward New Perspectives in Folklore, 145-168. Ed. Americo Paredes and Richard Bauman. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Tedlock, Dennis. 1983. On the Translation of Style in Oral Narrative. In The Spoken Word and the Work of Interpretation, 31-61. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Stewart, Susan. 1991. Notes on Distressed Genres. Journal of American Folklore 104(411): 5–31.
Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara.
Oring, Elliott.
Bronner, Simon. 1988. Art, Performance, and Praxis: The Rhetoric of Contemporary Folklore Studies. Western Folklore 47: 75-102.
Bogatyrev, Petr and Roman Jakobson. 1982 (1929). Folklore as a Special Form of Creativity. In The Prague School: Selected Writings, 1929-1946, 32-46. Ed. P. Steiner. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Ben-Amos, Dan. 1976. Analytical Categories and Ethnic Genres. In Folklore Genres, 215-242. Ed. Dan Ben-Amos. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Because of the interdisciplinary nature of folklore study, and often the interstitial housing of folklorists within the academy, there are a number of journals that are of interest to folklorists. The list below can only be suggestive:
* There are a number of state and regional folklore journals. For readers specifically interested in Louisiana matters, I also recommend the adjacent historical journal Louisiana History.
The contents of this list is something you will want to aim to be able to do by the time you take your comprehensive exams. You may not have the best of grasps on everything included here, but you have committed yourself to deepening your understanding as you write your dissertation.
Please note that the dates for the Spring 2010 offering of this course are as follows:
| Week | Dates |
|---|---|
| Week 1 | January 13 |
| Week 2 | January 20 |
| Week 3 | January 25 and 27 |
| Week 4 | February 1 and 3 |
| Week 5 | February 8 & 10 |
| Week 6 | February 22 & 24 |
| Week 7 | March 1 & 3 |
| Week 8 | March 8 and 10 |
| Week 9 | March 15 and 17 |
| Week 10 | March 22 and 24 |
| Week 11 | March 29 and 31 |
| Week 12 | April 12 and 14 |
| Week 13 | April 19 and 21 |
| Week 14 | April 26 and 28 |
All of JAF 1(1) is available at this link: [JSTOR]. I would encourage everyone to take a look at some of the other articles in the issue, especially the essays by Bolton, Brinton and Beauchamp that come between those by Crane and Boas listed below as well as the unsigned Note “The Credit of Originating the Term “Folk-Lore.”
Newell, W. W. 1888. On the Field and Work of a Journal of American Folk-Lore. Journal of American Folklore 1(1): 3-7. [JSTOR]
Crane, T. F. 1888. The Diffusion of Popular Tales. Journal of American Folklore 1(1):8-15. [JSTOR]
Boas, Franz. 1888. On Certain Songs and Dances of the Kwakiutl of British Columbia. Journal of American Folklore 1(1):49-64. [JSTOR]
Fortier, Alcee. 1888. Customs and Superstitions in Louisiana. Journal of American Folklore 1(2):136140. [ToC on JSTOR]
Fortier, Alcee. 1888. Louisianian Nursery-Tales. Journal of American Folklore 1(2):140-145. [ToC on JSTOR]
Fortier, Alcee. 1889. Louisiana Nursery Tales II. Journal of American Folklore 2(4):36-40. [ToC on JSTOR]
Newell, W. W. 1889. Reports of Voodoo Worship in Hayti and Louisiana. Journal of American Folklore 2(4):41-47. [ToC on JSTOR]
(March 8 & 10). Read Lévi-Strauss’ Myth and Meaning and his essay on “The Structural Study of Myth” (JSTOR).
The Singer of Tales. Read the first part.
Week 11 (April 5 & 7). The Emergence of Performance.
Week 12 (April 12 & 14). Portraits of the Whiteman.
Week 13 (April 19 & 21). Things Every Folklorist Knows.
Week 14 (April 26 & 28). Folklore’s Futures.
Burke, Kenneth. 1973/1941. The Philosophy of Literary Form. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Pp. 293-304.
[Square brackets indicate the end of a page in the printed version of the text.]
HERE I shall put down, as briefly as possible, a statement in behalf of what might be catalogued, with a fair degree of accuracy, as a sociological criticism of literature. Socio- logical criticism in itself is certainly not new. I shall here try to suggest what partially new elements or emphasis I think should be added to this old approach. And to make the “way in” as easy as possible, I shall begin with a discussion of proverbs.
Examine random specimens in The Oxford Dictionary of English Proverbs. You will note, I think, that there is no “pure” literature here. Everything is “medicine.” Proverbs are designed for consolation or vengeance, for admonition or exhortation, for foretelling.
Or they name typical, recurrent situations. That is, people find a certain social relationship recurring so frequently that they must “have a word for it.” The Eskimos have special names for many different kinds of snow (fifteen, if I remember rightly) because variations in the quality of snow greatly affect their living. Hence, they must “size up” snow much more accurately than we do. And the same is true of social phenomena. Social structures give rise to “type” situations, subtle subdivisions of the relationships [294] involved in competitive and cooperative acts. Many proverbs seek to chart, in more or less homey and picturesque ways, these “type” situations. I submit that such naming is done, not for the sheer glory of the thing, but because of its bearing upon human welfare. A different name for snow implies a different kind of hunt. Some names for snow imply that one should not hunt at all. And similarly, the names for typical, recurrent social situations are not developed out of “disinterested curiosity,” but because the names imply a command (what to expect, what to look out for).
To illustrate with a few representative examples:
Proverbs designed for consolation: “The sun does not shine on both sides of the hedge at once.” “Think of ease, but work on.” “Little troubles the eye, but far less the soul.” “The worst luck now, the better another time.” “The wind in one’s face makes one wise.” “He that hath lands hath quarrels.” “He knows how to carry the dead cock home.” “He is not poor that hath little, but he that desireth much.” For vengeance: “ At length the fox is brought to the furrier.” “Shod in the cradle, barefoot in the stubble.” “Sue a beggar and get a louse.” “The higher the ape goes, the more he shows his tail.” “The moon does not heed the barking of dogs.” “He measures another’s corn by his own bushel.” “He shuns the man who knows him well.” “Fools tie knots and wise men loose them.”
Proverbs that have to do with foretelling: (The most obvious are those to do with the weather.) “Sow peas and beans in the wane of the moon, Who soweth them sooner, he soweth too soon.” “When the wind’s in the north, the skilful fisher goes not forth.” “When the sloe tree is as white as a sheet, sow your barley whether it be dry or wet.” “When the sun sets bright and clear, An easterly wind you need not [295] fear. When the sun sets in a bank, A westerly wind we shall not want.”
In short: “Keep your weather eye open”: be realistic about sizing up today’s weather, because your accuracy has bearing upon tomorrow’s weather. And forecast not only the meteorological weather, but also the social weather: “When the moon’s in the full, then wit’s in the wane.” “Straws show which way the wind blows.” “When the fish is caught, the net is laid aside.” “Remove an old tree, and it will wither to death.” “The wolf may lose his teeth, but never his nature.” “He that bites on every weed must needs light on poison.” “Whether the pitcher strikes the stone, or the stone the pitcher, it is bad for the pitcher.” “Eagles catch no flies.” “The more laws, the more offenders.”
In this foretelling category we might also include the recipes for wise living, sometimes moral, sometimes technical: “First thrive, and then wive.” “Think with the wise but talk with the vulgar .” “When the fox preacheth, then beware your geese.” “Venture a small fish to catch a great one.” “Respect a man, he will do the more.”
In the class of “typical, recurrent situations” we might put such proverbs and proverbial expressions as: “Sweet appears sour when we pay.” “The treason is loved but the traitor is hated.” “The wine in the bottle does not quench thirst.” “The sun is never the worse for shining on a dunghill.” “The lion kicked by an ass.” “The lion’s share.” “To catch one napping.” “To smell a rat.” “To cool one’s heels.”
By all means, I do not wish to suggest that this is the only way in which the proverbs could be classified. For instance, I have listed in the “foretelling” group the proverb, “When the fox preacheth, then beware your geese.” But it could obviously be “taken over” for vindictive purposes. Or consider [296] a proverb like, “Virtue flies from the heart of a mercenary man.” A poor man might obviously use it either to console himself for being poor (the implication being, “Because I am poor in money I am rich in virtue”) or to strike at another (the implication being, “When he got money, what else could you expect of him but deterioration?”). In fact, we could even say that such symbolic vengeance would itself be an aspect of solace. And a proverb like “The sun is never the worse for shining on a dunghill” (which I have listed under “typical recurrent situations”) might as well be put in the vindictive category.
The point of issue is not to find categories that “place” the proverbs once and for all. What I want is categories that suggest their active nature. Here there is no “realism for its own sake.” There is realism for promise, admonition, solace, vengeance, foretelling, instruction, charting, all for the direct bearing that such acts have upon matters of welfare.
Step two: Why not extend such analysis of proverbs to encompass the whole field of literature? Could the most complex and sophisticated works of art legitimately be con- sidered somewhat as “proverbs writ large”? Such leads, if held admissible, should help us to discover important facts about literary organization (thus satisfying the requirements of technical criticism). And the kind of observation from this perspective should apply beyond literature to life in general (thus helping to take literature out of its separate bin and give it a place in a general “sociological” picture).
The point of view might be phrased in this way: Proverbs are strategies for dealing with situations. In so far as situations [297] are typical and recurrent in a given social structure, people develop names for them and strategies for handling them. Another name for strategies might be attitudes.
People have often commented on the fact that there are contrary proverbs. But I believe that the above approach to proverbs suggests a necessary modification of that comment. The apparent contradictions depend upon differences in attitude, involving a correspondingly different choice of strategy. Consider, for instance, the apparently opposite pair: “Repentance comes too late” and “Never too late to mend.” The first is admonitory. It says in effect: “You’d better look out, or you’ll get yourself too far into this business.” The second is consolatory, saying in effect: “Buck up, old man, you can still pull out of this.”
Some critics have quarreled with me about my selection of the word “strategy” as the name for this process. I have asked them to suggest an alternative term, so far without profit. The only one I can think of is “method.” But if “strategy” errs in suggesting to some people an overly conscious procedure, “method” errs in suggesting an overly “methodical” one. Anyhow, let’s look at the documents:
Concise Oxford Dictionary: “Strategy: Movement of an army or armies in a compaign, art of so moving or disposing troops or ships as to impose upon the enemy the place and time and conditions for fighting preferred by oneself” (from a Greek word that refers to the leading of an army).
New English Dictionary: “Strategy: The art of projecting and directing the larger military movements and operations of a campaign.”
Andre Cheron, Traite Complet d’ Echecs: “On entend par strategie les manoeuvres qui ont pour but la sortie et le bon arrangement des pieces.” [298]
Looking at these definitions, I gain courage. For surely, the most highly alembicated and sophisticated work of art, arising in complex civilizations, could be considered as designed to organize and command the army of one’s thoughts and images, and to so organize them that one “imposes upon the enemy the time and place and conditions for fighting preferred by oneself.” One seeks to “direct the larger movements and operations” in one’s campaign of living. One “maneuvers,” and the maneuvering is an “art.”
Are not the final results one’s “strategy”? One tries, as far as possible, to develop a strategy whereby one “can’t lose.” One tries to change the rules of the game until they fit his own necessities. Does the artist encounter disaster? He will “make capital” of it. If one is a victim of competition, for instance, if one is elbowed out, if one is willy-nilly more jockeyed against than jockeying, one can by the solace and vengeance of art convert this very “liability” into an “asset.” One tries to fight on his own terms, developing a strategy for imposing the proper “time, place, and conditions.”
But one must also, to develop a full strategy, be realistic. One must size things up properly. One cannot accurately know how things will be what is promising and what is menacing, unless he accurately knows how things are. So the wise strategist will not be content with strategies of merely a self-gratifying sort. He will “keep his weather eye open.” He will not too eagerly “read into” a scene an attitude that is irrelevant to it. He won’t sit on the side of an active volcano and “see” it as a dormant plain.
Often, alas, he will. The great allurement in our present popular “inspirational literature,” for instance, may be largely of this sort. It is a strategy for easy consolation. It “fills a need,” since there is always a need for easy consolation [299] — and in an era of confusion like our own the need is especially keen. So people are only too willing to “meet a man halfway” who will play down the realistic naming of our situation and play up such strategies as make solace cheap. However, I should propose a reservation here. We usually take it for granted that people who consume our current output of books on “How to Buy Friends and Bamboozle Oneself and Other People” are reading as students who will attempt applying the recipes given. Nothing of the sort. The reading of a book on the attaining of success is in itself the symbolic attaining of that success. It is while they read that these readers are “succeeding.” I’ll wager that, in by far the great majority of cases, such readers make no serious attempt to apply the book’s recipes. The lure of the book resides in the fact that the reader, while reading it, is then living in the aura of success. What he wants is easy success; and he gets it in symbolic form by the mere reading itself. To attempt applying such stuff in real life would be very difficult, full of many disillusioning difficulties.
Sometimes a different strategy may arise. The author may remain realistic, avoiding too easy a form of solace—yet he may get as far off the track in his own way. Forgetting that realism is an aspect for foretelling, he may take it as an end in itself. He is tempted to do this by two factors: (1) an ill-digested philosophy of science, leading him mistakenly to assume that “relentless” naturalistic “truthfulness” is a proper end in itself, and (2) a merely competitive desire to outstrip other writers by being “more realistic” than they. Works thus made “efficient” by tests of competition internal to the book trade are a kind of academicism not so named (the writer usually thinks of it as the opposite of academicism). Realism thus stepped up competitively might be distinguished [300] from the proper sort by the name of “naturalism.” As a way of “sizing things up,” the naturalistic tradition ends to become as inaccurate as the “inspirational” strategy, though at the opposite extreme.
Anyhow, the main point is this: A work like Madame Bovary (or its homely American translation, Babbitt) is the strategic naming of a situation. It singles out a pattern of experience that is sufficiently representative of our social structure, that recurs sufficiently often mutandis mutates, for people to “need a word for it” and to adopt an attitude towards it. Each work of art is the addition of a word to an informal dictionary (or, in the case of purely derivative artists, the addition of a subsidiary meaning to a word already given by some originating artist). As for Madame Bovary, the French critic Jules de Gaultier proposed to add it to our formal dictionary by coining the word “Bovarysme” and writing a whole book to say what he meant by it.
Mencken’s book on The American Language, I hate to say, is splendid. I console myself with the reminder that Mencken didn’t write it. Many millions of people wrote it, and Mencken was merely the amanuensis who took it down from their dictation. He found a true “vehicle” (that is, a book that could be greater than the author who wrote it). He gets the royalties, but the job was done by a collectivity. As you read that book, you see a people who were up against a new set of typical recurrent situations, situations typical of their business, their politics, their criminal organizations, their sports. Either there were no words for these in standard English, or people didn’t know them, or they didn’t “sound right.” So a new vocabulary arose, to “give us a word for it.” I see no reason for believing that Americans are unusually fertile in word-coinage. American slang was [301] not developed out of some exceptional gift. It was developed out of the fact that new typical situations had arisen and people needed names for them. They had to “size things up.” They had to console and strike, to promise and ad- monish. They had to describe for purposes of forecasting. And “slang” was the result. It is, by this analysis, simply proverbs not so named, a kind of “folk criticism.”
With what, then, would “sociological criticism” along these lines be concerned? It would seek to codify the various strategies which artists have developed with relation to the naming of situations. In a sense, much of it would even be “timeless,” for many of the “typical, recurrent situations” are not peculiar to our own civilization at all. The situations and strategies framed in Aesop’s Fables, for instance, apply to human relations now just as fully as they applied in ancient Greece. They are, like philosophy, sufficiently “generalized” to extend far beyond the particular combination of events named by them in any one instance. They name an “essence.” Or, as Korzybski might say, they are on a “high level of abstraction.” One doesn’t usually think of them as “abstract,” since they are usually so concrete in their stylistic expression. But they invariably aim to discern the “general behind the particular” (which would suggest that they are good Goethe).
The attempt to treat literature from the standpoint of situations and strategies suggests a variant of Spengler’s notion of the “contemporaneous.” By “contemporaneity” he meant corresponding stages of different cultures. For instance, if modern New York is much like decadent Rome, then we are “contemporaneous” with decadent Rome, or [302] with some corresponding decadent city among the Mayas, etc. It is in this sense that situations are “timeless,” “non- historical,” “contemporaneous.” A given human relation- ship may be at one time named in terms of foxes and lions, if there are foxes and lions about; or it may now be named in terms of salesmanship, advertising, the tactics of politicians, etc. But beneath the change in particulars, we may often discern the naming of the one situation.
So sociological criticism, as here understood, would seek to assemble and codify this lore. It might occasionally lead us to outrage good taste, as we sometimes found exemplified in some great sermon or tragedy or abstruse work of philosophy the same strategy as we found exemplified in a dirty joke. At this point, we’d put the sermon and the dirty joke together, thus “grouping by situation” and showing the range of possible particularizations. In his exceptionally discerning essay, “A Critic’s Job of Work,” R. P. Blackmur says, “I think on the whole his (Burke’s) method could be applied with equal fruitfulness to Shakespeare, Dashiell Hammett, or Marie Corelli.” When I got through wincing, I had to admit that Blackmur was right. This article is an attempt to say for the method what can be said. As a matter of fact, I’ll go a step further and maintain: you can’t properly put Marie Corelli and Shakespeare apart until you have first put them together. First genus, then differentia. The strategy in common is the genus. The range or scale or spectrum of particularizations is the differentia. Anyhow, that’s what I’m driving at. And that’s why reviewers sometime find in my work “intuitive” leaps that are dubious as “science.” They are not “leaps” at all. They are classifications, groupings, made on the basis of some strategic element common to the items grouped. They are [303] neither more nor less “intuitive” than any grouping or classification of social events. Apples can be grouped with bananas as fruits, and they can be grouped with tennis balls as round. I am simply proposing, in the social sphere, a method of classification with reference to strategies.
The method has these things to be said in its favor: It gives definite insight into the organization of literary works; and it automatically breaks down the barriers erected about literature as a specialized pursuit. People can classify novels by reference to three kinds, eight kinds, seventeen kinds. It doesn’t matter. Students patiently copy down the professor’s classification and pass examinations on it, because the range of possible academic classifications is endless. Sociological classification, as herein suggested, would derive its relevance from the fact that it should apply both to works of art and to social situations outside of art.
It would, I admit, violate current pieties, break down current categories, and thereby “outrage good taste.” But “good taste” has become inert. The classifications I am pro- posing would be active. I think that what we need is active categories.
These categories will lie on the bias across the categories of modern specialization. The new alignment will outrage in particular those persons who take the division of faculties in our universities to be an exact replica of the way in which God himself divided up the universe. We have had the Philosophy of the Being; and we have had the Philosophy of the Becoming. In contemporary specialization, we have been getting the Philosophy of the Bin. Each of these mental localities has had its own peculiar way of life, its own values, even its own special idiom for seeing, thinking, and “proving.” Among other things, a sociological approach should [304] attempt to provide a re-integrative point of view, a broader empire of investigation encompassing the lot.
What would such sociological categories be like? They would consider works of art, I think, as strategies for selecting enemies and allies, for socializing losses, for warding off evil eye, for purification, propitiation, and de-sanctification, in consolation and vengeance, admonition and exhortation, implicit commands or instructions of one sort or another. Art forms like “tragedy’. or “comedy” or “satire” would be treated as equipments for living, that size up situations in various ways and in keeping with correspondingly various attitudes. The typical ingredients of such forms would be sought. Their relation to typical situations would be stressed. Their comparative values would be considered, with the intention of formulating a “strategy of strategies,” the “over-all” strategy obtained by inspection of the lot.
