Incendiary

I just saw Buckethead at the Recher in Towson. His opening act was a mohawk-sporting hulk named Wolff (of Drums and Tuba) who, living up to his absent band's moniker, spent the better part of an hour doing unwholesome things with, and to, a tuba. We then stood for another interminable hour with an ever-more-restless crowd, waiting for the virtuoso to appear. Just as we began to ask ourselves "How long would you wait for Buckethead?" he descended upon us. The rest of the evening is a haze of shrill and blinding shredding, the music that Disney plays in its animatronic attractions, Buckethead dispensing gifts from a giant blue sack, an excellent John Williams interlude, and some genuinely solid and meaty metal riffs. The man, it must be said, is a prodigy. At times it was entirely unclear if he was playing the guitar or giving it multiple orgasms. My ears still feel cotton-plugged and my legs ache from standing, but the 90-minute set flew by. Not all of Buckethead's music is gentle on the ears, nor even entirely pleasant, but it is powerful if for nothing other than the immense skill it evinces. And his more melodic tracks can be perfectly sublime.

Did I mention that he wears a KFC bucket over his featureless white mask and does not speak during shows? Well, he's earned the right to be as strange as he wants. When you're that good with a guitar, no one cares what you're wearing on your head.

Now cracks a noble mind

As I was stumbling into bed a minute ago, far too late for the alarm clock I just set, I began mumbling in exhausted delirium. "Goodnight, sweet prince," I slurred to... myself, I suppose, "and flights of angels sing thee to thy rest. The rest," I continued, "is silence." I was immediately struck by three things, none of which (fortunately) were corporeal:

1) That I had just recited the lines out of order, and would probably be consigned to an extra decade in purgatory for my offense against the Bard.

2) That it's funny how both Hamlet and Horatio use the word "rest" two different ways in their abutting lines-- could it have been wordplay?

3) And lastly: what if it was a stage direction? I mean, it's one of the most famous lines in Shakespeare, if not the English canon, but what if "the rest is silence" is not what the actor playing Hamlet is actually supposed to say, but it just means that he's supposed to shut the hell up after prophesying the election lighting on Fortinbras? If certain scholars are to be believed, our written corpus of Shakespeare's work came from the frantic scribblings of audience-based scribes, probably looking to sell pirated copies of the latest blockbuster. So what if Jack Half-Flagon was scratching out the final iambs and forgot to put parentheses around the part where Hamlet starts mumbling incoherently before shuffling off his mortal coil? Over the next couple centuries, that smidge of non-dialogue gets enshrined as one of Will Shakespeare's most profound sentiments. It could all be a lie! I can see, even now, the topless towers of Academe crumbling to dust around my feet, and prophesy the destruction lights on English Departments. So tell them, with the occurrents, more and less, which have solicited. The rest is silence.

Recession to the Mean

In these times of economic woe, the blogosphere is abuzz* with chatter of “Going Galt.” Much cyber-ink has been spilled over the issue already, and often by wiser heads than my own, so I will refrain from actually entering the fray. If you are seeking after erudite insight into the idiocy of Randian creative denialism, or you want to find some helpful tips for living free of those barnacles on the hull of society who are known more conventionally as “the poor,” I suggest you seek elsewhere. If, alternatively, you are happy to stand back from the mêlée,** keeping your frock coat clean from nasty stains and pondering matters more speculative in nature, I would be honored if you’d stay a while. One lump or two?

As is my wont, I’ve decided to put a somewhat historical cast on the whole hullabaloo, and I ask myself what, in their titanic wisdom, would the great scientists of yesteryear do? Though sundry historians may disagree, there is perhaps some merit in gleaning from history examples we may follow—from the past, lessons for the present. I am driven, half by intellectual curiosity and half by sheer perversity, to consider the merits of “Going Galton.”

As you may (but probably do not) know,*** Francis Galton was a cousin of Charles Darwin and one of the forebears of modern anthropology. He introduced the use of statistics into the field, developing the analytical technique of regression to the mean.**** Now, if you know any anthropologists (or, heaven forfend, are one yourself), you’ll know that anthropologists, as a rule, have enough chips on their shoulders to put Toll House out of business. Yes, I’ll be the first to admit that we folks who don’t spend our time compiling type indexes and acquiring cultural competency in the commodification of mimetic indigenous kin-group ritual/rite-patterns have some unsavory stereotypes of those who do.

But listen up, filthy acolytes of Malinowski: you should count your lucky shamanistic fetishes that the best we can come up with is the fact that your work is entirely without merit.***** Just be glad that Galton didn’t leave an even bigger, creepier stain on your discipline’s bed sheets. This man's many hobbies include using anthropometrics to explain why the white race was superior to all others and creating a "beauty map" of England, showing where there were statistically significant concentrations of foxy ladies.****** I kid you not.


So what might it mean to Go Galton in this recession? The ultimate goal, of course, would to make some sort of statement about President Obama’s economic policy and even legislative change. Ideally, that statement should be as obstreperous as possible and wreak a degree of havoc on the hearts and minds of the hogs who cluster greedily around the trunk of your intellectual tree, growing fat off of your creative windfall. So, we ask again the question, asked by the most discerning of racist bigot douchebags for generations: What Would Galton Do?

Galton's travels in Africa can give us some insight into how the great Asshole of Anthropometrics would proceed. As M.G. Bulmer writes in a curiously laudatory biography:

“One problem had to be resolved before Galton could travel north into the land of the Damaras. The local Hottentot tribes under the above-mentioned Jonker were in constant conflict with the Damaras and wanted to prevent white men from traveling into Damaraland. Galton tried to negotiate with Jonker with little success and finally decided to intimidate him. He rode into Jonker’s village, dressed in hunting pink (red hunting-coat, jackboots, and hunting cap) and mounted on his favorite ox, Ceylon (the horses had all died of distemper), leaped a brook, trotted into Jonker’s hut, and berated him. Jonker was suitably impressed, and he and the other chiefs later agreed to make peace with the Damaras so that it would be safe for white men to pass through their territory. They also agreed to abide by a simple code of law drawn up by Galton.”*******

Wow. Not only did he intimidate the chief into granting him safe-passage by charging a pack-animal into his living room and manage to negotiate a peace treaty between the two perpetually-warring tribes, but this Moses of the Muskox also brought enlightened European law to the benighted savages? Why hasn't anyone tried this yet? It would certainly be much more effective than impotently threatening to withdraw your creative efforts from society because you're being punished for being successful.

(Oh, and if you're worried about any racist undertones associated with comparing Obama to an African chieftain, just remember: it's mostly Republicans who are into this whole Galt thing. Do you think that the party of "Barack The Magic Negro" and "Obama Bucks" is really going to have a problem with that?)

To close, here is a sketch of Ceylon in Galton's own hand:
The caption states, as best as I can tell, "Ceylon ---- the best back in Africa." I'm probably just not racist enough to understand what must have been some kind of hilarious bon mot to Galton & Co. But, to be fair, I'm sure Ceylon did have a very strong back. After all, it must be hard work bearing the white man and his burden.





Footnotes
*Only two sorts of things may be properly “abuzz:” a hive of bees and the blogosphere. Perhaps it has something to do with the senseless repetition of inanity by hordes of mindless drones. This naturally raises comparisons between hyperlinks and the waggle dance, which subsequently evokes the image of a crowd gathered around Warren Ellis shaking his derriere and dancing in a figure-eight to demonstrate exactly how far and in which direction one must fly in order to find a picture of a man with his penis in a vice.

**Avec la circonflexe et l’aigu, bien sur. In the Francophone world, “mêlée” denotes both hand-to-hand and ranged combat, as, in a pinch, the accents may be used as a boomerang and a dart, respectively. Once used, however, the fight devolves into the much more English melee, which just involves lots of punching and the occasional broken bottle.

***Look, no offense. It’s just that in all likelihood, you have never heard of this guy. If you have, I probably know what you look like when you sleep. Yes, even you. Especially you.

****Yeah, I don’t know what that shit means either. I may be pre-med, but I’m a recidivist humanist, not a fallen mathematician. It’s a miracle I can even type the words “regression to the mean” without foaming at the mouth and falling into a brief catatonia.

*****Lucky you! You don’t have to go anywhere to Go Galt—you’re already there, you majestic Randian übermensch, you!

******He was also known to measure the proportions of women he found attractive from afar, using a sextant, presumably sighting off of Polaris and their cleavage.

*******Bulmer, M. G. Francis Galton: pioneer of heredity and biometry. 2003. Johns Hopkins University Press.

Excerpt from the TEXTBOOK OF MEDICAL PHYSIOLOGY by Arthur C. Guyton, M.D., 4E (1971)

The professors at Goucher have been spring cleaning, so there are tables full of free textbooks all over the science building. A slave to my compulsive acquisition of codices, I have been leaving school with a heavier backpack every day. Yesterday, I picked up a copy of the 1971 Textbook of Medical Physiology, and began flipping through it during an especially boring session of MCAT review. So, while my friends and colleagues were pretending to be interested in how to write scientific notation, I discovered the joys and foibles of obsolete medical science. I would like to share one particular section which appealed to my Imp of the Perverse. What this means is another non-notebook post-- enjoy them while they last.

"Chapter 50: Somatic Sensations

II. Pain, Visceral Pain, Headache, and Thermal Sensations

[...]

METHODS FOR MEASURING THE PERCEPTION OF PAIN

The intensity of a stimulus necessary to cause pain can be measured in many different ways, but the most used methods have been pricking the skin with a pin at measured pressures, pressing a solid object against a protruding bone with measured force, or heating the skin with measured amounts of heat. The latter method has proved to be especially accurate from a quantitative point of view.

Figure 50-1 illustrates the basic principles of a heat apparatus used for measuring pain threshold. An intense light is focused by a large condenser lens onto a black spot painted on the forehead of the subject, and the heat intensity delivered by the light is controlled by a rheostat. In determining the subject’s threshold for pain, the intensity of the heat is increased in progressive steps, and the length of time required for the forehead to heat sufficiently to elicit pain is recorded for each heat intensity. These data are then plotted in the form of a “strength-duration curve” to express pain threshold, as follows.

[…]

By far, the greatest number of subjects perceive pain when the skin temperature reaches almost exactly 45 °C, and almost everyone perceives pain before 47 °C. In other words, it is almost never true that some persons are unusually sensitive or insensitive to pain. Indeed, measurements in people as widely different as Eskimos, Indians, and whites have shown no significant differences in their threshold for pain. However, different people do react very differently to pain, as is discussed below.

[…]

THE REACTION TO PAIN

Even though the threshold for recognition of pain remains approximately equal from one person to another, the degree to which each one reacts to pain varies tremendously. Stoical persons, such as members of the American Indian race, react to pain far less intensely than do more emotional persons."

There are probably many things to say about this bit of medical arcana, and many questions to ask about the minds behind this research. I imagine that, as children, they enjoyed pursuits that involved ants, a magnifying glass, and the smell of baking chitin in the morning. But my thoughts are perhaps more preoccupied by questions about the kind of individual who decided to strap a series of Caucasians, Indians, and Eskimos into a forehead-burning apparatus and then assessed the quality and intensity of their yelping. Of course, it might seem that the study suggests that the diversity of the world is best represented by two different Native American peoples and "whites." However, this is actually because Asians, Blacks, Latinos, and Polynesian Islanders feel no pain. Or maybe they just don't exist.

Regardless, what it really leaves me with is the mental image of Iron-Eyes Cody with a quarter-sized black spot on his forehead and that single tear trembling on his eyelid. "Stoical" indeed.

(Ironically, both the PSA and the 4th edition of the textbook were from 1971, although whether the pain study appeared in the 1956 first edition is unknown. The forehead-burner seems to have been invented in 1940, so it is possible.)