Pater Familias

DO I HAVE A FIXED SELF?

Philip — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 15:10:58 +0000

DO I HAVE A FIXED SELF? I posted here on Colin McGinn’s proposition that Shakespeare argues that “our personality (or many personalities) is analogous to the character an actor plays on the stage.” The conclusion is that “We construct our personalities using an actor’s skills.” I can accept the view that I am always playing a part as an actor does. Indeed, I have recently come to realize that much of what I say in conversation is said for effect. But Colin McGinn also raised an additional issue. He cited Hume and Montaigne in support of the proposition that a person does not have a fixed self. Hume and Montaigne base their position on their own experience of themselves. I don’t have the same experience. I think of myself as being the same person that I was fifty years ago.

TWO YEARS.

Philip — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 16:16:04 +0000

TWO YEARS. I began this blog two years ago today. I want to thank Annalisa and Lee Bryant again for giving it to me. And thanks to all of you who have helped and encouraged me with it.

ANNALISA’S RETELLING OF “SIR GAWAIN AND THE GREEN KNIGHT.”

Philip — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 15:14:27 +0000

ANNALISA’S RETELLING OF “SIR GAWAIN AND THE GREEN KNIGHT.” My daughter Annalisa has retold and illustrated “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” for an audience of children aged nine to twelve. In retelling the story, she chose not to translate the word “wodwo” into a word that a child would know, but to use one of the variants of the word that preserved the mystery of the original: “With his bright sword Gawain battled bears and boars and bulls, wolves and wild men and woodwos, giants and great snakes too.”

THE WODWO AND “SIR GAWAIN AND THE GREEN KNIGHT” (COMMENT).

Philip — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 16:24:48 +0000

THE WODWO AND “SIR GAWAIN THE GREEN KNIGHT” (COMMENT). What is a wodwo? The Sidestep essay refers to a poem written in about 1375: “The Wodwo, is an ancient, Middle English word taken from Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.” (Mary Jane speculated in a comment that a “wodwo” was like Gollum in LORD OF THE RINGS. A good guess because “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” was very important for Tolkien. His edition of “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” in 1925 was enormously influential. But, according to Tom Shippey in ROOTS AND BRANCHES, it is not Gollum, but the “Woses”, the Wild Men of the Woods of Druadan Forest in the chapter “The Ride of the Rohirrim”, that derive from the “wodwos” in “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.”)

A MICROACCENT FROM 600 YEARS AGO.

Philip — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 20:55:25 +0000

A MICROACCENT FROM 600 YEARS AGO. Ted Hughes not only took the title poem of his 1967 book WODWO from Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, but he also translated parts of “Sir Gawain” in 1997. One of the reasons that “Sir Gawain” may have appealed to Hughes—aside from the fact that it is a great, great poem—is that the poem was written in about 1375 in a localized dialect, much farther removed from standard English than is the language of THE CANTERBURY TALES. Tom Shippey (in an essay collected in ROOTS AND BRANCHES) says that “the modern descendants of the Gawain-poet’s dialect are among the least-regarded and lowest-status dialects of modern England.” I posted earlier on how a linguist was able to identify within a block the home in the Bronx where my friend Dick Weisfelder grew up. Shippey says that philologists can identify — within one hundred yards— a location for the Gawain poet, who wrote over 600 years ago.

HUGHES—STRANGE STATES OF BEING.

Philip — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 00:23:17 +0000

HUGHES–STRANGE STATES OF BEING. Cadie Robertson urged me to read the translation by Ted Hughes of Ovid’s METAMORPHOSES. It’s a great book, the product of two geniuses. Hughes and Ovid are both fascinated with nonhuman states—Actaeon being changed into a deer or Callisto being changed into a bear. The Sidesteps essay that I posted on recently describes Hughes looking at the world from the point of view of a pike. And then there is his poem about the wodwo, which is told from the point of view of the wodwo. In that poem, as the essay says, “The Wodwo is uncertain of its own identity, as seen in the rhetorical questions ‘What am I?’ and ‘What am I doing here in mid-air?’” Here are three more lines from “Wodwo”:

“But what shall I be called am I the first
have I an owner what shape am I what
shape am I am I huge if I go…”

Here is a link to “Wodwo.”

MONEYBALL AND THE FINANCIAL CRISIS.

Philip — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 02:41:02 +0000

MONEYBALL AND THE FINANCIAL CRISIS. What does MONEYBALL have to do with the financial crisis? The connection is that Michael Lewis, the author of MONEYBALL (which describes how sabermatricians brought statistical analysis to baseball) has written a long, amusing, and scary article about some of the few people in the financial world who foresaw what would happen (link via TwoBlowhards). They not only foresaw what would happen, they made great efforts to publicize what they foresaw. And they made lots of money selling short. But, as the article explains, the short selling only fed the mania. One scary item: the process that got us here depended on the rating agencies giving certain mortgage-based securities a rating of AAA (the highest rating). To quote from the article: “[One of the short sellers called a rating agency] and asked what would happen to default rates if real estate prices fell. The man at [the rating agency] couldn’t say; its model for home prices had no ability to accept a negative number.” In other words, because their model was based on history, and prices had always gone up, there was no possibility they could go down.

A RATING AGENCY FOR LIQUIDITY.

Philip — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 02:34:23 +0000

A RATING AGENCY FOR LIQUIDITY. Financial institutions have relied on rating agencies to evaluate the credit-worthiness of financial instruments. Now that it has been dramatically shown that credit-worthiness is different from being liquid, perhaps there should be a rating agency for liquidity. Of course, I think everybody’s going to be a lot more cautious about liquidity–for a few years.

DOCUMENTATION: 1,700,000 PAGES.

Philip — Sat, 15 Nov 2008 16:58:17 +0000

DOCUMENTATION: 1,700.000 PAGES. How complicated are some of these securities? A friend sent me a link to a seminar report where James Grant, of Grant’s Interest Rate Observer, described the legal documentation for a collateral debt obligation company as having 1,700,000 pages.

WHERE THERE ARE COINS, THERE MUST BE MARKETS.

Philip — Sat, 15 Nov 2008 16:04:12 +0000

WHERE THERE ARE COINS, THERE MUST BE MARKETS. This article tells of the discovery in the Netherlands of Celtic gold coins which were minted by the Eburones (a tribe that Julius Caesar claimed to have wiped out in 53 B.C) and also of Celtic silver coins which were minted by tribes further north. Coins are strong evidence that there were local markets in Caesar’s Gaul.

BASEL II—WHAT REGULATORS DIDN’T FORESEE.

Philip — Sat, 15 Nov 2008 14:57:46 +0000

BASEL II–WHAT REGULATORS DIDN’T FORESEE. I have posted on the remarkably small percentage of liquid reserves that financial institutions were maintaining before the current crisis. But those institutions were not the only ones that did not foresee the risks. The Lex column in the Financial Times for November 14 points out that under the Basel II accord, “even when playing within the rules, the most conservative banks still became ridiculously geared. Under the most basic version of Basel II, triple A corporate bonds have a 25 per cent risk weighting. That means banks can theoretically ramp up their exposure to this asset class by 50-fold and still not breach the required capital ratio of 8 per cent.” Basel II was adopted (and is still in the process of being implemented), as this Economist article points out, “[u]nder the auspices of the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), a central bankers’ central bank in Basel, in Switzerland.” In other words, top thinkers from all the world central banks were involved in formulating Basel II. The Economist article concludes that “[The chief failing of Basel II] is its reliance on rating agencies and the banks’ own models of the risks that they are carrying—an idea that has been discredited by the way banks have been caught out.” What happened with this latest regulatory reform should make us cautious about formulating sweeping new regulations going forward.

HEANEY—BOG PEOPLE.

Philip — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 14:19:51 +0000

HEANEY—BOG PEOPLE. Seamus Heaney has special meaning for me because of his poems about bog and peat. (The Sidestep essay I linked to yesterday refers to Heaney’s “obsession with peat bogs.”) I have long thought of my ancestors on both sides as bog people. My father was primarily Irish and my mother was primarily Danish. Seamus Heaney writes of Ireland, but he begins his poem on the bogman, Tollund man, in Aarhus, which is the city in Denmark where my mother’s people lived. Our family went to an exhibit on bogs at the Norwalk Aquarium some years ago. The kids thrilled to the exhibit on the bogey man, the bog man, with one of Heaney’s poems posted on the wall. There was a peat fire, giving off the only peat smoke I have ever smelled. I still imagine the smell of that peat fire when I drink Laphroaig.

Here is a link to Seamus Heaney reading “Tollund Man”, which begins;
“Some day I will go to Aarhus
To see his peat-brown head….

TED HUGHES AND SEAMUS HEANEY (COMMENT).

Philip — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 14:27:56 +0000

TED HUGHES AND SEAMUS HEANEY (COMMENT). I received a comment here from the proprietor of the Sidestep blog with kind words for Paterfamilias and a suggestion that I might find his blog interesting. I do. Sidestep is a much more ambitious blog than mine, with long essays full of insights on interesting topics. This essay on Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney seems to be representative and is of great interest for me. The essay, which has a lot of close reading of their poems, is built on the question of whether Heaney can be called an “Irish poet” and Hughes and “English poet”, and it has a number of insights about the Irish and English literary traditions. For me, however, the essay makes a finer point that echoes the themes of some recent posts: that both poets are notable for their celebrations of their localities (I posted here on how in nineteenth century France the “pays” with its own dialect, costume and customs might be as small as the area in which its church bell could be heard). The essay shows how Hughes is “influenced by specific rural landscapes, folklores and dialects”; his themes are “typical of a rural Yorkshireman.” The essay also shows how Heaney’s poems are grounded in Ireland, in localities like Inishbofin, with “turfsmoke” and “potatoes in a field on the riverbank.”

NEBRASKA SPLITS ITS ELECTORAL VOTES.

Philip — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 15:59:07 +0000

NEBRASKA SPLITS ITS ELECTORAL VOTES. I have always skipped reading articles which argue for electing the president by popular vote or for electoral college reform. I can’t imagine it happening. I can’t imagine the smaller states voting to approve a constitutional amendment which would reduce their influence. It is possible, however for a state to divide its electoral college vote. Maine and Nebraska do. This year Nebraska split its electoral college votes between McCain and Obama.

“BEAT-SWEETENER PIECES.”

Philip — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 14:56:38 +0000

“BEAT-SWEETENER PIECES.” Almost two years ago, I posted on Mickey Kaus’s use of the term “source-greaser” for an article that is slanted toward an anonymous source. In the November 10 Washington Post, Howard Kurtz quotes a former managing editor of the Chicago Tribune, who uses the term “beat-sweetener pieces”, which are used to “cultivate sources” (apparently new appointees). The term has been around for at least eight years, since here is a link to a Slate contest which challenged readers to write a paragraph from a “beat-sweetener” article for an imaginary Bush cabinet appointee.