Tuesday, August 05, 2008
(12:31 AM) | Ben W:
Tuesday Hatred: Presumption.
Adam asked me several hours ago, am I feeling hateful? I am. But I was not present to receive his question—so even characterizing his asking me as taking place at a more or less distinct period might be inept—and now he's gone. So I can only assume that he was asking me, or preparing to ask me, to preside over this Tuesday's Hatred. The Monday-Tuesday transition in Chicago already having come and gone, with no Hatred yet being posted, I decided to quick quick quick write one up and post it. One might call this presumptuous—hence the title. See how that works? This used to be a regular gig of mine, you know. I know what I'm doing.I hate the way people went about solving this puzzle. Once you get a list with no correct answers, it's easy, people! Let's introduce some names and notation. Call the list with no correct answers "Wrong". Makes sense! And say that, for any list, L[i] denotes the ith element of that list, and L[i/e] denotes the list L with the ith element replaced by the element denoted by e (so the thing before the slash is an index, and the thing after the slash is a potential list element—here, a song). Then, once you've got Wrong established, you just toss out a bunch of other potential lists. If any of them has even one right answer (call this list with at least one right answer "R"), your next eight guesses are Wrong[i/R[i]] for 0 <= i < 8, assuming zero-indexed lists (as god intended). This will quickly allow you to suss out which answers in R were right. You can then build on this in short order. GOD!
I hate this shit, and also that my reaction to it is, you know, what else is new? Maybe I can change things through graduate study—oh wait, except I hate that too, or maybe would if I were actively engaged in it in any but a nominal way. If I were going to invoke nautical metaphors for my hateful situation, they would probably include "listless" and "in the doldrums" but not much else, because, let's face it, I don't know much about the nautical life. I'm pretty ok with that, though.
I hate bad improv. I hate that the much of the first act at the concert I attended on Sunday consisted of bad improv. I hate that I accidentally took the wrong CD from the merch table after the concert: I wanted Trignition (Vinny Golia, Bertram Turetzky, Barre Phillips), but took Triangulation (Vinny Golia, Bertram Turetzky, George Lewis). I hate that there seems to be no remedy for this. I don't even like Triangulation very much; plus I already own it. I hate that Achewood runs so irregularly and that Chris Onstad seems to have decided to devote so many energies to this paid update text message bull flop. I hate that at an earlier concert (Some Ensemble of Lisa Mezzacappa; Aaron Novik's Catastrophe Practice) some attractive chick was totally, like, looking in my direction, even at me, like, you know, totally eyeing me, man, I wasn't making it up this time, fer shure, but I resolutely persisted in the stoneslessness required not to even attempt to converse with her. I hate that variations on the preceding can probably be found in every previous hatred of mine: can't I at least not repeat myself in writing, even if I do so in life? No. I can't.
At times I hate Stanley Cavell's writing style. Is that ok? Can I say that, you know, in public? It doesn't seem poetic or profound or anything to me, but rather self-absorbed. I guess that's no surprise to anyone. I also hate Jeff Malpas' book about Davidson, which seems calculated to shed no light on anything, but rather to teach the student that, whenever a problem seems about to crop up, one can simply mumble something about holism or indeterminacy or whatever and TA_DA! problem solved, just as common sense would mostly have it! I'm also prepared to say that I absolutely loathe, really detest, Word and Object, and I haven't so much as opened it. I'm pretty sure that if I were to open it, I would not be able to stop myself from hurling it across the room soon thereafter. Even if I didn't read any of it: just opening it would be sufficient.
I harbor a certain attitude towards the job that Oxford University Press did in editing Mark Wilson's Wandering Significance, which was really transcendently (in the sense of being inexhaustibly) shitty—the editing job, that is, not the book—there are many nonsentences or ungrammatical sentences, typoes, and misuses of words per chapter, misattributions (e.g. authorship of Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman to Gleick, who wrote Genius), simple mathematical thinkos of the sort that a copyeditor with a modicum of domain-specific knowledge ought to have been able to catch, and so on and so forth. I can only assume that actually no one edited it at all.
I hate campylobacter.
