The Eschatology of Hope

Fig. 1. Not so exciting for the sardine.

TGS's Tracy Morgan's greatest wisdom has been "live every week as if it were Shark Week." Well, last week was Shark Week, but I'm afraid the phenomena surrounding the exciting tv shows seem remarkably unpleasant when there is actually blood in the water. Social upheaval in London, economic struggles in the US and Europe, ridiculous political gridlock in Washington; a feeding frenzy looks very different when you suddenly discover that you are a sardine [Fig. 1]. I confess I am feeling a pull to just dive deep, hide in the murk, and count my blessings.

One of those blessings was the attendance of a very special wedding. One of my former students, let's call her Lily, a dramaturg, was joined in holy matrimony to her longtime beau, who happens to be an Episcopalian priest. This presented Lily's family with something of a pickle - they are devout Catholics. The happy couple asked me for advice many months ago, because they knew that Mrs. Doc and I had confronted a similar conundrum when we wanted to get married, back in the late Cretaceous period - Mrs. Doc is a Muslim, and I am Jewish. Our solution (to elope, get married in a parking lot, and present our detractors with a fait accompli), seemed not preferable in this case. I was optimistic - at least they were both Christians, and him a man of the cloth no less, and also they didn't have to worry about Tyrannosaurs.

Now, apart from the fact that I am a theatre history scholar with a particular interest in religious practices, I have a special attraction to wedding ceremonies because I became ordained in the Church of Universal Life many years ago in order to conduct weddings for my non-religious and gay friends. Weddings are at their cores performances of a hope for the future, and opportunities for communities to come together and affirm their specific hopes for the couple's happiness within a context that re-inscribes their shared hopes for their collective futures. For most people, this context is described by their religious practice, so it seems natural for weddings to be celebrated in a religious context. But religions, while very good at nurturing their internal communities, seem to me historically to be very very bad at integrating the practices and beliefs of other communities. It's to be expected - as Hayden White observed, it is difficult to identify the content of one's own felt humanity, and much much easier to ostensibly self-define by negation. To wit: "well, I don't know what I am, but I know I'm not THAT."  So religious communities define themselves in opposition to one another. How to reconcile that? Well, for Catholics and Protestants, the historical solution is to make hot and cold war on one another for centuries.

Fig. 2. You know you want to.

So I have to take a moment and applaud what happened at this wedding. Lily and her beau talked it out with their respective families, and I'm sure there was much gnashing of teeth and renting of garments, but in the end there was a really beautiful wedding ceremony. I think it was largely Episcopalian, as it was conducted by the Dean of the Episcopalian cathedral where Lily's beau works. I know something about this Dean - she's been on the frontlines of the recent schisms of the church having to do with acceptance of homosexuality, and frankly I think she is a pretty heroic figure. However, also present was a Catholic priest, who was specifically invited to say a few words. The invitation was pretty telling - it said "you are a guest here." But the Father's words were all about compassion, acceptance, and a bringing together of Christians despite the historical enmities. It would probably have been even more beautiful for me if I wasn't a Jew married to a Muslim and father to a... uh... devout Futuramaist [Fig 2], and therefore not really included in the benediction, but what the hell. You still need a negative against which to ostensibly self-define, and traditionally Jews and Muslims are still really useful for that. I stopped taking it personally after I graduated from elementary beatings -- I mean, school.

The point is, I applaud these families for figuring it out, because finding hope in a world in a lot of the evidence seems counterindicative is a tough job. It requires compromise, and compromise requires a sacrifice, of one's ostensible identity if nothing else. That's hard to do, particularly when you are frightened of losing something dear to you, like your faith, or your daughter. And yet, those dark shapes in the water are getting closer, and it's not like we have a lot of options. Like the wily sardine, we're gonna have to work together to survive.

What's that you say? Sardines actually don't work together? Correct. That's why they die.

Werewolf Hunter Arrested

I've noticed that the Thomas Stroup story (see: Non Culpae Ex Esse Lupintotuum below) was picked up by online and television "news" services all through June, including a site dedicated to hunting which seems to be encouraging adding werewolves to the US Big Game lists. I feel obliged to point out that so far your humble correspondent has been the only source to do any investigative journalism; it was here, on Glorious Wreckage, that the information about the populations of wolves in Germany and the phase of the moon during Stroup's transformation was uncovered. You're welcome.

But today I ran across this little item. Apparently a shirtless man was approached by police while he was attacking objects with a sword in a parking lot. He explained that he was "hunting werewolves and C.H.U.D.s."

Ridiculous. C.H.U.D.s are only found in New York.

Why God Never Recieved Tenure

Speaking of Bob Ettinger, there was a joke running around universities before the internet - in those days, the only way we had of sharing jokes were to tell them to each other. So primitive, and there's no way to monetize that. But someone in Mrs. Doc's biology lab told me this one and I never forgot it, and I used a condensed version as the opening lines of my presentation on "Transhumanity" at Carnegie Mellon in 2005. I thought it would be fun to share it in its entirety:

Why God Never Received Tenure

Fig. 1. Question MY syllabus, will you?

1. He had only one major publication.
2. It was in Hebrew.
3. It had no references.
4. It wasn't published in a refereed journal.
5. Some even doubt He wrote it Himself.
6. It may be true that He created the world, but what has He done since then?
7. His cooperative efforts have been quite limited.
8. The scientific community has had a hard time replicating His results.
9. He never applied to the Ethics Board for permission to use human subjects.
10. When one experiment went awry He tried to cover it up by drowning the subjects.
11. When subjects didn't behave as predicted, He deleted them from the sample.
12. He rarely came to class, just told students to read the Book.
13. Some say He had His son teach the class.
14. He expelled His first two students for learning [Fig. 1]
15. Although there were only ten requirements, most students failed His tests.
16. His office hours were infrequent and usually held on a mountaintop.

A Meditation on the (Temporary) Death of a Modern Prometheus

Fig. 1: Crackpot.

The theme of my blog is derived from the quote from Lessing that inhabits the upper right quadrant of this page: "they make glorious wreckage who are lost in seeking worlds." There's a lot packed into that one line, but I think the aspect of Lessing's wisdom that excites me most is its demand to push the boundaries of human experience and knowledge, to expand the limits of human thought and action, and at the very least you will leave something spectacular behind, even if it is only the spectacle of your own fantastic destruction. So who better to memorialize here than Dr. Robert Ettinger [Fig. 1], who pioneered the cryonics movement. For those of you just tuning in, cryonics is a theory that holds that, sooner or later, human medical technology (specifically, nanotech and free cloning) will get around the fatal limitations of the body, making death, or at least death as we know it, a thing of the past. Since we live in that past, however, the trick will be to hang on long enough for technology to catch up and save us. Ettinger theorized that a careful freezing process to preserve your physical tissues from the moment of your death could preserve you long enough for future doctors to revive you, fix the horrible damage to your cells from the freezing and thawing process, and reverse the effects of ageing, so that you awaken in a better, enhanced body, with youth and vitality that might persist indefinitely.

Some futurists and scientists reacted to Ettinger's theories as one might react to the sudden release of an enraged wolverine into a day-care center. But I must say that I am partial to those people, even crackpots, who provide what Ernst Bloch called a vor-schein, an image of the future that gives us something to strive for. Wholly apart from the fact that Ettinger's work inspired my favorite tv show [Fig. 2], I became attracted to Ettinger when I was researching a presentation which I would eventually entitle "Transhumanity: Or, Why God Never Recieved Tenure." I came across this quote from Ettinger:

Fig. 2: Fry, Philip J., in his tube.

The ‘normal’ processes of evolution are wasteful and cruel in stupefying degree… Even an occasional calamitous error in planned development could scarcely match the slaughter, millennium in, millennium out, of fumble-fingered Nature.

He's got a point, the crackpot. Evolution's strategy for solving a problem is to throw millions of organisms against it, each one a little different, in the hopes that one will squeak through and preserve life. I don't know if it is cruel, but it is certainly incapable of predicting the future. Should humans, if they can, attempt to circumvent, or indeed improve upon, the circumstances in which we find ourselves? Of course we must, we do, we always will, struggling against the entropic current towards the future.

That's the great thing about the future, of course. As a historian, I think we tend to cultivate a sense of the past as an looming and growing thing, like an old, dark city with countless filthy alleyways, that perpetually wags a warning finger at you. The future, on the other hand, appears to be a bright, sunshiney place, full of gardens and meadows and promising an end to suffering. The future has hope in it. The fact that the endless transformation of the future into the past with all its polymorphous disappointments doesn't deter our optimism is, I think, one of the great miracles of the human mind. So, the science supporting cryogenics is (as even they will admit) pretty lousy, or perhaps one should say, optimistic. It's hard to refute directly, since it's based on potential technology rather than actual, but very few of the scientists who have signed the "Open Letter on Cryonics" are actually neuroscientists, which may be one reason why there are so many disclaimers. Honestly, though, this is like a less execrable iteration of Pascal's Wager:  I mean, think about it - what have you got to lose? If humanity nukes itself back to the Stone Age, or gets wiped out by an asteroid, or fails to raise the debt ceiling, or if geriatrics never progresses to the point where it can reverse extreme cerebral ischemic injury [Fig. 3], so what? You're not going to be any more dead than you already are (turns out I'm not the first to make that analogy).

Fig 3. Well, at least the zombies will be happy.

So Bob Ettinger's 92-year allotted term on the planet Earth is complete, and his dead body has been drained, drilled, filled with anti-freeze and dunked in a liquid-nitrogen-filled tube, like 105 of his past clients, in a process that Warren Ellis, in his epic Transmetropolitan, likened to "throwing a coin into a wishing well." In Ellis' futuristic world, lots of people get "revived" by this process, and, because their first unfiltered glimpse of future society drives them irretrievably insane, they form an unwanted social underclass and spend the rest of their super-enhanced lives living in squalor in homeless shelters.

What is the lesson to take from all of this? Well, as a historian I am aware that we can make use of the "wilderness of horrors" that is our past, and find an enlightened way forward, and as a fledgling social robotics student I am aware that the path to the future is hard, uncertain, and fraught with accidents, and even if we get it all right there's still no telling where we will end up. The future is every bit as likely to be decorated with horrors as it is with wonders. Meanwhile,  every day the "Zen Buddhist Sayings" widget on my google homepage reminds me that the real trick is living in the present, and making the absolute most out of whatever time you have. Then, it doesn't really matter if you live 50, or 92, or 1000 years.


Does it?

Another Werewolf Arrested

So here's another case of modern criminal behavior associated with werewolfism:

http://www.sonomanews.com/News-2011/Daylight-doesnt-dissuade-Werewolf-of-Larson-Park/

A Broeverbial No-No

 

 

Yesterday the 2011 session of Carnegie Mellon U's Pre-College session opened. Apart from the fact that I really enjoy teaching Pre-College, and the fact that my nephew Seth is attending this year, this gave me a chance to speak to Boevers face-to-face about the pic he sent me (Fig. 1), and provide his commentary.

Fig 1. "You'd look like a carrot." -DB

Broeverbs; the proverbial sayings of David Boevers, edition 3: On Sucking

My favorite Broeverb so far is this one, referring to the Carnegie Mellon School of Drama:

"We're the best in the world at what we do, and we still suck."

I have waited a long time to put that one up because I thought it might reflect negatively on the School, but since the Professor went ahead and did it anyway, what the hell. On his blog, David points out that it is actually fairly celebratory, but reminds one to stay humble. True, but actually what I really like about this Broeverb is that it also does the opposite. Now, we have really terrific students in our program, and generally they work their butts off and excel brilliantly. And we, as faculty, work our butts off for them. Every day I solve problems in the program, negotiate with other faculty to help my students, assist other faculty on projects for their students, recruit them to help me with mine, help build the program generally, look for new experiences and resources to improve the student's experiences, and on and on. That's my job, and I like it. But students being students, they sure do seem, perhaps from the exhausted perspective of the faculty, to be able to point out every feature of every facet of the work we do that could be better. I'm not saying they complain constantly. No, actually I am saying they complain constantly, but that comes as much from a place of wanting to have a genuine, profound, and challenging experience as it does from a sense of privilege or entitlement. What the students don't see all the time, I feel, is what they are getting for their investment compared to other programs they might have chosen. The School really is quite remarkable in many ways. As much as I think of myself more as a Tigger than an Eeyore, I guess I tend to concentrate on the things that need improvement, which is fine, but sometimes I forget to think about how much we are getting right, every day, and how proud I am of the work that we do collaboratively with our students, because we still suck and I guess I wouldn't have it any other way.

Broeverbs; the proverbial sayings of David Boevers, edition 2: On Fashion

I mentioned to my colleague and friend David Boevers that I needed some fashion tips - I really don't know anything about men's style, clothes, hair, all that stuff that makes it pleasant to be around a person. I guess I was just in the library the whole time I was supposed to be learning that. So David kindly gave me his three high-fashion secrets:

1. Don't wear anything with a visible food stain on it.
2. Don't wear anything your wife hates [Fig. 1].
3. Never mix green and orange.

As it happens, I don't own a single article of green nor orange clothing, so I'm already 30% assured of success!

Fig. 1. The Boeverses. I don't know what Marisa sees in David's ear that she finds so funny, but I know at least he's not wearing green pants.

Robot Plays

It's well-known that RUR, a play by Karel Capek, featured the first modern conception of a "robot," and indeed coined the term. But for my little friend Data, Heather Knight's Comedybot, there are going to have to be some new titles. Here is a selected list from an old blog I used to maintain, called Lapsus Linguae (www.lapsusl.blogspot.com), before it was overrun, coincidentally, by robot spammers. Many of my pals at the CMU School of Drama contributed to these. Here's the best of:

A Doll's Mouse
'night, Motherboard
The Merchant of Virus
Riders from the C Drive
Curse of the Silicon Class
Ctrl-Alt-Delete, I Want to Get Off
'Tis Pity She's a Mac
Spam, a lot
iMACbeth(pro)
The Iceman.cometh
Fool for RAM
Uncle Tom's Inbox
Mourning Becomes Electrons
Long Day's Journey into Byte
Suicide in BASIC
Charlotte's Website
Playboy.com of the Western World
Cat on a Bot Tin Roof
Ibsen's Ghosts (In The Machine)
Waiting for Geardot
Downloading at Lughnasa
The King and IBM
Suite In Press Any Three Keys to Continue
LINUXtrata
C//:gul
The Stronger (by Strindborg)

110 Characters in Search of an Author
Blog of Anne Frank
House of 000FF Leaves
Servant of Two Applications
Curse of the Dialup Class
Autocadia

Scanner Drum Song
The Secret Password
Sunday in the Park with a Laptop
Merrily we Surf Along
A Funny thing Happened on the Way to the FAQ

Robodramatix Video Up!

The long-awaited (by me, anyway) edited video of the presentation Heather Knight and I gave at the TEDxCMU conference this year has been posted on YouTube. Thanks, James Pan and the rest of the TEDxCMU crew. Planning is already heavily underway for next year's conference.

When I was a kid, hearing yourself on tape was always embarrassing and off-putting. Now, seeing myself on digital video - jeez. Is my head really that big? Anyway, I know this presentation is a little bit awkward and maybe under-rehearsed, although both Heather and Data are so magnetic (literally, in Data's case) that it hardly seems to matter much, at least to that audience. But the point is that Data becomes more sophisticated each time he performs. I think you can perceive a lot of development since his debut with TED WOMEN in "Silicon-Based Comedy" a few years ago. Of course, he's been working with Matt Gray, a superb acting teacher of robots as well as humans. And I'll claim to have had a hand in this from the point of view of roboturgy - the "Hath Not a Robot Video Cameras?" speech from The Merchant of Virus by W(i)11-i/am Shakesbot, and perhaps the idea that Data may one day become the new prophet of Prometheus.

The point is that the development of Social Robotics is made of these building blocks - interactions between humans and robots that are analyzed by roboticists like Heather to make one further iteration forward towards increasing sophistication and compatibility. I am convinced now that performance theory is going to be of greater importance as the field develops, and weirdos like me are going to have a role to play, pardon the pun. Social intelligence is the reason why human cognition is so much more advanced over the other primates, and it is heavily imbricated with performance and mimesis. Machine intelligence will have to develop similarly; I'm proud and excited to be involved with this.

Anyway, enjoy!

On Illness and Recovery

If man thinks about his physical or moral state he usually discovers that he is ill.  ~Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Sniffing at the Crotches of Power

Fig. 1. Do you see it? Do you see it?!?

The other night Yours Truly was out enjoying himself with a company of delightful dementigenstia of my acquaintance, pictured here recreating Da Vinci's Il Cenacolo  correcting all of the mistakes in the occult semiotics [Fig. 1].  From left, Louis Brown (holding a credit card rectifying the error in the painting that Bartholemew is not trying to pay for the dinner. Historically, Bartholemew was a notorious check-grabber, and expected everyone else to pony up for the theatre tickets), Mike Dzibiak looking for more vowels for his last name, Wayne Wise (a Professor of Comic Books - it's probably best that we can't see what he's doing with his hands) and Marcel Walker as either Andrew or Judas, depending on how well you know them. In the center is Mark Best, Chair of the Department of Godzilla Studies at Pitt - the less said about his Jesus Complex, the better. The Apostle Thomas is being played by Claude Mauk, Chair of the Languages You've Never Heard Of department at Pitt (you know, like Blonginese, V'larch, and High Pflerman). Then you see Mrs. Doc, me, and Baby Doc there as Matthew, Jude Thaddeus, and Simon, naturally! I mean, who else would we be? Also Maya Best is there as the hostess, not depicted by Da Vinci, who is coming over to tell the party they are disturbing the other customers by all sitting on one side of the table.

Just as in the actual last supper, we all fell to talking about famous celebrities we know. Until I joined Carnegie Mellon, I had a few close calls with the A-List, topped by three events:

3. I stood next to Steven Tyler on 7th Avenue in Seattle waiting for the light to change.
2. I attended an exhibition of Impressionist Art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in the accidental but prolonged company of Jamie Lee Curtis.
1. I took a piss in a Tribeca restaurant men's room next to Bill Murray [Fig. 2].

Fig. 2.  This image always makes me think of Ghostbusters.

But now I'm in show business, however tangentially, and I've hobnobbed with quite a few well-known folks; Alan Arkin, Elaine May, Ted Danson, John Wells, Stephen Bochco, Felicia Rashad, John Kani, Warwick Davis, Mike Carey and Mike Reiss being on the top of my list of good encounters. The funny thing is that a lot of the fanboy glamour goes away when you are doing it as part of your job. Not all of it, but taking an unexpected piss next to Bill Murray is a lot more titillating than spending three days helping John Wells (who is awesome) negotiate the ins and outs of the school to which he is donating a truckload of money. It's work. It's great getting to know John as a human being, and all that, and to learn from his astonishing example about how to do the work we do as well as he does, but you don't have the giggling consequence-free delight of being a faceless joe. Bottom line, you have to TREAT THEM LIKE HUMAN BEINGS, and that means that you have to ACT LIKE A HUMAN BEING.

But yesterday Jed Harris and I had lunch with the President (Emeritus) of the Pittsburgh City Council, Doug Shields. I'm a fan of the Councilman; voted for him every time he ran since I got here. He backs the causes I believe in, he was a great help to a big project at my son's school, and he came to see our Inspector General twice. After the second appearance he did a postshow talkback with myself, Jed, and Molly McCurdy (dramaturg) and I said "do you think people will be offended by my ridiculous lampooning of city government?" and he said "Lampooning? I thought you had put a hidden bug in the Mayor's Office and just wrote down what you heard." My ego as a writer, dramaturg, and adaptor soared, but my hopes as a citizen plummeted. After all, I put the worst garbage in there I could come up with. Anyway, the Councilman agreed to blurb the back of the book for me, and so when it came out I wanted to give him a few of my author's copies, which I get from CMU Press in lieu of "pay" (love ya, Jerry and Cynthia!). So we had lunch yesterday.

I believe that Doug is on the side of the Wise and the Just, which is probably why he's not Mayor. But every time I speak at length to him I get a better sense of what goes on in government, and at the age of 40 I know I shouldn't be so idealistic that it continues to make me sick to my stomach. It's like the meat and dairy industry - one day you learn how much blood and pus from damaged and infected cow's udders the USDA allows to be legally incorporated into cheese, and you say "I'll never touch animal products of any kind ever again." And a week later you're tucking back into the burgers. Politics is the same way. It's vile and disgusting and warps your mind and showcases the worst aspects of human existence, both on the side of the manipulators and those willing to be manipulated. Plus, no one is interested anymore in listening to me gass on about Marx as a precursor to discussing Brecht or Feminism, or Queer Theory. I should just forget about it and work on robots, but I can't. I keep returning to it like a dog revisiting its own upchuck. Today's sputum has to do with the wholesaling of Pennsylvania's clean air and water to the Marcellus Shale fatcats. I saw a similar process destroy the glorious natural resources of Utah once, and I'm nauseated to think about it happening again here in the woodlands.

Celebrities of any kind, entertainment or political, emit the same smell. It's the smell of your ability to think as an individual rapidly decomposing. The more you sniff it, the more of yourself you lose. Too bad it's so goddam addictive.