Monkeys have grammar.
December 10, 2009
Boom-boom-krak-oo – Campbell’s monkeys combine just six “words” into rich vocabulary.
Many animals have calls that are suggestive of a rudimentary language. Of course, calls are rather crude signifying systems – “signs” in the commonplace distinction, meaning that they depend on the thing they refer to being immediately present, as opposed to a symbol, a full linguistic signifier that refers to things present or absent with equal facility. Consider the difference between a stop sign, which needs to be at an intersection for it to be meaningful (otherwise, you’re thinking, “What’s this stop sign doing here where there’s no intersection to stop at?”), and the word “stop,” which in conversation can refer to an event taking place at anytime and anyplace. So animals calls signify more or less like a stop sign: they refer to the near-at-hand event that prompts them. “Mate with me,” “Danger,” “My place,” “I survived the night,” etc.
Whether apes and parrots might be capable of communicating in the full sense of language is the subject of much speculation and controversy, and outside my expertise, but I’m always pleased to find indications that animal calls are not wholly mechanical. A recent study of Campbell monkey calls suggests that the monkeys have a finite set of calls – six – which they combine in a variety of ways according to set rules. The result is a rich system of calls that can, for instance, identify a threat – leopard, eagle, or some unclear but potentially threatening activity - and even the threat’s relative immediacy. What the blog I’m linking to doesn’t discuss – and I don’t know if the original study looks into this or not – is the degree of creative freedom in chaining together the calls into a complex monkey “sentence.” It does say that the system for combining calls functions much like a human grammar in that it permits some combinations as meaningful and not others, so that, as the blog post notes, “boom boom krak-oo” means “look out for that falling branch,” but place the “krak-oo” anywhere else in that sequence but the end and it would be meaningless to the monkeys. But do the monkeys have the option to add an additional “boom” or “krak” or another call in somewhere without disturbing the core meaning of the phrase? Our own grammars, as has been frequently noted, allow for a core meaning to be expressed in an endless variety of potential combinations even if those grammars restrict the manner in which those combinations are manifested. How much expressive liberty does the monkey poet have?
It’s enough to make me wish I had the time to look into the current science of bird calls as well.
Job search update
November 19, 2009
Two whole weeks!?! It’s been that long since my last post.
Well, I have been sick. And busy. Very busy at a job that I want to leave very much because of its insistent busyness, an insistent busyness that also keeps me too busy to actively search for other jobs. There is a bit more than three weeks of the semester left, but the job search window is closing fast, and I’ve not been able to complete many of the applications before deadlines. Soon I’ll be able to write and submit proposals to conferences and submit articles to journals and do all the other pointlessly alienated things academics do to raise their profile, and still be too busy the following job search cycle to take advantage of any tentative bites on those offerings.
I’ll also be preparing a non-academic resume and shopping it out to publishers and other preparers of academic and educational services in the hopes that I might be able to find a position there or somewhere like. Part of me is indeed very hopeful that I might be more successful doing that than the academic search. It’s no secret that I’m disillusioned and more than a little bitter about academic work, my inability to escape non-tenure track status, and the current state of the academy in general. I’d like to be getting a little more scratch, quite honestly, and that may be hoping for a little much at this point, but one of the unpleasant truths of academic life is that we are paid far less for the level of qualifications and the amount of work done than any other professional class.
Cooking meat
November 4, 2009
I should be grading, or revising my teaching letter to send out for job applications, but the flu has laid me pretty low today. So I’ll make a quick post.
Thanks to those of you who are following along despite my unorthodox approach to the art of blogging. My posts may not be short, but they’re short for the format I’m accustomed to writing in, the academic article/paper. My thoughts were to experiment in writing series of short, off-the-cuff essays on topics that are important to me: namely, the natural world, my ambiguous professional status, writing as an art and discipline, secularism, and cooking. There are so many more I could add, but I thought these choices would give the blog consistency and coherence and still reflect the full presence of a mind.
I’m enjoying it immensely – I honestly do enjoy writing, and my life is too chaotic and fragmented right now for me to find the peace and concentration to write poetry, so the blog has become a welcome companion. I hope that I’m good at it: most of the posts are written in one or two brief sittings, and then edited for spelling and grammar live on the blog the day they’re posted. The one exception is a post on science and belief ideologies I’ve been working on, which, perhaps because it’s more like my academic work, has taken several sittings and may not ever make it up.
I’m constantly tempted to post shorter pieces on the attractive detritus that I find strewn about the Web, because there’s a lot of it and I have lots of interests, but I’m forcing myself to limit those “link” posts to material that fits into the predefined array of topics. Meaning that people encountering the blog are being expected to do a lot of heavy lifting, while I’m simply enjoying having a form to fill with my typically overwrought sentences.
Anyway: cooking meat. I was a strict vegetarian for well over a dozen years, and then when my body began displaying signs of “metabolic syndrome” (hypertension, pre-diabetes, high cholesterol) I added seafood to my diet, thinking that would be healthier for the heart than a strictly vegetarian. That may be controversial, but I’ll stand by that assessment. That lasted for five years or so, and now over the past year I’ve become a full-blown carnivore. Or at least in what I’ll eat out and about. At home, I’m still largely vegetarian in what I cook. Why? Well, partly it’s because that’s still clearly a healthier (and more satisfying) way to live, but also because I’ve got no idea how to go about cooking a piece of meat.
The Catholic Church’s increasing irrelevance, and why not?
October 31, 2009
It used to be that the Catholic Church was actually a force for good in the world. Sure, there were some embarrassing doctrinal issues, and the whole male, unmarried clergy thing was kind of, well, weird, but at the same time the Church was earnest, devout, and genuinely concerned about not only its parishioners but also the spiritual and material well-being of all people. Being raised as a Catholic was for me always a source of pride, which was helpful, because growing up Catholic in the south is fairly much like growing up there as a Jew. It’s not a huge conceptual leap for me to regard American secularism as just another version of American Protestantism as it might be for northerners: I’m used to a cultural milieu which assumes Protestantism to be as universal and transparent as the air we breath, and one that silently but pointedly excludes my kind.
That was then. In the twenty-odd years since I renounced the Church, that whole male, unmarried clergy thing was revealed to be what it has been for hundreds of years – if not longer, simply part of a massive conspiracy for socially inept and sexually confused men to fuck unwilling young boys. The Church never anticipated the social and sexual revolutions of the 1960s and 1970s that finally permitted the victims of abuse to speak out due to the growing understanding that they wouldn’t entirely become social pariahs for admitting publicly what they’d been forced to endure. That finally if somewhat surprisingly slowly undid the whole silence about it, though I dare say the abuse still continues now even if somewhat muted.
A fall hike with things falling
October 26, 2009
It’s been a few weeks now since we took the hike I wanted to write about. The grading and lesson plans have completely taken over my life, and the guitar is going unplayed, the dishes are piling up, and the writing’s not getting done. Mid-semester fall is about the worst time of year work-wise for an academic, and it’s a pity, as it’s definitely my favorite time to be walking about with no definite purpose other than to absorb the what’s there to see. I had wanted to talk about falls colors, since for us ruralists – well, us arboreal mid-Atlantic and New England state ruralists – the fall transformation that so many city-dwellers and suburbanites seek out as car-touring eye-candy is no less a spectacle and a prompt to reflections on beauty, mortality, and the value of the natural world, even if it does fall somewhat into the rhythms of the typical. Then the colors were only starting to change, and that change was mostly to the deep reds or pure yellows of shrubs and vines, with additional notes of yellows and purples provided by late-blooming wildflowers. Now the maples with their monochromatic but grandiose show have gone fire-orange and nearly done, with the top half of the trees fairly much blown out by now. Even the massive maple in our backyard, which is for us fall’s biggest diva, going dramatically yellow before gracing us with two days of a constant rain of color as the leaves drop, has this year shed all its leaves without our noticing.
Metaphors literalized.
October 24, 2009
Photographs of the decomposed bodies of albatross chicks dead from eating plastic detritus.
Chimpanzees have tools, culture, and morality.
October 18, 2009
The crying student
October 17, 2009
I get one – at least one – every semester. It’s usually a woman, but men cry, too. (Tracy Budd, who sent into my office the most lachrymose individual I’ve ever had the pleasure, knows exactly what I’m talking about.) Usually it’s someone who’s well indoctrinated into the educational system, enough anyway to regard my pronouncements as not only authoritative but somehow bearing on her or his respective worth or character, has been receiving therefore high marks throughout high school, and has been performing well below level of the typical Rutgers student. And yes, the typical Rutgers student is, while often obnoxious and possessing of a stunning sense of self-entitlement, actually capable of a very high degree of critical intelligence and expression.
They show up in my office mid-semester or a little before because I’ve been giving them poor grades, and they’re trying and trying, but they’re still not getting the grades that would validate them as worthy individuals. And it’s not like I don’t know who they are: usually have been trying to get them into my office so we can figure out what they can do to improve, but this type of student is eager to please and therefore somewhat intimidated by the idea of speaking one-on-one with the person who dispenses knowledge and judgment. But finally they muster up the courage, they come to my office during office hours, and the combination of the humiliation of the poor grades, the habitus of respect for educators and higher education, and the shock of finding themselves in a chair in my office engaged in a conversation with their tormentor reduces them to tears.
Letter, CV, abstract
October 13, 2009
Deadlines are coming up – and I missed one: Princeton as usual had some humanities postdoctoral thing up to apply for with a ridiculously short deadline of October 1. Highly desirable position, of course, being that it’s Princeton and they’re paying more than a lot of Associate Professors make just for a 2-year research position with a teaching load of maybe two sections a year. Yeah, like I’d be able to compete for that one. That deadline was up even before I did my first search, so I’m just going to be relieved I didn’t feel like I had to be responsible enough to actually apply.
The application packet for these positions is remarkably standardized. They ask for a letter of application and a CV*, and you send them a letter of application, a CV, and an abstract of the dissertation. They never – or hardly, hardly ever – actually ask for the abstract but apparently just expect you to know to send it. I have two different letters of application drafted up – one for a research university/literature position, and one for a composition heavy/heavy teaching load position. Postdocs require an even different array of qualifications and aspirations in the letter of application (generally known in the culture as the “job letter”), since you have to propose a course of research you’ll engage in that’s working off from the dissertation and into new and unexplored realms, and I don’t have anything drafted up for such a purpose. There are just very few postdocs that come up in the humanities, and it’s rare to see one that I would qualify for or would consider accepting. Except that I see that Harvard has a postdoc up, and the deadline isn’t until December 1. Well. That’s different.
Rooster sauce
October 10, 2009
You get your choice of rooster sauce at Pho Ha in South Philly: smooth or chunky.
Rooster sauces
