Metacognizant's New Writeups

miserlou (person)

2005-02-17T20:21:34Z

"Miserlou" is a traditional Middle Eastern Arabic melody first and a Greek folk song second. The Arabic melody is played within the maqam hijaz, a scale that features two 1 1/2 tone intervals. In 1945, an instrumental recording of the song by the Greek-American composer Nick Roubanis¹ was used by the Duquesne University Folk Dancers for their setting of the Greek "Kritikos" folk dance. The song and associated dance were adopted by Greek and later Armenian folk dancers, and the newly created folk dance has circulated ever since under variants such as Misirlou, Misery Lou, Never On Sunday, Hasamisu and the Snake Dance². Additionally, since the 1940s, an Americanized version of the song has become a standard of cheesy exotica.

Of greater interest to me is the klezmer "Miserlou" that has existed within Ashkenazic Jewish communities since at least the 1920s.³ I…

Slijper's goat (thing)

2004-04-16T22:16:14Z

Slijper's Goat

or

What a grotesque little beast

Sometimes during the 1920's, a darling little baby goat was born without forelimbs. It barely even had stubs. But we all know how inventive and irrepressible goats are, so it comes as no surprise that this particular goat taught itself how to walk on its hindlimbs alone. Actually, it taught itself how to hop around, something like a kangaroo does, only without a long, thick tail to use for balance. The animal lived for about year, and then it died in a freak accident.

I don't know how the goat got into the hands of Dr. E.J. Slijper, a Dutch veterinarian. It's not impossible that Dr. Slijper was so eager to dissect the goat that he bought it from the gentle farmer who had lovingly raised it, promised him that it would be treated kindly, and then gently shoved it down a flight of stairs. (Excuse me, it fell.) But I do know that upon…

Buddhist monks are sexy (person)

2004-03-17T05:05:07Z

It's the shoulder.

A sleeveless shirt allows its wearer to work without hindrance. She can plunge her arms deep into any mess of bread dough, sewage, or medical specimen, while leaving her clothing unstained. But if a shirt has one sleeve? What was utilitarian becomes ludicrously useless. The missing sleeve explicitly exposes skin for the very sake of visibility, and therefore fantasy. Consider the off-the-shoulder dresses and blouses that had their moment and died sometime during the eighties. As clothing they generated sex appeal by appealing to asymmetry. Their effect on the body was one of enacting a discontinuity between the members of a given set of paired morphological structures. And so the strumpets coquettishly paired their Yves Saint Laurent high heels and colorful slouch socks with off-the-shoulder dresses in order to announce: If I were working I would uncover both arms. If I were warm I would…

Voltaire (person)

2003-12-14T11:02:55Z

Voltaire the Activist

The writings of the philosopher Voltaire vary wildly between pertaining to the universal and to the specific. While his general comments on social ills such as fanaticism, intolerance, optimism and Christianity may appear to be among the more timeless portions of his oeuvre, his specific writings, which publicized and sought to correct certain contemporary injustices, provide a particularly useful insight into his character. In order to more fully understand this character it is necessary to compare the moral philosopher's prescriptions for living with the man's own modus operandi. If the latter falls short or oversteps the philosopher's description of a virtuous life then it must be attributed to some source other than that of Voltaire's own reasonable intellect.

Throughout his later life, especially during the period of 1769 until his death in 1778, Voltaire was immersed in a series of causes, some less celebrated than…

Nanach (person)

2003-12-12T00:11:43Z

Go to Safed. No really, fly to Tel Aviv, go to Tachana Hamerkazit, and take an Egged bus to Safed. It's beautiful, a city in the air, the home of artists and mystics, the birthplace of Lurianic Kaballa. The city is cold, for Israel, but the views are incredible. And there is Hebrew graffiti everywhere, all the same:

Na Nach Nachma Nachman Me'Uman
נ נח נחמ נחמן מאומן

The phrase translates quite simply as Na Nach Nachma Nachman from Uman, as well as, due to a quirk of homonymity, Na Nach Nachma Nachman is faithful.

The graffiti is courtesy of the aptly named Nanach sect, founded during the 20th century by Rabbi Yisroel Ber Odesser of Tiberias. Rabbi Odesser was born in 1888 to a family of Karliner Hasidim, but as a young man he came across the book Histopchus HaNefesh…

Enlightenment (idea)

2003-12-11T19:33:49Z

Enlightenment: Failure or Defeat?

As an ideologically obstinate communist, when confronted with that system's failures, will often automatically respond that communism hasn't failed because in fact it has never been completely attempted, so we can imagine a partisan of the Enlightenment proposing that Enlightenment hasn't failed, it has merely been stalled or even defeated by other, momentarily stronger, contingencies. Enlightenment thought, while in some cases disparate, tends to postulate certain if/then relationships. To chose just two examples: If people are tolerant, then they will be happy, or If people are free from coercion, then they will think for themselves. It is not enough for a critique of the Enlightenment to observe in opposition to these postulates that in the post-Enlightenment era people are unhappy or herd-like. Such a critique must undermine the causal link between the purported conditions and their supposed…