Science, Art and the Coronavirus

Perhaps you've heard: the unfortunate conflict between scientists and artists is still going on. This conflict is not always such a big deal, but, perhaps you've heard, there's a deadly worldwide plague going on.

Not every scientist is in conflict with every artist. Some scientists are deeply knowledgeable about and appreciative of the arts, and some artists are deeply knowledgeable about and appreciative of science. These people -- I don't know how large a group they represent, I can only hope the group is large and growing quickly -- have grasped that neither science nor art by itself can address all human needs. They realize that art and science can compliment and help each other.

Then there are people like Frank Castorf, an idiot and perhaps Germany's most famous living theatre director. He's become even more famous in the past couple of days by publicly complaining that he doesn't like being told by Angela Merkel to wash his hands, and that he resents not being able to shop and dine out as he is accustomed to do.

And so, since he is one of Germany's most prominent representatives of art, he's causing a lot of damage. Who knows how many deaths he will be directly responsible for.

I wonder, does Castorf resent Merkel telling him what to do because she's a woman? If Germany had a male Chancellor at the moment who was passing along the advice of scientists -- that's all that Merkel is doing, of course: passing along the advice of scientists about how we can best hope to survive this epidemic, not exercising any sort of personal authority over Frank Castorf -- would Castorf enthusiastically support social distancing and masks and hand washing? I suspect he might. He might think of it as a paramilitary sort of discipline. He has some stupid macho tendencies.

Castorf is also, like Donald Trump, making this worldwide crisis all about him. He claims that before the coronavirus outbreak, young people in the theatre wanted old men in the theatre to die as soon as possible. (Castorf is 68 years old.), and that now they want to save every old man they can, even with such allegedly fascist measures as compulsory hand-washing.

No sensible person I know agrees with Castorf that young theatre people were ever wishing old men dead. I suspect the truth may be more something such as that now and then, some big-mouthed, wise-assed young people have said that they wish that Castorf would retire, and Castorf is blowing that way out of proportion and using this particularly thin excuse to wallow in self-pity, at a particularly bad time and in a particularly destructive way.

This conflict between art and science comes from artists and scientists not appreciating what the other group can do. Some scientists think that science can solve all of humanity's problems, some artists think that art can solve all of humanity's problems, and, of course, they're all mistaken. We need both.

Social distancing, masks and hand-washing will save lives. Science has told us that, and there is no doubt at all that science is correct about that. We still have a problem, though, because many people are not listening to this very simple and important message from science. Scientists know how people should best respond to a pandemic, but they don't know how to convince people to respond in the best way. Convincing people to take scientifically-sound, live-saving advice is something that artists are good at -- or, at least, something they can be good at, if they're not completely infantile self-pitying idiots.

Jeff Gibbs and his Documentary, "Planet of the Humans"

"Hi, I'm Jeff Gibbs, maker of the new documentary movie Planet of the Humans. As you can tell by my voice, I'm a very cheerful and up-beat person." [This is hilarious because Gibbs, in his documentary, actually sounds clinically depressed. He sounds as if he hasn't so much as tried to smile for several years.] "However, as I made this documentary about alternative energy, electric vehicles and such, I found that things are often complicated, and not always perfect. Therefore, I have decided to lay down and die, and I hope that all of you do, too."

That's the basic message of Planet of the Humans. Like me, other reviewers have wondered What the Hey? Why is Gibbs, alleging to be an environmentalist, doing everything he can to make all sorts of environmental action and clean technology look as bad as possible?

After you finish reading my review, I suggest this one at the website Films For Action. And if you're interested in seeing a documentary which actually shows some of the good that environmentalists are doing, I suggest Jamie Redford's Happening: A Clean Energy Revolution. (But be warned! Redford's documentary is NOT PERFECT!!!!! All it does it show people making a difference, encouraging the viewer to make a difference.)

The movie is mostly divided between telling us things we already know, and focusing on a flaw in an otherwise-good thing or helpful person or entity -- which can be regarded as more telling us what we already know, for those of us who have already grasped that nothing is perfect. It is not news that corn-based ethanol is flat-out a failure from an environmental point of view. Switchgrass-based ethanol is much cleaner -- oh, but it's not in Gibbs' film, is it? It is not news that an electric vehicle can get its electricity from a grid which is powered by coal. However, it seems that many people still have not grasped that, even if it gets its electricity from coal, an electric vehicle will still be cleaner, overall, than an internal-combustion vehicle. And if they didn't know that already, they also didn't learn it from Gibbs' movie. And of course, if an electric vehicle gets its electricity from solar or wind, it is much cleaner still. And many of the people who drive electric vehicles also advocate for solar and wind and other types of clean energy, have solar panels on their roofs and so forth.

Gibbs shows protesters in Vermont hiking to the top of a mountain to protest plans to put wind turbines on the mountaintop. He films one of the protesters comparing wind turbines on top of this mountain to entire mountaintops having been removed in other parts of the country in the process of strip-mining coal -- and he ends that scene there, as if that were a valid comparison. I think that if he had dug a little deeper, he might have been able to show that the wind turbines planned for the Vermont mountaintop would be a wee bit more environmentally-friendly than coal mining with mountaintop removal in Appalachia.

But he doesn't seem interested in showing any upside to anything or anyone in the alternative-energy sector. Al Gore sold his cable TV network to Al Jazeera, a company which owns stock in oil interests -- and so, Gibbs implies, all of Gore's efforts on behalf on the environment are therewith exposed as -- you know, we've heard this sort of thing before. But usually, we don't hear it from environmentalists, we hear it from Fox News or Rush Limbaugh or some other oil-funded right-wing idiots who are trying to discredit the entire environmental movement.

What exactly is Gibbs trying to do?

There are some environmentalists who hate people, and want the human race to die out as quickly as possible, for the alleged good of the rest of the planet. The only way I can make sense of Planet of the Humans, which begins with a montage of Folks on the Street Answering the Question: How much longer will humanity survive? -- is if Gibbs is one of that humanity-hating type of environmentalist.

Some right-wingers and proponents of petrochemical and nuclear power also seem to like Planet of the Humans, since it does what they do: trash environmentalists, supposedly "expose" us by concentrating on our real and imagined flaws, ignore what we're actually getting right. Screw you, Jeff Gibbs! The Wrong Monkey might love you, but he loves everybody. I don't.

ASMR

It's has been less than 3 months since I discovered that there is a name for what happens to me -- and millions of other people, but apparently not most people -- when we hear certain sounds. It's called ASMR.

Scientists haven't explained it yet. Its full name, Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response, might sound science-y, but it's not. It was coined by non-scientists. Apparently it doesn't happen to most people. One theory is that it is small seizures. I was surprised to learn that. I was mostly familiar with large, dangerous seizures -- not personally, but through knowing people who have experienced them. I don't know whether the theory that ASMR is seizures makes sense. Kinda doesn't make sense to me.

Anyway: I've experienced it my whole life. "It" is certain sounds which make me tingle, starting with my scalp and moving down my body, and which make me very relaxed. And I'm not talking about the wind in the trees or a burbling brook. They can be pleasant, but they don't give me The Sensation. Music doesn't do it either.

What does? Often, it's people's voices -- not singing, but speaking softly or whispering. The earliest example I can remember was a chess master who had a program on public television. This may have been earlier than 1970. I loved that show. I didn't pay any attention at all to what he was saying about chess, I have no idea but his voice made me feel great. Another example is the actress Lynne Gordon in the movie The Hot Rock, released in 1972, with Robert Redford and George Segal. Lynne Gordon plays the hypnotist Miasmo, in a short scene which I, and perhaps others who react to ASMR, wish was much longer. Hypnotists in general seem to set off my ASMR response. I can't honestly say that I've ever been hypnotized. I gather that some scientists claim that NO-ONE has ever actually been hypnotized. That seems like a bit of a stretch to me. But whether hypnotism is real or not, perhaps some of its fascination is due to the ASMR response.

Some people just naturally speak in a way which triggers the response in me. More than once, I have known someone personally who was psychotic, but whom I sought out and spent time with, because they tended to talk non-stop for long periods of time, and they had one of those voices.

Benny Hinn can definitely trigger that response in me. But not all of the time: just when he does those murmuring segments with soft background music. The times when he sounds like his mentor, Kathryn Kuhlmann. The problem with people like Hinn and Kuhlmann is, I'm not always able to ignore the content of what they're saying, content which is deplorable and disturbing. Much more disturbing than anything any of those psychotic people said.

It doesn't have to be a human voice. Here, for example, is a YouTube video from a woman who calls herself WhispersRed, with three and a half hours of ASMR, with no talking. There's a lot of sounds of fabrics being rubbed and crinkled and such. It works for me, and it seems to work for a lot of people, judging by the fact that it has 18 million views.



But more commonly, it's a human voice. And now ASMR has become big business on YouTube, with many people doing it deliberately. And some people do it much better than others. Or perhaps I should say: some ASMR performers work much better on me than do others. Perhaps it's as subjective as music. The following video, one of my favorite ASMR videos, is an example not only of something which makes me very relaxed, but also an example of something which, at least on YouTube, very often comes along with ASMR: Reiki. The lady who made this video, who goes by the name Cutebunny992, says in its title that it is "roleplay," and in the video description she says, "I am pretending to be a Reiki therapist."



The role-playing and pretending in this video doesn't bother me at all, but in many ASMR videos it puts me off. For example: Cutebunny992's native language is Greek, and other than this one video, I prefer the ones where she speaks in Greek, because I can't understand what she's saying, because the role playing of being in a doctor's office or a travel agency or whatever, is just a big distraction from the tingles and relaxation I came there for.

Some others who combine ASMR with Reiki on YouTube are most definitely not pretending. Or should I say: they most definitely SAY that they are not pretending, but are actually performing Reiki, which is a method of cleansing your aura and chokras of negative energy and replacing it with positive energy. I could write at least one blog post on Reiki on YouTube, and I found out about it even more recently than ASMR.

Literary Works Formerly Ascribed to Julius Caesar

In addition to his remarkable military and political careers, Julius Caesar has been one of the most widely-read of ancient Latin authors. Many generations of upper-class European boys -- mostly upper-class and mostly boys -- read Caesar's accounts of the Gallic and the Civil War, in which Caesar led and triumphed. It was once thought that, besides the prose of Caesar's narratives being fairly easy to read, and thus well-suited to young boys, he provided an admirable example for future leaders of Europe to follow.

As time as gone on, however, scholars have found and more and more reason to doubt the veracity of Caesar's accounts, to regard them as extremely self-serving propaganda and Caesar as a propagator of genocide -- and of course, the proportion of males is no longer so overwhelming in /classical studies, or in world leadership. O tempora o mores!

Caesar continues to be very widely read, but no longer with an admiration as uncomplicated as he once received.

In addition to his commentaries on the Gallic and Civil Wars, accounts of the Alexandrian, African and Spanish Wars were written during or very close to the time of Caesar's life and circulated under his name along with the genuine war commentaries. But it has long been recognized that that attribution of these works to Caesar was false. Even readers as early as Suetonious saw clearly that these were the works of different authors. The author of the Alexandrian war is probably the same Hirtius, a personal acquaintance of Caesar's and an officer in his army, who added an eighth book to Caesar's account of the Civil War. The author of the African war is not quite as polished; and the Spanish War is simply awful. And even Hirtius' contributions, although unobjectionable from a purely literary point of view, stand out sharply from Caesar's own writing because Hirtius lacks Caesar's grasp of military matters.

The manuscripts of Caesar fall into two main groups: one of which contains only the commentary on the Gallic War, and none of which is older than the 9th century; the other group contains the entire Casarian and psuedo-Caesarian corpus, and none of this group is older than than the 10th century.

As with other ancient authors, so with Caesar, it seems to be the trend recently to print less text per volume. While as recently as Rene Dupont's 1901 Oxford edition the Civil War was printed with Hirtious' 8th book and the 3 pseudo-Caesarian texts, it appears that the newest editions from both Oxford and Teubner contain only the 7 books actually written by Caesar. O tempora o mores! (You realize, I hope, that I realize that there are reasons for changes in publishing habits, that I exclaim O tempora o mores! ironically, and do not wish for a return of good old days.) The pseudo-Caesarian works can still be had, in older second-hand volumes of the Civil War, and in newer separate editions.

Florus

The best manuscript of a certain brief history of Rome from Romulus to Augustus, a 10th-century copy in Bamberg (B), gives its author as Julius Florus. Other manuscripts give its author's name as Lucius Annaeus Florus. However, many believe that the author of the history is Publius Annius Florus, poet, friend of the Emperor Hadrian and author of a dialogue entitled Vergilius orator an poeta, of which only a fragment survives. In the following I shall concentrate on the history and refer to its author simply as Florus.

The various titles of the history describe it as an epitome of Livy. Livy is indeed by far its most important source, followed closely enough that Livy can at some points offer important readings in Florus. Conversely, Florus' history is one of the most important sources for re-imagining the missing books of Livy.

However, the reader should not be misled into thinking that Florus compiled his history solely from Livy. At times he disagrees with Livy. He draws from the histories of Sallust, Caesar and the Elder Seneca. There are hints of the poetry of Vergil and Lucan.

The numerous manuscripts of Florus testify to the great popularity, in earlier ages, of brief histories of Rome. In the 6th century, Jordanes, in his history entitled De summa temporum vel origine actibusque gentis Romanorum, excerpts Florus to such a great extent that he is treated as an early manuscript, with the designation I. The above-mentioned B comes from a source similar to I, and I and B are sometimes referred to together as group [A]. Separate from [A] are the great number of manuscripts in group [C]. From [C], PK Marshall, in LD Reynolds (ed), Texts and Transmission, Oxford, 1983, p 165, selects 12 manuscripts from [C], from the 9th to the 13th century, mostly from France and western Germany, as being the most important.

The date and place of the editio princeps are unknown to me. I have seen it described as being printed in Paris in 1470; however, I have really no idea how authoritative that description might happen to be. A second edition was printed by Aldus in Venice in 1521. Nine further editions were printed before the end of the 19th century. More recent editions have come from Teubner, Loeb, Bude and the Libreria dello Stato.

Today, the importance of Florus' text as history is seen as slight. Florus wrote it as a panegyric, describing Rome's military prowess as ever-increasing until it reached a peak in the time of the Gracchi, and steadily declining since then. This attitude of praising past greatness and regretting present decline had much greater appeal in earlier epochs than it does at present. However, Florus does occasionally offer a pleasing turn of phrase. And his interest to textual critics, and to those of us interested in the missing books of Livy, is great.

Will Bernie Help Biden?

I would've much preferred Bernie Sanders to Joe Biden, as the Democratic nominee for President. But still, I would much prefer Biden to Trump as President. Now that it's gonna be Joe, is Bernie going to help out?

It's something which (eww!) politicians do, something known as (ewwwww!!!) politics: give and take. Give something to somebody, even if it's someone you really dislike, in order to get something. To save the situation from being a total loss. To help the possibility that later on, you'll get that something, the something you wanted but couldn't get right now.

I don't know what Bernie will do. I have no idea what goes on in his mind. But right now, he wields a lot of power, and he could use it to help someone he has a lot disagreements with, Biden, in order to help Biden beat someone who is much, much worse: Trump. Remember President Trump?

In 2016, Bernie wielded a lot of power after he had lost the nomination, and in my opinion he didn't do everything he could have done with that power, in order to beat Trump -- but right now 2016 and how well Bernie used his power and my opinion of what he did, none of that matters. Right now, what matters is Trump vs Biden in November. And Bernie can do a lot about that. Many of Bernie's supporters say they don't see any difference between Trump and Biden. Bernie could do a lot to explain the differences to them. If he wants to. If he sees the differences. Like I said, I have no idea how Bernie's mind works. He's a strange case to me: a politician who has spent nearly his entire career not engaging in politics, holding himself disdainfully above all of the compromises and horse-trading.

This would be a particularly bad time for him to keep holding himself above it all, instead of getting his hands dirty, helping something to happen which he no doubt sees as bad -- a Biden Presidency -- in order to prevent something which would be much worse: a 2nd term of Trump. I hope so much that he gets down into the dirt and fights, that he acts like a politician at last. The whole world needs all the help it can get right now, removing Trump from office. And that's not going to be done with idealism. It's going to be done if a whole lot of us hold our noses and vote for someone we despise, in order to stop someone else who is much, much worse. That's politics. There's nothing pure about it, never has been.

Translations from Greek to Latin

In the Roman Republic and the Western, Latin-speaking Western Roman Empire, many people were bilingual and could speak Greek as well as Latin. How many? I don't know, but I do know that some Classical Latin authors such as Cato the Elder and Juvenal complained that it was too many. Many other ancient Latin authors saw Greek very positively: from its beginnings in the third century BC, Latin literature very often copies Greek literature very directly. Many Roman young men were sent to Athens to be educated; some of them liked Greek culture and literature so much that they became poets, instead of lawyers as their families had intended (some things never change), some of them strew many Greek quotations among the Latin texts of their books. The Emperor Marcus Aurelius, although a native of the Latin West, wrote an entire book in Greek.

This all changed very quickly when the Western Empire declined and ceased to be in the 5th century AD.

Jerome's Latin version of the Bible, the Vulgate, dominated Western literature for 1000 years.

Although scholarly types in the West never ceased to read the Latin Classics, the ability to read Greek became very rare. The philosopher Boethius (ca480 -- 524), made some of the first translations of Aristotle into Latin. He had planned to translate all of Aristotle and Plato into Latin, but was imprisoned and executed on suspicion of treason before he could complete this project. Apparently already at this time there was a need, even among those inclined to philosophy, for translations of Greek works.

Another illustration of the lack of reading comprehension of Greek in the West is the popularity of the poem known as the Ilias Latina. PK Marshall (in: LD Reynolds (ed), Tests and Transmission, Oxford: 1983, p 191), with refreshing frankness, refers to the Ilias Latina as an "unatractive compendium." Written probably during the reign of Nero, it reduces the 15,693 verses of Homer's Iliad to just 1070, and those remaining lines often resemble Vergil's style much more than Homer's. Nevertheless, in the absence of either knowledge of Greek or fuller translations of Homer, the Ilias Latina enjoyed great popularity from the 9th century onward.

Many translations from Greek into Latin, most notably of the very numerous works of Aristotle, began to cause a great sensation when they appeared at the University of Paris and in other Western centers of learning in the 12th century, coming from the great school of translation in Muslim-controlled Toledo, Spain.

I suppose that this is as good a time as any to point out that, apparently contrary to widespread beliefs, most of the Latin translations of Aristotle and other Greeks which appeared in 12th-century Europe were not, in fact, first translated from Greek into Arabic, and then from Arabic into Greek. Most have survived in Greek, and in the 12th century in Toledo, most of the Latin translations which were to be so popular among Western scholars were made directly from Greek. Even in the 12th century, people knew the hazards of what we now call the game of Telephone. There have been a few cases in which the original versions of Greek Classics have vanished, and an Arabic or Hebrew version has survived, so that all further translation must come from them, and these few cases make for interesting stories. But they are atypical stories.

In the 13th, 14th and 15th centuries, as the Eastern Roman Empire, the Byzantine Empire, declined and finally fell, many Greek scholars who fled from that decline and fall chose to migrate to Italy, and they taught Greek to those scholars who re-introduced Greek literature to the West in the Italian Renaissance. Numerous full-length Latin translations of both the Iliad and the Odyssey began to circulate in the West, replacing Professor Marshall's "unattractive compendium," along with Latin translations of many other Greek works, as the scholarly Western world, or at least wide swaths of it, became bilingual again, mastering both Latin and Greek, as it had done 1000 years before.