Is this thing on ...?

Oops. I knew there was something I was supposed to be doing... I hadn't realized just how useful the A to Z Challenge was for keeping my nose to the grindstone, so to speak. There are actually a few bits and pieces I've been working on during my long hiatus away from this blog: if I were sensible, I'd parcel them out over the next couple of weeks to give myself opportunity to get back into the swing of things.

I am not sensible.

Accordingly, I'll be posting up in relatively short order a prototype for a new "Round Up"-format blog; an observation on Weinergate, which came and went while I was away but deserves comment; a second "Project" blog; and a lengthy counterblast against a Time article allegedly identifying five myths about our economic recovery. Plus, we're long overdue a Mojo Monthly Mindbender, and indeed the solution to the one posed previously; and there's a Mailbox to craft.

Hopefully, you'll still be around to read this; even more hopefully, you'll gain something from the experience.

Mojo's Mailbox #4

Completing a thirty-day A-to-Z blogging challenge, after long blogless years, is the internet equivalent of following a four-year stay in a monastery with an all-expenses-paid no-questions-asked weekend at the Playboy mansion: satisfying and exhausting in equal measure.

This explains, without excusing, the hiatus between my last post and this one - a necessary pause for your chronicler, and perhaps a welcome one for his readers, but one that concludes here with a roundup of comments before I embark on the next chapter. I may retain the A-to-Z format, at least for a while (the structure appeals to me) but I'd like to leaven my written contributions with rather more in the way of reading. The little I managed to do during the past month whetted my appetite, and there are at least 15 people to whom I owe it simply as a courtesy. This, plus the surprising difficulty of obtaining dilithium crystals at Walmart and the concomitant unavailability of my time machine, should see a reduction in the number of blogs I produce monthly, but hopefully a compensating increase in the number of comments I bestow on yours. I earnestly hope this proves to be a good thing...

So: to the mailbox.

Heather has been a selfless commenter on my doggerel, with far too little by way of grateful recognition. Consider this a partial recompense for your kind and encouraging words! The flip side is that they have kindly encouraged me to inflict a trivia quiz in the next post that ushers in the Monthly Mindbender series of Mojonalia, for which you may yet have cause to curse my name. Either way, your blog's delightful, and I intend to go back and comment on the posts I missed. Your visuals appeal to my sense of the eclectic, and you quoted one of my favorite songs of all time in your Z post, so it will be a profound pleasure to shower belated praise on your efforts over the last month. I look forward to reading more of you in future!

P.S. Thanks ever so much for my award!!! We never tire of flattery, here at Mojo, Inc. ...

I was pleased that Laurie, whose blog I found full of wisdom and wonderfully open to alternative ideas, enjoys a good Rickroll as much as I do. Mrs. Mojo and I were surfing Youtube the other evening and encountered a Rickroll while perusing the "Duck Song" series - highly recommended by me, which might mark mine as a peculiar sense of humor - which was among the highlights of the day. In my defense, it was a Monday, and those are seldom awesome.

I was also delighted to see comments from new readers - a very satisfying feeling for a n00b blogger like myself, that!

Luana, whose blurb reveals herself to be a high-caliber polymath, earns even more of my admiration by having produced an A-Z of movies. This idea is sufficiently brilliant that I will shamelessly steal it - I haven't decided whether to do so this month or allow a little time to elapse so I can deceive future followers into believing it was all my own creation. The blog of her alter ego Madison is also extremely interesting and entertaining, although I'm not sure what to make of people who create online alter egos ...

Moving on... Nicole was very complimentary about my posts, and I'm delighted to reciprocate about hers. Another cineaste, and an eloquent and entertaining one, I'm happy to add her to my list of followed blogs as well.

Sylvia hosts an entertaining blog that is both informative and demonstrates terrific taste in blog templates.

Well, I liked it... In all seriousness, Sylvia's one of several people I've encountered through the A-Z blogroll who is just a very positive presence - her blog's another that's full of useful and encouraging tidbits of information, and I thank her for doing an exemplary job with it.

Last, but not least, Elizabeth bestowed yet another award for my already-groaning shelf - part of an extraordinarily ambitious and generous journey through the 1000+ blogs on the A-Z blogroll that I cannot sufficiently admire. As soon as I can devise an appropriate award of my own, I shall be sending it your way. You inspire me.

Thanks to everybody who I've met through the A to Z challenge; for those I missed, and for those I didn't follow as closely as I would have liked, I look forward to seeing more in future.

Z is for ... Zeno of Elea

Herewith a culling from my personal archive - an illustrative fable, borrowing heavily but unwittingly from Lewis Carroll's What the Tortoise Said to Achilles, which I didn't actually encounter until later in a linear-time paradigm. The tortoise in my story advances three of the "immeasurably subtle and profound" (thank you, Bertrand Russell) paradoxes of Zeno of Elea, an ancient Greek philosopher hailed by Aristotle as the inventor of the dialectic. It is perhaps appropriate that this fable takes a dialectical form.

* * *

"Let us race," declaimed the tortoise with a loftiness belying his low center of gravity.

The hare left off appreciating the feel of the wind cool against his long ears and regarded the tortoise with leporine indulgence.

"You want... us... to race?" clarified the hare, not unkindly he thought.

The tortoise nodded, an exercise that took long enough that the hare had time to watch a small cloud scud across the sky overhead. It looked like a nice head of lettuce, he thought. His stomach rumbled: his was an active metabolism.

"Each other?" The hare was a thorough if not a very bright animal.

Again the tortoise nodded, and the hare occupied himself scratching at his flank.

"But I'm much faster than you," explained the hare as sensitively as he could. "You racing me would be just pointless."

"Oh, it doesn't matter how fast we go, you know," remarked the tortoise pleasantly. "It's a question of how far."

This seemed a rather odd view of racing to the hare, who felt that he knew a thing or two about racing after his serial adventures with the farmer's hounds; but he kept his counsel, because he felt rather sorry for the tortoise.

"However," the latter was now saying, "you do make a good point. Would you agree to give me a head start?"

"Hang on," said the hare. "A head start to where? A race has to have a start and a finish."

"It does, does it?" The tortoise seemed amused. "Let's suppose a race goes from some place to some other place that's different. Then to move between those places, we can surely agree that at any moment one would have to be moving either from a spot or to a spot between them. Correct?"

The hare thought about this. His nose twitched as he worked it out, and this time the tortoise had the luxury of observing a cloud scud by overhead.

"I think so," said the hare at length.

"And," continued the tortoise carelessly, "at any moment one would have to be in a spot between the start and finish of the race, yes?"

The hare chewed pensively. His feet were much happier with racing than his brain.

"That seems right," he ventured.

"Well then," said the tortoise, "in that case, no matter where the start and finish are, or when we consider one's position, one has to either be in the place where one is and the place one just came from, or the place where one is and the place one is headed."

The hare's ears drooped.

"That can't be right," he said miserably.

"Oh it can," said the tortoise with placid contentment. "Unless of course movement is continuous and it's the instant that's an illusion. But then there's no reason to suppose that it means anything to say that at any moment anything's in any particular place. One might as well say one starts the race at the finish, since no moment's any more real than any other."

The hare hopped about unhappily in a circle. "You're confusing me," he said.

"Don't worry about it," enjoined the tortoise earnestly. "Let's pretend that it does matter and we actually do occupy some coordinate in spacetime."

The hare's eyes were glazing.

"I'm going to walk over here," said the tortoise, starting out on that journey, "and you can wait there."

He sauntered off, while the hare tried to work out if he had time for a snack and whether he might actually already be having one. The tortoise had upset his delicate sensibilities, and he was sorely in need of a radish.

Some minutes later, the tortoise hailed him, from a distance of some ten feet away.

"That should be enough of a headstart, don't you think?"

The hare looked doubtfully at the space between them.

"It doesn't seem very far," he suggested timidly.

"Oh but quite far enough," returned the tortoise. "Because now to win the race, you'll have to pass me. And to pass me you'll have to reach me."

"Yes..." said the hare, with the uneasy feeling that he was about to get a migraine.

"Of course, to reach me, you'll first have to get halfway here."

The hare thought about this. "Of course," he said, but he didn't sound certain.

"And naturally, to get there you'll have to go halfway first."

"... Naturally ..."

"And to get there you'll have to go halfway as well."

"I suppose so..."

"And in fact no matter how many times we divide that distance up, you'll always be able to divide it up one more time. For you to reach me, you'll have to first travel an infinitely short distance."

The hare extended a paw towards the tortoise, and hesitated, and withdrew it.

"Can't I just -?"

"Not logically," said the tortoise firmly. "In any case, even if you could start out, and even if having started out you could move from place to place... there's still the problem that you'll never catch up with me, let alone get past me."

The hare felt sure there was something badly wrong with this, but he couldn't put his paw on it.

"Because," explained the tortoise patiently, "even though I travel much slower than you, I am travelling at the same time as you are and on the same journey, albeit from a different start point. We're going in the same direction, is what I mean to say."

"But," blurted out the hare, "you're only ten feet away! I can cover that distance in no time!"

"On the contrary," sniffed the tortoise. "You can only cover that distance - or any distance - in some time. And in that time, I can cover some distance too. Oh, not nearly as much of course... but enough."

"You'd only go..." the hare struggled with mental arithmetic, "one foot."

"Correct!" said the tortoise delightedly. "And of course you'd cover that distance easily as well... but I'd have moved on..."

"... a tenth of a foot..." whispered the hare miserably.

"Quite so!" went on the tortoise. "And I know you'd cover that distance even quicker... but I'd have moved on another hundredth of a foot. Oh, you'd get very close," he smiled, "but you'd never catch me."

The hare scratched his other side. The smell of radishes was overwhelming.

"You win," he sighed, and hopped past the tortoise to get some food.

* * *

This concludes, only slightly late depending on how one measures these things, my personal A to Z challenge. I want to reiterate thanks to everyone who helped me along the way, and apologies to all of them, and more besides, for not getting out there and commenting more in return. It is my earnest hope that I'll be redressing that balance in coming days.

I also have a mailbox to compile, which I'll be getting around to hopefully tomorrow. I've been honored with an award, from a blogger I appreciate greatly but haven't done much to show that lately, so that needs to go up as well. Busy, busy, busy! PLUS the inaugural Mojo's Monthly Mindbender (which for May will have a musical and mathematical bent, since I might as well milk the alliteration for all it's worth) and perhaps the first tentative steps towards the Mojofesto, in preparation for November 2012. I eagerly await the inspirations and communications the blogosphere has in store for me over the coming thirty days - thanks for the ride so far, guys and gals!

V is for ... Velikovsky

With the end of the A to Z challenge hoving into view - hoving, moreover, at rather alarming speed, given my somewhat scattershot approach to daily updates in a linear-time paradigm - this seems as good a moment as any to write a blog about an obscure Russian Zionist and revisionist historian.

The obscure Russian Zionist and revisionist historian in question is one Immanuel Velikovsky, a medical man who published in the 1930s the first article advocating the use of encephalography as a diagnostic tool in cases of epilepsy. A disciple of Freud who also authored several papers on psychoanalytic subjects, Velikovsky was a well-traveled man, fluent in several languages and educated in Montpellier, Edinburgh, and Moscow. He obtained his medical degree in 1921, and for much of the next two decades lived in what was then the British Mandate of Palestine, where he worked with other notable Jewish intellectuals - including one Albert Einstein, later to refuse the Presidency of Israel - on the establishment of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. As a practicing Freudian psychoanalyst, Velikovsky was naturally interested in Freud's own output; as future events were to prove, he shared his mentor's somewhat monomaniac habit of shoehorning all manner of data into a pet theory, and, with war looming, Velikovsky decamped with his wife - the violinist Elisheva Kramer - to New York, there to research material for a book about Oedipus.

The 'Oedipus complex' is one of the better-known offshoots of Freud's comprehensive psychosexual theories of human development - it describes a syndrome in which the son's unconscious sexual attraction to his own mother creates a tension eventually resolved by self-identification with his father, and is named for the mythical king of Thebes immortalized by Sophocles in Oedipus Rex. Freud considered this a universal stage in the development of all males - females passed through a similar 'Electra Complex' in which they fixated on the father - which earned him a devoted following at the time as psychoanalysis flourished, but has since equally drawn criticism from more cautious and more pluralist researchers. Part of Freud's basis for universalizing his theories was the support he sought and found in historical contexts. An example of this was his Moses and Monotheism, which rewrote the Bible and argued that Moses and the Pharaoh - identified as Akhnaton, the first Pharaoh to promote monotheistic worship of the Aten - were one and the same. From this revisionist leap, it was a short journey for Freud to postulate the murder of Moses/Akhnaton as the motivation for the Jewish belief in a Messiah, and thence to characterize the importance of religion in the Jewish identity as a shared guilt complex arising out of the Oedipal murder of the father-figure.

Velikovsky took a different but no less bizarre tack - his psychohistoric theory identified the Egyptian pharaoh Akhnaton with the Thebean king Oedipus directly. He was seeking confirmation of his theories in contemporary Egyptian accounts of the Exodus, a task made possible by the discovery of the Rosetta Stone in 1799 but still fraught with difficulty. He found in the Ipuwer Papyrus evidence that seemed to correspond with the Biblical plagues of Egypt; there was a trifling chronological problem with the centuries these events were believed to have happened, but Velikovsky was equal to that and embarked upon a feat of revisionism that left Freud in his shadow: nothing more nor less than a hybridization of Biblical scholarship with Egyptology into a new Velikovskian history of the ancient world, one in which psychoanalytic theories were consistently demonstrated in the events and personages recorded in the resultant mishmash.

The story takes a turn for the even wierder when, in 1950, we catch up with a Velikovsky now deeply embedded in catastrophic cosmology and hawking his Worlds in Collision around various publishing houses. Despite his track record as a published scientist, and despite the erudition and scholarship of his work, he is turned down by eight publishing houses because what he is writing is deemed to be simply too controversial - too "out there" - for the highly conventional world of academic publishing. Part of their reluctance stems from the unifying thesis of Velikovsky's reimagining of the Bible: he ascribes many of the events of Biblical history to an extraordinary astronomical event, the eruption of the planet Venus from the planet Jupiter, and the subsequent near misses as both Venus and Mars swooped past Earth en route to their current celestial positions. The complete lack of any precedent - indeed, any conventional astronomical evidence - for this remarkable cosmic occurence dissuaded Velikovsky not at all, because he was able to compile all the evidence he needed by selectively culling from widely-disparate sources and, where necessary, guessing.

Eventually, Velikovsky's perseverance was rewarded: the textbook division of prestigious publishing house Macmillan agreed to publish Worlds in Collision. It seemed as though Velikovsky's ideas were going to be aired before the public - but there was a problem. During his research for Worlds in Collision, Velikovsky had corresponded with, among others, Harvard astronomer Harlow Shapley - a potential stablemate at Macmillan's scientific division. The problem was that Shapley considered Velikovsky's theory of planetary billards patently absurd, and mounted a vehement, and successful, campaign with the assistance of other scientists contracted to Macmillan to have Velikovsky's book shelved. The success of that campaign demonstrated that Velikovsky's own world was in collision with the monolith of orthodox Science.

Doubleday, a publisher without a textbook division, picked up the book; and the assaults of the scientific community upon it continued. No less a luminary than Carl Sagan used his various bully pulpits, including his PBS show Cosmos, to inveigh against Velikovsky's maverick ideas. He cited the atmospheric composition of Venus, the radioemissions of Jupiter, the physics of celestial orbits, and other established scientific facts to assert that Velikovsky's proposed causal mechanism was junk science - it simply couldn't have happened as Velikovsky asserted it had. Sagan did have the grace to consider Velikovsky's thesis, and reject it on the basis of scientific observations that contradicted it; he criticized others in the scientific community who had simply tried to silence Velikovsky because his proposals were so far outside the mainstream.

This firestorm of criticism came as a surprise to Velikovsky himself, for whom ten years of his life had been devoted to systematically laying out the evidence for something that, to him, had become obvious. In vain, he tried to defend his own claims, pointing out that the vast majority of his evidence was concerned with archaeological and historical matters: what had convinced him of the truth of his assertions was the remarkable concordance between mythologies in places as far-flung as China and Egypt. And he gained a following among the lay public, who were sympathetic to him because of the harshness of the treatment meted out by his fellow scientists. Velikovsky was neither the first nor the last man to have his work ridiculed because its results lay outside the mainstream - Robert Goddard, for example, had been mocked in the New York Times for lacking the knowledge "ladled out daily in high schools" when he proposed the use of rockets in the vacuum of space; a groveling apology was printed when, years later, his theories were employed to put men on the moon.

Science has since moved on from attacking Velikovsky's causal mechanism to attacking the substance of his thesis: the assertion that the miraculous events described in the Holy Bible were actual historical occurences. This transition perhaps illustrates why the reception to his controversial book was so hostile: Science and Religion have always been "worlds in collision." Ironically, the evidence used to undermine the catastrophic theories of Velikovsky was partly compiled to support the catastrophic theories of global warming. Al Gore, a man with no significant scientific background - unless you count his claim to have invented the Internet - earned himself a Nobel Peace Prize, an Emmy, an Oscar, and a Grammy for his advancement of a catastrophic thesis. It's all about who you know, rather than what you know...

Although history will remember Velikovsky as a brilliant but flawed thinker, his years of scholarship did raise questions that remain valid despite his rigorous pummelling at the hands of the scientific community. For example: if there was no Great Flood, as documented in the Book of Genesis... why do the mythologies of Australia, China, Egypt, Greece, Mesopotamia, India, Zimbabwe, and the Americas - cultures that had no contact with one another until well into the period of historic time - agree that there was?

Mojo's Mailbox #3

The mailbox is having to flex its time-travel muscles ever more strongly in order to appear to appear when it does. I'm also struggling with the commenting side of things; I haven't been getting round the blogs I follow like I'd want to, let alone expanding to new ones. I need to get into a better rhythm, but it's hard to balance this with other commitments. I'm still very new to all this. A work in progress, so to speak.

Despite this, I'm humbled and inspired by the comments you've given me. I promise I'll try to provide the same encouragement in return.

Nancy - a fantasy author whose Treasures of Carmelidrium not only sounds like the sort of book I'd be very interested to read, but actually reminds me of elements in an unpublished work of my own (don't worry, I abhor plagiarism and would never dream of piggybacking on another writer's hard work - in any case, Mozart has us both beat with the magic-flute idea) - picked up another resonance on a blog of mine that had eluded me. I think the movie you're referring to might be Peggy Sue Got Married, and I'm going to have to go review it thanks to your comment. That's a good thing, in case it wasn't clear. Thank you, Nancy. Also, your taste in music rocks. I dig the Sixties: I don't remember them, which apparently means I was there. Or something.

Moving on: Jeremy seems to have made a few commenters think as much as it did me - it's one of those songs that sticks with me, there's something terrible and beautiful in the understatement of "Jeremy spoke..." I like Kelly Rowland's Stole for similar reasons - the implication of "everybody knows his name" chills me. There's something monstrous about fame, something that Andy Warhol and Lady Gaga may not have grasped quite as firmly as they might seem to - but that's going to be another blog sometime. For now, let me take this opportunity to say I appreciate the comments of Lee, without whom I wouldn't be here - well, indirectly anyway; Heather, whose talents impress and delight me and who offered a very valuable perspective in her comment; and, last but not least, Lynn, my very dear wife who went over and above even her usual level of support by not only commenting but crowding my awards shelf with this little beauty:

Thanks, hun!

Lee made a great observation about Hello Kitty - these huge runaway corporate successes all seem to emerge from the simplest things. There's always that "why didn't I think of that?" aspect, waiting in the wings for us. I like to think we all do have something like that, something that could be a runaway success, some expression of ourselves that could change the world - or at least become a part of it recognizable beyond our shores. The main reason I want to get out there commenting and encouraging and soaking up the awesomeness of other blogs is that I want to watch one of those take off. It's like being one of the twenty people at a band's first gig and then screaming for them at Madison Square Gardens twenty years later. Heather - I'm so proud of you, admitting the cult of Hello Kitty has you in its clutches :P It's the first step to recovery, you know...

The NEO post brought a couple of new commenters, so thanks and welcome and all that jazz to Roland - his "About Me" alone confirms him as somebody I want to read - and Karen Walker, who earns my deepest respect by having authored a memoir, which strikes me as one of the bravest and most valuable things a person can do. To not only publicize one's most private memories, but to do so in a form that can provide comfort and support to people you'll never meet, is an example of the best in humanity. Her blog is awesome, too.

Now, I might have some time to go out and spread some comment love. There are so many great writers, and great people, I'm getting to learn some about through this A to Z challenge. Thanks, all of you, for taking part and making it what it is!

I'm seriously considering extending the A to Z format beyond the end of April. X is tapping me on the shoulder and making rude faces, but I find the simultaneous stricture and suggestion of the form a real spur to my creativity. I'd also like to introduce another infrequent addition - my unformed thought at this point is a Monthly Mojo Mindbender, a trivia quiz for readers to have a go at - I'd welcome anybody's suggestions on how to improve this. Erin already suggested I should curb the verbiage, but I don't think that's in my nature, sadly...