For fun, I've been re-reading E.E. "Doc" Smith's "Skylark" novels for the first time in (lessee) some forty-nine years: They do creak a lot, but they retain a certain almost plausible science fiction charm. Hardest to suspend disbelief in is the cavalier treatment of Einsteinean realtivity: However you do it, you can't, by any theoretical means of propulsion, go several thousand light years out into the universe, and then come back, and find things only a couple of years older than when you left. I'd like to believe you could, but I can't. Also, 'tis all too plain that "Doc" Smith in 1928, knew virtually nothing of the universe that we have discovered in the 79 years since: Compare his "dead stars" with the black holes we all know about nowadays.

Late readings: A. Daudet's Lettres de mon Moulin (first time I ever read the thing straight through, with all the footnotes and dossier at the end); A. Pope's Satires and miscellaneous poetry (life's too short, ever, to read the Genial Dwarf's translation of the Iliad and the Odyssey). Love 'em both very, very much.

But now, reflecting: Much as I admire Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate, Etc., and his reinvention of faculty psychology (which he has not quite i coglioni to acknowledge humbly and simply to be such), I have from the beginning had grave reservations about his attempts: (1) to stretch and straiten psychology on the Procrustean bed of evolutionary theory; (2) to redefine plain, old-fashioned mental faculties as "modularities;" and (3) to insist, despite every evidence to the contrary, that faculties so redefined are "computational." Still, to my delight, he has given a good, richly deserved thwacking to behaviourists, dualists, primitivists, and pragmatists. I just knew when I started reading the mindless, placid bovine excretions of Lakoff, Johnson, Turner, et alia, that Pinker had to be their natural wolvish enemy; that he would nip them; and that they would panic, run in circles, and bleed. And so, of course, th'event (the disgraceful bitch-fight between Pinker and Lakoff) did prove. Of course, I've been laughing my butt off. My basic sympathies, as you might suppose, are still with Pinker (and Chomsky)--But damn, why can't he just give up the silly, over-particular insistance on how our faculties distinguish themselves, where they come from, and what they're for? Just a little more slack on the ideological, pseudo-scientific reins, would produce so much more clarity and insight. But nothing drives a man like adherence to a theory which in his heart he knows to be untenable.

And now, thanks to the in-library, inter-island loan system peculiar to our lovely 50th state, I've obtained and read virtually all of Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe murder mysteries. And I must say, though I've enjoyed the last (Murder by the Book, The next Witness, Die like a Dog) most of all, I am surfeited like one who, thinking he could never get enough of salted peanuts, has eaten way too many salted peanuts. My gorge has risen. I am weary, beyond satiety, of Stout's (Wolfe's and Goodwin's) smart-ass, Ohio-based, too-too cynical, heterosexist, Broadway musical-loving infatuation with the culture (grant it that) and city-slickness of New York, New York. Time to quit.

Well, somehow the past two or three weeks I've disposed of a lot of reading. Of particular note is The Way we Think, co-authored by Gilles Fauconnier and the ubiquitous Mark Turner; I slogged, waded, puzzled ("no-meaning puzzles more than sense") through it, suspending judgement as well as I could, while being appalled by its preciosity and sickened by its plain dumb unintentional errors. Of the latter of which I will just cite the mistake that both our authors working together have apparently made about the birth of Aphrodite, supposing her to have been born from the foam of the testicles of Chronos, rather than of Ouranos, which they assume were severed by Zeus rather than by Chronos. Making a perfect hash of a rather subtle and evocative Greek myth. And that ain't all, of course. Several references to Freud lack the now-obligatory point of what a bloody peaching pious self-serving fraud and utter humbug was Father Sigmund. So Anyway, then I looked to see what Steven Pinker is saying about George Lakoff--and it's devastatingly much like what I've been saying, though without the insistance that I favor on the conscious vs. the half-conscious use of metaphor. Looks like my work is cut out for me.

Well, Rosie, I'm back, having spent the week from Holy Saturday till the next at Queen's Hospital with a wicked pneumonia of my right lung, which had spread to my blood. My condition now is stabilized, and I no longer spit blood--but I came as close as I ever like to think to brain damage (fever of nearly 106 degrees fahrenheit) and grim death. So what did I think about as I lay near-dying? Saving the Chang brothers (favorites in her old age of the Empress Wu Zetian), of course. Where in the world could they have got to, with a fair start ahead of the "Elder Statesmen," in the year 697 a.d., that they could have lived out their lives in peace and civilized comfort? Japan, perhaps. Constantinople, maybe. Or was not India, or some part of it, having something like a Golden Age about then? Certainly they would want to have given the Moche People, then on the rise, a wide berth. And the Classic Maya, nearing their apogee of sadistic artistic and mathematical complexity, might have been interesting, but scarcely tranquil circumstances for the last days of a couple of world-weary drag queens. On the whole, I think I'd have opted for Japan, if I'd been them, and been clever enough to plan my escape, instead of trying to face down the concerted Confucian powers of a cruel dynasty in transition.

But while thinking of these things, it occurred to me that I've only recently re-read Lady Sei Shonagon's marvelous Pillow Book--and the thing that's different about the Chinese and the Japanese imperial courts, is the astonishing, virtually total, absence of physical cruelty in the latter. As if nobody had ever heard, among the Japanese, of having people beaten to death on a whim of the Emperor. Curious.

Reading lately deliberately, with recreative and reflective intervals, C. P. Fitzgerald's biography of the Empress Wu [Chao], as tantalizing in its reticences as illuminating in its explications. Tantalizing: [The Emperor] Kao Tsung was lecherous in temperament, and his tastes in sexual intercourse were curious. Wu Chao had won his attachment by her willingness to pander to these peculiarities, not hesitating, as historians put it, to "abase her body and endure shame in order to conform to the Emperor's will." Tantalizing and illuminating: Whatever the real nature of the intimate relationship which grew up between the Empress and the Chang brothers, and which continued uninterrupted for eight years, till she was eighty, the favour of the Changs soon surpassed all limits, and their behaviour was more such as might have been expected of the Empress's young ladies in waiting than of her lovers. Dressed in gaily coloured silks the Changs frequented the Palace with powdered and rouged faces, exacting from the Court a deference which was rarely given to Princes of the Blood...The Court had never been so gay and so free...The scholars of the Court were invited to make poems celebrating [Chang Ch'ang-tsung's] beauty, and numerous handsome young men were engaged to attend upon him. This indeed made something of a scandal, for the Empress was informed that many of the courtiers were obtaining large sums of money for introducing these youths to the service of Chang Ch'ang-tsung.

Meantime, I've fallen sick, yet once again, of an intestinal flu, barely managing to sustain myself without soiling my clothes with frequent ingestion of Imodium. And the weather is so lovely, the beaches so enticing--Tomorrow, whate'er my condition, I'm going to Kailua to bask in the sun and frolic in the surf.