Sic transit gloria campi

I received some sad news yesterday. The captain of my varsity soccer team, the 25th Anniversary team that won the MISSL and went to State, died last week at the age of 46. It seems absolutely impossible, not because we’re in our forties or because it shatters some illusion of youthful immortality, but because for me he was an acquaintance who was just a little larger than life.

I met him in 7th grade when I was sent to private school for the first time; we were two of the original class of 1986 that gradually swelled each year. We weren’t friends, but neither were we enemies. He was at the top of the social ladder of our class from the start and I was pretty damn near the bottom for our first three years there. We both played soccer, but as a bigger, more developed, and more skilled player who was the varsity coach’s son, he played two teams ahead of me, on the C-squad.

I didn’t start to get to know him well until we both started taking German classes in 8th grade from his father, who like most coaches was a teacher at the school. An Austrian immigrant, his father was a good coach and a superlative language teacher. Unlike most kids who take high school languages, all of us were fully and comfortably conversational in German after five years in the program. From day one, we were forbidden to speak English in the classroom and only referred to each other there by our German names. His German name was Max, and I will henceforth refer to him that way.

Max was a bully, but not a mean one. He was an Alpha male maintaining his place at the top of the social order, not a cruel individual torturing the bottom-dwellers in order to impress others. He was mercurial, quick to anger and even quicker to smile, laugh, and forget whatever had set off his temper. He was stocky, but not heavy-set, just above average height, with dark blond hair parted in the middle and the sort of pugnacious good looks that are adorable on a little boy, but can look thuggish on the face of an adult.

He was the private school version of a bad boy who sneaked beers into parties, radiated a vague sense of danger, and was usually involved with one of the more attractive girls in our class. His longtime girlfriend, “Liesl”, was a slender athlete who wasn’t especially pretty in the conventional manner, but was the prototypical cool chick everyone liked. We voted her homecoming queen our senior year. When my parents went to Europe for a month during my senior year, I threw a Super Bowl party. Max brought the keg.

I was always wary of Max although he never really hassled me. It was clear that he wasn’t the sort of boy it was wise to cross. But despite having class with him literally every school day for four years, it wasn’t until I finally made the varsity team, on which he’d already been playing for two years, that I discovered his true colors. He was one of the team’s three captains, but there was no question to whom everyone looked for direction. This wasn’t because he was the coach’s son, but because the other captains were both highly gifted players who were too laid-back and self-contained to concern themselves much with what everyone else was doing.

We were supposed to be mediocre that year, since the team only had four lettermen returning after the previous team had gone to the State tournament for the first time since the varsity lost the State championship game when I was in 8th grade. (That made a huge impression on me in junior high, going to the night games with the stands full of cheering, chanting fans.) Prior to the start of the season, we were playing Apple Valley, the defending state champions, in a preseason scrimmage and we were losing one to nothing at halftime.

We were playing poorly and the coach was disgusted. He waved his hand, said he had nothing to say to us, and walked away. Max stood up and promptly lit into every single one of us, sparing no one, not even the bench players. I have no idea what he said, I just remember the raw fury in his eyes as he yelled at us. We went back onto the field, angry and embarrassed, and promptly outplayed the best team in the state. The game ended in a tie.

That set the stage for the season. We destroyed many of the teams we played. Both of the other captains got hat tricks in the first two games, I got mine in the third one. We had an eclectic group of players, a mix of popular boys and outsiders, and although we didn’t necessarily all like each other, we all really enjoyed playing together. We came together as a team in the purest sense of the word; it wasn’t a social group, it wasn’t a gathering of friends, it wasn’t a family, it was a group that came together for a single purpose: every time we stepped onto the field together, we were there to win.

That didn’t mean there weren’t some bumps and bruises in practice. Max was our number 10, and he was a bruiser. He wouldn’t so much steal the ball as bulldoze the player on it before taking it and turning up the field. One day, in practice, he came charging at me and kept coming after I passed the ball away. I saw that he was intending to flatten me, so I swung my elbow around and caught him in the jaw, hard enough to knock him down. I swear, he bounced right off the ground and chased me halfway across the field before enough of our teammates managed to corral him and calm him down.

A few days later, in the middle of a game, I got into some fisticuffs with two Hill-Murray players and was in the process of getting soundly thrashed. Max came flying in, literally threw himself into their bodies and knocked both of them off me. He stood over me until I could scramble to my feet, swearing a blue streak at them all the while. If you were his teammate, he had your back. I’ve played on and against many teams since then, some of them championship teams, and some of them that featured players from Europe’s most famous soccer clubs. But I’ve never known a better team leader than Max. In 27 years of track, martial arts, and soccer since, I’ve never met anyone who was more willing to stand up or throw down on a moment’s notice for a teammate.

We went on to win the conference, defeating an SPA team had two future US National team players and would go on to win two consecutive State championships. Max was named All-Midwest, some of the other players were named All-State, but we didn’t win the State championship. After defeating our hated archrivals, Minneapolis Washburn, in the quarterfinals, a game followed by a brawl so epic it made the 10 PM news, Max scored a goal that was disallowed (erroneously) against Bloomington Kennedy. They scored in overtime to knock us out of the tournament in the semifinals. It was an especially bitter defeat because Kennedy was the team that had defeated our varsity team in the State championship game four years before.

Max and I only saw each other again once after graduation. It was on our home soccer field, an alumni game against a varsity that included two of my younger brothers. They had two 30-goal scorers, one of whom did those fancy flip throw-ins. They were undefeated, and they were more than confident that they would beat up on the old guys without breaking a sweat, as the varsity teams usually did. I scored twice and we won 3-1. It didn’t matter if it was a scrimmage, a State tournament, or an alumni game, if you were playing with Max, then you were going to play to win.

It was a privilege to play with Max, even if only for one season. I wasn’t the only player to feel that way. One of his college teammates, someone I’ve never met, wrote: “He was an unselfish leader and I loved playing with him.” To this day, when I think of a leader, he is the very first individual of whom I think. And if there is a Valhalla for soccer players, I am absolutely certain he will be there in the midfield, taking no prisoners, and inspiring his teammates by word and by deed. Rest in peace, #10.

Exult O shores, and ring O bells!

     
But I with mournful tread,

Walk the deck my Captain lies,

     
Fallen cold and dead.

An embarrassing failure

I tried. So help me, I tried. I honestly thought I had pulled it off, but the verdict is in and I simply didn’t manage to do it. McRapey writes:

From January 1 through today, Mr. Beale has mentioned me by name (or by nickname) on those two sites 145 times. This is defined as references in blog posts; other references — references in comments, persistent sidebar links, or comments by others weren’t counted, nor were Twitter or other social media posts. If you want to do the math, that means Mr. Beale invoked me on his blogs on average once every 2.366 days. Which is rather a lot! There are 22 days left in the year, which means if Mr. Beale follows his average, he’ll mention me nine more times before the ball drops in Times Square. So, for my purposes, I am using 154 times as the official tally number.

I had pledged $5 per reference up to $1,000, which (again with the math) means that Mr. Beale would have had to reference me 200 times over the year for the full payout. 154 times turns out to be 77% of that.

So: If you made a pledge to support the Counteract a Bigot fund drive earlier this year, please donate at least 77% of your pledge amount to the organizations you pledged to fund.

I say at least because, of course, I encourage you to donate the full amount of your pledge if you can. I will be doing so, I have just done so, as well as adding in another $250 to my pledge as thanks to the friend who kept track of Mr. Beale’s sites so I didn’t have to. But even if everyone sticks to just 77% of their full pledge amount, we’ll still have donated at least $46,000 dollars to charities and organizations dedicated to fighting bigotry and/or sexual assault in its various forms. And that ain’t bad.

As for Mr. Beale, well. He’s Dunning-Kruger’s favorite son. As such he’s incapable of imagining himself in anything other than a victory condition, so I’m sure he’ll imagine one here, too. Let him. The rest of us know better.

The idea that I am incapable of imagining myself in anything other than a victory condition is an interesting one; I am admittedly good at many things, but I’m not THAT good. Indeed, one need merely look at my failure to mention McRapey the requisite 200 times to see that I am not always triumphant. I am embarrassed. I am chagrined. And I would also be remiss if I did not bring the following facts to the reader’s attention. (The numbers in parentheses are global Alexa rankings.)

Alexa USA rankings 12/12/12
12,996 Whatever
29,426 Vox Popoli
73,183 Alpha Game

Alexa USA rankings 12/12/13
6,690 Vox Popoli (55,972)
14,181 Alpha Game (101,337)
50,207 Whatever (143,885)


Google Pageviews November 2012
745,857 “those two sites”
726,445 Whatever

Google Pageviews November 2013
1,058,663 “those two sites”
384,958 Whatever

Considering that the victory conditions last year were established as blog traffic, with members of the Whatever warren taunting me about Whatever’s supposedly gargantuan blog readership and McRapey himself pounding his chest about his 8 million pageviews in 2012 when he wasn’t advertising his “50,000 DAILY READERS”, in this case, the facts speak rather clearly for themselves. McRapey is unlikely to even hit 7.5 million Google pageviews this year; imagine how much more his readership would have declined if “those two sites” hadn’t mentioned him 145 times, to say nothing of the copious references on Heartiste and other sites.

I note that the Dunning-Kruger effect is “a cognitive bias in which unskilled individuals suffer from illusory superiority.”  I leave it to the reader to determine who the description fits more closely.

But at least he’ll always have his Participation Hugo.

The war on grammar

As the rape of science fiction was apparently not enough for the pinkshirts, some of them are now attempting to destroy programming in the name of sex equity as well:

One of the node.js core contributors, Ben Noordhuis, rejected a pull request that eliminated the use of a gendered pronoun in libuv. Now, this was quickly reversed by node.js project lead Isaac Schlueter (that is, Isaac accepted the patch eliminating the gendered pronoun), but because this is a Joyent-sponsored project, many made the reasonable inference that Ben is a Joyent employee—and have called Joyent to task for tolerating such poor behavior. (Especially when that poor behavior transcended into the gobsmackingly inappropriate as Ben tried to revert Isaac’s commit.)

But while Isaac is a Joyent employee, Ben is not—and if he had been, he wouldn’t be as of this morning: to reject a pull request that eliminates a gendered pronoun on the principle that pronouns should in fact be gendered would constitute a fireable offense for me and for Joyent. On the one hand, it seems ridiculous (absurd, perhaps) to fire someone over a pronoun — but to characterize it that way would be a gross oversimplification: it’s not the use of the gendered pronoun that’s at issue (that’s just sloppy), but rather the insistence that pronouns should in fact be gendered. To me, that insistence can only come from one place: that gender—specifically, masculinity—is inextricably linked to software, and that’s not an attitude that Joyent tolerates. This isn’t merely a legalistic concern (though that too, certainly), but also a technical one: we believe that empathy is a core engineering value—and that an engineer that has so little empathy as to not understand why the use of gendered pronouns is a concern almost certainly makes poor technical decisions as well….

But just so you heard it from
us: if this were the act of a Joyent employee, we would—to
deliberately use a gender-neutral pronoun—fire them.

I would avoid using any of Joyent’s products, given that it is clear that as a company, they are far more concerned about ideological correctness than with working code or the abilities of their programmers. They are actually insisting upon the use of grammatically incorrect language and threatening to fire those who are unwilling to use the improper form. It would be fascinating to investigate their employment practices and determine if they have 50 percent female programmers, and if not, to learn why they are operating in such an overtly sexist manner.

As a game developer, I am a potential customer of “high-performance cloud infrastructure and big data analytics company”. And I certainly will not be using, or recommending, Joyent.

It’s also informative to learn it has now been established that the deliberate choice of pronouns is a fireable offense. This means those of us who speak proper English and understand, as Churchill used to say, that the masculine embraces the feminine in English grammar, are now free to fire anyone who deliberately uses a gender-neutral pronoun such as “he or she” or “them”.

This gender-policing of the language is such a stupid, left-wing, and above all, parochial attitude. It should be amusing to see them clumsily attempt to covert all gendered articles to “das” in German and to attempt to impose gender neutrality upon la lingua bella and le français.

The Scholar’s Edition

RG kicks it SERIOUS old school style:
Habitabilis facta et condita anno
MMDCCCX, Ryshalan mundus insignis
in regione Kantillona prope extremos fines Dominationis Terranei Maioris
celeriter fiebat. Propter locum pollentiorem
ipsa saepissime oppugnata victaque erat dum, anno MMCMXXXV, facta sit
mundus liber a Pronavarcho Classis Beze Davenant, imperatore Classis
XXIo
Imperii, qui erat primus Dux Ryshalanis. Post Seditionem Machinarum
Divinarum anno MMCMXCIX et natum Unitatis, Ryshalan primum destinatum
victorum administratorum et nationalum et mundanorum
fiebat. Quartus Dux, arbitrans
haec crebra proelia infinitum numerum exsulum opulentorum creatura,
primus morem Asyli praebendi instituit.
–
“Annales Ducum Ryshalanis” scripti a Thucidean Marcel

QUANTUM MORTIS: The Scholar’s Edition. It’s certain to be a classic in the mode of De Bello Gallico.

We already ran into one major translation issue. The primary Latin endearment used in the sense that we English-speakers use “baby” is cara. If you’ve read the book, then you can probably see the problem there. But, as it happens, RG managed to resolve the issue in an exquisitely appropriate manner worthy of William Weaver himself.

This is a very high tone blog, you see. Don’t forget to keep your pinky out while you’re reading.

In not-entirely-unrelated news, the QM hardcovers are at the printers and should be shipping this week to the preorders. Thanks very much for your support!

“Send the lot back”

An English UKIP politician is attacked for saying what most English people now fervently believe:

A high-profile UKIP politician is facing a racism storm after being caught on camera saying all immigrants to Britain should be sent back home. Victoria Ayling, who made headlines when she defected from the Tories in March, made the inflammatory comments in a 20-minute video seen by The Mail on Sunday. On the subject of immigration she talks about restricting the numbers of foreigners entering the UK, but then adds: ‘I just want to send the lot back, but I can’t say that.’

Of course, she and UKIP are making a huge mistake by backing down and trying to hide behind the “illegal immigrant” fig leaf.  But the problem with mass immigration is not whether the immigrants are legal or not, it is that there are simply far too many of them.

No nation can survive an immigrant population, including second and third generations, of more than five percent without seeing its legal and cultural traditions significantly transformed.  That transformation is precisely why anti-American forces have been pushing mass immigration since 1965. And it is why the EU elite has been forcing it on the European nations as well. But the tide is rapidly turning, as the Labour party leaders have learned:

Mr Morris, a former No 10 adviser to Tony Blair at the time of the ‘open-door’ policy, used the social-networking website Twitter to announce on Monday evening: ‘Recipe for a miserable evening:  off to do focus groups on immigration.’

And afterwards, he wrote, in a line dripping with sarcasm: ‘Tonight’s focus groups as progressive as  I hoped,’ adding: ‘Their plan: end migration and fill jobs with Brits who have to take job.’ He declared that it had left him ‘depressed, as you might imagine’. The liberal views on immigration of many of Labour’s frontbenchers are not shared by most voters.

In a recent opinion poll, 72 per cent of respondents favoured slamming the door on unskilled immigrants, while 59 per cent thought we should allow fewer relatives of people already living in Britain into the country to join them.

Multiculturalism and mass immigration are already mortally wounded, even as the Obama administration tries to figure out how to ram immigration amnesty through Congress. Legal immigrants are now being openly attacked across continental Europe, from Hungary to Greece. Saudi Arabia has announced plans to deport 2 million immigrants, which represents nearly 7 percent of its total population, and has already deported over 100,000.

And on the Daily Mail site, a considerable portion of the 2300+ comments are strongly in favor of Ms Ayling’s opinion. The top-rated comment on the article, with 11,105 upvotes to 3,751 downvotes, was this: “How 95% of the UK feels but are for some Reason shouldn’t say!”

The age of mass immigration is obviously over. Multiculturalism is a failed and societally destructive concept and it is now eminently clear that large-scale immigration devastates advanced economies. Civilized repatriations must begin and they must begin within the next ten years. If they do not, history strongly suggests that the world will enter into another era of vicious ethnic cleansing and mass killings.

Here is the vital point I hope you will at least try to understand: it doesn’t matter what you think. It doesn’t matter what I think. It doesn’t even matter what Barack Obama or David Cameron think. It doesn’t matter what any of us prefer or believe to be ethically or morally right. The great historical patterns always overwhelm national politics and specific ideologies in the course of time. Just as the various mono-ethnic nations came into being in the first place, they will recreate themselves over and over again, and there is no government or ideology that is capable of standing in the way of the basic human instinct to be surrounded by one’s own kind in periods of uncertainty, economic contraction and international chaos.

Fred meets evolutionists, wins

After his long article expressing his fundamental skepticism towards the cult of TENS, a number of Neo-Darwinists didn’t hesitate to try to inform Fred that his skepticism was misplaced. This was a tactical error, as Fred responded to their various attempts to correct his heretical thinking..

The Argument from Time
Even a Federal Bureaucrat Can Get A Job Done, Given Forever

A staple of evolutionary evasion is time, lots of it. This is particularly applied to the putative formation of the OC (Original Critter). One intones “billions and billions and billions of years,” the implication being that with so very, very, very much time, so many billions of gallons of sea water, surely an OC would have to form. Why, it could hardly help it.

Not necessarily. Probabilities can be more daunting than one might expect. Things that seem intuitively likely sometimes just flat are not. To illustrate the point:

We’ve all heard Sir James Jeans’ assertion that a monkey, pecking randomly on a typewriter, would eventually produce all the books in the British Museum. This may sound reasonable, even obvious, at first glance. But would the monkey in fact ever get even one book?

No. Not in any practical sense.

Consider a thickish book of, say, 200,000 words. By the newspaper estimate that there are on average five letters per word, that’s a million letters. What is the likelihood that our monkey, typing continuously (we ignore upper case and punctuation), will get the book in a given string of a million letters?

He has a 1/26 chance of getting the first letter, times a 1/26 chance of the second, and so on. The chance of getting the book in a million characters is therefore one in 26 to the millionth power. I don’t have a calculator handy, but we can get an approximation. Since 26 = 10(log 26), then 261,000,000 = 10(log 26 x 1,000,000). Since log 10 = 1 and log 100 = 2, log 26 has to be between, somewhere on the low end. Call it 1.2.

The monkey thus has one chance in 1 followed by 1,200,000 zeros. That is what mathematicians call a GBH (Gret Big Honker). For practical purposes, one divided by that rascal is zero. If you had a billion billion monkeys (more monkeys than I want) typing a billion billion letters a second, for a billion billion times the estimated age of the universe (1018 seconds is sometimes given), the chance of getting the book would still be essentially zero.

Well, you might say, that is asking a lot of our monkey. How about the chance that the monkey would get the mere title of a book—say, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the  Struggle for Life, the original title of Darwin´s book. If my finger count was correct, that´s 117 letters and spaces. Then the probability is 1 in 26117, or 10(log 26 x  117), giving 10140 and change. Now, again taking the age of the universe as 1018 seconds, our monkey would have, sigh, essentially zero chance of getting even the title. Ain´t gonna happen.

Does the chance formation of an Original Critter involve such forbidding numbers? I don´t know that it does. Nor that it doesn´t. It is difficult to calculate the probability of an unknown process of unknown complexity under unknown conditions.

As we have repeatedly observed, biologists are reliably inept when it comes to math. This is why they repeatedly turn to the LOTS AND LOTS OF TIME argument, which is nothing more than an appeal to their own credulity. What they forget to account for properly is the even more extraordinary numbers that are required in order to account for the probabilities of the necessary mutations a) happening and b) proving to be of superior fitness.

It has been asked before why so many economists, whose own “science’ is entirely debatable, tend to be skeptical of evolution by natural selection. The answer is twofold. First, if you don’t get the math right in economics, the error will be immediately obvious even in theory. No economists will blithely carry on with his model if it produces 10,000 percent unemployment or an estimated 8 billion unmarried households in America. Second, every economics major has seen an awful lot of theoretical bullshit. So, we recognize it when we see it.

Why Pink SF is doomed

John C. Wright continues his series on Saving Science Fiction from Strong Female Characters. In the sixth part, he explains why Pink SF is intrinsically bound to suck, how some Pink SF authors have attempted to get around the dramatic limits they have imposed on themselves, and points out that Urban Fantasy has done little more than recreate the very sexual dynamic it was supposed to subvert:

The logic of Political Correctness requires that men and women not be complimentary because the concept of complementary strengths and weakness is not a concept that Political Correctness can admit, lest it be destroyed. The concept of complimentary virtues undermines the concept of envy, and Political Correctness is nothing but politicized fury based on politicized envy. We can define Political Correctness as the attempt to express fury and envy via radical changes to legal and social institutions.

Hence, the Politically Correct writer attempting to make the female ‘strong’ cannot make her strong in the particular feminine way of, for example, Nausicaa, because that would be the same as admitting that there is a particular nature of male and female, which are different and complimentary, which, as I said above, undermines the envy-fury on which Political Correctness is based.

So the logic of Political Correctness directly defies the logic of drama. The more you have of one, the less you have of the other.

The more Political Correctness you have, the less Science Fiction you have, because Politically Correct science is Junk Science.

Political Correctness requires the women not to be of complimentary strength to men, that is, not strong in a feminine way, because that would legitimize femininity. Remember, feminism is the foe of femininity, hence of love and romance.

Instead, Political Correctness requires the female to be as strong as a man, as good as a man, in the very areas men are good at and want to be good at. It is a deliberately unnatural pose. The women character have to be portrayed as the types of character female readers, by and large, do not want to be like or read about, and the female character have to do things women by and large do not create a big thrill or many bragging rights about doing, and the male characters are basically extraneous.

Can it be done? Sure. Writers are endlessly inventive, and we get to set the situation and the plot and, in science fiction, we get to set the laws of nature, too. So the basic physical limitations of the female physique in real life need not hinder us in science fiction situations, because your heroine can be from Krypton, or armed with a phaser weapon, or have cat-girl genes spliced into her DNA, or be an Amazon. Second, the writer gets to set the period and the genre. No one can claim that Hermione Grangier is in any way a second class citizen of Hogwarts, because, like a detective in a detective novel, physical strength and fighting prowess are not the main point of a magical school-chums novel.

Third, if your superheroine is stronger than any normal man, and does not need Prince Charming to settle the hash of the evil dragon, but can wield the sword herself, you can either leave out your male love interest, or you can, Anita Blake style, make him superhuman also. This, of course, is a sly cheat, because it put the girl back in the position of being allured to a dangerous male figure who is more powerful than she, so your vampire huntress falling for a fallen angel (or whatever) is in the same dainty shoes as the spitfire Irish lass kidnapped by the ruthless but devilishly handsome pirate Black Jamie (or whatever) which we all see in the Bodice Ripper racks at the paperback bookstore.

Paranormal Romance, in other words, is an example of the logic of drama subverting (or perhaps superverting) the logic of Political Correctness. It allows the writer to eat her cake and have it too: she can make her warrior-princess or vampire huntress as tough and strong in any way she likes, as tough as Scarlet O’Hara vowing as God is her witness never to go hungry again, and then also bring in a supernatural version of Rhett Butler, and she can retell the story of Beauty and the Beast while retelling GONE WITH THE WIND, and make her man a human being.

VPFL Week 13

127 Bane Sidhe (8-5)
50 RR Redbeards (8-5)

60 Fromundah Cheezheads (10-3)
44 Suburban Churchians (5-8)

73 Mounds View Meerkats (6-7)
67 Bradford Gamma Rays (5-8)

71 Bailout Banksters (6-7)
69 Greenfield Grizzlies (9-4)

86 Boot Hill Hangmen (4-9)
68 Mercury Marauders (4-9)

The playoff teams are set, all that remains to be settled is who plays where.  Right now, no one wants to face the defending champions, Bane Sidhe, who appear to be rounding into late-season form. And curb-stomping Nate? Well, let’s just say the old Weeper was smiling that day.

I’m not discontent with my performance this season. Losing both Rodgers and Foster knocked me out of contention, but I still managed to score more points than two of the four playoff teams.

Umberto Eco on the death of William Weaver

Umberto Eco eulogized his translator and friend, William Weaver, in an article that was published on 3 December, 2013 in L’Espresso.
After ninety years, the last ten of them reduced to a quasi-vegetable state, William Weaver is no more. He was
a great translator, and one could say that it was primarily through his merits
that our contemporary literature is known and loved in the
Anglo-Saxon countries. Born in Virginia, a conscientious objector but
unable to ignore the grand conflict that was underway, he enlisted in the Second
World War as an ambulance driver. He served with the
English forces throughout the entire Italian campaign, facing danger without ever holding a rifle in his hands. From Naples to Rome, he
made friends with many Italian writers of the era, and from then on,
he never left our country.
Thus it was that he came to translate Pirandello (One, No One, and One Hundred Thousand and The
Late Mattia Pascal), Zeno’s Conscience by Svevo, That
Awful Mess and Acquainted with Grief
by Gadda, two-thirds of
Calvino’s works, The Monkey’s Wrench
and If Not Now, When?
by Primo Levi, The Sunday Woman
by Fruttero and Lucentini,
History and Aracoeli
by Elsa Morante, Incubus
by Berto, A Violent Life
by Pasolini, as well as Cassola, Calasso, De Carlo, Malerba, La
Capria, Parise, Soldati, Alba de Cespedes, Festa Campanile. He also
translated A Man and
Inshallah by Oriana
Fallaci.

In addition, from 1981 to 2003 he translated
four of my novels and many of my essays. For twenty intense years, it
was a splendid collaboration, in which we could spend afternoons, or
exchange two or three letters, on a single word. If the culture has
lost a great writer, I have lost a friend. Weaver was a great
translator, not only because he sought to accurately render the
fluidity, the rhythm, the lexical richness, and the sound of the text. (From my
perspective, he sometimes improved upon my original.) He was a great
translator because he also knew that to translate the meaning, one must
dare to reject the literal translation in order to conserve the
effect or the deeper sense of the text. For reasons of space, I am
limited to relating one amusing memory, of a time in which we tore the text apart in order to render a simple play on words, a wordplay that was already
difficult for Italian readers.

Bill was translating my Foucault’s
Pendulum. He arrived at a
point in which two protagonists, obsessed with the world of the
occult, found a mysterious symbol tied to the transmission system in
automobiles. To demonstrate, in an ironic manner, their propensity to
think that every aspect of the world, every word written or spoken,
does not have the sense it appears, an allusion to the axle of
the Sephirot of the Kabbalah was made.
For
the English translator
this allusion presented difficulties from the start, because in English
there is a difference between a “tree” (vegetable and
cabalistic), and the axle (automobile), but after foraging through
the dictionary, Weaver discovered that the expression “axle-tree”
was legitimate. Nevertheless,
he found himself in a predicament when the two characters then
engaged in a certain word play that involved
the gnostic pneumatics, (the spirits opposite the somatics, that are
immaterial), and the pneumatics of a car. It was a joke, but the
protagonists were simply making jokes.
However, in English, the rubber upon
which an automobile’s wheels roll are not “pneumatics”, but
rather, “tires”. What to do? Weaver, as he recounts in his
translation diary, Pendulum Diary, was struck by a brilliant notion when he remembered the name of a celebrated brand of tires: Firestone. It occurred to him that one might draw an association
between that name and the English expression “philosopher’s stone”
of alchemic lore. The solution was found and the English text therefore
describes how the sightless occultists did not succeed in finding the
true connection between the philosopher’s stone and Firestone.
As one can see, he turned the gag into
something different than the original. The translator must render
the deeper sense of the text, one that is not “the protagonists
speak of tires”, but rather, “the protagonists are students who
play foolishly with the universal knowledge”.
As the Prince of Laughter once said,
translators are born. And Bill was a born translator.

This is not only an affectionate tribute to a great translator, but wonderful advice that I hope everyone who is translating one of my books into another language will keep in mind. It is always il senso profondo del testo that comes first, not il testo literale.

Speaking of translations, I’ve translated eleven or twelve of Eco’s online articles that aren’t otherwise available in English. If you are a fan of his, you can find them here.

Saudi Arabia performs the “impossible”

Isn’t it amazing how other countries routinely appear to be able to do what we are informed is not only impossible, but outright unthinkable?

Teodros Adhanom, the Ethiopian foreign minister, has turned to
Twitter almost every night for the last three weeks to tersely report
the number of his countrymen expelled from Saudi Arabia.“Last night arrivals from Saudi reached 100,620,” he wrote on Friday,
describing a fraction of one of the largest deportations in recent
Middle East history. Riyadh has said it wants to forcibly expel as many as 2m of the foreign workers, including hundreds of thousands of Ethiopians, Somalis, Indians, Pakistanis and Bangladeshis, who make up around a third of the country’s 30m population.

At home, the exodus of illegal workers is being seen as the kingdom’s
most radical labour market experiment yet. With one in four young Saudi
males out of work, analysts applaud Riyadh’s determination to tackle the
problem, but doubt the crackdown will achieve its objective, as Saudi
nationals are unlikely to apply for menial jobs.

What a fascinating way to solve the unemployment problem! Get rid of the excess labor supply. Why, the next thing you know, someone will discover that the Law of Supply and Demand applies to the labor market! And if a country with a 30m population can expel 2m illegal workers in a civilized manner, then surely a country with 300m population is capable of expelling 20m of them.  Minnesota could be Somali-free within 15 days if they contracted the job out to the Saudis.

It’s not a coincidence that after importing tens of millions of immigrants, the USA has gone into economic and demographic decline. The same is true of the UK and Western Europe. The facts are in. Mass immigration does not boost mature economies. It only speeds up their decline by reducing wages and forcing native workers to go into debt in order to try to maintain their standard of living until the debt limits are reached.

As for the unwillingness of Saudi nationals to apply for menial jobs, the Saudis might consider raising the wages and eliminating the subsidized unemployment.