Book Review: The Scroll of Seduction by Gioconda Belli

Monday, February 08, 2010

I never realized that eroticism and history could mix together and form a very interesting novel. If one wants to have that combination, then this should be the book that one should read.

So, what is this about? This is a book written by Gioconda Belli, one of Central America's great writers. This tells the story of Juana La Loca and Philippe the Handsome. Juana is the daughter of Queen Isabella of Spain, while Philippe is from Flanders. The story begins along the time when Juana was arranged to be wed to Philippe, up to the point when she dies as an old woman of 76 years old.

As a parallel story, it also tells the story of Lucia, an orphan from Central America, who is studying in a boarding school in Madrid. She befriends a historian, Manuel, and his aunt, Aunt Agueda.

The main setup of the story is that Manuel first met Lucia in the Museo del Prado in Madrid, and remarked that Lucia resembles Juana La Loca very much, to the point that he invites her, a 17-year-old student, in his house, in order to relive the story of Juana La Loca. Manuel has a medieval dress that he insists Lucia wears whenever they would meet during the weekends.

Thus, the story of Juana and Philippe and Lucia and Manuel become intertwined together, and the narration swings from first-person to second-person and back. Overall, I think it was a very interesting device.

Now, the title is actually misleading. There isn't a scroll of seduction in the book. However, the story is indeed about seduction, and there's multiple instances of it. First, there's Manuel, a 30-something-year-old historian, seducing a 17-year-old girl. There's also Juana, seducing Philippe, back in the 16th century. And yes, there are numerous instances where sex becomes a major player in diplomacy.

A little disturbing factoid in this novel is the fact that a body seems to inhabit multiple bodies. Lucia makes love with Manuel, but as who? As Lucia? Or as Juana? And who was she making love to? Manuel? Or Philippe? The book makes a good job of blurring the boundary between reality and hallucination.

So did I like this book? Yes, definitely. This is not for youngsters, but I find it very well researched. I never knew of the existence of Juana La Loca before, but now I have a better idea of who she was. This may be fiction, it may be historical fiction, but it was a good read if one is interested in the history of Castile and Aragon back in the 1600's. 4.5 out of 5 stars.

(Fountain Creature, from my Library of Congress Series)

Groupthink

Saturday, February 06, 2010

The other day, I was in the bus heading home, and I witnessed something disturbing.

There were sixteen girls in the bus, all college students. And practically, they dominated the whole bus, they were the only ones talking, in the middle of the night, while everyone was trying to wind down and rest. Therefore, one can hear what they were up to that night.

Apparently, they were heading to a sorority house, and it's their first night pledging. And so after hearing what they were up to, I couldn't help but think how pathetic they were.

So they were talking about how to interact with the elder sisters. How one should not look at them in the eye. How every time they interact with them, they should call every one "Sister So-and-So" and all that. How every time the sisters talk to them, they should always say sorry and apologize. How they shouldn't talk before being addressed to do so.

I was like, wow, this is groupthink par excellance. I wonder why people feel the need to join groups like fraternities and sororities, where one undergoes these initiation rites to fit in, to join a group, a secret society. Is it the case that one cannot stand alone in this world, that they are willing to be submitted to all this humiliation just in order to fit in and stand as a group? I don't get it.

It's like surrendering your own body and soul to a group entity. I overheard one girl telling her boyfriend over the phone that she cannot talk to him for the next two weeks, even over the phone, because she was pledging. Because that was a requirement for the sorority, and she kept explaining to her boyfriend and apparently the boyfriend wasn't too happy about it, and so some other girl in the group even told this girl who had the phone to give the phone to her so that she could explain it.

Weird.

Then, they did a countdown roll-call sort of thing, they practiced that while in the bus a few times. Then they called some other girls and told them to wait for them in the bus stop so that they could walk together once the bus stops at the end of the line.

What makes people surrender their individual control of their person and let a social construct guide their actions like that? What constraint ranks so high as to allow a group dictate one's movements? I am no sociologist, so I do not know the right answer to this, but nevertheless, I am disturbed that there are people who would be willing to go to great lengths just to pursue group solidarity. The thought is somehow scary.

(Poseidon Fountain, from my Library of Congress Series)

Make My Day

Wednesday, February 03, 2010

Wow. It's been a non-stop day.

8:45 AM: I arrive on campus. I head to my office, and turn on my computer. I head to the lounge to leave my lunchbox in the common refrigerator. Unable to wait for my computer to boot up (it's a 2005 laptop), I head to the library in the next building to check my email and respond to the important ones.

9:15 AM: I head to the ATM and withdraw a small amount of money intended for participant compensation that would last the whole day. I head to Lab A and get my folder where I keep my recruitment fliers, and walk all over campus, refilling the ones that are gone.

10:00 AM: I head to Starbucks and get a hot chocolate. I need an excuse to do so, as I don't do this often (not only is it calorie-filling, it's also 3 bucks a pop), but I need to break the twenty bucks I withdrew so I can pay people 5 bucks each when they come to lab. After getting my drink, I head back to Lab A and return the folder.

10:10 AM: I arrive at my office. I work on amending an experiment protocol that we currently have approved, since we are adding a new venue and a new subject pool to the experiment. Thus, instead of conducting the experiment just in Lab A, I can also conduct it in Lab B once the amendment gets approved.

10:36 AM: I am finished with the amendment, and emailed it to the reviewers.

10:45 AM: I head to class in another building.

12:00 PM: I get back from class, and check my email. I notice that the reviewers were quick to respond, and that they have no problems with my amendments. I now have my approval.

12:05 PM: Lunch in the lounge, while talking with two other graduate students about why I do not like to do fieldwork, and how I told someone interviewing me for an honor society that I wanted to do fieldwork in Zulu in the future. Totally false given where I am right now.

12:40 PM: I get back to my office, and print stuff for a meeting with my adviser.

1:00 PM: I head to Lab A to run an experiment for 30 minutes.

1:30 PM: I print legal forms for the experiment, so that they can be run in Lab B. 60 Informed Consent Forms, 30 Debriefing Sheets.

2:00 PM: I head to Lab B and install the experiment. I find out that the button boxes (weird experimental contraption that has just 5 buttons) do not work in Lab B, therefore the procedure has to be edited so that the experiment runs on button boxes in Lab A, but runs with just the keyboard on Lab B.

3:00 PM: The experiment finally runs on Lab B. I go ahead and print the tracking sheets and several other pieces of paper.

3:30 PM: Awesome friend calls and tells me we should go for coffee. Since I haven't caught up in a while with awesome friend, I accompany her. However, I already had my drink fix in the morning, so I was just an escort and not a customer.

4:00 PM: Back in Lab B, I finalize the folder that contains the legal documents, the storage for the data, and the tracking sheet. I email everyone in the lab about the particulars of the experiment, telling them that if there are any problems, they should email me. The experiment is due to start tomorrow first thing in the morning.

4:30 PM: I email everyone in my Tuesday Lab Meeting the paper that I am discussing. I also upload the paper to the common online folder that we all have access to.

5:00 PM: Little break. Chat with friends. Catch my breath.

5:30 PM: Meeting with the adviser. I manage to convince him that the second topic I plan to cover in my dissertation is worth doing. He finds the idea very interesting and cute. Discuss, chat, discuss, explain. Wash, rinse, repeat.

6:25 PM: Meeting adjourned.

6:30 PM: I head back to Lab A to run another participant.

6:50 PM: Participant finishes the experiment. I answer emails and write emails. Then I write a blog entry.

Which brings us to now. 7:09 PM.

(Jefferson Building, from my Library of Congress Series)

I Need Two Bodies

Tuesday, February 02, 2010

Today was such an exciting day. Well, the excitement actually started yesterday, but it extended mainly to today.

Well, the thing is, I had an epiphany yesterday, with respect to the research that I have been doing. I cannot tell the whole thing here, for fear that someone might catch the idea and publish it before me, but it basically consists of finding that nobody has done what I wanted to do in my topic, but plenty of people have done something similar in a totally different topic. Thus, I can make analogies from a totally unrelated discipline to my own, thus making a generalization that might shake the way we see how things work.

It's like, say you're a neurosurgeon, and you were trying to find a way of doing something with your field, but found that nobody else has tried it before you. That makes you skeptical, but you notice that people specializing in culinary arts for example has done something popular in their field, and that you think you can apply the principles they have in such an unrelated field, therefore drawing analogies.

I know, I can't say much here, but needless to say, I am excited. I have ran my story on several people, both on people in the department who work on my field and those that don't, and they all tell me that it is a neat idea. So at least I am getting feedback that aren't telling me that I have a crazy idea.

Aside from that, it seems that we got permission to run our experiments in another lab. Thus, I have spent the rest of this evening amending the legal aspects of the research, revising the formal documents that allow us to collect human data in the first place. I then sent copies of those to my collaborators and my mentor so they can read it and see if there are bugs that I haven't caught. If it is all clear, then we'll go ahead and send it to the reviewers, so we can perform the amendment as soon as possible. Thus, hopefully, we can go ahead and finish the data collection. And after this, all we need is sit in front of the computer and run the statistics. And then we have something to write up.

Sometimes, I wonder at the amount of correspondence I get in my email inbox. I get so many emails every day from students, experiment participants, adviser, collaborators, and so on. But I like the excitement. I like this, I prefer this than stagnation at least. I can feel that my brain is working. That's a good thing.

Oh, before I end this post. This is the beginning of my Library of Congress Series. I know, I suppose people are sick of my Washington DC photos by now. But don't lose hope. I only have one more series from DC after this one.

(The Library, from my Library of Congress Series)

Alphabet Dance

Saturday, January 30, 2010

The other day, I was in the lab, since I had to be there to do my two-hours weekly duties, running experiments on participants. However, while I was there, there were other things to be done, such as alphabetizing a huge stack of old Informed Consent forms.

There were two folders of old Informed Consent forms. Whenever a participant comes in, we go over the legal aspects of research, and they have to sign an Informed Consent form, in duplicate. One goes with us, the other goes to them. And since this is a big lab with participants coming every day for the whole semester, it accumulates quite fast.

It was funny alphabetizing them. There were post-it notes everywhere in the lab, from the letters A to Z. Three people were there, doing this musical chairs dance, having a pile of papers on their hands and just dumping the papers on the relevant stacks. It was quite an interesting feat, sort of a work out actually, since we were moving all over the room arranging the papers in the different stacks. And once we were done, then they would go in a neat alphabetical pile.

I don't know why, but I found that a little fun. It was different from what we were usually doing, so I didn't mind it at all.

Oh, and some good news. This is the last photograph from my Hirschhorn Museum Series.

(Burghers of Calais, from my Hirschhorn Museum Series)

9 Degrees

Friday, January 29, 2010

So, after that nice warm weather that we had, right now, we have extreme cold. Currently, it is 9 degrees Fahrenheit. Yep, you read that right, 9 degrees. I think it is a double digit negative number if that were in Celsius.

So, if you're in California, do not even bitch about how cold it is there right now, because unless you come to Buffalo and deal with the snow, you do not know what cold is. You would not know cold until you feel that you were injected with cryogenic fluid as a bone marrow transplant.

Anyway, in unrelated yet happier news, I was able to load a new experiment into the lab, and therefore I started posting fliers all over campus again. And yes, people started signing up yet again, and we are starting to run the experiment starting next week. That way, hopefully, we get to have another publication into press.

Oh well, it's the third week, and things have started to pick up. I just graded my first quiz, and I am back into my other lab, running subjects yet again. And guess what? A few more days and it's already February!

(Mechanical Globe, from my Hirschhorn Museum Series)

Book Review: The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work by Alain de Botton

Wednesday, January 27, 2010

I usually do not pick a book that is non-fiction when reading. In fact, if not for a couple of good friends giving me this book as a present, I would not have known that this book even existed. Anyway, so I got this as a present last year, and finally I decided to take it out of my bookshelf and read it.

Well, surprisingly enough, I liked reading non-fiction. It was reading as escape, and at the same time, reading for the sake of being informed. And upon reading this book, I was informed about a lot of things.

The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work is this ten-chapter essay on how various mundane and ordinary things that we deal with everyday are manufactured, and the amount of effort that multiple people around the world put on the product in order for us consumers to partake in it.

What did I just say? Well, take the chapter on tuna fishing for example. The author follows the steps on how a shopper in a London supermarket gets his tuna steaks. First, he flew all the way from London to the Maldives, where fishing boats scour the Indian Ocean for schools of tuna. He joins the fishing boat, witnesses the men bludgeon the tuna to death, and follows the dead tuna to the processing plant that is still in the Maldives.

A couple of hours later, the tuna, which are already sliced and filleted and packaged, are being loaded into freight trays and are loaded in the belly of an Airbus A340 headed for London. Once in London, he follows the cargo into the delivery trucks, and then the trucks deliver the sliced tuna into the supermarkets, where one shopper has all the chance in the world to buy it and consume it. Just a mere 36 hours from the time the tuna was caught in the open sea to the time the shopper cooked it.

Which kind of made me think when I was in the grocery store the other day. I bought a pineapple, as I wanted to reintroduce fruit to my diet (I digress, but I fondly remember my mother cutting apples and other fruit and dividing them accordingly between the four members of my family, basically ensuring that we have fruit in our diet). I looked at the label, and it said that it was a product of Costa Rica. I wonder how much effort people put in that, from harvesting the pineapple from the farms, to shipping it all the way to the United States and finding its way to a supermarket in Buffalo. For 3.99 USD, I can get a pineapple and enjoy it in the comfort of my own home. It is now sitting on top of my microwave oven waiting to ripen.

Anyway, the rest of the book are other essays on other seemingly ordinary things in life that we rarely think about, such as the way electricity gets transmitted to our own homes, and the way our satellite TV gets a reception from that orbiting metal object. It made me think of the various contributions that several unknown people have given in order to live the life I am living right now. The world is indeed small, and more and more instances of living prove that we cannot live by ourselves anymore without the help of tens of thousands of others. 4 out of 5 stars.

(Brushstroke, from my Hirschhorn Museum Series)

Back to Regular Cold Programming

Tuesday, January 26, 2010

January is such a bizarre month. It is basically, unpredictable. How so?

Well, this past week, we had such wonderful thawing that we Buffalonians were rejoicing at it. We had above-freezing temperatures, that it actually melted the snow in my yard, and I saw the green grass again. It was beautiful. It wasn't T-shirt weather yet, but it felt so warm that I didn't mind not wearing a sweater or a jacket when I stepped out of my building to buy coffee from the coffee shop at the next building.

All the while I see my friends and relatives living in California complaining how cold their temperature was, and when I asked them, they were having 50 degrees over there. I was like, are you kidding me? Here in Buffalo, we have 40 degrees, and we think this is warm! Get over it Californians!

Oh well, apparently, our warm weather is over for now. Just this morning, when I looked outside my window, I saw that we had an inch of snow and my green grass is covered again with the white stuff.

I guess that's normal. After all, it's not officially spring yet. But we'll get there.

(Bulbous Sculpture, from my Hirschhorn Museum Series)

Subject Pools

Sunday, January 24, 2010

The other day, we finished an experiment that I was running with someone else. Finally. Then, I sat down in front of the computer, and ran the stats. After a half hour, I got my printout. Well, truthfully, I was a little disappointed.

I mean, I was disappointed because the results mean that we need to revise some of our items, since it didn't pass the norming criteria that we had. In other words, some of the items had to be dropped because they were confounded. That means, we have to go back to the drawing board for half of the items and do the norming experiments again.

Anyway, I am looking at it as a learning experience. Nobody said that research was easy. That is the basic nature of research, one sometimes goes by a process of trial and error.

Anyway, the research team is thinking of enlisting the help of another faculty, so that we can gain access to a subject pool. That means, running the experiments would be faster, since there is a pool. Instead of the way we currently run it, where we are posting fliers all across campus and people who are interested contact us, and then we pay them, if one has a subject pool, then subject recruitment is streamlined that it is just so easy one can do it while asleep.

It made me appreciate the benefits of a subject pool. How convenient having one is. Unfortunately, my current department doesn't have one, that's why I am collaborating with a department that has one. Which made me think, that when I come to the point where I am in the job market, what would be the factors that I would consider important? A good insurance program? A university that is in an urban setting? Should I pick a university that is located say in Boston or Washington DC, because it is in a good metro area, but it doesn't have a subject pool? Or what if there is a university in the middle of the boonies but it has a subject pool? I think I'd prefer the latter.

Playing with people's heads is awesome, you have no idea.

(Avant-Garde Museum, from my Hirschhorn Museum Series)

Book Review: Life After Genius by M. Ann Jacoby

Saturday, January 23, 2010

Awesome book this truly was. Oops, time to switch to the non-Yoda dialect.

Anyway, I should say that I thoroughly enjoyed this book. It was very interesting and captivating that I blasted through it in just a couple of days.

So, this is a book that revolves around Theodore Mead Fegley, who is a math genius, genius enough to skip several grades in elementary, middle, and high school, and enters college at 15, and finishing his undergraduate in less than three years. Almost, since the book begins when he walks out of college a week before graduation, without delivering his senior thesis.

Several characters revolve around Theodore. His father, Lynn, is an undertaker, very quiet, refuses to accept a scholarship for his son and instead insists on paying for his college education on his own. His mother, Alayne, is this control freak, who thinks that Theodore is different from his father's side of the family, and dreams big for her son. She basically is the typical parent who wants their kids to do the things that they were unsuccessful in accomplishing. Theodore's aunt Jewel, used to be a very caring aunt, but now, after the death of their son Percy, she went into catatonic depression. Uncle Martin on the other hand is a fellow undertaker, managing the family business of a funeral home, and is harsh and cruel on Theodore, because he blames him for Percy's death. In short, every character in this book has their own skeletons in their closets.

I suppose it is difficult to recreate the conflicts that this book presents, as everyone seems to be blaming everyone for the existence of their skeletons. Theodore decides to have a new life once he enters college, so he wants everyone to call him by his middle name now, which is Mead. This creates a divide in the arenas in the book: his family members still call him Teddy, his school associates call him Mead, while his arch-nemesis calls him Fegley.

Growing up, he battles the bullies, destroying his science project, embarrassing him to various degrees. He also battles the cutthroat people in college, people who would go into depths of crime and bribery just to get an A, like his "friend" Herman Weinstein, who turns out to be the person that he battles the most in the story.

The book presents a very good scenario for several psychological conflicts. It indeed is psychological fiction at its best, although I think it may have been a little over the top. There are too many abnormal people in the story, which I think is the only bad element of this book. But then again, who in the world is normal? We all have skeletons in our closet.

I have to say that I liked this book a lot, and found plenty of things in which I can relate. Mead has conflict with his parents: her mom only wants one thing, that is, to get him out of the small town of High Grove, Illinois by means of his genius. His father on the other hand secretly desires his son to be an undertaker like him and continue the family business. So there's the overprotective mother and the very impassive father. Their family dynamics are so extraordinary that I feel pity for Mead. It also made me appreciate the value of openness, and listening. Mead's parents didn't even listen to him, only insisting on what they think was best. Never did they realize that they had to listen to what Mead had to say as well, they only realized that late in the game, when their kid is all grown up. In the beginning, they were more willing to think that Mead was simply hallucinating instead of taking his word for the truth.

With respect to the structure of this book, I highly took a liking to it, since it wasn't the traditional chronological narration. Every chapter was dated, as to how many days or years it was before graduation. Thus, the chapters were in different time periods in Mead's life. It was presented based on content, and not based on the date. One chapter can be 8 years before graduation, when Mead was just 10, and the next can be 3 weeks before graduation, when his parents were in town visiting the university. In this way, I believe the author had trusted her readers that her readers would be smart enough to reconstruct the missing links in between the episodes. I liked that factor, since it needed use of my brain by requiring me to read between the lines.

I also liked the ending. The conflicts were slowly being resolved, one by one. One by one, Mead's family members get normal, and finally sees the light, in a way. However, the good thing is that the author did not fully end the story. The main conflict is between Mead and his relationship with Herman Weinstein, and the ending leaves it hanging, welcoming the reader's imagination to fill in the blanks.

Overall, a very awesome novel. 5 out of 5 stars.

(Pillowed Statues, from my Hirschhorn Museum Series)

Psycholinguistics and Linguistics

Friday, January 22, 2010

What follows is not a scientific exposition. What follows instead is a subjective rant of a person who simply happens to have a background in academia.

So, I was reading this one article the other day. It wasn't a trivial article, it was an article that was published in an academic journal. The journal was something that I constantly kept an eye on, given the fact that it publishes things that I am usually interested in. It is also peer-reviewed, which means that in order to be published, one's manuscripts will be critically scrutinized first by anonymous reviewers.

So I was reading an article, and I never got past the introduction, since the introduction was rather interesting, in the interesting sense of the word. The thing is, in mainstream Linguistics, there is a big split between the Chomskyans and the non-Chomskyans. This is basically a syntax issue: there are people who believe that humans represent sentences with the use of movement (like Chomsky), and there are people who believe that movement is not a real construct in the head. I happen to be non-Chomskyan.

So, back in the 1970s, psycholinguists got so interested in this new theory of syntax, so they went into their lab and tested this. Now, the results weren't too promising. The psycholinguists didn't find what the linguists were positing. So experiments have been conducted to prove and disprove the existence of movement, among other things. Now, out comes the biggest claim, and one that I think is detrimental to the field. Chomsky claims the difference between competence and performance. Competence refers to one's knowledge of one's language, and performance refers to one's actual use of the language. Thus, these theoretical constructs can exist, but in competence. It does not always mean that it reflects in one's performance, as the linguists claim.

Now that is something that I find it hard to swallow. That basically renders the linguists unfalsifiable. That basic tenet of falsifiability, that I think is very important. No wonder I started moving into the camp of the psycholinguists. Because I think that just simply sitting in an armchair positing all these constructs will be useless if they have no psychological reality.

Anyway, back to the article that I was reading. They were lamenting that there has been a decrease in collaboration between the linguists and the psycholinguists for the past couple of decades. Well, my impression is that it is because the psycholinguists were frustrated at the linguists, at how the theories of these linguists became too abstract to be psychologically tractable.

I personally do not believe in a division of labor between competence and performance. There may be a good reason to posit the distinction between these two ideas, but I do not see why plenty of theoretical linguists are so hung up at just studying linguistic competence, as if there is always this ideal speaker or ideal listener of the language.

Language is meant to be used. Language is used by everyone in many different situations, and these situations exhibit language use that may be very very different from what the ideal form of language is. I find it interesting that some scholars decide to study language in a bubble, in a vacuum, protected from the elements of society and other factors, without taking into consideration what exactly is the reality of things.

(Delicate Installation, from my Hirschhorn Museum Series)

Book Review: Love and Obstacles by Aleksandar Hemon

Thursday, January 21, 2010

I did not like this. And the main reason for this dislike is the fact that I cannot wrap my head around it.

The thing is, I was very much confused as to the nature of this book. It was a collection of stories, and yet the stories were linked with each other, in fact, too linked to each other that I am not sure whether this is a novel or not. The whole collection of stories sounded like several chapters of a novel about this one person.

Now the other disturbing thing is that this book claims to be fiction, and yet it somehow sounds very autobiographical. Maybe it was intended that way, maybe not, but I just don't know.

Another thing that irks me is the fact that the chapters (or should I say, the stories) that compose this book are too microscopic. They focus on one explicit thing that makes the reader lost in its pages, in a bad way. One gets the hint that the stories are related to one another, and yet at the same time, the stories narrate something so intense and deep. All the stories are told in the first-person, and yet this first person has no name. It is implied that the stories share one first person, therefore, it's just a collection of chapters of a novel of this person.

Anyway, this first person has plenty of things in common. He is Bosnian, he has been living in the United States, he got stranded in the USA as a tourist when the war in Bosnia erupted, and he has plenty of connections. He lives in Chicago, he writes, and he has family in Bosnia. All of these seem to mirror the life of the author himself.

Anyway, reading this book has plunged me into this deep confusion, that I think I ended up being more dissatisfied than pleased. Unfortunately, the author has won a MacArthur Genius Grant and therefore suggests that plenty of people out there like his work. Unfortunately, I don't think I can consider myself to be one of them. 1 out of 5 stars.

(Weird Chair, from my Hirschhorn Museum Series)

Linguistic Factoid No. 16: Relative Clauses

Wednesday, January 20, 2010

Relative clauses are certain structures in language that are meant to enrich and modify the description of entities. These add descriptions to the entities in the sentence, namely, the subjects and the objects. Here is an example.

1. The dog chased the cat.
2. The dog chased the cat that ate the mouse.

In the first sentence, both entities are just regular plain old entities. However, in the second sentence, the object of the sentence has a relative clause attached to it. Now, in this case, what is the purpose of the relative clause? Well, it adds further information about the entity. So, in the discourse of the second sentence, it may be the case that there are two possible cats to talk about, but we are picking out of the two the cat that was involved in eating the mouse.

Relative clauses are one kind of extraction. Relative clauses are made by joining two clauses together, basically. There is a main clause, and the relative clause needs to have a missing argument, since this is basically the same entity as in the main clause. Thus, in the second sentence above, "ate the mouse" is actually the clause with a missing subject.

In many languages, the relative clause either have a missing subject or a missing object. Compare the following two sentences in English.

3. The cat that _____ ate the mouse went missing.
4. The cat that the dog chased _____ went missing.

Sentence 3 has a subject relative clause, while 4 has an object relative clause. So English allows extractions for both places. There are languages, however, that have restrictions on extraction. Tagalog, for example, is one such language where one can only extract the subject of the relative clause. Thus, object relative clauses do not exist in Tagalog. In order to extract the proper entity, one needs to modulate the voice of the relative clause in order to vary the subject, and then one can extract it.

Okay, that last bit must have sounded gibberish, since I am not providing any examples here. But hey, this isn't a research paper, so I guess this is enough. If you really are curious, then email me and I will be more than happy to give you examples and further explanation.

(Optical Illusion, from my Hirschhorn Museum Series)

Cavalier Cooking

Tuesday, January 19, 2010

One of the reasons I like cooking more than baking is because I can be impromptu and cavalier about it. Unlike baking, one does not need to be precisely exact in measurements when it comes to cooking. One can modify things on the fly, and add things if necessary.

So today, I made pasta. I bought oyster mushrooms, a jar of alfredo sauce, fresh dill weed, onions, and penne. What I did was saute the minced onions and oyster mushrooms until they were tender, and then I added the chopped dill weed and one-half teaspoon of nutmeg. I also added a half of a jar of olives that I still had in my refrigerator. Finally, when everything seemed cooked, I added the jar of alfredo sauce, and rinsed the jar with a little milk, and added that as well. Finally, I added salt and pepper to the sauce.

Now, when I eat this, I would sprinkle a little grated Parmesan cheese. That would be awesome. I like oyster mushrooms a lot, they are meaty, heavy, and yet exotic. So there you have it, a meatless pasta in cream sauce.

(Balancing Act, from my Hirschhorn Museum Series)