Nabokov, on Freud:

In response to a Freudian explication of his works, the great one wrote:

One may wonder if it was worth Mr. Rowe’s time to exhibit erotic bits picked out of Lolita and Ada– a process rather like looking for allusions to aquatic mammals in Moby Dick. ...

Who the hell cares, as Mr. Rowe wants us to care, that there is, according to his italics, a “man” in the sentence about a homosexual Swede who “had embarrassing manners” and another “man” in “manipulate”? “Wickedly folded moth” suggests “wick” to Mr. Rowe, and “wick,” as we Freudians know, is the Male Organ. “I” stands for “eye,” and “eye stands for the Female Organ. Pencil licking is always a reference to you know what. A soccer goal hints at the vulval orifice (which Mr. Rowe evidently sees as square).

Let the credulous and the vulgar continue to believe that all mental woes can be cured by a daily application of old Greek myths to their private parts. I really do not care.

Literary psychoanalysis:

In Will's discussion of A.S. Byatt's NYT piece on Harry Potter, he comments,

: The application of Freud seems almost like a strange parody of literary analysis (and maybe it is intended as parody).

Henry James lends himself well to such analyses -- it seems perfectly plausible that his writings may have been influenced by the work of his brother William, the famed Harvard psychologist. Certainly, it is known that he thought people read one word, even one part of a word, at a time. One of his favorite sentence techniques was the formula "He struck her, she realized, as a fish out of water in the prim, contained world of the widow's cottage." [This is not a quote, but an example of "He struck her, ___, ____."] He used the idiomatic 'struck' repeatedly to show a character's violence or lack of control, believing that the reader would initially read the sentence as meaning that a blow was struck, only to understand a second later that HJ wasn't speaking of any physical acts. This theory that people read by such small discrete units is now, I understand, discredited; still, it's very useful to know about in understanding him.

Freud's theory that children dream of being orphans, living with families to whom they are not related, is fairly well-known. One of the stages children passed through was the stage when they looked at their parents and cried out, "There's no way I could be related to these people or, God help me, resemble them!" I don't know what current psychologists think of it or how common it actually is (when one has an identical twin sister who looks a lot like one's mother, such fictions become difficult to maintain, but I don't know that plausibility was ever a key part of the orphan dream). But even if the orphan dream isn't supported by psychologists, it is a recurring plot in literature, even in fairy tales.

Drawing more Lines:

The New York Times runs an op-ed on why independent districting commissions are good. It makes some good arguments, but doesn't go far enough. As I've said, one of the troubles with gerrymandering restriction is that it's something like disarmament. The incentive, regardless of what the other side does, is to keep on doing it.

This is so because states often have partisan preferences without having partisan consensus. One example of this is in the oft-cited Texas. There's simply no political incentive for the Republican majority to stay its hand. This is even more so in states whose partisan allegiance is all but assured (as Texas might one day become). When there's no worry about turnabout, why bother with fair play?

Now one solution is this direct appeal to voters, which is what the Op-Ed piece is trying for, I suppose. If enough people in a state demand a fair system, they can get one, even if partisan politicians would rather play district-line-etch-a-sketch. But I'm not actually convinced people do want a fair system if the current system supports them. Why should the Republican voters in Texas, any more than the Republican candidates in Texas, want a system that gives more Democrats seats? Only if they can extract a similar concession from New York or California. So, since the country actually approximates an even split, this change needs to be on both sides of the aisle. Federal legislation can't do it, so states should either enact conditional redistricting statutes (I'll switch if X other states of Y size switch) or suck it up and amend the Constitution.

Guns:

So the Koch fellows were treated today by a debate on the Second Amendment featuring the Cato Institute's Robert Levy and and The Violence Policy Center's Matt Nosenchuk. Both participants did good jobs, though I'm not going to rehash the entirety of the debate in particular, mostly out of fairness to Mr. Nosenchuk, who did the best he could with a losing hand of cards and a better opponent.

But after Levy gave us all of the arguments in favor of individual rights and Nosenchuk gave us all of the reasons to believe that the rights belong to a militia and are therefore obsolete, I was still left with some questions. These may not be the questions most people are asking in this debate, but that's fine. The empirical questions are, well, highly empirical and don't survive blogging well. The legal questions are, well, highly legal and absent clear caselaw, are better left to people with a broader and deeper understanding than me of history, state constitutions, and all the rest.

So, if there is a 2nd Amendment right for a citizen to keep and bear arms, what exceptions should it have? This is particularly problematic for those of us (like myself, and apparently fellow Koch-head Josh Barro) who think that the First Amendment might not permit any exceptions, or at least not nearly as many as seem "clearly obvious" to the Court. Does an absolutist view of the First Amendment commit one to an absolutist view of the Second?

Secondly, should the right to keep arms be treated with different scrutiny than the right to bear them? Both words, after all, feature in the same place of the same clause. (This is a point often raised about Establishment and Free Excercise in the First Amendment; the definition of religion, it is widely thought, ought to be the same for each purpose). Levy suggested to us that it would be easier to win a victory for the right to keep arms in one home than the right to brandish them about on the streets. I think this might well be so, but should it?

Conversely, for those who imagine some more nebulous role for the 2nd Amendment, what is that role exactly? (This is the question that Nosenchuk kept dodging). What gun regulations would unconstitutionally infringe upon the right of the people to keep and bear arms? (As Justice Scalia says, "you can't beat something with nothing"). Nosenchuk simply told us that not all rights are Constitutional rights. This is true, but hardly on point when interpreting a Constitutional provision that explicitly mentions arms.

UPDATE: Venkat Balasubramani of Balasubramania's Mania writes in with some tentative thoughts on guns. He suggests that we construe the Second Amendment more narrowly than the First because the First references "freedom" and the Second fails to include a right to "utilize" our arms. So maybe the Second is less concerned with actual use than the First. I'll wait for Balasubramani to expound this view more fully, but I think there's a clear reason that the founders didn't mention a right to "use" arms in the Constitution. Murder statutes are one example.

Now Featuring:

As you can see below, the opinions available here have once more increased. Matthew Hengeveld is a student of philosophy (and other things) currently at Carnegie Mellon University but eagerly seeking escape from the city of Pittsburgh. I've known him approximately forever, or at least for as much of forever as really matters. Which is to say I've known him for about as long as I've been seriously committed to rational thought. I'll leave you to guess when that would be. Enjoy.

Regarding the question of why rejection hurts more than non-selection, I believe that the culprit in this instance, as in so many others, is willful self-delusion.

When a crush remains secret a person can continue believing whatever he can believe whatever fantasy amuses him about the object of his affection, whether this be something romantic or otherwise. He can live with his pain, playing the role of the sufferer, lover from afar, or whatever suits his particular tastes.

The minute you reveal your secret to the object of your affection, however, you are allowing for some basis in reality. Things often do not play out as expected, and any previous delusions are inevitably shattered.

If there is initial success the fantasy or some new one is able to continue, and as you actually get to know the object of your affection better more and more reality slips in. More and more the presence of the other person becomes something assumed. When the relationship ends in this case it is like having the chair you are sitting on pulled out from under you. Something that has become real and assumed, at times unnoticed, is suddenly gone. Certainly we should expect this to cause more pain in all but the most imaginitive.

Rejection and Non-selection:

So here's a romantic query.

One hears a lot about the pain of rejection, how it hurts to be emotionally or physically rejected by the ones one loves, and all the rest. But one very rarely hears about the pain of non-selection. Why is that?

There are two versions of this question. The first: why are people hurt more by eventual rejection than by immediate rejection? I think most people would suffer more emotional pain from being turned away by a year-long love than if the same person had turned them away from the start. Why?

Second, why is rejection more painful than non-selection? Sometimes people avoid telling another person that they harbor romantic feelings because of the "fear of rejection." But why would being rejected be any worse than the current state of affairs? Some say it is because before one is rejected one still nurses some hope, but what about in the case of somebody who's almost sure to say no, anyway?

I think there are tentative answers to these questions. Rejection after a long time is more painful because of the betrayal of the emotional reliance one has placed on the other. Non-selection is preferable to rejection because it is secret; only your closest friends know about the crush you've nursed for years on the girl who lives on the first floor of your building. But both of these answers are surprisingly metaphysical. Are their simpler or alternate explantions? What's so painful about rejection anyway?

Rise of the Group-Blogs:

As heralded by Jacob Levy, and uncovered via Instapundit, Kieran Healy et.al. have a new group-blog called Crooked Timber.