Pathetic Fallacy

I always feel like somebody’s watching me

During my septoplasty convalescence I spent a lot of time doing nothing. I had optimistically planned that I would spend the time reading, or at least playing video games; but when your nose is sore, bloody, and full of plastic packing, the constant pain and exhaustion leads you to seek entertainment that requires no thought. So I ended up watching a lot of YouTube. More specifically, I ended up watching a lot of reaction videos. For those of you (perhaps blissfully) unaware, reaction videos are videos where you watch the host watch, listen to, read, or otherwise experience something else, normally in real time. These are extremely popular because they are relatively low-effort to make, requiring a minimal set-up and no fussy production values; and the videos tend to be long, giving ample opportunities for monetization (i.e., ads); and (most importantly) easy for the algorithm to index and recommend.

In some ways the lowly reaction video belongs to the high-brow tradition of criticism and analysis. A scholarly monograph on the works of Faulkner could be seen as a reaction by a fan; a New Yorker movie review is likewise a record of the writer’s experience watching. More recently, since around the early 2010’s there have been “Let’s Play” videos in which a host plays, and comments on, a video game. These can be demonstrations of skills or interesting play styles, but they’re just as often a chance to watch someone’s shocked reaction to the big twist in Bioshock¹ for the 52nd time. But the modern react-to-anything trend really got started with the pandemic, like so many other stuck-at-home-on-the-internet pastimes.

Some reaction videos fall into the category of “professional” commentary. For example, an M.D. might discuss the accuracy of an episode of The Pitt, or a Michelin-rated chef might critique the techniques used in an episode of The Bear, or a lawyer might count the number of criminal offenses in a Fast and Furious installment and tally up a suitable prison sentence. These sorts of videos are what attracted me to reactions in the first place, and they remain my favorites, because I love watching experts bullshit about stuff that doesn’t really warrant analysis. Beyond these, there are long-form video essays that provide deeper analysis and historic or cultural context for a work of media, or obsessive three-hour fan videos whose recap is much longer than the episode or movie being discussed.

But the vast majority of reactions out in the wilds of the Internet today are simply those showing John and Jane Does respond to stuff. It’s a way of vicariously enjoying the pleasure of seeing or hearing something for the first time—the main criterion is that the reactor have never been previously exposed to the subject: a virgin. These videos can be fun, particularly if the movie/tv show/song is a work for which you have a lot of fondness, or one that none of your friends or family is interested in. But let’s be real, it’s a form of emotional voyeurism. If you look at the histogram of what the most-watched parts of a reaction are, you will see predictable spikes where a big reveal happens, like the end of The Sixth Sense², or two characters have their first romantic encounter, or the hero drops the movie title into their dialogue.

This communal catharsis is something that disturbs me a little as an autistic person. Neurotypical folk are very big on shared emotional states, on group opinion, and these can feel to me a bit like coerced assent. I guess it’s akin to the experience of watching a performance with an audience, but even that also can feel onerous to me—like I have to constantly monitor and adjust my responses to fit the group. For most non-autistic viewers, of course, the concurrence is the attraction, and I can appreciate that emotional reactions can provide a feeling of community, even if that community is an artificial one consisting of comments by dogeball28319 and IamFartGuy.

All in all, these videos are a pretty harmless, albeit frivolous, way to waste time online. However, there’s a category of reactions that are performative in way that skeeves me the hell out. These are ones in which the theme is “member of specific generational, national, or racial group reacts to something outside of their culture—and likes it!” These videos have titles like “Gen Zer listens to Led Zeppelin for the first time: mind blown!” or “Guy who only ever listens to rap cries real tears over the Carpenters” or “I never got the hype about Star Wars until I watched every movie in release order: some thoughts.” Like a Puritan conversion experience or a Congressperson apologizing for an affair, the reactor publicly performs the scales falling from their eyes: they have been missing out, but now they’re down.

These videos are pure confirmation bias, assuring viewers that their tastes and/or childhoods were the best ever. Comments are patronizing toward the reactor: “yes, kiddo, this was before fancy digital engineering, when artists could only record on adhesive tape using tin can microphones—back when music was still real.” Or they are selective in their nostalgia: “Imagine living back in 1985, when every single movie produced was a stone cold classic, and also gas was so cheap they gave it away for free out of garden hoses.”

But the weirdest comments of all are the ones that are pure pathos, in which the commentator claims a special connection to the movie/program/book/song by virtue of their own trauma. “This song was my mother’s favorite song that I played to her every day she lay in hospice wasting away to Glaubner’s disease.” “This movie was the last movie I saw with my dad before he joined the cult.” These comments are so pervasive and the misfortunes they describe are so severe that I assume they’re just made up, but I’m not sure if this is some sort of extremely dry humor, or if it’s some sort of kayfabe at work, or if the poster is enjoying the emotional response they get in the form of likes. I guess some could be real? Online discourse is problematic.

Anyway, join me next time on the blog when I read On the Road for the first time and learn that Boomer culture is the best, actually.

Spoiler for a 19-year-old game: there’s a big twist. ↩︎
Spoiler for a 27-year-old movie: there’s another big twist. ↩︎

Greece is the word

This post is a companion piece to Sophomore Lit episode 187, Plato’s The Apology. Why not listen to that podcast before reading?

As we mentioned on our Apology episode, Marina and I recently traveled to Athens, Greece. The trip was a surprise birthday present she arranged for me. Marina is the planner of the two of us, and if there’s one piece of advice I would give to my fellow Autistics, it would be to marry a planner. Your life will be 256% better¹. The trip was something we had discussed for a long time as an intersection of our professions: hers as a philosopher specializing in Plato, and mine as an art historian. However, my areas of interest are 19th and 20th century art and popular culture, and my last formal study of ancient art was one of the final classes I took for my M.A. waaay back in 1993. But actually being on the Acropolis brought back a flood of memories of lectures about Phidean sculpture and the thesis I wrote about the Museum of Fine Art’s late classical fragmentary statue of Leda and the Swan (or perhaps Nemesis and the Swan, but that’s a story for another day). This essay is notes on our visits to the Acropolis and the Ancient Agora. We saw many other sites in and around Athens, but in this essay I’m focused on places that are relevant to Soph Lit listeners.

Panorama — The Acropolis, with the Parthenon to the left and the Erechtheion to the right. At the rear is the monumental gate to the Acropolis, the Propylaea. Photo by Marina McCoy.

While most people have heard the words Acropolis and Parthenon, it might be good to lay down a few terms: The Athenian Acropolis is a rocky plateau that was on the edge of the ancient city of Athens and is currently at the center of Athens, surrounded by the tourist district. The word “acropolis” actually means “highest point in the city,” and many cities had acropolises that were used for sacred spaces and citadels, not just Athens, but today when someone says “the Acropolis,” we know which one they mean. The Parthenon (447–432 B.C.E.) is one of several buildings that were built on the Acropolis in the 5th century BCE, and is the famous example of ancient Greek architecture, if not the most famous example of a building in the world. The Parthenon is a Doric temple that once housed an enormous chryselephantine (ivory and gold) statue of Athena, the patron god of Athens, designed by Phidias, the sculptor credited with developing the high classical style. He also designed the architectural statuary for the Parthenon, including the metopes, frieze, and most importantly the statues in the pediment which were stolen by the English nobleman Thomas Bruce, 7th Earl of Elgin, a.k.a. Lord Elgin in 1803 and for God’s sake, Britain, just give Greece their damn marbles back already. Sheesh.

The building of the Parthenon was designed by the architects Iktinos and Callicrates, and classicists since the 18th Century have lauded it as perhaps the greatest achievement of Western Civilization, and a testament to the uniquely mathematical aesthetics of the ancient Greeks. The Parthenon is very beautiful and its construction was a marvel. However, the oft-told story that the building’s proportions are based around the Golden Mean are largely the fabrication of 18th century German psychologist Adolf Zeising, who was obsessed with this proportion and saw it everywhere. The Golden Mean, denoted φ, is about 1: 1.618 (φ is irrational); it means that two numbers a and b, where a > b, have the the same ratio as the ratio of (a + b) to a. Look, it’s pretty heady, don’t worry about the specifics. The important thing is that Zeising saw this ratio in all kinds of things, and believed that it was the most beautiful mean and that it stirred a sense of awe and beauty in viewers even if they didn’t know the math, and Zeising was enormously influential to aesthetic theory at the time, and so people like to claim that φ is everywhere, from the Mona Lisa to tree growth and especially in the Parthenon. The trouble with this theory is that it is entirely made up and there’s no evidence that Greek architects of the fifth century had any concept of the Golden Mean, in spite of what Donald in Mathemagic Land would have you believe. It turns out it’s surprisingly easy to superimpose a diagram of the Golden Mean (or, for that matter, a Pythagorean Spiral, or a Fibonacci Sequence) over a photo of anything and claim that it’s proof of the Mathematical Basis of Everything.

Still from *Donald in Mathmagic Land* (1959). C’mon, Donald, that’s not even close to a Golden Mean.

But none of this should diminish the achievement of the Parthenon, or of the other buildings that were built on the Parthenon during the space of a few decades from about 440 to about 400 B.C.E. The Erechtheion (421–406 B.C.E.) is the site of the remarkable Caryatids, enormous sculptures of maidens supporting the weight of the porch roof². My own favorite is probably the tiny Temple of Athena Nike (c. 420 B.C.E.), a small square Ionic temple that sits on the very edge of the Acropolis, facing outwards. Long-time listeners to Sophomore Lit may remember the episode on Thucydides’s Peloponnesian War, in which Daniel Daughetee and I discussed the way the Athenian statesman and military leader, Pericles, used funds from the Delian League of cities to pay for all this marble and gold and ivory and whatnot. These funds had been pledged as a reserve to fund the League in case of further attacks by the Persian Empire, and Pericles’s appropriation of these funds to benefit Athens are often seen as one of the major complaints fueling the war. But when Marina and I visited the Acropolis Museum and saw the exhibitions focused on the Persian destruction of Athens in 480 B.C.E., we found ourselves for the first time sympathizing with Pericles, who I’d always imagined as something of a dudebro. The shame and despair of the loss of the previous Acropolis was still living memory. I can see how skimming some funds from the League would be appealing.

Caryatids — South porch (“the Porch of Maidens”) of Erechtheion. Photo by me.

As magnificent as the Acropolis is, I think it was more affecting for us both to visit the Ancient Agora, situated in the city below. The Agora was a common area of land and buildings that combined both city operations and commerce. Being a direct democracy (for free male Athenian citizens, at least) Athens did not have a government per se, but various councils and official functions had buildings in and among the stoæ, which were long covered colonnades where merchants could rent space. Then, as now, the political health of the polis was entwined with economic activity. It was in the Agora the Socrates did the majority of his work, engaging directly with people, posing questions, picking apart beliefs. And it was here in the Agora that he was jailed before execution. Today most of the Agora is crumbling rows of foundation stones, and no one knows where the courtroom in which Socrates was tried was, but archeologists have a pretty good guess of where his cell was, in a structure on the northeast side. Close by are the remains of a water clock: in the Apology, Socrates refers to the practice of timing a prisoner’s defense speech by such a device, although whether this one is the one to which he refers is unknown. If you are the type to get emotional over these things, you will get emotional there.

One final note—the Agora site is full of sleepy cats and flocking birds, including my favorite bird, the Eurasian Magpie, which is perhaps the smartest of the corvids (the family containing crows and ravens). This bird doesn’t inhabit North America, but in Europe and especially Greece they’re everywhere, and I spent much of my time trying to get a perfect picture of one, which to native Athenians would be like someone trying to photograph a pigeon.

And you have to believe this statistic because ASDers are so good at math. That’s how it works, don’t even. ↩︎
Or at least, reproductions of these statues. The originals are in the Acropolis Museum. All but one and guess who stole that one. ↩︎
Yes, I futzed with this in Photoshop, so sue me. ↩︎

Measure twice, cut once

In spite of my resolutions to write and podcast on something that more resembles an actual schedule, I have done neither recently. But my plea to the dozen of you that read this blog is to be forgiving: last week I had in-patient nose surgery to correct a deviated septum. In my case it was less deviated and more full-on deviant. Often, the septum can be corrected by septal resection: simply removing a portion of the cartilage and calling it a day; but my deviation was so extensive that doing this alone would cause my nose to collapse, and while that might be hilarious at first, it’s medically inadvisable; so my surgery was a septoplasty¹, which is like a rhinoplasty, but less sexy, in that the nose gets shored up, either with bits of the patient’s cartilage or with a donor’s².

I’m not over-sharing this out of a desire for sympathy while I convalesce (although flowers, chocolates, and bottles of scotch are welcome). Nor am I using solipsism as a crutch for not having other things to write about (not much, anyway). What I want to write about here is the way that, for all of the advancements in pharmaceuticals, imaging systems, and assistive robotics, surgery—and medicine in general—remains low-tech at heart.

Reconstructing a septum has many similarities to carpentry: it’s a matter of cutting, positioning, and tacking. My surgeon had to use a hammer and chisel (or whatever they’re called in a surgical context) to pop my septum’s cartilage free from the bone. To allow my nostrils to heal in the proper open shape, I have had stents stuck in my sinuses like tiny cannoli tubes. Similarly, my post-surgery care has also been humble: flushing my nose with salt and water, and strapping a bit of gauze under the nostrils to soak up whatever falls out on its own due to gravity.

Back in the early 90s, when cable television kept adding odd networks in an attempt to convince viewers they were getting a bargain, there was a channel that consisted almost entirely of videos of surgical procedures, and since as I child I had wanted to be a surgeon, I watched these late at night³ with fascination. The one I remembered most vividly was a hip replacement in which the head of the femur was to be replaced with a polyethylene and steel prosthetic. The surgeons popped the bone free from its joint so that it stuck out like a rib in a rack of lamb, and then used a hacksaw to remove to worn-out part.

But the part of the procedure that was most memorable was when they hollowed the upper shaft of the femur so that the stem of the prosthetic could be inserted and cemented in place. One of the surgeons reamed out the femur using a long hand rasp, the kind you might have kicking around in a toolbox in the garage. I was shocked that such an imprecise tool, powered entirely by hand, was being used on a person. Recently I discussed this video with my son, who is his fourth year of med school, and he seemed unfazed, saying that it was about par for an orthopedic surgery, where so many involve mallets, saws, and screws.

Actually, I find it oddly comforting that at the end of the day we are made of physical stuff, and that there are people who have developed the skills to repair that stuff physically. It takes an enormous amount of knowledge, it takes substantial resources, and it takes procedures that have been developed painstakingly through generations. But it also takes a skilled, steady hand, patience, and pride of craft. It takes someone breaking things and sticking them together with stitches, screws, and glue. And I am lucky to have had the opportunity to get broken and fixed by a pro.

Because nothing is ever easy, “Septoplasty” is sometimes used to refer to the removal of cartilage alone, or to the harvesting of said cartilage, or to the subsequent reconstruction, or to the whole enchilada of these procedures. And here I thought medical terms were all about precision. ↩︎
In my case, my own cartilage was enough, so sadly I can’t now lay claim to a Frankenose. ↩︎
I worked second shift. The joys of grad school! ↩︎