I read it and said to myself, "No Bard he." I'm talking about the author of A Funeral Elegy, the poem which Donald Foster of Vassar identified in 1995 as being by Shakespeare using computer analysis of word usage.

Statistical analysis is one valid approach to identifying authorship ~ after all, it worked for Foster when he identified Joe Klein as the anonymous author of Primary Colors. But it's currently even more helpful to have a keen ear, and to be deeply familiar with the flavor and nuance of an author's style, as is Gilles D. Monsarrat, the man who debunked the Shakespeare attribution and pointed to John Ford (who wrote 'Tis Pity She's a Whore a wonderful play with Shakespearean echoes). Connoisseurship is a fascinating exercise in the extremes of human pattern recognition, no matter what field it's exercised in. And we've a long way to go with computer technology (I'm guessing we need at least really good weak AI) before it catches up to the human expert.

Now even Foster admits he was wrong about the attribution. And for those experts who bought it (e.g., Harold Bloom) ~ let it be a lesson in humility to you! Read more about it: A Scholar Recants on His 'Shakespeare' Discovery.

5:29:57 PM    please comment []

Popular entertainment is full of them. They are a staple of fiction and movies, of TV news magazines, and of our own nightmares. But despite the best efforts of social scientists, psychologists, and specialized law enforcement officers, the fact remains that we really don't understand them.

Serial killers.

Let's face it, we are fascinated. They are just like us, except they are so so different. Fleeting fantasies of violence and cruelty that the rest of us instantly smother ~ to the point where we may not even be aware of them in ourselves ~ are brought methodically into physical action by these people. They are not fueled by the same kind of ambition as a political mass murderer, who generally kills at some remove from his victims, and under the ideological umbrella (no matter how specious) of war. With these folks, it's personal.

And, furthermore, in almost every case there's an element of sexuality that's channeled into this compulsive violence. That adds another layer of perverse interest. We think we know something about the craving for connection, for visibility, for mastery, for sensation, for intensity, for abandon, and for the heightened experience of physical life that sex can offer. In the lives of serial killers these motivations are taken to their extreme limits, deformed, and expressed in ways that are both hideously recognizable and utterly foreign.

So we call them monsters ~ and they are monsters.
We call them evil ~ and their actions are indisputably evil.
We call them sick ~ and we cannot conceive of their behavior as anything but unutterably abnormal.

We wonder if they were born that way. Or if their childhoods warped them. Or if they are possessed by demons, in league with Satan. If we knew, we could define exactly how it is that they are different from us ~ and that would be a great comfort. The term "sociopath" is descriptive, not explanatory.

If we knew what was wrong with them, perhaps we could prevent the harm that they inflict. How would pro-life activists respond if, hypothetically, a definitive genetic marker for sociopathic behavior could be identified prenatally? If we could CURE a serial killer, would we still be justified in putting him to death? If environmental causes were proven to cause this pathology, could victim's relatives sue the parents for damages?

These speculations were fueled by an edition of Dateline I watched last night, "Kill and Kill Again," and by this review of a docudrama about Jeffrey Dahmer. Instead of executing serial killers, we should be locking them up for life and studying them in depth. We should learn everything we can about their physiology, their brain function, their life history, their worldviews. We have to know why.

And knowing why they are the way they are, maybe we'll be able to protect ourselves from them. And maybe we'll also know something more about ourselves.

5:04:13 PM    please comment []