Fox’s Game Ch. 9: A Classicist and a Music Critic Debate Renaissance Symbols in a Nashville Coffee Shop

May 20^th

“So Julian, you read the folder. Anything stand out to you?”

Robert sat across from his friend in a dimly lit corner of Fido’s. A concert had just ended, so it was more crowded than normal.

“You know, the only thing I saw that seemed a little weird was that this guy Christopher J. Harvel seemed so guilty. Know what I mean? It’s like he did everything wrong that you could possibly do. It’s a little too neat,” Julian said.

“Hmmmm…” Robert hadn’t considered that.

“What do you think?” Julian asked.

“No, go on.”

“Well, if you try to kill someone in pure emotion, it’s usually in the moment. You don’t really have time to think, right? I feel like a crime like that wouldn’t be purely emotional. I’m reminded of Crime and Punishment. Raskolnikov kills Lizaveta with an ax. It’s a violent murder, but there’s no passion. It was part of an odd social experiment on his part. Lizaveta’s sister witnesses it, so then Raskolnikov has to kill her, too. That murder was unplanned and sloppy. That’s one reason why the Inspector Porfiry catches him.”

Robert nodded.

“That’s what I can’t understand. You plan to meet someone on their travel route, you’ve obviously planned some things. You can’t anticipate everything, so maybe you still get caught. But why even risk it in front of all those people unless you want to get caught.”

“Perhaps he wants to be a martyr?”

“Maybe. That’s the only way it makes sense. But if that’s the case, why risk it by weaving through traffic? Why even worry with a getaway?” Julian asked.

“I don’t know. We humans are capable of both great rationality and great irrationality at the same time. Perhaps he’s both Raskolnikov and Lizaveta’s sister,” Robert said.

“It’s certainly possible. What’d you notice?”

He pulled out a black and white image from his folder. “This seems like a little thing, but I noticed this picture of him as he’s running to his car. He seemed to have lots of tattoos. So I pulled out my microfiche lens in order to get a closer glimpse.”

“Hoping that his body would reveal something about his mind?”

“Exactly. I wondered if there was some sort of outer manifestation of an inner condition.”

Julian reached across his body, grabbed his coffee mug with his left and sipped. His right hand fidgeted with his napkin. “And? What’d you find?”

“Well, it’s probably nothing.”

Julian fidgeted faster. “You found something everyone else overlooked, didn’t you?”

“I don’t know if anyone overlooked it or not. We’d have to ask Captain McRay. But I noticed an interesting tattoo. Here.” He slid the picture across the table to Daniels who stared like he were watching a magician’s hands during a coin trick.

“Look through this,” Robert handed the microfiche lens.

“Sorry, but he has a whole sleeve of tattoos. They all run together. They seem weird, a little gothic, but nothing you can’t find at a biker bar on a Saturday night.”

Robert smiled. “Keep looking.”

Julian stared for 10 minutes. “Again, sorry. I have no idea what you saw.”

“How familiar with you are Renaissance imagery?”

Daniels sipped his coffee and laughed, “now you wanna give me a hint? Look, I’m familiar with Renaissance images—Hamlet gazing at Yorick’s skull, Di Vinci’s Vetruvian Man, God touching Adam’s finger in the Sistine Chapel—but I’m not seeing a connection. He has a skeleton tat on his bicep, but it looks more like an ode to Salvador Dali than a Shakespearean play.”

“You’re thinking too general, too…too obvious. This is a very esoteric symbol. Look one more time, this time at the forearm. Right above Harvel’s left hand is a circle. It’s partly obstructed, but it’s a picture of a Renaissance Memory Wheel, not to be confused with the Medieval Memory Wheel.”

“Of course, it’s like confusing ‘your’ and ‘you’re.’ People do it all the time, but they really shouldn’t.”

“Exactly.” Robert miss the sarcasm, he’d already switched to lecture mode.

“Well, as a Classicist, my eye was immediately drawn to the image. It’s not something that most people would be familiar with let alone get a tattoo of. That got me thinking. So I visited the library to see if this was a particular wheel or just something he thought may have looked cool.

“I looked at several types of memory wheels, Medieval, Renaissance, modern, just to cover my bases. But it wasn’t until I opened De Umbris Idearum that I found a match. It’s a book by Giordano Bruno written in the late 16th century. In it he discusses his version of the art of memory. He has different types of memory wheels meant to remember different things—the signs of the Zodiac, the different angels—almost any list of things could be plugged in.

“Well Bruno has this one wheel that’s not quite Renaissance and not quite Medieval. Seems like a mixture of the two. It has Hebrew, Greek, and Latin lettering. It encompasses the Greek origins, the Christian tradition, and the Cabalistic influence that have shaped the discipline of memory.”

Julian fidgeted again. “Okay, so what does all this mean?”

“Well, it might not mean anything. We’d have to know where he got it from and when. That might lead us to something else. Here’s the thing: it’s not a trendy image that you get in order to seem smart,” Robert said.

“I follow you now. People like talking about their tattoos, but they don’t always want to explain them. It can get tiring, and people lose interest quickly. If you want a tat that reflects your affinity for that time period, you get one of the images I mentioned because people have heard of Di Vinci and Shakespeare and Michelangelo. If you have to provide too much backstory, it’s almost not worth explaining. You need a neat, quick story.”

Robert smiled.

“But Robert he knew about a rare image and got it put on his body. How does that point to anything?” Julian asked.

“Here’s where it gets interesting. Giordano Bruno was a Dominican cleric. But like many people in Europe during that time, or anytime for that matter, his faith was mixed with the pagan influences that were part of his culture. So he was a bit of an occultist. Nothing unusual there, but De Umbris Idearum translates to Book of Shadows. He’s essentially writing about things that are meant to be secret.

“So he was trying to expose these secrets?”

“Not exactly. Remember, this is during a time where few people read and even fewer people read Latin. He wrote to other educated people whom he could hopefully influence. He might as well have been writing in code,” Robert said.

“Makes sense. He wants to see how many out there are like him. Maybe form a subset of a subset of the Catholic faith?”

“Yes, kind of. And this is where I need to catch up on my research. But I think he was reaching out to people who were capable of retaining a great deal of information. He saw how much power the Church had. Church leaders and the rich were the only ones who, for all intents and purposes, could read. But when you get to those who could read Latin, the number gets smaller. And when you think of those who could memorize books, that number gets much, much smaller.”

“So you think he was looking for a way to get an even smaller group to control information?”

“Yes. The fewer, the better. No one can achieve large scale power alone, but the fewer people who help you, the less power there is to go around. He wanted a group of people with whom he could share his memory systems. That way, they could control information more tightly than his superiors in the Church.”

Julian nodded. “It’d be like if only a few people around the world had access to the internet and those few people weren’t academics in universities but midlevel politicians wanting more power.”

For the first time during their meeting, Robert sipped his drink. “Yes, that tattoo could mean all of that…or none of it. We have to go further in order to find out.”

“Fair enough, how do we do that?”

“Here’s what I was thinking: we both went through the information in our folders, right?”

“Of course.”

“Well, there’s little else they can tell us. We should go to our direct sources. I’ll talk to Ben and see what he knows. Like, how did he decide what to put in our folders and what to leave out? I think you should contact the news producer.”

“You think so?” Julian asked.

“Yes. Her job’s on the line, and she worked hard on this. She’ll enjoy talking about it, and she’ll be glad to know she’s not alone. And even if she wants nothing to do with our leads, we haven’t lost anything.”

Julian paused. “You’re right. I’ll call the station and see what I come up with.”

“Let’s meet here same time tomorrow.”

Fox’s Game Chapter 6

Foxes vs Hedgehogs 

Fido’s Coffee Shop
21^st Avenue

Julian Daniels sipped his coffee while studying what he just typed:

“The scope and manner of Jack White’s decision to parlay his music to that of international business mogul reflects his desire to not just entertain well but to exceed what society thought was possible. This thought process is reflected in detail through his lyrics.”

He yawned and rubbed his eyes. He knew the article he was writing for The Nashville Scene just needed to be informative. But that wasn’t enough. Once Daniels began looking at his writing as a craft, he couldn’t just “provide information.” He had to as Samuel Taylor Coleridge said put “the best words in the best order,” especially after writing a New York Times bestseller.

He was worried less about the article and more about his reputation. He had established high standards for himself. And he didn’t want to put his name on any writing that didn’t possess his clean, prose style. Words normally came easily, even the wrong ones. But today something didn’t feel right.

He sat in his usual spot at Fido’s Coffee Shop down the street from the Vanderbilt library. His routine was in place. But he was still out of sync. Daniels decided to work on a different writing project. He took out Isaiah Berlin’s The Hedgehog and The Fox, an 81page essay about intellectual history discussed through the prism of Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace. Daniels used Berlin’s book as a basis for discussing martial rhetoric in fiction, which he’d present as a paper at a Military and Literature Conference in Annapolis, Maryland.

He wrote more comfortably after switching topics. He decided that Berlin’s book would also be the topic he’d discuss as small talk at Dr. Hoek’s get together whenever the conversation drifted towards academic work. Julian knew Dr. Hoek professionally, the two had worked together on faculty council during Julian’s first year at the university. He found Benjamin to be thoughtful, quiet, and amiable. But they only really interacted in small doses, so it was difficult to get a true gauge on his personality.

Daniels was eager to sample the homemade hot chicken Ben’s email had promised. And any opportunity to network with colleagues outside of school was as good as any to cancel his plans of watching the NBA playoffs in his Hillsboro Village condo. Besides, he’d be able to discuss the ideas for his conference paper with people from other disciplines. The fact that many of them may not have heard of Berlin’s book might help him see his topic from a unique angle.

Daniels liked that writing provided a means of classification, a way to draw order from the slippery nature of ideas. And Berlin’s essay provided an order of sorts. He divides intellectuals—indeed all people—into two groups: hedgehogs and foxes. Berlin states that thinkers can be put into two categories: hedgehogs and foxes. Just like the hedgehog that survives by doing one thing—burrowing—well, intellectual hedgehogs relate everything they experience into a central vision, an idea that allows them to find order in a seemingly chaotic universe. Hedgehogs often return to the same ideas, albeit in different ways.

Foxes, however, search for truth on many paths, sometimes even pursuing conflicting beliefs in hopes of making sense of the world. Figures like Plato, Nietzsche, and George Washington are Hedgehogs. Aristotle, Shakespeare, and Thomas Jefferson are Foxes. Julian found the taxonomy fascinating, even if it were a little incomplete. He thought of himself as a fox, not because he lacked any guiding principles but because he refused to think of himself as someone with just one way of seeing things.

Daniels was the youngest member of the Vanderbilt faculty. He was a Nashville native who attended Vanderbilt as an undergrad. He made a name for himself as a Yale PhD student when he expanded his dissertation into a New York Times bestseller. The dissertation, “Poetic Rhetoric: The Complexities of African American Language Through the Prism of Hip Hop,” became the book Poetic Rhetoric: Hip Hop’s Hold on Language. He became a minor celebrity in 2007, doing interviews with media outlets ranging from NPR to Newsweek. He even spoke briefly by phone to presidential hopeful Barack Obama.

His surprising success led him in a direction he hadn’t intended: the pop academic. He could be a scholar who gained fame outside of academia like Cornell West or Brian Cox. He could slide his way into mainstream culture through cable news interviews and intellectual books aimed not at other intellectuals but at the layman interested in learning more.

Here’s the rub: in academia as many other professions, there’s a tension between purists and popularists. In the field of English, it’s characterized as the philologists versus the dilettantes. The former work to further scholarship through detailed research and debate within the scholarly community, the latter wish to further the field by making it more accessible to the public through entertaining presentation and understandable yet incomplete analogies. Popularity is not always accepted at the highest levels where the most talented work. Just as musicians like Taylor Swift can gain fame while loosing respect if they aim more at producing ear candy than pushing artistic boundaries, professors could lose in respect what they gain in fame if they’re seen as doing the equivalent in their fields.

Academics, even if foxes, tended to be hedgehogs when it came to their careers. Professors could lose in respect what they gain in fame if they’re seen as doing the equivalent in their fields.

Academics, even if foxes, tended to be hedgehogs when it came to their careers. The nature of higher education led people to label themselves and label others with easily recognizable terms. This could be challenging. Daniels wanted to approach his life like a fox, not just his research. He wanted more than one avenue to success, more than one means of income, more than one way of defining himself.

         He checked his phone and saw that he’d been at Fido’s for just over 2 hours. He’d long surpassed his self-imposed daily 1,000 word minimum. As his mind eased out of the writer’s trance where the subconscious mind produces words and the conscious mind orders them, he began wondering who else would attend this off campus meeting.

There was an oddness to it. The location, the time of year, the formal invite, something that made him both anxious and expectant. Whatever it was, Daniels hoped it wouldn’t interfere with his writing.

Behavioral Psychology Explains Why Kentucky Won’t Win the National Title If They Lose a Game

“It’s like a finger pointing at the moon. Don’t concentrate on the finger or else you’ll miss all that heavenly glory.” –Bruce Lee

I don’t like Kentucky. I don’t trust Calipari. But if they go into the tournament undefeated, I will want to see them win their next six games, raise the National Championship trophy, and make the Bluegrass state smile. And not because they’re in the SEC but because I enjoy rare, high level accomplishments, regardless of who’s achieving it. And if we pay attention, John Calipari’s interviews illustrate how to arrive at success more often.

A group of children sat in a classroom, unaware that they were being studied by behavioral psychologists. Even if they were, their minds were temporarily distracted by the easy math problems upon which they eagerly scribbled their answers. The experiment really began when they were given more difficult ones. None of the children got the problems right. But something happened next: they were again given easy problems. One group of students completed the problems easily while another group was so distracted by their inability to solve the difficult problems that they had trouble completing the once easy task before them.

Dr. Carol Dweck is a leading researcher in developmental psychology. She talks about how these two types of learners: incremental and entity. The former views learning as a process, a constantly evolving growth of mind and intelligence. The latter views learning as a result, something you’ve achieved. Essentially, entity learners do well as long as they’re succeeding. Their identity is so tied into results that when they come up short, they don’t bounce back as well. Part of long-term winning involves learning from losses.

It’s like the fastest kid in class racing the new guy and losing. If he comes back the next day wanting to race again, it reflects an incremental thought process. But if he slows up before the race is even over, claiming he wasn’t trying, then that kid is an entity thinker who will likely only race guys he knows he can beat.

College coaches are highly paid, highly specialized college professors, so they know that learning is like water cupped in your hands—you may have it. But that possession is precarious. On some level, it’s easy to hold, but then again, it’s easy to lose. And a coach’s wins are based, in part, on the ability to teach. And winning, like learning or power or love or faith, is an abstract concept that you must work to grasp and work to keep or else it can slip quickly through your fingers. Incremental thinkers intuitively understand this, which is why they, in general, succeed more than entity thinkers.

This is why Calipari makes such a big deal about defensive lapses after clear blowouts. Staying focused on process when results are so prominent is difficult. What’s harder? Keeping others focused on it. And Calipari’s not alone. The most famous Vince Lombardi quote is “Winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing.” Yet let’s not forget that he could talk about the Green Bay power sweep for 8 hours. That means he could start talking about this one play while someone clocks into work. And after that person has played on Facebook, watched YouTube videos, went to lunch, came back, did two hours of real work before clocking out, Lombardi would just be finishing up his discussion—about one play. The length of time is probably apocryphal, but the message is clear: Lombardi valued process. You see this same thread of thought in any of Phil Jackson’s books.

Obviously, I don’t know what kind of learners the individual Kentucky players are, but we have enough seasons of background to know that collectively, teams who earn 1 loss late in the season falter worse than undefeated teams. It’s difficult to mark exactly where teams pass that point of no return, but if you’re at 26-0, you’re definitely there. Whether they realize it or not, Kentucky is now a group of entity learners tied to the accomplishment of going undefeated. And Calipari’s job is to keep them more incremental than entity, to keep them focused, not on winning, but on doing the things that produce winning.

Now, the counterpoint to my construct is that each win breeds confidence, and that sense of self creates the habit of winning. There’s power in expecting to win; it’s hard to quantify, but we know it’s there. The “pressure” of maintaining a streak is only a factor if a team doesn’t really expect to be where they’re at. A team like Kentucky with top recruits at a legendary program would feel that pressure less than say an undefeated Tennessee team that doesn’t have a legendary basketball legacy and doesn’t have the best players clamoring to play for it. For Kentucky, each win creates more momentum than tension.

I watch sports to see my teams win, but I also watch to see history. My high school principal was an assistant coach on the undefeated ’76 Indiana team. I wasn’t alive to see that. But I’m alive for this. By default, Kentucky is, on some level, an entity team, but are they more incremental? I don’t want to find out because finding out means they’ll lose before getting to the tournament. Some things you just don’t want to learn.