Your Mother was Right!

My more recent full review of better can be found here.

better is the second book by Atul Gawande, a surgeon at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston. His goal, he tells us, is "a book about performance in medicine" and what he terms the three core requirements for success:

• giving sufficient attention to detail
• to do right in the face of human failings
• the ability to think anew which is only possible says Gawande, when reflecting on failure and a searching for new solutions.

The chapters cover topics such as the eradication of polio in India, the potential difficult feelings surrounding the intimacy between doctor and patient, and hand washing. His relaxed narrative is seamless. Each chapter tells a story and he is frank in writing of his own failings and the dilemmas he faces.

Now am I just weird? I have loved "inside medicine" kind of books since I was about 10 years old, but how does Gawande make an entire chapter about washing your hands a page-turner? And after reading his chapter you'll know your mother was right. I will probably wash my hands devoutly for at least a week!

Zeitgeist Alert: Sensory Disorders in The Science Times

Well, it's nice to be au courant. Today's Science Times has an article about the battle raging around sensory integration problems in children - do they qualify as a disorder? And, given the fact that some children most definitely experience symptoms, how can they be treated?




Occupational therapies for hypersensitivity combine gradual exposure to the offending stimuli, and conditioning techniques that calm over-arousal while in the presence of the stimuli so that the child becomes more and more used to it . Hyposensitivity (under sensitivity) does the opposite.

I always distrust campaigns for new disorders to be named, it can bias the work behavioral scientists are doing. But that seems to be the fashion nowadays. Having dealt in the lab with children who have ADHD and autism for only short periods of time, I can't blame the parents whose kids have real problems, who deal with them day in and day out, and who desparately want solutions for them.

Book Review: Bleak House - Charles Dickens - Scenes of Purpose and Drama - Summer Reading Challenge - Dickens' Bleak House cont'd

What a dramatist Dickens is. I just read two terrific chapters in Bleak House that I wanted to post on briefly.

Dickens creates a marvelous scene between a husband and wife - Sir Leicester and Lady Dedlock, who are bastions of feudalism, and a character called the Ironmaster. He is the son of their long-time housekeeper, a "working man." His son wishes to marry Lady Dedlock's new and very beautiful ladies maid. Right before the Ironmaster enters, Sir Leicester and their houseguest Miss Volumnia - an upperclass woman by birth, but actually a pauper who moves perpetually from the homes of one rich friend and relation to another - discuss the regretable dissolution of clear class distinctions:

"And it is a remarkable example of the confusion into which the present age has fallen; of the obliteration of landmarks, the opening of floodgates, and the uprooting of distinctions," says Sir Leicester with stately gloom; "that I have been informed by Mr. Tulkinghorn that Mrs. Rouncewell's son has been invted to go into Parliament."

Miss Volumnia utters a little sharp scream.

"Yes, indeed," repeats Sir. Leicester. "Into Parliament."

"I never heard of such a thing! Good gracious, what is the man?" exclaims Volumnia.

"He is called, I believe - an - Ironmaster." Sir Leicester says it slowly, and with gravity and doubt, as not being sure but that he is called a Lead-mistress; or that the right word may be some other word expressive of some other relationship to some other metal.

Volumnia utters another little scream.

Is this not pitch perfect? If I were adapting this for the stage, I wouldn't change a thing. The scene PLAYS. I see these characters, I hear their inflections. You know Sir Leicester knows that the man is called an Ironmaster; that his uncertainty is pretense. Sir Leicester is established from earlier chapters as the descendant of a great 'line.' He has inherited everything - his wealth, his land, his gout - he is outraged yet still can laugh at the little chink he sees in the wall of his privledge, but Volumnia is even more desperate to hold up the institution of class than Sir Leicester is, for without it, she has nothing at all.

Mr. Rouncewell, the Ironmaster - a man of 50, enters. He apologizes with ease and without embarrassment for intruding:

"In these busy times, when so many great undertaking are in progress, people like myself have so many workmen in so many places, that we are always on the flight"

Sir Leicester is content enough that the ironmaster should feel that there is no hurry there; there, in that ancient house, rooted in that quiet park, where the ivy and the moss have had time to mature, and the gnarled and warted elm, and the umbrageous oaks stand deep in the fern and leaves of a hundred years; and where the sun-dial on the terrace has dumbly recorded for centuries that Time, which was as much the property of every Dedlock - while he lasted - as the house and lands. Sir Leicester sits down in an easy chair, opposing his repose and that of Cheney Wold to the restless flights of ironmasters.

The Ironmaster explains of his son's love for their maid, Rosa and that, if he marries her, she would not be able to remain in their employment.

"Am I to understand, Mr. Rouncewell, and is my Lady to understand, sir, that you consider this young woman too good for Chesney Wold, or likely to be injured by remaining here?"

"Certainly not, Sir Leicester."

"I am glad to hear it." Sir Leicester very lofty indeed.

...

We have three daughters, besides this son of whom I have spoken; and being fortunately able to give them greater advantages than we had ourselves, we have educated them well; very well. It has been one of our great careas and pleasures to make them worthy of any station."

It makes me think that in the 1910s Virginia Woolf was still not able to attend Cambridge, but in the 1850s Dickens was writing of education of the English working class as preparing them to be "worthy of any station!!" I know that university is not what he's talking about - but wasn't this must a surprising notion in the 1850s?

And yet, Mr. Rouncewell too has pride of his station:

"All this is so frequent, Lady Dedlock, where I live, and among the class to which I belong, that what would be generally called unequal marriages are not of such rare occurrence with us as elsewhere. A son will sometimes make it known to his father that he has fallen in love, say with a young woman in the factory. The father, who once worked in a factory himself, will be a little disappointed at first, very possibly. It may be that he had other views for his son, 'I must be quite sure that you are in earnest here. This is a serious matter for both of you. Therefore, I shall have this girl educated for two years' ....

If at the expiration of that time, when she has so far profited by her advantages as that you may be upon a fair equality, you are both in the same mind, I will do my part to make you happy." I know of several cases such as I describe, my Lady, and I think they indicate to me my own course now."

Sir Leicester's magnificence explodes. Calmly, but terribly.

"Mr. Rouncewell," says Sir Leicester, with his right hand in the breast of his blue coat - the attitude of state in which he is painted in the gallery: "do you draw a parallel between Chesney Wold, and a - " here he resists a disposition to choke - "a factory.?"

'I need not reply, Sir Leicester, that the two places are very different; but for the purposes of this case, I think a parallel may be justly drawn between them."

Sir Leicester directs his majestic glance down one side of the long drawing-room, and up the other, before he can believe that he is awake."

"Are you aware, sir, that this young woman whom my Lady - my Lady - has placed near her person, was brought up at the village school outside the gates?"

"Sir Leicester, I am quite aware of it. A very good school it is, and handsomely supported by this family."

"Then, Mr. Rouncewell," returns Sir Leicester, "the application of what you have said is, to me, incomprehensible."

"Will it be more comprehensible, Sir Leicester, if I say," the ironmaster is reddening a little, "that I do not regard the village school as teaching everything desirable to be known by my son's wife."

This is such marvelous scene writing because it presents serious content - a battle between representative of two distinct classes. Dickens is chipping away at an important institution. It makes me continually wonder what will be said next. And it's really hilarious!

I also read another chapter that reveals some important details about one of the central mysteries of the plot, so I won't reveal anything, except to say that I really held my breath through the whole chapter. It was very suspenseful.

And now, back to reading

Reflections on Neuroscience: Are We Seeing the World or Creating It? Perception & Sensory Integration

From time to time I will be posting on neuroscientific areas of interest– from published studies, more mainstream reporting on science, and the work that I’m doing at the lab, or in classes. My driving interest is human behavior – how it happens, what is behind it. How does a brain make a mind, a ‘self?’ Human behavior is fascinating to me, so whether I’m teaching acting, directing theater, studying the brain’s processing of sensory information, or reading a about a character in a book – that’s what motivates my interest and is, no doubt, much of what you will read at this address. The study I’m working on at the lab looks at sensory integration – the ability to take all the information from our separate senses – and combine it as one experience. The lab I’m lucky enough to work for did some of the landmark conceptual work in this area. One of their important experiments helped establish the timing of this process of integration in normal adult brains. Our current experiment collaborates with a neuropsychologist's lab to compare that process in “normally” developing brains in 5-15 year olds, and the same age kids with developmental disorders like autism or Asperger’s Syndrome, attention disorders like ADHD, and sensory integration problems.

I wanted to talk about autism today because that what I’m reading about, but I think I’ll devote this post to some conceptual information regarding sensory integration itself and get to the subject of autism in a later post.

Think about what happens when we perceive an object. It’s amazing! Separate systems with highly specialized functions (our eyes, ears, etc.) take in very discrete aspects of that object, e.g. its horizontal edges or curves – its features. In order to recognize a word, we must perceive its letters, and in order to perceive those letters we need to construct them from lines and loops, and that means that at some point they must be put back together. The “binding problem” is how, throughout the isolated processing of separate features, we keep track of those features as parts of that one object. It is thought that attention might cause the neurons processing the features in separate cognitive systems to fire in the same rhythm flagging the features that must be put back together.

Sensory Integration
Multisensory integration is the binding of parts to create the experience of a whole object, which is our usual experience. If we see and hear a red car driving by, the separate systems of our visual apparatus deals with shape, color, movement – all the visual components – another system processes the auditory components. At some point they must be reassembled if we are to experience a red car driving by. Once it was thought that visual and auditory information from a single object was first processed separately, in the more primary sensory areas of the brain, combining later in higher multisensory areas - when the individual features are put back together. However, given the different lengths and thicknesses of sight and sound neurons, some of the information would have to wait for the other – causing a traffic jam. Some of the people I work measured electrical brain activity in order to understand when audiovisual integration happens in the process of perception. Areas of the brain that were originally thought to be devoted exclusively to early processing of just one sense, demonstrated that they were processing information from two senses just 46 milliseconds after the appearance of the object. In layman’s terms – that is really, really fast. That would be too little time for information to have been relayed all the way up the visual pathways to the higher levels where integration was thought to happen, and feed all the way back down to the auditory areas. They concluded that integration had to happen much earlier. This was supported by evidence that sensory integration remains intact even when those areas that were once thought to be higher multisensory processing areas are damaged. For those of you interested in a more thorough version, here’s a link to the lab’s papers on sensory integration. Molholm, et. al. 2002 is a seminal one.

Early low-level multisensory integration would be helpful in conceiving of a solution for the binding problem. Establishing an association between separate sensory systems that have processed information independently and at different rates would be extraordinarily difficult. Furthermore, as information moves through the system, it is recoded many times along the way (an explanation follows below). Early cross-communication between separate inputs prior to several generations of recoding would be more efficient (although nothing promises that brain processes are actually efficient, neuroscientists love to think they are). It also suggests a system that uses both feedforward AND feedback pathways – which is borne out physiologically and is another really cool aspect of perception to ponder.

Visual Processing Stream

I’ll talk just about the visual system now. It was thought, until only a few years ago, that visual information moves in only one direction. It enters the retina, (I’ll do a simplified version) travels to the thalamus, (a nexus in the center of brain, where connections from many areas meet, located beneath the outer layer of the brain known as the cortex), travels from there down the optic radiations to the primary visual cortex (in the occipital lobe located at the back of your head more or less where the skull bumps out an inch above where the soft part of your neck begins), then moves up through the visual areas higher and higher. Lower level or primary information would be details like horizontal and vertical edges – fine details, high resolution stuff – the earliest areas have neurons that are tuned to process only that kind of information. As we proceed up the visual pathway, higher area’s neurons levels are sensitive to less fine grained, more global information – e.g., color – higher still would be areas where associations between features are made. Finally, frontal lobe areas connect that information to memory areas where matches to previously seen whole objects are made, and we can be said to have “recognized” them. What has been observed is that the connections go both ways – forward and back. In fact, between certain levels of the visual system there are MORE connections seen going backwards than forwards. Many people (but not all) interpret that to mean that the information travels both ways. Scientists in the lab where I work were also responsible for some of the work that proposed this reconception of perception. If you want to read one of the papers I’d say Foxe & Simpson, 2002 is a really good one.

The term bottom-up is used to describe the flow of information going from lowest level to the higher (the object outside you, to your retina, to your visual cortex, to your frontal cortex) and top-down to describe the flow of information that proceeds from higher areas to lower. Top-down flow may sound counter-intuitive but were doing it all the time. It happens, for example, when we perceive a letter as part of a word. We perceive letters in the context of words faster than letters alone (measured in milliseconds) – why? – because, having stored a word in our memory with the many associations we have made in reference to it, the features that comprises that letter travel along a better paved road, both speeding up the process that leads to our perceiving that letter and saving on the cognitive effort needed to do so. But according to many researchers in the area, top-down processes are a normal part of every perceptive act we perform.

That two-way stream is feeding information from the top-down, and that has an important implication about what we’re seeing. Think about our common conception of seeing – “seeing is believing” “I saw it with my own eyes” “there was a witness” – all of these phrases equate seeing with truth. We value the evidence given us by our trustworthy eyes and think that what we see is an accurate representation of what is in the outside world…is it?

Recoding and what this all might mean
I look at it this way: there is only one time the object in the external world is truly unadulterated - that is in that external world, prior to its entry into our perceptive systems. When it enters our sensory equipment it is immediately in pieces. The whole red car does not drive onto our retina – its features are apprehended by neurons, each designed to convert light into code that our nervous system can read. It travels through system, each processing step means new neurons with slightly different specializations are functioning and information is recoded at each step. The primary visual cortex predominantly processes features. The fourth level of the visual processing stream processes associations of many features – those neurons don’t “read” the same language and so translation, or recoding, is necessary. Finally information is integrated, i.e. visual code, auditory code, and tactile code, are translated into multi-sensory code. We are constantly creating new wholes that get further and further from the original red car in actual form – even though at our highest conceptual processing levels we identify the information as ‘red car.’ BUT – and this is a big but – parallel to that process – something is keeping track of all those features so that eventually they can all be put back together as part of the same whole and referenced to other cars we have stored in memory.

So the three take-home messages would be:

• perceiving an object requires integrating information from all the different senses
• the pathway that leads to perception is a two-way stream - high-level information feeds down to areas that analyze basic information and vice-versa
• as information travels the pathway it is recoded many times since information from the external world (color, three dimensional objects in space) cannot literally occupy space in our heads
  

Each of our experiences is unique (even twins who share an extraordinary amount of similarities occupy different skins, different physical spaces, and therefore do not see exactly the same thing). Given the fact that each of us experience different things, each of our memories possess different stores of experiences and therefore, each of our top-down processes reference themselves to different associations. Each person is his or her own context. If context changes meaning - and it does - then I create each time I perceive. I create perceptions even if they come from existing sensory information because they are recoded in the context of me, in a way no one else could recode them - how I recombine them is original. The red car itself does not exist in my head, only the re-coded information from the object and the referent visual, semantic, and acoustic information held in my memory are. I must create that car when cued to do so by my environment. No one else will see it with my perceptual apparatus, from the point in space and time that I saw it. That information is perceived because it is recombined in me today instead of yesterday.

I think this is an extraordinary concept - perception is in some ways a creative act. And this is a satisfying notion for the artist/neuroscientist in me. A composer builds a piece of music from the same notes all the other composers have, but they neverwrite the same piece. The same red car can pass both of us on the same street, yet we will create perceptions based on the context that is ourselves. The process by which our brainscreate visual images (internal representations experienced as visual without no external information causing them) has even more parallels with creating a work of art, but I'll save that for another day. Each of our brains are remarkable creators day in and day out every time we look and see – oh my god, how exhausting!

Since this is my first neuro-post I'd appreciate feedback from you, especially if you're not in the field. Was it comprehensible to you? Was it interesting? Do you want more? Would you rather be strung up by your toenails - let me know.

Summer Poetry Challenge Update!! - The Details

The Challenge: Assign yourself 4 poems you have not really read:

• 1 poem written before 1900
• 1 poem written 1900-2000
• 1 poem written in 2000-2007
• 1 poem you're intimidated by, find mysterious, or simply don't understand, from any period.

These can be any length - really. They can be haiku, they can be book-length. They can be famous, they can be unknown - just don't use your own poetry, please. Otherwise, suit yourself.

What to do: Please formally enroll yourself here with your blog name in parentheses and blog URL (linking me directly to your posting of the poems will make the process more efficient for your visitors, but do as you wish). Also list your four poem titles and poets, please. If you change your mind or fill in one as you go, please mark your addendum as "your blog name" poetry submission #2 (etc...). Please label all posts "summer poetry challenge." One submission (of four poems) per person, please.

Sign-up deadline: No later than July 20, 2007.

I will post an index of all participants, listing your name, blog, four poems and poets. I will be on vacation from June 27 - July 9, so don't panic if you submit in that period and don't see yourself immediately. That index will link readers in our "reading week" to your poems directly.

Posting deadline: For one week, beginning August 1, post your poems (unless they're too long, in which case your thoughts on them, your questions about them, and any excerpts you choose can be posted instead). If they are long poems, post sooner so others can read them too if they choose!

Posting the poems on your own site will create readers for you and put your dialogue right at your fingertips, but with any luck we will get a cross-dialogue going.

If there is to be any sort of contest, details will follow but right now, I'm thinking the pleasure is in the reading.

Please inform me if I could be organizing things better - I haven't been blogging very long. Thanks for your guidance, Imani!

Check in periodically for updates.

Most of all - read gorgeously good poems and spread the word(s)!

Blogroll Game

Dewey over at The Hidden Side of a Leaf (great moniker - no?), is hosting a blogroll game. Think of it as a networking event for bloggers. If you want to meet more bloggers, you can use the button below. It will transport you there instantly so that you can check it out!

Book Review: Dickens - Writer With A Mission

I've begun Bleak House, actually I'm about half-way through, as the first book of my Summer Reading Challenge. I'm sort of re-reading it - I had to read it in an undergraduate course called Dickens and Dostoyevsky in which we had so much assigned - The Opium Eaters, Oliver Twist, Anna Karenina, Dostoyevsky's short stories, Brothers Karamazov, Crime and Punishment AND Bleak House - that something had to go. I read half of Bleak House, which I couldn't stand at the time, and asked my friend Pam to tell me the rest of the story. If I recall right, I did at least as well as she on the final and she wasn't too happy about that. I think I'm just at the point of the story where I'm not re-reading anymore.

Now that it isn't an assignment, I am loving it! I'm struck by three things in Dickens' writing. Well more than three, but I’ll write about three:
1) He writes from passion. This man is driven by mission - he sees injustice and hypocrisy in the world and he writes about it. I can't think of a better reason to write. But he doesn't lecture us at all, he writes a great story so that we actual want to read on and find out what happens. I'm finding this one a page-turner.

“This boy,” says the constable, “although he’s repeatedly told to, won’t move on-”

“I’m always a moving on, sir,” cries the boy, wiping away his grimy tears with his arm. “I’ve always been a moving and a moving on, every since I was born. Where can I possible move to, sir, more nor I do move!”

“He won’t move on,” says the constable, calmly, with a slight professional hitch of his neck involving its better settlement in his stiff stock, “although he has been repeatedly cautioned, and therefore I am obliged to take him into custody. He’s as obstinate a young gonoph as I know. He WON’T move on.”

“O my eye! Where can I move to!” cries the boy, clutching quite desperately at his hair, and beating his bare feet upon the floor of Mr. Snagsby’s passage.

“Don’t you come none of that, or I shall make blessed short work of you!” says the constable, giving him a passionless shake. “My instructions are, that you are to move on. I have told you so five hundred times.”

“But where?” cries the boy.

“Well! Really, constable, you know,” says Mr. Snagsby wistfully, and coughing behind his hand his cough of great perplexity and doubt; “really, that does seem a question. Where, you know?”

“My instructions don’t go to that,” replies the constab le. “My instructions are that this boy is to move on.”

Do you hear, Jo? It is nothing to you or to any one else, that the great lights of the parliamentary sky have failed for some few years, in this business, to set you the example of moving on. The one grand recipe remains for you – the profound philosophical prescription – the be-all and the end-all of your strange existence upon earth. Move on! You are by no means to move off, Jo, for the great lights can’t at all agree about that. Move on!

Social criticism and humor and pathos are all wrapped up together in this one little scene. It sounds like bureaucracy hasn’t changed in 150 years.

2) The psychology of the characters and the story telling are complex and completely modern. I know some site Dickens as the ultimate caricaturist, but I think his best characters are boldly drawn but stop just short of caricatures, you really get them and can laugh out loud at their behavior.

Mr. Snagsby is sure he is being used by an influential lawyer, yet he can’t quite put his finger on how. His behavior becomes distracted. His wife, seeing her husband distracted is sure that her husband is keeping something from her:

To know that he is always keeping a secret from her; that he has, under all circumstances, to conceal and hold fast a tender double-tooth, which her sharpness is ever ready to twist out of his head; gives Mr. Snagsby, in her dentistical presence, much of the air of a dog who has a reservation from his mater, and will look anywhere rather than meet his eye.

Isn’t that marvelous – ‘dentistical!’ Mrs. Snagsby begins to go through her husband’s pockets, his letters, his safe, putting together a completely false story:

Mrs. Snagsby screws a watchful glance on Jo, as he is brought into the little drawing-room by Guster. He looks at Mr. Snagsby the moment he come in. Aha! Why does he look at Mr. Snagsby? Mr. Snagsby looks at him. Why should he do that, but that Mrs. Snagsby sees it all? Why else should that look pass between them; why else should Mr. Snagsby be confused, and cough a signal cough behind his hand? It is as clear as crystal that Mr. Snagsby is that boy’s father.

It proceeds from her husband being distracted to his having a secret, out-of-wedlock child, which bespeaks volumes on her character. What would a modern couples’ therapist say about this!

Sometime the character insights are profound. Richard is around 19 years-old. He has been made party of an interminable case stuck in the Court of Chancery for years and years that is at the center of this novel, because he is a descendent of one of the original plaintiffs. Knowing he will one day have money, he tries medicine, the law, and the army – beginning each with enthusiasm – knowing it will be the answer - but each one fails to live up to his expectations and he quits. His happy-go-lucky façade combined with his inability to “settle down” causes Jardynce and Esther much worry. Their heart-to-heart chats about this young man, whom they both love deeply, read like contemporary pillow-chat of 21^st century parents.

It’s another modern touch that this novel presents the story not in one voice, but in two – a personable, omniscient narrator gives us a third-person view on much of the story – on London, on a tremendous number of characters who, by the half-way point in the book, are being brought closer and closer together. This tends to be the more humorous voice. But we learn most about the core of central characters – Esther, Ada, Richard, and their guardian – the wonderful Mr. Jarndyce, through Esther’s first-person account. Two completely different tones pervade the story and alternate nicely, creating contrasting rhythms, points of view and suspense – since you're wondering what’s happening in the one world after you’ve been in the other for a while.

3) Now, I mean this in a good way, by this novel reminds me of nothing so much as serialized television. It is driven by plot – i.e. you want to know what will happen next, it’s characters are oversized, it comments on the issues of the day – the corrupt Court of Chancery, the immense inequity of the way those with and without live their lives, and it’s massively entertaining. His books are assigned in school now and Dickens has achieved the ranking of “classic,” but really these are popular entertainment, and the parallels with our own day in every realm – from social injustice to the hypocrisy of human behavior – are striking.

I am just loving this book.

Poetry Challenge - NEWER VERSION POSTED JUNE 2 Link to it below

Link to Summer Poetry Challenge Rules by clicking here.



I would like to propose a summer reading challenge. It's easy in one way - the reading assignments can be quite short, it might be challenging in others.

This occurred to me today as I was posting a comment to Daniel in response to her reading of The Good Soldier at her great blog A Work in Progress. Poems do things with words that prose does not - that might seem obvious - but we pretty much all use words everyday and have a certain expectation of how they're meant to be used - we're supposed to explain our point clearly and, generally, economically, if possible. But poems use words purely for the sake of structure, texture, sound, how they look on the page, their aim may not be clarity but instead obscurity, poking fun, doing what we're not supposed to do, or expressing private matters in a secret code. We pretty much accept that paint and clay can be used non-representationally, we know that space can curve, that light can be conceived of as both a particle and a wave, but when words challenge our expectations...

See the rules by clicking on the above link and, meanwhile, here's one I enjoy:

The Wrong Way Home
- James Tate

All night long a door floated down the river.
It tried to remember little incidents of pleasure
from its former life, like the time the lovers
leaned against it kissing for hours
and whispering those famous words.
Later, there were harsh words and a shoe
was thrown and the door was slammed.
Comings and goings by the thousands,
the early mornings and late nights, years, years.
O they've got big plans, they'll make a bundle.
The door was an island that swayed in its sleep.
the moon turned the doorknob just slightly,
burned its fingers and ran,
and still the door said nothing and slept.
At least that's what they like to say,
the little fishes and so on.
Far away, a bell rang, and then a shot was fired.

Jeff Buckley - Dido's Lament

Jeff Buckley Lament, as promised

Lament for a Genius - (Jeff Buckley - Live at the Green Mill)

My friend Sheila over at The Sheila Variations had a great memorial post to Jeff Buckley the great rock troubadour, who died ten years ago, remembering a concert she and I attended together at the Green Mill in Chicago. Not only the best live performance I've ever attended -period - but most influential one for me as a an acting teacher and director. My memory of that great evening was that it started with a depressed woman with very talented hair singing songs of doom to open the show. Every bit of her exuded gloom - her diction was depressed, her outfit was depressed, never mind the songs. She invited JB up on stage to do the final song with her. He reluctantly gave up his position at the bar where he'd been drinking a too much tequila, still in his overcoat, slunk up to the stage, and sat on the floor with his back to us so that she would have the limelight for the end of her set.

When JB and his band got up on stage they tuned and suddenly photographers were everywhere, shooting pictures which made Buckley very self conscious. I should just say that I'm going to take the liberty of imagining some of the thing's Buckley thought, and I could be way off. The tour was for the release of his then new album - Grace. He riffed vocally for a while with no words - just 'ah' - until they stopped taking pictures, he seemed to hate the photographs, The first several songs he could not find his footing, he would sing a piece from the album and would feel it was lifeless and just moan to us "God this sucks. I'm so sorry. I wish I could give you all your money back." It was agonizing to watch. He was a performer that was all about being with the music at this one moment in time that would never come again. His tour was about publicity and performing the same pieces over and over again like he did on the recording, but because he'd said some stupid thing to Rolling Stone or MTV - some really influential media outlet in music they threatened would cost him any future publicity- he was kicking himselft and censoring himself and just couldn't get past it. He was not meeting his own standards. He apologized after every one of the first few songs and then, I believe it was on Leonard Cohen's Halleluiah, he started the song and then quieted the band and began riffing a capella - I believe it was on the line "it's a cold and it's a broken Halleluiah" - I think he just couldn't stand not being with the music any more. He improvised for at least five or ten minutes on that phrase until he finally found his way to the moment he was in - disappointed in himself, in the conflict created by career and art, in love with the music, and finding that new moment in a song he's performed 100 times. I've always thought that that was the job of the artist - not just a live performer, but a painter or a writer too. It's the part of the work that is hardest in some ways. I'm obsessed with artists' creative processes, how we awaken ourselves to the moment we're in rather that the moment we think we should be in - because of our artists' expertise - about the right words or the prettiest notes - we get sidetracked and start trying to get out of the lousy moment we're in (which is the actual pay dirt) and instead get to some "better" thing we think should be there to make the song or the character or the sentence good, right, funny, brilliant - or in some way appealing to our vanity. That struggle is a tough one - it's a daily war for an artist - and the thing that always amazed me was that he fought that battle right in front of us. When I think of the really great performers I've seen - Lorraine Hunt Lieberson in concert (Alex Ross at The Rest is Noise who always has great writing on music, has some excellent posts on Hunt Lieberson), Kim Stanley on film, Billy Crudup in Waking the Dead, Geraldine Page in almost anything at all - that's what they all do. It's an act of courage really - to strive to be your imperfect self in front of everyone.

The rest of Buckley's concert was like being under a spell. It's sad that there is not more music to be heard from him, more of that haunting voice, great taste in songs (he sang Pink Floyd like Rock ballads, Edith Piaf, Benjamin Britten - stupendous stuff), and that we can't see him continue to wage that battle. I'm sure it would have been beautiful.

And what is more fitting than having him sing his own lament (let's see if I can figure out how to post this recording and slide show). Hah! I've succeeded, it's above. "Remember me, but ah, forget my fate." How apt.

Happy Weekend

Off to my partner's grandmother's 90th birthday party and a long weekend with the family (and hopefully a fair amount of reading - I want to get a running start on Bleak House for the Summer Reading Challenge (see below, I hope that's not cheating), and I have tons of reading to do for the autism research I'm working on. More on that later.
Danielle at A Work in Progress has some nice stuff posted on Katherine Mansfield's diaries, if you want to continue on that theme (and I do!). I've linked to her blog on the Blogs I Like list.
See you Wednesday.

Transformation Courtesy of Katherine Mansfield

One of the reasons I love French film (aside from the fact that the characters always have to find parking spaces and they're constantly eating) is how I see the world after viewing them. Certain film makers use the camera not to make the world more perfect that it really is, but to see how perfect this world is, and that stays with me when I leave the theater - if it was a really good film, all day long. Great documentaries can do this too, like the great double feature Film Forum showed about the artists Kiki Smith and Agnes Martin back in January, or the absolutely amazing John Cage and Merce Cunningham one of my favorites. You sit in their workspaces or their homes with them and the film renders them as objects of utter fascination. I love watching John Cage, one of music's most controversial composers, rinse the grain that he is about to prepare in the kitchen of his loft. But I'm digressing, the point is that the world seems different after watching them. French films often make me see a brick wall or hear the sound of a shoe clocking on the pavement as something new and Katherine Mansfield's Prelude seems to have the same power. I'm nearly done reading it and At the Bay and The Doll's House, in a neat little edition of three Mansfield stories that all feature the same family.

They quote Virginia Woolf on the back cover, who said that she was jealous of Mansfield's writing, and it is easy to see why. The stories remind me of nothing so much as The Waves. It's as though we're watching the world through the eyes of a dragon fly, skimming over the surface of this glassy world and every so often we land weightlessly and pick up a phrase or stark detail that , like a shard of glass, cuts beneath the surface and makes the world bleed, and then it flits on. There is a chilling moment in At The Bay where the mother lies dreamily with her baby boy on a summer day, one minute you're smelling the heat and laziness and the next you hear her thinking that she really doesn't like her baby boy at all, and then the sound of the ocean pulls you out of that thought and on to something else.

I broke open a brand new bag of sencha this morning (I'm something of a tea freak), and I saw the amazing potent green of the leaves and tasted the grassy, nutty tea through the lens of the Prelude. I love that - the world transformed by a story. Mansfield's voice is lyrical but stark, and the volume is slim but not "lite."

Summer Reading Challenge

There's a fun summer reading challenge hosted by Amanda's Weekly Zen and I have accepted with alacrity... and 10 books, (yeah, right):
Bleak House
The Symbolic Species
Memory, Brain, and Belief
Beyond Black
All the Names
The Unconsoled
Better
The Yiddish Policemen's Union
The Author of Himself
Elia Kazan

Shameless Self-Promotion

I am shamelessly tagging myself for this meme (which I always think of as a Me Me!) courtesy of Reading is my Superpower who I enjoy reading.

A book that made you cry: Sula by Toni Morrison - bawled my eyes out in an ice cream store in Pittsburgh.

A book that scared you: The Magus I guess freaked me out would be more accurate. Although it may have been the 16th century castle in Bruges that I read it in. It was haunted.

A book that made you laugh: To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis.

A book that disgusted you: One of my neuroanatomy textbooks had a section on the part of the brain connected with vomiting (area postrema) and it made me gag - does that count? Interestingly, this part of the brain is one of the few that is permeable to toxins. It is responsible for inducing vomiting in humans but in animals like rats, which are scavengers, and cannot vomit, it is responsible for associating certain tastes with danger. This kind of learning is accomplished in just a single trial (if the rat is lucky enough to survive being poisoned). It accomplishes conditioned taste aversion in humans too, which is the reason you can't eat the food you get sick on for years. Was that too much information?

A book you loved in elementary school: From The Mixed up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler. I still dream of spending a whole glorious night in the Metropolitan Museum without being caught.

A book you loved in middle school: The Hardy Boys Detective Handbook - I never had enough of it.

A book you loved in high school: All the President's Men and everything by Agatha Christie.

A book you hated in high school: I can't believe it's true but, A Catcher in the Rye.

A book you loved in college: Franny and Zooey.

A book that challenged your identity: Brideshead Revisited, and I'm just watching the BBC adaptation again - one of the best things ever made for television.

A series that you love: His Dark Materials trilogy.

Your favorite horror book: I don't like being scared, but I remember Something Wicked This Way Comes, being a good kind of scare, romantic with the smell of autumn in it.

Your favorite science fiction book: Maybe this is more horror or psychological thriller but The Man Who Turned into Himself is pretty great.

Your favorite fantasy: Memory and Dream is pretty great and de Lint's voice is a singular one. Also, I admit it, I'm a Harry Potter fan.

Your favorite mystery: I love the early Arturo Perez-Reverte stuff, especially The Flanders Panel and The Club Dumas.

Your favorite biography: Oh my god - one? You have to understand, I love biographies. and I get so into them that I have to check whether and how the person dies at the end if I'm getting into it so that I don't have to end my reading experience with their death: Personal History about and by the remarkable Katharine Graham, Joe Papp, John Adams, and two less conventional ones Rodinsky's Room - a great read - and Sir John Gielgud: A Life in Letters.

Your favorite “coming of age” book: Shadow of a Man. I love May Sarton's writing and ate up the romance of this novel about coming of age when I was coming of age.

Your favorite classic: The Waves

Your favorite romance book: Maurice.

Your favorite book not on this list: The Goldbug Variations just amazing, but it's dense, give it time!

Long-time bloggers probably hate being dinged the way I hate getting promises of much luck and fortune coming through emailing 9 people some ridiculous piece of drek so, I'll leave this to any reader so moved.

Actually, I lied, I'm ammending this post one day later and dinging two bloggers for this meme. Memes are silly however, they're one way to get acquainted and I'm new to the blogging world and want to meet my community. Also, I want to mix up my worlds - my life mixes arts and sciences - so, I hope you take this in the spirit I intend it - I read you regularly and enjoy your blogs a lot: Jake at Pure Pedantry and Jonah at Frontal Cortex, consider yourselves dinged (dung?) ...but no pressure if you'd rather not.

110 In The Shade - hot, hot, hot

From time to time I plan to write on my theater going experiences, since that has been such an important part of my life. 110 In The Shade is a musical version of N. Richard Nash's 1954 play, The Rainmaker by Tom Jones and Harvey Schmidt of The Fantastics fame. You will certainly be familiar with the play if you have every been in an acting class. You can't get out of one without seeing someone do a scene from that play. More likely many of you saw the film with Burt Lancaster and Katherine Hepburn. I saw the show a few weeks ago at the Roundabout Theater (linked above) when it was still in previews and it is terrific.

In many ways this is a classic Broadway musical - it's structure is tried and true. It opens with a chorus number, the lead character - Lizzie Curry - has a character-revealing solo in Act I, it has a secondary romantic couple who do a silly dance number, but classical form has never been a fault. It works for Shakespeare. That's one place I really fault Ben Brantley's NY Times review which called Audra McDonald's superb performance "too good" for the piece. He's certainly not off the mark about the quality of her performance - utterly human, compelling, beautifully sung whether lyrical or belt, real deeply-felt acting at every moment - but I think he misses what her performances reveals about this musical. A good performance is not going to change the form of a piece created for Broadway in 1963, however the musical doesn't patronize Lizzie, as Brantley claims, its her father and older brother who patronize her. If you read traditional plot summaries of this piece, they describe Lizzie as an "old maid" and Starbuck - the rainmaker - as a "con man." Sure, those are their stereotypes, and her father is an "old man," and her younger brother is a "rube," BUT if you can get past your expectations of what a musical is supposed to give you - and with many of the performances in this production you actually can - you see a story where those characters belie their stereotypes, and that is what this show is all about. It seems to me this is not a story about an old maid (the point of view one takes looking in on the story from the outside) it is Lizzie's story. She has almost all the music in the show - and as such, this story reveals the experience of the "other." Whether that is the experience of two musical theater-loving boys growing up in Texas in the 1930s , as in the case of Jones and Schmidt (am I reading too much into this?), or the story of a black woman growing up in a white society, as I can imagine Audra McDonald probably experienced - they both speak deeply through the experience of Lizzie, still unmarried because she is bookish and outspoken and taught that that means she is not attractive. Audra Mcdonald infuses each moment spoken or sung with the most deeply human pain and rage, and that's far from being "too good" for this piece, it is rather exactly what it needs so that we can feel this story from the inside and either remember or learn what the pain of ostracism is like. It is a disservice when a society teaches us to judge others merely for their difference from us. It is tragic when that society adds to that corrupting that person's own judgment of themselves, so that they imagine themselves less smart, beautiful or worthy than they actually are.

Other things to enjoy in this worthwhile production are John Cullum's relaxed, hapless father, and a wonderfully understated Christopher Invar (although he sometimes sings under pitch) , as File, the sherrif and another outsider in this story. Santo Loquasto's double-turntable set is very effective - particularly as used by director Lonny Price in one number of Lizzie's toward the end of the show. I also liked the simple disk serving both as the "curtain" and the looming sun of the drought afflicted Southwestern town. The fancy house that trucks in for the early scene in which we are introduced to the Curry family and then witness Lizzie's homecoming, replete with walls and a door, seems like overkill - some furniture on the turntable would have served just as well. And I'll put in a plea you may hear frequently from me: these are talented singers - does the show HAVE to be miked? I hate when a show works so hard to create intimacy with a nicely sized theater and honest performances and then completely throws me out of the experience when their voice seems to come from somewhere else. Finally, I praise the casting of good singers and actors of all races - without respect to whether they are playing members of the same family. The opera world been way ahead of theater on this score for years. It's about time that it becomes common practice on the Broadway stage. Talent is talent and this show is full of it - I hope you get a chance to see it.

First Post Ever

There is probably no one reading this besides me, but the whole point of starting this blog is for me to interact through writing, and I am writing. And I see no reason not to cut to the chase...

I've just come off a two month jag of not being able to read what I want - I'm in graduate school - so the end of the spring term meant one thing for me - books I choose, especially fiction. Rebecca Stott's Ghostwalk was the first. In its early pages you can feel the author trying hard. It boasts not one prologue but two! And the line "it was difficult to tell where your skin ended and mine began" almost scared me off, but I stuck with it. If you enjoy literate mysteries, this one has the ultimate in romantic settings - Cambridge (UK). It satisfies every pop-lit craving you could ask for - stories in twin time periods, the history of Cambridge, romance, animal rights, Sir Isaac Newton, and neuroscience. The voice is a trifle self-conscience, and at times corny, but it is well plotted - a satisfying literary page-turner - and a lovely welcome back to fiction after starvation, if ever there was one.