Helter Skelter - the stepping stones of my mind (tales of a scattershot reader)

Today's post will be scattershot, if not quite desultory,reflecting my mind and getting in those GRE vocab words. A sultry day yesterday, with a couple of tremendous downpours. It made everything damp - my shoes, my shirt - so I was slightly chilled every time I went inside somewhere airconditioned - my brain, my personality... damp, damp, damp. After two mind-numbing hours yesterday on the difference between developmental scores and standard scores on psychological tests, two reading a couple of studies on how we recognize objects when we can't see them completely, and another two analyzing data on a study about factors influencing learning and performance, I was hoping some leisurely reading time was in the cards. No such luck. First I flitted about on line - visited Matt and Siew, both back from their vacations, dropped in on Lotus reads who had a great post on a new book about alexia which is all over the sphere, and finally I headed over to my friend Sheila who was raving about the likelihood of coming down with Capgras syndrome spontaneously by thinking about it too much - I totally understand! Because, although you resemble my usual reader you are clearly a cleverly constructed copy sent here by the French government. We then shared a rave on a wonderfully fun book called The Man Who Turned into Himself by David Ambrose. All I can say is read it - it is sci fi, quantum physics, and a love story - that makes it sound complex which it's not - it's an easy read, not brilliant. But without giving too much away, it's about a man who needs denial really badly, so he enters an alternate reality. It's the kind of book that twists my brain into a little pretzel. Then I wanted to hunker down with some happy analogue reading - you know the kind with pages, the kind for which you have to knock down a few trees. I jumped from Didion to Laurie King (see current reading on the side bar) - and they weren't doing it for me. So I picked up The Welsh Girl which I read about over at Dovegreyreader Scribbles. I believe it was nominated for the Booker Prize, I don't know if it got any further, I just can get myself to care about awards. Anyway, I don't like reading multiple books at a time - some of you impress me no end with your ability to frolic from flower-to-flower, keeping track of multiple plots, characters and impressions. But each book is its own world to me, and I want to be in that world until I'm out. I'm a one-book kind of guy. Not so this week. I've become an adulterous reader. I've only just started but already I'm hooked. The time: 1944; the place: Wales; the situation: a young British officer is brought to interrogate Rudolph Hess. That's all I got before falling asleep as the humidity finally broke.

Neurology is psychology is neurology is.... but who are you? (Books - The Echo Maker by Richard Powers and an article on Capgras syndrome)

There is a short piece in the Science Times this morning about a rare form of the already rare Capgras syndrome, in which someone can no longer recognize certain people who are close to them, believing them to be imposters. The piece, which I link to here, is surprisingly uninformative, giving a psychoanalytic explanation for the condition which considers it a form of displacement, which is in a sense not arguable, but, while it mentionins that there may be a neurological cause, it never discusses the credible theories that exist. So I will.

I also found it surprising that the article made no reference to The Echo Maker, a fantastic novel by Richard Powers that came out less than a year ago and received tons of press. It may indeed be the source of your own familiarity with Capgras, if you've read it, as its plot revolves around a man, Mark, who acquires the syndrome following a car accident and can no longer recognize his sister or his dog. A little primer here on our best understanding of the neuroscience behind face recognition both when it works and when it breaks down.

The human face - it's the chief tool we use to determine the identity of others - although there are other cues. Given the fact that the same basic features comprise most faces and sit in relatively the same place, it is a wonder how we make distinctions among thousands of faces every day and can usually recognize a person as familiar somehow after a single meeting (even if we're struggling for their name). Aside from the normal visual apparatus that we use to see and identify any object at all, a network of regions that include the fusiform face area and the occipital face area have been identified as responding more strongly to faces than to other objects and are probably involved in face detection and perception (although probably not as much in gaze perception, head detection, or memory for faces). Some scientists persuasively argue that the fusiform face area specializes not for faces per se, but rather for objects for which we have great expertise and that faces are simply the exemplar of something requiring this kind of processing, but I won't get into that argument now.

Prosopagnosia is a deficit in which people cannot recognize faces. Even though prosopagnosics cannot overtly recognize people from their faces, their body tells us by other means (measures of perspiration a change in the autonomic nervous system that indicates emotional arousal, ) that are though to be a form of covert recognition - some part of us recognizes the familiar face even if we do not consciously register it. It has been suggested that there are two concurrent visual pathways, a ventral one is providing the detection of identity by matching the stimuli we are seeing with something in our memory, while a dorsal route is providing emotional information that distinguishes what is relevant to us from what is irrelevant by involving the limbic system (associated with emotions), and providing a source for this covert recognition - an unconscious feeling of familiarity.

Capgras syndrome is a delusion that someone closely related to the patient and recognized as resembling that person has been replaced by an imposter. Misidentification syndromes are not exclusive to human stimuli, they can involve inanimate objects as well. While the precise location of the pathology is not yet identified, it has been shown that Capgras patients recognize the the faces - i.e. their form a match with information in their memory - but do not show the emotional or covert response, that sends the message indicating familiarity. So Capgras is effectively the mirror image of prosopagnosia. If the two route model holds true, Capgras is explained as damage to the dorsal route connection the limbic system. However, this creates an interesting paradox - the emotional response is assumed to demonstrate the relevance conferred on the face by its familiarity, however, the stimuli has to have been recognized already as familiar before it can elicit this emotion. So a newer model suggests one route until recognition with two pathways afterward - one to biographical information and the second to emotion information. In either case, it is damage to the limbic system and or the connection to it that is presumed to be at fault and researchers interested in such subjects have been exploring damage to the amygdala - an important component of the limbic system - as a player in Capgras syndrome.

I find it troubling that all of these models omit any discussion of the delusional component of Capgras in which lack of a confirmatory feeling is given an absurd rather than a reasonable explanation. If a friend who I've haven't seen without long sideburns for the last five years walks into the room with them shaved off, I may feel that there is something different about him but be unable to place what it is for a while. However, I am unlikely, even at my worst moments, to think that he is an alien from outer space who has replaced my friend. That is usually the type of delusion you hear about with Capgras. Some neuroscientists expect that there is concurrent frontal lobe damage. Others are looking for two anatomical sources for the covert recognition as opposed to one. The jury is out.

Today's Science Times article, written by a psychiatrist says:

My patient suffered from a variation of Capgras syndrome, in which people are replaced by inexact duplicates. It has been considered rare, but the more I work with geriatric patients, the more I am diagnosing it.

I found this the most interesting part of the article. I'm curious whether this "inexact" duplication suggests a subclass of Capgras patients that have damage to both the overt and covert types of recognition or whether it is simply a variation in the narrative that accompanies their particular delusion.

Richard Power's novel The Echo Maker gives both beautiful and credible expression to what it must be like to be inside such a delusion. It also deals meaningfully with the repercussions that are experienced by his sister Karin, who uproots herself to help her brother in his crisis, and a famous neurologist who visits him and who I took to be a fictional amalgam of the neurologist and writer Oliver Sachs and the neuroscientist and theorist in consciousness Gerald Edelman. It is mysterious to contemplate identity - one of my favorite subjects - we would all likely say we have one (or at least one) but where does it originate? Is it fixed or malleable? What does it mean not to be recognized - not from one's physical appearance but because one doesn't seem the same anymore. Karin is understandably distressed because Mark doesn't think she is the same person anymore, and yet her brother goes through a terrible accident and she leaves her job and her life to care for him - OF COURSE SHE IS NOT THE SAME PERSON ANY MORE! Mark is undeniably delusional as Karin knows she is Karin and has not been replaced by the government, but there is a peculiar truth to his perception that she is no longer the same, which is expressed in all its complexity by Powers novel as Karin deals with the day-to-day realities of Mark's accident. The doctor too observes the nature of his own identity in light of experiencing the fragility of who we are through Mark's disease. What Power's novel expresses so well about Capgras (which is not its only point by a long shot) is that the syndrome cannot be said to be exclusively neurological any more than it can said to be psychological. In this day and age, one does not exist without the other.

The Romance of Acquiring Knowledge (Books - The Beekeeper's Apprentice - Laurie R. King)

Mary Russel is a lonely, brilliant 15-year-old heiress whose parents have both died (is this a requisite for young heroes and heroines in adventure stories - perhaps so the reader isn't constantly asking why they are permitted to take such risks?). She stumbles across Sherlock Holmes on the moor near the country house where he has chosen to retire. He mistakes her for a young boy (I guess his wits aren't what they were), she deduces with logic the experiment he is conducting with bees (it's elementary, my dear Holmes) and lo a friendship is born. He becomes her only friend, father, and tutor in all things of the mind - they play chess, she works on his experiments, learns how to distinguish between different kinds of ash - you know, all the important skills for a young detective. Being a creature hungry to understand all things that can be understood through logic, she eats it up. I think today she would be diagnosed with Asperger syndrome. Mrs. Hudson, Holmes trusty housekeeper, becomes a surrogate mother of sorts. Even Dr. Watson makes an appearance.

There is actually quite a bit of exposition before the mysteries begin, but this is not dull at all - especially if you enjoyed Sherlock Holmes. Its like being reintroduced to someone I knew once. He is somewhat older now and I knew him from a more polite distance before whereas now he is up close. The mystery format echoes the earlier Holmes stories - the first one I read yesterday is perhaps 30 pages in all. It's reminding how much I enjoyed Holmes, Father Brown, all of Agatha Christie, Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, when I was a kid. I can remember taking ten Agatha Christie books home at a time from the library when I was around 12 and reading through that pile completely before returning them. I remember being sick and in bed and having my heavy Sherlock Holmes volume on my knees, and trying to solve the mystery, though always one step behind his logic. One of my favorite books at that age was The Hardy Boys Detective Handbook. That was a well thumbed volume.

Laurie King's Mary Russel and her Holmes are capturing that same sense for me. I have always romanticized the life of the mind - especially when it comes to books - I am greedy to know. To be on the hunt to find out something is perhaps the finest state I can think of (unless that something is electronic). Why? For others, the unknown is a source of threat and revulsion. I am titillated by the possibility of fitting pieces into the puzzle - knowing what, and then knowing how. These stories appeal to that sense of romance for me and their short format is the perfect one for the reads I can muster now between GRE studying and neurophysiology.

DO NOT SUSPEND YOUR DISBELIEF - YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED (Penelope Fitzgerald, Sherlock Holmes, Harris Burdick, tesseracts, oh! and a cool weblog)

Odds and ends and one diatribe .

I started Penelope Fitzgerald's The Gate of Angels yesterday as planned, but I don't think I'll be going there right now. I'll give it one more try. I did dip into another library find: The Beekeeper's Apprentice which is the first in Laurie R. King's series of books featuring 15-year-old Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes, yes THE Sherlock Holmes. This was a recommendation from Kate's Book Blog, so far I like the way Holmes is reimagined, the book is framed three times, once by the original novels courtesy of Conan Doyle's Dr. Watson - this is the "original Holmes" known to most but since Mary Russell is meeting the "actual Holmes," this allows for a subtle differences. Then Mary writes in the introduction that this manuscript was written as she approaches 90 years of age. The third frame is Laurie King's - claiming to have been delivered these manuscripts by mail and re-written them - correcting grammar, etc.. King has built a series of puzzle boxes that allow for the differences any Sherlock Holmes fanatics might find, and adding to a sense of intrigue at beginning the book - I am finding it great fun.



It reminds me of one of my favorite books, a gift from Sheila, in fact, The Mysteries of Harris Burdick by Chris van Allsberg. If you don't know it - well I suppose it's not for everyone - but the "stories" are black and white drawings each with one line of text of the facing page. That's it. You do the rest. It's great to read before going to bed. I love this book, I've nearly destroyed it packing it with notes and carrying it with me everywhere, since I've used it for years when doing certain exercises I've created as an acting teacher. In fact, it's behind me on the shelf right now, it's jacket long gone, it's spine in shreds, but the birthday inscription intact. The introduction to the book begins:

Thirty years ago a man called at Peter Wender's office, introducing himself as Harris Burdick. Mr. Burdick explained that he had written fourteen stories and had drawn many pictures for each one. He'd brought with him just one drawing from each story, to see if Wenders liked his work.

Peter Wenders was fascinated by the drawings. He told Burdick he would like to read the stories that went with them as soon as possible. The artist agreed to bring the storeis the next morning. He left the fourteen drawing with Wenders. But he did not return...

I adore this book it accomplishes something I think all art must do in our self conscious age, invite the audience in and earn our trust in its artifice. Diatribe alert..............................................

Ok, you've been warned,
I think that the willing suspension of disbelief is one of the biggest crocks of s#%* out there. And I think the phrase is an absolute crime when artists claim they wish to accomplish it. When I director a play or opera I don't want my audience to disbelieve anything, least of all their own lives. What possible use can what I've made have if it cannot be experienced in the context of the audience's lives? It can never have resonance. Want I want is their deep belief in the micro-universe I've created. To do this I might woo them, cadjole them, strong-arm them, invite them - the techniques are endless. Through this process I establish my language and do what I need to do to earn their belief. But asking someone to "suspend disbelief" is like inviting them to forget that proverbial white elephant. It won't happen because you've asked it to. I believe it is the creation of belief or faith in a new world the artist is after, and that new world is nestled within the one the reader or viewer, or theater goer brought with them. Diatribe over.

Anyhoo, I think the introduction to Harris Burdick accomplishes this perfectly for the combination of its content and its reader and, so far, The Beekeeper's Apprentice seems to be doing the same.

Speaking of perfection of content for reader, I give you of this:

It was a dark and stormy night.

In her attic bedroom Margaret Murry, wrapped in an old patchwork quilt, sat on the foot of her bed and watched the trees tossing in the frenzied lashing of the wind. Behind the trees clouds scuddled frantically across the sky. Every few moments the moon ripped through them, creating wraith-like shadows that raced along the ground.

The house shook.

Don't you just want to get into bed and read on?! That's what I loved about Madeliene L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time which Cynthia Zarin called:

it is - depending on how you look at it - science fiction, a warm tale of family life, a response to the Cold War, a book about a search for a father, a feminist tract, a religious fable, a coming-of-age novel, a work of Satanism, or a prescient meditation on the future of the United States after the Kennedy assassination.

Zarin wrote a profile of L'Engle for The New Yorker in 2004 called The Storyteller, which I kept in my copy . It makes a lovely tribute for L'Engle who died this week at 88, going through her own wrinkle in time. I toast her, with a cup of jade oolong.


Oh, and I almost forgot... I've been enjoying my visits here a lot lately.

Comedy and compassion, eloquence and economy (Books: The Beginning of Spring - Penelope Fitzgerald)

I've finished Penelope Fitzgerald's The Beginning of Spring - recommended by David Leavitt in one of his guests posts at The Elegant Variation. I even found it at the library. I don't know what I expected, but as I started reading this book set in Russian in 1913, I was disappointed. It was probably coming off of Children of the Arbat, another Russian novel, but set in the 1930s and a sprawling adventure tail. This is a compact work, with a single domestic setting - the home of Frank Reid. Reid is English by birth, but raised in Russia and the heir to a modest printing business from his late father. His home is shared by his wife, Nellie, three young children, and a host of servants until the start of this novel when Nellie abruptly leaves, with no announcement, returning to England and leaving no forwarding address but leaving Frank with the children. However, I did not remain disappointed - this little novel does its work quietly. Moscow 1913, the chaotic home of Arkady Kuriatin - a second merchant and a client of Frank's, Nellie's brother Charlie who visits Frank and the children after his sister's disappearance, Volodya - a revolutionary student who creates a great deal of trouble for Frank, the woods behind the family's summer dacha - each object Fitzgerald turns her writer's eye on is calmly and exquisitely wrought in ink so that we know it intimately and precisely.

Tvyordov the compositor:

After his tea, at ten o'clock, Tvyordov took his lunch, and at eleven he lifted his type again, his head and body sympathetic to the ticking watch. At twelve he went home for his dinne,r and in the afternoons was less silent, but only marginally. There was something indescribably soothing in the proceedings of Tvyordov. There was nothing mechanical about them. There were many minute variations, for instance in the way he washed the type free of dirt and, while it was still just moist enough to stick together, lifted a small amount on to his brass slip, resting it against the broad middle finger of his left hand. No one could tell why these variations occurred. Perhaps Tvyordov was amusing himself. What would he consider amusing? On Saturday nights, when Agafya was seeing to the oil-lamp in front of the composing-room's ikon, Tvyordov wound up the office clock. On his way home, on Saturday's only, he stopped for five minutes exactly at Markel's Bar for a measure of vodka. On Monday mornings he arrived thirty second earlier than usual, to clean the clock glass for the week. No one else was trusted to do that.

There was no mystery about Tvyordov's attitude to the machine-room. Linotype, he felt, was not worthy of a serious man's carefully measured time. It was only fit for slipshod work at great speed. To make corrections you had to reset the whole line, therefore you had orders not to do it. The metal used was a wretchedly soft alloy. Monotype, after some consideration, he tolerated. The machine was small and ingenious, and the letters danced out as they were cast from the hot metal, separate and alive. They weren't as hard as real founder's type, still they would take a good many impressions, and they could be used for corrections in the compositors' room. When, or even whether, Tvyordov had been asked for his views was not known, but Reidka's did monotype, and no linotype.

Selwyn is Frank's friend, accountant, and a rabid Tolstoyan lunatic. He rescues a beautiful young shopgirl - Lisa Ivanova - from a job in a handkerchief department, in which she is unhappy. He convinces Frank to bring her into his home to care for his children - and that is when the action, if this book can be said to have action, begins. Selwyn takes pity on Lisa, Uncle Charlie develops a soft spot for Lisa, the children test and come to love Lisa, and Frank is not sure how he feels about her (he doesn't know if Nellie will ever return) - but not one of them knows very much about her.

The book is full of delightful comic portraits - I found Uncle Charlie and Selwyn particularly ridiculous and wonderfully drawn. It's also full of marvelous scenes filled with conflict - sometimes internal and sometimes external - often both. Moscow's streets, its pre-revolutionary politics, the printing business, the disorganized thoughts of the young student revolutionary, the publishing of Selwyn's poetry the Thoughts of Birch Trees - all of this adds up to a novel in which I really cared what happened and was very surprised at the end, but I can't say any more than that without giving away the experience of reading it because the way it observes what happens - is its pleasure. Suffice it to say, its eye is comic, but its vision compassionate, its voice is economical and it is well worth the read.

I've read The Blue Flower and The Bookshop already so I'll be trying Fitzgerald's The Gate of Angels next.

An Inflorescence (A Regular Series of Poems Every Friday) Cockeyed Optimist - Mary Oliver

In-flo-res-cence - from the Latin inflorescere - to begin to blossom. 1. the producing of blossoms; flowering; 2. the arrangement of flowers on a stem or axis; 3. a flower cluster on a common axis; 4. flowers collectively; 5. a solitary flower, regarded as a reduced cluster.



American poet Mary Oliver (b. 1935) has been a published poet since the 1960s. She and her partner Molly Malone Cook are longtime residents of Provincetown, Massachusetts. Cook died in 2005. I think of her poems as a quiet place in the bustling world to stop and listen. Their diction is straightforward, their tone tends to be optimistic and meditative, their subject is usually the natural world, their sound like the regular trod of a boot on a soft ground of pine - you hardly hear the footfall, some crackles of needles and twigs, but when you look back its step has made an imprint. I own three of her books, two volumes of poems Dream Work and Why I Wake Early, and A Poetry Handbook - which talks about the elements of poems and how they are put together. Here is a link to her books, some of her poems, and here is my selection for today's inflorescence.


An Afternoon in the Stacks

Closing the book, I find I have left my head
inside.  It is dark in here, but the chapters open
their beautiful spaces and give a rustling sound,
words adjusting themselves to their meaning.
Long passages open at successive pages.  An echo,
continuous from the title onward, hums
behind me.  From in here, the world looms,
a jungle redeemed by these linked sentences
carved out when an author traveled and a reader
kept the way open.  When this book ends
I will pull it inside-out like a sock
and throw it back in the library.  But the rumor
of it will haunt all that follows in my life.
A candleflame in Tibet leans when I move.

Knife

Something
just now
moved through my heart
like the thinnest of blades
as that red-tail pumped
once with its great wings
and flew above the gray, cracked
rock wall.
It wasn't
about the bird, it was
something about the way
stone stays
mute and put, whatever
goes flashing by.
Sometimes,
when I sit like this, quiet,
all the dreams of my blood
and all outrageous divisions of time
seem ready to leave,
to slide out of me.
Then, I imagine, I would never move.
By now
the hawk has flown five miles
at least,
dazzling whoever else has happened
to look up.
I was dazzled. But that
wasn't the knife.
It was the sheer, dense wall
of blind stone
without a pinch of hope
or a single unfulfilled desire
sponging up and reflecting,
so brilliantly,
as it has for centuries,
the sun's fire.

Honey at the Table

It fills you with the soft
essence of vanished flowers, it becomes
a trickle sharp as a hair that you follow
from the honey pot over the table

and out the door and over the ground,
and all the while it thickens,

grows deeper and wilder, edged
with pine boughs and wet boulders,
pawprints of bobcat and bear, until

deep in the forest you
shuffle up some tree, you rip the bark,

you float into and swallow the dripping combs,
bits of the tree, crushed bees - - - a taste
composed of everything lost,in which everything lost is found.

When Death Comes

When death comes
like the hungry bear in autumn;
when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse

to buy me, and snaps the purse shut;
when death comes
like the measle-pox

when death comes
like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,

I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering:
what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?

And therefore I look upon everything
as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,
and I look upon time as no more than an idea,
and I consider eternity as another possibility,

and I think of each life as a flower, as common
as a field daisy, and as singular,

and each name a comfortable music in the mouth,
tending, as all music does, toward silence,

and each body a lion of courage, and something
precious to the earth.

When it's over, I want to say all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

When it's over, I don't want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.

I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.

I don't want to end up simply having visited this world. 

The Fire

That winter it seemed the city
was always burning - night after night
the flames leaped, the ladders pitched forward.
Scorched but alive, the homeless wailed
as they ran for the cold streets.
That winter my mind had turned around,
shedding, like leaves, its bolts of information -
drilling down, through history,
toward my motionless heart.
Those days I was willing, but frightened.
What I mean is, I wanted to live my life
but I didn't want to do what I had to do
to go on, which was: to go back.
All winter the fires kept burning,
the smoke swirled, the flames grew hotter.
I began to curse, to stumble and choke.
Everything, solemnly, drove me toward it -
the crying out, that's so hard to do.
Then over my head the red timbers floated,
my feet were slippers of fire, my voice
crashed at the truth, my fists
smashed at the flames to find the door -
wicked and sad, mortal and bearable,
it fell open forever as I burned.

Sunrise

You can
die for it -
an idea,
or the world.  People

have done so,
brilliantly,
letting
their small bodies be bound

to the stake,
creating
an unforgettable
fury of light.  but

this morning,
climbing the familiar hills
in the familiar
fabric of dawn, I thought

of china,
and India
and Europe, and I thought
how the sun

blazes
for everyone just
so joyfully
as it rises

under the lashes
of my own eyes, and I thought
I am so many!
What is my name?

What is the name
of the deep breath I would take
over and over
for all of us?  Call it

whatever you want, it is
happiness, it is another one
of the ways to enter
fire.

Daisies

It is possible, I suppose, that sometime
we will learn everything
there is to learn: what the world is, for example,
and what I means.  I think this as I am crossing
from one field to another, in summer, and the
mockingbird is mocking me, as one who either
knows enough already or knows enough to be
perfectly content not knowing.  Song being born
of quest he knows this: he must turn silent
were he suddenly assaulted with answers.  Instead

oh hear his wild, caustic, tender warbling ceaselessly
unanswered.  At my feet the white-petaled daisies display
the small suns of their center-piece - their, if you don't
mind my saying so - their hearts.  Of course
I could be wrong, perhaps their hearts are pale and
narrow and hidden in the roots.  What do I know.
But this: it is heaven itself to take what is given,
to see what is plain; what the sun
lights up willingly; for example - I think this
as I reach down, not to pick but merely to touch -
the suitability of the field for the daisies, and the
daisies for the field.

There's no place like it...The Meaning of Home (Books - Slouching Towards Bethlehem - Joan Didion)

Joan Didion's On Going Home, another essay in her collection Slouching Towards Bethlehem is a 1967 meditation on the meaning of 'home,' - whether it is a physical place in which we live or a way we have of living with each other. I mention the date because it is the last 4 characters I read in the essay and therefore the most recent, and because it somehow encapsulated what I had read. Not that the essay is dated in a way that makes it no longer comprehensible, but rather it is dated in the way an archaeologist can date the layers of a dig. In this essay one experiences the 40s, the 60s and the 00s by the way Didion writes of 'home.'

I go to visit my great-aunts. A few of them think now that I am my cousin, or their daughter who died young. We recall an anecdote about a relative last seen in 1948, and they ask if I still like living in New York city. I have lived in Los Angeles for three years, but I say that I do. The baby is offered a horehound drop, and I am slipped a dollar bill "to buy a treat."

Didion's visit home is made palpable by the way in which she experiences the present - that always seems the element around which she has the most clarity.

Paralyzed by the neurotic lassitude engendered by meeting one's past at every turn, around every corner, inside every cupboard, I go aimlessly from room to room. I decide to meet it head-on and clean out a drawer, and I spread the contents on the bed. A bathing suit I wore the summer I was seventeen. A letter of rejection from The Nation, an aerial photograph of the site for a shopping center my father did not build in 1954...

And it is made most poignant when she muses:

...That I am trapped in this particular irrelevancy is never more apparent to me than when I am home.

There is nothing like seeing a thing you know was meaningful to you once and is now empty and wondering - what was that all for. I know how much I cared. And those things I care about now - should I really care about them? Are they anything at all or will I just pull them out of a drawer thirty years from now and wonder?

She takes the reflection one level further, imagining what sort of home she will give her own baby as she has her next birthday - fearing she is not giving her enough. I take that reflection still one level further, reflecting on whether that child, now no longer alive, had the home Didion wished for her, and whether she had a chance to return to that home and reflect as her mother had.

Studying in the Stacks - Back to school with neuroscience and literature

Studying in the stacks - heaven, right? Those of us going to school are now back in full swing (at least I am), but I was worrying that others of you not lucky enough to have purchased your new shoes and Pink Pearl, or have carried around a 10-pound book on neurons today might be a little jealous. So I've found a number of talks by scientists and artists on subjects such as the elements of language and beauty from the perspective of a novelist and a neuroscientist - that way you don't have to feel left out.

The Puppet Master - How the Brain Controls the Body - Dr. Daniel Wolpert
Royal Society Prize Lecture Video - The Royal Society Site has many other videos you can access as well

Words and Rules: The Ingredients of Language - Steven Pinker
from Fundamentals of the brain and mind - MIT's neuroscience lecture series with many great talks on memory, brain architecture, and how cognition is controlled

How Does it Feel - Joseph LeDoux
on conscious and unconscious emotion from National Institutes of Health's library of videos on a wide variety of scientific topics

Beauty in Science and Literature - Ben Okri & Nancy Rothewell
The title says it all - a novelist and a neuroscientist discuss - I didn't actually see this one my self - so let me know how it is.


So sharpen those pencils and hit the books like the rest of us slobs!

The connections that only I can make (Books - On Keeping a Notebook - Joan Didion)

I don't think, after reading Joan Didion's essay On Keeping a Notebook from her collection Slouching Towards Bethlehem, that I ever have to read another essay again, so perfect a creation has she made, so resonant a reflection on why we record.

'"That woman Estelle,'" the note reads, "'is partly the reason why George sharp and I are separated today.' Dirty crepe-de-Chine wrapper, hotel bar, Wilmington RR, 9:45 a.m. august Monday morning."

Since the note is in my notebook, it presumably has some meaning to me. I study it for a long while. At first I have only the most general notion of what I was doing on an August Monday morning in the bar of the hotel across from the Pennsylvania Railroad station in Wilmington, Delaware (waiting for a train? missing one? 1960? 1961? why Wilmington?), but I do remember being there...

Didion's straightforward flow of language seems to just reveal what is already there. Every word is inevitable - I knew it would be there the second after I read it. Her story reads my own mind.

Why did I write it down? In order to remember, of course, but exactly what was it I wanted to remember? How much of it actually happened? Did any of it? Why do I keep a notebook at all? ... I have felt compelled to write things down since I was five years old, I doubt that my daughter ever will, for she is a singularly blessed and accepting child, delighted with life exactly as life presents itself to her, unafraid to go to sleep and unafraid to wake up. Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether...

Aside from the apparent lightheartedness that cloaks that heavy observation, is the fact that I read Didion's last book A Year of Magical Thinking (a scary, relentless look at herself in the year following the death of her husband), and know of the sickness and subsequent death of this blessed child who was Didion's daughter, adding another layer to the experience of reading this essay.

Didion reflects that, although she is apparently recording the events around her, the entire exercise is one of self observation - "Remember what it was to be me: that is always the point." And that did not change with her last book.

Yet another layer is added because I read this essay following three hours of reading on the architecture of neurons and as another keeper of notebooks I thought: why do I keep one? To make a record. Of what? Those associations I make between things that, having lived, are distinct to me. Only I would have made them. Some of us leave progeny, and we all leave the consequences of our acts - but basically we are the sum of those associations unique to us having occupied this skin, this childhood, this place. The progeny is the product of an association between two people, our acts, we commit because of those connections that brought us to a distinct place at a distinct moment that only we could have occupied having lived all the moments before. Indeed, the brains that keep our heart beating, that keep us energized enough to sit upright and pay attention, that build memories, are composed of billions of neurons (we have more cells in our brains than there are people on earth). When electric current runs through one nerve cell to help regulate breathing, the content of that electrical impulse is not different from the one that creates a memory, what is different is the kind of nerve cell that conducts that "message" and the changes that it leaves behind in the spaces between nerve cells - the synapses. Another change between things as opposed to within them - one that records "what it was to be me" by altering how two elements of our nervous system associate. Our own little notebook.

Secret Life of the Manic Depressive (Part 1)

British actor and author, Steven Fry, discovered he had manic depression after living with it for years. He comes out about it here with this frank, personal, and informative program for BBC 4. The Ragazzo discovered it while trolling around on You Tube. You can get it all there, divided into about 20 chunks. He explores not just his personal experience but others' too, the latest treatments, and the supposed link between bipolar disorder and creativity. Here is the first part. I recommend it highly. Now don't immediately diagnose yourself.

Collusion with Terror - a repression or a perfection of self? (Books - Children of the Arbat, Tear off the Masks, Revolution on My Mind)

I've finished Anatoli Rybakov's Children of the Arbat - a novel about life in Russian during the reign of Stalin. It is a multi-faceted sweep across the vast Russian society during the mid-1930s as the purges were beginning and leading up to the assassination of Kirov. It looks at party loyalists, Stalinists, individualists, pragmatists, exiles, and the mind of Stalin himself. I've done several posts on it, here they are. It is an epic work with a broad view, but easy to read.

As I was finishing it, I noticed an article by Aileen Kelly in an old issue of The New York Review of Books that I hadn't read yet called Why They Believed in Stalin. It's a review of two recent books - Tear off the Masks! Identity and Imposture in Twentieth-Century Russia by Sheila Fitzpatrick and Revolution on My Mind: Writing a Diary Under Stalin by Jochen Hellbeck, which have different but not completely mutually exclusive views of how individual citizens lived with the violence committed in the name of Soviet revolution. Fitzpatrick's book looks at the strategy of obliterating a sense of individual self altogether:

Alexander Zinoviev depicted a new type of human being: Homo sovieticus, a "fairly disgusting creature" who was the end product of the Soviet regime's efforts to transform the population into emodiments of the values of communism.

Hellbeck looks at four diarists, whose journal reveal their strategies. These range from a slow evolution from a member of the old intelligentsia to eventual justification of violence in the service of the creation of "new forms of life," to an all-out campaign of perfecting the self as an instrument of revolution. Kelly quotes Hellbeck's final chapter:

Bolshevik activists were successful in propagating the urgency of individual growth through adherence to the revolution because such thinking was rooted in Russia's historical past. The moral duties of self-improvement, social activism, and self-expression in concert with history were a staple of Russian intellectual and political life for almost a century before the revolution of 1917. As Stalin-era diarists worked to align themselves with history and to achieve a historically grounded notion of selfhood, they acted in striking consistency with generations of educated Russians since the early nineteenth century. To behave in such ways was what distinguished a member of the Russian intelligentsia.

These both sound like fascinating books, I'm particularly drawn to the second one as diaries play into my interests in character, identity, psychology, acting, and the like. Next up for me, another novel on Russia, this one set just before the revolution and written by the English novelist Penelope Fitzgerald. The Beginning of Spring was recommended by novelist David Leavitt in one of his guest posts at The Elegant Variation.

Hopeful Monster - Nicholas Mosley, underappreciated novelist

Here is a portrait from the journal Prospect of a complex and challenging novelist - one of my favorites - Nicholas Mosely. His Hopeful Monsters makes my top 10 list without a doubt.

Mosley's style sets him well outside the solidly realist mainstream of the English novel. Writers such as Beryl Bainbridge, Alan Hollinghurst and (latterly) Ian McEwan see themselves almost as historians or sociologists, taking pains to get every period detail, every nuance of class and culture, right. The results are deathly in their exactitude. Mosley has no interest in such verisimilitude. "The only reality one can hope to get is of a separate order, the order of storytelling," he wrote as a young man to his friend Hugo Charteris, "and to try to get any other is a mixing-up of two worlds, like the hope that by getting a portrait 'accurate' enough it will suddenly come to life and speak, which it won't."

Hat tip: 3 Quarks Daily (natch)

And here are a series of interviews with Mosely about his writing.

An Inflorescence - A flowering of poetry every Friday (Marianne Moore)

In-flo-res-cence - from the Latin inflorescere - to begin to blossom. 1. the producing of blossoms; flowering; 2. the arrangement of flowers on a stem or axis; 3. a flower cluster on a common axis; 4. flowers collectively; 5. a solitary flower, regarded as a reduced cluster.



The magnificent Marianne Moore was born in 1887 in Missouri, living many of her early years in New York City, during which she wrote poems, and edited Dial. She lived for many years caring for her mother, a point that she and fellow New York artist Joseph Cornell corresponded about, as they had it in common. For the remaining years of her life, until 1972, she lived in Pennsylvania. Moore's Collected Poems (1951) won the Pulitzer, National Book Award, and Bollingen Prize. She was an afficianado of boxing and baseball and, in 1955, served as a consultant to the Ford Corporation in naming a new car. Her submissions, including Intelligent Whale, Andante con Moto, Mongoose Civique, and my personal favorite - Utopian Turtletop - were all rejected in favor of Edsel. Not that any of her names would have helped that ill-fated vehicle, but I would say her true skill lay elsewhere - it is a good thing she had a day job.

Her writing often incorporated quotes from other sources into the text, her use of language was condensed and idiosyncratic - offering a variety of associations within a single image. In his 1925 essay, William Carlos Williams wrote of her capturing the vastness of the particular: "So that in looking at some apparently small object, one feels the swirl of great events." She loved to write, among other things, about animals, publishing a verse translation of Fables de la Fontaine. To choose only a few of her poems is difficult, so feel free to choose your own by getting her Complete Poems which has footnotes of her sources, if that sort of thing interests you.

Although the first three lines of Poetry are usually all that is printed as the "definitive" version:

I, too,dislike it./Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one dis-/covers in/it, after all, a place for the genuine.

I learned from Paul Muldoon's passionate, breathless lectures The End of the Poem, that a longer version is published. It's lines are so long that I can't fit it here, but I recommend it. Here are some others.

The Fish

wade
through black jade.
  Of the crow-blue mussel-shells, one keeps
  adjusting the ash-heaps;
     opening and shutting itself like

an
injured fan.
  The barnacles which encrust the side
  of the wave, cannot hide
     there for the submerged shafts of the

sun,
split like spun
  glass, move themselves with spotlight swiftness
  into the crevices -
     in and out, illuminating

the
turquoise sea
  of bodies.  The water drives a wedge
  of iron through the iron edge
      of the cliff; whereupon the stars,

pink
rice-grains, ink -
  bespattered jelly-fish, crabs like green
  lilies, and submarine
     toadstools, slide each on the other.

All
external
  marks of abuse are present on this
  defiant edifice -
     all the physical features of

ac-
cident - lack
  of cornice, dynamite grooves, burns, and
  hatchet strokes, these things stand
     out on it; the chasm-side is

dead.
Repeated
  evidence has proved that it can live
  on what can not revive
     its youth.  The sea grows old in it.

Elephants

Uplifted, and waved till immobilized
wistaria-like, the opposing opposed
mouse-gray twined proboscises' trunk formed by two
trunks, rights itself to a spiraled inter-nosed

deadlock of dyke-enforced massiveness.  It's a
knock-down drag-out fight that asks no quarter? Just
a pastime, as when the trunk rains on itself
the pool it siphoned up; or when - since each must

provide his forty-pound bough dinner - he broke
the leafy branches.  These templars of the Tooth,
these matched intensities, take master care of
master tools.  One, sleeping with the calm of youth,

at full length in the half-dry sun-flecked stream-bed,
rests his hunting-horn-curled trunk on shallowed stone.
The sloping hollow of the sleeper's body
cradles the gently breathing eminence's prone

mahout, asleep like a lifeless six-foot
frog, so feather ligh the elephant's stiff
ear's unconscious of the crossed feet's weight.  And the
defenseless human thing sleeps as sound as if

incised with hard wrinkles, embossed with wide ears,
invincible tusked, made safe by magic hairs!
As if, as if, it is all ifs; we are at
much unease.  But magic's masterpiece is theirs -

Houdini's serenity quelling his fears.
Elephant-ear-witnesses-to-be of hymns
and glorias, these ministrants all gray or
gray with white on legs or trunk, are a pilgrims'

pattern of revery not reverence - a
religious procession without any priests,
the centuries-old carefullest unrehearsed
play.  Blessed by Buddha's Tooth, the obedient beasts

themselves as toothed temples blessing the street, see
the white elephant carry the cushion that
carries the casket that carries the Tooth.
Amenable to what, matched with him, are gnat

trustees, he does not step on them as the white-
canopied blue-cushioned Tooth is augustly
and slowly returned to the shrine.  Though white is
the color of worship and of mourning, he

is not here to worship and he is too wise
to mourn - a life prisoner but reconciled.
With trunk tucked up compactly - the elephant's
sign of defeat - he resisted, but is the child

of reason now.  His straight trunk seems to say: when
what we hoped for came to nothing, we revived.
As loss could not ever alter Socrates'
tranquility, equanimity's contrived

by the elephant.  With the Socrates of
animals as with Sophocles the Bee, on whose
tombstone a hive was incised, sweetness tinctures
his gravity.  His held-up fore-leg for use

as a stair, to be climbed or descended with
the aid of his ear, expounds the brotherhood
of creature to man the encroacher, by the
small word with the dot, meaning know - the verb bud.

These knowers "arouse the feeling that they are
allied to man" and can change roles with their trustees.
Hardship makes the solider; then teachableness
makes him the philosopher - as Socrates,

prudently testing the suspicious thing, knew
the wisest is he who's not sure that he knows.
Who rides on a tiger can never dismount;
asleep on an elephant, that is repose.

Enough
1969

Am I a fanatic?  The opposite.
   And where would I like to be?
   Sitting under Plato's olive tree
or propped against its thick old trunk

        away from controversy
        or anyone choleric.

If you would see stones set right, unthreatened
   by mortar (masons say "mud"),
   square and smooth, let them rise as they should,
Ben Jonson said, or he implied.

        In "Discoveries" he then said,
        "Stand for truth.  It's enough."

How to know you've been reading too much about Stalin

This morning, while at a bus stop I don't wait at very often, I noticed a sign for Autocraft Driving School, which I read as Autocrat Driving School for at least five minutes, trying to imagine where the name came from - are they that strict? And perhaps you be sentenced to an auto-da-fe if you don't parallel park properly? I'm nearly finished with Children of the Arbat now, and good thing too given the fact that I'm seeing despots everywhere. That and the phenomenal amount of reading on neuron morphology that I have to do!

Creating a life of the heart when there is none. (Film - Notes on a Scandal)

Judi Dench's character, Barbara Covett, is what might kindly be referred to in old fashioned parlance as a spinster. She is the sad product of someone terrified of risking intimacy, and cloaks her longing in idealized friendship. She creates a harsh and chilly narrative in obsessive journals to keep herself the cool observer of her love object, rather than risking the terror of passion. Cate Blanchett plays Sheba Hart, the young art teacher, as an aimless bohemian - someone who never really got it together professionally, but has ended up surrounded by a life with enough daily chaos that she's always occupied. Life happens to her and she seems to not have enough strength or good sense to resist when sexual attraction arises between her and a 15 year old student. The film establishes differences in character in lovely simple ways, there's a great scene in which Hart invites Covett to dinner at her house, after which she, her older husband and her children put on some music and dance around the living room. Covett sits stiffly on the sofa, smoking, unable to join. I believed her body no longer could move as the others did, so hard had she become. Yet Judi Dench allows you to see the pain and loneliness that drive her actions rather that just playing the manipulative harridan. This is not the mustache twirling antics of Judith Anderson as Mrs. Danvers in Rebecca (great though that is), this is a subtler more human creation.

Understatement is at the heart of what makes Notes on a Scandal a terrific film. Desperate loneliness, manipulation, and sexual longing would all seem to provide ample excuses for teeth gnashing - but the writer, actors, and director seemed to be able to keep it in check until it really rises unbidden, the result being a more terrifying film because it is about 'us,' and not 'them.' This is a major motion picture, with star power behind it, but it never smells like one.

Actually both characters, despite their superficial differences, share immense passion that is expressed in ways society does not tolerate. Both are also possessed of creative drive. Interestingly, Hart, the artist, never produces art - her energies are too dispersed, but Covett must be highly imaginative - not only in producing volumes of elaborate journals, but she creates relationships with others that never really exist. It a sort of desperate act of self preservation - she becomes an artist of fantasies, engineering a life for her heart when there really isn't one. Dench allows you to see this with painful clarity. Great performance. Terrific film.

Hearts and Minds (Mikhalkov's Anna and Children of the Arbat)

For all I read of the history and psychology behind the growth of Stalin's Russia in Children of the Arbat, that state was created one soul at a time.

At first, Nina used to say that Sasha's arrest had been an absurd accident, but then new nuances began to creep into her conversation: there was the difficult internal and international situation, the sharpening of the class struggle, the activities of anti-Party groupings, and as never before particular precision and clarity of one's position was required, whereas unfortunately Sasha sometimes put his own understanding of events above the point of view of the collective. In a word, she hinted that Sasha's arrest had some foundation.

The change has to happen in the minds and hearts of the people who make up the State. This reminded me of one of the most amazing films I've ever seen, Anna, by Russian director Nikita Mikhalkov. Mikhalkov is a great Russian actor and director - his film Burnt by the Sun, was an international success and deservedly so - a gorgeous film. But Anna is really something extraordinary, it documents his daughter Anna's life from ages 6 to 18 alongside Russian history in the same years (late 70s - through early 90s). In it he asks her the same few questions each year, basic questions: "What do you love?" "What do you fear?" And through that we watch the world change. What is more amazing still about this film is that when Mikhalkov began making it, the Soviet government controlled the use of all film, keeping strict record, day after day, of the number of meters of used so that no unauthorized film could be shot. Mikhalkov and his collaborator Sergei Miroshnichenko had surreptitiously collected film bits over the years and used these little saved up scraps to shoot the film. He only worked with one other person on the film so as not to endanger anyone in the making of the film.

Other posts on Children of the Arbat 1, 2, 3.

First Day!

Why does the first day of school always feel like, well, the first day of school? I have my pink pearl, I have my psychedelic pencil case, only the textbook titles have changed.

Faces I Love Too

My dear friend Sheila is presenting part IV of her series of faces she loves, started by Dennis. I hope they will consider imitation the sincerest form of flattery.



























and there are so many more!

New Feats in Origami ! A 30 foot long paper boat sails down the Elbe

No, really.

Hat tip: Gizmodovia Scout Holiday.

Secrecy and Power - Who will resist and who will serve? (Books - Children of the Arbat III)

While I couldn't find any images of original editions of Children of the Arbat, this is the original samizdat (see a definition here) of Czech writer Vaclav Havel's Letters to Olga. Havel wrote, largely for the theater, as well as leading a campaign to save a subversive literary magazine Tvar. In 1965 the StB tried to recruit Havel as an informant but his refusal led to his continual observation throughout the communist regime. In 1979 he was arrested for anti-state activities and imprisoned for months without a trial. He was imprisoned four times but remained no less subversive a voice. After the devision of Czechoslovakia, he became the first president of the Czech Republic. I give this very short summary of his political life to ask - what makes one person subversive and the other submissive?

One of the plot lines that I'm enjoying right now in Children of the Arbat is about Yuri Sharok, the son of factory workers, whose aim is to become a lawyer for the factory where he worked as a young man. He is among a group of students in school whose popular leader, Sasha, is expelled for anti-state activities and sentenced to three years in Siberia. He had been a rival to the popular Sasha. Following school, he is approached by the NKVD, Stalin's secret police who were the force behind the political repression, running the Gulags, as well as conducting espionage in other countries, including the assassination of Leon Trotsky.

Why had they picked him? He was an average student, he never got the best grades. And his social work was average, he only did what he was told. Average people had their uses, too, evidently...

Sharok had been created for this job, he was right for it, not open-hearted Maxim Kostin, or that spineless intellectual Vadim Marasevich, or that overconfident Sasah Pankratov. Nobody would be able to wriggle out from Sharok's grasp, or manage to justify tghemselves. He would not believe in anyone's sincerity - it was impossible to believe sincerely in this whole business, and anyone who claimed they did was lying...

He's be safe there, nobody would be able to touch him. He'd by one of those who could reach everyone else.

In this part of Rybakov's story, we observe the evolution of his choice - the birth of cruelty. Another one of those instances where it is easy to say "I would never...," but would we? I would like to think I would not. But would I lie in jail like Havel? Endanger my friends and family? My livelihood? My life?