The Ascent of Man with Jacob Bronowsky, on youtube in six parts. A nicely philosophical and poetic approach to question “what makes us human?”. Thanks to Machteld
March 26th, 2011
the wisdom of pessimism
Alain de Botton – On Pessimism from The School of Life on Vimeo.
Some wonderful truths (apart from the suggestion that the consumption of booze excludes misery absolutely and should therefore be absolutely avoided). Thanks Machteld for the tip.
March 13th, 2011
an earring-wearing Incredible Hulk on a stationary bike.
The art of memory is credited to the ancient Greek poet Simonides, who was able to perfectly recall the scene in a banquet hall moments before the roof collapsed, simply by reviewing it in his mind’s eye. The “method of loci” assigns distinctive images to anything one wants to remember, placing the images in familiar rooms or buildings. Recalling, then, becomes a matter of traveling through those locations, or “memory palaces,” and noting the images assembled there. This seeming sleight of hand — memorize X in order to remember Y — takes advantage of a simple fact of human cognition: we naturally remember visual images. Take a moment to imagine your own living room; a detailed description of everything in sight is effortless.
Translating your shopping list into something memorable involves choosing good images and good loci — and then concentrating on them. The less banal, the better. Quotidian scenes are forgettable. What snags the cells of our brains are disgusting, bizarre and novel images.
Using a version of these ancient techniques, a past world memory champion named Ben Pridmore was set to prove he had memorized 50,000 digits of pi. (Trumped by a man who recited pi to 83,431 places, Pridmore spent the next six weeks cleaning the images of pi out of his memory palaces.) In joining their ranks, Foer develops various loci, including friends’ houses, his old high school, and Camden Yards. He mentally collects a population of images — often lewd or ridiculous — which he will assign to numbers, playing cards or whatever else he will need to memorize. (Hence his title, which represents the combination of images he uses to remember the four of spades, the king of hearts and the three of diamonds.) In this way, a long string of numbers becomes a farcical tour of fantastical images, distributed in a memory palace. They almost don’t need to be memorized, per se. Once you attend to them, it is hard to forget them. Dom DeLuise hula-hooping plays a pivotal role for Foer, as does an earring-wearing Incredible Hulk on a stationary bike.
Irregular images aside, Foer’s missteps are few. Discussing the neurological underpinnings of memory, he repeats some commonly held myths about it, for instance, that obscure facts — “where I celebrated my seventh birthday” — are “lurking somewhere in my brain, waiting for the right cue to pop back into consciousness.” In fact, not only are many such memories lost for good, even the memories we do have are often quasi-fictionalized reconstructions. Foer inexplicably devotes space to attempting to convince the reader that Daniel Tammet, a renowned savant who memorized 22,514 digits of pi, may not actually be doing it naturally, but only by using the same kind of mnemonic aids used by Foer and his fellow competitors (would it matter?).
Alexandra Horrowitz on Joshua Foer’s book Walking With Einstein, NYT.
January 8th, 2011
if it’s good enough for you, it’s good enough for me, Universe
Marcus Aurelius
“Get rid of the judgement, get rid of the ‘I am hurt,’ you are rid of the hurt itself.” “Everything is right for me, which is right for you, O Universe. Nothing for me is too early or too late, which comes in due time for you. Everything is fruit to me which your seasons bring, O Nature. From you are all things, in you are all things, to you all things return.” “How ridiculous and how strange to be surprised at anything which happens in life!” “Because your own strength is unequal to the task, do not assume that it is beyond the powers of man; but if anything is within the powers and province of man, believe that it is within your own compass also” .
Seneca the Younger
“That which Fortune has not given, she cannot take away.” “Let Nature deal with matter, which is her own, as she pleases; let us be cheerful and brave in the face of everything, reflecting that it is nothing of our own that perishes.”
The wikipedia page for Stoicism has some nice quotes to illustrate the philosophy. Those above are just a selection of ones I like most.
Addendum: Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations is online.
January 8th, 2011
the closet scenario
A closet scenario or closet screenplay “is a screenplay intended not to be produced/performed but instead to be read by a solitary reader or, sometimes, out loud in a small group”. Wiki.
From Friedrich Schiller’s Preface to his Die Räuber (a closet drama):
This play is to be regarded merely as a spectacular narrative in which, for the purpose of tracing out the innermost workings of the soul, advantage has been taken of dramatic modes, without otherwise conforming to the stringent rules of theatrical composition or seeking the dubious advantage of stage production. … A greater amount of incident is crowded together in this play than was possible to confine within the narrow limits prescribed by Aristotle and Batteux … And for this reason, I would have been ill-advised to attempt bringing my drama to the stage.
Kevin Alexander Boon in Script Culture and the American Screenplay:
Whether or not a screenplay is ultimately produced (read: performed) is a matter of consequence, not necessity.
These quotes head an article by one Quimby Melton, discussing closet dramas and closet screenplays, called Production’s “Dubious Advantage”.
January 1st, 2011
Modern people are inwardly thoroughly bored.
D. H. Lawrence on wonder. From “Hymns in a Man’s Life” – Evening News, 13 October 1928:
Nothing is more difficult than to determine what a child takes in, and does not take in, of its environment and teaching. This fact is brought home to me by the hymns which I learned as a child, and never forgot. They mean to me almost more than the finest poetry, and they have for me a more permanent value, somehow or other.
It is almost shameful to confess that the poems which have meant the most to me, like Wordsworth’s Ode to Immortality and Keats’s Odes, and pieces of Macbeth or As You Like It or Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Goethe’s lyrics, such as Uber allen Gipfeln ist Ruh, and Verlaine’s Aynte poussela porte qui clancelle — all these lovely poems which after all give the ultimate shape to one’s life; all these lovely poems woven deep into a man’s consciousness, are still not woven so deep in me as the rather banal Nonconformist hymns that penetrated through and through my childhood.
Each gentle dove
And sighing bough
That makes the eve
So fair to me
Has something far
Diviner now
To draw me back
To Galilee.
O Galilee, sweet Galilee,
Where Jesus loved so much to be,
O Galilee, sweet Galilee,
Come sing thy song again to me!To me the word Galilee has a wonderful sound. The Lake of Galilee! I don’t want to know where it is. I never want to go to Palestine. Galilee is one of those lovely, glamorous worlds, not places, that exist in the golden haze of a child’s half-formed imagination.
And in my man’s imagination it is just the same. It has been left untouched. With regard to the hymns that had such a profound influence on my childish consciousness, there has been no crystallising out, no dwindling into actuality, no hardening into commonplace. They are the same to my Man’s experience as they were to me nearly forty years ago.
The moon, perhaps, has shrunken a little. One has been forced to learn about orbits, eclipses, relative distances, dead worlds, craters of the moon and so on. The crescent at evening still startles the soul with its delicate flashing. But the mind works automatically and says: ‘Ah, she is in her first quarter. She is all there, in spite of the fact that we see only this slim blade. The earth’s shadow is over her’. And willy-nilly, the intrusion of the mental processes dims the brilliance, the magic of the first apperception.
It is the same with all things. The sheer delight of a child’s apperception is based on wonder; and deny it as we may, knowledge and wonder counteract one another. So that as knowledge increases wonder decreases. We say again: Falimiarity breeds contempt. So that as we grow older, and become more familiar with phenomena, we become more contemptuous of them.
But that is only partly true. “It has taken some races of men thousands of years to become contemptuous of the moon, and to the Hindu the cow is still wondrous. It is not familiarity that breeds contempt: it is the assumption of knowledge. Anybody who looks at the moon and says, ‘I know all about that poor orb’ is, of course, bored by the moon.
December 4th, 2010
sound that doesn’t mean anything
John Cage (loved sounds just as they were).
Via the blog of Foxes in Fiction.
November 25th, 2010
rhythm 0
Wikipedia on performance artist Marina Abramović’s Rhythm 0 (1974):
To test the limits of the relationship between performer and audience, Abramović developed one of her most challenging (and best-known) performances. She assigned a passive role to herself, with the public being the force which would act on her.
Abramović had placed upon a table 72 objects that people were allowed to use (a sign informed them) in any way that they chose. Some of these were objects that could give pleasure, while others could be wielded to inflict pain, or to harm her. Among them were scissors, a knife, a whip, and, most notoriously, a gun and a single bullet. For six hours the artist allowed the audience members to manipulate her body and actions.
Initially, members of the audience reacted with caution and modesty, but as time passed (and the artist remained impassive) several people began to act quite aggressively. As Abramović described it later:
“The experience I learned was that…if you leave decision to the public, you can be killed.” … “I felt really violated: they cut my clothes, stuck rose thorns in my stomach, one person aimed the gun at my head, and another took it away. It created an aggressive atmosphere. After exactly 6 hours, as planned, I stood up and started walking toward the public. Everyone ran away, escaping an actual confrontation.”
Rhythm 10 (1973):
In her first performance Abramović explored elements of ritual and gesture. Making use of twenty knives and two tape recorders, the artist played the Russian game in which rhythmic knife jabs are aimed between the splayed fingers of her hand (5-finger fillet). Each time she cut herself, she would pick up a new knife from the row of twenty she had set up, and recorded the operation.
After cutting herself twenty times, she replayed the tape, listened to the sounds, and tried to repeat the same movements, attempting to replicate the mistakes, merging together past and present. She set out to explore the physical and mental limitations of the body – the pain and the sounds of the stabbing, the double sounds from the history and from the replication. With this piece, Abramović began to consider the state of consciousness of the performer. “Once you enter into the performance state you can push your body to do things you absolutely could never normally do.”
November 21st, 2010
how proust can change your life
Embedding disabled, view on youtube.
The person who dredged up this old BBC documentary and took the trouble of uploading it to youtube in 6 parts is presumably an example of someone upon whose life Proust made an impression. Proustian sentence unintended.
The volume of the videos is pretty low, so this article on how to boost youtube video volume beyond the maximum may come in handy.
November 20th, 2010
airing the far tributaries of your lungs
Photograph: Danita Delimont/Getty Images/Gallo Images.
Poet Simon Armitage in The Guardian:
I try to get in a bit of a walk most days. Most times it’s a toss up between going for a walk and staying in and writing a poem, but it often leads to the same thing. I go on to the moors – we live on the edge of the Pennines and Saddleworth moor, and it can be quite bleak and quite dangerous. Sometimes I go off-piste, but there are issues around here with land ownership so sometimes I stick to the roads and the routes and sometimes I wilfully transgress, which gives me a kick.
Some people have said there’s a relationship between poetic meter and the fall of your foot – and possibly your heartbeat might be thought of as an iambic beat when it’s amplified by walking. Often when I go for a walk I come back with a poem. There’s a sense of creativity about it, and a sense of wellbeing that you are getting the organs and lungs and the blood moving. You never come back from a walk feeling worse – sometimes you come back feeling colder and wetter though, especially up here.
I’m sure that somewhere in the back of my mind I see it as a therapeutic activity. I know it can be good for a hangover. Some people believe strongly that art in general can put you in touch with yourself and through it you start feeling worthwhile and valuable, and there might be some kind of chemical trigger that aids recovery and keeps illness at bay. If a walk leads to a poem, maybe there’s a relationship there.
I am 47 now and sometimes I think “How many more fantastic days out on these moors are there?’ Sometimes it can be an expedition just to go up there, but when it’s sunny and clear and crisp like yesterday it’s exhilarating, and that gets right down to the far tributaries of your lungs that normally are breathing warm radiator air and it does heighten your sense of wellbeing.
More writers on walking: In Praise of the Daily Walk.
November 15th, 2010
despair has stopped listening to music
Robert Sapolsky, professor of biology, neurology and neurosurgery at Stanford University, has a fascinating blog post on the NY Times website about how our brains interpret symbols and reality in the same part of the brain. And about the consequences of this.
Consider an animal (including a human) that has started eating some rotten, fetid, disgusting food. As a result, neurons in an area of the brain called the insula will activate. Gustatory disgust. Smell the same awful food, and the insula activates as well. Think about what might count as a disgusting food (say, taking a bite out of a struggling cockroach). Same thing.
Now read in the newspaper about a saintly old widow who had her home foreclosed by a sleazy mortgage company, her medical insurance canceled on flimsy grounds, and got a lousy, exploitative offer at the pawn shop where she tried to hock her kidney dialysis machine. You sit there thinking, those bastards, those people are scum, they’re worse than maggots, they make me want to puke … and your insula activates. Think about something shameful and rotten that you once did … same thing. Not only does the insula “do” sensory disgust; it does moral disgust as well. Because the two are so viscerally similar. When we evolved the capacity to be disgusted by moral failures, we didn’t evolve a new brain region to handle it. Instead, the insula expanded its portfolio.
Or consider pain. Somebody pokes your big left toe with a pin. Spinal reflexes cause you to instantly jerk your foot back just as they would in, say, a frog. Evolutionarily ancient regions activate in the brain as well, telling you about things like the intensity of the pain, or whether it’s a sharp localized pain or a diffuse burning one. But then there’s a fancier, more recently evolved brain region in the frontal cortex called the anterior cingulate that’s involved in the subjective, evaluative response to the pain. A piranha has just bitten you? That’s a disaster. The shoes you bought are a size too small? Well, not as much of a disaster.
Now instead, watch your beloved being poked with the pin. And your anterior cingulate will activate, as if it were you in pain. There’s a neurotransmitter called Substance P that is involved in the nuts and bolts circuitry of pain perception. Administer a drug that blocks the actions of Substance P to people who are clinically depressed, and they often feel better, feel less of the world’s agonies. When humans evolved the ability to be wrenched with feeling the pain of others, where was it going to process it? It got crammed into the anterior cingulate. And thus it “does” both physical and psychic pain.
Another truly interesting domain in which the brain confuses the literal and metaphorical is cleanliness. In a remarkable study, Chen-Bo Zhong of the University of Toronto and Katie Liljenquist of Northwestern University demonstrated how the brain has trouble distinguishing between being a dirty scoundrel and being in need of a bath. Volunteers were asked to recall either a moral or immoral act in their past. Afterward, as a token of appreciation, Zhong and Liljenquist offered the volunteers a choice between the gift of a pencil or of a package of antiseptic wipes. And the folks who had just wallowed in their ethical failures were more likely to go for the wipes. In the next study, volunteers were told to recall an immoral act of theirs. Afterward, subjects either did or did not have the opportunity to clean their hands. Those who were able to wash were less likely to respond to a request for help (that the experimenters had set up) that came shortly afterward. Apparently, Lady Macbeth and Pontius Pilate weren’t the only ones to metaphorically absolve their sins by washing their hands.
Read more: NY Times.
November 4th, 2010
nothing lasts, nothing is finished, and nothing is perfect
Wabi-Sabi (from wikipedia):
Wabi-sabi (侘寂) represents a comprehensive Japanese world view or aesthetic centered on the acceptance of transience. The aesthetic is sometimes described as one of beauty that is “imperfect, impermanent and incomplete”. It is a concept derived from the Buddhist assertion of the Three marks of existence (三法印, sanbōin), specifically impermanence (無常, mujō).
Characteristics of the wabi-sabi aesthetic include asymmetry, asperity, simplicity, modesty, intimacy and the suggestion of natural processes.
Wabi-sabi is the most conspicuous and characteristic feature of traditional Japanese beauty and it “occupies roughly the same position in the Japanese pantheon of aesthetic values as do the Greek ideals of beauty and perfection in the West.” “if an object or expression can bring about, within us, a sense of serene melancholy and a spiritual longing, then that object could be said to be wabi-sabi.” ” nurtures all that is authentic by acknowledging three simple realities: nothing lasts, nothing is finished, and nothing is perfect.”
The words wabi and sabi do not translate easily. Wabi originally referred to the loneliness of living in nature, remote from society; sabi meant “chill”, “lean” or “withered”. Around the 14th century these meanings began to change, taking on more positive connotations. Wabi now connotes rustic simplicity, freshness or quietness, and can be applied to both natural and human-made objects, or understated elegance. It can also refer to quirks and anomalies arising from the process of construction, which add uniqueness and elegance to the object. Sabi is beauty or serenity that comes with age, when the life of the object and its impermanence are evidenced in its patina and wear, or in any visible repairs.
More: Wabi-Sabi.