from the comments
Our lead bird dog Tuffy would bring Miss Nell gifts of terrapins and turtles, try to drop them in her lap as she shooed him away. We always wondered why that? But now I’m remembering the people who walked by his pen after fishing the woods ponds and swamps. We’d stop them and examine their catches. They were big on turtle soup and often had a big one on a hook or rope. Did Tuffy “get” that? That the big terrapins he captured and ran with in his mouth back to the one person who resisted his love were considered great prizes by some? I mean, dogs, cats, owls, they just want to be friends.
Jason Molina – Don’t It Look Like Rain
The wolf outside my door don’t need
Anymore of my blood
Of my bood
She don’t wait for nothing
nothing anymore
She’s watching for nothing anymore
Moon above my light
Starts fading out
I live for nothing anymore
I live for nothing
Redington
“And this is where it starts.”
Living in the county long enough, you begin to feel that you know every road, every creek, and even every cow; but there are still places hiding out there, waiting, scattered amid the leaves, in the lonely hollows.
But where are we? Where have we gone?
Somewhere Beyond the Corn.
Read more
from the comments
One of my favorite books, Kiln People, is about a society where you can create clay copies of yourself to do various tasks (menial, dangerous) while you do something else, then at the end of the day you download their memories back into you. This got me into a really creepy conversation with a friend about the difference between experiencing something first hand and remembering something. If the memory is yours (these clay copies have your personality, tactile sensations, everything) what are you losing by not experiencing it? Each moment is fleeting, at what point does something become memory instead of experience? Your senses take a measurable amount of time to transmit information and your body to physically react to things. Something 1/100 of a second ago, something 1/10 of a second ago, something 1/2 a second ago, something 5 seconds ago?
I think a harder question might be: would you rather travel the entire world asynchronously by surrogate and inload the memories, or travel 1/100th or 1/1000th as much but experience it all first hand in real synchronous time? I’m not sure which I’d pick.
last night, tumbling sleepward
Let the little lost lamb lead the way.
from the archives: April 28, 2006
I always wondered why Whitney Houston and Bobby Brown decided to visit Israel and hang out with Ariel Sharon. Tonight, while eating Country Fried Kalebone™ at phATLanta’s Soul Vegetarian restaurant on N. Highland Avenue, I finally found the answer.
from the moderated comments
Well, Fuck me… your still as stupid as before.
Three for Today (Day Two)
Troy Davis died yesterday by the hand of justice. Many factions fought both sides. When does truth lie?
We write to you today with the overwhelming concern that an innocent person could be executed in Georgia tonight
Six former corrections officials wrote Georgia Corrections Officials and Governor Nathan Deal asking that the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles reconsider the execution of Troy Davis:
We write to you as former wardens and corrections officials who have had direct involvement in executions. Like few others in this country, we understand that you have a job to do in carrying out the lawful orders of the judiciary. We also understand, from our own personal experiences, the awful lifelong repercussions that come from participating in the execution of prisoners. While most of the prisoners whose executions we participated in accepted responsibility for the crimes for which they were punished, some of us have also executed prisoners who maintained their innocence until the end. It is those cases that are most haunting to an executioner.
As of now, the execution has been postponed pending review from the Supreme Court.
Update: The Supreme Court Rejects the stay of execution.
(thanks, Tim)
The bottom line is that memory is essential to constructing scenarios for ourselves in the future
A hodgepodge of the latest from the land of neuroscience:
As long as a hand-clapper is less than 30 meters away, you hear and see the clap happen together. But beyond this distance, the sound arrives more than 80 milliseconds later than the light, and the brain no longer matches sight and sound. What is weird is that the transition is abrupt: by taking a single step away from you, the hand-clapper goes from in sync to out of sync. Similarly, as long as a TV or film soundtrack is synchronized within 80 milliseconds, you won’t notice any lag, but if the delay gets any longer, the two abruptly and maddeningly become disjointed. Events that take place faster than 80 milliseconds fly under the radar of consciousness. A batter swings at a ball before being aware that the pitcher has even throw it.
(via the browser)
I do not fear death
I found Roger Ebert’s essay on mortality (excerpted from his new book) to be quite a lovely catalyst for reflection.
tweet of the day, III
tweet of the day
quote out of context
Now my own son has turned 17, the same age as the eggshell boy was then. He was in the void of pre-birth when our friend made his lonely descent through the lift shaft. I have a memory of being with my son when he was four years old. It is winter. We have left the warmth of our house for the freezing night air. There are few lights in the village and the sky is full of stars. We’re hardly out of the front door when he starts coughing. Are you all right? I ask him. It’s okay, he says, I think I just swallowed some dark. I realise that he has the notion that darkness is a substance. It will make you choke if you swallow too much in one go. I could have put him straight with some prosaic account of the coughing reflex. But I didn’t. I stashed away the treasure of the image, and left him with the version of reality fashioned by his own infant brain.
notes for a potential screenplay
One thing that could be explored, other than the fractious nature of self, is the shifting patterns of human sexuality, fantasy, relationships, the dynamic of sexual interaction and need at a particular moment, and how contradictory that can appear or be from one experience to the next. Also the reverberation of that played out in memory and self-consciousness.
from the comments
I’ve been making my way through the entire archives of Paul Bloks in Prospect Magazine, where he wrote about his experiences as a neuropsychologist. While I can’t say that the introduction to this awesome field has made me doubt my recent choice of career change, I am sure that I’ll be closely following the research and developments by Bloks and those like him. Where psychiatry searches for drugs to mostly tamper unconventional psychological experience, the field of neuropsychology seems to hold space for the curiosity of human life. The ways we make sense of ourselves and the world around us, in relation to how operational our brains are. What I find myself asking is, what’s a fully operational brain? Aside from all the physical expectations of what should be included and excluded inside our skulls, how can there be a standard amidst our diversity? And if we decide, someday, on a criterion for brain performance, will we unwittingly be further subjugating the extraordinary or unorthodox among us?
quote out of context
Ian McEwan makes a telling point. “What I believe but cannot prove,” he says, “is that no part of my consciousness will survive my death.” His enlightened fellow Edge contributors will take this as a given, but they may not appreciate its significance, which is that belief in an afterlife “divides the world crucially, and much damage has been done to thought as well as to persons by those who are certain that there is a life, a better, more important life, elsewhere.” The natural gift of consciousness should be treasured all the more for its transience.
The London Riots
Word.
Via Alan Phelan, who wrote: 21.40 Matthew Moore, the Telegraph’s assistant news editor, filmed this extraordinary speech by a fearless West Indian woman in Hackney, East London. Contains obscene language.
from the comments
I got slightly inebriated at a dinner party right after this record came out and kept repeating “All you want to do is be the fire part of fire” and everyone kept asking me what I was muttering about because apparently hanging out in a kitchen and muttering about fire is disconcerting.
to dance
I have been going through some deep introspection of late, trying to untie an emotional knot. Perhaps the most interesting offshoot of my subconscious dives has been the insistent assertion of the beauty of dance.
I have always loved dance, but I suspect not in the way that most people who love dance experience it. I have little interest in choreographed productions. I can appreciate the precision and athleticism and grace that goes into, say, a ballet, but I am rarely drawn to watch one. What I love is the Personal Dance. The dance that rises up and must come out, spontaneously, without ego or self consciousness of any kind.
As much as I love this dance impulse in myself (and Daryl can affirm that I cannot hear certain music without dancing–usually in my chair), what I love most are the rare times I can witness it in someone else. At its best, such dance is the purest expression of Joy. What I have realized in the past week is that I am more moved by the sight of Personal Dance than by any other form of art or expression. It touches me at my very core. It makes me want to jump up and cry simultaneously.
I can think of one film example in which you might understand what I am referring to. It is in The Motorcycle Diaries, a film brilliant on many levels. But there is a scene (not available on YouTube except as a glimpse in the trailer) where the Alberto Granado character, beautifully portrayed by Rodrigo De la Serna, jumps onto the dance floor, smiling and dancing in the pure way I am trying to describe. It lifts me out of myself every time I see it.
tweet of the day
Scream
I woke up screaming this week. A bad dream, said the Iowan. Eventually I went back to sleep, but the rest of the night was uneasy. The next night at dinner, he asked me about it, but I said I could not remember what was going on with me. Sleep walking and talking is not unusual in my family. Mr. B. will “speak in tongues” in the night, the Iowan says. But I quieted down long ago. And had not screamed in my sleep in decades.
Until just after midnight on June 29, 2011. The truth is I did have a vague notion about it all day. I didn’t really want to talk about it. Until I did. “Maybe it was because this was the day daddy died, 20 years ago.” I was born on Father’s Day. I had his black, curly hair. His laugh. His way of never meeting a stranger.
And on June 29, 1991, he shook hands with a friend after a session at the coffee shop, then ran straight into the path of a car. Did not walk. He ran.
Distressing thoughts, emotions, shock, these things can be tidied up and put away, but only for so long. The old mantle clock’s single peal at a quarter after midnight was all it took to crack open the mind’s thin colluding door. And out it came, a long, ear-splitting, scream. I imagine it sounded like loss.
Finally.
The Coping Cop-out of Machines of Loving Grace
Throughout the AWOBMLG trilogy, Adam Curtis effectively shows how certain memes inform economic, social & political change in the world & in the third monkey in the machine <> machine in the monkey episode he addresses the mother of all memes: the selfish gene, as put forward by Hamilton > Price > Dawkins. And in the process Curtis manages to artfully wrangle & weave in disparate & seemingly unrelated topics (like HIV, hippies, PS2, gorillas, London’s homeless, disco-dancing & conflict in the Congo), but doesn’t touch the one topic I would’ve liked to see addressed: interspecies altruism & how to explain it genetically. I’m not talking about the classic examples of reciprocal altruism (ox-pecker<>buffalo or remora<>shark) but for example dolphins saving humans from sharks or why this orangutan seemingly has an interest in reviving this little bird, or why we humans, unlike the honey badger, even give a shit.
At first these final lines of episode 3 were a let-down, a cop-out that left me hanging (for perhaps the same reason that Deron couldn’t get past the premise):
… But Hamilton’s ideas remain powerfully influential in our society. Above all, the idea that human beings are helpless chunks of hardware controlled by software programs written in their genetic code. The question is, have we embraced that idea because it is a comfort in a world where everything we do, either good or bad, seems to have terrible unforeseen consequences? We know that it was our actions that helped cause the horror still unfolding in the Congo. Yet we have not idea what to do about it. So instead we have embraced a fatalistic philosophy of us as helpless computing machines to both excuse and explain our political failure to change the world.
But now, waking up the next morning, I can’t stop thinking about it & I’m wondering if it bothered me because it’s true & I just don’t want to accept it?
neuroscientist David Eagleman on the competing nature of self
From an interview with neuroscientist David Eagleman on his new book Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain.
Wired.com: So if we’re not consciously directing our own decision-making, how do our brains handle the process?
Eagleman: I make this argument about the brain being like a team of rivals. I synthesize a lot of data to show that you are not one thing, but instead your brain is made up of these competing networks that are all battling it out to control this single output channel of your behavior. And so your brain’s like a neural parliament, and you’ve got these different parties in there like the Democrats and Republicans and Libertarians, all of whom love their country and feel that they know the best way to steer the ship of state. But they have differing opinions on how to do it, and they have to fight it out.
This is why we can cuss at ourselves and cajole ourselves and get angry at ourselves, and this is why you can do behavior and look back and think, “Wow, how did I do that?” It’s because you are not one person, you are not one thing. As Walt Whitman said, “I am large, I contain multitudes.”
I think Incognito is next on my list after The Information.
Thoughts on Clusterflock
So yesterday, I was fiddling with a beads and pearls hair comb that I use to pull back my hair on hot days. Rick said, “That’s pretty.” I was flattered. The Iowan is very notice-y. Mr. B. also can be alert, for a teenager. But if I was bound, in front of the wheels of a truck, with the driver threatening to run over me unless those two could name the “cute hair accessory” I had been wearing all week, I would be in trouble. The Iowan wouldn’t be able to say. Mr. Boudreaux would whisper, “What’s an accessory?”
Rick, the writerly friend who also has been a merchandising designer, notices. I see that he takes it all in, maybe even when he is trying not to do that.
I need all of it, my guys at home, my friends who wouldn’t visit this blog and even if they did would click off, baffled. And my Clusterflock. The flock has different meanings for all of us, of course. But to me, it is a shiny bauble, the layer of bubbles that appeared from out of nowhere and now accompany me throughout my day.
