The Coming of the Toads

A Notebook – Since 2007

  • Where readers eSurface but authors lose control

    One advantage of the eBook is lightness. And library books “just disappear” from the little light box on the due date – so no overdue notices, an article in this week’s Christian Science Monitor (print edition) illustrates (we’ve noticed our print books disappearing occasionally, reminding us of bumbling Polonius’s advice, “Neither a borrower nor a lender be”).

    We read a gloomy hope, for at least reading is in the headlines: gloomy in that “deep reading” is failing; hopeful in that readers appear to be surfacing. Some consider that’s a problem. The CSM article references Marianne Wolf, whom we first glimpsed in Carr’s “Is Google Making Us Stupid,” still concerned about the loss of “deep reading.” But “deep reading” may simply be floating, detachment: “The alphabet and print technology fostered and encouraged a fragmenting process, a process of specialism and of detachment,” McLuhan said.

    Carr, Wolf, and others are concerned that electronic reading is changing brain circuitry. Of course it is: “All media are extensions of some human faculty – psychic or physical…Media, by altering the environment, evoke in us unique ratios of sense perceptions. The extension of any one sense alters the way we think and act – the way we perceive the world. When these ratios change, men change,” McLuhan argues: “Electronic circuitry is an extension of the central nervous system.” If that’s so, then what? The end of books?

    The eBook returns us to the middle ages, before copyright, before individual authors, before fixed points of view. The problem for some is now authorship and ownership: “Medieval scholars were indifferent to the precise identity of the ‘books’ they studied. In turn, they rarely signed even what was clearly their own…Many small texts were transmitted into volumes of miscellaneous content, very much like ‘jottings’ in a scrapbook, and, in this transmission, authorship was often lost” (McLuhan). Sounds like blogging.

    “We’re not going to change the code,” Reid Lyon says. No, we’re not, but perhaps readers will, or non-readers – perhaps the code is changing (under our very ears), for, as McLuhan argues, it’s impossible to be illiterate in a non-literate culture. We may be coming close to “the end of the line.”

    McLuhan, M. (1967). The Medium is the Massage. Bantam Books.

  • Me epistle on “Moopetsi meepotsi”

    Whenever challenged with words unknown we go first to the OED then to Finnegans Wake. We did so this morning looking for meep, following yet another Language Log thread. We found meep in Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, on page 276, in footnote number 4:

    “Parley vows the Askinwhose? I do, Ida. And how to call the cattle black. Moopetsi meepotsi.”

    A meep, then, is a calf, and a moop, the calf’s mom.

    The moral of me epistle can be found in today’s Boston Globe, where the principal barning the word learns who abuses meep, steps in moop, for the pot (principal), trying to silence the kettles (students) back, starts them whistling, creating a word stampede:

    “That was the first joke of Willingdone, tic for tac. Hee, hee, hee! This is me Belchum in his twelvemile cowchooks, weet, tweet and stampforth foremost, footing the camp for the jinnies. Drink a sip, drankasup, for he’s as sooner buy a guinness than he’d stale store stout” (p. 9).

    Let the peeps meep, for as Robert Frost said, “…there must something wrong / In wanting to silence any song” (“A Minor Bird”).

  • Where Sarah Palin Meets Andy Warhol

    Andy Warhol is everywhere. That sentence is everywhere. Andy’s fame has lasted longer than his predicted 15 minutes of world-wide fame for all of us. But one place he’s currently not to be found is on the New York Times bestseller list, which is full of Sarah Palin’s Going Rogue, already topping the million mark, according to the CSM’s tomatoes and books review.

    What is fame? These days fame appears to be some light travelling in a motor home coach across the malls of America. The ubiquitous mall is where we might all go to “look for America,” as Simon and Garfunkel sang.

    But a book purchased is not always a book read, as a review of our own bookcase shows. There sits Nabokov’s Ada, added to the stack decades ago and still not cracked, and McEwan’s Atonement, a paperback picked up at a garage sale last summer, the first few pages read a few times. Still, most do show signs of reading’s wear and tear. Our 1966 Love’s Body is falling apart – we’ll need to replace it soon.

    We would like to think that the teens with their moms in lines at the malls to get Sarah’s book autographed will actually read it, but as Flannery O’Connor said: “I would be most happy if you had already read it, happier still if you knew it well, but since experience has taught me to keep my expectations along these lines modest, I’ll tell you that this is the story of a family of six which, on its way driving to Florida, gets wiped out by…” some misfit’s ill-tossed tomato. For “Words can be overlooked,” P. G. Wodehouse said; “But tomatoes cannot.”

    The word value, often abused, as in “family values,” or “good, old fashioned ‘Good Country People’ values,” means nothing but what we desire, what we want. And what we want, as individuals and as communities, isn’t always what’s good for us.

    Reading is good for us, but we doubt that many of the millions who have purchased Sarah’s book want reading. It takes longer than 15 minutes to read a book. Still, we hope they do read the book. We wish the book well, for in the midst of the Reading Crisis, it’s a rose in winter. We don’t want to read Sarah’s book; but we hope that the millions of shoppers who did buy it do read it – such is our faith in reading; such was Andy Warhol’s faith in art.

  • Written after a visit to Language Log

    We look forward to our daily dose of Language Log. Language has undone so many. This morning there’s a post on the mateless orange, for she can’t be rhymed, yet she’s not alone. 

              The Mateless Orange

    The shelves are bare of rhymes for orange.

    Not only that, but my dish is empty of porridge.

    You’ve heard that girl before, right?

    Orange is popular, purple not,

    not even for Steven Earle.

    For it’s rindlessness that’s comic.

    But let me ask you something:

    What the heck is this all about?

    If you stop and think about it,

    your head is jam-packed

    with oranges,

    with the curious result

    that there are those who will find this an insult:

    a banana is not yellow,

    and the mateless orange rinds,

    for she can’t be rhymed,

    yet she’s not alone.

  • “Off with their heads!” Rhetorical Images of Heads of States

    Mao: Another head in a different time and place.

    “Off with their heads!” shouts Carroll’s Queen in Wonderland. Just so, Platon has beheaded them all in “Portraits of Power,” in the December 7 New Yorker.

    The head of state is not a whole person, but a symbol, but of what?

    “The king is an erection of the body politic,” Norman O. Brown says in Love’s Body. “The king personifies the pomp and pleasure of the community; but must also bear the burden of royalty, and, as scapegoat, take away the sins.” Yet the head retaliates with tyranny over the body.

    The head of state is a figure, a doll, a clown, a puppet. But the heads glower like lead. The flash of the moment turns the head to metal. Platon’s photographs are like statues, busts; the heads in the color photos are surrounded with an eerie blue halo, as from a welder’s torch, echoed in Mugabe’s photo with a blue glow around his face, and a thin blue glow around his otherwise dark eyes.

    England’s Gordon Brown, left eye slightly askew, appears to be saying, like Mad magazine’s Alfred E. Newman, “What, me worry?” While across the Irish Sea, Brian Cowen looks like a Roddy Doyle character just informed Ireland has made it to the World Cup finals, eyes disbelieving, mouth ready for the celebratory pint.

    But not all the heads are smiling to be beheaded, nor are they all quite beheaded; two of the three women are spared, along with Qaddafi, who sports a paisley shirt that could have been worn by Sly Stone in There’s a Riot Goin On. 

    Some of the heads shed an animal sense: Ahmadinejad a fox, Mesic an old dog. Some smile like they just ate the opposition (South Africa’s Zuma), or mischievously, like the Imp of the Perverse (Italy’s Berlusconi).

    The electronic version of the portfolio contains a few more photos than the print version, and a couple of those are classics: Estonia’s Tooma Ilves, bespectacled with bowtie; and Lithuania’s Dalia Grybauskaite, looking very much like a Baltic Hillary. It’s not clear why these did not make the hard copy cut. The online recorded commentary by Platon on each head is remarkable for its detail and accessibilty to an otherwise “behind the wall” process that readers of the print version alone don’t have. Platon’s comments are devoid of political content, focus on the passion he has for his craft; he has time to barely brush against these men and women who surely have seen so much, and his task is to capture all that they have seen in a flash and convert it to metal, which he does with alchemical art. 

    And Obama? Give this man his body back; the photo is from a previous sitting – it was decided he would not sit for a photo like the others at this time and place.

  • In Twosome Twiminds: News from the Stroke Club – “Who Are We?”

    During our stroke, we picked up the Takemine to test our left hand, self-diagnosing our condition. We noticed our left hand with interest; it formed the shape of the chord we had asked for, but not on the frets and strings we wanted. The result was discord, the guitar sounding badly out of tune. We moved to the Telecaster. The sound was distorted, the guitar either badly out of tune, the amplifier’s speaker blown, or our hand forming some new nonsense chord. Yet, “It sounds fine,” Susan said. “It sounds like it always does.”

    In Finnegans Wake, Joyce recreates the experience of a stroke: “…and now, forsooth, you have become of twosome twiminds…” (188).

    From 12-1-09 Open Culture: “Jill Bolte Taylor’s ‘Stroke of Insight’ talk reaches the top of many lists. What happens when a neuroanatomist experiences a massive stroke and feels all the brain functions she has studied (speech, movement, understanding, etc) suddenly start to slip away? And how do these losses fundamentally change who we are? You’ll find out in a crisp (and at times emotional) 18 minutes and 40 seconds. You can also read her book that elaborates on her life-altering experience. See My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist’s Personal Journey.”

    Join the Stoke Club by finding a quiet 20 minutes to watch Taylor’s talk on  video.

  • Camus and The Myth of Syllabus

    “One must imagine Sisyphus happy,” Camus says, in The Myth of Sisyphus.

    So too, one imagines a happy student, book in hand, pushing the syllabus up another class – happy because in the push he writes his own syllabus, for, as Rene Char said, “No bird has the heart to sing in a thicket of questions.”

    “Expression begins where thought ends,” Camus says, reminding us then of Wallace Stevens in “The Man with the Blue Guitar”:

    XXXII

    Throw away the lights, the definitions,

    And say of what you see in the dark…

    The blue guitar surprises you.

  • caMels, whEN to caPITalize, & concrEte POEMS

    Over at Steamboats, Caleb Crain has lately expressed a concern over the use of camel case letters.

    We are not opposed to the use of camel case in a corporate logo, particularly where Concrete poetry might find a place in commerce.

    We went to An Anthology of Concrete Poetry (Emmett Williams, ed., 1967, Something Else Press), remembering some camel casing there, but spacing is a more prevalent tool. Remember that most of the old Concrete poems were chiseled out on manual typewriters.

    The John J. Sharkey poem, “Schoenberg” (1963), is shown in the Anthology in two versions. The first (left) was rejected “…because the publisher does not use upper-case letters in his graphic production style.”

    The second version was “interpreted typographically by Simon Lord…,” and Sharkey apparently liked it less than his original.

    There’s often a reason for things like spacing, capitalization, reading silently – and then the reason becomes the rule, and remains the rule, even after we’ve forgotten the reason; then we might invent a new reason to support what we now don’t want to change.

    Note: The title to this post is a Concrete poem, created with camels:

    MEN PIT & Ete POEMS.

  • Rap Phonics Rhapsody: Eating the Alphabet and Spitting it Out

    If the vowels decide to strike, we can probably keep the machines running, but if we lose the consonants, we’ll have to shut down.

    How should we learn to read? The beginning reader, trying to make soundsense from the smell of ink of the “…miseffectual whyacinthinous riot of blots and blurs and bars and balls and hoops an wriggles and justaposed jottings linked by spurts of speed” (Joyce, Finnegan’s Wake, 118) soon understands that “When a part so ptee does duty for the holos we soon grow to use of an allforabit” (19).

    Today’s beginning reader (and teacher) sit at the bottom of a tower of babble constructed of politics made necessary by how education is funded and a grant industry, partisan learning theories (in which the neuroscientists are now investing a huge down payment), and good, old-fashioned my way is better than your way faculty room argument.

    “It is told in sounds in utter that, in signs so adds to, in universal, in polygluttural, in each auxiliary neutral idiom, sordomutics, florilingua, sheltafocal, flayflutter, a con’s cubane, a pro’s tutute, strassarab, ereperse and anythongue athall” (117).

    Over at The Frontal Cortex, the reading discussion was lively but short, and our hungry mind wanted more. So once again we picked up Joyce and reread a few favorite passages (aloud, the better to taste and hear the words, to slurp and listen as the vowels (like Alice’s EAT ME cake) made us bigger and the consonants smaller), and then we perused a few articles.

    Nicholas Lehman reported in a 1997 Atlantic article that “The dispute operates at three levels, which is one reason why it is so pervasive. It concerns how people learn, what schools should be for, and the essential nature of a good society.” This came three years after Art Levine reported in an Atlantic article that “In education no question has produced so much bitter debate for so long as this one: What is the best way to teach children to read?”

    The debate continues worldwide, with no sign of abatement, and the political influences continue, as shown in a 2006 Guardian article featuring Oxford’s Kathy Sylva, in which she discusses legislative interests. Also in 2006, Sylva brought attention to the issue of learning reading in a teaching expertise interview; here we find her discussing neurons, signaling that as debate continues, it is now infused with new ethos borrowed from neuroscience.

    Should the words go from the page directly into the brain through the eyes, or should the words be eaten first (eat your p’s), rolled around on the tongue, felt, then spat out into the ears to worm their way into the brain? 

    We don’t value fast food reading; we want the old-fashioned, sit down meal. Words have substance: they are smooth or rough, loud or quiet, ticklish or jolting. Words leave bruises that other words salve.  Words rap and rip their way into our consciousness as we tear them apart with our teeth. Syllables slide like bumpy water. We want to eat the alphabet and spit out the seeds – now that’s reading.

  • A Different Brain: Reinventing Neuroscience from the Bottom Down

    We saw Robert B. Laughlin lecture in Portland in 2005. It was Eric’s idea. He was taking a high school physics class, and there was a free ticket and extra credit in the wings, so we tagged along, always interested in what the physicists are up to.

    The hall was packed. On the stage was a podium and an overhead projector. We had expected high tech Excel files pasted into a slick PowerPoint. Instead, we got a speaker and cartoon drawings on the overhead. And it was brilliant (in the Roddy Doyle sense of the word). Laughlin was funny, accessible, engaging (a Q&A followed the lecture), humble, generous, challenging. Then the Nobel prize winning physicist sat in the lobby selling and signing his book: A Different Universe: Reinventing Physics from the Bottom Down.

    Our brain, an old dog versed in verse, struggled a bit in parts of the lecture, wanted to chase a Frisbee in the park, get out and smell some dirt, so we looked forward to sharing the book with Eric and learning more about the universe. Eric had Laughlin sign the book; his signature looks like a nebula.

    What can science tell us about life? In his preface to the book, Laughlin says, “Seeing our understanding of nature as a mathematical construction has fundamentally different implications from seeing it as an empirical synthesis. One view identifies us as masters of the universe; the other identifies the universe as the master of us…At its core the matter is not scientific at all but concerns one’s sense of self and place in the world.” One of these views he explains with a reference to John Horgan’s The End of Science, “in which he [Horgan] argues that all fundamental things are now known and there is nothing left for us to do but fill in details.”

    That is the view of the brain taken by some of today’s neuroscientists, a view that has the seemingly infallible protection of the scientific method. Yet Laughlin moves on to describe a different view, “that all physical law we know about has collective origins, not just some of it. In other words, the distinction between fundamental laws and the laws descending from them is a myth, as is the idea of mastery of the universe through mathematics alone.” This is an untamed elephant in the science lab. And we’re only in the preface.

    Emergence is Laughlin’s theme: “…human behavior resembles nature because it is part of nature and ruled by the same laws as everything else…we resemble primitive things because we are made of them – not because we have humanized them or controlled them with our minds. The parallels between organization of a life and organization of electrons are not an accident or a delusion, but physics” (201).

    Laughlin likes quotes; they help him move his conversation forward. This one opens his book: “Not only is the universe stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine” (Sir Arthur Eddington). This one opens the last chapter of the book: “A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects” (R. A. Heinlein).

    Juxtaposition to synthesize varying points of view casts things in new light. In the chapter “Picnic Table in the Sun,” Laughlin, describing some physicists’ conversation, says, “At any rate, by noon nobody’s brain would hold any more…,” and they move off to an outdoor lunch.

    We find the physicists’ full brains hopeful; it suggests the need to digest, sleep, and let go – a need we all feel, regardless of the relative size of our brain. Here in this particular spot in the universe it’s morning, and we are thinking of some scrambled eggs, toast, and coffee. Then we’ll take a walk in the sun, and if we’re lucky, our brain will forget about itself, becoming just another part of us, no more, no less, another part of the universe.

  • Neuroscepticism: Exploring the Dark Matter of the Brain

    The neuroscientists exploring the brain are like the physicists exploring the universe. We are reminded of Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle: no cat, lots of string.

    We enjoyed The Frontal Cortex’s answer to our question on the distinction between brain and mind: “The mind is really just a piece of meat.” Still, that’s more than some physicists think of the universe.

    The neuroscientists now appear in danger similar to that of the physicists, of generating both politics and mythologies. What amounts to a case study argument has recently developed at the New Humanist Blog, with Raymond Tallis trashing, literally, in his article titled “Neurotrash,” the neuroscientists as social engineers, and Matt Grist responding in his article titled “Neuroscience can help tame the elephant” (caution: metaphors on the loose), offering the neuroscientist as the savior of juvenile delinquents: says Grist, “We are now properly understanding human behaviour (if only in outline) in the holistic setting of our actual dwelling, rather than in terms of the abstractions of Platonic philosophy. And the lesson seems to be that being a rational, creative, happy and well-behaved human being is a social achievement that takes time, dedication and certain kinds of environments.”

    At this point, readers might be hearing the radio in their brains switched on; it’s the West Side Story song, “Gee, Officer Krupke,” where once again we find the poets beating the scientists to the punch.

    To Tallis’s point, the neuroscientists (like some of the physicists) have yet to explain emergence, where the whole is more than not equal to the sum of the parts, but where the individual part does not even predict the whole. To Grist’s point, the neuroscientists are not alone but have joined with the other social sciences to better build a holistic view of human behavior.

    But we are concerned with Grist’s warrants and the toll they appear to take on freedom. Just what, exactly, is a “well-behaved human being,” and why is it, whatever it is, a “social achievement”? Who will be selected, using what rubric, to become well-behaved?

    Certainly there are environments that produce predictable results, where predictable results are what we are looking for, but in the brain, as in space, so far our explorations suggest that nothing is predictable – such is our freedom, which we seem to share with the universe. There’s a lot of dark matter yet to digest. Perhaps what the neruoscientists need is an iconoclast like Garrett Lisi, whose “An Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything” rocked the physics world a couple of years ago. Then again, the neuroscientists already seem to have their exceptionally simple theory of the mind: “…just a piece of meat.” Fries with that? For if the mind is just a piece of meat, who decides, and how is the decision made – who says how it should be seasoned, prepared, cooked, and eaten? The specialist? The neuroscientist? Perhaps Grist thinks Swift was not joking. “Taming the elephant”: we won’t soon forget that metaphor, for what becomes of a tamed elephant?