The Coming of the Toads

A Notebook – Since 2007

Category: Reading

  • 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?

  • Where Pascal metaphorically wagering meets Borges bird-watching

    Imagine that as a young person you once had a conversation with a close friend in which you made a wager on God’s existence. One of you argued for God’s existence, the other against. The wager went like this: one of you is to live his life as if God exists; the other is to live his life as if God does not exist. The two of you would meet regularly over the course of time to compare notes, but the wager could only be decided if you both lived into old age, at which point the winner of the wager, you both agreed, would be obvious.

    This is the sort of proposition that sometimes informs novels. Pascal handles the matter more briefly, in one of his thoughts (Pensees, #233), in the form of a dialog. It is an either or proposition, one that we are existentially bound to, and it may very well be our freedom that is being wagered; yet Pascal says we have nothing to lose.

    Borges, in his essay “The Fearful Sphere of Pascal,” suggests that for Pascal, uncertainty produced anxiety, and that he found no solace in his thought that “Nature is an infinite sphere, whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.” Borges brings to our attention an alternative translation based on Pascal’s notes. Apparently, Pascal had started to write “Nature is a fearful sphere….” Borges points out that Pascal’s sphere is a metaphor, and that “It may be that universal history is the history of the different intonations given a handful of metaphors.”

    In Borges’s “Argumentum Ornithologicum,” he argues for the existence of God. Closing his eyes, he envisions a small flock of birds, around ten birds in number, but they quickly disappear, and he’s uncertain exactly how many birds he saw in his vision. To him, the exact number “is inconceivable; ergo, God exists.” The exact number of birds that Borges saw is known to God.

    Pascal was a mathematician, a logician, clearly interested in the existential predicament of man; Borges was a poet. They both tested the existence of God by living their lives as if He existed. It may matter not God’s existence if His existence is not evident to us; it does matter how we live our lives, for which there is existential evidence, if none other, and who is able to prove this, wins the wager.

  • This Is Your Brain On Books

    Over at the Frontal Cortex, Jonah Lehrer has posted his review of a new book about the effects of the brain on reading: Stanislas Dehaene’s Reading in the Brain. Lehrer says that the “moral of Dehaene’s book is that our cultural forms reflect the biological form of the brain; the details of language are largely a biological accident.” We’ve not read Dehaene’s book yet, but Lehrer’s summary seems to suggest a symbiotic relationship between the brain and the brain’s environment.

    To understand the effects of reading on the brain, one must go to non-literate cultures, and study, as Marshall McLuhan researched, the changes that occur in both the brain and the culture as reading is learned. “The most obvious character of print is repetition,” McLuhan said, “just as the obvious effect of repetition is hypnosis or obsession” (p. 47). It’s impossible to be illiterate in a non-literate culture, and non-literacy has its advantages.

    When we read, we are hypnotized, the eye becomes master of the sensorium, the remaining four senses impressed into eye-service. The hypnosis blinks when the eye sees an unfamiliar word, and the tongue and ear have to help out: “we’re forced to decipher the sound of the word before we can make a guess about its definition, which requires a second or two of conscious effort” (Lehrer). This means that the new reader must mouth his words as he reads (since all the words are unfamiliar to the new reader); he must hear them first. This is why, according to McLuhan, “the medieval monks’ reading carrel was indeed a singing booth” (p. 115). They had not yet learned to read silently. They had to say the word and hear it; the words entered the brain through their ears, not through their eyes. (This supports using a phonics method to teach reading.)

    Lehrer says that Dehaene “also speculates that, while ‘learning to read induces massive cognitive gains,’ it also comes with a hidden mental cost: because so much of our visual cortex is now devoted to literacy, we’re less able to ‘read’ the details of natural world.” Again, this ground was covered by McLuhan in The Guttenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man.

    “Literacy,” McLuhan argued, “affects the physiology as well as the psychic life” (p. 45). McLuhan said that “every technology contrived and ‘outered’ by man has the power to numb human awareness during the period of its first interiorization” (p. 187). And this is the ground that Nicholas Carr has been sifting though with regard to the effects of the internet on reading and on the brain.

    It’s curious to hear Lehrer, not quite a neuroscientist (which is one reason we like him; he’s a non-specialist), say that “the brain is much more than the seat of the soul…,” curious in that he resorts to both metaphor and the metaphysical in a single phrase. “The seat of the soul”: surely that’s your brain on books.

    June 6, 2010 Update: Jonah Lehrer takes some of the wind out of Nicholas Carr’s neuro-sails in a Times review of Carr’s book The Shallows and in a follow up post on his blog.

  • Eric Sevareid, Italo Calvino, and NASA’s Watery Disappointment

    We’re not in a hurry to get to the moon; there doesn’t appear to be a lot to do there – great view of Earth, of course, and the air is clean. Up close, though, the moon looks like an ancient Egyptian golf course. The moon was probably once covered with lush greens and lovely azaleas surrounding freshwater hazards, but the groundsmen disappeared long ago, around the time the gamekeepers were laid off.

    Now, NASA tells us there is water on the moon, lots of it, but not enough to get the surfboard out.

    Italo Calvino, in “The Distance of the Moon,” tells us of a time when the moon was much closer to the Earth, and could be reached by climbing a ladder: “…from the top of the ladder, standing erect on the last rung, you could just touch the Moon if you held your arms up.”

    William S. Marshall, a staff scientist and dowser at the NASA Ames Research Center, recently contributed a woeful Op-Ed piece to the Times describing NASA’s disappointment in the public’s waned response to its recent divining-wand blast: “Almost as surprising as NASA’s announcement [of water in the moon] is the lack of attention it has received. Thirty years ago, a development like this would have been heralded as one of humanity’s greatest discoveries.”

    But what was the response decades ago to NASA’s climbing the ladder to the moon? To find out, we looked up our old friend Eric Sevareid, who, in a short opinion piece titled “The Dark of the Moon” (1958), a radio piece written when NASA was created to erect a lunar ladder, said, “It is exciting talk, indeed, the talk of man’s advance toward space. But one little step in man’s advance toward man – that, we think, would be truly exciting.”

    Alas, they may have found water on the moon, but here on Earth, we are still thirsty.

  • Becker-Posner: fodder for rhetoric foragers

    The shallow depth of the unstated warrants at the Becker-Posner blog makes for good fodder for rhetoric foragers. Consider this, from Posner’s half of their 15 Nov 09 post: “Should the U.S. economy grow more rapidly than the public debt, we’ll be okay. But the government’s focus appears to be not on economic growth, but on redistribution (the major goal of health reform) and on creating at least an aura of prosperity, at whatever cost in deficit spending and future inflation, in time for the November 2010 congressional elections.”

    Redistribution may be an effect of health care reform, but there’s no evidence that it’s a goal; at the same time, distribution, and redistribution, is always a goal or effect or both of most legislative programs, so why mention it? Because redistribution is always viewed as a negative value (something one doesn’t want), particularly for those who do value the current distribution.

    Posner’s claim is that the “major goal of health [care] reform” is “redistribution.” In Posner’s view, wealth should not be redistributed to achieve health care reform (redistribution by definition is a wrong).

    Yet it’s impossible to have meaningful health care reform without some form of redistribution, so Posner’s unstated warrants here include that we should not have health care reform, that redistribution is a wrong, an economic wrong, and that he values this wrong over the health care uninsured – and over the inflated costs being paid by those who do have health insurance. Posner values the wealth of a minority over the physical and economic health of the majority, and the support for this is found in his cynical reference to yet another assumption – that any legislation that involves redistribution has as its root cause an upcoming election. It’s no wonder we never get anything accomplished.

    Posner’s claim is that the government should not take something from someone who has and give it to someone who has not. Redistribution is a trigger word intended to attract those that have with its click. It’s quick draw rhetoric. Posner’s use of “government’s focus” also serves as a trigger, for the word government in this context is meaningless, or can only mean one thing – that entity constantly at work to take something from one and give it to someone else – it’s the government of Huck Finn’s father.

    There are many entities at work on health care reform, including doctors and hospitals. For a thorough discussion of health care costs and what’s at stake in trying to lower those costs while insuring everyone, see Atul Gawande’s article “The Cost Conundrum,” in the June 1, 2009 issue of the New Yorker.

  • APA Caution: Metaphor Crossing

    We don’t find E. B. White adhering to APA guidelines. It’s more palatable monkeying with rats if one denies them human characteristics.

    One rule that hasn’t changed in the new 6th edition APA manual concerns a warning against the use of metaphor, specifically anthropomorphic connotations (p. 69). One may not use metaphor; the question is, can one not.

    Camus avoided metaphor in The Stranger, creating an anti-man. For McLuhan, technology is metaphor, extensions of the senses. For Norman O. Brown, in Love’s Body, language is metaphor; to avoid metaphor is to avoid language: “Metaphor is mistake or impropriety; a faux pas, or slip of the tongue; a little madness; petit mal; a little seizure or inspiration” (p. 244). It’s easy to see why the APA wants to avoid it. On the other hand, “Freedom is poetry, taking liberties with words, breaking the rules of normal speech, violating common sense” (p. 244), in short, jazz. But metaphor is ambiguous, and that’s what we must avoid: “Psychoanalysis, symbolic consciousness, leads from disguised to patent nonsense – Wittgenstein, surrealism, Finnegans Wake” (p. 245). In “VII” of Love’s Body, titled “Head,” Brown lights out for the territory, ahead of all the rest: “Psychoanalysis shows the sexual organization of the body physical to be a political organization; the body is a body politic…a political arrangement arrived at after stormy upheavals in the house of Oedipus…a well-organized tyranny” (pp. 126-127). And if one wants to avoid sex, of course, one may go in for the corporate body, where the head sits at the top, and gets dibs on the first parking space.

    Metaphor begins with sound, and poetry begins with being tricked by sound: “…cuckoo(‘s)fool, maid(en, mate, the Wryneck, which arrives at or about the same time as the cuckoo” (OED, mate).

    So, in the 6th edition of the APA manual, we find this: “Correct: Pairs of rats (cage mates) were allowed to forage together. Incorrect: Rat couples (cage mates) were allowed to forage together” (p. 69). But, first, pair is no better than couple. Since the 13th Century, at least, the OED gives us, pair has been used to describe a married couple; indeed, the denotative meaning of pair is couple. Second, the offensive word in the passage (taking the APA view of metaphor as something to be avoided), is not pairs or couples, but mates, for a mate is one of a pair, a partner in marriage, a lover. The denotative meaning of mate, from the OED, is “A companion, fellow, comrade, friend; a fellow worker or business partner,” and only an E. B. White can handle a rat as all of these.

    The poor rats, coupled in their cage, denied by the APA their very coupling, for, again, as the OED gives us, couple means “That which unites two. 1. a. A brace or leash for holding two hounds together.” Alone, together; together, but separate: like humans, a condition that can only exist in some cage, in cagey logic.

    And what of cage? From the OED: “I. Generally and non-technically. 1. A box or place of confinement for birds and other animals (or, in barbarous times, for human beings), made wholly or partly of wire, or with bars of metal or wood, so as to admit air and light, while preventing the creature’s escape.”

    Note “in barbarous times” suggests time past, but no longer: we wish, for language is our cage, a pair of gloves with a missing mate, a decoupling of experience.

    If we want to avoid metaphor in the APA example given on page 69, we suggest: Rats were allowed to forage together, in cages, separated two by two. Lovely, isn’t it? Then again, were the rats allowed out of their cages to forage? Can one forage in a cage? Perhaps rats can, but still, an even greater problem than pair, couple, or cage is found with the word forage, for a forager is a messenger, though one may forage for oneself. Do rats “plunder, pillage, ravage” (OED, for forage)? No, only humans forage, as we have done here, within the cage of our blog.

  • Good night, my some-corpus one

    We’ve been enjoying a discussion over at Language Log on the difference between the words someone and somebody.

    Maybe Meredith Willson’s Marian the librarian’s song “Good Night, My Someone,” from the musical The Music Man, illustrates a point that might be made for the ear making the distinctive decision, a vote for tone:

    “Good night, my someone, good night, my love…”

    Of course, you have to hear the song, not merely read it, but “good night, my somebody” somehow doesn’t sound the same, carries a different tone, and suits the romantic intent far less, introducing as it does, indeed, the corpus, which, from a grammar of romance, should not come into play too early in someone’s love song.