Jennifer came across this passage in Peter J. Conradi's biography of English author and philosopher Iris Murdoch that reminded me of Matisse's notorious comparison between art and a comfortable armchair. In a dialogue by Murdoch, Plato and Socrates argue about the meaning of art. Plato says art is an evasion, that it prevents people from confronting the gods. Socrates answers:
You say art consoles us and prevents us from taking the final step ... It may be that human beings can only achieve second best, that second best is our best ... Homer is imperfect. Science is imperfect ... our truth must include, must embrace the idea of the second-best, that all our thought will be incomplete and all our art tainted with selfishness. This doesn't mean there is no difference between the good and the bad in what we achieve. And it doesn't mean not trying. It means trying in a humble modest truthful spirit. This is our truth ...
It may even be that ... good art tells us more truth about our lives and our world than any other kind of thinking or speculation -- it certainly speaks to more people. And perhaps the language of art is the most universal and enduring kind of human thought ... We are all artists, we are all story-tellers ... And we should thank the gods for great artists who draw away the veil of anxiety and selfishness and show us, even for a moment, another world, a real world, and tell us a little bit of truth. And we should not be too hard on ourselves for being comforted.
I stumbled across a hilarious interview between Allen Ginsberg and conservative columnist John Lofton from 1990. Lofton begins the interview aggressively asking if Ginsberg is crazy. Ginsberg talks about seeing a shrink and Lofton is mystified why the poet doesn't know his psychiatrist's religious beliefs.
GINSBERG: I know some, through body language and the response to the
immediate situation in front of me, which is what I am really
interested in, rather than, say, this conversation. I'm dealing with
you in terms of how you display yourself here, not the history of your
thoughts. I'm trying to deal with the evidence or manifestation of how
you present yourself here--your harshness, aggression, and insistency
and--
LOFTON: Why not call it my perseverance? Isn't that a nicer word? Or guts? Or tenacity?
GINSBERG: I would say there is a little element of S&M in your approach. Power.
LOFTON: No. I would say this is more like the kind of sex you like.
GINSBERG: And I would say this is the kind of power relationship you like, judging from your behavior.
LOFTON: Well, that's certainly what S&M is all about--power..
GINSBERG: And you seem to like that don't you? Have your sexual fantasies ever involved that kind of power relationship?
LOFTON: No, not to my knowledge, I'm a Christian. So I don't fantasize..
GINSBERG: Do you ever have sexual fantasies?
LOFTON: No.
GINSBERG: None at all?
LOFTON: No, I said I am a Christian.
GINSBERG: You've never had any sexual fantasies!
LOFTON: Before I was a Christian, I had them, absolutely.
GINSBERG: And since you're a Christian you don't?
LOFTON: No.
GINSBERG: And when you had them, did they involve any dominance/submission fantasies!
LOFTON: Mine were pretty orthodox heterosexual kinds of fantasies. But
there's no doubt they were bad. And I am so glad that Jesus Christ
delivered me from them.
GINSBERG: You have no erotic dreams now, at all, that you remember!
LOFTON: None that don't feature my wife, no.
GINSBERG: Yeah.
LOFTON: It's an amazing thing what Jesus can do for a person.
GINSBERG: Uh-huh.
The conversation turns towards Ginsberg's affection for young boys, which Lofton calls rotten and sinful.
GINSBERG: I should say my sexual preference is not just for boys, but also for middle-aged men, straight men, and women. I've occasionally had fantasies about making out with trucks as well as beasts. And maybe I'll be making out with you, before it's all over. [laughs]
LOFTON: Well. maybe I could drive that truck while you make out with it, perhaps an eighteen wheeler, with the pedal to the metal.
GINSBERG: Now there's your fantasy. [laughs]
LOFTON: Excuse me. but you raised the idea of having sex with a truck.
GINSBERG: You extended it.
LOFTON: I'm just trying to accommodate you. I even offered to drive the truck. And you attacked me. But to hell with you. I won't drive the truck. Get your own truck.
The conversation moves to the nature of the mind. Lofton doesn't believe Ginsberg has any qualification to talk about "the mind" when his experience is only with his own mind (and to Lofton, Ginsberg's mind is sinful and deranged).
GINSBERG: I'm observing my own mind and consciousness and reporting on that and trying to be candid. Walt Whitman, who was a very great poet and, incidentally, gay, said he thought that for poets and orators of the future the great quality would be candor, frankness, truthfulness.
LOFTON: Well, Walt Whitman suffered from, if I may say so, what might be called terminal candor--not unlike yourself.
GINSBERG: You don't like Whitman?
LOFTON: No.
GINSBERG: Have you read Whitman?
LOFTON: Some.
GINSBERG. Do you remember the name of the poem you read?
LOFTON: Yes, one that says something like: "So I make mistakes. I contradict myself. So what? I contain all things," This is absurd. Talk about arrogance.
GINSBERG: Dig this.
LOFTON: I'm diggin' it.
GINSBERG: He says: "Do I contradict myself? Very well. I contradict myself. I am large, I contain multitudes," Do you know what he meant by that?
LOFTON: Probably nothing good. And I doubt if he knew what he meant.
GINSBERG: Yeah, he did. I know what he meant.
LOFTON: How do you know what he meant?
GINSBERG: [laughs] Because I am large. I contain multitudes.
LOFTON. But you might contradict yourself.
GINSBERG: Yes. And I certainly will contradict myself.
LOFTON: This will be one of your multitudes the ability to contradict yourself.
GINSBERG: That's what Whitman is saying.
LOFTON: It's gibberish.
GINSBERG: That our own minds are so vast that we can wind up contradicting ourselves without having to freak out about it. It's very similar to what the poet John Keats said about negative capability. He said the quality of a very great poet like Shakespeare was his ability to contain opposite ideas in the mind without an irritable reaching out after fact and reason. Meaning that that part of the mind which judges, and irritably insists on either black or white, is only a small part of the mind. The larger mind observes the contradiction, and contains those contradictions. The mind that notices that it contradicts itself is bigger than the smaller mind that is taking one side or the other.
LOFTON: You speak very confidently about this. Where do you get your ideas about what the mind is?
GINSBERG: By direct observation through meditation practice.
LOFTON: But at most this would tell you only about your mind, wouldn't it? You were making statements about the mind.
GINSBERG: I should say I noticed this about my mind and John Keats noticed it about his mind. Sure, you might want to check our which side is right but when you get irritable about it and insist on one or the other, black or white, it's likely you'll eliminate some information from both sides.
LOFTON: Is nothing black-and-white?
GINSBERG: Nothing is completely black-and-white. Nothing.
Ginsberg's point dovetails nicely with a recent article about how babies see the world. For a long time, we've thought of newborns as being blank slates that get filled up by experience.
Now, however, scientists have begun to dramatically revise their concept of a baby's mind. By using new research techniques and tools, they've revealed that the baby brain is abuzz with activity, capable of learning astonishing amounts of information in a relatively short time. Unlike the adult mind, which restricts itself to a narrow slice of reality, babies can take in a much wider spectrum of sensation - they are, in an important sense, more aware of the world than we are.
The article goes on to talk about how artists' and musicians' minds physically work more like children's, keeping an openness to life without preconceptions. It even compares a baby's mind to the Zen idea of beginner's mind, which is something Ginsburg was very interested in.
And just to add more to the mix, here's Kool Keith's crazysexy ode to Mack trucks:
A young girl asked this of her father while they looked at Børre Sæthre's "Stealth Distortion (...must have seen it in some teenage wet dream)" at P.S.1 on Sunday.
The dad said he thought it was fake, but didn't elaborate.
This is what I imagine it would be like to visit Universal Studios Oslo.
I'm sorry to have missed this film at the Tribeca Festival, but hopefully it'll be in theaters soon:
If a Harvard-trained evolutionary biologist makes a film about creationism's cousin, intelligent design, and calls it "Flock of Dodos," you know who he's talking about, right?
Maybe not.
The biologist, Randy Olson, accepts that there is no credible scientific challenge to the theory of evolution as an explanation for the diversity and complexity of life on earth. He agrees that intelligent design's embrace of a supernatural "agent" puts it outside the realm of science.
But when he watches the advocates of intelligent design at work, he sees pleasant people who speak plainly, convincingly and with humor. When scientists he knows talk about evolution, they can be dour, pompous and disagreeable, even with one another. His film challenges them to get off their collective high horse and make their case to ordinary people with — if they can muster it — a smile.
Otherwise, he suggests, they will end up in the collective cultural backwash just like the dodo.
Watch a clip from the movie (explaining the strange fecal/eating habits of rabbits) here. See the movie's trailer here. And watch videos from Olson's project on marine decline here (I recommend the Rotten Jellyfish Awards).
The eggheads are learning things from the Hubble Telescope. But even if they weren't, it serves an even greater purpose: you and me are seeing our universe. Nothing compares to the majesty and just plain coolness of seeing a comet breaking up. The closest this comet will come to us is 7.3 million miles away. But the Hubble puts it on our desktop with video like this.
A mathematician has explained how to stabilise a wobbly table without needing to jam a beer coaster under one of the legs.
Australian researcher Dr Burkhard Polster, of Monash University in Melbourne, and his international colleagues have calculated that turning a rectangular table around on most surfaces will cure the wobble.
The table will not necessarily be horizontal, which means your beer may still slide off, but it will not wobble.
RELIGIOUS belief can cause damage to a society, contributing towards high murder rates, abortion, sexual promiscuity and suicide, according to research published today.
According to the study, belief in and worship of God are not only unnecessary for a healthy society but may actually contribute to social problems.
While we're questioning religion's effect, it might be a good opportunity to see how the Bible Belt fares against us godless heathens in the North and West. Here's a completely partisan site that uses statistics that show maps of crimes rates, education, etc.
The latest issue of the New Yorker features a remarkably clear dissection of evolution's (and science's) greatest foe of the moment: Intelligent Design.
The movement’s main positive claim is that there are things in the world, most notably life, that cannot be accounted for by known natural causes and show features that, in any other context, we would attribute to intelligence. Living organisms are too complex to be explained by any natural—or, more precisely, by any mindless—process. Instead, the design inherent in organisms can be accounted for only by invoking a designer, and one who is very, very smart.
...
Advocates of intelligent design point to two developments that in their view undermine Darwinism. The first is the molecular revolution in biology. Beginning in the nineteen-fifties, molecular biologists revealed a staggering and unsuspected degree of complexity within the cells that make up all life. This complexity, I.D.’s defenders argue, lies beyond the abilities of Darwinism to explain. Second, they claim that new mathematical findings cast doubt on the power of natural selection. Selection may play a role in evolution, but it cannot accomplish what biologists suppose it can.
H. Allen Orr goes on to describe the work of ID's two leading theorists -- Michael J. Behe, a biology professor at Lehigh University, and William A. Dembski, a former professor at Baylor University and now a teacher at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.
Both of these guys are working at a very high conceptual level. They are essentially meta-scientists whose work isn't about experiments and hard data, but about larger theories of origins and broad material development. Orr concludes:
It’s also hard to view it as a real research program. Though people often picture science as a collection of clever theories, scientists are generally staunch pragmatists: to scientists, a good theory is one that inspires new experiments and provides unexpected insights into familiar phenomena. By this standard, Darwinism is one of the best theories in the history of science: it has produced countless important experiments (let’s re-create a natural species in the lab—yes, that’s been done) and sudden insight into once puzzling patterns (that’s why there are no native land mammals on oceanic islands). In the nearly ten years since the publication of Behe’s book, by contrast, I.D. has inspired no nontrivial experiments and has provided no surprising insights into biology. As the years pass, intelligent design looks less and less like the science it claimed to be and more and more like an extended exercise in polemics.
A Viking burial ground, which has held bodies undisturbed for 1,000 years with all the trappings of the Sagas including swords, jewellery and firemaking materials, has been uncovered in Cumbria, after a chance find by a metal detector.
The site - thought to contain the first formal burial of bodies discovered in England - is believed to date from the 10th century, when the Vikings had been Christianised, but were evidently still hedging their bets.
"I've been thinking about this problem for the last 30 years, and I think now I have the answer to it. A black hole only appears to form but later opens up and releases information about what fell inside. So we can be sure of the past and predict the future."
Since I work in the health care industry, sometimes I come across really great health care articles (that, incidentally, may be interesting only to me). This morning I found this 2000 (but very good) discussion about health care between Adam Gopnick and Malcolm Gladwell in the Washington Monthly. It does a great job of breaking down some of the main differences in mindset about health care among different countries, especially the U.S., Canada, and France (and yes, Adam, we are aware that you lived in France... like R. Crumb! and Woody Allen! And Johnny Depp...)
Sadly, the swarms of pests I'll see here in NYC are limited to rats, roaches, and Hilton sisters. But for the lucky folks out there who actually have backyards and walk on grass each day, you're in for a treat. The cicadas have arrived!
I haven't heard tales of biblical swarms yet, but slowly the little critters are emerging. There's a pretty cool time-lapse video of a cicada molting here.
People always object to boxing as a barbaric sport that insults human decency. But would those same people object if squirrels were outfitted with gloves and went 12 rounds? I think not.
Pictured at left are real animals in a real boxing match. Of course, these animals have been dead for over a century and have been posed by 19th century taxidermist Edward Hart (b. 1847 - d.1928).
A LifeGem is a certified, high quality diamond created from the carbon of your loved one as a memorial to their unique and wonderful life.
The LifeGem provides a way to embrace your loved one's memory day by day. The LifeGem is the most unique and timeless memorial available for creating a testimony to their unique life.
We hope and believe that your LifeGem memorial will offer comfort and support when and where you need it, and provide a lasting memory that endures just as a diamond does. Forever.
Would you notice a gorilla playing basketball, or a woman with an umbrella crossing the court as players swarmed around her? Egghead psych professors found out.
Working with Christopher Chabris at Harvard University, Simons came up with another demonstration that has now become a classic, based on a videotape of a handful of people playing basketball. They played the tape to subjects and asked them to count the passes made by one of the teams.
Around half failed to spot a woman dressed in a gorilla suit who walked slowly across the scene for nine seconds, even though this hairy interloper had passed between the players and stopped to face the camera and thump her chest.
However, if people were simply asked to view the tape, they noticed the gorilla easily. The effect is so striking that some of them refused to accept they were looking at the same tape and thought that it was a different version of the video, one edited to include the ape.
It's really quite remarkable. Check out the research videos with explanatory text here. (via ALDaily)
The Guardian Online has a great article today using Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind as a jumping-off point for looking at both historical and current science of memory. Some recent studies have disputed the long-held assumption that memories can be "fixed" biochemically.
Four years ago, Karim Nader and his colleagues in New York showed that if an animal was taught a particular task, and then days later was reminded of it by being put in the same context, the memory became labile once more - that means it could be disrupted by protein synthesis inhibitors. It was as if the reminder not only reactivated the old memory, but resulted in an entirely new memory being formed on top of it. Of course, we can intuitively recognise this; when we recall a past event, we are not recalling the event per se, but our memory of it from the last time we recalled it. This is why our autobiographical memories are being reshaped as we go through life.
The article also fact-checks the science in films that use memory as a fictional device, from Hitchcock's Spellbound to Finding Nemo. You've got to love lines like, "Anterograde amnesia is not that sexy."
Morphogenesis. What's it mean to me? In ten years, it might mean the ability to gnaw off my own arm and watch it grow back. There's nothing like fresh arm. (via Chica)
People always object to boxing as a barbaric sport that insults human decency. But would those same people object if squirrels were outfitted with gloves and went 12 rounds? I think not.