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Tuesday, May 24th, 2011
Nasa's picture of the day is of the Prometheus Plume, a sulfurous eruption from the surface of Jupiter's moon Io: Thanks for the link, Matt!
posted evening of May 24th, 2011: Respond
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Bob Dylan has been in the world for 7 decades today. That's a good long time, and for about the last 5 of them he has been contributing some beautiful, significant art to the world. I'm not sure what to say about this but, happy birthday, Bob! Many happy returns of the day! The Guardian has a slide show of images from his career.   I became a fan of Dylan's music in 1983, when I was 13 years old. I had always known about him and recognized some of his songs; but in the summer of my 13th year I spent a couple of weeks staying with my parents' friend Jim Higgs (r.i.p.), who had a lot of Dylan's records and the book of his lyrics. This was the summer Empire Burlesque came out, and Jim was talking it up a whole lot; but I started reading the book and became entranced by "Subterranean Homesick Blues". I listened over and over to Bringing It All Back Home; and when my family came back to town and I went home, I raided my parents' collection of Dylan records. That year and the years that followed, I listened very heavily to Bringing It All Back Home and Highway 61 Revisited; and less heavily to Blonde on Blonde, The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, and The Times They are a-Changin'. In autumn of 1983 Jim took me to see Dylan and Tom Petty play Sacramento fairgrounds; it was the first rock concert I ever went to. At some point in high school I came into possession of a copy of Dylan's first album, self-titled, I think from Replay Records on McHenry -- that was where I got most of the music I bought in high school. I don't remember listening to this record a whole lot in high school, but later it would become one of my very favorite records. I remember seeing Steve Ewert and Tim Lechuga playing at Mondo Java -- it was one of the first concerts I went to at Mondo Java, in 1989 or so -- and getting them to let me sing "Subterranean Homesick Blues" with them. That was great even though I didn't remember all the lyrics. Not as great was the second time I saw them, when I got them to let me sing "Desolation Row" with them -- I had rehearsed and knew all the words, but the spontaneity that had made the first time so much fun was gone and it came off pretty flat. Also IIRC I brought and played bongo drums without understanding going in, how lame that was. In 1993 I bought Dylan's two new records, Good as I Been to You and World Gone Wrong. This was well before I really got into old-time music -- I loved these two records at the time but I don't think I really understood at the time, how great they are. These two certainly were part of the process that got me interested in old-time. And since then? Well... Dylan is just part of my psychic landscape, one of the places I go when I think of music. I'm glad he's here and glad I've got his music around me.
↻...done
posted evening of May 24th, 2011: Respond
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Sunday, May 22nd, 2011
Holding as we do that, while knowledge of any kind is a thing to be honoured and prized, one kind of it may, either by reason of its greater exactness or of a higher dignity and greater wonderfulness in its objects, be more honourable and precious than another, on both accounts we should naturally be led to place in the front rank the study of the soul.--Aristotle
De Anima
(tr. J.A. Smith)
An interesting tidbit from Scott Greer's essay "A Knowing Noos and a Slippery Psychê: Jaynes's Recipe for an Unnatural Theory of Consciousness": Jaynes' estate library includes a copy of The Basic Works of Aristotle, in which the pages of De Anima are (unlike anything else in the library) covered with marginalia -- clearly it was an important book for Jaynes.Funnily enough I have the same edition of Aristotle -- I have not read any of his works but I did make a brief stab at De Anima 11 years ago.* My pages of De Anima have some annotations, the early pages, but they are generally more of the "trying to unravel the syntax" sort than the "introducing original insight" sort. Next to the opening sentence (quoted above) I have written, "There are types of knowledge; some types are more desirable. The best type is the study of the soul."
 *And there must have been some sort of faking-having-read Politics or portions thereof in freshman year of college. I've also (that I can remember) made attempts to read Metaphysics and On Generation and Corruption, but not really gotten anywhere with any of them.
posted evening of May 22nd, 2011: Respond
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Today's New York Times has spectacular, picture-book photography of restoration work being done on the castles of Bannerman Island in the Hudson River. (Thanks for the link, Diane!)
posted morning of May 22nd, 2011: 2 responses
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Saturday, May 21st, 2011
All joking aside, the final word on the recent prophecies of tribulation comes (by way of the Slacktivist) from my ranine namesake, prophet Jeremiah:
Build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat what they produce. Take wives and have sons and daughters; take wives for your sons, and give your daughters in marriage, that they may bear sons and daughters; multiply there, and do not decrease. But seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare. For thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel: Do not let the prophets and the diviners who are among you deceive you, and do not listen to the dreams that they dream, for it is a lie that they are prophesying to you in my name; I did not send them, says the Lord.
 Update: mediævalists.net, relieved that the world has not ended, is linking some articles on mediæval references to rapture and tribulation. First in the series is Francis Gumerlock's 2002 essay on The History of Brother Dolcino (pdf), an early instance of pretribulationism.
posted evening of May 21st, 2011: Respond
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I shut my eyes and try not to think, but consciousness still streams on, a great river of contents in a succession of different conditions which I have been taught to call thoughts, images, memories, interior dialogues, regrets, wishes, resolves, all interweaving with the constantly changing pageant of exterior sensations of which I am selectively aware.-- Julian Jaynes
The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind Here is something that has been running through my head as I read John Limber's essay "Language and Consciousness: Jaynes' 'Preposterous Idea' Reconsidered":
What about meditation? I have had mixed results with my occasional attempts over the years to meditate; but my understanding is that it is intended to address precisely this state of streamingly verbal consciousness. When one is in a successfully meditative state, so I believe, the stream of thoughts, images, memories, interior dialogues, regrets, wishes, resolves falls away and one is left with quiet interiority... Is this a reversion to bicamerality? In his piece "The Self as Interiorized Social Relations," Brian McVeigh suggests (if I am taking his point correctly -- it is an extremely dense essay) that hypnosis and spiritual possession can be seen as forms of reversion to the bicameral mentality. I wonder if meditation is another point in the same continuum -- I have heard meditative prayer described as "listening to the voice of God" which is certainly suggestive of something along these lines.
posted afternoon of May 21st, 2011: 2 responses
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Thursday, May 19th, 2011
 For my birthday gift, Ellen and Sylvia gave me Reflections on the Dawn of Consciousness: Julian Jaynes' Bicameral Mind Theory Revisited, recently published by Marcel Kuijsten of the Julian Jaynes Society. Thanks, Ellen and Sylvia! It was just what I wanted.
Started reading the book last night -- not much to say about it yet other than it is a lot of fun to read and thought-provoking. I wanted to quote some passages about occurrences of hallucinated imagery in visual and textual art. (The first essay in the book, after a prefatory biography of Jaynes, is a short piece Jaynes wrote for Art/World magazine in 1981 called "The Ghost of a Flea: Visions of William Blake", about Blake as a transcriber of heard voices.) I'm interested to read Jaynes' 1979 article "Paleolithic Cave Paintings as Eidetic Images", not reprinted in this volume but referenced a few times -- this is a great book if considered only as a source of outside references. Kuijsten references a couple of other writers in support of the idea that cave paintings are transcribed hallucinations, including
David Lewis-Williams, who argues that cave art was painted by individuals hallucinating in trance states. Lewis-Williams noticed similarities between recent rock art of the San tribe of the Kalahari and that of much older European cave art. He learned that modern San shaman engage in trance dances to "contact another world" for various purposes such as healing the sick, then noticed that the San rock art from past generations did not depict scenes from daily life but in fact represented spiritual experience and trance.
Kuijsten also talks about European and American writers, poets and artists who
have been known to draw inspiration from actual hallucinations. Judith Weissman discusses this in her book, Of Two Minds: Poets Who Hear Voices [ooh! another ref. to follow up...]. V.S. Ramachandran... describes visual hallucinations in the writer and artist James Thurber. Thurber was blind by the age of 35 and experienced visual hallucinations that he incorporated into his work. ...While in Egypt in 1904, [Aleister Crowley] claims that for three days between the hour of noon and 1pm his "Holy Guardian Angel" Aiwass dictated the Book of the Law to him. In his book Equinox of the Gods, Crowley describes the event in detail, saying that as he sat at his desk, the voice of Aiwass came from over his left shoulder in the furthest corner of the room. ...Crowley himself did not entirely rule out the possibility that the voice came from his own mind:
Of course I wrote them, ink on paper, in the material sense; but they are not My words, unless Aiwass be taken to be no more than my subconscious self, or some part of it; in that case, my conscious self being ignorant of the Truth in the Book and hostile to most of the ethics and philosophy of the Book, Aiwass is a severely suppressed part of me. Such a theory would further imply that I am, unknown to myself, possessed of all sorts of præternatural knowledge and power.
posted evening of May 19th, 2011: Respond
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Wednesday, May 18th, 2011
Look at that: another year gone by... From National Geographic, an otherworldly photo of camel thorn trees in the Namib-Naukluft National Park in Namibia: Difficult, as Jason Kottke points out, to believe that this is a photograph rather than a Dr. Seuss illustration. Thanks for the link, Matthew!
 Update: Andrew Howley interviews photographer Frans Lanting about this image and about the Deadvlei salt pan. Click the photo for more images of Deadvlei and other Namibian wilderness areas.
posted evening of May 18th, 2011: 1 response
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Sunday, May 15th, 2011
(Guest post by Ellen)
A rainy day seems about the right time to go over the photos from our China trip last month and whittle them down to a fast-movin' slideshow of a manageable 40. You'll see Qing, our guide in Beijing, with Sylvia and Jeremy in Tiananmen Sq., the Sun and Moon Pagodas in Guilin, the Great Wall on a rainy day, the Forbidden City. All of the photos of sculptures are from the Art Zone in Beijing. The photo of the bird cages hanging in Mulberry trees is outside Yuyuan Gardens in Shanghai, and in the courtyard of Michael's House, where we stayed in Beijing, you'll also see a bird cage - these inspired our recent acquisition of Woodstock and Chirpers, green and blue parakeets residing in Sylvia's room. The photos of Sylvia, outside People's Sq. Train Station and inside, are near Sylvia's foundling site in Shanghai. The photos of the little kids and the photo of Sylvia with a camera in her hand, are taken at the Shanghai Children's Welfare Institute. The Buddha was in Suzhou. Sylvia reading a Chinese version of Harry Potter and Jeremy are taken on a boat in the canal city of Qibao. Sylvia on a bamboo raft was taken on the Li River in Guilin. The futuristic city is Pudong, taken from the Bund in Shanghai. The view taken from the little balcony to the street was from the Magnolia B&B, the place we stayed in Shanghai. The exercise equipment in a public area in Beijing was installed at the time of the Olympics - they're all over. (Reminds me a little of the enormous public swimming pool in the tiny town we stayed in Spain, put in during Franco's regime.) The red pandas, erhu playing musician, gorgeous flowering trees are taken in Seven Stars Park, Guilin. The chicken and quail eggs in the bucket are soaked in tea, and sold on the street. And check out the rock formation of Elephant Trunk Hill.
What photo do you like best?
posted evening of May 15th, 2011: 1 response
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I picked up Krakauer's Into the Wild at the South Orange Public Library's annual sale yesterday, and read it last night and today. It is a great read, hard to put down: it takes you into McCandless' world and into various historical frames with remarkable clarity. I have always admired Krakauer as a journalist; what he is doing here is not so much journalism as memoir -- he is examining himself through the lens of the research he did into McCandless' life and death. I wrote at the time I saw the movie that I found it sappy and that I expected the sappy qualities were Penn's additions to the story rather than Krakauer's writing. But they're not, or not precisely -- the book is an exercise in romanticization. What keeps it from being sappy is Krakauer's clarity about what he is doing in writing the book, about why he is romanticizing McCandless' life. The reflexive element of Krakauer's authorial voice was missing from the movie, so the problem was not additions by Penn but rather omission. Anyways: I found myself crying on the last pages of the book, and it came as something of a surprise how emotionally invested in the story, in the author's voice, I had become. Another beautiful thing about the book which was (as best I can recall) missing from the movie, is the epigraphs. Every chapter is headed with excerpts from the books McCandless was reading at the end of his life, and from other books Krakauer finds relevant to the case. His judgement is superb.
posted afternoon of May 15th, 2011: 2 responses
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