Jay
“The most beautiful women you see in public, none of them are for real. They're just men perpetuating their perverted stereotype of women. Just the oldest story in the world. There's a penis on every page of cosmopolitan magazine if you know where to look.”
Not a descriptive summary of the book, although it's definitely my favorite quote. This one gets at it a little better:
“In ancient rome, at the coliseum, the “editor” was the man who organized the bloody games at the heart of keeping people peaceful and united. That's where the word “editor” really comes from. Today, our editor plans the menu of murder, rape, arson, and assault on the front page of the day's newspaper.”
Overall the story felt like Chuck's exhausted his visceral formula and relied on shock value to carry this one over the finish.
What We See When We Read, more aptly titled What I See When I Read, is a collection of Peter Mendelsund's musings over the imagery and consciousness conjured by some of his favorite writing, mainly the canon.
The book is divided into a series of themes (Picturing “Picturing”, Co-Creation, Synesthesia, etc). Each theme starts off with an excerpt followed by exposition about the writing's significance and a few illustrations. Mendelsund's insights are incredibly thoughtful and beg for more in-depth exploration. Sadly, he spent more time on kitsch illustrations (which account for the bulk of the 425 pages) than extruding his ideas into essay-length literary criticism.
The illustrations felt clever at first, but then became an annoyance as they continually interrupted latent insights. With such a staccato rhythm, each new chapter felt like it started without a proper segue or a meaningful development having arisen from the previous chapter. Despite the inclusive title, the writing felt warm with conceit. “Hey, check this out! I thought of this! ...And then I thought of this! Which could mean, but this! I also think of this! Did you ever—Hey! I'm over here now...”
Even so, there are a fair share of gems. I especially enjoyed:
“Often, when I ask someone to describe the physical appearance of a key character from their favorite book they will tell me how this character moves through space. (Much of what takes place in fiction is choreographic.) ... It is how characters behave, in relation to everyone and everything in their fictional, delineated world, that ultimately matters. (“Lumbering, uncoordinated ...”) Though we may think of characters as visible, they are more like a set of rules that determines a particular outcome. ...Aristotle claimed that Self is an action, and that we discover something's nature through knowing its telos (its goals). A knife becomes a knife through cutting...”
“A thing that is ‘captured' by an author is taken from its context in the real world, where this event or thing may exist in a state of flux. An author might notice a wave in the ocean (or a “silvery pool”), and merely by remarking upon this wave, the author stabilizes it. It is now removed from the indiscriminate mass of water that surrounds it. By taking this wave and holding it fast in language, it ceases to be fluid. It is now an immobile wave.”
“Maybe elaborate descriptions, like colorful descriptions, are misdirection. They seem to tell us something specific and meaningful (about a character, a setting, the world itself), but perhaps such description delights in inverse proportion to what it reveals. The writer Gilbert Sorrentino takes John Updike's A Month of Sundays to task: When the aim is ‘vivid' writing, it seems that anything goes as long as the surface dances ... The work buckles and falls apart time after time under the weight of this concatenation of images, often linked together by comparisons that work to conceal the reality they are supposedly revealing: ‘... newsletters and quarterlies that pour through a minister's letter slot like urine from a cow's vulva.' Such writing is, Sorrentino tells us, ‘Shiny and meaningless.' The relationship between a mail slot and a cow's vulva is confusing. Two objects are compared in order to help focus our mind's eye, while in fact just the opposite happens—we focus only on the bolder (or in this case more grotesque) of the two images. By contrast, Jean Giono writes: ‘Look up there, Orion–Queen Anne's lace, a little bunch of stars.' I see the flower, then I see the flowering of stars in the night sky. The flower itself doesn't appear in the night sky of my mind, but the flower determines how the stars are arrayed. Giono's stars are clearer to me than Updike's mail slot. Maybe that is because Giono would like me to see his stars, whereas Updike would like me to see—what? His prose? Giono's flower and his stars are held in balance. One image assists the other. (Giono could have written: “a little cluster of white stars.” But this description doesn't bloom in quite the same way.)”
“There is no real unity without incorporeality.” Moses Maimonides ... Maimonides subscribed to an approach known as “negative theology” in which one comes closer to God by enumerating the things he is not. Characters have only implied corporeality. And our imaginations grant them unity. But characters are also defined by what they are not. By asserting that Vronsky was a squarely built, dark man, not very tall... ...Tolstoy informs us that Vronsky is neither blond, nor short.”
“Words are effective not because of what they carry in them, but for their latent potential to unlock the accumulated experience of the reader.”
This reads more like an acupuncture textbook and gets granular very quickly. While it's incredibly insightful, there's way too much detail for a lay-creature like moi.
“It seems reasonable to infer that if consciousness can function independently of the body when we are alive, it could be able to do the same after death.”
“There would be no hope for the world if we all continued to carry in us hatred for the deeds committed by our ancestors.”
When I first tried to encapsulate Amy Leach's writing I came up with the description: “picture a 12 year-old Annie Dillard over-dubbing a David Attenborough documentary after guzzling 40 oz. of Mountain Dew.” But then I realized that's pretty degrading and doesn't come close to capturing the depth of her poetry. What I was trying to get across, which I think most readers will notice first about her writing, is the gravitational force of her energy. There is so much vitality in her writing! How the hell does she confine it all in her singular being?!
In pondering Amy's existence I'm reminded of this Susan Sontag quote:
“If the outside corresponded to the inner life in people, we couldn't have “bodies” as we do. The inner life is too complex, too various, too fluid. Our bodies incarnate only a fraction of our inner lives. (The legitimate basis for the paranoid endless anxiety about what's “behind” the appearances.) Given that they would still have inner lives of the energy + complexity that they have now, the bodies of people would have to be more like gas—something gaseous yet tangible-looking like clouds. Then our bodies could metamorphose rapidly, expand, contract—a part could break off, we could fragment, fuse, collide, accumulate, vanish, rematerialize, swell up, thin out, thicken, etc. etc. As it is, we're stuck with a soft but still largely determinate (especially determinate with regard to size + dimension + shape) material presence in the world—almost wholly inadequate to these processes which then become “inner” processes. Our bodies become vessels, then—and masks. An imperfect design! An imperfect being!” —As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh
Amy's imaginative use of language alone makes Things That Are a worthwhile read, but underlying such luminous adornments is a deep poetic sussing of the nature of existence. In rococo flair—decked out in crushed velvet tutus and opalescent piping on holographic bodices—her metaphors twirl, dip, and dander around the essence of light, the process of manifesting consciousness, self-actualization, and the human yearning to be to be truly manmade, machines.
“Your blessing is your curse and your curse is your blessing. Because you see details, you cannot see hints of light; because you see hints of light, you cannot see details. You would need diverse eyes if you wished to be equally penetrating and sensitive. You would need to have eyes like the box jellyfish, with its sixteen light-sensitive eyes and eight acute camera-like eyes—all twenty-four eyes hanging down on stalks. However, you would also need a brain. But maybe that is not possible; maybe, in fact, the brainlessness of the box jellyfish is a direct consequence of its tremendous powers of sight. Perhaps neither the animal nor the prophet has been invented who could process so thorough a vision. It is disquieting enough to be hyper-acute or hypersensitive; perhaps being both would very soon melt your brain and leave you quiescent, hanging transparently in the giant dancing green waters of the world.”
WHOA! So many “whoas” while reading Things That Are. And how is it that Amy has time to write? How is she not the sole guest of a radio broadcast where people call in from 6AM to 6PM to ask her what she thinks about cellular mitosis, aspartame, and the former Soviet Republic? To then host a banquet on the mating habits of Neolithic ideas? Followed by amending 40 new words to her fledgling language, Z1pE? I suppose it's because she's selfish. So we're left to wonder...
“Stars are my bonfires, blue is my diaphanous land”
I really enjoyed reading How Music Works, and I think that's saying a lot, because I am neither a Talking Heads fan nor a musician. Byrne's writing is casual and easy to read. He favors an impartial tone for most of the book, but opens up with more personal insights in the chapters “Creation in Reverse,” “Amateurs!” and “Harmonia Mundi.” This is where I found Byrne's candor and curiosity most engaging. He makes one hell of an amateur ethnomusicologist for an art-school-dropout-turned-pop-icon.
Aspiring musicians will find the chapters, “In the Recording Studio,” “Collaborations,” and “Business and Finances” incredibly insightful. Byrne uses his own financial history to illustrate different ways to cover the costs of recording, distribution, touring, etc. I really admired not only his transparency (when do celebrities voluntarily share their finances?), but also his attention to detail.
As a primer in music history and ethnomusicology, How Music Works has provided a great jumping off point for plenty of personal research.
“Music was the main poetic metaphor for that which could not be preserved.” -Walter Murch
Prior to Hallucinations, my first reading of Oliver's* work, I've been a fan through his appearances on Radiolab and recommendations by friends. What I found most enjoyable in his writing is the characteristic way he elucidates neurological phenomena through a humanitarian lens. I have a rudimentary education in science and lean towards the humanities in interest, so being able to read the first-hand accounts of patients made an otherwise dense topic approachable and relatable. It also allows for the reader to empathize with these patients in their search for understanding and consolation, which seems most important when dealing with neurological disorders that are so readily stigmatized as psychosis. Our contemporary scientific and medical practices have a tendency to isolate the person from the ailment in the search for understanding. Oliver trekked against the tide by placing the patient back into focus.
Here are the four concepts I've found most insightful after reading Hallucinations...
1. Perception is a two-way street, involving not only reception but also generation:
“We are not given an already made, preassembled visual world; we have to construct our own visual world as best can. This construction entails analysis and synthesis at many functionals levels in the brain, starting with perception of lines and angles and orientation in the occipital cortex. At higher levels, in the inferotemporal cortex, the “elements” of visual perception are of a more complex sort, appropriate for the analysis and recognition of natural scenes, objects, animal and plant forms, letters, and faces. Complex visual hallucinations entail the putting together of such elements, an act of assemblage, and these assemblages are continually permuted, disassembled, and reassembled.”
2. The stigmatization of hallucinations, especially hearing voices, is a recent societal development:
“Psychiatry, and society in general, had been subverted by the almost axiomatic belief that ‘hearing voices' spelled madness and never occurred except in the context of severe mental disturbance. This belief is a fairly recent one, as the careful and humane reservations of early researchers on schizophrenia made clear. But by the 1970s, antipsychotic drugs and tranquilizers had begun to replace other treatments, and careful history taking, looking at the whole life of the patient, had largely been replaced by the use of DSM criteria to make snap diagnoses.”
3. Hallucinations are an incredibly common neurological phenomenon, occurring as a result of sensory deprivation (sometimes within one hour), the loss of limbs, migraines, Parkinson's disease, post-traumatic stress, intoxication, hypnagogic and hypnopompic “sleep” states, exhaustion, sleep deprivation, epilepsy, brain damage i.e. strokes, dementia, delirium, and schizophrenia—to name a few.
4. The meaning-making that we place on hallucinations is an entirely subjective exercise largely influenced by the superstitions of the current social climate, i.e. witch trials:
“In Charles Bonnet syndrome, there seems to be a mechanism in the brain that generates or facilitates hallucination—a primary physiological mechanism, related to local irritation, “release,” neurotransmitter disturbance, or whatever—with little reference to the individual's life circumstances, character, emotions, beliefs, or state of mind. While people with such hallucinations may (or may not) enjoy them as a sensory experience, they almost uniformly emphasize their meaninglessness, their irrelevance to events and issues of their lives.”
“But one can readily see why others, perhaps of a different disposition, might interpret the “sure knowledge of the close presence of a sort of mighty person' and ‘a startling awareness of some ineffable good' in mystical, if not religious, terms. Other case histories in [William] James's chapter bear this out, leading him to say that “many persons (how many we cannot tell) possess the objects of their belief not in the form of mere conceptions which the intellect accepts as true, but rather in the form of quasi-sensible realities directly apprehended.
Thus the primal, animal sense of ‘the other,' which may have evolved for the detection of threat, can take on a lofty, even transcendent function in human beings, as a biological basis for religion passion and conviction, where the “other,” the “presence,” becomes the person of God.”
* * I think I would've enjoyed the book a bit more if it started with the chapter titled “Altered States.” In this chapter we learn about Oliver's own experiences of hallucinations, often under altered states of consciousness while on his “drug holidays.” It concluded with a revelatory story about how Oliver learned of his life's purpose while on a 10-hour amphetamine bender. This story vividly displayed the depth of his curiosity and intensity with which he approached life. It aptly frames the rest of the book as the thesis for his writing, but we only learn of it six chapters in.While there's a clear sense of Oliver's compassion for his patients, I feel like he relied too much on his patients in telling their own stories. The tone of the writing felt a bit hands-off in providing grander insights into the mystery of hallucinations, which I found surprising since it was written at the end of his career. I wanted more connective tissue between stories. While this came in full force during Oliver's own accounts of hallucination in Chapter 6, afterwards my interest began to waiver. It felt like I was being handed a stack of case studies to sift through, although each of the patient stories has its own poetic brilliance:“I am maneuvered into a delightfully soft chair. I sink, submerged as usual in shades of night...the sea of clouds at my feet clears, revealing a field of grain, and standing about it a small flock of fowl, not two alike, in somber plumage: a miniature peacock, very slender, with its little crest and unfurled tail feathers, some plumper specimens, and a shore bird on long stems, etc. Now it appears that several are wearing shoes, and among them a bird with four feet. One expects more color among a flock of birds, even in the hallucinations of the blind...The birds have turned into little men and women in medieval attire, all strolling away from me. I see only their backs, short tunics, tights or leggings, shawls or kerchiefs...Opening my eyes on the smoke screen of my room I am treated to stabs of sapphire, bags of rubies scattering across the night, a legless vaquero in a checked shirt stuck on the back of a small steer, bucking, the orange velvet head of a bear decapitated, poor thing, by the guard of the Yellowstone Hotel garbage pit. The familiar milkman invaded the scene in his azure cart with the golden horse; he joined us a few days ago out of some forgotten book of nursery rhymes or the back of a Depression cereal box...But the magic lantern show of colored oddities has faded and I am back in black-wall country without form or substance...where I landed as the lights went out.”—Virginia Hamilton Adair, poet (who suffered from Charles Bonnet Syndrome after losing her eyesight to glaucoma)I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in altered states of consciousness and the peculiar powers of perception. I plan to follow up this book with Oliver's memoir, On the Move, to hear more about this endearing man who turned over rocks looking for pure indigo, “the color of heaven,” “the color of the Paleozoic sea!”Oliver's writing style feels like he's writing more to a friend than an unknown reader, and “Oliver” has a much more pleasing sound than SACKS!
“While the hells of the Tibetan Book of the Dead and the Egyptian and Pre-Columbian underworlds were places through which the deceased or initiate could pass during their spiritial journey, the Christian Hell was the final destination, from which there was no escape.”
Jung's philosophy of life: “Man becomes whole, integrated, calm, fertile, and happy when (and only when) the process of individuation is complete.”
This quote for me seems to embody the thread connecting each of the stories:
“You seem incredibly faraway to me, like someone on the other side of a lake. A dot so small that it isn't male or female or young or old; it is just smiling.”
A yearning for connection, despite ultimately untraversable separation. Regardless of the fixation on desperation, Miss July has a way with words.
“The interesting thing about Positive is that it never mentions HIV. If it weren't for the advertisements-Retrovir, Sustiva, Viramune-you would think it was a magazine about staying positive, as in upbeat. For this reason it is my favorite magazine. All the other ones build you up just to knock you down, but the editors at Positive understand that you have already been knocked down, again and again, and at this point you really don't need to fail a quiz called “Are you so sexy or just so-so?” Positive prints lists of ways to feel better, kind of like “Hints from Heloise.” They seem easy to write, but that's the illusion of all good advice. Common sense and the truth should feel authorless, writ by time itself.”
and a personal favorite:
“...letting go of mammalian pride.”
A life's work:
“Hold on the center.”
“In dwelling, live close to the ground. in thinking, keep to the simple. in conflict, be fair and generous. In governing, don't try to control. In work, do what you enjoy. In family life, be completely present. When you are content to be simply yourself and don't compare or compete, everybody will respect you.”
“Receptive as a valley.”
“He simply reminds people of who they have always been.”
“When they lose their sense of awe, people turn to religion.”
“Failure is an opportunity.”
“If you blame someone else, there is no end to blame.”