I am about to fall over as I finish this post. There remains emails. Can I get them done?
88 degrees at 9:08. Clothes started sticking to me a few hours ago. The air conditioner is in the bedroom, and I cannot feel it out here. Sultry makes this heat and humidity sound sexy. It is draining, enervating, and in sum: unpleasantly wearisome.
I did not want to get up this morning, but I did.
Church this morning went well. Then I got back here around 12:30. I knocked for an hour and retreated to the bedroom. Again, I did not want to move.
Posts written, email has taken its whacks.
The following are items I did not see fit for a post of their own.
Things to do in Muncie: Muncie Man Charged with Felony After Allegedly Driving Forklift into Books-A-Million
More amusing than anything else: One Thousand Years of Domelessness (JSTOR Daily). Why Rome went from domes to dome-less to domes.
After having built and rebuilt Rome for centuries, Romans saw little need to change as long as there was no impetus to do so. But then, in 1453, a domed addition was built beside the church of San Teodoro al Palatino. This wasn’t a throwback to antiquity but a nod to contemporary Florence; the architecture is attributed to a Florentine “intimately familiar with Brunelleschi’s work,” including the Duomo, the great dome of the Florence Cathedral. Soon, under Pope Sixtus IV (1471–84), the “will to build domes” in Rome surged. They were the thing again. The dome was back, bambini!
An Indiana writer, the delights of serendipity, proof it is still possible to be from Indiana and be a writer: No Matter How Much We Look, We Don’t Necessarily See (Los Angeles Review of Books)
NIK SLACKMAN: Taylor, tell me about growing up in Indiana. Did you start reading Lynne’s work then?
TAYLOR LEWANDOWSKI: I was thinking about this the other day—Lynne, did I ever tell you that, in my formative years, my backyard was a cemetery?
LYNNE TILLMAN: Yes, you did tell me.
TL: From ages one to five, all of my birthdays and hide-and-seek would happen in the cemetery.
Wow.
TL: I would be dropped off by the school bus and walk around in the cemetery as this kindergarten kid. And my parents didn’t care because we lived in the middle of nowhere. My formative years were spent around people buried in the ground, I guess. So, The Mystery of Perception is connected to these things I’ve been thinking about since a pretty young age: talking about these people who have passed, maybe resisting disappearance. It sounds a little corny.
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LT: None of which I knew. One of the things that’s interesting about you, Taylor, is that if you weren’t from Indiana, if you were a New York guy, you would have said, “I’ve read all your work, Lynne!”
Now, that may be one of the best descriptions of what makes Indiana different from the coasts, admitting we don't know everything, a diffidence.
Just as I know there is something very Hoosier in feeling disappearances, even, sometimes, of what we did not like all that much. I miss old independent Chanel 4 with Cowboy Bob and Janie and Sammy Terry - for all of their corniness I ran from when I got to be a teenager.
LT: From having feelings. You know, I read about many people who just disappeared. Chaucer did for 200 years. Everybody talks about how Moby-Dick only sold 80 copies upon publication. I thought knowing that was like some armor, but it’s not.
One of the things that really freaks me out—and is probably why I’m a writer—is how quickly a person vanishes. There’s a month, or two, or three of mourning … it makes me want to cry just thinking about it.
TL: Me too.
LT: I’ve known so many people who have died, and when I start thinking about that, I want so much to keep them alive. Somehow—this may be why Freud put together hysteria and writing—to hold on to those people. (A lot of people don’t want to be reminded.) In Thrilled to Death, in my acknowledgments, I include some of the people who’ve died, and dedicate it to my father, who’s been dead a long time. The desire not to forget is huge in me.
TL: This feeling of resisting disappearance … you can’t, obviously, but there is something with capturing consciousness in literature that instills it beyond a person’s human existence. I do feel like sometimes writing, the act of it, is some kind of communing with the dead.
LT: The other night, I went to a Jason Moran concert, who’s a brilliant piano player and jazz composer. Just amazing. And he was playing Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn music. It was at the Apollo, so it had all that history, and in the background there were moving slides of photographs by Gordon Parks of Ellington and Strayhorn and Lena Horne. There were “at home” portraits of Duke Ellington lying in bed with four pints of ice cream in front of him. At one point, Jason said that he plays to the spirit of Duke Ellington, and that without Duke Ellington, there wouldn't have been Thelonious Monk.
The whole history and lineage of writing is also in that. I don’t know if I’m writing to the spirit of Jane Bowles—I hope not, because she would reject [that connection] if she were alive. But I think that, like jazz, where people are responding to music before, whether it’s conscious or unconscious, we are riffing off things from the past.
If There’s Truth in Cinema, It’s Sideways (Los Angeles Review of Books) is another interview, less willing to be quoted, but provocative for writers and film buffs.
In the essay “This Father Film,” you discuss the ambition of something like Citizen Kane and the arrogance necessary to make it. You write that you personally fear being or acting arrogant—and yet you also admit that making art is an inherently arrogant act. Where do you draw the line between ambition and arrogance as a writer?
That’s a very tricky question. Those qualities are very close together in some pursuits and very far apart in other pursuits, and my relationship to ambition has changed a lot since I wrote that essay. I think that ambition is about wanting and striving, and arrogance is about assuming. They may look the same in some places and in some contexts, but that’s the fundamental difference: trying versus assuming. Assumptions will kill you.
The rise of the female spymaster (Engelsberg ideas), and Judi Dench, does get a mention. What will all those males who hid their failures behind fears of emasculation do now?
What emerges is a complex picture across all aspects of British intelligence that, like Blaise’s own hard-working career, is simply inspirational for a new generation. Despite the prejudices that existed against them, women were historically in a wealth of roles across the intelligence spectrum in the First World War, in the 1920s and 1930s, during the Second World War, and beyond. They worked for civilian organisations (MI5 and MI6) and in uniform. A closer look at these roles shows that they were a critical part of intelligence successes. In operational intelligence they were engaged behind enemy lines in intelligence gathering, deception and sabotage. In strategic and support intelligence, women provided analysis of aerial photography, radio communication, code-breaking and interrogation. Their true contribution has been obscured by labels such as secretaries, clerks and drivers; but they have been the ‘invisible’ presence as code-breakers, interrogators, agent handlers, spies, double agents, couriers and analysts.
Patrick McGoohan still makes sense:
Book reviews from The Guardian:
Let Me Go Mad in My Own Way by Elaine Feeney review – a satisfying tale of memory and place. Having roots in any one place, certainly not a family home running back the centuries, is not within my experience. My family is like most Americans - drifting across the land, leaving behind only tombstones, and soon those tombstones will be forgotten by the generations following me. That does not mean the following does not fascinate me, quite opposite:
...Or rather, that’s one thread in a story that becomes steadily more interesting than this simple set-up from the romance novelist’s playbook, as layers of family memory and trauma build up to form a portrait of the wider O’Connor family: all their history, the way it has shaped them and the traces it has left on the places around.
***
It slowly emerges that really, this novel tells the story of a house. Feeney has created a brilliant metaphor in the O’Connor family home, a modern bungalow with the old farmhouse looming behind it. Like the fairy tree at the bottom of the farm, the family have come to believe they can never pull the old house down, lest it bring them bad luck; but this looming cavern of memory seems to offer very little access to past happiness, only past pain. By the end of Let Me Go Mad in My Own Way, the novel has become a story about what a family should do with its past. It’s a hugely satisfying, sophisticated structure, and the apparent thinness of Claire and Tom’s story ceases to matter, because it’s only the first layer of a more complex work.
A Trick of the Mind by Daniel Yon review – explaining psychology’s most important theory should interest all of us - well, those who are interested in how they think. I have this vague feeling these are ideas I can use in a story.
A century ago, someone with an interest in psychology might have turned to the work of Freud for an overarching vision of how the mind works. To the extent there is a psychological theory even remotely as significant today, it is the “predictive processing” hypothesis. The brain is a prediction machine and our perceptual experiences consist of our prior experiences as well as new data. Daniel Yon’s A Trick of the Mind is just the latest popularisation of these ideas, but he makes an excellent guide, both as a scientist working at the leading edge of this field and as a writer of great clarity. Your brain is a “skull bound scientist”, he proposes, forming hypotheses about the world and collecting data to test them.
The fascinating, often ingenious research reviewed here is sorely in need of an audience beyond dusty scientific journals. In 2017 a Yale lab recruited voice-hearing psychics and people with psychosis to take part in an experiment alongside non-voice-hearing controls. Participants were trained to experience auditory hallucinations when they saw a simple visual pattern (an unnervingly easy thing for psychologists to do). The team was able to demonstrate that the voice-hearers in their sample relied more heavily on prior experience than the non-voice-hearers. In other words, we can all cultivate the ability to conjure illusory sound based on our expectations, but some people already have that propensity, and it can have a dramatic effect on their lives.
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One of the most enjoyable things popular science can do is surprise us with a new angle on how the world operates. Yon’s book does this often as he draws out the implications of the predictive brain. Our introspection is unreliable (“we see ourselves dimly, through a cloud of noise”); the boundary between belief and perception is vaguer than it seems (“your brain begins to perceive what it expects”); and conspiracy theories are probably an adaptive result of a mind more open to unusual explanations during periods of greater uncertainty. This is a complex area of psychology, with a huge amount of new work being published all the time. To fold it into such a lively read is an admirable feat.
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