Check out my chum and occasional collaborator’s two-part discussion of Kiyoshi Chiba’s Kants Ontologie der raumzeitlichen Wirklichkeit.
Little Richard @ 81
Thelma Toole Interview
Thelma being . . . Thelma . . . what with the ubiquitous piano. (Also I’ve just noted that the excellent documentary on Toole, a collaboration between Toole biographer Corey MacLauchlin and film-maker Joe Sanford, has been updated — and there is now a transcript which I’d have found handy when writing my forthcoming review of “Butterfly”).
Life, death, music and food
An eloquent review of the final season of Treme from the LA Times.
the series takes its form from the city’s substance; it does not so much present a point of view as embody a perpetual argument….It is romantic and naturalistic at once, as dreamy and earthy as the place in which it takes place — a place where when you die, they strike up the band.
Neuroaesthetics . . .
This from the NYT (h/t to Shannon Selin). We will see . . . but me thinks the results (as with neuroeconomics) will be over-stated. Still, great marketing ploy for the author and his publisher. Check out The Science of Art and Brain and Art. This is a very good culturally informed and salutary article that one should read.
But the real quantitative science will come later, Mr. van der Werf said, when the researchers measure the novella’s effect on the 50 readers. They have asked Mr. Grunberg to try to keep each chunk of text limited to one dominant emotion, and have tracked where his cursor was at various points in each writing session, to match his words with the physiological data. The 50 readers will read the novella on an e-reader, to allow similar tracking.
A Confederacy of Dunces – quotes and extracts – 38
We do correspond quite regularly, the usual theme of Myrna’s correspondence tending to urge me to participate in lie-ins and wade-ins and sit-ins and such. Since, however, I do not eat at lunch counters and do not swim, I have ignored her advice. The subsidiary theme in the correspondence is one urging me to come to Manhattan so that she and I may raise our banner of twin confusion in that center of mechanized horrors. If I am ever really well, I may make the trip. At the moment that little musky Minkoff minx is probably in some tunnel far beneath the streets of the Bronx speeding in a subway train from a meeting on social protest to an orgy of folk singing or worse. Some day the authorities of our society will no doubt apprehend her for simply being herself. Incarceration will finally make her life meaningful and end her frustration (p. 109).
Neurotechnology, Invasiveness and the Extended Mind
This from the latest issue of Neuroethics December 2013, Volume 6, Issue 3, pp. 593-605.
A belated “happy birthday” to Hendrix
One day late (an oversight). Anyway, here is news of an “autobiography” that has recently been released.
Without the nutrients in our beer, we would have died
Michael Jackson (no, not that one!) on, to my mind, the greatest brewery of all — my #1 brew of all-time being the Rochefort 10.
My tasting notes made the beers sound like foods, and Father Antoine reminded me that they once were. The Trappists still do not eat meat, but once also ruled out fish and cheese. “Without the nutrients in our beer, we would have died.”
Shaved Catfish
This from Sean Brock, The Mind of a Chef.
