[studiotheory]

e.l. doctorow, faulkner, hemingway, courage

i’ve read e.l. doctorow with that sense that i am supposed to like what i am reading and i always feel as though i’ve missed something. he gets put on the shelf, over and over again, with a sense that someday, one day, i shall read him and it will have a sense of expansive bliss, some opening, blossoming sense of wonder that i’ve missed to date.  he is one of those authors where i always think, ‘it’s me, not him’

his article in the nyrbs on 24 May 2012 reminds me again that this is likely the right thought. in four columns he makes me nod my head at faulkner’s famous remark that hemingway lacked courage. as a writer. 

at the end of the article, doctorow writes this: 

and so it is possible for us now to begin to understand what he meant in his criticism of his colleague ernest hemingway; not merely that hemingway was technically undaring, but that, in thrall to the romance of the self, he had never tapped the human psyche to the depth of its raw existence, or written of characters not defined by the familiar constructs of social reality. 

it has been a significantly long time since i read As I Lay Dying. I rooted about a friends apartment the other day for a copy, mine long since having gone who knows where. doctorow having handed me a desire to open the book and be reminded of, in particular, ‘the stubborn domination of their cunningly passive father’. 

my only concern is that doctorow’s well considered and beautifully written essay will taste better than the faulkner i can barely remember. yet a man who speaks of it with such admiration of the language and tone, for, as he says, ‘As I Lay Dying does not look up to its characters, or down, but maintains them at eye level, where we sense that a scrupulous dispassion gives faulkner access to the unmediated truth.’

go. read both. 

Maps and Mercator

[I hope to re-write this when I have a bit more time. Tracking thoughts, for now.]

I’ve been seeing quite a few versions of this map of Africa pop up across all the various flavors of social media in the past week. 

Years ago I worked at National Geographic, so I know the difference between a cylindrical map projection, such as the Mercator, which looks like what is used to make this image.

Maps are always political and power related, I won’t argue that, I believe it is the history of the world, the history of mapmakers, and there are a lot of books to read about this.

Mercator’s map was created for sailing, its best use is nautical. But, flatting an oval onto a cylinder results in significant distortion, particularly on the edges. In the late 1600s this distortion was not really important. 

Maps distort in area, direction, and distance. Pause for a moment to consider. This Winkel Tripel, which is the projection Geo switched to as standard when I was there (from the Robinson), tries to minimize all three of these (hence the Tripel). It was a good goal, for a map designed 350 or so years after the Mercator, and in a world that had changed. 

Once, only adventurers needed maps, the crown, the insane, perhaps, who sailed off the edges. Now we have maps on all of our devices, and not only are they the Mercator projection, they are fixed (fire up the iphone and try to travel west from hawai’i to china). I sometimes express sadness at the limitations of what is on today’s maps, so standardized. 

If you’ve gotten through all that noise I just wrote, here is what I am thinking about: why do I need a map that is true to area? or even distance? In this modern world, I don’t use these things. I do need to know direction, and direction, distorted on a mercator, its OK.  Area surely has political concerns, from the days of the colonists to whose property is where and where crazy old mr brown’s yard starts. (But you know that, he has a fence.)

What do we, individuals, use maps for now, other than directions in the small sense, local directions? I use them for dreaming. I use them to figure out how to walk from here to there. Sometimes I use them to figure out how long it will take me to get from here to there. 

So what is the purpose of that map I linked to above? I think it is to make you feel bad. I’m not sure why, or to what end, but that is the sense I get. Now that you know the area of Africa is Very Large, what now? I also think its interesting that Canada is not included. Maybe because it would have taken up about third? 

Melting, Dissolving, and Molten Things

This morning I find myself considering the word ‘melt’ and how little I know about how it works. Things melt when it is hotter than they would like it to be. It doesn’t require fire, extreme heat will do. I was wondering what would cause the world to melt, then more specifically, the brownstones across the street. 

The internet says that if I put something in water to dissolve, that this is a definition of melt. How can melt and dissolve be the same thing? 

Thermodynamics considers melting to be fusion, the phase change from solid to liquid. At what point is something a liquid? I think if the brownstone across the street were to melt, it would be more of a sludge than a liquid. Molten? Is lava melted rock? Where is the fusion in lava? 

I have no answers because this, in fact, is procrastination, staring out the window, wondering what happens if the world melts. 

Cool fact though, sulfur increases in viscosity at increased temperature. Now I really want to try that myself, I wonder if it smells as bad as my imagination thinks it will. Also, I wonder who will let me melt things in their yard. 

Interoception and the Beating of My Heart

I opened the lastest issue of Scientific American Mind, and noticed an article on body image distortion, a topic which fascinates me. [Sadly, for you, behind the paywall.]

It introduced me to a word I had not heard before, interoception, which the magazine defines as a sense which monitors how we feel inside, the awareness of one’s internal state of being. Interoception, says author Carrie Arnold, informs us of emotions, pain, thirst, hunger, and body temperature. 

I am not so good at some of these, likely part of why the article fascinates me. I won’t go into further details, because I suspect it would bore you and I really want you to get to this next part. the Test of Sense of Self.

The article says, “here is a simple way to test your interoceptive skills…” It suggests you find a stopwatch (haven’t they heard of smartphones over there?). Set it for a minute, sit down, and start the clock, and count your heartbeats by feeling the rhythm. Don’t touch a pulse point. Write it down. Then take your pulse twice, using a pulse point, and take the average. They have a handy formula to tell you the absolute value of the difference (uh, why?)

1- ((estimated heartbeat-avg pulse)/average pulse))

.8 or higher = good, .60-.79 = moderate, <.6 = poor (they wrote less than .59, but .59 wants to be counted. this is a science mag? ok whatever, still a fun exercise.)

So my assumption, me knowing me, would be that I am way off, I am distorted, I have no concept of self in some ways. Again, not with the boring parts. But here is what happened. I did the first round, and my count came out to 58 and I thought, ‘way off, your pulse hasnt been that low in decades’ and then I took my pulse and the rounds were 58 and 59. I was pretty amazed. Also, focus on the beat of my heart in my body has a strangely claustrophobic feel to it. I don’t know why.

Try it, see how you do, and let me know? 

regarding my last question:

i think it is just very unequally distributed.

and i do differentiate magic from delusion or superstition. 

are we living in the time with the least magic, in the history of man?