Mindful Agnosia

I think my brother is going to buy me a whip for Christmas.

Yesterday was our annual Christmas concert at my church. I sang the 11AM mass, ran for a bite to eat with a friend and then went straight back to church, spending the time before we were supposed to be there working on the presentation I gave this morning. We were starting to warm up and there were still folks not there. The whole concept of "on the risers in vestments at 3PM" just seems to escape some people and so I ran back to say, "get your buns out here!" to the folks lollygagging in back. crack!

So, we go through warm-ups, and try walking through some of the minimal movement we were doing: walking in, kids choir walking off, adults walking off, small groups getting into place. Really not that much. Well, as the adult women were rehearsing Britten's "There is no Rose" the kids wouldn't shut up. I walked over and in my she-who-must-be-obeyed voice told them to be SILENT while others were rehearsing. Two of the tenors sitting behind them were scared. Crack!

So, we go downstairs as people start arriving. I'm the last down, having helped one of our senior (meaning in her 70's) members with something. I get down there to "Glenn said to start them on the "Hodie" (Sweelink, YUM!) and "The Lamb" (Tavener, interesting!). Okay, everybody get into the chapel and into your sections. "Who do you want where?"..."I don't care, just get there quick!" I start the piece, only once actually stopping to give directions. Most of the time it was yelling commentary and keeping it running (drive the moving notes! LOOK UP AND WATCH!) CRACK!! The fun part being my comment that the tenors set the tone, coming in like trumpets, so everyone else should do the same. Glenn made the exact same comment when he got there.

Then it was line up in the other room. Again, I'm the last one in, because one of my altos asked me to run the opening line of the Britten because she was hearing notes all over the place (I knew where they were coming from and it was a futile attempt, but she asked). The soprano section leader greats me walking in the door with, "they have no idea what they're doing, can you get us lined up?" Sigh. "Okay, Lisa's first, who's after her?" I finally get them lined up and they start heading out the doors. There are two lines, because we're coming in from both sides of the church. One of the basses, who is a dear sweet sould that I love to death, is a red hot mess when it comes to organization. His line is heading out the right door, and he starts heading left, "JACK, don't you dare!! Follow your line out the right!" CRAAACK!!!

At this point, one of my friends says, "Don't let her ever fool you, she wears leather on weekends." My brother seems to agree and while we were out for dinner afterwards, turns to his wife and says, "a gift idea for my sister!"

Sigh. I wouldn't have to do it if people paid attention!! Is it really that difficult to read a clock, or remember who was in front of you in a line? I mean, really folks, this is not rocket science...I leave that up to my cousin who deals in jet propulsions!!

Here is the URL for one of the pages on which Neil Gaiman—whom, by virtue of Dan Guy's shorthand for him while he was filling in blog entries while Gaiman was in China, I shall henceforward refer to here as "the other Mr. G."—discusses the research for his mysterious Monkey project:

http://journal.neilgaiman.com/search?updated-max=2009-11-12T16%3A04%3A00-06%3A00&max-results=10

I know I am being obsessive about this, but back on October 17th, Dr. Schulz and I—Larry Schulz, the translator of The Tower of Myriad Mirrors, the sequel/supplement to The Journey to the West—did our little dog-and-pony show at Kiang Gallery explicating Chi Peng in terms of The Journey to the West.

Little did we know that AT THAT VERY MOMENT the other Mr. G. was trekking through far-off Xinjiang, taking pictures of camels, pomegranates, and police stations, and relentlessly researching the legends of the Monkey King for his book.

And for those of you who don't read my other blog regularly, this is the reference promoting our gallery walkthrough:

http://counterforces.blogspot.com/2009_10_01_archive.html

I hope my Agnes Scott contacts will pass along the full story of getting the Neil Gaiman reading to happen on a day of thick fog and three-hour flight delays. One hopes he booked an early flight so as to catch his breath before doing the reading and then facing a miles-long but orderly line of eager fans. (Who will be called forward one row at a time, thus preventing additional folks from sneaking in after the reading for an up close and personal moment with Mr. Gaiman.)

Last week I had fantasized putting together an ad hoc show of "art Neil might like to look at" (only no one responded to my query, proving my suspicion that no Atlanta artists read this blog and few enough read the other one), but it turns out that the art show he would have been interested in was already to be found at Kiang Gallery, albeit by as non-local an artist as you can get; viz., Chi Peng whose "The Journey to the West" photos update the Monkey King mythology in contemporary comic-book and video-game fashion, as in this mix of Monkey and The Matrix (unfortunately, in this low-res version you can't read the titles of the books and DVDs on the back shelf and on the floor; they're quite funny when taken in combination):



I was clued in by this "Ask Neil a Question" entry on "little blog of stories":

the grammar monkey said...

Thanks for giving us this opportunity! Here's mine:


You mentioned on your blog that while you were in China recently, you were doing a bit of research about the Monkey King and the Journey to the West. Can you tell us anything about the project that research was for?

--Lauren

from the Edgewood nativity:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/nisaasokan/4178103143/in/photostream/

I keep thanking the writing gods for Pyr's superb work--especially art direction--for "The Entire and The Rose" series. Incredibly beautiful books. You can see more of Pyr's cover art and books here.

So this is the new trade paper version of Book Three of the series, City Without End, shipping on January 25. Cover art by the amazing Stephan Martiniere.

And although this cover looks like a celebration, as in perhaps a triumph over all odds, actually there's much more to come with the fourth and final volume, Prince of Storms (Also a January 2010 release).

---

Kay's Website

I am sure that somewhere in the world at this very moment there are two or more other people who are concurrently reading Prince of Stories: The Many Worlds of Neil Gaiman and The Man Who Loved China, Simon Winchester's biography of Joseph Needham which has been given a descriptive subtitle I shall not quote because it is worthy of the early Fiona Apple. (Apple, it will no longer be remembered, released an album with one of the longest-ever titles, originally the longest ever.) For that matter, the sentence preceding the parentheses is worthy of the early Fiona Apple.

Anyway, the volume about Gaiman has the advantage of bringing outsiders up to speed on the contents of Gaiman's many projects and the relationships between them. Winchester's volume doesn't quite do the same for Needham's Science and Civilisation in China, and in fact the biography is marred by a few remarkable observations such as that the young Needham could be released from naval medical service in time to enter Cambridge in October 1918 because the war had ended in August 1918.

So one ought to take this with the appropriate degree of caution, but Winchester's description of a tiny moment from Needham's Edwardian childhood illustrates an underlying reason behind my relative the entire neglect of more than a fraction of the Gaiman oeuvre on which I am having to bring myself up to speed: real life is always much more strange and dream-inducing than anything written as deliberate fantasy:
"The family took the clanking steam train up to the medieval Templars' church in the center of London each Sunday to hear the controversial mathematician and priest E. W. Barnes preach one of his so-called 'gorilla sermons.' Barnes...was at the forefront of a movement to remodel Christian doctrine in the light of scientific discovery—most notably Darwinian evolution, from which the 'gorilla sermons' took their name."

Well, Tuesday turned out to be the end of the road for our marketing manager. This is the person who lost me a $300K+ sale opportunity with her screw-ups, so I can't really say I'm sorry to see her go.

Apparently our Monday meeting was the last straw. We had an intern, who started last spring. A sweet young girl from Seton Hall. Well, starting in September, she was supposed to be paid. Not huge amounts, but still, a paycheck. Well, that paperwork never went through, and so on November 19th, she left. At Monday's meeting, knowing what had happened because the university justifiably called our boss to say, "seriously not cool folks!" her name came up. Our boss said, "oh yeah, by the way, where is B?" In front of all of us the marketing manager said, "oh, she has finals."....and the camel's back broke.

Now that she's gone and folks are sorting through her emails, they're finding things like district adoption notices that were never sent to the reps to take care of things, leads that were never sent out, etc. The kicker, however, is that she was apparently trying to set up a bit of a deal with someone at our parent publisher. Now, this person has come in and poached on our sales, which means that the rep who worked things on our end doesn't get the credit, unless we find out about it and claim it. She's not supposed to do that, since we're supposed to be the exclusive high school distributor. Needless to say, this is not our favorite person at the company, and we refer to her as the chihuahua, because she's small and yappy (with apologies to all of the rather sweet chihuahuas I've known). Our marketing person was supposed to have a call with her today to discuss us channeling our sales through her department so she gets the credit for them.

Well, passwords are changing and warning flags have gone up...as if we hadn't already known we couldn't trust her as far as my 8 year old niece could throw her.

The interesting point in all of this for me? At the end of the meeting where our boss announced she was fired, I was asked to stay behind. When everyone was gone, my boss asked, "How would you like to pick up some freelance work?" I will be writing all of the email blasts for the next three months while I'm off for Christmas and New Year's so they'll be queued and ready to roll. My boss had asked me to proof one and I changed the wording to make it flow better and sound more dynamic. Apparently that was my "interview."

So, I go from worried that I'm going to be fired to being hired for extra stuff on the side. Life is never dull!!

I was able to catch the Globe Theater company's touring production of Love's Labour's Lost in Holyoke, where they performed in a wonderful (and unrenovated) WPA theater or rather public auditorium space called the War Memorial Auditorium (1936). Still with beautiful Art Deco eagles and the zigzag paneling of the wooden doors; still the original oil portraits of Washington, Pershing and FDR on the walls. Holyoke is one of the poorest cities in Massachusetts, a nearly deserted town center of smoke-blackened churches and boarded store-fronts; a high percentage of the population is recent immigrants. Why the Globe booked this place rather than a place in the midst of the five College haven of upscale commerce and culture I don;t know, but it was gratifying, and I studied the audience (at L.'s behest) to see who composed it. (Many older people, some schoolkids given free tickets for the matinee -- not many locals perhaps, but who knows?)

The performance was wonderful and spirited in the best modern British mode, like the All's Well I saw broadcast recently, and with the truly wonderful Michelle Terry (Helena in All's Well, among the very best performances in Shakespeare I've ever seen) as the French princess. She much outshown the Rosaline, which somewhat unbalanced the show. The Berowne had a rather thick Northern accent, or maybe Scots? which for an American audience made his convoluted speeches hard to follow; he was personable and funny but didn't have that attack on the verse that's so new now among the Brits, finding depths and sudden shifts of feeling you don't expect, all as though it were being heard and spoken for the first time. The young and tiny woman who played Moth was perfect, and the Don Armado was not the usual braggart soldier but a mild-eyed, shy, self-conscious, inarticulate unfortunate. I loved it.

AB is getting a Tasty Award for Lifetime Achievement and he is also in the running for Viewers Choice "Best Male Host in a Series"

Head over to the Tasty Award website to vote for AB!

Tasty Awards Viewers Choice

A Footnote to a New Theory of entirely too much

I guess to do it right I would have to add how globalization has created a planet full of contending cultures such as previously existed only in isolated zones, and I would have to bring my theory into contention against those three books that Everybody Has Read Or Pretends He or She Has Read: Empire, Multitudes, and now Commonwealth.

But cut me some slack, I just now figured out how all this fits together, and I have always had difficulty framing all this in terms of Commonly Accepted Categories, even though it consists of a bunch of commonly accepted categories, just categories commonly accepted in different academic disciplines, which don’t seem to like to converse with one another.

I Know Why I Haven’t Seen This Before: Sorry, Folks, It’s a Whole New Theory of Everything

Jerry Cullum

Any theory of human society and psychology that is sparked by an almost certainly wrong anthropological theory about tribal cultures in upland South Asia is almost certainly insane. But the theory doesn’t involve space aliens, ineffable revelations, or thoughts that I and only I have had, so maybe it’s worth going past the LJ-cut when you feel sufficiently rested and misguidedly curious. ( ”click!” )

Or, actually, is supposed to arrive in less than a week to do a reading at Agnes Scott College, the reward to Little Shop of Stories for having staged one of the two most successful Halloween party homages to The Graveyard Book.

A photographer whom I have discussed before on this blog is planning to present him with exactly the photograph I would have recommended (actually, I would have recommended either of her two chefs d'oeuvre, but Neil Gaiman should be able to see the virtues of this one when she hands it him, even after hours of signing umpteen thousand books for a miles-long line of well-wishers).

This has got me to thinking that the poor fellow ought not to be subjected to the Standard Tour during his brief visit since, as I have tried to indicate occasionally, there is so much Authentic Strangeness to be found in the neighborhood. But I'm not on the Little Shop of Stories circuit, and it's their party. And given the fact that he is doing the same gig in Winnipeg, Manitoba exactly twenty-four hours later, I have the feeling he will be rushing in from the airport and rushing out again, so I would like for him to be driven to Agnes Scott via the scenic route, at least, if not shunted off to some hypothetical très intime Edgewood-mansion gathering.

I do wonder how many artists are planning to attend the Agnes Scott reading, and how many of those would say that Neil Gaiman has been influential in the formation of their artistic sensibility.

Anybody who wants to contact me offlist, as they say, with the answer presumably has my e-mail address already. Anybody who wants to post here as an Anonymous Commenter and put their name in the body of the comment should be able to use the comment function without being an LJ-user. (Unlike blogspot, apparently, where Counterforces regularly reverts to denying anonymous comments no matter how many times I supposedly change the default setting.)

Unlike my recent song-and-dance vis-à-vis Leonard Cohen, this is not a subterfuge to give away a spare ticket. I don't even have a ticket for myself for the Presser Hall event, which is described (as of today, since the page will change soon enough) here:

http://www.neilgaiman.com/where/

The centenary (finally) of the Waite-Smith Tarot provides an excuse for a brief exercise in literary history. ( here )

( if )

At Yale last night I attended an event in honor of the SPanish novelist Javier Marias (A Heart So White, Your Face Tomorrow, among many others). He read a really quite striking piece (reading, with some effort, the English translation) that involved a man and his dying father, a pistol in the family since the Spanish Civil War, and a poem of Heine's. But after that he had a conversation with people from the Romance Languages and English departments, in which he revealed (or told us about, anyway) the way he goes about writing a novel. He writes with a typewriter, beginning with the first page, with a situation he has been brooding about, and some sense of the implications or characters involved, but no real storyline. He probes forward with this, discovering as he goes (he pointed out that the Latin root of "invent" also has the meaning "discover"), but here's the thing: he does not ever go back and change what he has written. It's a pact he has with himself. He must accept and work with what he has laid down as he goes. If he has had a character's mother die at a particular time, he can't alter that, even if becomes clear it would be convenient if she died earlier, or later. And writing as he does he has to remember just what he did say, so that later on he won't violate it (without a "search" function on the typewriter; the new work is a trilogy some 1200 pages long.)

My daughter when I told her this asked if he'd ever just given up on a book because of this -- got into such a mess trying to reconcile what he laid down at first with what he wanted to happen later on that he threw the book away.

I think there ought to be a word for writing in this way, something like villanelle or roman fleuve or roman a clef. I'd never thought of it before.

Oh and: my Nicholson Baker essay is now available on the Boston review website.

I believe I have conspired to put a more permanent form of the True Names map into the previous entry, for those who couldn't see it.

I had never heard of David Eagleman, to the point of mistranscribing his name when I wrote it down from the NYT. Leaving aside his novel Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives which I somehow overlooked back in April, a glance at his web page reveals that his 2010 forthcoming books are on topics I have written about often on this blog (one of them earlier this morning, in fact). (Plasticity: How your Brain Dynamically Reconfigures Itself; and Dethronement: The Unconscious Brain Behind the I, Oxford and Pantheon, respectively)

He seems to be a sudden superstar, since his book tour ended on November 12 in London (unless this is a Hannibal Fogg type of listing on his website; please advise):

Nov 12 - London, England - Performance of Sum with Brian Eno, Philip Pullman, Nick Cave and Miranda Richardson at Queen Elizabeth Hall

David Eagleman's op-ed piece in this morning's New York Times discusses the likely impact on the American people of President Obama's speech setting out an Afghanistan timeline.

He cites an experiment from Emory University that I found fascinating; given a choice between a stronger electric shock at a time of their choice or a weaker shock at an indefinite time in the future, a surprising number of experimental subjects chose to self-administer the stronger shock right away instead of enduring the anxiety of waiting for the weaker shock to arrive without warning.

But what I really found fascinating was that given a political speech, the NYT chose to print an analysis by a neuroscientist.

Waist Deep in the Big Muddy

Jerry Cullum


The late professor of Asian religions John Fenton was extraordinarily fond of a found New Yorker cartoon that he taped to his office door: a business-suited type at a bar, berating a second business-suited gentleman with “The trouble with you, Fenton, is you don’t understand the goddamned Oriental mind.”

I have written often that my sense is that we don’t understand anybody’s minds, our own least of all. I have been fascinated recently by a fact that I haven’t encountered before, in all the writings about shamanism: field work cited by Michael Taussig from the Pacific Northwest, where it was general knowledge that the magic tricks practiced by shamans were in fact tricks; not only did shamans confess their best tricks to one another in hopes of having a trick explained to them that they didn’t yet know how to do, but everyone knew that this is how it worked. But there were rigorous expectations that the tricks be done well; if the trick was done badly, then the healing wouldn’t happen.

This sounds too impossibly postmodern to be true, but I have also written repeatedly that “postmodern” is just what happens whenever there are zones of cultural collision and tension, and there have always been zones of cultural collision and tension, ever since the Paleolithic.

And as I’ve written before, the geographic zone stretching from eastern Iran to Afghanistan has historically been a particularly nasty neighborhood in terms of contending cultures in which disputes tend to get worked out unpleasantly. (There are other intermountain zones where the same dynamic obtains among different ethnic groups, but I make no hypothesis.)

So it continues to make perfect sense to me that there should have been places of refuge, monasteries that were effectively interdisciplinary institutes for anyone who was hot and bothered by the mysteries of human existence and/or the immediate problem of figuring out how to make folks get along better with one another. There would have been a huge incentive, and only occasionally would there have been central governments up to the task of sponsoring universities. (Of which latter, the ones in the adjacent richer neighborhoods were legendary, and pulled off some major intellectual discoveries.)

But it would also make sense that many of the hypotheses developed under such complex conditions would have been wrong, and the ones that were right would have been couched in self-protective phraseology. Using the wrong words to hot-headed people can get you killed, to this very day. So you do a lot of dodging and weaving, and you encode your insights in jokes.

So just as history has to be brushed against the grain (to use Walter Benjamin’s phrase) to reveal the patterns of material benefit (and the barbarism of exploitation that underpins civilization), truly strange tales and texts have to be read against the grain to reveal not just the motives and the material underpinnings of their composition, but to reveal the actual content in order to evaluate it.

The trouble being that since the mind is mostly unconscious (as we now know in a purely material sense) and stretches from the swamps to the dizzying mountain heights, most of the would-be explanations of the data really do make no sense, and perhaps all of them are wrong.

And it is all too likely that legends of lost colloquies of intellectuals are true; all it takes is a few plagues and a couple of military invasions, and a lot of masters of wisdom can get wiped out, especially given their frequent lack of street smarts. (Hence the practical incentive to invent social psychology and the sociology of knowledge a few thousand years early. You need the community-liaison guys to keep the pure theoreticians from getting themselves killed, and the Companions of Complementary Disciplines do seem to have worked synergistically on occasion. Right time, right place, right people. The Lodge of the Nine Sisters may have had improbable precursors…said Lodge having once been described as “the UNESCO of the eighteenth century,” which some would not take as a Good Thing, though the historian meant it as a compliment.)

Whoever may or may not have been able to put the pieces together once in a while in past centuries, there don’t seem to be any comparable types on the scene in those latitudes in the postmodern moment. Too bad.

I title this essay as I do because thanks to an accidental convergence of homages to Pete Seeger on “Thistle & Shamrock” and on “Fresh Air,” I have heard “Waist Deep in the Big Muddy” twice in less than a week, after not having heard the song for decades.

I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do because I notice it always coincides with their own desires

Susan B. Anthony, 1896