This is to celebrate the big monster face and the bright colours I made. Hello! I’m ready to stop hiding for awhile!
Author: sarah
But I do like this reading goal.
76. A good reading goal is to read a single author for every letter in the alphabet. I did this in 2006 and stopped on Auster, Paul. I couldn’t pick a single author for ‘B’.
That’s right, I’m reading somebody’s list of 100 things they learned in 2006. Apparently that is one of the things I didn’t learn to stop doing last year.
Quantity of notes is a useful measurement
I take notes on paper while I read, and file them chronologically as I finish with each source. On other projects, I’ve recorded just the title and the date in my table of contents, but this time I added the number of pages of notes. It’s a handy little metric! The quantity of notes correlates well with the impact a book had on me, and it’s very easy to scan.
If someone asked me to recommend a book about education or death, so far I would head for anything with five or more pages of notes in my Binder of Doom. (The notes wiki gets a filtered, delayed set of notes.)
Several pages of notes
- Instead of Education, by John C. Holt (8 pages)
- On Death and Dying, by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross (6 pages)
- Being and Time (selected sections), by Martin Heidegger (5 pages)
- Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers, by Mary Roach (5 pages)
Two or three pages
- Compulsory Mis-Education (selected chapters), by Paul Goodman (3 pages)
- Body Worlds 3 exhibit (2 pages)
- The New Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, by Betty Edwards (2 pages)
- The Saddest Music In The World, dir. Guy Maddin (2 pages — a lot of these were artistic, for web design inspiration)
Single pages
- Building a Bridge to the Eighteenth Century, by Neil Postman (1 page — this sucked hard)
- Dracula, by Bram Stoker (1 page)
- The Future of Statues, by Rene Magritte (1 page)
- How to Read Heidegger, by Mark Wrathall (1 page — selected chapters)
- My Arm, perf. Tim Crouch (1 page)
- An Oak Tree, perf. Tim Crouch (1 page)
- Regarding Sarah, dir. Michelle Porter (1 page)
- Surgeons’ Hall Museum, Edinburgh (1 page)
- Volver, dir. Pedro Almodovar (1 page)
Each “page” is a double-sided sheet of paper. For some reason I am self-conscious about the amount of notes I take. I have not been recording these scholastic anxieties and old school-related wounds, but maybe I should start. That could be my next metric— awkward moments prompted by each source.
Machine of Death
Machine of Death is an upcoming published anthology of short stories edited by Ryan North, Matthew Bennardo, and David Malki !, inspired by this episode of Ryan’s Dinosaur Comics.
All the stories will be about a world where a machine can tell people how they will die.
The machine had been invented a few years ago: a machine that could tell, from just a sample of your blood, how you were going to die. It didn’t give you the date and it didn’t give you specifics. It just spat out a sliver of paper upon which were printed, in careful block letters, the words “DROWNED” or “CANCER” or “OLD AGE” or “CHOKED ON A HANDFUL OF POPCORN”.
At a recent art opening, I pulled exactly such a slip of paper from an art installation by Hank Pine, and the mix of deadly predictions was very similar. A good variety of glamorous or outlandish ways to die (decapitation, dusting accident, lead pipe…), with the occasional realistic downer (I myself got “leukemia”).
Small talk around the death oracle was exactly as described in that call for submissions. “It said ‘lead pipe’… but I don’t know if I’ll be hit with a pipe or poisoned by lead plumbing.”
“OLD AGE”, it had already turned out, could mean either dying of natural causes, or shot by a bedridden man in a botched home invasion. The machine captured that old-world sense of irony in death— you can know how it’s going to happen, but you’ll still be surprised when it does.
I think part of the reason the diseases managed to be shocking was that there were fewer loopholes. “Hey, I… I can’t think of an ironic way to die of AIDS.”
A death oracle might be a good format for my long standing intention to find out, statistically, how I’m likely to die. Filling a hat with 45% “heart attack” would be several levels more morbid, somehow. Not as personalized as the Machine of Death, but just as accurate, in its way. A Pie Chart of Death is within the reach of current technology.
to recap
Guy Maddin is my muse of the week
Interview with Guy Maddin, one of my favourite directors, from October 2006:
GM: I’m also kind of pleased with what I came up with. It was such short notice that I didn’t have time to make anything up, I had to just be very honest. So much so that I can’t really show it to my family. I’d be disinherited, things like that.
TB: It’s kind of funny to hear you say that about a film that involves organ harvesting in a lighthouse.
GM: Yeah, I sort of promised myself I’d never talk about that part of growing up. It’s all there now! But sometimes you can hide things in plain sight.
I watched The Saddest Music in the World three times over the weekend, with and without commentary, and now I find myself hanging on every word out of Guy Maddin’s mouth.
His comments about expressionism in the Saddest Music are helping me with my mission to draw. He did things like shoot the actors making assorted facial expressions against a black backdrop so he could stick them in whenever he needed a shot, figuring that nobody really cares whether the backgrounds are consistent or accurate: the characters are in the movie, that’s enough context. I like that specific tactic, to just stick everything in together and nevermind the accuracy. It’s helping me draw, and design websites. I’m good at thinking up parts; less good at accurately proportioning them.
This other comment is helping me think about giant projects that involve a lot of research:
I know the Japanese had a different way of presenting silent film altogether, with a benshi narrator who would get in to characters or supply their own narratives that ran athwart the text unfolding on screen and that sounds really elaborate. The most I wanted my interlocutor to do was sort of season up, spice up, the proceedings a little bit and, truthfully, clarify some spots where I may not have shot things clearly enough. The benshi thing I found out about just a bit too late to figure out how to work with it and incorporate it myself.
That happens to me a lot, getting into a project and then finding really inspirational ideas right at the end. I have to insist that it’s ok, a good sign even, to be spotting neat ideas all the way through a project instead of having a complete and perfect idea right from the beginning.
And of course I’m looking forward to sometime seeing the organ harvesting movie, The Brand Upon The Brain.
Temple Grandin documentary
- The Woman Who Thinks Like a Cow on Google Video
Errol Morris made an episode of his short-lived TV show First Person about Temple Grandin, specifically about her decision to study and design cattle slaughterhouses as a way to understand death and dying. It was my favourite episode of the show— I’m going to watch it again for thesis ideas— and this documentary looks equally interesting.
Dead teenager songs
Behold! The only discussion of dead teenager songs that I haven’t found completely tedious!
I love ridiculous catalogs that overwhelm even the archivist, and this archivist is barely keeping a handle on his dead teen songs. If I set out to organize dozens of melodramatic ballads by cause of death (cars, rivers… surfing…) I’d probably get a bit silly too.
Honey – Bobby Goldsboro (1968) Kind of a twist, it sounds like she crashed the car and survived, but then died of some sort of disease. Most of the song is about the tree he planted.
He makes fun of most of the songs, but he still catalogs them. This role model might help me break on through to a “so bad they’re good” appreciation of these songs. I’m always game to stop hating something.
What really makes this list for me, though, is the inclusion of songs I genuinely like. I may be all burnt out on Leader Of The Pack and Tell Laura I Love Her, but I can still handle these post-punk gems:
- Tonight, by Iggy Pop (“I saw my baby/She was turning blue”… filed under drugs.)
- Space Junk, by Devo (“it smashed my baby’s head/and now my Sally’s dead”… filed under my favourite, other.)
(The photo above is a shot of Madonna that Galen pointed out looks just like Iggy Pop. They’re both kind of undead.)
Maybe novelists are just nerds
This NYT article complaining about bibliographies in novels is hilarious to me. Have they never heard of sharing? Why this obsession with modesty?
“It’s terribly off-putting,” said James Wood, the literary critic for The New Republic. “It would be very odd if Thomas Hardy had put at the end of all his books, ‘I’m thankful to the Dorset County Chronicle for dialect books from the 18th century.’ We expect authors to do that work, and I don’t see why we should praise them for that work. And I don’t see why they should praise themselves for it.”
Do literary critics really have no interest in reading related books? Bibliographies are so clearly useful that I can’t understand anybody giving them the diss. Most of my reading list is harvested from the back pages of other books, especially for the indie thesis. I would love to see more bibliographies reference non-literary sources too: movies, art, people, places (you know, more like what websites do).
When websites post references and citations, that is taken as helpful even if it is a form of bragging. I guess on the internet it is ok to brag as long as you’re still contributing. I wonder how much that has to do with nerds taking delight in working too hard and caring too much. It’s not even real bragging or showing off, it’s just geeking out.
Songs about death #1 (with bonus beard)
One of the death-related things I’ve been collecting is music. Death songs aren’t as common as love songs, but they’re up there, especially if you count songs about killing. I’m hoping to regularly post music here… say, every Tuesday, since today is the day I found The Saddest Beard In The World.
“Hope There’s Someone,” by Antony & The Johnsons is one of my favourite songs about dying. So weighty! “Oh I’m scared of the middle place between life and nowhere…” I wonder if the solution to that fear could actually be unlocked by contemplating this bearded gentleman and his ice cream (and the ice cream in his beard).
I’m not kidding— those heavy sighs are committed and respectful as well as hilarious. Watching this video makes me feel ok about most things.
Sex, death and consensual education
I’ve finished reading Instead of Education, one of John Holt’s influential tomes about unschooling and home schooling. As soon as I started typing my notes into the thesis wiki, I had to make a Vagina deja vu category to keep track of all the concepts I recognized from studying women’s sexuality and reproduction over at All About My Vagina. The root of all the deja vu seems to be one single thing, and it’s one of my favourite things, too! It’s consent.
John Holt spends a lot of Instead of Education making the point that compulsory education is, by nature, oppressive and unethical. (The book is a bona fide manifesto! ‘Students, you have nothing to lose but your chains’… the whole deal. I liked it.) My favourite quotes on this topic are in the wiki:
This seemed vaguely familiar, but I couldn’t put my finger on why until, about a hundred pages in, Holt started writing about teacher-learner relationships. He insists that because these relationships involve one person assuming a position of authority and power (the teacher), teaching relationships need to be temporary, well defined, and free to leave. Maybe I’m the only person who hears that and thinks immediately of BDSM, but I think it’s a really useful parallel!
There is a huge amount of sex writing about boundaries, relationships, temporary roles, domination and, above all, consent. I think what John Holt was after was consensual education. When he talks about the impossibility of consensual education within the framework of compulsory schooling, he sounds exactly like lesbian feminists who believe hetero sex is automatically oppressive within a patriarchal society. It’s about consent, and the circumstances under which it is possible.
My favourite discussion of consensual sex is The Ethical Slut‘s characterization of consent as an active collaboration for the benefit, well-being and pleasure of all persons concerned. An ‘active collaboration’ is exactly the kind of learning John Holt promoted. E.g.,
Like a few children I know in the U.S., [unschooled children from Ny Lilleskole in Denmark] are probably much more able than most of their [conventional] schoolmates (who can only submit or resist it) to make use of [conventional] school, to get from it at least some of the things they want for their own reasons.
It makes perfect sense that a freedom loving gal such as myself would want all relationships to be consensual, but I’d never thought of teaching as a relationship. I started to wonder what other situations I might enjoy more by examining the relationships involved and finding ways to make them consensual.
I think this definitely applies to self-defense (I had trouble making sense of it until I realized that being attacked is a relationship, not a situation). Cooperation and competition in business is another one.
Mainly though, I think this might be a good way to think about dying and death. There are obvious hot topics about death and consent (euthanasia, living wills, etc), but I wonder what could be gained by trying to have a consensual relationship with Death itself. It clearly has terms of engagement; maybe I could come up with my own set of terms and we could collaborate.
Jaron, wishing for crowd science
Digital Maoism Revisited lays out Jaron Lanier’s concerns that we don’t know how to build an open, optimistic kind collective intelligence. (I seem to have started collecting instances of people talking about The Age of Complexity.)
There is a third empirical problem to tackle, and it is the least comfortable. To what degree is mob behavior an inborn element of human nature? There are competing clichés about human identity: that we naturally and inevitably form into competing packs or that we would refrain from doing so if only we had decent gang-free peer groups in our teens. These theories can actually be tested. The genetic aspects of behavior that have received the most attention (under rubrics like sociobiology or evolutionary psychology) have tended to focus on things like gender differences and mating strategies, but my guess is that clan orientation will turn out to be the most important area of study.
I always find Jaron such a calm and polite writer, in contrast to the shit storms he occasionally stirs up around himself. I like this. “It is the least comfortable.” Such a considerate warning.