Alzheimer's Patients Turn To Stories Instead Of Memories

Further evidence (as though any were needed) that our most fundamental psychological need, and the only way we can imagine that we understand anything, is to spin a story about it. "It" being the narrative string connecting sights, smells, memories, and everything else. It's what dreams are made of, and theology, and scientific theories, and all our human relationships.

Alzheimer's Patients Turn To Stories Instead Of Memories : Shots - Health Blog : NPR

Plus of course our novels, short stories and poems. Like the ones these patients are creating.

The most explosive writer of the late 20th century?

Cinema Libre: Norman Mailer

Was Norman Mailer "the most important writer of the second half of the 20th century"? That's what Mary Dearborn (Mailer: A Biography) says in this 85-minute documentary on the life and lovers, boorish violence and charming gestures, rapier wit and bludgeon insults of this most contradictory American celebrity. 

Mary Dearborn's appraisal sounds over the top but — You know? It's not entirely absurd. He was in all events one of the heavyweight contenders on an era when a whole raft of writers was competing to be the most attention-getting, outrageous and provocative. It wasn't easy to be more provocative than Gore Vidal,  Jack Kerouac, Hunter S. Thompson, or other contemporaries, or to outshine as a prosemaker that older generation of Hemingway and Faulkner, but Mailer did his damnedest. 

Like Vidal, he participated in politics as a candidate for office — not the Senate, like Vidal, but for mayor of New York. Like Hunter Thompson, he'd fuel himself on alcohol and drugs (though unlike Thompson, he was not a firearms enthusiast). Like Kerouac and other writers he admired, he wrote fast and furiously. And, most of all like Hemingway, he tried to live the experiences he wrote about, from war to prize-fighting to political campaigning.

And far more than any of them, even more than Hemingway, he outraged and openly insulted feminists. Though — or because — as he and many of his lovers said, he "loved" women. "Love" can mean many different things. In his case it meant that he strongly desired to couple with them, to possess them, to please them. And imagined that he was pleasing them by being outrageous, by talking dirty in public or even, in a drunken drug-fueled rage that is one of the most impactful moments of the documentary, attacking and stabbing his wife under the apparent illusion that he was a bullfighter and she the bull.


And he also wrote some of the most powerful descriptions of death and killing, of male rage. Drawing on and channeling his own rage to make us feel and shiver with the shot, the stab, the punch, the fuck. His themes were always sex and violence. His problem, that he didn't know the difference. Violence was always orgasmic, sex to be complete had to be violent.

He wasn't always a great artist — sometimes he was just a stupid clown. But he could be a great artist, and sometimes was. Maybe his most important work is the nonfiction (Armies of the Night, etc.). But — for him and I think in reality — it's all "fiction," because every supposed fact is really a distortion through somebody's way of viewing and describing events. And that's why a work that the reader knows is "fiction" can be truer, because it avoids the pretense of objectivity and openly calls on the reader to draw on his or her own experience to feel and complete the story. This is an insight from one of the "Extras" in the DVD, from an interview in Mailer's last year of life (2007).


This addition to the abundant Mailer literature — no writer seems to have attracted more attention — doesn't give us much in analysis of why America could grow and celebrate such an enormous ego, despite the suggestion in the title "Norman Mailer, The American"— that is, that he and his fame were uniquely American phenomena.  That's something for us to think about. Something about "America" made him possible. 

What the documentary does offer is a lively composite of videoclips and interviews, some of them insightful and others revealing the incomprehension of people Mailer had stunned — most notably, Adele Morales Mailer, the wife he took for a bull and nearly killed. Except for Adele's very personal account of that fateful night, most of this stuff we knew before.  But the documentary is most interesting, to me and probably most writers, for the scenes of Mailer himself, talking about life and writing.  If you get the DVD, don't miss the snippets of his remarks, at widely different times of his life, in the "Extras." Mailer was very intelligent, and occasionally — but only occasionally, and only when sober — he was also wise.

Just released by Cinema Libre 

Check out these video clips: http://vimeo.com/album/1917630 

Also worth reading, this obit from the New York Times, by Charles McGrath: 
Norman Mailer, Towering Writer With Matching Ego, Dies at 84

Corporate debt causing woes in Spain

All the more reason to think that the PP (Partido Popular) government's drastic budget cuts (and the "labor reform" cheapening firing) are just the opposite of what we need here. It's not the government deficit that is causing the crisis, but rather the crisis of the private economy that has caused the deficit.

In Spain, Grupo A.C.S.’s High Debt Reflects Country’s Finances - NYTimes.com

Imaginary friends on absurd adventures

The Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A small group of gentlemen with the leisure and resources to do whatever they choose, and without having anything particular to do, accompany Mr. Samuel Pickwick on his adventures to explore the more curious portions of the world — as long as they are not more than a two-day stagecoach drive from London, and there is assurance of a comfortable inn at their destination. There follow 57 chapters of silliness, in which Dickens alternately lampoons and lovingly illustrates personalities and customs — some truly absurd — of laborers, lawyers, medical students, journalists, coachmen, servants, businessmen and the idle and pretentious sub-aristocracy of the 1820s (supposed period of the Pickwick Club) or '30s (the novel began to appear in 1836).

Young Dickens (then 25) was invited to write text to accompany comic sketches of sportsmen by illustrator Robert Seymour, and at first he seems to have had no clear idea of how to develop it nor anything about the characters beyond the funny names he assigned them and the physical appearance that Seymour had given them. After the first installments, Seymour (who had a history of mental problems) committed suicide, but by that time Dickens' narrative inventions had already taken priority, so that instead of the text following the sketches, the sketches had to illustrate the new text, as other artists (R. W. Buss, briefly, and then Hablot Knight Browne, "Phiz") succeeded Seymour. Among the more memorable episodes is Pickwick's unequal litigation with the shyster lawyers Dodson and Fogg and Pickwick's subsequent sojourn in debtors' prison because he refuses to pay the obviously unjust sentence of costs and compensation for a breach of promise he never made (brought by a hysterical widow who mistook the overly-polite Pickwick's inquiries about lodgings as a proposal to marry). The story eventually becomes clear and the characters more clearly defined, especially Pickwick's cockney manservant Sam Weller, the quick-witted scoundrel Jingle, and Sam Weller's marvelously drawn coachman father, full of false wisdom mispronounced, generous and well-disposed to all but ready to fight for honor and justice when he thinks these have been offended.

Especially delightful to any of us in the trade are Dickens' wry comments on the craft of writing. There are many, including the nearly-illiterate Sam Weller's efforts to compose a love letter. But I'll quote only one, near the end (Ch. LVII) of this long serial, which is an observation on the work itself: "It is the fate of all authors or chroniclers to create imaginary friends, and lose them in the course of art. Nor is this the full extent of their misfortunes; for they are required to furnish an account of them besides." In this, his first long work of fiction, Dickens has succeeded to the delight of many thousands of his contemporaries and to generations ever since.

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David Damberger: What happens when an NGO admits failure | Video on TED.com

As a veteran of what we then called community development projects abroad — in my case, in the hillside barrios of Caracas — I recognized immediately the problem this young engineer is addressing. Our organization, like almost any NGO then or now, was shaped for the donors, not the end users, so if the project looked good, that was enough even if it didn't make people's lives any better.

I applaud the bold solution that Engineers Without Borders has adopted— acknowledging failure when it occurs and figuring out how to remedy it instead of replicating it.

David Damberger: What happens when an NGO admits failure | Video on TED.com

For more, check out the EWB Canada branch's Failure Reports.

The History of English in 10 Minutes Video | Smithsonian Magazine

Don't miss this! Get the real lowdown on how we got to where we are.

The History of English in 10 Minutes Video | Smithsonian Magazine

Thanks to Dirk van N. for forwarding.

Antitrust Primer for the Publishing Price Fixing Lawsuit

In the recent lawsuit between Apple and several big publishers on one side, and Amazon on the other, where Apple et al. wanted to let the publishers set ebook prices and Amazon wanted to be free to sell at any price (to undersell the publishers),  I was rooting for Apple et al. — because I'm an author and I saw their position as favoring authors, while not really hurting the consumer significantly. The Authors Guild has been arguing that the Amazon position, if it prevailed, would damage the whole publishing industry. Well, it has prevailed so far. The issues are complicated (it's the lawyers' job to make them so); here's an explanation by Jane Litte that should interest any other authors out there.

Antitrust Primer for the Publishing Price Fixing Lawsuit

And here's what Scott Turow, president of the Authors Guild has to say about it: Grim news.

Ill Fares the Land by Tony Judt
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Tony Judt's last book is his legacy, the closing lecture or set of lectures for the most important course this most European of Englishmen felt he had to impart to American college students like those he was teaching at New York University up until the last weeks of his life. He is mainly concerned to elucidate the successes, failures and future possibilities of social democracy, and to distinguish it from "liberalism", which not as the opposite of "conservatism", but rather the set of principles of individual freedom and tolerance of diversity that underpins most truly conservative thought. Though his hero is that eminent conservative John Maynard Keynes, an enlightened defender of capitalism, Judt is nostalgic for the European social democracy of the 1950s, when European states were powerful enough to impose their laws on corporations, and corporations were prosperous enough to provide funds for broader health, education and other social democratic programs. And even in the U.S., where "social democracy" was anathema (because it sounded like "socialism" which meant "communism" which meant everything evil), Democratic presidents (from FDR to LBJ) were able to increase social equality. But that time is past; as the current world-wide economic re-ordering makes plain, the kind of capitalism that could or would support social programs, and the power of states to command them, have all but evaporated before the triumph of finance capital, creating nothing itself and thus not increasing world wealth but merely seizing for itself and its billionaire leaders an ever greater portion.

"To put the point quite bluntly, if social democracy has a future, it will be as a social democracy of fear." (p. 221) Fear that anything else — untrammeled finance capitalism or authoritarian dictatorship — will be far worse. Judt still thinks the nation-state can play a major role in preventing such disaster, but on the whole this is a thoughtful but ultimately pessimistic view he leaves us.

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An Overdose of Pain for Spain - NYTimes.com

This came out over a week ago, but I just saw it (thanks to a friend's recommendation) and it's still valid.
An Overdose of Pain for Spain - NYTimes.com

Walt Disney as urban planner

Fellow urbanists (as well as Mickey Mouse fans) will find this review, by Julianna Delgado of a book by Sam Gennawey, fascinating. Was Walt's vision fascist? Or communist? Or neither of the above? It sure wasn't democratic, but designed to be people-pleasing. Which is the essence of the patrician view of the world.

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