Religious Experiences Shrink Part of the Brain: Scientific American

I have sometimes felt a twinge of envy for those who manage to convince themselves of the existence of extraterrestrial beings who look out for us or manipulate our fate. It would make the world much more predictable knowing we had somebody to plead to, and would mitigate the despairing awareness of our essential solitude.  So thought the original pragmatist, Charles Sanders Peirce, who supposed that his mind would be more tranquil if only he could accept what was to him obviously absurd, i.e., a Higher Intelligence or God. But no such luck, for him or me.

But as we've always known, since even before Voltaire lampooned it, the cost of such tranquility is the sacrifice of critical intelligence. And now we have a clue as to how that tranquility and that sacrifice may be related, and I cease feeling any twinge of envy. And I'm not even especially despairing about the solitude: as we say in Spanish, Mejor solo que mal acompañado.

Religious Experiences Shrink Part of the Brain: Scientific American

Thanks to friend Dirk van Nouhuys for signaling this article. If you're curious about my other reflections on this most curious phenomenon, religious experience, just click on the keyword "religion" below.

Real democracy now! Toward a "Spanish revolution"

Finally good things are happening in Spanish politics! Calling the massive demos in towns across the country a "Spanish revolution" (as some of the foreign press has it) may be hyperbole, but those assemblies have broken open a political and psychological blockage to release real democratic dynamism.

Last year I planned to post a commentary on Spanish politics every week, as a writing exercise that would help me get to know this country. But I found myself presenting excuses for failing to meet my own self-imposed deadline (for example, in this post from 2010/06/04), mainly for these reasons:

• it was taking too much time, and I had other things I wanted to do (like publish my novel) ;
• it was too depressing; and
• nobody cared, or at maybe I just hadn't managed to make these events interesting or comprehensible enough for anybody to respond.

It's still depressing to watch the politics of destroying your opponent so that you and your buddies, rather than the other guys, could pillage public resources, especially when you see voters return to office notorious crooks. But now, suddenly, in a burst of mobilization that began only a few weeks ago, a major part of the electorate is no longer looking on dazed and impotent.

Last week we were in Madrid, part of the time at the Puerta del Sol, at the huge, spontaneous, beautifully ordered mini-city of thousands of people drawn to the demand of "Real democracy now!" I rolled the video above on Thursday, 19 May.

Now let's see if the official, institutionalized "left" — especially the Partido Socialista Obrero Español, which suffered disastrous defeat last week — will be able to respond creatively. Or just dissolve into irrelevance.

Tremors

Thanks to all of you who have expressed your concern. Susana and I are fine, the tremors in Lorca were barely felt in Carboneras, though we are only 75 km. away. We know that little city and know people who live there, and have been watching events there closely, but so far no one we know has been seriously hurt.

We're in Madrid this week, celebrating San Isidro and seeing theater and films, and next week we plan to visit Galicia (Santiago, Pontevedra, A Coruña), and (for now) have no internet connection while traveling, so I may not be posting another blog this month. Hope you don't miss me terribly.

A love affair across the centuries

The Russian Orientalist Nicholas Martinovitch (1883-1954) fell madly in love with the object of his research, a Turkish poetess who had died, he believed, more than 350 years before his birth. I have just uploaded my essay on this peculiar love affair, introducing Martinovitch's monograph on the 15th century Turkish poetess Mihrî Khâtûn (or "Hatun" in modern Turkish), which appeared in the inaugural issue of the Journal of Turkish Literature (2004).

I had discovered Martinovitch's unpublished, handwritten manuscript in the New York Public Library, while researching background for my novel A Gift for the Sultan. Readers of that novel may recognize Mihrî's name: I used the full version of it, Mihr-u-Mah ((Persian for "Sun and Moon") as the flattering name that the Turks bestow on the young Christian princess who is in their charge.

You can read my brief introduction free on Scribd: A Love Affair Across the Centuries.

My novel A Gift for the Sultan is available in electronic (Kindle) or printed paperback edition from Amazon, where you will also find 8 customer reviews, all of them positive (including the one Amazon considered the most critical). It is also available as an e-book (all formats), at the same low price ($4.99), from Smashwords, where there are so far no reviews.

"A first language not my own"

I feel this way sometimes — Spanish, a language that I acquired only after adulthood, has become a "second first language" in my everyday life, including most of my reading and almost all my daily conversation. Though I still use the English I grew up with (Midwestern US, middle-class variety) for many purposes, including this blog and most (but not all) of my fiction.

This kind of polyglot experience gives people like me (and there are millions of us in all parts of the world) a certain distance from each of the languages we use, making even the least literate of us sensitive to the peculiar resources of each. I remember the especially creative and surprising English expressions of an illiterate Cairene in New York who was also fluent in her own creative version of French. Marvelous.

Unfortunately I'm not attached to an institution that subscribes to this journal, so I don't have access to more than the abstract. I guess it's time to read Derrida.

The Languages of Charles Reznikoff

IAN DAVIDSON (2011).

Journal of American Studies, Volume 45,
Issue 02, May 2011 pp 355-369


http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?aid=8267708

Extras for "A Gift for the Sultan"

In case you've been intrigued by the history behind A Gift for the Sultan, this page is for you.

Inspired by the Shelfari/Amazon system of "book extras", available to anyone who has purchased the book for Kindle, I've put background material (including historical tidbits) on my own website, available to everybody — including those of you who have not yet purchased the book. You can find it here: Sultan

And here is mostly the same information on Shelfari. 

More news: The Turkish translation has now been completed, and the Turkish edition of this novel is scheduled for presentation by the publisher, Nokta, at the Tüyap International Book Fair in Istanbul in November.

E-book pricing: Writer Beware™ Blogs!

This whole blog entry may be of interest, but what caught my attention is the discussion of pricing (scroll down the blog).

Writer Beware™ Blogs!

I've priced the e-book editions of A Gift for the Sultan at $4.99 on both Smashwords (for all e-readers: Nook, Kindle, iPad, etc.) and Amazon's Kindle. (The Amazon Kindle price may be higher if you are ordering from outside the United States — that's something I don't control, has to do with Amazon's relations with foreign distributors. The Smashwords price should be constant wherever you are.)

Was that wise? Is it really "competing" against all those e-books offered at $0.99? Or are those cheapo books in an altogether different category for potential buyers? $4.99 feels right; it's accessible to anyone really interested, and those are the people I want to buy it — those who will actually read it.  (The discussion of the difference between readers and buyers is one of the most interesting parts of this "Writer Beware" post.) So far, more people have bought the paperback ($15.70 + shipping from Amazon, or save the shipping if you order it through a bookstore). Now those buyers are almost certainly going to be readers.

I plan soon (as soon as I get it scanned and formatted) to offer my 1988 collection of short stories, Welcome to My Contri, as an e-book at $1.99. That seems pretty cheap for a book reviewed in The New York Times Book Review. But it's not such a throw-away casual purchase as a 99 cent'er.

Your thoughts?

The Sad, Beautiful Fact That We're All Going To Miss Almost Everything : Monkey See : NPR

You know that list of 1,000 books you must read before you die? It's not true. You will be permitted to die even if you don't read them. So, sad to say, delaying reading them is no guarantee of a longer life. But there may be other reasons to put them off.

The Sad, Beautiful Fact That We're All Going To Miss Almost Everything : Monkey See : NPR

Other worlds, dark and joyous

I had long wanted to read this famous book — a space fantasy far from my usual choices of fiction reading; it's good to break routine once in a while, as industrial diplomat and star traveler Marq Hyeth (the narrator of most of this book) might say. And it was not at all what I expected. Which is good, I guess. I wanted surprises and got them.

As I did expect, it is fantastical and ironic. But it is not light comedy. It is a story contrived to reflect on complicated, unresolved philosophical questions, with dark hints about the answers: how the brain really works and how its processes can be disrupted; the construction of memories, creating myths; the varied ways of negotiating our sexual obsessions, and, finally (finally!) time, space and death.

The setting: Millennia from now, when humans and other intelligent beings from other planets (some of them with 6 legs, multiple tongues, wings and metallic claws) have achieved relative peace in their competition to colonize the 6,200 or more known worlds in the  universe, a big (7'4") 19-year old social misfit, homosexual and long drug user in a world that discourages that sort of thing volunteers for Radical Anxiety Termination to turn him into a "rat", an anxiety-less and thus ambition- and curiosity-less human used as a slave by the more-or-less corrupt state industries. His partial recovery of his mental faculties and belated discovery of emotion, described mainly by the short, stocky interworld traveler and industrial diplomat (ID) Marq Hyeth, his perfect love object, is the central story around which we witness many other relationships, experiences and memories. And hovering over all of it are two massive, possibly related conflicts which may threaten them all: first, an internal rivalry among the federated worlds between a fundamentalist political-ideological movement called the Family  (apparently the inventors of Radical Anxiety Termination) who want everyone and everything to be controlled and orderly and invent exquisite punishments for those who are not, and the more tolerant, laid-back, open-to-experimentation Sygn; and beyond them, outside any known federation, a mysterious and immensely powerful system of beings who offer no communication to the others, the Xlv, whose intentions are unknown but, if hostile, may be spell disaster.

The book is full of invention, with new worlds and new sorts of intelligent beings and new technologies with strange names appearing in every chapter, almost on every page. Which often makes it very difficult to figure just who is having sex with whom, and how they're doing it, or what's really going on in the dinner parties. (There's a lot of explicit, sloppy sex, but unless you're attracted to six-legged evelmi with shiny scales, or have an opportunity to stroll or float through a love-park on one of the Sygn controlled worlds, it will be beyond reach for you.)

My favorite parts include the long first section, before Marq Hyeth even appears, where we witness the brain-zapping  in the Radical Anxiety Termination Institute and its consequences — which include the inability to take in new information from the General Information (GI) network which other humans and evelmi (those six-legged, winged- beings with all the tongues) use to learn new languages or access whatever data they want. This is because, as the high-ranking interworld official Japril explains,

"It's precisely those 'anxiety' channels which Radical Anxiety Termination blocks that GI uses both to process into the brain the supportive contextual information in the preconscious that allows you to make a conscious call for anything more complex than names, dates, verbatim texts, and multiplication tables; and it also uses them to erase an information program in such a way that you can still remember the parts of it you actually used consciously." (Pp. 161-162 in my edition.)

Wow! So all that we would give up if we lost all anxiety. That is a heavy thought. If I were a rat, i.e. if I had been subjected to blockage of my "anxiety" channels, I might be able to repeat that paragraph but I would never fathom its meaning. The novel is full of rather surprising, often profound, usually wittily stated observations.

Another delight is the dragon-hunting chapter. I won't tell you more. You just have to experience what happens in Dyethshome when you go on a dragon hunt. The final chapter comes as somewhat of a relief from all the interminable invention and learning of new creatures, habits, worldscapes. For here Marq Dyeth recalls his earlier life, which helps bring some coherence to the jarring, seemingly chaotic space travels we have just gone through.

Here's what Wikipedia through Google (our primitive version of "GI") tells us about the ebullient and creative Stephen R. Delany. And here's  something else I found when I looked him up. Delany doesn't even appear in this first part, but it's in his spirit. Check out this video, The last angel of history.

This is not directly relevant, but fun: a view of some of those 6,200 worlds from our own little planet, in Terje Sorgjerd's video, The Mountain on Vimeo.

In the peninsula of Bithynia…

[Text found in an old notebook, dated 1983.6.11 — slightly edited]

In the peninsula of Bithynia, in about 120 B.C. — the chronicles are not very precise, saying only "in the reign of the Elders of the House of Baal" —a girl was seen near the Temple of Tanit with a T-shirt (for this would seem to be the garment described) inscribed thus: "Ravissez-moi, je suis vièrge. Estienne."

When asked what that meant, the girl said she wasn't sure (the characters themselves were quite unlike the Phoenician script known to the region) but that it was her father's idea, that it was addressed to the Carthaginians and would assure her — and thus the House — of eternal existence in the fiction of Flaubert.

The interlocutor, a young acolyte of Tanit, was not troubled by the reference to the unknown foreign god Flaubert — there were so many gods, and it was well to respect them all — but he was puzzled by the severe and undecipherable characters. How, he asked, were the Carthaginians — who in all events were not expected in the area — how were they to understand a message in a strange language?

"Oh, my father says the Carthaginians of Flaubert understand it perfectly," replied the girl.

∞∞∞

[I must have been reading Salammbô; "Estienne" may be a reference to the type-face used for at least some editions of Flaubert's works.]