reading

On Virality and the Ecstatic Jason Silva

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John Updike famously said, “Nabokov writes prose the only way it should be written, that is, ecstatically.” It’s one of my favorite descriptions of Nabokov’s writing.

Today, I watched the video below. The creator of it, Jason Silva, uses the word ecstatic to describe how he wants to feel. Take two minutes out of your day to watch it:

[vimeo https://vimeo.com/29938326 w=600 h=400]

And then read this excellent interview with Jason Silva in The Atlantic:

I’ve heard you described in a lot of interesting ways, as a performance philosopher, an Idea DJ, or even as a shaman—What do those terms mean to you and is there anyone else out there that you see as performing a similar cultural role? Are there historical precedents for what you’re trying to do?
 
Silva: Definitely. I first heard this term “performance philosophy” on a website called Space Collective that was started by the Dutch filmmaker Rene Daalder as a way for humans to imagine what it might be like to eventually leave the Earth. I was reading an article about Timothy Leary that said that Timothy Leary and Buckminster Fuller used to refer to themselves as “performance philosophers,” and that really stuck with me. 
 
When Timothy Leary was in prison he was visited by Marshall McLuhan, who told Leary “you can’t stay way out on the fringes if you want to compete in the marketplace of ideas—if your ideas are going to resonate, you need to refine your packaging.” And so they taught Leary to smile, and they taught him about charisma and aesthetic packaging, and ultimately Leary came to appreciate the power of media packaging for his work. According to the article, this is where Timothy Leary the performance philosopher was born, and when he came out of jail all of the sudden he was on all these talk shows, and he was waxing philosophical about virtual reality, and downloading our minds, and moving into cyberspace. All of these ideas became associated with this extremely charismatic guy who was considered equal parts rock star, poet and guru scientist—and that to me suggests the true power of media communications, because these guys were able to take these intergalactic sized ideas and spread them with the tools of media. 
 
The problem, as I see it, is that a lot of these stunning philosophical ideas are diluted by their academic packaging; the academics don’t think so because this is their universe, they could care less about how these ideas get packaged because they’re so enmeshed in them. But the rest of us need another way in. We need to be told why these ideas matter, and one of the ways to do that is to present them with these media tools.
And these videos that you’re making now? How would you describe them?
 
Silva: I see them as souvenirs that I’m bringing back with me from the ecstatic state. Some people have criticized me for being overly expository, they see me as the equivalent of a voice-over narrator in a film who’s telling you what’s happening on a screen even though you can see it right in front of you. But it’s not enough to feel the experience; it needs to be narrated in real time. That method really works for me because narrating my experience creates a self-amplifying feedback loop whereby articulating experience allows me to feel it in a richer way, which in turn helps me articulate it in a richer way, and so on. That feedback loop helps you sort of author your way into your experience, like writing your name on a tree and saying “Jason was here.” It’s a way of saying “I experienced something and it matters,” a way of throwing an anchor into something that’s ephemeral and trying to hold it in stasis. That’s what we do with all of our art. A beautiful cathedral, a beautiful painting, a beautiful song—all of those are ecstatic visions held in stasis; in some sense the artist is saying “here is a glimpse I had of something ephemeral and fleeting and magical, and I’m doing my best to instantiate that into stone, into paint, into stasis.” And that’s what human beings have always done, we try to capture these experiences before they go dim, we try to make sure that what we glimpse doesn’t fade away before we get hungry or sleepy later. 
Consider me an immediate fan.

Decimal Points Matter

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From a story in Bloomberg today:

JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM) is being sued by a trader who says he accepted a contract from the investment bank because a typographical error made him believe he would be paid 10 times what was actually offered.

Kai Herbert, a Switzerland-based currency trader, is suing JPMorgan for about 580,000 pounds ($920,000), his lawyers said at a trial in London this week. The original contract said Herbert’s annual pay would be 24 million rand ($3.1 million). JPMorgan blamed the mistake on a typographical error and said the figure should have been 2.4 million rand, according to court documents.

Who should win the lawsuit?

This Is Your Brain on Fiction

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What do you say to someone who prefers to read nonfiction over fiction? Easy. Read more fiction. According to several studies, when you read fiction full of detailed descriptions, clever metaphors, and complex characters, your brain is stimulated in novel ways:

The brain, it seems, does not make much of a distinction between reading about an experience and encountering it in real life; in each case, the same neurological regions are stimulated. Keith Oatley, an emeritus professor of cognitive psychology at the University of Toronto (and a published novelist), has proposed that reading produces a vivid simulation of reality, one that “runs on minds of readers just as computer simulations run on computers.” Fiction — with its redolent details, imaginative metaphors and attentive descriptions of people and their actions — offers an especially rich replica. Indeed, in one respect novels go beyond simulating reality to give readers an experience unavailable off the page: the opportunity to enter fully into other people’s thoughts and feelings.

The novel, of course, is an unequaled medium for the exploration of human social and emotional life. And there is evidence that just as the brain responds to depictions of smells and textures and movements as if they were the real thing, so it treats the interactions among fictional characters as something like real-life social encounters.

Indeed, individuals who frequently read fiction seem to be better able to understand other people, empathize with them, and see the world from their perspective. This relationship exists even after the researchers account for the possibility that more empathetic individuals might prefer reading novels (which is debatable in its own right).

So: read more fiction.

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Source: New York Times 

On Word Choice

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This is a great post on word choice in writing:

1. A Series of Word Choices

Here’s why this matters: because both writing and storytelling comprise, at the most basic level, a series of word choices. Words are the building blocks of what we do. They are the atoms of our elements. They are the eggs in our omelets. They are the shots of liquor in our cocktails. Get it right? Serendipity. Get it wrong? The air turns to arsenic, that cocktail makes you puke, this omelet tastes like balls.

 2. Words Define Reality

Words are like LEGO bricks: the more we add, the more we define the reality of our playset. “The dog fucked the chicken” tells us something. “The Great Dane fucked the chicken” tells us more. “The Great Dane fucked the bucket of fried chicken on the roof of Old Man Dongweather’s barn, barking with every thrust” goes the distance and defines reality in a host of ways (most of them rather unpleasant). You can over-define. Too many words spoil the soup. Find the balance between clarity, elegance, and evocation.

 3. The “Hot and Cold” Game

You know that game — “Oh, you’re cold, colder, colder — oh! Now you’re getting hot! Hotter! Hotter still! Sizzling! Yay, you found the blueberry muffin I hid under the radiator two weeks ago!” –? Word choice is like a textual version of that game where you try to bring the reader closer to understanding the story you’re trying to tell. Strong, solid word choice allows us to strive for clarity (hotter) and avoid confusion (colder).

 4. Most with Fewest

Think of it like a different game, perhaps: you’re trying to say as much as possible with as few words as you can muster. Big ideas put as briefly as you are able. Maximum clarity with minimum words.

 5. The Myth of the Perfect Word

Finding the perfect word is as likely as finding a downy-soft unicorn with a pearlescent horn riding a skateboard made from the bones of your many enemies. Get shut of this notion. The perfect is the enemy of the good. For every sentence and every story you have a plethora of right words. Find a good word. Seek astrong word. But the hunt for a perfect word will drive you into a wide-eyed froth. Though, according to scholars, “nipplecookie” is in fact the perfect word. That’s why Chaucer used it so often. Truth.

Read the rest of this pithy, funny post (note advice #9 and #11). I like the conclusion:

Write to be read. Choose words that have flavor but do not overwhelm, that reach out instead of pushing back, that sound right to the ear and carry with them a kind of rhythm. Write with confidence, not with arrogance. Don’t be afraid to play with words. But be sure to let the reader play with you.

And after you’re done reading the post, and you’re serious about improving your craft (of writing), make sure to grab Stephen King’s classic On Writing. It’s the best book I’ve read filled with practical advice on how you can improve your writing.

A Brief History of Cannibalism

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Steven Shapin, who teaches history of science at Harvard, reviews Cătălin Avramescu’s An Intellectual History of Cannibalism for The Los Angeles Review of Books. The summary is brief, but it’s an excellent primer of how cannibalism has developed (and been misunderstood) over the generations:

Modern condemnations of cannibalism largely set aside questions of moral law or natural law, with their suppositions about the nature of human beings, and thus what is unnatural. These are not assumptions we’re comfortable with these days; chacun à son goût is more to our taste. Formal prosecutions of modern anthropophagists — when they happen — now fasten on attendant crimes, notably, though not necessarily, murder. Cannibalism can be judged a sign of insanity, and the perpetrator locked up not for a criminal act but for mental derangement likely to endanger himself or the community. In 1980, the Poughkeepsie, New York, murderer and testicle-eater Albert Fentress was found not guilty by reason of insanity and committed to a psychiatric hospital. The more famous, but less real, Dr. Hannibal (“the Cannibal”) Lecter was confined to a state hospital for the criminally insane. The cannibal is less and less an actor in the sciences of human nature and culture, more and more handed over to the criminologist, the psychopathologist, and the journalist. The figure of the cannibal is good for selling books and movie tickets, but not particularly important to think about or to draw lessons from. 

But it hasn’t always been this way: Cannibalism was once taken very seriously indeed, and the Romanian philosopher Cătălin Avramescu’s learned and brilliantly told intellectual history of anthropophagy recovers the cannibal’s once central place in formal thought about what it means to be human. Commentators from antiquity through at least the 18th century needed first to establish whether cannibalism actually existed as a collective practice.

On the origin of the word “cannibal” (it surfaced with Christopher Columbus):

It was the discovery of the Americas, and especially Columbus’s voyages to the West Indies, that gave the European imagination more cannibals than ever existed before. Indeed, Columbus discovered cannibals almost at the moment he discovered America: The wordcannibal came into European languages via Columbus’s usage, probably from the Carib people he encountered. Trying to make out both where he was and the identity of the indigenous peoples he encountered, he wrote that “there are men with one eye and others with dogs’ snouts who eat men. On taking a man they behead him and drink his blood and cut off his genitals,” and on November 23, 1492, the word “canibales” appears in his log for the first time. “Cannibal” was the proper name of a defined group of people-who-eat-people that came to designate anyone who ate human flesh. In The Tempest, the name of the wild-man Caliban has been widely understood as a loose anagram of cannibal.

Concluding the review, Shapin writes that the cannibal we know today is a figure of shock, schlock, and sensation: “The modern cannibal is little more than a mental deviant, and the eater of human flesh is for us just a bit player in a theater of perversity. An Intellectual History of Cannibalism describes how that transformation happened.”

Susan Cain: The Power of Introverts

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Susan Cain is the author of Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking. In her excellent TED talk featured below, she explains how society should embrace introverts. She explains how our schools and businesses were designed for extroverts, but there is a way to make introverts feel more included. She spent seven years working on her book, and spent the better half of last year working on her speech:

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3yyeJ1jaGDU h=400 w=600]

As an introvert myself, I found the talk inspiring.

David Foster Wallace on Arts and Television

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This is David Foster Wallace talking about TV and the arts:

You teach the reader that he’s way smarter than he thought he was. I think one of the insidious lessons about TV is the meta-lesson that you’re dumb. This is all you can do. This is easy, and you’re the sort of person who really just wants to sit in a chair and have it easy. When in fact there are parts of us, in a way, that are a lot more ambitious than that. And what we need… is seriously engaged art that can teach again that we’re smart. And that’s the stuff that TV and movies — although they’re great at certain things — cannot give us. But that have to create the motivations for us to want to do the extra work, to get those other kinds of art… Which is tricky, because you want to seduce the reader, but you don’t want to pander or manipulate them. I mean, a good book teaches the reader how to read it.

The quote appears in David Lipsky’s Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace, published about ten years after his interview with DFW.

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(via Brain Pickings)

Roberto Bolaño’s Labyrinth

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Labyrinth

Take a look at the photo above. It’s a real photograph, but in a story published in The New Yorker last month, Roberto Bolaño creates a (fictional) story for each of the individuals seen in the photo. He goes in depth hypothesizing on how the characters are named, how they are dressed, why they are or aren’t looking at the camera, what’s going on in the background, and ultimately into behavior of the characters. The title of the story is “Labyrinth,” and it is fascinating:

The photo was taken in winter or autumn, or maybe at the beginning of spring, but certainly not in summer. Who are the most warmly dressed? J.-J. Goux, Sollers, and Marc Devade, without question: they’re wearing jackets over their turtleneck sweaters, and thick jackets, too, from the look of them, especially J.-J.’s and Devade’s. Kristeva is a case apart: her turtleneck sweater is light, more elegant than practical, and she’s not wearing anything over it. Then we have Guyotat. He might be as warmly dressed as the four I’ve already mentioned. He doesn’t seem to be, but he’s the only one wearing three layers: the black leather jacket, the shirt, and the striped T-shirt. You could imagine him wearing those clothes even if the photo had been taken in summer. It’s quite possible. All we can say for sure is that Guyotat is dressed as if he were on his way somewhere else. As for Carla Devade, she’s in between. Her blouse, whose collar is showing over the top of her sweater, looks soft and warm; the sweater itself is casual, but of good quality, neither very heavy nor very light. Finally, we have Jacques Henric and Marie-Thérèse Réveillé. Henric is clearly not a man who feels the cold, although his Canadian lumberjack’s shirt looks warm enough. And the least warmly dressed of all is Marie-Thérèse Réveillé. Under her light, knitted V-neck sweater there are only her breasts, cupped by a black or white bra.

All of them, more or less warmly dressed, captured by the camera at that moment in 1977 or thereabouts, are friends, and some of them are lovers, too. For a start, Sollers and Kristeva, obviously, and the two Devades, Marc and Carla. Those, we might say, are the stable couples. And yet there are certain features of the photo (something about the arrangement of the objects, the petrified, musical rhododendron, two of its leaves invading the space of the ficus like clouds within a cloud, the grass growing in the planter, which looks more like fire than grass, the everlasting leaning whimsically to the left, the glasses in the center of the table, well away from the edges, except for Kristeva’s, as if the other members of the group were worried they might fall) that suggest a more complex and subtle web of relations among these men and women.

If you’re a fan of fiction, don’t miss it.

Books with the Oddest Titles

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I’d never hard of The Diagram Prize. Turns out, it celebrates the very best in books with odd titles published around the world. Judges from both The Bookseller and its sister consumer magazine, We Love This Book, whittled down the original submissions to a shortlist of seven. And it is spectacular:

A Century of Sand Dredging in the Bristol Channel: Volume Two by Peter Gosson (Amberley). A book that documents the sand trade from its inception in 1912 to the present day, focusing on the Welsh coast.

Cooking with Poo by Saiyuud Diwong (Urban Neighbours of Hope). Thai cookbook. “Poo” is Thai for “crab” and is Diwong’s nickname.

Estonian Sock Patterns All Around the World by Aino Praakli (Kirjastus Elmatar). Covers styles of socks and stockings found in Estonian knitting.

The Great Singapore Penis Panic: And the Future of American Mass Hysteria by Scott D Mendelson (Createspace). An analysis of the “Koro” psychiatric epidemic that hit the island of Singapore in 1967.

Mr Andoh’s Pennine Diary: Memoirs of a Japanese Chicken Sexer in 1935 Hebden Bridge by Stephen Curry and Takayoshi Andoh (Royd Press). The story of Koichi Andoh, who travelled from Japan to Yorkshire in the 1930s to train workers at a hatchery business the art of determining the sex of one-day-old chicks.

A Taxonomy of Office Chairs by Jonathan Olivares (Phaidon). Exhaustive overview of the evolution of the modern office chair.

The Mushroom in Christian Art by John A. Rush (North Atlantic Books). In which the author reveals that Jesus is a personification of the Holy Mushroom, Amanita Muscaria.

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(hat tip: Tyler Cowen)

Inspirations: a Short Film Celebrating M.C. Escher

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This is a beautiful short film celebrating M.C. Escher (1898-1972), the Dutch artist who explored a wide range of mathematical ideas with his woodcuts and lithographs. The filmmaker behind the film is Cristóbal Vila, who invites you to visit etereaestudios.com for more information about the film.

The film starts out with a view of a chessboard and what appear to be beans arranged on eleven of the board’s squares. This is a reference to the famous “Wheat and Chessboard Problem.” When the creator of the game of chess showed his invention to the ruler of the country, the ruler was so pleased that he gave the inventor the right to name his prize for the invention. The wise man asked the king: for the first square of the chess board, he would receive one grain of wheat (in some tellings, rice), two for the second one, four on the third one, and so forth, doubling the amount each time. The ruler, arithmetically unaware, quickly accepted the inventor’s offer, even getting offended by his perceived notion that the inventor was asking for such a low price. But when the treasurer started doing the calculations, it quickly surfaced that this was an impossible offer to fulfill. Given the request, the final tally would have been 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 2^64 – 1 = 18,446,744,073,709,551,615 grains!

Continuing along, we also see homages to such things as Fermat’s Last Theorem, Leonardo da Vinci’s The Vitruvian Man (Leonardo may have had some help in its creation), Hokusai’s The Great Wave, Jan van Eyck’s The Arnolfini Wedding, Gustav Klimt’s The Kiss (which I saw in person at the Belvedere Palace in Vienna, Austria), and much, much more. In essence, the short film contains a treasure-trove important cultural references. All of the artworks featured in the film may be seen here. All of the math references may be seen here.

If you’re interested in learning more about the creation of the film, take a look at the wireframes below:

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(hat tip: Open Culture)

(Update 3/10/2012: Corrected the count of total grains from 2^64 to 2^64 – 1.)