2/26/10
Finished "Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell". Huge, digressing book, tempted to call the author "narratively overstimulated". Still, marvelous, totally worth reading. Started "Carter Beats the Devil" on Allison's recommendation. *Very* readable. Nibbling at "On the Oceans of Eternity" during TV commercials.
1/10/10
Finished "Time" (storage cellar chapter) and renamed it "The Selene". Feel like Lennie Bruce reading his trial transcripts during his act. Old "Selene", now "The Falls", is working chapter. Will have to extensively re-write.
Koan: what is the sound "about" about?
11/13/08
No longer "stuck" in storage cellar, am making way out while parallel self drifts along the underground river.
6/24/08
Took PBR off website (days ago). Am stuck in storage cellar. Plan for second draft non-first-person detail additions to letters and journal entries.
What is the sound "about" about?
12/4/07
Someday everything will be considered a part of narratology. We organize ourselves into stories. The mind is a story our neurons have come up with to work together better.
Naming is a primary function of language. How much can a thing change and still "deserve" the same name? The Kingston Trio. Beowulf the poem, Beowulf the movie. The strange wordname God. What conception of God deserves the wordname? Theism, deism, panentheism.
1/18/07
Negayn vem utran.
Noises we make.
Sounds we emit.
Words we say.
Things we talk about.
What are we doing when we understand each other?
We decode ciphers/foreign languages into our own language. What do we decode our own language into?
4/29/06
How The Body Shapes The Mind - Shaun Gallagher
"Human life and the beginnings of the intelligent behavior that we can see in the infant are not only measured by their physical manifestations as bodily processes, they are those processes, and are constituted by them. Movement and the registration of that movement in a developing proprioceptive system (that is, a system that registers its own self-movement) contributes to the self-organizing development of neuronal structures responsible not only for motor action, but for the way we come to be conscious of ourselves, to communicate with others, and to live in the surrounding world. Across the Cartesian divide, movement prefigures the lines of intentionality, gesture formulates the contours of social cognition, and, in both the most general and most specific ways, embodiment shapes the mind."
The Body In The Mind - Mark Johnson
"In this book, then, the term 'body' is used as a generic term for the embodied origins of imaginative structures of understanding, such as image schemata and their metaphorical elaborations. An alternative way to state my project is to say that, contrary to Objectivism, I focus on the indespensability of embodied human understanding for meaning and rationality. 'Understanding,' of course, is here regarded as populated with just those kinds of imaginative structures that emerge from our expericnce as bodily organisms functioning in interaction with an environment. Our understanding, I shall argue, involves many pre-conceptual and nonpropositional structures of experience (such as image schemata) that can be metaphorically projected and propositionally elaborated to constitute our network of meanings."
4/19/06
The Loved Ones Of The Dead.
What if the British had invaded Germany in the '30s, captured Hitler, and fought a years-long war with different factions trying to fill the vacuum (Nazis, Communists of several degrees, republicans, "Bismarckists"), and finally succeeded (whatever form that might have taken). WWII and the Holocaust would have been averted, but no one would have known. Would their effort have been considered worth their dead?
I don't know yet whether our current war is going to be worth it. You can certainly ask right now, what do the loved ones of the dead have to show for it? Aren't wars always a matter of faith?
1/24/06 Narratology. Story and discourse. The Telling and the Told, the Knowing and the Known. "Story...exists only at an abstract level; any manifestation already entails the selection and arrangement performed by the discourse as actualized by a given medium. There is no privileged manifestation."-Seymour Chatman, Story And Discourse, 1978.
Embodied cognition. Source-Path-Goal schema. "Building on work by David Bailey (1997) Srini Narayanan (1997) has observed that neural motor-control programs all have the same superstructure: Readiness, Starting up, The Main process, Possible interruption and resumption, Iteration or continuing, Purpose (check to see if you have succeeded), Completion, Final state."-Lakoff and Nunez, Where Mathematics Comes From, 2000.
Phenomenology. "Contrary to our traditional assumptions, then, this is the form that experience typically takes: we are imaginative, interpretive, synthetic subjects for whom objects are meaningful calls to action that direct our life without our self-conscious intervention. Objects as they figure within our experience are not discrete and alien, but, like notes in a melody, they are embedded in contexts with other objects with which they mutually interpenetrate, and they already penetrate and impinge upon us....Self-knowledge does not come through the easy reflection upon ourselves that we typically rely upon, but, on the contrary, will only come through a study of the determinate forms of interpretive synthesis that can be discerned within the character of objective calls to action ("objective" in the sense of "pertaining to the nature of the object"): the terms in which we experience the object as calling upon us reflect the values and projects through which we experience the world....My location...is a first...that immediately defers to the firstness of another, namely the past: my location is always premised on there having been another before. I always experience myself as having already been....What I remember, though, is always remembered as a promise, a route to a future...The future, too, defers its primacy, like the past and the present, for the future rests its existence on my actions now. This is the irreducible temporality of our existence, the equiprimordiality of the past, present, and future that is constitutive of our identity."-John Russon, Human Experience, 2003.
11/1/05 Obviously not pursuing thlog very enthusiastically. Have made significant progress in Theaphilia notebook. Finally got them into the city. Unforeseen whystones in a niche on the way in; I love it when that happens.
5/17-19/05 Made Theaphilia notebook. Tabbed dividers for each Redwillow move, each containing pages for a Redwillow room and the corresponding Theaphilia events, divided into 9 phases. Also floorplan of Redwillow first floor with movepath and a schematic of Theaphilia phases in relation to the s/Selene city. Will begin updating PBR webpages tonight to match notebook. Played a few games of Conquian with Anne. We finally finished our 2-year+ reading of the whole Earthsea cycle, 6 books in all. We were both sorry to see it end. I'd like to do a marathon reading of the whole thing sometime. Working my way through Where Mathematics Comes From, though slightly distracted by PBR-related eclipse reading.
5/14-15/05
Added All-On-One-Page version of PBR. Saw infamous 1973 musical remake of Lost Horizon at the Egyptian with Anne, who had never seen it. This movie was apparently considered unworthy of being put on video, so I hadn't seen it since '73 - 32 years! The very pop-whimsical Burt Bacharach numbers are usually jarringly inappropriate for the seriousness of the story, but there are at least two ("Share The Joy" and "The World Is A Circle") which are just fine for it, I think. And - Olivia Hussey, Sally Kellerman, and Liv Ullman (!), singing, all in one movie - I can't find anything wrong with that!
5/12/05
Set up Thlog.