to hear about her ambitious photographic-memory training course. Then later to an
anthropology talk with Dorina where the lecturer describes a study visit to Iceland.
February 24th;
Wednesday. After pub quiz on the team with Inese, Jill, & Jooa {once again we come
fourth to last, but all the teams score many more points than two weeks ago}, I
meet Inger to pick up her pug puppy Wilma for four nights. Wilma is one of the famous
Smuggled Puppies
that entered Norway with papers "not in order", so are waiting a
few months outside Norway before attempting to re-enter.
February 23rd;
Tuesday. To Mystery Friend 2 for curry and a watch of the director's cut of
'Apocalypse
Now' with Martin & Edith & Edith's dog Simon. Intriguing to see some new scenes
that were not in the film I saw alone on a 6th-form History outing where everyone
else, including the teacher, failed to turn up at the cinema. The French dinner scene
was appalling. Sheen's wild-eyed stare which for most of the film successfully
conveys "What am I doing in this ghastly war?" somehow imperceptibly slides during
this meal into conveying "What am I doing in this ghastly scene?" Much of the up-river
weirdness is suggested by use of coloured smoke. Watching this film
again right through for the first time in three decades, and able to compare it to
Conrad's 'Heart
of Darkness', I am struck that something unintended happened with the film. On the
surface, like Conrad's novella, it indicts Western imperialism and colonialism. Yet
somehow Coppola's film, while working to make American civilisation look weak,
hysterical, and hypocritical, accidentally says something revealing about the local
culture. This undercuts all the surface images of rich Americans bombing poor Asians
which signal The Message of The Film. Colonel Kurtz's ultimate sin is going
beyond the bounds of decency in a crazy war, and this really means he went native.
His closing speech about the Viet Cong amputating the arms of some vaccinated village
children, and him 'realising' the US needs
to fight the war in the same way, is supposed to make him sound like
a deranged Nietzschean. Actually it lets slip that what he was really guilty of
was descending from impersonal, industrialised brutality to more personal, Oriental
viciousness. The monstrous regime of the Khmer Rouge in
Cambodia, as well as atrocities by the Vietnamese without US involvement,
show this difference. As low and nasty as the smug,
cowardly US war effort was, their local opponents were clearly even lower and
nastier. The heart of darkness is in the dark continent after all,
an extra layer of subtlety Conrad's work hints at better than Coppola's.
February 22nd;
Monday. Finish a book called
'Mind
Wide Open' by Steven Johnson, who seems to be
tring to build a franchise as the thinking man's Malcolm Gladwell.
Disappointing read. Bits start promisingly, but most of it seems to just repeat what
we all knew from a handful of science articles 15 years ago, padded out with a
sort of waffly watered-down gonzo journalism. So Johnson does Simon
Baron-Cohen's mood interpretation test, looking at lots of photographs just of
pairs of eyes. Johnson is rolled inside a brain scanner, and describes how
claustrophobic it is. Johnson tells us a storm blew in the window of his
Manhattan apartment, and his amygdala has made him nervous about windy days ever
since. Likewise, being in New York on 2001 September 11th has made him nervous
about days which aren't windy, but have clear blue skies. I was stunned when
he refers respectfully to Eric Kandel, whose
tedious
tome about the wiring of sea slugs and pompous recounting of what he said at
his Nobel Prize ceremony clearly formed part of Johnson's crash reading list for
this book. Even more startling, like Kandel, he cannot produce a book like this
without mentioning Freud. The 30-page conclusion, unbelievably, is all about
Freud's theories and the tiny areas where they seem to overlap with postwar
neuroscience findings. Johnson once mentions Nietzsche and Schopenhauer without
apparently realising that they, not Freud, created our view of the fragmented self
and the subconscious. Then he discusses each of Freud's ideas, again and again
saying things like "this part of Freud's scaffolding got it wrong" without apparently
bringing together his own remarks to see that all of Freud's contributions were
wrong, and the only parts where his beliefs still resonate today came wholesale
from the two German philosophers. As modest authors nearly say, all the worthwhile
bits of psychoanalysis were actually taken from Sigmund's predecessors, while all the
mistakes were his alone. This much is obvious early in the book, if it was not
already obvious early last century. Traumas are not weakened by being talked about,
they are strengthened. The subconscious is not censoring suppressed memories and
hiding them from the conscious mind - the researchers Johnson has coffee with show
it is precisely the other way round. The mind's modules are nothing like the ones
the Viennese doctor imagined, and they're not built largely around sex. And so on.
Who even mentions Sigmund now?
The conclusion might have been an idea of his publisher, or of Johnson himself,
but America's inability to let go of Freud must be the equivalent of Europe's inability
to let go of Marx. And then, every time we get to an interesting moment, like his mention of
'rejection sensitivity', we soon swerve back to Johnson's self-indulgent prose instead
of saying anything new. Each hormone, brain region, mood alteration drug
seems about to get interesting, but never does. I suspect Johnson just can't think
of anything of value to ask experts when he meets them. The footnotes
{why stuffed at the back?} are more interesting than the book itself, which is really
a kind of extended magazine article.
February 21st;
Sunday. Work on e-summary for book.
February 20th;
Saturday. Seems Regina can help me with
iPhone programmers.
February 19th;
Brunch with Martin. Start
'Memo'.
February 18th;
Bobbling round town by tram & metro, I finish the agreeably slim book Rob kindly gave me,
'Neuroscience
& Philosophy', made up mainly of a slightly
tetchy exchange of views between Maxwell Bennett & Peter Hacker in the blue corner,
and Daniel Dennett & John Searle {on the same side for once} in the red corner. To sum
up, Bennett & Hacker argue for the Wittgensteinian view that philosophers are
therapists of linguistic confusion, and that many neuroscientists make category
errors with sentences like "the brain remembers..." and so on. Dennett defends his
not unreasonable emergent-property view that modules in the brain do a simpler version
of whole-person thinking, simpler at each level down, until it makes sense to speak of
groups of neurons {or thermostats} doing a kind of primitive thinking or believing, out
of which higher properties are assembled. Dennett says Hacker reminds him of Oxford in
the 1960s, whereas he reminds me more of Cambridge in the 1930s and
Oxford in the 1940s, not that I was at either place at any of those times, of course.
Dennett also snidely refers to "St. Ludwig". Good to see that some irreverence
for The Master is finally allowed, since it wasn't kosher in the 1980s - I
remember that much. Searle responds a bit less huffily to the Hacker attackers,
and more expertly skewers Wittgenstein's breath-taking claims about conditions
for the use of verbs being the main criterion for judging what entities there are.
Later in the afternoon, more time on public transport lets me finish Frances Yates'
'The Art of
Memory', a history of artificial memory techniques as interpreted
by Renaissance thinkers from Thomas Aquinas to Gottfried Leibniz. Yates has some quite
startling insights, bringing us a mnemonic dimension to Dante's 'Inferno', to Llull's
revolving logic discs, and to Giordano Bruno's audacious cosmology. In a curious
digression, she argues that Robert Fludd's discussion of a 'memory theatre' gives us
the best clues we have available as to what the Globe theatre where Shakespeare's plays
were performed looked like.
February 17th;
Over a Chinese-restaurant lunch, a friend urges me to visit Hungary's 'heart chakra',
the Dobogoko of course. Think I shall.
February 16th;
Continues to hint at a thaw, but every road still lined by knee-high ridges of chunky
white frozen stuff. On Saturday, leaving Mariannpsy's flat, I saw in their yellow-tiled
apartment-block courtyard a thalidomide snowman with no arms, but still a solid
four-foot-high torso and head. The neck still wore a scarf of copper-coloured tinsel,
and a surprisingly shiny and new-looking inverted saucepan sat on the featureless
head as a hat or helmet. Judging by continuing temperatures around zero, that snowman
is probably still much as I saw him three days ago. Three miserable artworks by the
unusual but clearly very unhappy 60s minimalist
Eva Hesse:
Hang up /
Ingeminate /
Untitled.
Finally, I get round to it, and
make those
angel/fairy/whatever
cakes.
