“Time Inc. announced yesterday that Life magazine would cease publication next month, the third time since Life’s founding in 1936 that its owner has pulled the plug.
The magazine once featured the work of some of the world’s greatest photographers. In its current incarnation, it has dwindled to 20 pages of mostly celebrity interviews and homemaking tips. The last issue will be April 20.”
by Zbigniew Brzezinski, National Security Adviser to President Jimmy Carter
“To justify the ‘war on terror,’ the administration has lately crafted a false historical narrative that could even become a self-fulfilling prophecy.”
“The culture of fear is like a genie that has been let out of its bottle. It acquires a life of its own — and can become demoralizing. America today is not the self-confident and determined nation…”
Might this be the mood that we have been discussing in relation to post 9/11 American Fiction?
Former Vice President Al Gore, rejecting complaints by Republican lawmakers that he was waging an alarmist war on coal and oil use, insisted before Congressional panels today that human-caused global warming constitutes a “planetary emergency” requiring an aggressive federal response.
“This whale is pain, and searing cold. Bursts of fact his skin tells him. Planted in this flat prairie, dumped by a wave that went out too fast. Great jaws bigger than a garage flap on the ground, sounding. Every cry from the cavern throat shakes walls and breaks windows. Far away, blocks down – the stranded beast’s tail flaps. Hemmed in by houses, pinned by this instant low tide.
Miles of air above press down so hard the whale can’t breathe. Can’t lift his own lungs. Dying in dried ocean, smothered underneath the thing it now must inhale. Largest living thing, almost God, stretched out flat, muscles beaten. Only his heart, as big as the courthouse, keeps pounding.
He wants death, if he wants anything. But death rolls away with the retreating water. His breathing is an earthquake. The whale gasps and rolls, crushing lives underneath it, as it is crushed by air. Storms rage in its head. Spears and cables drape down his sides. His skin peels off in sheets of blubber.”
~ from The Echo Maker
“I was the shadow of the waxwing slain
by the false azure of the windowpane;
I was the smudge of ashen fluff — and I
Lived on, flew on, in the reflected sky.
And from the inside, too, I’d duplicate
Myself, my lamp, an apple on a plate:
Uncurtaining the night, I’d let dark glass
Hang all the furniture above the grass,
And how delightful when a fall of snow
Covered my glimpse of lawn and reached up so
As to make chair and bed exactly stand
Upon that snow, out in that crystal land!”
~ from Pale Fire
Here is the Fresh Air interview I mentioned on Monday in which Powers discusses among other things, creating the Echo Maker via computer aided voice recognition software and spending a one year self-imposed exile from speaking.
These are the links Theresa provided for the Richard Power interviews here and here, and the NY Times’ review here.
Here are the links to the books Fabian recommended for those interested in neurology, neuroscience, and evolutionary psychology.
~António Damásio, Descartes’ Error
~Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Took His Wife for a Hat
Also, the BBC has a fairly decent article on synaesthesia, “Why some see colours in numbers.”
This is a video segment from 60 Minutes about Daniel Tammet, known as the Brain Man, whose extraordinary memory is related to the way he “sees” numbers as colors, shapes, and textures. He says he “sees” landscapes. In this sense, we might say his brain creates a mental map using symbols much like the cranes map out their flight plans.
I seem to always search out multiple mediums as a means of adding texture to my own experiences in our literary discussions. Perhaps I myself am just a post-modern product like the characters in our stories. “Memento” is a sort of neo film noir psychological thriller in which the main character suffers from acute short-term memory loss. If film can be post-structural, this one surely is.
And finally, Jean Baudrillard, the philosopher and sociologist most famous for his theories on the hyper-reality(the simulated realm that is “more real than the real”) of which we are all products, died on March 6th.
“How is this better than real Ping-Pong?” he asked tiny Jess. He genuinely wanted to know her answer. The same question haunted his work. What was it about the species that would save the symbol and discard the thing it stood for? His seven-year-old sighed. “Dad,” she told him, with that first hint of contempt for adulthood and all its trouble with the obvious. “It’s just cleaner.” The Echo Maker
“What I am, I don’t know. I am the simulacrum of myself.” Jean Baudrillard
