Sunday, January 13, 2008

What's So Amazing About Really Deep Thoughts

Yet the absence of imagination had / Itself to be imagined ... (Wallace Stevens)


For your consideration: Two articles (one from Mom) about making a science of observing the processes of consciousness. This first one is worth reading for Proust Was a Neuroscientist author Jonah Lehrer's earnest "surprise" at "how seriously all of these artists [Virginia Woolf, Marcel Proust, Gertrude Stein & co] took their art," (um, yeah); this second one for the "novelistic twist" (can't you see the film adaptation?) to the research sessions described at the end. There's a lot -- too much, really -- to be said on this subject. So I'll just say that sometimes a picture really is worth a thousand words and close with two visual recommendations. Book: Graphic novelist Charles Ware's very cool depiction of the mind in the first thirteen years of the life of a character named Jordan W. Lint (included in the terrific new anthology The Book of Other People). Movie: The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (don't be put off by the blurbiness). But that's just what I think.

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