11: The Partly Cloudy Patriot, Sarah Vowell

Blah, blah, blah. This isn't nearly as good as Assassination Vacation. Sarah's patriotism is tiresome, though her writing's still good:

At the Witch Dungeon Museum, a place about as dignified as it sounds, there is the fun kind of bad actress in a period costume emoting through a reenactment of Elizabeth Proctor's with trial, "I am not a witch! I am innocent!" There's a colorful old guy walking-tour guide named Bob who must not be a member of the chamber of commerce because he says things like "They hung dogs for being witches, that's how stupid these people were."

[...]

There's an old cemetery so archetypal it looks as though a child has drawn it as a decoration for Halloween.

[...]

And there are a few yellowing historical documents to look at in the Peabody Essex Museum so that I don't feel like a total cheeseball, even though I just bought a whiskey glass emblazoned with a little yellow highway sign with a silhouette of a hag on a broomstick that says, "Witch XING."

See? She writes really well.

When I was growing up in Bozeman, Montana, I got all my ideas about going to the movies in New York City from the Woody Allen oeuvre. [...] In Woody Allen movies, people stood in line for Ingmar Bergman films or holocaust documentaries, talking up media theory to pass the time. At sixteen, that was my idea of fun. Now that I live in New York I can tell you that people lined up for tickets don't debate theory; they talk about cute guys at the gym or whether or not they live within walking distance of a Krispy Kreme.

[...]

My hometown is a college town populated by a minority of city-slickers who taught Western kids Western civ. Marooned at cow college, these humanities types pined for pretense. So they organized a weekly film festival, slanted heavily toward foreign product. I remember one night so cold the cars wouldn't start, moviegoers sprinting in the forty-degrees-below-zero cold to watch something Danish. And I remember I once overheard a teenager telling her mother after the actually entertaining Wings of Desire that Wim Wenders had "sold out". See, we were mad for the New German Cinema [...] Like, people in Bozeman would do impressions of characters from Volker Schlöndorff films, walking up behind you and screaming at the top of their lungs, then asking, "Who am I? Who am I?" and you'd say, "Duh. Oskar from The Tin Drum."

See? See? Hella funny. Also, it should make you want to watch The Tin Drum, even though it has, indeed, mad screaming (and drumming). Also, it has an 11-year old actor pretending to have oral sex with a 24-year old actress, which got it banned from Canada, Oklahoma, and other random places.

The chapter about Al Gore made me mad about that twit Bush and the retarded nature of the American electorate again.

Random factoids of interest to West Wing watchers who don't give a hoot about real-world politics:

• the "Bob Russell's so boring his secret service code name is Bob Russell" joke is an Al Gore quotation
  
• North Dakota really did want to change its name to "Dakota" for tourism reasons
  

There's one moment of personal interest to me that may leave most readers cold. After a friend says that some days he just wants "to move to Mexico and learn how to make clothes out of the dirt around my house" Sarah replies:

"I know what you mean," I say. "Only I don't want to move to Mexico and play in the dirt. It's more like I want to want that. I like how things are, so I worry that I'm not aiming high enough. i worry that I'm too complacent. I worry that I'm perfectly happy sitting in my leather chair watching HBO."

And I worry, too. Except some days I'm miserable and don't like how things are at all, so at least that's something.

10: An Anthropologist on Mars: Seven Paradoxical Tales, Oliver Sacks

I want Oliver Sacks's job. This is a collection of observations on seven patients with interesting neurological conditions. I took notes rather haphazardly. Here they are, with no real attempt at organisation.

Frontal lobes don't fully develop till age seven.

Many symptoms of Tourette's Syndrome remind me of things I did obsessively in childhood and, to a lesser degree, still do now:
Symmetric tics: compulsions to balance, centre, or touch things "symmetrically".
Obsessions with certain numbers; having to do things a certain number of times (with me this was always an even number, with 2, 4, 8 getting progressively more desirable, "round", and "finished").
A strong sense of personal space; not wanting to sit near people in restaurants and preferring corners (I have this, but I don't have the sudden urge to lunge at anyone near enough and touch them); being uncomfortable in traffic when someone drives by because it feels too close (I definitely have this, but that's likely because I don't drive much at all).
Feelings of violence and rage with extremely sudden onset:

He has only to get a parking ticket or see a police car, sometimes, for scenarios of violence to flash through his mind: mad chases, shoot-outs, flaming destructions, violent mutilation, and death scenarios that become immensely elaborated in seconds and rush through his mind with convulsive speed.

The blind live in time, not space. They have no symultaneous touch perceptions of objects around them and they have to "learn space", the very idea of space and its dimensions, if they become sighted. (How does audition fit in? Presumably there is some auditory space they are aware of--"this sound comes from behind me, while this one comes from in front, at the same time". Sacks does not mention it.) The learning of space reminds one of Charles Hinton and his cubes used for learning how to think in a fourth spatial dimension.

Gerald Edelman has constructed several artificial beings, DARWIN I through IV, as part of testing his theory of neuronal group selection. These roam the world using simple value rules like "light is better than no light" that guide (but do not fully determine) behaviour.

One of the defining characteristics of autism, according to Leo Kanner, is an obsessive insistance on sameness. (I feel I have, and definitely had, this insistance—reading this book made me a neurological hypochondriac.)

Freeman Dyson on Jessy Park, the autistic artist:

I've always felt she was the closest I would ever come to an alien intelligence. Autistic children are so strange and so different from us—and yet you can communicate; there are many things you can talk with her about....[But] she has no concept of her own identity, she doesn't understand the difference between "you" and "I"—she uses pronouns almost indiscriminantly. And so her universe is radically different from mine. Concrete social relations are for her very, very difficult to comprehend. On the other hand, with anything abstract, she has no trouble. So mathematics, of course, is no problem for her, and we can talk very easily about mathematics....I think autism comes about as close as possible to the central problem of exploring the neurological basis of personality. Because these are people whose intelligence is intact, but something at the center is missing.

Things added to my reading and viewing list:
Mary Collins, Colour-Blindness
Alberto Valvo, Sight Restoration after Long-Term Blindness: The Problems and Behavior Patterns of Visual Rehabilitations
Jonathan Miller BBC film Prisoner of Consciousness, 1988

9: Born under the Sign of Jazz, Randi Hultin

Catching up again... I finished this a few weeks ago.

Randi Hultin was a Swedish jazz fan who forged close relationships with many leading jazz musicians in the second half of the 20th century. The book is a memoir of her meeting these musicians, sometimes at festivals or clubs, and often in her own living room where they held frequent jam sessions.

Sometimes the subjectivity bothered me. Eh. So it goes. It's a memoir, after all. Comes with a CD of rare recordings made by Randi herself. The Stuff Smith track was the reason I wanted the book.