10 - 20 Random Things

Okay . . . believe it or not, I have a Facebook page.

It was something I got into not but a few months ago as a consequence of my wife's Best Man (an old friend from as far back as the 2nd grade) starting his own Facebook page and inviting us to be "friends."

Well, low and behold, but don't I find that there are people on Facebook I actually know. And one of them recently initiated (or continued?) an interesting twist on the chain letters from the days when letters were actually written and mailed with stamps: 10 or 20 Random Things About Yourself forwarded to 20 random people on Facebook that you know. I suspect this is something dreamt up by someone with thousands of Facebook connections, some of whom about which they know absolutely nothing.

The concept is intriguing . . . tell a bunch of people things about yourself that you might never have told anyone else (ever!) in an effort to get to know them better. Because, in a perfect game, they are supposed to respond in kind.

I must admit that I was not sure where to start. Or even whether I should start. Or if I could start, and then finish. But once I got going, I really got into it. So, at the risk of repeating myself over multiple platforms, here are the 20 Random Things about myself:

1. My cat hates me; but then she hates everyone but my wife . . . and the cable guy . . . and . . .
2. I am the only person I know who has turned a $30 home tune-up into a $300+ radiator job; I am no longer allowed to work on cars.
3. I wanted to be a fireman when I was little; now I am a consultant.
4. I had a fringed fire-engine red nap rug in kindergarten; now I wish I could take naps at work. What ever happened to that rug?
5. I used to eat library paste and pour my pineapple-grapefruit juice down the drain when I thought the teacher wasn't looking. I remember the taste of both: one with some small delight and one with shudders of disgust. You guess . . .
6. I cut class once in summer school; I sneaked out the bathroom window at Mesa Elementary School in Los Alamos. I think I was between the 4th and 5th grade. I never did it again, until I first got to university; then I never even bothered to go to class.
7. I am a sucker for back-scratches . . . my "wings" itch all the time, but they itch most when someone touches them. Then, no amount of scratching satisfies me . . .
8. I would retire right now if I thought we could get me through a PhD program without going BUST.
9. I love to cook . . . I hate doing dishes . . . I am legendary for my ability to TOTAL a kitchen (and everything in it). Ask Lois Maggenti, my high school English teacher. Or our friends Glen and Linda.
10. I read lots of books, but my secret pleasure is reading PULPS. I loved reading Doc Savage books in high school; the works of Edgar Rice Burroughs and H. P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard still thrill me. H. Rider Haggard taught me that adventure stories could be cerebrally challenging. But, it took Joseph Conrad and Rudyard Kipling and Ernest Hemingway to convince me that they could be great literature. Even Shakespeare has his pulpy moments.
11. I suffer from "imposter's syndrome" whenever I attend and present papers at conferences, particularly literary conferences. I've been told that everyone does, even the experts. That is no comfort.
12. I have been teaching for the last 30 years and I still get somewhat anxious before walking into a classroom; even one full of students I know.
13. I like my coffee fresh ground, made in a French press, and served black. On weekends, I use a mug that used to belong to my father; it makes it even more special than it usually is.
14. While I love travel, I have come to truly hate being on the road and away from Laurie and home. But that is the lot of a consultant. I probably would not have been home any more often had I become a fireman, right?
15. Iowa really isn't such a bad place . . . if you like corn, and pork, and bitter cold winters, and hot humid summers. They are even considering making it illegal to use cell phones while driving (FINALLY!!), except for the police.
16. I am a Democrat, but then aren't we all in the literal sense of the word? I am also a Republican, in the literal sense of the word. The two are not mutually exclusive, except in the minds of certain inveterate fools. We all need to keep that in mind.
17. I am unbelieveably lucky! Inanimate objects continually conspire among themselves to do me in, yet I manage to get along with them. But, why can't I get along with my cat? Laurie would say it is because I can't stop "poking the bear." She's undoubtedly right.
18. I frequently use Google Maps to look at my childhood home town (Los Alamos, NM). I am able to pick out our house because my father did some landscaping which is unmistakably visible in the images.
19. I would love to leave a meaningful footprint that "visible."
20. I have no regrets . . . at least, none that I let keep me awake at night.

Feel free to respond with your own 10 or 20 Random things, here.

NARRATIVE 2009

Received this evening: "Your proposal to the Narrative Conference 2009 has been accepted. Congratulations!" The conference is in Birmingham, UK, the first week of June; essentially it is a 57th birthday present for me.

For the record, here is what I proposed (long form):

Reading Polyaesthetically: Extending Observed Pictorial Boundary Extension Effects to Engagement with Narrative Texts

Recent experimental work by psychologist Helen Intraub and her research teams have confirmed a phenomenon which may be extensible to the reading of narrative texts. Experimental evidence suggests boundary extension of visual memory occurs in the time period between briefly viewing images and a subsequent request to recall and draw those images. That is, the viewer reproduces an image which includes peripheral information not in the originally viewed image. This phenomenon is more pronounced for images with a narrower field of view than for those with a wide-angle view. It also appears to be time dependent in that the amount of extension decays with time after viewing. Yet, it always manifests as extension, never compression. Intraub suggests boundary extension is grounded more in the perceptual schemata of the viewers than in other memory-related functions. Working from the idea that readers’ representations of texts are not unlike viewed images, I map Intraub’s notion of boundary extension onto the mental images constructed from the text(s) as we read—visual images being the most prevalent, but aural, tactile, and olfactory images occur as well. This notion is supported by Sven Birkerts’ writing on the concept of depth of field in reading where he raises the idea that as we read we “hear” but do so without aural stimulation. From this point it is a logical and not unreasonable extension to suggest that we also “see” without visual stimulation (that is, the eyes are not seeing anything but words on a sheet of paper yet the mind “sees” the images evoked by the text), “smell” without olfactory stimulation, and so on. Consequently, it is not uncommon that recollections of texts are somehow greater than the texts themselves. In this paper, I suggest that—just as with viewed physical images—a created mental image produced as a consequence of engaging with a narrative text is also grounded in and enlarged by our perceptual schemata. I also suggest that the more senses engaged by a text the greater the opportunity for boundary extension: this is what I mean by “reading polyaesthetically.” Perceptual schemata are not merely visual; they involve all of the senses such that from a single stimulus—e.g., the act of reading—textual depth is developed by the consequent response of manifold senses. This paper extends earlier work on my project on Depth of Field in Narrative, as presented at the Narrative Conferences in 2005, 2007, and 2008. Examples from the works of Joseph Conrad, Ernest Hemingway, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Virginia Woolf support the discussion. Critical foils will include aspects of Emma Kafalenos’ recent book on causality in narrative and H. Porter Abbott’s discussion of under- and over-reading of texts.

Gustatory Rhinitis

A-a-a-a . . . A-a-a-a-a . . . A-a-a-a-a-chooooooo!!
A-a-achoo . . . A-a-achoo . . . A-a-achooooooooo!!

Appaloosa

There are elements of story that will always point to one specific genre into which the story fits, despite most stories fitting into multiple genres. Consider, for example, a little known Sean Connery film: Outland. Despite its obvious Sci-Fi surface story, it is also a "western" in the sense that Connery plays a "marshall" in a "frontier town" who has to run off or kill the "bad guys." Another example: The Man Who Would Be King, which fits nicely into period colonial piece not unlike Zulu, while still meeting all of the requirements for an adventure story.

In contrast, Appaloosa is purely a western, a REAL western--if one can use that term with impugnity. There are clearly BAD guys and GOOD guys. One of the good guys appears to see things with just that sort of clarity of distinction, while the other has too much "feeling" to be truly, unequivocally good (in fact, he admits at one point to having killed outside the law); and we suspect that side of him from the beginning. The bad guys are indeed truly bad, from their bad fashion through their bad behavior and bad speech all the way to their bad teeth. The environment is dusty, windy, dry . . . unforgiving. Interestingly, the two most prominent women in the story--a widow from St. Louis and a local whore--end with character that is the opposite of their characters.

This is my immediate (in the literal sense of the word: little or no mediation, meditative reflection) reaction to the movie. I will see it again. It is one of those kinds of films.

Just how cold is COLD?

At a weather station located at a local High School, not 4 miles from my apartment here in the middle of the Great American Corn Desert, the temperature is MINUS 19. It also records that there is an 8 mph wind out of the WSW. At some point, the temperature numbers become purely academic . . . don't they? At some point, it just doesn't get any "colder" in terms of sensation. I have to remind myself on mornings like this that temperature is nothing more than a measure of the average kinetic energy of the molecules of a substance. As temperature goes down, molecular energy is dropping; things just become more rigid. Things like the water molecules in your fingers and toes . . .

The value of intuition

A recent thread on the listserv for the International Society for the Study of Narrative (ISSN) concerned the power and effects of visual metaphor in determining how viewers respond to film adaptations of novels. Implicit in the question was the notion that one had read (or was familiar with) the paper "text" before viewing the film and that somehow the film was unable to fully "capture" (even with the aid of visual metaphor) some of the more subtle points of the originating text. But one respondent poked at the notion that there are visual metaphors that are--to use my own words--canonical in themselves; that they can be used to evoke and invoke subtexts found in the originating text without the use of long-winded passages. A respondent to this speculated that one still had to have read the originating text in order to "get" the visual metaphors. This led me to respond that--for instance--while not having read Jane Eyre before having seen the Welles' version of the story in film, I formed an image of Jane consistent with the originating text (discovered later when I read it) as a consequence of the ways in which Welles evoked her character using what I refered to as stock/canonical metaphors. In the end, I speculated that perhaps there is an analog to mirror neurons which affects our processing of visual metaphors in a manner not dissimilar to the way mirror neurons affect our reading of the body language of others.

Okay, so now you have the prologue and are probably asking just what the hell this has to do with the value of intuition. Well . . . a respondent to my post pointed me in the direction of the work of one Raymond W. Gibbs, Jr., professor in Cognitive Linguistics at UCSC. I used my college computer account to access the article databases and found quite a number of articles by Gibbs dealing with metaphor, irony, and other rhetorical tropes in relation to our sense of meaning. This evening, I read one of them: "Psycholinguistics and Mental Representations," from Cognitive Linguistics, volume 10.3, 1999. In the article, Gibbs argues against a complete dismissal of intuition in the field of epistemology. While it cannot be used wholly as proof of a point, particularly in the realm of linguistics, he argues quite convincingly that intuition has value insofar as it serves as a seed bed for hypotheses, (dis)proof of which can then be undertaken using sound scientific methods.

Think of the ways in which you use your own intuition. Does it spur you to know more, more certainly? Or, do you gobble it blindly to feed empty calories to your ideology?

Comfort Foods . . .

Foods that--no matter how miserable you are--will always warm you and put a smile on your face:

• Creamed Chipped Beef on Toast - which I happen to be having right now. It is -6F outside (here in the middle of the Great American Corn Desert) and I needed not only cheering but warming. Also known as S.O.S., which my father once told me meant "Shit on a Shingle." This particular incarnation is the Stouffer's frozen S.O.S. It is as good as any homemade I ever had.
• Kraft Macaroni and Cheese - I cannot remember the last time I had it. I do remember, though, that Laurie and I lived on it and baloney when we were first married. It was not that we were miserable--or needed warming, Charleston being a relatively toasty place to live--it was that we were broke, living on a 2nd Class Petty Officer's "salary." It was all we could afford.
• Fast becoming a favorite: my own homemade Tortilla Soup, the recipe for which varies with the wind. I honestly do not think I have made it the same way twice. It does, though, always make me feel better not only eating it but making it, as well.
• Then, there is Clam Sauce on Linguini . . . one would not think something as "classic" as this has the potential to be not only a comfort food but one of those "everything but the kitchen sink"-type recipes. You really have to work to hose this one up; and if you are judicious about additions everything you add improves it. It always brings a smile to my face.

Things one should NEVER do . . .

NEVER pick up a bottle of wine, once opened--particularly an organic Syrah--by the cork. Never do it, that is, unless you are willing to accept the consequences. Note to self: Harvest Gold shag carpet and organic, full-bodied red wines do not go well together.

Resuming after being away from this for some time . . . I set this up originally in 2006, when I was still calling upstate NY home. Many things have changed, all for the better. Now if I can just get over my motivational malaise . . .