Afghanistan

Thanks, Isaac

I was gripped and then saddened by Isaac's It happened on the way back from the Optometry Clinic. I think that can understand from personal experience what Isaac went through. I'm inspired by the insightful, edgy personal writing taking place in our community to be bolder in the reflections that I share here. Thanks.

Amélie

OK, I think I'll see Amélie -- the combination of Lloyd's review, the play the movie got in the East Bay Express, its appearance on Elvis Mitchell's top ten list for the year (for the NY Times) has convinced me to go -- at least to a matinee today. I hope that I don't run into the same crazy traffic jams and near car accidents that Lloyd ran into.

Later that night:

Alas, I did run into the traffic jams and awful parking. I should have known that it wouldn't be easy to arrive at the Piedmont Theater at the last moment and expect parking. When the idea of going to the 1pm showing went up in smoke, I drove to Solano Avenue for the 3:30 showing at the Albany Twin. I was miffed that Yahoo Movies incorrectly indicated that the 3:30 showing would be a matinee -- but ended up coffing up the dough anyhow for the full-priced feature.

So what did I think of the movie? I liked it quite a bit but suspect that I will soon forget it. The lead actress Audrey Tautou was the best thing about the movie for me -- I can understand why so many have been bewitched by her performance, why she's being compared to that other Audrey. (I loved staring at Tautou every moment she was on the screen.) Of course, I'm afraid for anyone who is compared to Audrey Hepburn because it may well be a complement that turns into a curse.

Perhaps I'll feel differently tomorrow or a week from now. Amélie is a romantic and endearing and charming movie, but at some basic level, I just didn't buy the overall construction of the movie. There was a ten minute stretch right in the middle, as the movie shifted from the comedic, somewhat surreal reconstruction of Amélie's childhood to her current adult pains and dilemmas, that completely jarred me. The movie recovered and ended OK, and I didn't feel the movie to be too long, as did Mick Lasalle (SF Chronicle).

Maybe I'm just become an old crank.

Lessig

Lessig was indeed on the Charlie Rose Show last night. I have the interview on tape. I also noticed that there is a review of Lessig's Future of Ideas in today's New York Times..

Some early-in-the-year, weekend reflections

Since I'm planning to make a matinee today, I'll only be able to begin this section running off to the theater. At the back of mind is the promise I made yesterday to write more on "childhood psychology, growing old, computers, and my own journal writing." I hope to get there by the end of the day but feel that I must digress a bit first. (And it's dangerous for me to digress!)

I've been blogging every day since Oct 10 (with the single exception of Christmas Day, when I flipped too late.) Daily blogging has become a way of life for me, a blessing for the most part. I'm still learning a lot about this medium and about myself -- and how the two get along. Some days, I spend way too much time. Other days, I essentially just flip the page and say hi.

Has it been worth it? What am I getting out of blogging anyhow? Is it for myself? Who is the reader I have in mind? Do my readers get anything from reading my blog? These questions run throughout my blogging days, especially at the beginning of a new year.

Most days, I throw down links to things I've read (or just seen) that day. These items are of interest to me -- and, for the most part, I think I know why they interest me. (At other times, I don't -- there are neat things out there that intrigue me and I just don't know why they do!) Now, are any of these "tidbits" of use to my readers? Sometimes, I know they are -- colleagues mention that they read an article I blogged about or a friend brings up a topic in conversation that he read on my blog. Other times, I have my doubts.

Later that night:

It's 9:21 pm now, and I'm tired. A dangerous time to be blogging, I'm sure. The traffic turned out to have some redeeming value for me. During the hour I sat at Grace Baking (right across from the Albany Twin), I sketched out an annual letter that I'm (still) planning to write and send out to friends.

So, this post started as a reflection on blogging and it's working its way towards child psychology. I wrote that I needed to build up to the ending....and now, I will just jump right in.

TLS, too much reading, metacognition, children, growing old

On Thursday, I wrote:

As a way of getting more out of reading The Times Literary Supplement, I'm being metacognitive, thinking about what I'm learning and what I'm not. I've been pondering John Sutton's review of Metaphors of Memory: A History of Ideas about the Mind (by Douwe Draaisma) At first, other than having a general curiosity about psychology and intellectual history, I did not have any burning interest in this book. But as I pondered the implications of the review (and of the book), I've begun thinking about everything from childhood psychology, growing old, computers, and my own journal writing.

BTW, a draft version of Sutton's review is on Sutton's website.

I recently started a new subscription to the Times Literary Supplement (TLS). I convinced myself that it would be a good-thing-to-spend-money-on, that it would complement my subscription to the New York Review of Books (NYRB). TLS is British, covers a greater range of materials, lots of shorter essays about topics grand or obscure. Now the fact that I can't already keep up with the NYRB crossed my mind -- but the allure of having another publication aimed at the intelligent dilettante was too much to resist.

Besides, I had the perfect strategy for handling this potentially overwhelming reading load. I would skim the TLS and NYRB (and any other magazine that I got regularly) for articles that I think might be interesting or important to read before actually reading them in total. And I would refrain, as much as possible, from feeling guilty about not reading everything. In classic metacognitive fashion, I would ask myself, "Self, why do you want to read that article? What questions am I trying to answer by reading that article?" And after reading the piece, I ask, "So what did I learn?"

Truth be told: I'm often too tired to implement this metacognitive strategy consistently. But I did give it a go after reading Sutton's article, to which I was deeply drawn to, because of my philosophical cast of mind. I struggled, however, to make the review and the book relevant to what I am dealing with right at this moment. I haven't been pondering how my mind works (on any deep philosophical level), let alone the metaphors deployed to understand memory and mind. After reading Sutton's review, I could see how studying the metaphors implicit in cognitive science could be a fascinating, even revealing, task. (Being on the same campus as George Lakoff, the author (or co-author) of Metaphors We Live By, Philosophy in the Flesh, and Where Mathematics Comes From: How the Embodied Mind Brings Mathematics into Being, has made me somewhat aware of the power of looking at metaphors. Indeed, I wonder whether there are any connections between the work of Lakoff and Draaisma.) But reading Sutton's review hasn't convinced me to drop everything, run out, and grab Draaisma's book either. Sure, I'll throw it on my reading list -- but my reading list is currently a useless, unorganized, undisciplined device of unfulfilled longing.

Probably the best teacher I've had recently in the area of cognition has been living with children. I live with two little girls, 4-1/2 and 2-1/2 year olds. I had next to no interest in how children operate until Bori came into the world, my house, my life. Then all the questions came -- and I wanted to know about how kids sleep, how they learn, when they learn, what they can and cannot know, how language is being formed. Being in a mostly adult world, I've always known that my perceptions are not necessarily those of my colleagues. And if someone drinks or takes drugs, clearly his perceptions are distorted (or changed, at the very least.) But it's just not the same as being in the house with a young child -- then it's so obvious and amazing that we can be looking at or listening to the same things -- and have an almost completely different sense of what's going on.

It's hard for me to understand that the world was around long before I arrived on the scene and will be around for a long time after I shuffle off my mortal coil. Living with Bori and Orsi have helped me to see that reality more clearly. I wonder whether I will be one of their parents' old and weird friends who talk about a time of little interest to them, a pre-history when I knew their parents before they were ever on the scene. I am only coming to terms with seeing my own parents as people who had full existences long before I was ever born.

I am thankful to be healthy and of basically sound body and mind. And, God willing, I look forward to growing in knowledge and wisdom in the years to come. I am also painfully aware that I have live in a narrow band of my life because I have seemingly forgotten most of what I have ever known or experienced. I say "seemingly" because on occasions, sometimes in ephiphanic moments, I have glimpses into my past -- memories of snow crunching underneath my boots in cold, cold Timmins, of gym classes I hated, of classmates who have gone to places I know not where. I am an iceberg and only the surface is apparent to others and to myself.

And one day, my mind and my memories will fade away. Just like I can't really remember how I thought as a child, I suspect that I cannot really imagine what I will feel like as I grow old in body and in mind. Though I haven't read anything by Iris Murdoch, the brilliant British philosopher-novelist who died of Alzheimer's and whose life is currently being portrayed in film (with Judi Dench and Kate Winslet, no less) -- I have been morbidly fascinated by the story of her mental decline. How is it that someone of her magnificent intellectual gifts, the author of more than twenty novels, become the happy teletubbies-watching fan of her last years? (Jonathan Franzen wrote recently about his father's Alzheimer's in the New Yorker -- Sept 10?)

I clearly don't have the answers that I'm looking for. I don't even know the questions most of the time -- hence, the limits of my metacognitive efforts. I read the New York Review and TLS to help me find books that help me grapple with the big questions and answers. And, now, I also look to the blogs of friends and acquaintances to make sense of the world.

A nice way to end

Let me quote from girlrepair, a blog that Doc Searls calls "one of the best-looking blogs I've seen in long time. Great writing too":

i write this weblog for a number of reasons: first, because i'm powerless not to write. second, though it still freaks me out to see all these unknown addresses in my server log who've read me, because i think observations on the human condition by the anonymous among us paint an honest and vivid picture of what it's like to live today. third, to heal. i tend to find myself attached to those who need to heal so much themselves that often i lose sight of what i'm grappling with all by my lonesome. fourth - i know, a lot of reasons - because there is isn't anyone in my life currently that i write to daily and tell about the things that affect me. i share my world with no one, so i may just as well share with anyone who cares to read. fifth, finally, because i think that we live in an amazing world, it's an incredible time to be alive, and all the ugliness that surrounds us is only so that we can really feel the beauty when we find it. sometimes i don't notice all that's wonderful about life until i sit down to share.

Dec Feb

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