MIND WIDE OPEN and EMERGENCE

I’d like to take the time to recommend the writings of Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software and Mind Wide Open : Your Brain and the Neuroscience of Everyday Life.

In the research style of Howard Rheingold, Steven Johnson seems to spend his time traveling around the country collecting bits of information from inventors and scientists, as well as a healthy backlog of reading material. I like that Johhson, in his wonderfully meandering style, isn’t afraid to drag literary works into the mix as well. There’s a delightful (for me) moment in Mind Wide Open when he uses Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway to illustrate the point he’s making about brain functions. He also uses a passage from Henry James’ The Golden Bowl (okay, so I may be remembering this incorrectly) to illustrate the the way that people (and their brains) continuously interpret the subtle interactions of body language and facial expressions.

I read Emergence first and, as per usual, I can’t quite recall the place that I originally read about this book, though I seem to remember reading this interview with Steven Johnson on Salon.com when it originally came out. I didn’t read the book at the time or even look for it. What I can’t remember is what prompted me to read the book now. It’s funny that I can remember an interview I read three years ago, but not the reason that I decided to read a book two or three months ago.

–Completely tangentially, but I think that the image or metaphor of my brain that most seems to fit is based on a dream that I had some time ago, but that was so vivid it’s stuck with me ever since. I had a very detailed dream in which I designed and built a circular cage in which fans were arranged in such a way that air blew through the cage in a constant tumult. Into this cage, I put thousands and thousands of cut-up words and phrases, so that, when the fans were blowing, the bits and pieces of paper would fly about in a constant and random flurry of motion. In the dream, I would stand in the middle of this cage and, in order to ascertain the answers to my questions, I would reach out into this moiling of paper and grab the bits of paper that I needed. I would use this as a practice of prophecy or divination and, in the dream, I was absolutely convinced that this system would work. What was fascinating to me, even while dreaming it, was the detail that went into the construction of this device (shall I call it a fragmenomancer?), from the initial technical drawings to the bolting and shaping of metal and electrical systems. And me without an engineering bone in my body. So, transpose words on paper to thoughts as words on scraps of paper that flurry around the self, momentarily and somewhat randomly coming into vision, then… that seems about right. My brain as a giant cut-up machine.—

Emergence deals primarily with the way in which complex systems arise out of the interaction of simple rules, repeated many times. For example, the way in which the 20 or so chemical signals that one ant creates, repeated many times over, generates ant colony behavior from the layout of the colony to the way in which an ant colony will react to food or scarcity thereof. Johnson goes on to discuss the properties of emerging complexity which appear in such disparate things as the physical development of cities over time, human brains and software development. He’s even got people talking to him about how creativity is an emergent property. Emergence is well worth reading. Especially in terms of the way in which emergent complexity, as metaphor, changes the ways in which we think about our world around us and ourselves.

In many ways, Mind Wide Open seems like a logical follow-up to Emergence. In it, through his conversations with neurologists and bio-feedback engineers, Steven Johnson records his exploration of his own brain. There’s an interesting thing that seems to happen (to me) when I read about how brains function. I’ll be reading some description of a mental reaction to some situation and, while reading, I’ll find my own brain beginning to mirror that reaction. It’s very strange. Perhaps this happens more than I think, but I’m only hyper-aware of it when reading a book about brain activity. Very worthwhile for all you brain enthusiasts out there. (Heh.)

The last day of Poetry Month: “Brother Writer’s” by Vladimir Mayakovsky

In commemoration of the end of Poetry Month, a poem by Vladimir Mayakovsky:

Brother Writers

Seemingly I shall never grow accustomed
to sitting in the “Bristol,”
sipping tea,
fibbing by the line.
I shall knock down the glasses,
clamber on the table:
“Listen,
literary brothers!
Here you sit,
eyes drowning in tea,
velvet elbows worn with scribbling.
Raise your eyes from the unemptied glasses!
Disentangle your ears from those shaggy locks!
Darlings,
what has wedded you to words,
you who sit glued
to walls
and wall-paper?
Do you know
that Francois Villon,
when he had finished writing,
did a job of plundering?
But you,
who quake at the sight of a penknife,
boast yourselves the guardians of a splendid age.
what have you to write about today?
Any solicitor’s clerk finds
life
a hundred times more fascinating.
Gentlemen poets,
have you not wearied
of palaces,
pages,
love
and lilac blooms?
If such as you
are the creators,
then I spit upon all art.
I’d rather open a shop,
or work on the Stock Exchange
and bulge my sides with fat wallets.
In a tavern rear
I’ll spew up my soul
in a drunken song.
Will the blow tell,
cleave through your sheaves of hair?
But you have only one notion
under that mop of hair:
to be slick-combed! Rut why?
For a short while it’s not worth the labour,
and to be combed
eternally
is impossible.”

Vladimir Mayakovsky (1893-1930)
Translated from the russian by George Reavey

holding out for lunchtime, maybe

oh, that silvery fish just slipped into the fryer, and the acheing burn that places it there and then just claws out the eyelids. oh my, gargling with frothy draining mustard would be more fun, feel those seedlings, those tiny thoughts, grow big and consume the brain, spreading out their tentacles, groping into countless crannies, then blooming out.

filthy horror, that lurks in plainsight, dallying in the daylight. where’s the monkeygrinder been loafing? where’s the snakecharmer when you need some cheap rope trick? this one wants to climb out of the place he’s sitting in–the brain snapped back to rue, from some unwelcome visitation from the past, some unexorcised demon or ghost which floats, just waiting to coalesce within some vibrant thought.

ick, feel that skin crawl and the physical sickness, caused by the brainboil–stop little brain! stop, with the flooding of the body with the neurochemickals that sicken and die the healthy flesh and soul!–oh, and there go the muscles clenching in some heated fashion, ouch. and, but, where does all your brainreading get you now, little boy? when the greasy sucking wounds come ratcheting around the bend? why does that old dear friend have to be such a crow’s-call of old ill omen? bringing those nasty once-darks to bear, oh, all innocent-like and no-harm-meant… though the visitation left some light which stabbed a spear of thought and memory into the brain…

where’s the module in this brain that will banish that cavalcade of fiery minstrels, playing their discordant panpipes and dancing their stick and garish plots? oh, begone thou fair and vile memory! if i had but a razorblade of mind to cut away that perished thought. p’raps it’s just my cold repilian brain, once seized in pain and now like tortured grapes or some other word or phrase that makes no sense, which flees-or-fights, which longs to claw the eyes out of some thing.

fly away, silvery fish, fly away from those pincing tongs of thought. and, oh, perhaps the trending time of words will keep those hollowness at bay. a flickering walnut to escape from or to, depending. so even words of strain, which, lacking art or even some Romantick gesture, all o’erflowing with some Revolutionary Principle, some heated vision of Mountain or of Roiling Sea, will open up a door, floating green and EXIT by and by.

another book “game” floating around the internet

There’s another book game floating around the internet. Here, it’s all about taking a list of books and bolding all of the ones which you’ve read. I first ran across it at Nick Mametas’s livejournal. Something called the “College Board’s 101 Greatest Works of Literature”. The good Mr. Mametas has read all of these, but I’ve read a goodly number of them myself and since I’ve been thinking about lists of books that I’ve read, this seemed appropriate. (Funny: I’ve read far more, percentage-wise, of these science fiction books…) Here it is:
Continue reading “another book “game” floating around the internet”