DAVID EAGLEMAN SUPPORTS THIS BEATNIK'S IDEAS

David Eagleman

Absolutely nothing to report. Nothing. Last two weeks has been busy with non-writing tasks and around the house duties. We are looking into reflooring the condo, but laminated flooring may be not possible due to Condo Community Regulations. I finished another short story, "The Feels Of Homer". Like it. Recent reading has been Incognito by David Eagleman, an update on neuroscience that supports the theory we humans are as much robots as gorillas are. I accept that I'm a robot. It's that or evolution is a lie, and I know that's not true. Thus the human species has gone from believing it's the center of the solar system and in command of its own behavior to being just another instinct driven animal in the vast Cosmos. I find that an intriguing proposition. Nothing to fear. Now reading Rather Outspoken by Dan Rather.

BEATNICK SILENT SPENDS A TRANSCENDENT AFTERNOON WITH JOHNNY DEPP

I know. This entry's long overdue. Writing going well the past couple of weeks. Had some bad days too. Some days, I feverishly hated writing. In the past that was never the case. Character-driven novels were easier to write. The writer can follow his characters along until they reach some  state of stasis, whereas plotting a mystery is difficult. When I feel I'm losing control of the plot is when I feel the most fear and want to quit. I'm haunted by the thought my brain will give out before I finish the novel. I'll feel the book is escaping me, and it's so damn clever, really. I truly want to complete it, see it made into a movie too, take the money and live out my final years in a condo by the Willamette River in Portland. 

Today, Mertie and I went to see Depp's Transcendence, an interesting film about neuroscience and the merging of neurology and computers. Imperfectly plotted and slow in places, at least it was better than all the Marvel Films full of bang-bang, crash and thunder with religious, choral music in the background they thundered at us in "Previews of Coming Attractions". Comic book action films are so out of date. Supposedly futuristic, their themes are as old as a cave man's brain with good and evil battling and choral music to stimulate feeling in the dull witted comic book brains of  illiterate youths. Nothing new. Nothing to learn that Fellini didn't teach us a way out of many decades ago. 

Life is ambivalent, ambiguous and paradoxical. Seriously, if we allow movie people to keep making bucks by playing on the good versus evil synaptic connections in our brains, we'll never escape duality into the technicolor world, the real world of human experience. At least, Tanscendence tried to escape the duality trap. Huzzah for Johnny Depp!

SILENT BOOMER TAKES A LEFT UPPERCUT TO CHIN!

Thank you so much for your interest in Talcott Notch. While your project has much merit, I'm afraid I don't feel strongly enough to take it on in this tough marketplace. I wish you the best in placing it elsewhere.
Best, 
Paula Munier  Talcott Notch Literary Agency
 

Got photo at:

I always pay attention to a very interesting word in Paula's rejection letter. She writes, "I don't feel strongly enough...." From my own editing experience (and my reading in neuroscience), I assure myself that "feeling" is the only important element in every literary judgment. 

A guy like me (or a gal like Paula) reads something and likes it or not... period! Once the electrochemical computing system that runs the human body and is the human being has made that important feelingization (sic), it can generate an impressive set of  rationalizations for why I felt as it did or it felt as I did.

Of course, my feelings about each piece of writing I looked at when I edited Willow Springs, George & Mertie's Place or Heliotrope were informed by decades of reading the very best and the very worst of literature, and Paula's are based on, she hopes, what might be popular, and, later, the books that last will be the combined feelings of agents, publishers, scholars and readers...Dickens, James Joyce or Tolkien.

That's the situation as I feel it. Feelings are what motivates an agent and an editor, and the feelings of readers make a book a best seller. Feelings made a very poorly written book like "Uncle Tom's Cabin" a powerful tool in the anti-slavery movement that led to the American Civil War. Feelings!

It's the same old story,

A fight for love and glory,

A case of do or die,

The world will always welcome lovers
As time goes by.

WHAT A CREATIVELY WRITING OLD COOT READS

The following is a selective list of books I've read over the last  two years. I'm an eclectic reader. I don't understand all that I read, but I do credit myself for trying! Some are rereads:

Franny and Zoe by Salinger
Breaking The Spell by Daniel Dennett
An American Trilogy (all three novels in Philip Roth's trilogy, the 60s so real)
Foundation by Asimov 
Deeper Into Movies, Pauline Kael 
Axis sci fi by Robert Wilson
She Left Me In The Middle of Nowhere great poetry by pal Geoff Peterson (on Amazon)
The Drunkard's Walk, science by Leonard Mlodinow
"Evolutionary Social Psychology" in Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology, ed. by David Buss
365 Days by Ronald Glaser (Vietnam vet personal history)
The Falling Man by Dan DeLillo
Greatest Show On Earth and Ancestor's Tale by Richard Dawkins (both evolution) 
Pentimento, An Unfinished Woman and Scoundrel Time by Lillian Hellman (memoirs and interesting insider look at the McCarthy Era)
Slaughterhouse Five by Vonnegut 
Feathers by Thor Hanson (a book about the evolution of feathers) 
The Darkness Around Us Is Deep (poetry of William Stafford)
Darwin a bio. by Desmond and Moore
Harmony scifi by Project Itoh
Idoru  scifi by William Gibson
The Emotional Brain and The Synaptic Self  both by Joseph Ledoux (neuroscience which has influenced my writing and my understanding of the human condition)
Einstein: his life and universe by W. Isaacson (excellent book which capsulizes his theories as well as Einstein's bio)
 

The writer among his books

That last Einstein book is very representative of how reading works for me. For a fraction of a day, I almost grasp his theories. By the next day, the knowledge is lost among the synapses. The older I get, the more advanced is this process of forgetting, and I do not like it one bit!  

As I said...if I remembered a fraction of what I read, I'd be a man of wide and deep knowledge, a man for all seasons, but, genetically, that was not to be my fate, so I read and recall mere fragments and am forced to build my flawed picture of the Cosmos and my place in it from scraps and personal suffering. When I was younger my most anguished moments of self-knowledge came when I knew I would never have the understanding or reputation of a genius. Laugh at me—I finally did—but when I was a youth and often in my cups, that knowledge was a source of ceaseless anguish.

THE WRITER'S BRAIN

The one year I taught high school, I still recall Cameron S. coming up to me after class and saying, "Mr. Thomas, you know all the big stuff, but you miss all the little things." These days, I understand that her "big" and "little" could mean different things than I imagined they did at the time, but I had thought all along that my brain seemed to extract generalizations from reading and from experience but did not accurately recall the details. I recently tried to memorize the process by which DNA via RNA makes copies of itself. The step by step drawing of the process was so simple and mechanical, anybody could understand it, but I haven't retained the details. I kick myself for this failing, yet—in kindness to myself—I do understand that had I been a teacher who taught neuroscience every day, I'd probably be more familiar with terminology. 

the brain, high on life.

Of course, the way my brain functions creates my writing style far beyond any conscious control I imagine I have over the process. However, oddly, the following passages are the opening of the second novel I ever wrote and they are rife with tiny detail. Not a generalization to be found. I'm currently translating Delinquent Lives through OCR software from typed pages to editable files. The novel is stream of conscious and darts back and forth between an adult and a boy. The adult works in a home for emotionally disturbed boys, and the boy is an "inmate" there. The plot is an X pattern which I won't  reveal for fear that no one will buy the novel when I put it out (I think) on Amazon as an e-book:
 

    1

    The Zapruder Super-8 had been hand held and shaky. Specifically, Paul remembered how the blurry blowup caught the piece of skull, hairy on the one side and bloody on the other, and the eruption of blood and fluid blown out in the spray of death. Stupidly, he imagined the fragment’s underside to be a kind of mesh material, like the underside of a toupee, and the fragment itself to be tumbling forever through black and most infinite space.
    “Oh yes,” he imagined exclaiming to others, “I can see myself traveling to the loony bin and back on a piece of bone like that!”

     2

     They walked together on a yellow afternoon in the green, city park through the small, grey, hopping birds. She held his hand. In a paper sack, he carried dry bread broken into crumbs to give them.
     “Sparrows, Jimmy,” she said and pointed.

  He threw the dry, white crumbs to them and watched them gather to feed while the heavy balloon man came down the wide, cinder path under the tall, green, high-branched trees.
     “Those are elms and hickories. See?” she told him, pointing."
     Jimmy tilted his face to their far, green tops which blotted out whole pieces of the blue sky. Then, lowering his gaze, he watched the fat, round balloon man come. He watched the red balloons wave above the round balloon man. Oh! The balloons stretched their strings tight, trying to go up.
     Sunlight splashed on everything and made an eye-hurting dazzle of everything in sight. The sun poured on the tall trees, on a brown dog far away running, on the red balloon cherries in the blue, bright sky stretching their strings. The sun splashed on her yellow hair. The sun lit the long, white hairs on the balloon man’s ears. The sun jumped and leaped from the clear, brightly-ruffled wading pool surface in a dazzle bits of light.
     “Balloons,” she said and pointed.
     “Loon! Loon!” he said and pointed too.
     When she knelt to hand him the balloon string, he smelled the soap in the dish by the white tub at home which she used only. Then he held the balloon string and tilted back his head to stare at the bright ball of red she had given him. The wind moved it. It drifted and tugged. He felt it’s life through the string and he laughed.