Someone left a copy of Borges’ Labyrinths in my mailbox. I vaguely remember this book coming up in conversation recently with someone, but I can’t remember who. So if you left me this book, if you’d kindly remind me it was you, I’ll return it to the proper mailbox when I’m done with it.

Also, in case this book wasn’t supposed to be in my mailbox: if you hear of anyone who lost a copy, I totally have it. If it’s not for me, it’s an amazing coincidence, and the universe obviously wants me to read it anyway, so I’m bringing it with me to CogSci.

Steve & I went to Barnes & Noble Saturday night to see the Rev. Michael Dowd speak on his book, Thank God for Evolution, and find out how the marriage of science and religion could transform our lives and world. We were expecting to hear some sentimental pseudoscience that focused on evidence that we were created by God in the image of God. But we were surprised.

There was the expected amount of watered-down science. Dowd talked about how human nature (virtue, temptation, and sin) can be explained in terms of the biological evolution of the brain. He presented a diagram of the evolved human brain designed by his wife, popular science writer Connie Barlow:

The lizard represents the “Lizard Legacy,” which he said just manages the three… F’s… feeding, fffff-something, and fucking, only he didn’t say fucking—he said “copulation.” (Get it? Copulation doesn’t start with an F! You thought he was going to say it, but no, he’s more wholesome than that.) Then there’s the “Fuzzy L’il Mammal,” which… I don’t remember what he attributed to that… general area… of the brain. Basic ability to reason? Caring for young? Pack mentality? Then there’s the “Monkey Mind,” which cares about things like status and basic communication. And, finally, the “Higher Porpoise,” which he said is exactly what it sounds like. That is, presumably, the part of the brain that is moral or ethical or religious or whatever word you want to use. He talked about how understanding our sins and our humanity required knowledge and understanding about the conflicts between these parts of our brain.

And, of course, this is a gross oversimplification. To attempt to explain, say, marital infidelity entirely in terms of biology is… I don’t even know what it is. Maybe just unromantic.

So his science was a bit fuzzy. But his main argument was actually reasonable… at least, we think so. He spoke about “day language” and “night language”. “Day language,” he said, are things that are plausible and true in the reality that exists when you are awake and alive in the world. “Night language,” he said, was things that are plausible and true when you sleep. The Bible stories may be interpreted as being written in “night language,” which we think was just a euphemism for “metaphoric language.” We think he was arguing for a literal interpretation of scientific fact and a metaphoric interpretation of the Bible. So, basically, he’s selling Unitarianism.

So you’d think I’d have gone for it, but actually, Steve & I were left with really different impressions of the talk… his more favorable than mine. Surprising, considering I’m the Unitarian. Steve thought it was reasonable to try and convince hardcore “flat earth” Christians to believe in science, even if doing so required watering down fact and speaking in flowery language. I think speaking about religion in euphemistic terms think is both condescending and ineffective. Things are true in the world, or they aren’t. Stories are metaphor, or they’re fact. There’s very little in between for me.

So? It was an experience. I’d like for us to go more place we don’t belong more often.

Collecting guesses. Murakami reveals the answer tomorrow. Extra points if you identify which Murakami novel this hypothetical is from.

… is just as good as The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, although it seems more loose (looser?). Stevie P. was nice enough to give me the book-on-CD version, which I’ve been listening to on work breaks, before bed, and when I drive. I’m not quite done—one CD of 15 left! Dying to finish, but making myself wait until I’m in the car again. (Why? That’s rather silly of me, yeah? Maybe I’ll finish them when I go home today.) I bought a book of Haruki Murakami’s short stories for the trip to CUNY, so that makes waiting easier. I want to read everything he’s written. So exciting, to have a new author I love!

Running themes across the two Murakamis so far include sex as a means of gaining mutual understanding, contradiction as truth, free will as illusion, and cruelty without gain. These are all things I’ve been thinking about the past couple years, since the hurricane. The world has felt utterly unpredictable… perverse… uncontrollable… and, sometimes, cruel for no reason, since the levees collapsed. Murakami’s themes speak to me. I wonder what made the themes speak to him.

And? And. No need to get upset, nothing you can do, try and understand and that’s really it… fatalism is comforting. Maybe bogus. Probably bogus, in everything except for a metaphorical sense. But totally comforting.

From Haruki Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle: A Novel:

“Not long after I gave up any effort to concentrate on thinking, all kinds of fragmentary memories began to visit me. They arrived in silence, like water slowly filling an underground cavern. Places I had gone, people I had met, wounds I had received, conversations I had had, things I had bought, things I had lost: I was able to recall them all with great vividness and in amazing detail. I thought of houses and apartments in which I had lived. I thought of their windows and closets and furniture and lighting fixtures. I thought of teachers and professors I had had, all the way from elementary school to college. Few if any of these memories had any connection with each other. They were minute and meaningless and came in no chronological order. Now and then, my recollections would be interrupted by another painful wave of hunger. But each memory was incredibly vivid, jolting me physically with the force of a tornado.” (266-7)

“It’s like when you put instant rice pudding mix in a bowl in the microwave and push the button, and you take the cover off when it rings, and there you’ve got ricing pudding. I mean, what happens in between the time when you push the switch and when the microwave rings? You can’t tell what’s going on under the cover. Maybe the instant rice pudding first turns into macaroni gratin in the darkness when nobody’s looking and only then turns back into rice pudding. We think it’s only natural to get rice pudding after we put rice pudding mix in the microwave and the bell rings, but to me, that is just a presumption. I would be kind of relieved if, every once in a while, after you put rice pudding mix in the microwave and it rang and you opened the top, you got macaroni gratin. I suppose I’d be shocked, of course, but I don’t know, I think I’d be kind of relieved too. Or at least I think I wouldn’t be so upset, because that would feel, in some ways, a whole lot more real.” (460-1)

“Eight soldiers marched four Chinese men ahead of them at bayonet point–young men, perhaps twenty years old, wearing baseball uniforms and with their hands tied behind their backs. The black-and-blue marks on their faces made it obvious they had been severely beaten. The right eye of one man was swollen almost shut, and the bleeding lips of another had stained his baseball shirt bright red. The shirtfronts had nothing written on them, but there were small rectangles where the name patches had been torn off. The numbers on their backs were 1, 4, 7, and 9. The veterinarian could not begin to imagine why, at such a time of crisis, four young Chinese men would be wearing baseball uniforms, or why they had been so badly beaten and dragged here by Japanese troops. The scene looked like something not of this world–a painting by a mental patient.” (512)

I’ve been talking about “chunking” in children’s speech lately. By chunking, I mean when a child misparses a sentence such that multiple word that occur together frequently (i.e., collocations) become sort of glued together. Just like in collocations in adults (like throw up, a lot, went out), the group of words together take on a meaning that is beyond just the sum of the individual components. For example, white wine means something different than wine that is white.

When I’m explaining children’s use of chunks to someone for the first time, I’m always prompted to provide an example, and for weeks, I’ve been blanking. But today, when I flipped open the Erika Hoff Language Development textbook being used in BCS 259, I happened to open to the dedication page… a page I hadn’t read before. And there, on the page, was the following transcribed interaction between the author and her daughter:

At the dinner table–

Kirsten (aged 7 years): Are we having for dessert ice cream?

Author: Kirsten, Are we having for dessert ice cream? What kind of a sentence is that?

(A reflective pause)

Kirsten: You should write it down for your book.

A perfect example of a chunk! Having for dessert! Thank you Erika Hoff, and thank you Kirsten! I’ll blank no more.

Gravitons came up at a party last night. I’d never heard of gravitons. How did I miss this?

A graviton is a theoretical massless particle that mediates the force of gravity in the Quantum Field Theory framework, Gabriel & Greg kindly explained. It’s an alternative to the concept of gravity as curved spacetime, as in a general relativity framework. And it models gravitational interaction just as well, recovering the behaviors explained by Isaac Newton’s theory of universal gravitation!

Very neat.

Book that discusses gravitons recommended by Gabriel: Feynman Lectures on Gravitation.

“To me death is above all things a smell, a very bad smell, and that, like the skeletons which terrify children, is not death at all. If I had to smell it more often, if I had to work in the catacombs, I would think nothing of it. And a few years or decades from now, I will think nothing about everything.”

- William T. Vollman, Three Meditations on Death, Rising Up and Rising Down: Some Thoughts on Violence, Freedom and Urgent Means

I bought Tender is the Night, Moby Dick and The Death of Ivan Illyich and Other Short Stories today. I’m seeking guidance while I make some major life transitions. Fitzgerald, Melville and Tolstoy are, like Juvenille and Balzac, smart guys.

Feeling is at least as important as thinking, and it’s easy to forget that while you’re preparing to apply to graduate school.

I’ve read but don’t remember Moby Dick, but I think I may have been too young. I’ve read and do remember The Death of Ivan Illyich and Other Short Stories, but having good short stories on hand is a good idea. And I happen to know that my copy is lost somewhere, because I didn’t pack it.

I liked Blindness so much, I want to read the Saramago’s sequel, Seeing, but these three first. Blindness was a great-but-quick read, so Seeing might be a good one to save for recreation once the semester starts.

Ah. It’s so late at night and I can’t wait until it’s morning. Now is nice, but I’m anxious to do day things and there are at least four hours left until then.

Vonnegut died today. He was one of my heros. He was 84, so I can’t say his life was cut short, but I’m still sad. Cat’s Cradle is one of my favorite books. My most favorite behind White Noise.

A Bokonist poem in Mr. Vonnegut’s honor:

I wanted all things
To seem to make sense,
So we all could be happy, yes,
Instead of tense.
And I made up lies
So that they all fit nice,
And I made this sad world
A par-a-dise.