Impatso and Punning

How many puns are in this Filipino commercial?

Obama, Lakoff, and Conceptual Metaphor

Follow commentary on the 2008 US elections via George Lakoff's commentary and conceptual metaphor discussions. Other interests:

• TalkLeft: What Lakoff and Obama Do Not Understand (Jul 2006)


• AlterNet: The Secret of Obama's Success, He Listens to Lakoff (Feb 2008)


• Lakoff's Buzzflash Interview (Apr 2008)


• Obama in a Bind (Jul 2008): Christopher Lyndon talks to Lakoff

Neuro-Liberalism is William Saletan's NYT review (Jun 2008) of Lakoff's The Political Mind: Why You Can't Understand 21st Century Politics with an 18th Century Brain:

Lakoff is a puzzle. No one has more brilliantly dissected conservative spin. "My goal as a scientist and a citizen is to make the cognitive unconscious as conscious as possible," he writes. But each time Lakoff the scientist exposes a right-wing frame, Lakoff the citizen substitutes a left-wing frame. First he shreds Bush's depiction of Iraq as a "war" that can end in "victory" over a united "enemy". Then he repeats each of Bush’s fallacies, oversimplifying the conflict as an "occupation" in which the United States is "losing" to a united "resistance". It's as though Lakoff were lobotomized.

Charles Bernstein's 'Poetry Bailout' Statement

[via Grand Text Auto] Poetry Bailout Will Restore Confidence of Readers by Charles Bernstein: From a statement read at an event marking the release of Best American Poetry 2008...

Let there be no mistake: the fundamentals of our poetry are sound. The problem is not poetry but poems. The crisis has been precipitated by the escalation of poetry debt—poems that circulate in the market at an economic loss due to their difficulty, incompetence, or irrelevance. Illiquid poetry assets are choking off the flow of imagination that is so vital to our literature. When the literary system works as it should, poetry and poetry assets flow to and from readers and writers to create a productive part of the cultural field. As toxic poetry assets block the system, the poisoning of literary markets has the potential to damage our cultural institutions irreparably.

Michael Symmons Roberts on Science and Poetry

Michael Symmons Roberts talks to New Scientist (2007) on science and poetry.

'The Box' (poem read in the above video) from Corpus (2004):

In case of catastrophe,
winter can be recreated
from this skeleton of leaf.

All the bitter subtleties
of crab apple are tangled
here, as is the DNA

of dew-point calibration
of the second when a tree
lets go, the recipe for clouds

on the horizon like a new
born mountain range,
like north itself.

And with the leaf,
this relic box contains
a hair curl from a child

to reconstruct humanity,
though all the lights and currents
of his soul are lost to us.

Spores, antennae, claws,
the box will hold all evolution.
It will be full and empty.

More of his poems from The Poetry Archive.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's 'Flow'

'Flow' and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (1999) discussed by David Farmer.

Flow with Soul (2002): Interview by Elizabeth Debold where Csikzentmihalyi talks about evolution and greater complexity.

My hunch is—and, of course, there is no proof of this—that if an organism, a species, learns to find a positive experience in doing something that stretches its ability; in other words, if you enjoy sticking your neck out and trying to operate at your best or even beyond your best, if you're lucky enough to get that combination, then you're more likely to learn new things, to become better at what you're doing, to invent new things, to discover new things. We seem to be a species that has been blessed by this kind of thirst for pushing the envelope. Most other species seem to be very content when their basic needs are taken care of and their homeostatic level has been restored. They have eaten; they can rest now. That's it. But in our nervous system, maybe by chance or at random, an association has been made between pleasure and challenge, or looking for new challenges.

The Creative Personality: Ten Paradoxical Traits

Alliteration and Memory Performance

Sweet Silent Thought: Alliteration and Resonance in Poetry Comprehension (2008) by R Brooke Lea, et. al.:

We used current theories of language comprehension as a framework for understanding how alliteration affects comprehension processes. Across three experiments, alliterative cues reactivated readers' memories for previous information when it was phonologically similar to the cue. These effects were obtained when participants read aloud and when they read silently, and with poetry and prose. The results support everyday intuitions about the effects of poetry and aesthetics, and explain the nature of such effects. These findings extend the scope of general memory models by indicating their capacity to explain the influence of nonsemantic discourse features.

Discussion by Dave Munger here.

Favourite Derek Walcott Poem

'Love After Love' (year unknown) by Derek Walcott:

The time will come
when, with elation,
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror,
and each will smile at the other's welcome,

And say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was yourself.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

Jonah Lehrer on Porn

The Neuroscience of Porn:

Porn does not cause us to think about sex. Rather, porn causes to think we are having sex. From the perspective of the brain, the act of arousal is not preceded by a separate idea, which we absorb via the television screen. The act itself is the idea. In other words, porn works by convincing us that we are not watching porn. We think we are inside the screen, doing the deed.

Further information: Mirror neurons and imitation learning as the driving force behind 'the great leap forward' in human evolution by V.S. Ramachandran

The STANDUP Project

The STANDUP project (System To Augment Non-speakers' Dialogue Using Puns): Collaborative project between the School of Computing at the University of Dundee, the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh, and the Department of Computing Science at the University of Aberdeen, funded by EPSRC (the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council). The project began in October 2003 and ran until March 2007.

Oliver Sacks on iPods

'Brainworms, Sticky Music, and Catchy Tunes' in Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain by Oliver Sacks (2007):

Half of us are plugged into iPods, immersed in daylong concerns of our own choosing, virtually oblivious to the environment--and for those who are not plugged in, there is nonstop music, unavoidable and often of deafening intensity, in restaurants, bars, shops, and gyms. This barrage of music puts a certain strain on our exquisitely sensitive auditory systems, which cannot be overloaded without dire consequences. One such consequence is the ever-increasing prevalence of serious hearing loss, even among young people, and particularly among musicians. Another is the omnipresence of annoyingly catchy tunes, the brainworms that arrive unbidden and leave only in their own time--catchy tunes that may, in fact, be nothing more than advertisements for toothpaste but are, neurologically, completely irresistible.

James Fenton on Douglas Dunn

'Goodbye to All That?' from The Strength of Poetry (2001) by James Fenton:

There was a time when, given the belief that empire was an absurdity and 'all that was in the past', a poet like Douglas Dunn could write his 'Poem in Praise of the British' confident that his ironies were shared....One could say of it that it takes nothing seriously, is unshockable and untroubled. The past is this wonderful absurdity. the politicians of the Right are not to be feared. We are living in this wonderful afterglow, and all is well. One of the things one would not have guessed about Terry Street when it came out was that its author was Scottish. In fact, given that most of the poems in the book are about a working-class district in Hull, one might perhaps have supposed him English. 'A Poem in Praise of the British' was untypical of its volume, but not untypical of the way Dunn later wrote at times, when he wrote as if he were expressing himself in French, in an easygoing, dandyish way of which sometimes tempted him. But what is absolutely untypical of the later Dunn is the insouciance with which he treats the subject of empire. Within ten years, in the volume called Barbarians, which shows the influence of the hard revolutionary Left, you find a poem called 'Empires' which might alos have been written to remedy the defects in seriousness of the earlier one....Soldiers are no longer funny. Empire is no longer an amusing mystery. By now Dunn has begun to think of himself as a barbarian to idenitfy with the victims of empire. And this phase gives way to a further phase in which, to a great extent, his Scottishness becomes his subject matter. He returns to his roots.

'A Poem in Praise of the British' (quoted in the above essay) from Terry Street (1969) by Douglas Dunn:

The regiments of dumb gunners go to bed early.
The soldiers, sleepy after running up and down
The private British Army meadows,
Clean the daisies off their mammoth boots.
The general goes pink in his bath reading
Lives of the Great Croquet Players.
At Aldershot, beside foot-stamping squares,
Young officers drink tea and touch their toes.

Heavy rain everywhere washes up the bones of British
Where did all that power come from, the wish
To be inert, but rich and strong, to have too much?
Where does glory come from, and when it's gone
Why are old soldiers sour and the banks empty?
But how sweet is the weakness after Empire
In the garden of a flat, safe country shire,
Watching the beauty of the random, spare, superfluous,

Drifting as if in sleep to the ranks of memorialists
That wait like cabs to take us off down easy street,
To the redcoat armies, and the flags and treaties
In the marvellous archives, preserved like leaves in books.
The archivist wears a sword and clipped moustache.
He files our memories, more precious than light,
To be of easy access to politicians of the Right,
Who are now sleeping, like undertakers on black cushions.

Garrison Keillor Reads Anthony Hecht

Garrison Keillor reads The Ceremony of Innocence from Collected Later Poems (2004) by Anthony Hecht.

He was taken from his cell, stripped, blindfolded,
And marched to a noisy room that smelled of sweat.
Someone stamped on his toes; his scream was stopped
By a lemon violently pushed between his teeth
And sealed with friction tape behind his head.
His arms were tied, the blindfold was removed
So he could see his tormentors, and they could see
The so-much-longed-for terror in his eyes.
And one of them said, "The best part of it all
Is that you won't even be able to pray."
When they were done with him, two hours later,
They learned that they had murdered the wrong man
And this made one of them thoughtful. Some years after,
He quietly severed connections with the others
Moved to a different city, took holy orders,
And devoted himself to serving God and the poor,
While the intended victim continued to live
On a walled estate, sentried around the clock
By a youthful, cell phone-linked praetorian guard.

Roger Caillois on Schizophrenia

Mimicry and Legendary Psycasthenia (1935):

I will [...] briefly describe some personal experiences, but which are wholly in accord with observations published in the medical literature, for example with the invariable response of schizophrenics to the question: where are you? I know where I am, but I do not feel as though I'm at the spot where I find myself. To these dispossessed souls, space seems to be a devouring force. Space pursues them, encircles them, digests them in a gigantic phagocytosis. It ends by replacing them. Then the body separates itself from thought, the individual breaks the boundary of his skin and occupies the other side of his senses. He tries to look at himself from any point whatever in space. He feels himself becoming space, dark space where things cannot be put. He is similar, not similar to something, but just similar. And he invents spaces of which he is "the convulsive possession." All these expressions shed light on a single process: depersonalization by assimilation to space, i.e., what mimicry achieves morphologically in certain animal species.

The Gay Brain

The Ivanka Savic and Per Lindström research on cerebral asymmetry and functional connectivity between homo- and heterosexual subjects has been generating a lot of online discussion.

Neuroanthropology has more extensive links and discussion:

Trying to shoehorn sexuality into one socially and politically charged box just does not work well from an anthropological point of view. As one example, men in some cultures go through different life stages, and in some of those stages homosexuality is the normal way of being, whereas at other times heterosexual relations are the norm. .... On the neuroplasticity and experience/behavior side, this type of approach generally leaves out something every consenting adult knows. Sex matters! The experience of a sexual encounter helps shape our desires, our pleasures, our associations.

Retana on Las Poetas Filipinas

De la evolución de la literatura castellana en Filipinas (1909) by W.E. Retana:

La responsibilidad que los poetas han comenzado á contrer (Guerrero sobre todo), no puede ser meyor. Filipinos se halla actualmente en un periódo crítico, de renovación si cuunde, y arriaga en la conciencia popular, una literatura enfermiza, decadente hecha por jóvenes que se compbien en llamarse a sí mismos ,,valetudinarios,, ó, lo que esigual inútiles, padiós nacionalismo! el pueblo irá derecho á la impotencia, que pueblo que se connaturaliza con el pesimismo literario, es pueblo huerto. Hoy los vates, más que nunca, hállanse obligados á hacer sonar la trompa resonante de la épica, no el figle tristón de la endecha ó la balada; hoy mas que nunca han de probar, pero en castellano rotundo, clásico, desposeído, de la false pedrería del filoneísmo preciosista, que son hombres, hombres cabales, bien diferentes de ciertos estetas á quienes toman por modelos. No es un Verlaine lo que necesita en estos momentos filipinos; lo que necesita es un Quintana: no un model, que ayude á caer, sino un modelo que ayude á subir...; Arriba, poetas!

Reviewing Cognitive Enhancers

Which Cognitive Enhancers Really Work: Brain Training, Drugs, Vitamins, Meditation or Exercise?: Brilliant entry that discusses in brief current research in cognitive enhancement techniques such as the popular Nintendo DS brain training softwares, drugs, nutritional supplements, meditation and exercise.

Reuven Tsur on the Heart Conceit

[old] What is Cognitive Poetics? (1982) by Reuven Tsur:

According to migratory theory, someone at the dawn of the history of literature happily 'hit' upon this heart-conceit; from this point on, the conceit migrated until it reached the Arab poets in Spain, who transmitted it to the Hebrew poets of the eleventh century in Spain, as well as to the Provençal poets, who are known to have influenced the poets of the dolce stil nuovo in Italy, who are known to have influenced English Metaphysical poetry. The geographical proximity of Provençe to Paris may account for the appearance of the conceit in Villon's poetry. This explanation is not without geographical or chronological plausibility; but it appears to be too concrete, too uneconomical, and to leave too much to chance. Above all, it does not explain how poets and readers of poetry handle novel conceits. it fails to explain why an earlier poet should be more likely to 'hit' upon a certain conceit than a later one. In addition, the above explanation is counter-intuitive from the point of view of what we seem to know about the inventiveness and ingenuity of the Metaphysical poets.

Reuven Tsur Interview

Interview with Reuven Tsur by Beth Bradburn:

When I was a teenager, at high school, studying Hungarian poetry, I was very much annoyed by the fact that our literary studies concerned mainly the idea contents of poetry. I had very strong intuitions that the most important things in poetry were not conceptual, but something of the kind that, now I know, was 'perceptual'. I spent the ensuing decades in a pursuit of that 'perceptual' something. One of the main problems appeared to be this: language by its very nature is conceptual; but it is an observational fact that poetry sometimes conveys emotional, perceptual, or mystical qualities. At the university, in Israel, I was exposed to 'New Criticism', and was committed to close-reading of poems as the only worthy critical activity. But I always felt that there was that important something which I later called the 'perceived effect' of the poem, and I soon realized that this could not be accounted for merely by appealing to the structure of the text; one had to assume a perceiving consciousness. Wellek and Warren along with Wimsatt and Beardsley provided the theoretical constraints within which I attempted to solve the problem. The latter warned against the 'affective fallacy', while the former conceived of a poem as of 'a stratified system of norms that is a potential source of experience', but categorically rejected all psychologization of the literary endeavour. I thought, therefore, that I must eschew what is individual and idiosyncratic in poetic experience, and pursue the intersubjective foundations of the 'perceived quality'. Eventually I found the redeeming formula in a noncognitive context, in L.C. Knights' Notes on Comedy...

Mary Gilmore's Little Shoes That Died

The Collected Verse of Mary Gilmore: Mary Gilmore was Australia's foremost woman poet during the first half of the twentieth century and it was as a poet that she wanted to be remembered when she died in 1962. More attention however has been given in recent years to her long and eventful life, her role as feminist, her championing of Australian literature as an instrument of national identity and her activism for various forms of social justice.

'The Little Shoes That Died': Also included in the anthology Hell and After (2005) edited by Les Murray:

These are the little shoes that died.
     We could not keep her still,
But all day long her busy feet
     Danced to her eager will.

Leaving the body's loving warmth,
     The spirit ran outside;
Then from the shoes they slipped her feet,
     And the little shoes died.

Luce Irigaray on Sharing the World

Sharing the World: From Intimate to Global Relations: We are accustomed to considering the other as an individual without paying sufficient attention to the particular world or specific culture to which the other belongs. A phenomenological approach to this question offers some help, notably through Heidegger's analyses of 'Dasein', 'being-in-the-world' and 'being with'. Nevertheless, according to Heidegger, it remains almost impossible to identify an other outside of our own world. 'Otherness' is subjected to the same values by which we are ourselves defined and thus we remain in 'sameness'. In this age of multiculturalism and in the light of Nietzsche's criticism of our values and Heidegger's deconstruction of our interpretation of truth, Irigaray questions the validity of the 'sameness' that sits at the root of Western culture.

How to Share the World: Luce Irigaray's public lecture at Queen Mary, University of London on 19 June:

We cannot share the world as it already is, with the exception of the natural world. The world that we can share is always and still to be elaborated by us and between us starting from what and who we are as humans here and now. Humans who endeavour to use their own energy as well as that arising from their difference to create a world in which we can live in peace and happiness.