Correction of the Week!

(from yesterday's New YorkTimes)

"... you often saw them lying open on the sofa…"

"Their house had real hardcover books in it, and you often saw them lying open on the sofa, the words still warm from being read."

-from "Loggerheads" by David Sedaris, from his 2013 collection "Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls: Essays, Etc."

“This is the only reality there is.”

“Everyone has his own reality in which, if one is not too cautious, timid or frightened, one swims. This is the only reality there is.”

-Henry Miller, from Stand Still Like the Hummingbird (1962)

(photos: backyard, July 18th; click image for full-screen)

"As far as I could tell, I didn't mind…"

"As far as I could tell, I didn't mind the way the date turned out, though I started crying the next day in my car on the way to the drive-in bank."

- from "The Professor" by Lydia Davis.

"…the pictures come to you one by one and you look at them, some of them last longer than others…"

"I'm beginning to lose it, you're afraid of how weak you are, that you can't get her all back into you again and now the whole thing is going out of your body and it's more in your mind than your body, the pictures come to you one by one and you look at them, some of them last longer than others, you were together in a very white clean place, a coffee house, having breakfast together, and the place is so white that against it you can see her clearly, her blue eyes, her smile the colors of her clothes, even the print of the newspaper she's reading when she's not looking up at you, the light brown and red and gold of her hair when she's got her had down reading, the brown coffee, the brown rolls, all against that white table and those white plates and silver urns and silver knives and spoons, and against that quiet of the sleepy people in that room sitting alone at their tables with just come chinking and clattering off spoons and cups in saucers and some hushed voices her voice now and then rising and falling."

-from "Break It Down" by Lydia Davis.

"…her eyes seemed to her to be wide open behind the closed lids…"

"She thought about the opening and closing of her eyes: that the lids lifted to reveal a scene in all its depth and light and dark that had been there all along unseen by her, nothing to her since she did not see it, and then dropped again and made all that scene unseen again, and could anytime lift and show it and anytime close and hide it, though often, lying sleepless, her eye shut, she was so alert, so racing ahead with what she was thinking, that her eyes seemed to her to be wide open behind the closed lids, bugged, glassy, staring, though staring out only into the dark back of the closed lids."

-from "Liminal: The Little Man" by Lydia Davis.

USA Labor Day Weekend Supermarket Photo-Blogging!

"aisle 6. snack time: soft drinks and soft drinks"

Magazine Cover (detail):
"DIET VS. EXERCISE: WHICH WORKS BETTER?"

Analogically speaking...

Today, above the fold, the Washington Post's headline writers gave us a metaphorical harvest, flurry, road, and lightning rod.

Free. Jazz. (or, Sidney & her man Clovis)

May I suggest that you set aside an hour before clicking through to listen to Jason Moran's amazing (and free!) "Live: Time On The Quilts Of Gee's Bend" Suite?

From the NPR website:

Jason Moran, composer and piano
Alicia Hall Moran, vocals
Bill Frisell, guitar
Tarus Mateen, bass
Nasheet Waits, drums

"What if he was the city?"

"Perceptual capillaries filled the entire indoor space, superexfoliating, dully aching, all of them translucent, and all of them [his] own; or had the shopping center shrunk, in all that sick sensation of tininess, until it fit in [his] ear and reduced the thousand sounds to auditory dots, compressing them, in the shell of his cranium, into the pure white rushing of a lifeless ocean?"

-from page 216 of the Picador edition of "The Twenty-Seventh City," the 1988 novel by Jonathan Franzen.

"Disruption is overrated."

"'Disruption is overrated,' [Stone] said. 'If you tell good stories, the platforms are sort of beside the point. We made the most analog thing you can think of, a play at the Eugene O’Neill Theater, and it worked out as well as anything we have ever done.'"

-Matt Stone, quoted by David Carr today in the NewYork Times.

"I used to think I was alone. Well, I ain't alone no more." [Special Kickin' in 2013 Rockin' New Year's Day Repost!]

Tom Morello's song about his guitar is uplifting:

Is abuse of the null hypothesis a felony or a misdemeanor?

Just one sentence from "Activity Metabolism Measurements Made Easy in Metabolic Phenotyping" by Dr. J.R.B. Lighton:

"Thus the null hypothesis is not only falsified, it is smashed into smithereens that daintily and prettily drift down to the floor like dandelion seeds, except that they sparkle in the moonlight."

h/t: Dr. M.R. Laughlin

"Then the machine turned on and began to let out a very annoying array of loud, high-pitched tones that then repeated, like a car alarm cycle."

At a recent conference in Sonoma, California, I met the novelist Reif Larsen.

Most of the conference attendees were architects and designers, but the speakers were from very varied fields. I showed how magnetic resonance imaging can reveal the functional organization of our brains, even when we are simply resting; he read from his amazing debut novel, "The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet."

I thought I saw a twinkle in his eye when Reif told me that he had learned about functional MRI for his novel. And, a few days later, I read this in Chapter 14, wherein the novel's 12 year old protagonist undergoes an MRI scan, the sounds of which remind him of a car alarm:

Then she told me to just lie there and think of nothing, although I of course thought of car alarms. I hope this did not screw up her data sets: she would unknowingly show an MRI of "Boy Contemplating Nothing" to her colleagues at a big conference when in fact it was actually an MRI of "Boy Contemplating the Terrible Nature of Car Alarms."

"Back out of all this now too much for us ..."

At a recent conference in Sonoma, California, I met the poet Jill McDonough. 

Most of the conference attendees were architects and designers. I'd flown in from Maryland to show how magnetic resonance imaging can reveal the functional organization of the human brain; she'd flown in from Boston to read poetry at the closing dinner.

Please may I suggest, dear NeuroCooking friends, that you read this poem, then wipe your tears, and buy this book?

___________

[Note regarding post title: The opening of Robert Frost's Directive is repurposed as a line in "Blackwater" from the book "Where You Live."]

"How many do you have?"

In "The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity," playing through the end of the month at the Woolly Mammoth Theater in Washington, D.C., Chad Deity says:

"Chad Deity has four crispers in his fridge, and he doesn't even use a crisper."

I've never seen a better or more topical wrestling drama. If you're in the area, go! Tickets available.

Cars go bang! [NeuroCooking FlashBack]

If you get the chance to attend a county fair demolition derby, we suggest that you go. But bring earplugs.

[Photos: At the 2010 Delaware County (NY) Fair.]

"I feel / I feel like I am falling / and it feels / it feels like it's okay..."

"...we ain't nothing / but we are something..."

- from "Fall Apart with You" by Alejandro Escovedo (who will be appearing at Maxwell's in Hoboken on Monday!)