National Capital Area readers, today you may purchase tickets for the AFI Silver's Alfred Hitchcock retrospective, part II, at half-price. Those not familiar with the AFI Silver may be interested to learn that their café offers fine adult beverages, which you may take to your seat in the theater...
Showing posts with label twentieth-century fiction. Show all posts
Showing posts with label twentieth-century fiction. Show all posts
April 21, 2011
April 19, 2011
Half-Off Hitchcock, Again!
National Capital Area readers: If you use this link to the program for the AFI Silver's Hitchcock Retrospective, part II, and then click on any of those "buy tickets" buttons, you will be able to buy tickets for $5.50, which is half the usual price, this Thursday (4/21) only.
November 27, 2010
November 25, 2010
A Thanksgiving treat!
In honor of today's holiday of Thanksgiving*, the Library of America has made available Mark Twain's short story, Hunting the Deceitful Turkey, first published in Harper's Magazine in December 1906.
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*Today is Thanksgiving in the USA; Canadians celebrate Thanksgiving on the second Monday in October; our friends in the United Kingdom give thanks on July 4th.
November 16, 2010
Department of early twentieth-century irony.
In 1913, Marcel Proust paid for the publication of À la recherche du temps perdu, because he could not find a publisher who thought it worthwhile.
July 24, 2010
a matter of life and death
“I spent much of my youth soul-suckingly horrified by ‘Star Trek’ and not understanding why no one else could understand that it was a charnel ship manned by ghosts, because you die every time you teleport!”
August 24, 2009
and the last word is...
Just one sentence from Toni Bentley's review, in yesterday's New York Times, of "Hos, Hookers, Call Girls and Rent Boys: Professionals Writing on Life, Love, Money, and Sex", edited by David Henry Sterry and R. J. Martin, Jr:
This collection is a wonderful reminder that good writing is not about knowing words, grammar or Faulkner, but having that rare ability to tell the truth, an ability that education and sophistication often serve to conceal.
June 21, 2009
"His thoughts frightened him and he bolted into the house, hoping to leave them behind like a hat."
Our ability to measure things about the brain exceeds our understanding of how the brain makes the mind.
Maybe that's why that, at the Human Brain Mapping meeting in San Francisco this week, several groups are presenting work on sleep (example; example). Mostly, they're not studying sleep, per se. Rather, they're trying to exploit different states of mind, in order to figure out what some functional MRI brain signals might mean. The idea, roughly, is that because sleep is not consciousness, if something we measure looks the same in sleep and waking, then that something cannot reflect consciousness or mindfulness.
Of course, it's not quite that simple, because sleep is not just one thing; there are different kinds of sleep. And while slow-wave sleep is very different from the waking state, in REM sleep (also known as paradoxical sleep), brain activity is actually very much like that in the waking state. Or, as Nathanael West wrote in The Day of the Locust (1933):
His thoughts frightened him and he bolted into the house, hoping to leave them behind like a hat. He ran into his bedroom and threw himself down on the bed. He was simple enough to believe that people don't think while asleep.
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