Well, that’s it, i’ve finally moved out of Carrot Bay. House-sitting in Towers now. Oh joy of joys, this house comes with a new computer and always-on high-speed internet. Surfed my mind into submission last night, listening to kexp.org. Sometime last night i recalled that i could listen to CBC in the same fashion… and signed on just in time to catch the late-night broadcasts of english-language forgein public radio broadcasts (4-hour time difference here).
Tonight i’ve signed on early enough to catch some regular west-coast CBC afternoon broadcasts. Voices from home… a strange comfort, this.
December 14, 2005
c…b…c…
October 17, 2005
mind over mind
Another blogger i check from time to time wrote some lines about the connection of sense and memory, and i sent along a reccomendation for Diane Ackerman’s great book, “A Natural History of The Senses“; essentially a collection of essays on sense and sensiality. My favourite passages from that book were the bits of scent and memory, and on synthaesthia. My first indroduction to synthaesthsia was via an episode of CBC Radio’s “Ideas”, and it came to influence some of my own writing ideas. i don’t suppose that i exhibit much synthaesthia myself, although i’ve noted some sense/perception issues that are probably more linked to AS than anything else. For instance, most numbers evoke a definate character or sex in my mind; 1 is young and neuter, 2 is an adolescent female, 3 is a male baby, 4 is a young teenage boy, 5 is a middle-aged housewife, 6 is a conservative 50-ish male, 7 is a outgoing late-teen young woman, 8 is a quite late-20’s woman, 9 is a robust late 40’s gentleman, 10 is a bookish male college student, 11 is a an early-30’s woman, and 12 is a 70’s matriarchal grandmother. Numbers beyond 12 start to get muddled; some show characters of their own, while others are composites of their digits. If i look over a string of single digits, relationships often arise; typically, 2, 3, 4 and 7 are the children of 5 and 6, while 7 and 8 are friends, or at least aquaintances. With no effort, a telephone number becomes a row of people standing together. As far back as i can remember, these numbers have had the same sex and character in my mind, and i have no idea where it comes from. Curiously, it doesn’t work the other way. Scents and flavours evoke colours for me, but i don’t suppose any moreso than most everyone else. Wikipedia also now has a great Asperger Syndrome entry; one of the more well laid-out and comprehensive ones i’ve yet read. Synthaesthia has been linked to cases of autistic spectrum disorders, although there’s no firm connection. Still, all very fascinating, at least to me.
website o’ the day
…is Ruthless Reviews. Crap-cutting bile, for the most part, but here and there a salient and worthy nugget. Reading other people bitch makes me feel better, as long as it’s humourous and not too blackly serious. This site fits the bill.
October 14, 2005
elitism among the corpses
Heard some interesting Cooper Anderson comments, about the bodies in New Orleans. He talked about having been in war-torn foreign countries, especially Rwanda, and having seen the bodies of the dead out in the open, left to decay and disappear along roadways and other public places. He went on to say that he never ever expected to see such things in the US. Why is it that the typical first-world citizen is so shocked to discover that they’re subject to death and decay just the same as the rest of the (impoverished) world?
The implicit attitude seems not one of just “Our standard of living and wealth ought to keep us free of such things”, but more one of “That stuff simply doesn’t happen here”. It’s utterly elitist to assume that just because you live in the first world, you’re immune to death, and failing that, that your corpse will be immediatly cleaned up and “properly” disposed of. i find it weird that people are impacted less by death itself than by where it occurs.
Get over it, people! Death happens to all of us, high or low. Everything dies, decays, and dissolves into nothingness as part of the most obvious lifecycle. Not many folks i know of are still into mummification; no matter how much you respect the dead, and no matter what your spirutal beliefs or views regarding an afterlife, there’s no denying that bodies are just fertilizer in the end, and we’ll all go that way eventually.
Death and decay isn’t something that just happens to the impoverished or unfortunate. As my good friend Mose Malone (a great BVI elder) waxed one day, discussing racism with me; “You cut off you arm, and I cut off mine. We put out on de fence, and soon come they both stink just de same.”
