Rebecca Blood linked to “books too good to put down”; this, a librarian and mother’s compilation of books to read aloud, “books that you need a child on your lap to fully appreciate”, is one of the subsections. I believe that, even on my deathbed, one of the things I will recall with the greatest relish is the unending pleasure of reading to my children (and hopefully theirs). Try it out…

Josh Marshall is reporting that Dean has crashed and burned in Iowa. (Obviously,) more later…

Amy’s Robot sez, in exploring the historical significance of the Iowa caucuses: “Oh, well, maybe the Democrats will have better luck in 2036 when the government considers legalizing the Democratic party again.”

“On Jan. 2nd, 2004, NASA’s Stardust spacecraft approached Comet Wild 2 and flew into a storm. Flurries of comet dust pelted the craft. At least half a dozen grains moving faster than bullets penetrated Stardust’s outermost defenses. The craft’s 16 rocket engines struggled to maintain course while a collector, about the size of a tennis racquet, caught some of the dust for return to Earth two years hence.

All that was expected.

Then came the surprise. It happened when Stardust passed by the core of the comet, only 236 km distant, and photographed it using a navigation camera. The images were intended primarily to keep the spacecraft on course. They also revealed a worldlet of startling beauty.” —NASA

“Israel’s ambassador to Sweden has been questioned about attacking an artwork showing a Palestinian suicide bomber.” —BBC

Yes, milk…: “It is the only substance designed specifically by evolution to nourish mammals, and scientists have recently become aware of its various, long-term health-promotional features.

A recent conference on the future uses of milk was told about research showing how proteins in it lower blood pressure, prevent cancer and improve immune function. Milk has also been shown to speed the uptake of hard-to-absorb nutrients such as iron, promote the growth of good stomach bacteria, fatten infants without generally turning them obese and, in its cheese form, act as kind of natural tooth-decay inhibitor.

‘The problem is that we don’t know in molecular detail how milk is able to provide most of these benefits,’ Prof. German says. ‘Without knowing these, it is impossible to manage them.’

And thus was born the idea for the Milk Genome Project.” —Globe and Mail

An exquisite Oliver Sacks essay summarizes current approaches to the problem of consciousness and the emerging consensus that it represents the melding of a “collection of moments”, in both a personal and a physiological sense, into an illusion of continuity. —The New York Review of Books

Related? What has been described as the ‘narrativist orthodoxy’, that the self is constructed out of the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, is disputed by philosopher Galen Strawson in a review of preeminent cognitive psychologist Jerome Bruner’s Making Stories.

“Is the narrativity view a profound and universal insight into the human condition? It’s a partial truth at best, true enough for some, completely false for others. There is a deep divide in our species. On one side, the narrators: those who are indeed intensely narrative, self-storying, Homeric, in their sense of life and self, whether they look to the past or the future. On the other side, the non-narrators: those who live life in a fundamentally non-storytelling fashion, who may have little sense of, or interest in, their own history, nor any wish to give their life a certain narrative shape. In between lies the great continuum of mixed cases.” —Guardian.UK

He suspects that only ‘narrative types’ believe in the ‘narrativist orthodoxy. As a psychotherapist (although also, I concede, obviously a narrative type), I doubt it. The premise of the work I do every day depends on helping people reshape the stories they tell about themselves and in turn the notion that ‘narrative truth’ is different than ‘historical truth’ about one’s life (if, in fact, one can ascertain what the ‘historical truth’ is, which I profoundly doubt). Strawson has a distorted notion of ‘the narrativity view’, characterizing it as “the ethical-psychological hypothesis that we are, and ought to be, constantly engaged in making a tale out of ourselves and our lives.” But the idea that our identity is a product of the stories we tell about who we are does not demand constant or conscious engagement in the process! Even those who have no interest in their history or in giving their lives a certain narrative shape are bound by the stories they tell to constitute themselves; only they are not conscious of it, of the contingent nature of their beliefs about who they are, as the ‘narrators’ are. If Strawson claims that this is not so, he will have to mount a more far-reaching challenge to the notion of the unconscious itself, which he has not done. Even if Freud was wrong about the nature of the dynamics that underlies unconscious process, the discovery of the unconscious is arguably what has made self-reflection possible and is the basis for all self-reflective efforts to reshape onself. There are several frames of reference — the Buddhist, the orthdox behaviorist, and the neurocentric — in which self-consciousness is either an illusion or an epiphenomenon, but except for radical adherents of such paradigms, ‘narrators’ and ‘non-narrators’ alike have a remarkably similar commonsense notion of the ‘self’ at the core of their identity.

It becomes clear late in the essay why Strawson is afraid of the unconscious. He seems profoundly alarmed at the prospect that the truth about one’s life may inevitably be relative, as this concluding passage from the essay shows:

It is well known that telling and retelling one’s past leads to changes, smoothings, enhancements, shifts away from the facts; and recent research has shown that this is not just a human foible but a neurophysiological inevitability. Every conscious recall brings an alteration, and the implication is plain: the more you recall, retell, narrate yourself, the further you risk moving away from accurate self-understanding, from the truth of your being. Sartre is wrong to say that storying oneself is a universal trait, but he’s right that it is extremely common, and he is surely right, contrary to the tide of current opinion in the humanities, that the less you do it the better.

He has little to offer in the face of this profound alarm except unreasoned faith that there must be a non-narrative truth about our lives if we only we will refrain from departing from that truth by reshaping it. You would think that a philosopher would have greater tolerance for a notion such as the impossibility of objectivity, and something more reasoned to offer in the face of such a threat.

Two medical marijuana patients face potential life sentences on federal drug charges after being turned over by local authorities. The two men, both 53, have doctor’s recommendations to grow and consume medical marijuana under California’s 1996 Compassionate Use Act (Prop. 215). The prosecutor diverted the defendants’ attorneys by taking them out of the courtroom for a conference, only to announce that she was dropping the state charges because at that moment they were being taken into custody in the courtroom on a federal indictment. On the other hand, the raid on their home had netted more than 60 lbs. of marijuana, leading authorities to doubt they fell within the personal use provisions of California’s law. The defendants, however, argue that the case was turned over to federal jurisdiction when it became clear that the state prosecutor was losing the case in court. —AlterNet

“Today, more than twice as many young people apply to MTV’s ‘Real World’ show than to Harvard… Clearly, to a post-cold-war generation of Americans, the prospect of living under surveillance is no longer scary but cool.” —New York Times By and large, are the people alarmed by the erosion of our privacy the same ones who are appalled by reality television? They coalesce in me, for one; I have never watched, and never will, any reality t.v. (and I would not even if I were more than the minimal t.v. viewer that I am). I am reminded of the adage that people get the leaders they deserve.

How do the members of a string quartet play together and tour together year in, year out, without killing each other? Is it the sheer delight of a dream job or a constant indulgence in masochism? Is there a relationship between the quality of the music and the quality of the relationships among the quartet members? Cellist David Waterman spills the beans. —Guardian.UK Knowing little about the inner workings of quartets, I have been fascinated by the simple fact of the longevity of many of the groupings, and wondered if quertets stay together for decades because they are illustrious, or become illustrious because of their longevity.

“The number of people downloading music illegally surged a month after recording companies began suing hundreds of music fans, a marketing research firm said Thursday.

The number of U.S. households downloading music from peer-to-peer networks rose 6 percent in October and 7 percent in November after a six-month decline, according to a study of computer use in 10,000 U.S. households conducted by The NPD Group.” —Wired

“As baseball tries to figure out what to do with its degenerate superstar, Pete Rose, it ought to take a look at how art museums conduct business…

Museums make no moral judgment about their artists. Just imagine the personal lives of the artists who are represented at museums. We know Jackson Pollock was a drunk. We know Picasso had no regard for women artists, and he said women were either “goddesses or doormats.” Heck, if you believe Patricia Cornwell’s recent book, museum-worthy artist Walter Sickert was Jack the Ripper.

But museums know they shouldn’t be presenting the artists as good people, only their work as beautiful or important.”

Spalding Gray’s disappearance and the suspicions that he has suicided prompt a reexamination of the notion of the tormented artist. Are writers more prone to depression, or do we just hear about it? “No one ever hears about melancholic farmers; they don’t publish their stories.” Are tormented souls more likely to become artists? In the celebrated study of the issue, venerable psychiatrist Nancy Andreason found that mood disorders were far more prevalent among Iowa Writers’ Workshop participants than the general public. The direction of the causal link, however, remains puzzling despite being pondered at length by mental health experts. Ny own perspective is that both mood disorders (mania and depression) and thought disorders (schizophrenia and other psychoses) decrease rather than stimulate functionality and output in most sufferers, at least the ones I treat. Art by tortured souls is likely to be despite rather than due to their torment and represents the triumph of their other gifts over their suffering. Creative output may be a a strategy to bind and cope with distress in some instances… or in most, which is why the cost-cutting measure I see in most systems of mental health care delivery of eliminating art therapy as a treatment modality is so painful to watch. Not only may the artist have a transformative relationship to her distress but to her culture, that she is in a sense of but not in — making a metastatement on cultural and social norms, morés and suppositions. Mental illness too can be considered from the standpoint not of intrapsychic but sociocultural alienation and distress, so that the relationship between creativity and madness must be considered from that sphere as well. Is societal alienation and disengagement from cultural norms a cause or a consequence of mental illness? Another thing often debated without a simple answer… I also think it is naive to speak generically of ‘creativity’ as if there were only one kind. Psychological studies of intelligence have veered off from the classical notion of a unitary intelligence to the idea of a multiplicity of discrete intellectual (and emotional) skills. Similarly, I think, with creative abilities. Different forms of creativity will, almost inevitably, have differing relationships with psychological torment and cultural alienation. Addendum: John Perry Barlow, a friend of Spalding Gray, contemplates the likelihood he is gone.

Harvard animal cognition expert Marc Hauser and associates tout the results of this recent study of theirs as identifying a ‘fundamental bottleneck on animal thought’, explaining why humans can string sentences together and other animals cannot. In the paradigm, monkeys read simple sentences would look at the speaker when the sentence was ungrammatical. However, with more complex sentence structures such as ‘if…then’ constructions, they could not tell the difference between what was well-formed and ill-formed grammatically. But does this really explain anything about the origins of the fundamental differences between how humans and other animals communicate with one another? Not that I can see — it is just one reflection of the difference in the level of complexity of the symbolic manipulation different species are capable of, along with other differences cited in the article, such as capacity for abstract representation (which seems to me a more fundamental difference, although admittedly related to capacity for complex grammatical structures) and potential vocabulary size. It might be illuminating to use fMRI, a technology of which FmH readers know I am quite fond, to watch what is happening in animal ‘language processing’ as it compares with human. —Yahoo! News

Stephen Hawking’s children are seeking the second police investigation in four years based on fears he is being abused recurrently by 53-year old second wife Elaine, his former nurse (and previously married to the man who made him his renowned voice synthesizing machinery) for whom he left his first wife, mother of his children, in 1990. The 62-year old Hawking has periodically presented to the emergency ward of his local hospital with mysterious injuries about which he refuses to elaborate and has threatened police investigating such concerns with harassment suits. Last summer, someone left Hawking stranded in his wheelchair in his garden on the hottest day of the year. He suffered heatstroke and sunburn at that time. He is now hospitalized with an unrelated pneumonia but reportedly shows evidence of fresh bruising. Police are waiting to interview him. His children and his adoring private duty nurses suggest his injuries may represent ‘Munchausen’s by proxy’, a psychiatric condition in which someone induces medical problems in another to draw attention and sympathy to themselves. —Mirror.co.uk

Those diagnosed with Munchausen’s by proxy are generally reviled for harming those dependent upon them. often their children, for twisted needs; I think of them as the ‘short eyes’ of the mental health field. The article notes that Hawking’s spurned first wife Jane ‘was left with a deep loathing of Elaine, who she describes as “manipulative” ‘. What is conspicuously missing from the article is any detail about Elaine’s comportment and what secondary gain she might derive from harming Hawking, if she is. In the absence of such detail, I am left wondering if the somewhat gratuitous mention of Munchausen’s is anything more than a disparaging epithet (which is certainly one of the ways we see psychiatric diagnoses bandied about in this society!) from a family with apparent enmity for her. If it is she who is harming him, it might more prosaically be considered a case of spousal abuse; Hawking’s offense at the investigations and insistence that his private life is his own affair are more consistent with the typical battered spouse syndrome than Munchausen’s by proxy, where the abuse is more subtle, simulates medical conditions rather than overt ‘torture’, and the victim is not aware that something is being done to them (if they really suspect Munchausen’s. for example, they should investigate whether the victimizer has in some subtle way induced the pneumonia rather than, more clumsily, bumps and bruises…). Sordid and tragic in either case. Of note, in my state of Massachusetts at least there exists a disabled person’s protection commission which is empowered to investigate allegations of abuse regardless of the victim’s wishes, in recognition of the often complicated allegiance the victim has to her/his abuser. In a better-safe-than-sorry manner, the threshold for involving the DPPC is quite low. Can British readers of FmH tell me if similar protections of disabled and dependent exist in the UK?

William Safire tells us how to watch the State of the Union address in an election year, rightly pointing out it will be the campaign event of the week. —New York Times op-ed What he doesn’t acknowledge is that it will be Bush’s (or, more properly, the Bush speechwriters’) last SotUA.

A book of bad words (1996; out of print, but still available from Maledicta Press): “This entertaining and informative book is a compendium of colorful language in all its forms. A clever mixture of scholarly and popular, witty and serious essays and glossaries, it features insults, slurs, curse words, and blasphemous expressions from dozens of languages and cultures, including the worst Catalan, Italian, and Russian insults and blasphemies, medieval vulgarities, filthy limericks, slang terms for private parts, and thousands of other ribald delights.”

A book of bad words (1996; out of print, but still available from Maledicta Press): “This entertaining and informative book is a compendium of colorful language in all its forms. A clever mixture of scholarly and popular, witty and serious essays and glossaries, it features insults, slurs, curse words, and blasphemous expressions from dozens of languages and cultures, including the worst Catalan, Italian, and Russian insults and blasphemies, medieval vulgarities, filthy limericks, slang terms for private parts, and thousands of other ribald delights.”