Tag: thinking

~ Mark

Without the making of theories I am convinced there would be no observations.

–Charles Darwin.

austinkleon:

(Via Sam Anderson’s sentence of the week. Been thinking about “we see what we’re looking for” in terms of writing, and especially blogging. I find that when I set up a tag, often it’s a hopeful gesture, as if I’m saying, “Two or three makes a pattern. I’ll bet there’s more. I’ll name this so I can keep track of it and then I’ll keep an eye out for things to add.” And when I start a book, it’s, “There’s something to this. Let’s give this a name and start working on it.” Then the real gathering begins…)

Reminds me of a favorite Justin Wehr quote: “‘Organizing’ is really just an ugly way of saying ‘drawing connections’.” Or like with photo captions, you can’t help but be influenced by the labels put on things…

~ Mark

Before we learned to tell stories, we learned to read them. In other words, we learned to track. The first letter of the first word of the first recorded story was written–“printed”–not by us, but by an animal. These signs and symbols left in mud, sand, leaves, and snow represent proto-alphabets. Often smeared, fragmented, and confused by weather, time, and other animals, these cryptograms were life-and-death exercises in abstract thinking. […] The notion that it was animals who taught us to read may seem counterintuitive, but listening to skilled hunters analyze tiger sign is not that different from listening to literature majors deconstruct a short story. Both are sorting through minutiae, down to the specific placement and inflection of individual elements, in order to determine motive, subtext, and narrative arc.

John Vaillant in his excellent book, The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival. Great storytelling and lots to learn about tigers and Russia. I also liked this bit:

Evidence suggests that the reason tigers and their kind continue to capture our attention is because, over time, this has proven the most effective way to prevent them from capturing us. Maybe this is why it is impossible not to wonder what Markov and Khomenko saw and felt in their last moments–an experience so aberrant and alien to us, and yet strangely, deeply familiar: there is a part of us that still needs to know.

Purloined Letters: Are we too quick to denounce plagiarism?

~ Mark

A brief essay James R. Kincaid in The New Yorker, January 20, 1997. I like this bit, quoting Helen Keller:

It is certain that I cannot always distinguish my own thoughts from those I read, because what I read becomes the very substance and text of my mind.

That’s found in her autobiography, where she goes on to say:

Consequently, in nearly all that I write, I produce something which very much resembles the crazy patchwork I used to make when I first learned to sew. This patchwork was made of all sorts of odds and ends–pretty bits of silk and velvet; but the coarse pieces that were not pleasant to touch always predominated. Likewise my compositions are made up of crude notions of my own, inlaid with the brighter thoughts and riper opinions of the authors I have read. It seems to me that the great difficulty of writing is to make the language of the educated mind express our confused ideas, half feelings, half thoughts, when we are little more than bundles of instinctive tendencies. Trying to write is very much like trying to put a Chinese puzzle together. We have a pattern in mind which we wish to work out in words; but the words will not fit the spaces, or, if they do, they will not match the design. But we keep on trying because we know that others have succeeded, and we are not willing to acknowledge defeat.

Purloined Letters: Are we too quick to denounce plagiarism?

~ Mark

Ideas and views that differ from one’s own should not be targets for demolition, but whetstones for sharpening one’s own thoughts.

Philip Ball in the preface to his very good book, The Music Instinct.

Interview with Joyce Carol Oates | Arch Literary Journal

~ Mark

Who knew Joyce Carol Oates was a runner? On how running and dreaming are alike:

I think that when we’re stationary, we have a somewhat thickened sense of the ego or the “I,” and we’re just sort of self-conscious and aware of ourselves. But when we’re in motion, or when we’re in a dream, the “I” entity starts to dissolve. Some people, including myself, and possibly you, are capable of having dreams in which your own personality is really almost dissolved. You know, way, way down in the depths of the ocean there are creatures that are transparent. They’re like jellyfish, a lot of very transparent creatures. And I was thinking it’s almost analogous to the human experience of sleep, where when you’re really, really deep into sleep, your own physical self is often not even there. It’s like you’re transparent. And, it may be a process that we just will never understand, descending somehow deep into the primitive brain – like the brain almost at the brain stem – and away from the consciousness. And, somehow running replicates that, I think. I would think that if you were running very fast, if you were in an instinctive situation where you were terrified – say you were being pursued, and your life was in danger – you would be flooded with adrenaline. I would think probably the “I” or ego was almost gone, that you’re just running like a physical entity, the way a soldier might just start [running], or a boxer, or someone like that. But when you’re writing, there’s … as I say, we have this more thickened or more solid sense of the self, because it’s usually in some stationary situation with social definitions.

Interview with Joyce Carol Oates | Arch Literary Journal

~ Mark

The problem with clichés is not that they contain false ideas, but rather that they are superficial articulations of very good ones. The sun is often on fire at sunset and the moon discreet, but if we keep saying this every time we encounter a sun or a moon, we will end up believing that this is the last rather than the first word to be said on the subject. Clichés are detrimental insofar as they inspire us to believe that they adequately describe a situation while merely grazing its surface. And if this matters, it is because the way we speak is ultimately linked to the way we feel, because how we describe the world must at some level reflect how we first experience it.

Alain de Botton. Wehr in the World: The problem with clichés.
~ Mark ~ 2 Comments

Advice from Hal Varian’s monograph, How to Build an Economic Model in Your Spare Time [pdf], most of which applies to things not related to economics:

  1. Look for ideas in the world, not in the journals.
  2. First make your model as simple as possible, then generalize it.
  3. Look at the literature later, not sooner.
  4. Model your paper after your seminar.
  5. Stop when you’ve made your point.