That's it, that's all, there ain't no more!

Up, Down.

Well, this is it. Smoking is next, already underway actually.

I posted an article from the latest Atlantic yesterday, Is Google Making Us Stupid? by Nicholas Carr. The author seems to be more affected by the phenomenon than I have been so far, but I am very conscious of it, and my mind (he says 'brain' but I am not as sure of my brain as I am of my mind) has certainly changed with using the Internet so much, and not for the better neither.

From that article:
"Dave, stop. Stop, will you? Stop, Dave. Will you stop, Dave?” So the supercomputer HAL pleads with the implacable astronaut Dave Bowman in a famous and weirdly poignant scene toward the end of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Bowman, having nearly been sent to a deep - space death by the malfunctioning machine, is calmly, coldly disconnecting the memory circuits that control its artificial brain. “Dave, my mind is going,” HAL says, forlornly. “I can feel it. I can feel it.”

Later on I will see if I can say anything about this.

Meanwhile there is Watermelon Girl to look at ... she does take off all of her clothes, but nothing so explicit as to solve the riddle :-) Which riddle is that? Well ...

1. Having Cancer, and Finding a Personality, Ruth Pennebaker, August 11. This could be called 'Liminality 101.'

2. Harmony and the Dream, David Brooks, August 11. He has got it entirely wrong. Happens to be there for the games and finds his typically limited American scope slightly expanded and begins to think - and gets it wrong. But, the process and the kind of statement he comes up with could be the subject of a companion course 'Communitas 101.'







A friend, a girlfriend in fact, sent me a picture of the latest craze - Andressa Soares, the Dançarina do Créu. Créu is a fad dance ... like the Twist or the Loc-o-motion, but connected with a single pop-song, Funk, also called Créu, by a one-hit wonder - and even though I spent a good part of the day snagging these photographs, I still do not know his name. :-) They call her Mulher Melancia / Watermelon Woman, or Garota Melancia / Watermelon Girl. The picture she sent was #10 from the top - a remarkable rump by any standard. John Steinbeck lamented that, "the thighs of women have lost their clutch," I think it was Steinbeck (not going to Google it right away either, maybe later), and though I can't speak for their clutch, the woman certainly has thighs! and a glorious bunda to boot! She is already the ex-Dançarina do Créu, having moved on and up (I suppose it is up) to Playboy and other pursuits. Maybe it will come to be known as The Return to the Substantial. There is an antecedent, Preta Gil being Queen of the Drummers for Mangueira in the last Carnaval - but, though she is substantial, Preta definitely does not smile as much, (but is nonetheless waaaaay more interesting, that's what happens with these scions of the middle & upper-middle classes ... they get interesting :-).

Creu / Créu turns out to be favela slang for 'fuck' - and Andressa turns out to be fatter and slacker and piggier in video than in the gracefully re-touched photos in Playboy and so on that I picked up - rumours of liposuction (?) oh well ...


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Having Cancer, and Finding a Personality, Ruth Pennebaker, August 11.

They say cancer changes you. They may be right. When I found out I had breast cancer 12 years ago, I became a comedian.

Not the kind anyone paid to see. Just the kind who lurked around hospital corridors and examination rooms offering offbeat opinions, wiseacre remarks, outrageous commentary.

To my oncologist — a short, brisk woman who informed me my tumor had been “fairly aggressive” — I complained about the title of the pamphlet she had given me, “Chemotherapy and You.” I said I’d prefer it if the title were “Chemotherapy and Somebody Else.”

I complained, too, about the little marketing-friendly write-up that listed her family and her hobbies. The family was fine. But hobbies? I didn’t want a doctor who had time for hobbies. I wanted her to spend all her waking hours focusing on curing cancer, particularly the type indicated on my own nasty little pathology report.

To everyone else, especially the people wearing white coats and carrying big needles, I announced I was writing a book about cancer. I tried to look rabidly litigious whenever I spoke.

In the midst of all this — the comebacks, the wisecracks, the flapping mouth — I had a dim idea of what I was doing. I wanted to be someone, a recognizable personality, a full-blooded, memorable human being, and not just a cancer patient. I had already lost the person I used to be, that healthy, energetic 45-year-old woman. I wasn’t capable of losing more.

Other friends had their own spins on claiming individuality in the cancer world. One, a psychiatrist, questioned every medical decision that was made. Another, never timid to begin with, terrorized the technicians. “You get one chance to stick me and find a vein,” she told them. “If you can’t do that, find me somebody who can.”

I also took comfort from Anatole Broyard’s beautifully written, intermittently hilarious account of his own cancer treatments in “Intoxicated by My Illness,” published in 1992, two years after his death from prostate cancer. Mr. Broyard, a book critic and editor at The New York Times, had fired a prominent surgeon because he hadn’t liked the way the man wore a cap in the operating room. It looked, he wrote, “like a condom stuck on his head.”

The way Mr. Broyard saw it, : “A critical illness is like a great permission, an authorization or absolving. It’s all right for a threatened man to be romantic, even crazy, if he feels like it. All your life you think you have to hold back your craziness, but when you’re sick you can let it go in all its garish colors.”

Yes! That’s what I was experiencing, too. Those garish colors, that craziness and freedom, that painfully stark clarity about what was important and what was not. It was as if, I sometimes felt, I had lived my life half asleep. But now, now, I was wide awake.

As my treatments wore on, though — the catheter in my chest, the chemotherapy, the anti-nausea drugs, the baldness, the fatigue, the radiation — my high spirits and sense of clarity began to wane. One night at a play, I noticed a woman across the room. She was attractive, middle-age, vibrant. Completely unlike me, as I had become over the past few months. I huddled in my seat, feeling spent and empty and old.

The last time I visited my oncologist after my treatments were over, I felt lost. The image that kept recurring in my mind was that someone with a gigantic pair of tweezers had picked me up, shaken me and tossed me back down. Now what?

“I feel as if I want to ask you,” I told my oncologist, “how to live.”

She told me I could live as I had before — working, taking care of kids, exercising, traveling, enjoying life. Anything, really. I could lead a normal life.

As I left her office, I realized how completely I’d lost myself over the past several months. I needed to be reminded who I was.

Can you tell me who I am now? I never asked my oncologist that question. Probably she would have thought I was joking, the way I always was.


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Harmony and the Dream, David Brooks, August 11.

Chengdu, China: The world can be divided in many ways — rich and poor, democratic and authoritarian — but one of the most striking is the divide between the societies with an individualist mentality and the ones with a collectivist mentality.

This is a divide that goes deeper than economics into the way people perceive the world. If you show an American an image of a fish tank, the American will usually describe the biggest fish in the tank and what it is doing. If you ask a Chinese person to describe a fish tank, the Chinese will usually describe the context in which the fish swim.

These sorts of experiments have been done over and over again, and the results reveal the same underlying pattern. Americans usually see individuals; Chinese and other Asians see contexts.

When the psychologist Richard Nisbett showed Americans individual pictures of a chicken, a cow and hay and asked the subjects to pick out the two that go together, the Americans would usually pick out the chicken and the cow. They’re both animals. Most Asian people, on the other hand, would pick out the cow and the hay, since cows depend on hay. Americans are more likely to see categories. Asians are more likely to see relationships.

You can create a global continuum with the most individualistic societies — like the United States or Britain — on one end, and the most collectivist societies — like China or Japan — on the other.

The individualistic countries tend to put rights and privacy first. People in these societies tend to overvalue their own skills and overestimate their own importance to any group effort. People in collective societies tend to value harmony and duty. They tend to underestimate their own skills and are more self-effacing when describing their contributions to group efforts.

Researchers argue about why certain cultures have become more individualistic than others. Some say that Western cultures draw their values from ancient Greece, with its emphasis on individual heroism, while other cultures draw on more on tribal philosophies. Recently, some scientists have theorized that it all goes back to microbes. Collectivist societies tend to pop up in parts of the world, especially around the equator, with plenty of disease-causing microbes. In such an environment, you’d want to shun outsiders, who might bring strange diseases, and enforce a certain conformity over eating rituals and social behavior.

Either way, individualistic societies have tended to do better economically. We in the West have a narrative that involves the development of individual reason and conscience during the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, and then the subsequent flourishing of capitalism. According to this narrative, societies get more individualistic as they develop.

But what happens if collectivist societies snap out of their economic stagnation? What happens if collectivist societies, especially those in Asia, rise economically and come to rival the West? A new sort of global conversation develops.

The opening ceremony in Beijing was a statement in that conversation. It was part of China’s assertion that development doesn’t come only through Western, liberal means, but also through Eastern and collective ones.

The ceremony drew from China’s long history, but surely the most striking features were the images of thousands of Chinese moving as one — drumming as one, dancing as one, sprinting on precise formations without ever stumbling or colliding. We’ve seen displays of mass conformity before, but this was collectivism of the present — a high-tech vision of the harmonious society performed in the context of China’s miraculous growth.

If Asia’s success reopens the debate between individualism and collectivism (which seemed closed after the cold war), then it’s unlikely that the forces of individualism will sweep the field or even gain an edge.

For one thing, there are relatively few individualistic societies on earth. For another, the essence of a lot of the latest scientific research is that the Western idea of individual choice is an illusion and the Chinese are right to put first emphasis on social contexts.

Scientists have delighted to show that so-called rational choice is shaped by a whole range of subconscious influences, like emotional contagions and priming effects (people who think of a professor before taking a test do better than people who think of a criminal). Meanwhile, human brains turn out to be extremely permeable (they naturally mimic the neural firings of people around them). Relationships are the key to happiness. People who live in the densest social networks tend to flourish, while people who live with few social bonds are much more prone to depression and suicide.

The rise of China isn’t only an economic event. It’s a cultural one. The ideal of a harmonious collective may turn out to be as attractive as the ideal of the American Dream.

It’s certainly a useful ideology for aspiring autocrats.


From Lennie Cone,
"Your servant here, he has been told
To say it clear, to say it cold:
It's over, it ain't going any further.
And now the wheels of heaven stop,
You feel the devil's riding crop.
Get ready for the future - it is murder."

A-and finally, in the immortal (almost) words of Cheech & Chong,
"Dave's not here man."


Be well.    ("Smoke 'em if ya got 'em, raaar raaar." Denis Leary, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9)



Down.