Photo by Marcin Ryczek, via @brainpicker on Twitter.
Academy of American Poets. A lovely poster, though the Rilke quote is the surest recipe I can think of for really bad verse.
So the argument about the adaptiveness of stories, in Pinker, Gottschall, and Boyd alike, goes something like this: we are evolutionarily wired to be receptive to stories because receptiveness to stories gave our ancestors reproductive advantages. Those who could think narratively had a fund of virtual experience that they could use to anticipate problems, or to respond more constructively to them when they arrived unexpectedly. This led to longer lives and more offspring, offspring who inherited whatever cognitive equipment is associated with story-sensitivity, which over several thousand years produced our cultural environment, positively awash in every kind of narrative.It is in light of this account that Gottschall affirms that “Story is the counterforce to social disorder, the tendency of things to fall apart. Story is the center without which the rest cannot hold.” As someone who has devoted much of his life to reading, teaching, and writing about stories, this account certainly captures my attention—but is it true? And how would we know if it is true? Presumably not all people love stories equally; some, I imagine, are quite indifferent to stories. Are those people less likely to pass along their genes than the story-lovers among us? Imagine a society made up almost wholly of story-disdainers: would such a society fail to thrive? How might we correlate love-of-story with other traits we today have inherited from our distant ancestors, for instance, selfishness, or altruism, or competitiveness?
Lindisfarne Gospels
This is one of the very few pages on which Eadfrith’s original 7th century script can be admired almost entirely free of the gloss added by Aldred in the 10th century. Clear and black, very assured and regular in form, this script, designed for formal use, is known technically as insular majuscule. The page gives details of particular passages in St John which are to be read on specific feast days.
This overachiever’s mentality has also determined campus attitudes toward sex. Few notice the connection, because the end result—sexual permissiveness—is the same as it was in the sixties and seventies, when the theme of campus culture was not overachievement but liberation, and the eighties and early nineties, when it was postmodernism and the overthrow of all value judgments. The notorious Yale institution known as Sex Week—a biennial series of sex toy demonstrations, student lingerie shows, and lectures by pornographers—wouldn’t have been out of place in either of these eras. Consequently, Yale’s sexual culture is often mistaken for mere depravity by outside observers who assume that it is just another byproduct of moral relativism.It would be more accurate to say that Yale students treat sex as one more arena in which to excel, an opportunity not just to connect but to impress. Every amateur sonneteer secretly believes his verse to be as good as the United States poet laureate’s, and every undergraduate programmer suspects his code rivals the best in Silicon Valley. It’s not very different for Yale students to say that, if pornography is the gold standard of sexual prowess, then that is the standard to which they must aspire.
Imaginary View, landscapes by Rachel Thomas and Dan Tobin Smith (via things)
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Bill Callahan, “Riding for the Feeling”
Dear Unthinkable Mind students,Why memorize poetry?
“The best argument for verse memorization may be that it provides us with knowledge of a qualitatively and physiologically different variety: you take the poem inside you, into your brain chemistry if not your blood, and you know it at a deeper, bodily level than if you simply read it off a screen. Robson puts the point succinctly: “If we do not learn by heart, the heart does not feel the rhythms of poetry as echoes or variations of its own insistent beat.”
Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2013/01/why-we-should-memorize.html#ixzz2JHJp2MNRSpecial thanks to Unthinkable Mind’s AMYGDALA for bringing this to our attention.