To Dream in Different Cultures

"When Doug Hollan arrived on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi for his anthropology dissertation fieldwork in a rice farming village, his Toraja neighbors wanted to take turns sleeping with him and his wife.

The rural Toraja almost never sleep alone. They sleep in wood frame houses with little furniture and flimsy room dividers, and they sleep on the floor together in groups, sharing blankets and huddling close for warmth. And so the Toraja have “punctuated” sleep. They wake often as others turn and get up in the night, or when a child calls out or another adult can’t sleep and starts to chat. Mr. Hollan never heard anyone complain about this."

To Dream in Different Cultures
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/14/opinion/luhrmann-to-dream-in-different-cultures.html?_r=2

Literature

"....individuals who often read fiction appear to be better able to understand other people, empathize with them and view the world from their perspective."

Reading Literature Makes Us Smarter and Nicer

"Deep reading" is vigorous exercise for the brain and increases our real-life capacity for empathy

http://ideas.time.com/2013/06/03/why-we-should-read-literature/

Return

“Drinking is an emotional thing. It joggles you out of the standardism of everyday life, out of everything being the same. It yanks you out of your body and your mind and throws you against the wall. I have the feeling that drinking is a form of suicide where you’re allowed to return to life and begin all over the next day. It’s like killing yourself, and then you’re reborn. I guess I’ve lived about ten or fifteen thousand lives now.”

Charles Bukowski, An interview with London Magazine,
Dec 1974 – Jan 1975

The Eyebrows of Belonging

The Big Picture
News Stories in Photographs

Immigration: http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2011/06/immigration.html

"...All migrants leave their pasts behind, although some try to pack it into bundles and boxes-but on the journey something seeps out of the treasured mementoes and old photographs, until even their owners fail to recognize them, because it is the fate of migrants to be stripped of history, to stand naked amidist the scorn of strangers upon whom they see rich clothing, the brocades of continuity and the eyebrows of belonging..."

'Shame'
Salman Rushdie

L’Asie en notes et en motocyclette

http://voyages.liberation.fr/voir-et-lire/l-asie-en-notes-et-en-motocyclette

«Vingt-deux ans d’Asie, en chemin de fer, en chars à buffles, cahotant sur de grosses roues de bois peint, à motocyclette, à dos d’éléphant, en prahu, en catamaran, à cheval, en Rolls Royce - elle ne m’appartenait pas - ou en camion parmi les choux et les sacs d’oignons.» Gabrielle Wittkop n’a ménagé ni sa peine, ni ses différentes montures pour sillonner cette Asie qui exerce sur elle un pouvoir d’attraction irrésistible. Elle y est souvent allée pour des reportages parus dans le Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.

Les carnets que publie Verticales ne sont cependant pas une recension d’articles mais bien une sélection des notes qu’elle prenait au jour le jour, au gré de ses vagabondages tropicaux.

Née en France, Gabrielle Ménardeau, lesbienne, mariée à Justus Wittkop en 1946, écrivain déserteur antinazi et homosexuel, s’installe avec son mari à Bad Hombourg, près de Francfort. Elle écrit des romans vénéneux (le Nécrophile, Sérénissime Assassinat ou les Rajah blancs), qui ne seront remarqués qu’avec le travail des Editions Verticales. Elle ne goûte que brièvement le succès littéraire, se donnant la mort à 82 ans, en décembre 2002 après avoir appris qu’elle souffrait d’un cancer. Elle envoie un dernier message à son éditeur : «Je vais mourir comme j’ai vécu : en homme libre.» .......................

Does more information mean we know less?

Brilliant article, an unusual perspective, contrasts I did not expect at all.

If you want to listen to it rather than read, here it is, just 10 mins: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00xb105 ('The Point of View' on BBC iPlayer is a great way to listen to articles - some rest for sore eyes)

A Point of View: Does more information mean we know less?

We pay a price for all the information we consume these days - and it's knowing less, says Alain de Botton.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-12191104

'

"...For example, we are enticed to go to the cinema to see a newly released film, which ends up moving us to an exquisite pitch of sensitivity, sorrow and excitement. We leave the theatre vowing to reconsider our entire lives in light of the values shown on screen, and to purge ourselves of our decadence and haste.

And yet by the following evening, after a day of meetings and aggravations, our cinematic experience is well on its way towards obliteration. Just like so much else which once impressed us, but which we soon enough came to discard - the majesty of the ruins of Ephesus, the view from Mount Sinai, that poetry recital in Edinburgh, the feelings we had after putting down Tolstoy's Death of Ivan Ilyich."

"...The need to diet, well accepted in relation to food, should be brought to bear on our relation to knowledge, people, and ideas. Our minds, no less than our bodies, require periods of fasting."

Down the river...

So the rains are back in the city. Which means slush and potholes and traffic jams and vehicles splashing muddy water all over you. While thinking of these irritations one monsoon morning this July, I remember reading this article in the Deccan Herald. About these Assamese parents who had to keep the body of their 13-year old son killed in the floods, in a boat, and send it down the Brahmaputra because the entire village was inundated and there wasn't one bit of land anywhere to cremate him on.

Sending your son down a raging river to be eaten by vultures and dogs somewhere.
Their faces I have never seen continue to haunt me.

Oct 08, 2003