We all have those things we know stone cold totally, and those things
which will not stay in the head more than a few seconds. I'll bet that
if you set the pentose phosphate pathway recitation to music, you could
rattle it off like the parrot sketch from Monty Python. I think Tom
Lehrer taught a lot of math in his comedy songs...
Breadth or depth - it's not an either-or, I think, but more of a
whichever-is-needed-most, situationally speaking. The determining
factors must include those hungers to know and join and perform, the
hungers with which we are all born.
Dana
On 4/20/2011 7:33 AM, Alicia Henn wrote:
Is it because "ordinary mortals" have either breadth or depth in
scope? I've wondered this, as I find myself frustratingly unable to
remember fine details for long periods of time, but tend to be able to
think broadly (pardon the pun) about current issues.
On a separate issue, I am unable to remember fine details unless they
are tied into a strong narrative. The pentose phosphate pathway- I
knew it once cold, but I'd have to look it up now. Dialogue from any
Coen brothers' movie going back to Barton Fink? No problem.
Alicia
On Apr 19, 2011, at 9:57 AM, Dana Paxson wrote:
Wow, Eric! Your comment blew me away! What you've described
resembles the kind of thing I've been trying to write for the past 15
years or so: the project that is Descending Road and the ELM
supporting it! That's why I ended up with multiple POVs, multiple
masters of the narrative, and threading and glossaries and references
all automated - and I'm still having trouble making it comprehensible
to mortals like myself. Ha!
On 4/19/2011 8:57 AM, Eric Scoles wrote:
...
Many many moons ago I conceived of a character who would be a master
of memory, the end of a long lineage of such masters, who
transferred their history orally and as a result, had verse and
prose maps of a whole continent in their head at any given time,
situated in history. It was hard writing and in the end I let that
aspect of it slide, because I couldn't find a way to write the PoV
of such a person and make it comprehensible to ordinary mortals.
On Tue, Apr 19, 2011 at 8:08 AM, Dana Paxson <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
How clearly this emerges as we try to drink from the
informational firehoses every day. Two thoughts:
1) To trust certain people with the culling tasks is to empower
them. In the social framework, culling can be the enemy of choice.
2) Surrender may be inevitable and necessary, but the fabrics
of information are interwoven so richly and finely that many
works inform each work we read. The traces of Aristotle lie
latent in most of what we read in the West. We need not read
Euclid's Elements to gather its meaning, because most published
mathematical works use its paradigms. And the few who read one
obscure scribbler may find in their reading what will inform all
that they write, which in turn whole worlds may read.
Surrender, in the end, becomes a joyful swim in the great seas
of knowledge.
On 4/19/2011 7:43 AM, Alicia Henn wrote:
Culling is easy; it implies a huge amount of control and
mastery. Surrender, on the other hand, is a little sad.
http://www.npr.org/blogs/monkeysee/2011/04/18/135508305/the-sad-beautiful-fact-that-were-all-going-to-miss-almost-everything
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