Guardian: “It is said that we are all three different people: the person we think we are (the one we have invented), the person other people think we are (the impression we make) and the person we think other people think we are (the one we fret about). You could say it would be a lifetime’s quest to reconcile this battling trinity into a seamless whole. Maybe, but for the time being I am convinced that, in Kurt Vonnegut’s words (there I go, quoting again): you are what you pretend to be.”
Three Identities? Small Potatoes. I Have 452 Identities in a Spreadsheet
– March 26, 2007Posted in: Uncategorized
Magic Hours by Tom Bissell: This marvelous collection of essays chronicles everything from film shoots to novelists rescued from oblivion. (The essay on the Underground Literary Alliance, with its portrait of raucous factions, unexpectedly reveals how soft today's literary world has become.) But if you peer between the cracks of these smart pieces, you may very well see how cultural lives are formed from the most unexpected life choices. And as we follow Bissell's development as a writer over the years, that goes for Bissell as well. (
Angelmaker by Nick Harkaway: Harkaway's latest novel greatly improves on his previous book, The Gone-Away World, which I'm already on record as praising. Angelmaker adopts genre elements without ever feeling like a genre book, and it leads me to believe that Harkaway is well on his way to a narrative grace close to China Miéville's. Yet inexplicably this very fun book, which includes an eightysomething badass named Edie Banister, a mysterious mechanical object that may destroy the world, farcical scenarios involving lawyers and the police, and some unexpectedly moving moments about fatherhood, doesn't appear to be getting much attention in American newspapers. Nothing from the snobs at The New York Times Book Review, nothing from The Washington Post. And since I can't get Harkaway on Bat Segundo, I hope this Jump Up and Down mention gets you hopping as well.
The Age of Insight by Eric Kandel: Unless you're really pressed for time, forget Jonah Lehrer. If you want to understand creativity and its relationship to neuroscience, then the bowtie-wearing Nobel laureate is your man. In addition to being a physically beautiful book (you will drool over many of the paintings), there are helpful overviews on optical illusions, science, biographical backgrounds, and many vital figures from the Vienna Secession. Kandel's enthusiasm (and his call for greater unity between the humanities and science) is contagious.
I like how the Guardian eliminates the obvious fourth option: the person no one, not even you, suspects you are, but which in fact you are.
I think the ideas in Hoftsader’s new book, “I Am a Strange Loop,” are not only more accurate, but more beautiful. Here’s an account from the Journal review:
“Mr. Hofstadter writes movingly of the sudden death of his wife, Carol, at age 42 and of the effect this event had on his thinking about selfhood. Had Carol’s consciousness entirely ceased to exist? He argues that it had not, since, by the closeness of their understanding, Carol’s ‘I’ was instantiated not only in Carol’s brain but in Doug’s brain too, albeit in a partial, “low resolution” or “coarse grained” form. My self, my ‘I,’ is not impenetrably fenced off from others. There is seepage and replication, Mr. Hofstadter believes … what seems to be the epitome of selfhood — a sense of ‘I’ — is in reality brought into being if and only if there is, along with that self, a sense of other selves to whom one has bonds of affection. In short, when and only when generosity is born is an ego born …he discusses Alzheimer’s disease as the slow disappearance of an ‘I’ from its original container, while ‘low resolution’ copies of it yet glow in the minds of others.”