Music and the Midnight Part 3
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Author Archives: lefnat18
Music and the Midnight Part 2
Music and the Midnight Part 1
Spring Week 9 Log
Spring Week 9 Log
Sunday 5/26:
-3 hours working on term paper
-1 hour recording music
-1.5 hours editing recordings
-1/2 hour editing eAlphabet site
Day total: 6
Monday 5/27:
-4 hours working on term paper
-1.5 hours recording
-1.5 hours editing recordings
Day total: 7
Tuesday 5/28:
-3.5 hours working on term paper
-1.5 hours studying calculated poetics material
-1/2 hour writing calculated poem
-1.5 hours editing recordings
-1/2 hour recording
Day total: 7.5
Wednesday 5/29:
-2.5 hours working on term paper
-1/2 hour reading TGAO
-2 hours recording
-1 hour editing recording
-1.5 hours in class (calculated poetics)
Day total: 7.5 hours
Thursday 5/30:
-1 hour collecting sound samples
-2 hours editing recordings
-1 hour recording
-2 hours in calculated poetics seminar
Day total: 6 hours
Friday 5/31:
-3 hours working on term paper
-1 hour editing recordings
Day total: 4 hours
Saturday 6/1:
-1 hour recording
-2 hours editing recordings
Day total: 3 hours
Week 9 hours: 41 hours
Total hours: 168 hours
Week 9 Neuro Reverie
Week 9 Neuro Reverie
“We will undoubtedly find support fir the core contention of the human sciences, that human societies are not formed by aggregations of such isolates, each bounded by the surface of its individual body. We will find much evidence that disproves the idea that the nature of humans is to seek to maximize self-interest, and hence to challenge the view that to govern in accord with human nature is to require each individual to bear the responsibilities and culpabilities of his or her selfish choices. Such unpredictable conversations between the social sciences and the neurosciences may, in short, enable us to begin to construct a very different idea of the human person, human societies, and human freedom. We have tried to show, in this book, how neuroscience has become what it is today; let us conclude with a simple hope for the future: that neuroscience should become a genuinely human science.”
-Rose , N., & Abi-Rached, J. (2013). Neuro: The new brain sciences and the management of the mind. (p. 234). Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press.
This had to be the most spine-tingling paragraph of the entire book for me. Although it makes perfect sense that neuroscience will undoubtedly alter human social structures, it is hard for me to imagine how the future of humanity and the world will manifest itself. I love how sure the authors are about what we will come to experience with the continual advancements in neuroscience: the lessening of self-interest and responsibility, a new way of viewing ourselves and our actions, and new forms of freedom. It seems that neuroscience has the capacity to build a more collective and cohesive global consciousness; hopefully one that unites us all as equals stemming from the same all-encompassing body, a single heart that pumps the same fiery blood through our veins. Unfortunately the course of human history has not proven this to be likely. With new forms of freedom come new forms of oppression. Perhaps we are drifting away from human compassion and closer to Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.
May 23rd Calculated Poem
Nathan Lefkoff
Calculated Poetics
5/23/13
“Mantis! praying mantis! since your wings’ leaves
And your terrified eyes, pins, bright, black and poor”
-Zukofsky
“River that must turn full after I stop dying
Song, my song, raise grief to music
Light as my loves’ thought, the few sick
So sick of wrangling: thus weeping,
Sounds of light stay in her keeping…”
-Zukofsky
“The Rhino is a lovely beast…”
-Zukofsky
Eyes and lips, eyes and lips
now you are a lovely beast
and I, a lonely mantis.
Forelegs folded, stone upon stone
thus weeping.
Once for preying, these arms and body pray now
in dream and in sentient thought
for a death or a birth.
Enough with this weird limbo.
After I stop dying
I will be borne into my mind that bares the weight of your eyes and lips.
The night sky dangles a faraway planet
which looms like a beautiful ghost
and hopefully someday
will come circling back to these arms akimbo.
Spring Week 8 Log
Spring Week 8 Log
Sunday 5/19:
-1 hour writing Neuro reverie
-1 hour editing and adding to the eAlphabet site
-1 hour reading TGAO
-1 hour editing recordings
-1/2 hour recording music
Day total: 4.5 hours
Monday 5/20:
-2 hours in class (Monday student seminar)
-1.5 hours reading TGAO
-1/2 hour revising Neuro reverie
-1 hour calculated poetics readings
-1/2 hour calculated poem
-2 hours editing recordings
-1 hour recording
-1 hour working on term paper
Day total: 9.5 hours
Tuesday 5/21:
-2.5 hours in class
-1 hour reading TGAO
-2 hours working on term paper
-1 hour editing recordings
-1/2 hour calculated poem
-2 hours recording
Day total: 9 hours
Wednesday 5/22:
-1.5 hours in class
-1.5 hours working on term paper
-1 hour reading TGAO
-1.5 hours of recording music
-1/2 hour revising Queneau response and CP poem
-1 hour editing recordings
-1/2 hour editing eAlphabet site
Day total: 7.5 hours
Thursday 5/23:
-2 hours in class (calculated poetics)
-1 hour reading TGAO
-1 hour reading Neuro
-1 hour editing recordings
-1 hour working on term paper
Day total: 6 hours
Friday 5/24:
-2 hours working on term paper
-1 hour editing recordings
Day total: 3 hours
Saturday 5/25:
-1.5 hour working on term paper
-1 hour reading Neuro
-1/2 hour writing Neuro reverie
Day total: 3 hours
Week 8 hours: 42.5 hours
Total hours: 127 hours
Week 8 Neuro Reverie
Week 8 Neuro Reverie
“…your brain is amazing; it is flexible; it can be trained, developed, improved, optimized: learn to use it well for your own benefit and for that of your society, perhaps even for the world. It is not that you have become your brain, or that you are identical with your brain, but you can act on your brain, even if that brain is not directly available to consciousness, and in so acting, you can improve yourself—not as a brain, but as a person.”
-Rose , N., & Abi-Rached, J. (2013). Neuro: The new brain sciences and the management of the mind. (p. 222). Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press.
If I have not become my brain then I must be tucked away somewhere within its pinkish folds, muddling thoughts and breaking my focus. Recently, I made the decision to shave my head completely and it’s actually brought me closer to my brain. Looking at the eggish shape of my head it’s easy to imagine a mind encapsulated inside my awkward skull. That line about how the brain “is not directly available to consciousness” sort of gives me the creeps. To not know who or what you are can be extremely dooming when it happens at inopportune times.
Calculated Poem April 30th
“the abstract poem
that cleaves through the glassy heights like the hump of a great
beast, the rising reification, integration’s grandest, most
roving whale: in this way Enlil became a god and ruled
the sky: in this way earth became our mother: in this way
angels shaped light”
Ammons, A. R. (1995). Sphere: The form of a motion. (pp. 136-137). New York, New York: W.W. Norton.
Note: The god Enlil is prominent in Sumerian religion and his name translates to “Lord of the Storm”. One story describes his origin as the exhausted breath of the god of the heavens and the goddess of the Earth after sexual union.
Sighing, gasping,
Earth and sky consummate to produce the wind; the storm
that scrapes its limpest tentacle upon the crust of continents.
Flaccid and flailing, it makes its way back to the ocean
where waterspouts send humpbacks sailing through the atmosphere
like strange birds.
Once a roving whale,
now you are the sun-bleached trunk of a redwood
decaying on the sand under the eyes of some distorted form.
Now you are an abstract beast,
bending to the mercy of time and insects.
Insects that swarm and cover the sky
in spite of the lord of the storm
who scratches at his mosquito bites
and sighs a relief so massive
that it sets the milky way spinning
like a pinwheel in space.
Calculated Poem April 11th
What was it? That drowning word
or equation
smothered in its incantation.
In stillest frenzy
voice stumbles numbers tumble
into zero.
Burning in that sun collapsing.
Incredible masses,
folding, folding.
Saturn melts inside its rings
upon a wrinkled blanket.
Devouring its greatest digits,
the Cosmic Centipede wraps itself
around a planet, a world, a perception.
A placeless point on a lineless plain,
folding, folding,
wrapped and wrinkled.
With all this in mind,
we stray through space,
we fold in place.