MRI PROVES READERS EXPERIENCE WHAT THEY'RE READING

SALON : RISE OF SOCIAL READER - GOODBY VIRGINIA WOOLF'S SOLITARY

EXCERPT:

Virginia Woolf, writing to her pal Ethel Smyth, noted that “the state of reading consists in the complete elimination of the ego.” Hers was a 20th-century vision of a reader — someone who gets lost in books, someone whose identity is subsumed by the identity of another mind, a narrator. She’s describing a metaphoric experience: the reader becomes someone else.

York University psychologist Raymond Mar has done the MRI scans to back her up. We now know that when we’re reading novels, our brains light up as though we were experiencing the same things the hero experiences. When we read, we rehearse the lives of others. We are, in other words, exercising our empathy.

But Woolf’s ideal reader, who disappears as she reads and tries on alternate identities, is now under siege. Our stories are going social and, as new platform technologies remake the reading experience into something increasingly interactive, we now must ask what we’re giving up in the bargain.

THE SLOW SLOW SLOW CLIFFHANGER

THE ATLANTIC - WHAT'S THE OPPOSITE OF A CLIFF HANGER

EXCERPT : What’s the opposite of a cliffhanger? Tension, suspense, mysteries presented and then left deliciously unsolved—this is all the longstanding stuff of televised dramas, ported over from serialized novels and soap operas to guide the plots of shows that have their own literary aspirations. Cliffhangers themselves (the term arose from Thomas Hardy and his preference for unsubtle plot twists) are time-honored narrative devices, and when executed well they have proven extremely effective at sustaining audience interest and attention and frustration. Dickens used cliffhangers. So did Dallas. So have many, many shows, of the past both distant and recent. 

JAMES M. CAIN (1933) PARADISE : EXCERPT FROM WRITING LOS ANGELES

JAMES M. CAIN (1933) PARADISE : EXCERPT FROM WRITING LOS ANGELES

page 108-109

Wash out, then, the "land of sunshine, fruit, and flowers" : all these are here, but not with the lush, verdant fragrance that you have probably imagined.  A celebrated movie comedian is credited with the remark that "the flowers don't smell and the women do," but in my observation nothing smells.  Wash out the girl with the red cheeks peeping coyly from behind a spray of orange leaves.  The girl is here, but the dry air has taken the red out of her cheeks; the orange trees are here, but they don't look that way: the whole picture has too much pep, life, and moisture in it....

Wash out the palm trees, half visible beyond the tap dancing platform.  Palm trees are here, but they are all phonies, planted by people amused with the notion of a sub-tropical climate, and they are so out of harmony with their surroundings that they hardly - notice.  Wash out the movie palazzos, so impressive in the photographs. They are here, too, at any rate in a place called Beverly Hills, not far from Hollywood; but they are like the palm trees, so implausible in their surroundings that they take on the lifelessness of movie wets.  Above all, washout the cool green that seems to be the main feature of all illustrations got out by railroads.  Wash that out and keep it out."

Page 112)  Here Cain tries to come up with the positives

First, I would list the unfailing friendliness and courtesy of the people.  It is a friendliness somewhat different from what you find elsewhere, for it does not as a rule include hospitality.  The man who will take all sorts of trouble to direct you to some place you are trying to find does not ordinarily invite you into his house; it is not that he has any reason for keeping you out, it is merely that it does not occur to him to do it.

Hospitality, I think, comes when people have sent down roots it goes with pride in a home, pride in ancestors that built the home, conscious identification with a particular soil.  These people, in one way or another, are all exiles.  They have come here recently, and their hearts are really into the places that they left.  Thus, if they do not do as much visiting with each other as you see in other parts of the country, or the gossiping that goes with visiting, they do have the quick friendliness that exiles commonly show, and I must say it is most agreeable...

With the friendliness and courtesy, I would bracket the excellent English that is spoke her.  The Easterner, when he first hears it, is likely to mistake it for the glib chatter of a habitual salesmanship....


Writing Los Angeles

A Literary Anthology
Edited by David L. Ulin
Library of America publisher
Copyright 2002

MUSES ON THE GROUND IN SANTA CRUZ

One day I just got up in the fogpit and drove to the smogpit.
One world and another linked by fast highway.
Sometimes your other world is across the street and doesn't require drastic measures like mileage or time zones, but what did I know?
Walk in closets and toilets in parks were called "alternative housing."
I had to get out of there.

From somewhere high up, the clouds, or maybe the sea cliff, I left an imprint first.
I dragged my heart through the ocean waves before I left, dangling it in a bag made of net, that also held semi precious stones, letting the salt water do its work.

I left muses on the ground in Santa Cruz.
Some made me do what I wanted.
Some made me do what I didn't.
Some just left me terribly confused.

And I heard this song coming in from somewhere, in my head, Bob Dylan's Girl From North Country, so I went out and bought the album it was on so I could hear it again and wonder
who I left behind, who loved me. That and Alanis Morrisette's Ironic.

There were muses on the shelves of the libraries.
There were muses in binders left in coffee houses.
There was a muse who came up to me and pronounced my surname properly.

I had to hide my signature.
I went from handwriting to penmanship.


C 2018  Christine Trzyna 
All Rights Including Internet and International Rights Reserved

FAKE NEWS IS REAL

Even with an open mind, listening and watching YouTube videos, you know that many of them are not NEWS but conspiracy inspired opinion pieces and there are a lot of people out there who have no way of knowing that.  Especially when the "NEWS" is speculation, and has been proven to be so, these videos are time wasters.

But on a more personal level, anyone who has been slayed by gossip whores knows there is such a thing as FAKE NEWS.