One Art: Storytelling

The latest SciAm Mind features a piece on the science (and pleasure) of Storytelling.

The best stories—those retold through generations and translated into other languages—do more than simply present a believable picture. These tales captivate their audience, whose emotions can be inextricably tied to those of the story’s characters. Such immersion is a state psychologists call narrative transport.

They even depict the role of romance in stories and in the brain.

They found overwhelmingly similar gender depictions emphasizing strong male protagonists and female beauty.

“We couldn’t even find one culture that had more emphasis on male beauty,” Gottschall notes, explaining that the study sample had three times as many male as compared with female main characters and six times as many references to female beauty as to male beauty. That difference in gender stereotypes, he suggests, may reflect the classic Darwinian emphasis on reproductive health in women, signified by youth and beauty, and on the desirable male ability to provide for a family, signaled by physical power and success.

Swimming in the Dark

Last night, I swam again, and alone, and my time was even better than two months before. But my teacher did not let me swim in the dark — which I didn’t understand then and don’t understand now — maybe he was afraid it would cause a little accident…?

P.S: I almost became the little accident when I wandered about the gym in my bathing suit, looking for someone to tell me why there wasn’t anyone by the pool…

[And] the morning started with a chocolate bar and 15 minutes of Skipping Rope. I still smell of chlorine.

On Why An Author Should Allow a Character To Say Such Things

I started reading Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer a few days ago. I haven’t yet managed to get past the 5th page but, because I believe there is more to it than its unusual language, I did a little search on the Internet. And I found this: Henry Miller’s own geometry of love,  an article written by Herbert Gold and published in 2007 in The San Francisco Chronicle. It comments on

those ancient days of 1961, before the Summer of Love, [when] a bookseller in San Anselmo was busted for selling Tropic of Cancer.

When told that the characters’ lines are theirs and not the authors’,

with exasperation trained at fine parochial schools, the district attorney asked why an author would allow his character to say things he didn’t believe. He proposed to the jury that this meant the author was a liar.

The mind boggled, the flies buzzed, the eyelids dropped.

Back To Swimming

Last night I went back to swimming, after two full months of negligence. It felt wonderful. The teacher turned off all the lights and we were left to swim in the dark. And my time wasn’t as bad as I had thought it would be. There’s nothing like water in the whole world.

Drunken Mammals

A tiny (and very ugly) animal, actually a tiny pen-tailed tree shrew of Malaysia, has as many as nine alcoholic beverages per night, imbibing fermented nectar from the bertam palm.

The information comes from SciAm Fact or Fiction: Animals Like to Get Drunk:

In the mid 1990s, Frank Wiens and Annette Ziztmann, animal physiologists at Germany’s University of Bayreuth, observed that tiny pentailed treeshrews frequent the bertam palm, returning regularly to nip the nectar. Wiens also noticed a strange yeasty aroma wafting from the plant, and what appeared to be foam like the head on a mug of beer.

Humans have an affinity for ethanol (plant-derived alcohol), and captive primates are well known to like to drink anthropogenically sourced ethanol, Dudley told Sciam.com. Natural consumption of dietary ethanol deriving from fermenting fruits or nectar has never been studied previously, and this is a highly fruitful area for future investigation.

Long Live Books

One of our major newspapers is doing a piece on books and technology. When they spoke to me about it, I recalled immediately a very old MIT essay, Books Are Dead, Long Live Books, by Priscilla Coit Murphy.

It contains one of the best testimonies on the immortality of books. When asked to tell the magazine Scribner how it would be with letter, literature and books a hundred years from 1894, the author Octave Uzanne replied:

If by books you are to be understood as referring to our innumerable collections of paper, printed, sewed, and bound in a cover announcing the title of the work, I own to you frankly that I do not believe (and the progress of electricity and modern mechanism forbids me to believe) that Gutenberg’s invention can do otherwise than sooner or later fall into desuetude as a means of current interpretation of our mental products . . . .our grandchildren will no longer trust their works to this somewhat antiquated process, now become very easy to replace by phonography.

He insists:

Phonography would ease the physical fatigue (from the positions imposed by reading) and excessive burden on the eyes. Dismissing concern about the expense and weight of phonographs, he was confident that they would soon become quite inexpensive and portable — suitable for taking a “promenade” using “small cylinders as light as celluloid penholders, capable of containing five or six hundred words.

As we can see today, he missed the point.

The Stuff that Mirrors Are Made Of

Today’s NYTimes Science Section features an article on the nature of glass.

They’re the thickest and gooiest of liquids and the most disordered and structureless of rigid solids, said Peter Harrowell, a professor of chemistry at the University of Sydney in Australia, speaking of glasses, which can be formed from different raw materials. They sit right at this really profound sort of puzzle.

Virtual Shelves

For a month now (well, maybe three months) I’ve been trying to organize my bookshelves. Now, it seems, is the perfect time. A friend told me about LibraryThing, a online book catalog that works like a social network and has been existing, incognito, since 2005.

Up to 200 books is for free. More than that is U$ 10 a year or, alas, U$ 25 a lifetime.

It will be interesting to finally discover how many books I own per author (and you can also pick from different cover options!).

Awakening Love, by Somerset Maugham

The Painted Veil is not an immediately likable movie. At first, Edward Norton sounds like anything but himself and Naomi Watts is hateful. But, at some point, you start falling in love with them, and they start falling in love with each other.

The photography is unbelievably beautiful — and there is a quite moving love scene.

Now, I want to read Maugham’s book…

P.S: At some point, Kitty (Watts) points out to Walter (Norton): “It’s raining cats and dogs”. After a long pause, Kitty repeats it. He then says that he had heard it the first time, but he only said something when he had something to say. She laughs at him and then remarks that if everyone behaved like that, it would be the end of the human language (perhaps, but it could also be its evolution).

Emperor and Galilean

The play is being performed at SESC until August 24. It tells the story of Julian’s (“the Antichrist”, as he was called by the Church) 2-year emperorship. As he became Emperor, he declared freedom of religion for all citizens, receiving violent responses from the Christians.

Julian has been brought up as a Christian, but is haunted by doubt. Under the influence of his tutor, the philosopher Libanios, he goes to Athens to learn about the religion of the heathens. But he is unable to feel at ease with the belief in the old gods either, and he longs for a revelation to show him the way forward. Maximos, the Ephesus mystic, proclaims to him the vision of the “third kingdom”, a kingdom to be based on both Christian ethics and heathen wisdom and joy in life.

There are some interesting dialogues between Julian and Maximos, which actually reinforce the millenary strength of the Christian faith (it might be different in Henrik Ibsen’s text, though).