2014 — 14 August: Thursday
I face an invasion1 this coming Saturday. Is it too late to start cleaning the house, I wonder? A question I shall postpone pondering until after tomorrow's walk. Meanwhile, there's a more imminent prospect (an unknown known?) of rain timed for my 'lemonses'. Or more likely 'grapefruitses'. Better load that vital first cuppa and a bite of brekkie. Then there's the whole question of the choice of destination for today's lunch...
I've glanced at...
... copies of "The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals" occasionally (usually in dusty multiple-hand bookshops) but never seriously thought of buying a copy of Darwin's 1872 book. Much was made (in the Q&A session accompanying that Errol Morris 'portrait' of Donald Rumsfeld I watched yesterday) of Rumsfeld's peculiar Cheshire Cat grin. Baron-Cohen's new book also describes the action of the inferior frontal gyrus, damage to which can cause problems in recognising the emotions conveyed (or so I'm told!) by facial contortions. There's an interesting neuroscientific account of other investigations here. Source and snippet:
A smile is a peculiar thing. The upper lip lifts to expose the teeth. The cheeks bunch upward. The skin around the eyes crinkles. The 19th-century neurologist Guillaume-Benjamin-Amand Duchenne noticed that a cold, faked
smile was often limited to the mouth, whereas a genuine, friendly one involved the eyes. That genuine smile is now called a Duchenne smile in his honour.
Yet smiles can also be about submission. People in subservient positions smile an awful lot around more powerful people.
I recall similar points about submission being noted by Carl Sagan in "Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors". For example, a subservient chimp would show signs of reassurance when, having placed his fingers between the alpha male's teeth, they came back intact! In my opinion, Christa's glorious smile was both frequent and full-on Duchenne. By contrast, I recall an HR manager whose only facial expression appeared to be a permanent smile, regardless of the meaning (if any) of whatever he said. Deeply weird. Even by IBM standards. (And I wasn't alone in my opinion.)
This...
... made me smile :-)
The notebook [lists of books read] fizzles out in 1987, around my twenty-first birthday, by which time I was not only studying literature but also reviewing books for a student magazine. One of those was the last title on my list: "Mensonge," a satire of literary post-structuralism, by the British campus novelist Malcolm Bradbury. That it was this book that killed off my catalogue — which in my college years encompassed Chaucer, Dante, Milton, Donne, Shelley, Coleridge, Eliot, Yeats — strikes me as what the deconstructionists used to call ludic.
I didn't get on well with Mensonge, by the way. (Link to Rebecca Mead's article.)
History has just been made
Yes. I actually read a user manual before proceeding with a piece of hardware installation. I suspected (knew) I didn't really want to keep any of the application backup gorp and backup-to-Cloud gorp, and encrypt your files so even we can't help you if you forget your password gorp that was already cluttering up my new dinky little 1TB USB3 WD "My Passport" drive. I knew (suspected) all I really wanted was its basic driver.
Turns out there's a bit of gorp called something like SES that is recommended "even if you choose not to install" all the other gorp. It supposedly stops2 the "Found New Hardware" wizard leaping into irritating life and popping up every time you plug the drive in. So I let Win8.1 loose, attempted to follow the procedure outlined in the manual, was ticked off by Win8.1 telling me that I already had the best driver loaded. Formatted the drive to clear off all the unwanted gorp. And all is sweetness and light.
PTL
Before you know it...
... we're in the middle of Sibelius symphony #2 in D (though, for some reason, parts of the BBC web site are currently and mistakenly insisting it's Sonata #2) ...
... after a tantalising reminder of just how good the late Antony Hopkins was when "Talking about Music". Grand stuff. Doesn't really explain where the day has gone, though, does it?
It pains me...
... to admit this, but — thinking of lists of books read — I wasn't always assiduous in noting exactly when I bought some of my books. For example, I was just reading Lucy Mangan's story of how she was first introduced to Norton Juster's magnificent book The Phantom Tollbooth in 1983 at her primary school only to discover that it was by then out of print in the UK. Naturally, I thought to myself "So when did I buy my copy, then?"
Turns out the nearest I can pin it down to was "some time in 1975, sunshine". Don't even think of asking why I was already in my mid-20s before I finally bought my own copy. Actually, there are no less than 69 books I can only pin down to that year. Mind you, there was a lot going on in my life in that year.