Richard Jernigan -> RE: Atwood, Musk and Kurzweil walk into a bar... (Oct. 6 2016 4:48:09)
|
By the way, I read books too, though I usually add an hour or so of screen time per day reading the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Nikon users web page and the Foro; redddit once in a while, and a quick scan of Facebook to see what some of my friends may have gotten up to. After Massie's gigantic biography of Peter the Great, I picked up a book by a friend, a pro classical guitarist in New York. Andrew died from anaphylactic shock, probably in response to a blood transfusion occasioned by surgery. He was dead for about three minutes, enough time to worry about brain damage. He was resuscitated, but his blood pressure, heart rate and other parameters were so unstable they feared he would die again. So they put him in a coma, but he didn't stabilize for nearly a week. The doctors thought he would probably die. Andrew's wife Wendy was almost constantly at his bedside in the Surgical Intensive Care Unit. After days of grueling vigil while Andrew's condition gradually worsened, she was desperate. Andrew had loaded an iPod with some of his favorite music. His wife got permission from the medical staff to play some of the music to her unconscious mate. Andrew's blood pressure and heart rate immediately stabilized. The next day they brought him out of the coma, and told him he didn't have cancer, as they had thought when they operated. He remembered vivid dreams from the coma, and he remembered hearing the music that Wendy played to him. He was sure it had saved his life. A couple of days after that he went home. The first thing he did after he got home was to pick up his guitar. He could still play, though with difficulty. Then he found he had lost more than eight hours of memorized music. This devastating discovery was offset a little by finding he could still sight read. He set to work learning to play again. But he still couldn't memorize. The brain's organ of memory is often one of the first to suffer damage due to insufficient oxygen. After six months Andrew went back to ask to play in the Surgical Intensive Care Unit. Music had such a beneficial effect for him that he wanted play for the patients, as a way of giving something back. The hospital has a music therapy department. After interviewing Andrew, the Head said they would be glad to have him play. He still could not memorize, but sight read fluently, and showed up to play with folders full of sheet music. Most of the book, "Waking the Spirit" (by Andrew Schulman) is about the remarkable benefits music can have for some of the sickest patients. Over and over again, Andrew has been able to supply the stimulus for stabilizing vital signs, restoring normal function to a misfiring brain after surgery, for improving the patient's mood and outlook, even for bringing the patient out of the potentially fatal depression and disorientation of dysphoria. Much of the rest of the book is Andrew recounting his conversations with medical experts as he explored the mechanisms of the measurable effects of music on people in the severest need of help. The book is well written, lively, you meet several very interesting people among the patients and medical staff, and the bonus is that by playing for a few years in the hospital, Andrew regained his musical memory. He says it's better than ever now, and his friends tell him his playing is better than it was before he died. We were privileged to see Andrew at his regular gig the first time he could play the accompaniment to one of Villa-Lobos's Bachianas Brasileiras from memory. I'll never forget the smile on his face, when he motioned us to come over and whispered what he had just done. I think most people would find the book not only entertaining and informative, but also uplifting. After Andrew's book I finally got around to Perez-Reverte's "What We Become" ["El tango de la Guardia Vieja" in Spanish.] Over the course of a number of his books I have read, I think Perez-Reverte has gone from being a very good novelist to being a great one. The leading character is Max Costa, an Argentinian who lives by his wits employed as a ballroom dancer aboard ocean liners in the 1920s, with the occasional opportunity for a lucrative jewel theft. He meets Mercedes "Mecha" Inzunza, the stunningly beautiful 20-something old-monied wife of a wealthy and famous Spanish composer. They are crossing the Atlantic on the way to Buenos Aires. The composer has decided to compose a tango, to show he can make something better than his friend and rival Ravel's famous Bolero. Max is just the man to show them the cheap and occasionally dangerous bars and whore houses of the immigrant neighborhoods of 1920s Buenos Aires where he grew up, and where they still dance the tango the old way, not in the ironed-out prettified fashion of the upper class ballrooms of Europe. The novel follows the relationship between Max and Mecha through occasional rare encounters, slightly kinky sex, and Max's professional escapades of unwelcome increasing risk, and escalating unwanted violence. The story is brought up to near the present day. Max, now 64 and feeling just about washed up, by chance encounters Mecha in Sorrento, and attempts one last caper, just for her. Max is always as peaceful as the occasion allows him to be, never steals from anyone who can't afford it, and is always polite and friendly to the waiters, concierges, and tradesmen who ply the same sea in which he swims to search for a likely project. The theme of the good hearted grifter was handled famously by a former resident of my town, William Sydney Porter, whose nom de plume was O. Henry. My children attended O. Henry Middle School, and there is a Porter Elementary School in town. But Porter's path in Austin didn't run altogether smoothly. Though he was popular socially, and fell in love and married, he left town under a cloud, accused of embezzlement while he worked as a bank teller. Porter's form was the short story. His fame in this genre is still widely celebrated. But in the late 19th and early 20th century, though the good hearted grifter was a popular theme, sex and occasional violence were not. Perez-Reverte develops his themes at novelistic length and to great effect, with characters of real interest, whom I ended up liking immensely. Fiction is no more than a fifth of my reading, but I never miss a chance at Perez-Reverte. Now I am on to Yuval Noah Harari's "Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind." Harari is a professional historian, who teaches in Israel. He starts at the beginning, with the evolutionary emergence of the genus Homo. He writes with brilliance and humor. For example he discusses the "cognitive revolution," when anthropologists believe the social life of modern humans took a great leap forward. Most anthropologists believe it was due to an advance in the capabilities of language. Harari says that the great virtue of human language is not just its ability to impart information about the world. Monkeys can say, "Look out, an eagle," or "there's a lion nearby." Monkeys can even lie, saying, "Look out, there's an eagle," only to snatch a piece of food while the other monkey looks up to find the eagle. No, Harari says, the virtue of human language is that it can discuss things which never existed at all. You would never convince a chimpanzee to bring you a banana by promising him an endless supply of bananas after he died. Nor could you explain to him the legal fiction of the limited liability corporation, nor various tribal myths that allow humans to cooperate intricately, and on a far greater scale than the largest chimpanzee band. You get the idea. I'm less than fifty pages into the book. It promises to be good. Harari is both very smart, and very funny. Books are one of our greatest inventions. But like many other great inventions, their very power can make them dangerous, as well as supremely useful and entertaining. In the USA we largely leave the task of detecting dangerous books up to the individual. In China they don't think this is necessarily a good idea. Larisa points out that in Russia, writing a book seen as dangerous by Putin can get you killed. I like the freedom to choose. Once in a great while I wonder about other people, though. Here's hoping.... RNJ
|
|
|
|