After a week hiatus, our weekly column in which we recommend things we’ve been reading, watching, listening to, playing, and eating is back. So without further ado, here’s what we’ve been enjoying.
Justin
A former of professor of mine who specialized in philosophy of psychology had a habit that I found delightful, and others found quite annoying. He’d commonly catch other members of the department making claims that seemed to presuppose a highly rationalistic view of human cognition. (This, believe it or not, sometimes happens in philosophy departments.) This particular professor would frequently interject something like “Ok, but I don’t think the mind works quite that way.” He would then, without fail, rattle off descriptions of several cleverly designed empirical studies suggesting that we have less conscious access to our mental states than we’re inclined to think, and that much of the time that we think we are “introspecting,” we are in fact merely confabulating. I always found the studies he described fascinating, and wondered how he acquired this encyclopaedic knowledge of the empirical literature.
Perhaps it was easier than I thought. This week I’m writing to recommend a highly accessible but empirically rich book on the unconscious mind and the experimental evidence concerning its nature. The book is Strangers to Ourselves: Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious, by Timothy Wilson, a psychologist at the University of Virginia. In just over 200 pages, Wilson weaves an argument, drawing on decades of research, for the claim that most of us know far less about our own mental lives than we tend to suppose. Of course, nearly everyone will admit that much of our mental life is unconscious—as you read and understand this, for instance, you effortlessly glean meanings from the various squiggly marks that appear on your computer screen, but this remarkable process is practically instantaneous and takes place beneath the level of conscious awareness. Wilson goes farther, however, making a strong case that very many of our goals, beliefs, desires, and perhaps even feelings are inaccessible to even the most painstaking introspection. (In one memorable study, subjects seem to systematically confuse the physiological arousal caused by crossing a rickety bridge with sexual attraction to an experimenter.) Our reports of our own mental states are, Wilson suggests, more like narratives that we weave for ourselves on the basis of inconclusive evidence than they are direct reports of introspection. Furthermore, he argues, the key to better knowing our own mental lives lies not in rumination and looking inward, but in more careful observation of our own behavior. Whether or not you end up accepting this verdict, the book should keep you interested with the results of cleverly designed experiments that will, at the very least, allow you to delight and annoy your colleagues and friends.
Marian
Graphic novels have come up a couple times in past endorsements; in that spirit I’d like to recommend Joe Sacco’s second journalistic comic book on the Palestinian-Israeli struggle, Footnotes in Gaza. Grittier and somewhat bleaker than his first (Palestine), Footnotes in Gaza relies on painstaking archival research and eyewitness accounts to reconstruct two nearly forgotten massacres that took place during the Suez crisis in 1956. “”This is the story of footnotes to a side-show of a forgotten war…. like most footnotes, they dropped to the bottom of history’s pages, where they barely hang on” (8).
When Sacco and fellow journalist Chris Hedges were on assignment in Gaza Strip for Harper’s in 2001, the editors chose to cut out the entire section on the 1956 killings in Khan Younis, which it turns out is the greatest known massacre of Palestinians on Palestinian soil. This editorial decision prompted Sacco to thoroughly research the episode––relying on archives of the IDF, among others––and to report on it in graphic novel form. Sacco openly acknowledges, and presents as a sort of productive puzzle to think through, the “refraction” of the event that his visual interpretation entails.
I find the book compelling for the way that it takes up two challenges at the same time. First is the unnerving challenge of reconstructing an episode in history for which the documentary evidence is weak at best. “50 years is a long time,” Sacco says in the intro, “to wait before asking people what they remember about a particular day…. The [documentary] record is scant and certain unsavory orders and reports are often kept ‘off the books’ or are stored out of reach of even the most diligent researcher” (x). Second, of course, is the added challenge of tackling this project via the genre of graphic narrative, which can probably say both more and less than a more “straightforward” prose account. As far as the comics genre goes, Sacco is absolutely masterful at pointing up the distance between what can be said with words and what can’t. Some of his clearest and most compelling arguments come across altogether apart from the story he tells with words: in the the dimmed-out panel he devotes to a nearly-forgotten scene from fifty years ago, or the way he always draws his storytellers’ and interlocutors’ mouths just a little too big. This book is at once both entertaining and soberly moving, and there’s a lot to be learned here––both about a specific obscure event whose repercussions continue to play out in contemporary conflict, and about the limits placed on historical memory by today’s political stakes and expediencies.
Tom
I’ve long been a fan of instances when my interests or tastes (Herbert Gans would call them taste cultures) collide. A few years ago, for instance, Michael Schur, the creator of Parks and Recreation and the sadly defunct blog Fire Joe Morgan, directed a music video for the Decemberists, which featured a scene from David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. The video for “Calamity Song” brought together two writers and a band that I love, but who wouldn’t normally have occasion to collaborate. Although the sum wasn’t as good its constituent parts, it was nonetheless enjoyable to see not only these worlds collide but also the artists’ mutual affection.
Music videos seem to be a good breeding ground for this type of mixing. This week I’d like to endorse a wonderfully bizarre new music video from the band Beach House that features the actor who played Leland Palmer reprising his character from Twin Peaks lip-synching the female vocals to the song “Wishes.” It’s strange in a very Twin Peaks-y way, but it works, and it’s probably introduced a decent number of Beach House fans to the TV show, and vice versa. Enjoy.
Adam
We have been living through a month of Iraq anniversaries. Recently we had, of course, the 10th anniversary of the invasion itself. And out came the mea culpas. Today, meanwhile, is the 10th anniversary of Michael Kelly’s death. Kelly was the first journalist to die in Iraq, a tragedy that resulted from his Humvee sliding off a road south of Baghdad after enduring heavy fire, and his drowning, trapped inside the vehicle, in a ditch. And out have come the fond recollections.
We should remember Kelly, but we should remember him as much for his faults as for his virtues. I strongly recommend Tom Scocca’s scathingly eloquent assessment of Kelly’s legacy. It’s one of the more powerful pieces I’ve read in awhile.
Dave
Well, there have been lots of electric guitars flying around our house this week. Here’s a taste: World Cafe’s two-hour special on the new Jimi Hendrix collection is probably the only way I’d have listened to it. Though a huge fan, I’ve grown weary of each new “last Jimi album as he would have/may have intended it”–they come out every 5-6 years. This new one, though, does have a lot to offer: Jimi playing with Band of Gypsies drummer, Buddy Miles, for instance. The podcast includes interviews new and old and offers nice contextualizations of Jimi’s “last” studio works. Throw in Prince’s spectacular “hard rock” configuration of his own “Let’s Go Crazy” and Janelle Monae’s beautiful Jimmy Fallon rendition of Hendrix’s “Little Wing” and it’s been a good week to play guitar.
Keith
If you’ve got any hippie in you, you have used Dr. Bronner’s Magic Soaps and you love them. If you are buttoned-up and straight-edged, you should get yourself a bottle and familiarize yourself with one of the best cleaning products that gentrification can buy. I am no expert in the saponific arts. But I do know that Dr. Bronner’s cleans just about anything, and better than the chemical-laden, mass-market detergents under most sinks. It’s organic, it’s fair trade, and it’s all-natural. Take it camping and you can make it through a rainy day in the tent by reading the extensive and mystical mumbo-jumbo that constitutes its label.
