In a previous post quoting from Inventing Kindergarten by Norman Brosterman, “act” appears for “art”.
A chair might become numbers, numbers act, and art either or both.
And so it appeared on day 122 (15.04.2007) under the rubric “More on Diversity and Moral Character“.
Action and the play of the mind available at will! Insight into movement …
And so for day 410
27.01.2008
Inventing Kindergarten by Norman Brosterman is a beautiful book. Design complements content. Which is fitting in a book devoted to Froebel’s system.
[…] the ultimate lesson of kindergarten was straightforward: the world (nature), mathematics (knowledge), and art (beauty) were interchangeable, and their perceived border was misleading, artificial constructs.
I am always impressed that the gifts, the material support for the learning activities, come in sets. From the get go there is play with combinations and more combinations. This to my mind strikes closely to the story telling core of human activity.
Take for instance Brosterman’s description of what can be done with the first gift, a set of six coloured balls.
In play, it [a single ball] might become a bird as it flew, a cat as it sprang, a dog jumping over a hedge, or indeed any one of a million other everyday events in the life of a child. Mathematically, it was a point and the number one. Together, the six balls represented the realm of knowledge in the form of a line for counting and a set for learning addition and subtraction and the beginning of multiplication and division. In the realm of beauty, the balls together encompassed the primary colors — red, blue, and yellow — and the synthesis of their unions — violet, green, and orange.
Marvellous!
And so for day 409
26.01.2008
Eugene Fiume “Going Digital is Going Human” IDE&AS Volume 4, Number 2
Simulation comes easily to us. We are wired to simulate. Recent discoveries in neuroscience suggest that we have “mirror neurons” that, among other things, help us to understand the feelings of others through imitation and simulation.
A predisposition to mimetic behaviour and story telling? Sounds like a good story.
And so for day 408
25.01.2008
I have of late been thinking about public/private spheres and intermediary zones and was very pleased to come across these lines from “The Grand Dance”, a poem by Gwendolyn MacEwen:
[…]
I am simply trying to track you down
In preworlds and afterworlds
And the present myriad inner worlds
Which whirl around in the carousel of space
[…]
Pre, after and inner — an interesting cartography emerges
And so for day 407
24.01.2008
Stein, Gertrude. Narration. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1935.
Narrative concerns itself with what is happening all the time, history concerns itself with what happens from time to time. And that is perhaps what is the matter with history and that is what is perhaps the matter with narrative.
That subtle distinction between “of” and “with” is here the matter of the unsaid but hinted element of the discourse.
And so for day 406
23.01.2008
I have developed a mnemonic device to capture the important elements of time management for myself. On to the image of hand, I place “decision” at the opposable thumb and on each of the four fingers, the four traditional Ds for dealing with a task:
Dump
Defer
Do
Delegate
The thumb (decision) reminds one of the many little moments of “going meta” to direct the flow of attention. The four Ds are useless without the practised grace of pausing.
And so for day 405
22.01.2008
I have developed a mnemonic device to capture the important elements of sleep for myself. On to the image of hand, I place “sleep” at the opposable thumb and on each of the four fingers I imagine its components:
Rest
Relaxation
Dreaming
“Deep Cogitation”
It is like programming a journey to the deep deep beyond and back.
And so for day 404
21.01.2008
James H. Austin in Zen-Brain Reflections gives pause to ponder.
We consolidate memories mostly when we are either at rest or asleep, because these are quieter times when we are not processing any new external events. What evidence suggests that such consolidation does occur at rest? Electrodes implanted widely throughout cortex have monitored monkeys’ brain functions for many hours. The firing patterns are distinctive. They confirm that those same nerve cells which had perviously fired together cooperatively during tasks, later reenacted their responsivities. When? During the next rest period. Yet at this time, no such task was being overtly performed. Without moving, the resting monkeys appeared to be “replaying” their previous task activity spontaneously.
Hardwired for rehearsal. Austin goes on to ask “Are such replaying data relevant to a period of open, relaxed meditation, an interval of quiet that seems reasonably close to an actual state of rest?” I think there should be a distinction between rest and relaxation. The racing mind can exist in a body at rest. A relaxed body is less likely, if at all, to be connected to a racing mind. Note, I am here introducing the notion of the speed of the rehearsal or replay in order to raise the spectre of mania. It may be a good thing that social animals find their rest periods interrupted.
And so for day 403
20.01.2008
Sheldon Zitner contemplates a suitable memorial to poet P.K. Page in one of the poems collected in The Asparagus Feast. He hits upon a confection. The final lines say it all:
so Melba is remembered and Pavlova
in the flourishes of a lesser art,
appeasing a simpler hunger.
It is what the poet calls a “renewable elegance”.
And so for day 402
19.01.2008
Torill Mortensen in a Wednesday, January 25, 2006 entry “Returning Home” on the blog thinking with my fingers writes
I feel homesick for a language that touches me in a different manner, a longing towards harsh consonants, clear vowels and words that bring to mind a wiser range of meanings.
I am reminded how differently animal sounds are represented across languages and I am led to wonder about the Basho haiku devoted to the sound of the encounter between frog and pond.
glonk
Basho’s frog
gone
I find it amusing that the syntactic resources of some languages permit a sort of reversal:
gone
Basho’s frog
glonk
An interesting discovery I would not have found without a detour nostalgia. Keen, now, to discover the sounds of other versions rendered in other languages.
And so for day 401
18.01.2008
