help my banana is emitting anti-matter

Paul Draper, a philosopher at Purdue University, says that consciousness isn’t produced by the brain but the brain makes use of consciousness, just as bodies and plants make use of sunlight and evolve accordingly.

In this view, consciousness was already there before brains existed, like an all-pervasive ether. He calls this psychological ether theory or aetherism.

What does it remind you of?

jeroen caramelises the bok choi in ketjap and serves them with chicken thighs

The review in The Times of the new book by by Jeanette Winterson, Night Side of the River: Ghost Stories, starts off very positive but it has a sting in its tail.

It’s written in an informal, conversational style and lacks the heightened prose of the books on which Winterson made her reputation, (which were) filled with phrases that didn’t just describe the thing — they were the thing itself. The sound of the sentences doesn’t seem important to her any more.

Ouch!

Heightened prose or not, the book has at least one good line : “Grieving means living with someone who is no longer there.”

goodmorning! welcome to the world. here is a continual horrible buzzing noise for you that doesn’t stop. oh now it stops. and now it starts again. and then it stops. and now it starts again and doesn’t stop anymore at all.

and now here is the sound of a machine, a vacuum cleaner perhaps, or a power tool of some kind.

i’m about to have a conniption

one of the tragedies of old age is not that more and more people are dying, it’s discovering that more and more people, artists, writers, musicians, you loved and admired have turned into boorish sycophants, willingly allowing themselves to be turned into cogs in the consumer capitalist machine by publicists in the hope of extracting a few more dollars from the pockets of their erstwhile fans who now have plenty of disposable income.

sometimes i think the function of dreams is to let you know that you’re not dead, otherwise you’d keep waking up, petrified — that is if you’re afraid of death and rupert everett isn’t. he feels excited by “the prospect of the actual thing finishing off”.

i clicked on this because of the clickable headline and actually it has some pretty funny bits in it, everett is irreverent as fuck and i always think it’s interesting when people deny that therapy could be of any use whatsoever and then in the next sentence unconsciously reveal why it might in fact be useful for them. i guess some people don’t want to understand themselves better and that is a basic human right.

but his relationship with death is more complex than the headline suggests. he longs for it because he wants to be reincarnated as a tree. “i’m rather off human beings to be honest, in general.” omg yes, but believing in reincarnation is the denial of death. it is like a dream. you are dreaming! but we could talk about that in your next sess… oh never mind.

ha ha it makes a great headline but this is some seriously dodgy research.

i had no idea that the work of john cheever, who as a 3- or 4-year-old was kept on a leash (“Well, of course I had to keep him on a leash,” his mother, Ella Carver, said much later — and seemingly without irony.) was heavily edited, and frequently radically changed (to the point where cheever would be begging him to undo some of the changes without success) by his editor, whose surname was Lish.

link

an unreconstructed bear of little brain with the self-reflexivity of a midge is our jason

Edith Grossman (1936—2023) :

A translation is not made with tracing paper. It is an act of critical interpretation. No two languages, with all their accretions of tradition and culture, ever dovetail perfectly. They can be linked by translation, as a photograph can link movement and stasis, but it is disingenuous to assume that either translation or photography … are representational in any narrow sense of the term.

this obituary has an interesting tidbit (in dutch).

the dude in the story gets a cancer diagnosis. the doctor gives him 17 months, which is oddly specific, but perhaps he was using a computer programme. the dude is not unhappy about it, he is the wrong side of 60 and has lived a very full life. his mother is dead already. at some point they tell him that the computer has changed its mind and in fact he has longer than 17 months, and now he is unhappy. he was reckoning on 17 months! so he applies for euthanasia and gets it, 19 months after the diagnosis.

o hij was een stier nu begrijp ik het 😅

the english, when i first encountered significant numbers of them in the 70s, were like an entirely different species. they looked like this.

ok so i am dying and you put headphones on me so i hear the sound of someone repeatedly saying : banana pear apple? so that if i don’t in fact die you can ask me if i remember the names of any fruits being said to me when i nearly died? can i have an advanced care directive that specifically requests you not to do this?

ik doe ook aan extended non-cooperation maar dan in het algemeen.

if you don’t know what a psephologist does, it’s not as interesting as you might think, but what is interesting is that the word comes from the greek ψῆφος, psephos, ‘pebble’, as the ancient greeks used pebbles to vote. (similarly, the word ballot is derived from the medieval french word “ballotte,” meaning a small ball).

ugh i hate some of the cretinous presenters on bbc world world news news — and the one that i love, the awesome afghani australian yalda hakim, is leaving so i’ll be leaving soon too.

the end of the world as we knew it came on 3 april 2023, when bbc world, which had become bbc world news, dropped the ‘world’ and began filling up with more or more local stories about a 1.25% increase or was it a decrease in uk gdp or something boris johnson said or did not say or said or did and then denied saying or doing, which no one else in the world gives a fucking shit about.

miriam margolyes : “who benefits most from anal sex?”
— yes well, quite.
i won’t be reading the second volume of her autobiography, but isn’t it great that this rascal of a human exists? and i can almost hear her uproarious laughter from here at it being called ‘laboriously offensive vulgarity’ by the times.

the times reports that ‘iron’ mike tyson has openened a cannabis shop in amsterdam where you can buy “mike bites”, cannabis sweets in the shape of an ear, referring to his comeback fight against evander holyfield which was stopped when he bit off a piece of his opponent’s ear.

there is a national american industry code for psychic arts. just in case, it’s 812990.

pilvi takala—possibly interesting finnish artist

derrida : la mort? or l’amour?

recipe for thick golden dahl

10 or 20 cardamom pods
2 tablespoons vegetable oil
2 onions, chopped
3 or 6 cloves garlic, sliced
2 or 4 teaspoons turmeric
1 or 2 tablespoons fresh grated ginger
2 or 4 cups red lentils, rinsed
6 or 10 cups vegetable stock
1 or 2 bay leaves
juice of 1 or 2 lemons
salt and pepper

method