Olivia Laing - "The Lonely City"

Loneliness is difficult to confess; difficult too to categorise. Like depression, a state with which it often intersects, it can run deep in the fabric of a person, as much a part of one's being as laughing easily or having red hair. Then again, it can be transient, lapping in and out in reaction to external circumstance, like the onleiness that follows on the heels of a bereavement, breka-up or change in social circles.

Jon McGregor - "Reservoir 13"

Story about the 13 years after a girl went missing in a small (Northern?) English village. Almost abstract writing, and though you never get really close to any of the characters, beautiful writing, with a very smooth transition of time from close-up to distant, small steps to large jumps, even within the same sentence. Great portrayal of emotions through simple actions.

Great examples of using recurring imagery to show the passing of times and paint the setting: foxes mating. fox cubs. fox cubs setting out on their own.




He'd been in the job three months ow, and his supervisor said there were no complaints as such but did he want to have a think about engaging with the customers a little more? Martin said he would certainly think about that, and went out to the loading bay for a smoke and a kick of the packing cases which were stacked there. The sun went down around half past four but it was already dark by then, the murky light blotted out by the high moors and the gathering clouds.


Les Thompson walked his fields in the evening while the sun was still warm on the grass. The heads were up and the cut would come tomorrow. In the beech wood the fox cubs were taken away from their dens and taught to find food for themselves. A white hooded top was found in a clough on the top of the moor, oiled a deep peatbrown and fraying at the seams. The make and design were confirmed as a match by the missing girl's mother. The forensic tests took weeks and were inconclusive. Extensive searched were conducted where the top had been found but nothing further was unearthed.


Sophie Hunter and James Broad were known to be courting. This was the word Stuart Hunter used, without irony. Everyone had long assumed they would get together, but it was only a few weeks before they realised that something was wrong. They were in the cinema room at Sophie's house one afternoon while her parents were away, and she told him not to take this the wrong way but sometimes it felt like kissing her brother. James told her she didn't have a brother and she said that wasn't the point. He wasn't annoyed. He was almost relieved. He said that when he kissed her it didn't feel like kissing his sister but more like kissing her mum. She asked when he'd kissed her mother and he said often. She's a very liberated woman, he said, and she told him he was disgusting. It takes one to know one, he said. They were still holding each other, and although they knew where the conversation was going they were in no hurry to let go. He kissed her one more time, very softly, and shook his head. We used to run around naked together at playgroup, he said. It doesn't feel right seeing you naked now. People will be disappointed, she told him. Captain of the rugby team and the head prefect? We're supposed to be the dream team. This is it then? he asked. I guess it is, she said. That's okay, isn't it? He nodded. Mind you, she said, my parents aren't due back for hours. She watched him as she unbuttoned her top. Well, this is confusing, he said. He shifted on the sofa. But if you're going to be like that about it. She reached for the button of his jeans and they kissed again, quickly, and pulled off just enough clothes to have sex. He came quickly with a shout and a sigh and afterwards she stayed astride him for a moment, stroking the side of his face and telling him they would always be friends. And once they'd wriggled back into their clothes she told him, as though it was nothing, as though she'd only just thought of it, that actually Lynsey really liked him and he should think about that at some point. He shook his head and told her she was a disgrace. She asked him what the problem was. She wasn't even at playgroup with us, she said. It would be different. He buttoned his jeans and reached for the remote control. You can choose, he said.


Kid stuff. Building dens. Swimming in the river. Going into the caves. She'd always wanted to do a bit more, push things further. She wasn't much older than they were but she'd seemed a lot more mature. She was so pretty, Sophie said, lighting the pipe again. Wasn't she pretty, James? James glanced at her in the rearview mirror. Her eyes were closed and she was smiling. He looked at Rohan, and nodded. They'd all fancied her, he said, even if they hadn't admitted it at the time. There was something exciting about her, he said. She talked us into climbing the fence round the quarry, and she was the first one to jump off the rope-swing. She was hardcore. And she was smart, Sophie added, from the back seat. Lynsey sat up straight again. We should all go to the same uni, she said. Shouldn't we? We could live in the same halls and everything. James passed her the pipe, and they listened to the click and draw as she smoked it, the long pause before she sighed out the smoke. James and Sophie were both picturing Becky launching out from the rope-swing, this girl who none of them really knew, the light catching on her long bare legs as she fell through the air and something new stirred in them all. I was the only one who kept in touch with her, James said, after she went back to London. Emails, postcards, nothing much. I didn't have a phone and there was no Facebook in those days. But we kept in touch. We - fuck it. We liked each other, okay? We liked each other. He turned round and took the pipe from Lynsey, who was falling asleep again. He thumbed it full of skunk from the bag on the dashboard. Becky was the one who talked her parents into coming here again for New Year, is what she reckoned. He toked hard on the pipe, and coughed as he let the smoke go. So there's that for a start. Rohan took the pipe. And then when she was here we all met up and hung out for a bit, except it was cold and there wasn't really anywhere to hang out. It was nice seeing her though. We head a little bit of a connection or something. And she'd grown up a lot since the summer. He's talking about her being physically mature, Sophie said, sleepily. Don't be coy, James. You mean she had tits, yeah? Me and Lynsey were well jealous, weren't we, Lyns? Lynsey opened her eyes and looked at Sophie, Edinburgh, she said. We'll all go to Edinburgh. I'll do English, you guys do whatever. It's cheap up there. Sophie stroked her arm and said yes, we'll definitely all go to Edinburgh, we'll all go together, if we get in, we'll be a gang up there. Lynsey closed her eyes. I didn't just mean that, James said. But it was part of it, Sophie murmured. The car was quiet for a moment. When they talked about Becky now it was hard to actually picture her face. The photo on the news had never looked right, but it had replaced the image of her they'd held. She was being lost all over again. Outside the car the evening was still and the light was softening over the reservoir.

Hedda Hassel Mørch for nautil.us - "Is Matter Conscious?"

http://nautil.us/issue/47/consciousness/is-matter-conscious


This view, that consciousness constitutes the intrinsic aspect of physical reality, goes by many different names, but one of the most descriptive is "dual-aspect monism." Monism contrasts with dualism, the view that consciousness and matter are fundamentally different substances or kinds of stuff. Dualism is widely regarded as scientifically implausible, because science shows no evidence of any non-physical forces that influence the brain.

Monism holds that all of reality is made of the same kind of stuff. It comes in several varieties. The most common monistic view is physicalism (also known as materialism), the view that everything is made of physical stuff, which only has one aspect, the one revealed by physics. This is the predominant view among philosophers and scientists today. According to physicalism, a complete, purely physical description of reality leaves nothing out. But according to the hard problem of consciousness, any purely physical description of a conscious system such as the brain at least appears to leave something out: It could never fully capture what it is like to be that system. That is to say, it captures the objective but not the subjective aspects of consciousness: the brain function, but not our inner mental life.

[Bertrand] Russell's dual-aspect monism tries to fill in this deficiency. It accepts that the brain is a material system that behaves in accordance with the law of physics. But it adds another, intrinsic aspect to matter which is hidden from the extrinsic, third-person perspective of physics and which therefore cannot be captured by any purely physical description. But although this intrinsic aspect eludes our physical theories, it does not elude our inner observations. Our own consciousness constitutes the intrinsic aspect of the brain, and this is our clue to the intrinsic aspect of other physical things. To paraphrase Arthur Schopenhauer's succinct response to Kant: We can now the thing-in-itself because we are it.

Dual-aspect monism comes in moderate and radical forms. Moderate versions take the intrinsic aspect of matter to consist of so-called protoconscious or "neutral"properties: properties that are unknown to science, but also different from consciousness. The nature of such neither-mental-nor-physical properties seems quite mysterious. Like the aforementioned quantum theories of consciousness, moderate dual-aspect monism can therefore be accused of merely adding one mystery to another and expecting them to cancel out.

The most radical version of dual-aspect monism takes the intrinsic aspect of reality to consist of consciousness itself. This is decidedly not the same as subjective idealism, the view that the physical world is merely a structure within human consciousness, and that the external world is in some sense an illusion. According to dual-aspect monism, the external world exists entirely independently of human consciousness. But it would not exist independently of any kind of consciousness, because all physical things are associated with some form of consciousness of their own, as their own intrinsic realize, or hardware.

As a solution to the hard problem of consciousness, dual-aspect monism faces objections of its own. The most common objection is that it results in panphychism, the view that all things are associated with some form of consciousness. To critics, it's just too implausible that fundamental particles are conscious. And indeed this idea takes some getting used to. But consider the alternatives. Dualism looks implausible on scientific grounds. Physicalism takes the objective, scientifically accessible aspect of reality to be the only reality, which arguably implies that the subjective aspect of consciousness is an illusion. Maybe so - but shouldn't we be more confident that we are conscious, in the full subjective sense, than that particles are not?

A second important objection is the so-called combination problem. How and why does the complex, unified consciousness of our brains result from putting together particles with simple consciousness? This question looks suspiciously similar to the original hard problem. I and other defenders of panpsychism have argued that the combination problem is nevertheless not as hard as the original hard problem. In some ways, it is easier to see how to get one form of conscious matter (such as a conscious brain) from another form of conscious matter (such as a set of conscious particles) than how to get conscious matter from non-conscious matter. But many find this unconvincing. Perhaps it is just a matter of time, though. The original hard problem, in one form or another, has been pondered by philosophers for centuries. The combination problem has received much less attention, which gives more hope for a yet undiscovered solution.

The possibility that consciousness is the real concrete stuff of reality, the fundamental hardware that implements the software of our physical theories, is a radical idea. It completely inverts our ordinary picture of reality in a way that can be difficult to fully grasp. But it may solve two of the hardest problems in science and philosophy at once.

Zack Vasquez for CrookedMarquee - "What Is It That Makes David Lynch Movies 'Lynchian'?"

https://crookedmarquee.com/what-is-it-that-makes-david-lynch-movies-lynchian/


When we think of the term "Lynchian," the agreed-upon definition is the one composed by David Foster Wallace in his famous essay "David Lynch Keeps His Head." Wallace's "Academic definition" of the eponym describes it as "a particular kind of irony where the very macabre and the very mundane combine in such a way as to reveal the former's perpetual containment within the latter."



Wallace does get closer to an accurate appraisal of the Lynchian aesthetic in that same section of the essay, when he breaks down the comparison between Lynch and Tarantino further: "Quentin Tarantino is interested in watching someone's ear getting cut off; David Lynch is interested in the ear."
While this statement once more misses the mark in regards to Tarantino (go look again at that scene in Reservoir Dogs: we don't actually watch the ear getting cut off, and the mise-en-scène makes it clear that Tarantino is interested in everything but the physical violence), he is on to something in regards to Lynch's obsession with tactile objects.



This blue-collar aesthetic is the true central aspect to the Lynch brand of strangeness, one that is present in all but one of his films. It's there in the urban blight of Eraserhead and The Elephant Man; in the white picket fences, suburban front lawns, lumber yards, and roadside diners of Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks; in the long, open roads of Wild at Heart and The Straight Story and Lost Highway; and in the crumbling facade of old-school Hollywood glitz and glamour in Mulhulland Drive and Inland Empire. It is there in the anachronistic way his characters style themselves (Brandoesque leather jackets, lumberjack flannel, hair slicked back with goops of pomade for the men; tight wool sweaters, slinky film-noir nightgowns, platinum blonde dye jobs for the women), and in the seedy alleyways, lonesome desert motels, banal apartment complexes, and run down trailer parks where they wander.



The blue-collar surrealism that Lynch deals in extends beyond his country of origin. It is just as at home in the Victorian London of The Elephant Man, or in the Polish sections that are strewn throughout Inland Empire. David Lynch the man (or character, depending on how much credence you give to his public persona) may be as American as the apple pie his characters scarf down, but as an artist he comes from a long line of European surrealists. What separates him, however, from an early surrealist director like Buñuel, or the New Wave auteurs like Godard and Resnais that bridged the period between them, is that Lynch's films are not interested in the politics of class. That may seem contradictory to the notion of "blue-collar surrealism," but it all comes back to those tactile objects. It is in them that Lynch discovers the uncanny, not in the semiotics of class divisions that those other filmmakers use their fractured narratives to satirize and condemn. (Which is not to say that Lynch takes his working-class heroes for granted, it's just that he doesn't present their struggles as reating purely to their station. When representatives of a ruling power structure do make their presence known, as do the Castigliani brothers in Mulholland Drive or the residents of the Black Lodge in Twin Peaks, their origins and motivations seem to be otherworldly.)