Ciarán Ryan notebook

Ages ago, I’m sure I heard Bill Cullen say, on Radio 4, that “good luck is when hard work and opportunity collide”

http://www.independent.ie/national-news/and-now-for-the-good-news-1379098.html

Today’s Sunday Times magazine was very strong - May 11 2008.

Follow up on disfigured soldier / photos from crushed Prague uprising - Josef Koudelka, photographer / and a piece about the subject of a forthcoming BBC documentary ‘Hold Me Tight, Let Me Go’ - on BBC4 on Thursday, May 22, at 9pm

http://women.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/women/families/article3886308.ece

“The Mulberry Bush school in Oxfordshire – the subject of a film by Kim Longinotto to be shown later this month on BBC4 – looks after children who have been multiply excluded from mainstream primary schools. These are not yet the hooded teenagers of Camila Batmanghelidjh’s Kids Company: the youngest is just 6, the oldest 12. All of them are thought to have suffered significant neglect in the first two years of life, which has a ruinous effect on brain development. Fundamentally they are still babies. The building blocks of their personalities are not joined. They are chaotic, unpredictable and unable to function in a group without disrupting. That’s the theory. “

** Is there proof that neglect effects brain development? It sounds convincing - and it seems to be becoming a popular view.

Also: “Children with attachment disorders don’t just rage and spit and climb up on roofs: they connect inappropriately to total strangers, looking for warmth.”

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Also in the newspaper: Spaced learning

Monkseaton, which is a comprehensive in a deprived area, consistently wins high grades and has sent pupils to top British universities and Ivy League colleges in America.

Kelley’s technique, known as “spaced learning”, is based on the research of Douglas Fields, a neuroscientist at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development in Baltimore. He has found that connections between developing brain cells form most effectively when they are allowed breaks from stimulation.

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The first cartoon I’ve drawn in ages. I still have not thrown away all of my pieces of paper…

“Everything you can imagine is real”

Pablo Picasso

Cyberspace can become a dream world says John Suler.

http://www-usr.rider.edu/~suler/psycyber/psycyber.html

Rapid shifts of scenario - without travelling over ground - web surfing is like dreaming. Users can transcend the laws of space and physics.

People and images appear out of nowhere.

Time is irrelevant.

When computer freezes - it’s like a paralysis nightmare?

Dissociation  - people “lose themselves” - in web surfing and dreams. Your dreams may be from you - but are fragmented - and the dreamer is not aware.

Wish fulfillment.

** This reminds me of the san dot paintings - their red line between the human and spirit world.

Evolutionary theory differs from behaviour genetics:

It’s unwise to deduce ethical premises from biology.

But you cannot understand ethics without looking to biology for explanations.

See:

Maths:
Robert Axelrod
John Maynard Smith
(Game theory illuminates why self-interested individual co-operate)

Evolutionary psychology:
Leda Cosmides (cheating causes)

Edward O’Wilson wrote Sociobiology: The new synthesis
Peter Singer attempted to refute in: The Expanding Circle (1979)

People are co-operative and competitive  - see:

Emile Durkheim’s ’social facts’ -  Customs, institutions, nations etc that are more than the sum of their individual parts.

Ariely uses another example. A study conducted in an Israeli nursery decided to punish parents for collecting their children late. They would be fined £10. But once the fine was introduced, guess what happened to lateness? It went up. Once the social obligation (turn up on time) had been replaced by a market transaction (Late? That will be £10 please) attitudes changed.
Predictably Irrational by MIT’s Professor Dan Ariely.

http://timesonline.typepad.com/comment/2008/04/the-behavioural.html

The Observer invited Hunter S Thompson to cover the Braemar Games in Scotland (Royals, whiskey and guns) in 1992. He never made it. He did visit London for three days though, as Robert Chalmers recounted in GQ magazine - 1999 - in an article called ‘Fear and loathing in the Edgware Road’.

My selection of what Robert wrote:

Friday September 4th, 1992. 8:25am: “Thompson has begun a commentary on the view from the rear window: ” Poor f***ing dingbats, slobbering idiots roaming in the streets, doom, death and decay.” (We have reached Clapham.)”

The gents toilet, the Fox and anchor, 10am: I am hailed by an animated, grey-haired man in a suit, standing on my right at the trough urinal. It’s only 10 o’clock he says, but by Christ, I’m pissed. He says he works for Dewhurst butchers, who are having a do in a function room upstairs; he looks like a regional manager, in town for the day and making the most of it. Behind him I can see Thompson (in the cubicle, but with the door wide open) vigorously snorting cocaine.

10:20 a.m..There follows a 10 minute gap in which Thompson is left upstairs unsupervised; in this time, which passes mercifully unrecorded, he appears to have wandered into the butcher’s convention and mingled. When he eventually reappears, Thompson is brandishing a battered hardback called The Games, a book which, he announces, is research material for his trip to Braemar, but which turns out to be a social history of bullfighting in Andalusia. He claims he was given it by one of the men from Dewhurst.

11 a.m., Hunter is rapidly descending into a amphetamine psychosis; rambling about not understanding his brief, not being taken care of, not knowing what he’s doing here. His conversation sounds like William Burroughs reading Finnegan’s Wake. I hail a black cab; Thompson emerges, snarling, from the fox and anchor. He is carrying a half pint glass full of neat whisky. As he sits down on the back, he turned to me and begins to speak. He says: I am a professional.

12.00pm, at his hotel:… Hunter is teetering on the balcony, peering out over the Edgware road with a pair of binoculars, muttering about dingbats in Canary Wharf. He is surprisingly keen on the Post Office Tower.

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Later, Robert found at the Metropole, a room service menu on which Thompson had written the nearest he had come to written reportage in the entire trip - on the cover was one word: Dorthe

see also:

Oscar Zeta Acosta - what happened to him? Thompson wrote about him in 1977

1981 film, where the Buffalo roam, based on the Oscar piece

the great shark Hunt — another book by Thompson

He did the missiles in Constable’s Haywain - photo montage

Admass. This is my name for the whole system of an increasing productivity, plus inflation, plus a rising standard of material living, plus high-pressure advertising and salesmanship, plus mass communications, plus cultural democracy and the creation of the mass mind, the mass man.

J. B Priestley, Journey Down a Rainbow, Heinemann-Cresset, London, 1955, p. 51.

On War and Society…
“My own personal view, for what it’s worth, is that we must stop thinking in terms of property and power and begin thinking in terms of community and creation. …We want a world that offers people not the dubious pleasures of power, but the maximum opportunities for creation. And, even already, in the middle of this war [World War Two], I can see that world shaping itself.
” …Property is that old-fashioned way of thinking of a country as a thing, and a collection of things on that thing, all owned by certain people and constituting property, instead of thinking of that country as the home of a living society, and considering the welfare of that society, the community itself as the first test.”
(Taken from his weekly wartime broadcast, Postscripts, 1940)

An inspector calls

King leans forward. “I’ll tell you something that’s absolutely astonishing. In China, when Mao died, at his funeral there was a photograph taken of all the bureaucrats in a long, long line. But there were four carefully retouched blanks in the picture - the Gang of Four. Underneath, in the caption to the picture, they laboriously listed everybody, a name and then a comma. When it got to the Gang of Four, there were three x’s, comma, then three x’s comma… Amazing. They wanted you to know that they’d gone, and this was a warning: this is what you’re going to get, if you don’t watch out.”

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4158/is_19991130/ai_n14270884/pg_2

Arts: Retouched by the hand of God
Independent, The (London), Nov 30, 1999 by Linton Chiswick

also music

http://www.chesternovello.com/default.aspx?TabId=2432&State_3041=2&WorkId_3041=11869

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gang_of_Four

Fact and fantasy would collide. Reagan would famously recount scenes from films he had seen as though they had actually happened.

Reagan’s air of “gentle abstraction” as a child - got him harrassed by local kids

He tried to join the communist party in 1938 - but was turned down for being a “flake”

In his retirement - in decline - he would rake leaves from the pool for hours - not understanding that his secret service men were replenishing the leaves in the pool.

Dutch: A memoir of Ronald Reagan  by Edmund Morris

“He never quite threw off the image of the weakest member of the gang, pushed forward after a nasty killing when the police were on their way”

“You must be the change you wish to see in the world”

Mahatma Gandhi

The Holy Roman Emperor lives in Teddington

His Imperial and Royal Highness Prince Karl Fredericke Phillippe von Wettinberg.

His Imperial and Royal Highness Prince Karl Fredericke Phillipe Charles Louis Alexander Nicholas Leopold Albert Edward…