The Job of Language

Words can tell us who we are. But the words that really matter are the ones that tell us what we think.

Guardian Unlimited: Arts blog – books: Of course language offends: it’s doing its job

Fact Busters!

My librarian colleague Roxanne Hue Feldman (aka fairrosa) has been doing something very cool with our fourth graders during her library periods with them. It involves Snapple caps, facts, and a kid-edited wiki.  Read all about it here.

Migraines, Creativity, and Lewis Carroll

I keep stumbling across intriguing new blogs at the New York Times. There is one, I just discovered, about migraines. And yesterday contributor Siri Hustvedt considered how and what migraines have to do with the creative process, focusing in on my favorite Victorian children’s writer, Lewis Carroll:

“‘Who in the world am I?’ Ah, that’s the great puzzle!” says Lewis Carroll’s Alice after experiencing a sudden, disorienting growth spurt.

While she meditates on this philosophical conundrum, her body changes again. The girl shrinks. I have asked myself the same question many times, often in relation to the perceptual alterations, peculiar feelings, and exquisite sensitivities of the migraine state. Who in the world am I? Am “I” merely malfunctioning brain meat? In “The Astonishing Hypothesis” Francis Crick (famous for his discovery of the DNA double helix with James Watson) wrote, “You, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are, in fact, no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.” Mind is matter, Crick argued. All of human life can be reduced to neurons.

There is a migraine aura phenomenon named after Charles Lutwidge Dodgson’s (Lewis Caroll’s) story of myriad transformations: Alice in Wonderland syndrome. The afflicted person perceives herself, or parts of herself, ballooning or diminishing in size. The neurological terms for the peculiar sensations of growing and shrinking are macroscopy and microscopy. Dodgson was a migraineur. He was also known to take laudanum. It seems more than possible that he had experienced at least some of the somatic oddities that he visited upon his young heroine.

Read the whole piece here: Curiouser and Curiouser – Migraine – Opinion – New York Times Blog