THE HISTOLOGY OF TRUTH
In the world, I build reading rooms for low-income children at after-school sites. I certainly display usual suspects. If Stink is your springboard to chapter books, then sproing away. Many selections, however, doubtless would strike the kid-lit community as odd. I sneak in Edward Gorey (including The Fantod Pack), Saki, Shirley Jackson, Lore Segal, Anne Carson. I contend that Calvin and Hobbes is complete preparation for the SAT verbal section.
On the non-fiction side, I hit science and science journalism as hard as I can, with particular emphasis upon human anatomy and physiology. I also augment with other materials, including a field trip to Body Worlds. A detailed knowledge of how your own body works is not luxury, but necessity. If the children who I serve do not own their bodies and appreciate the narrow parameters of optimal function, they are all but guaranteed the horrors of childhood Type II Diabetes and the high blood pressure that causes heart failure in a reprehensibly high percentage of African-Americans under age 50.
Perhaps I should follow my own damn advice. For half of my adolescence, I was certain that I was grievously miswired, because fights with my batty mother triggered tears only from my left eye. This fear in turn generated even more addled theories. I might well be a monster, but lo the power! Fully half of my body was able to withstand her machinations!
Lord. Cue the 3/17/09 NYT interview of neurologist Dr. Alice Flaherty:
When weeping during a scene, the actress who played Nora was alarmed upon noticing that the mascara ran from her left eye more quickly than from her right. Dr. Flaherty reassured her that the neurology was normal: the right brain, which controls the opposite side of the body, also controls negative emotions. Therefore, one side seems, and is, sadder than the other.
HERR KEPLER'S NOTEBOOK
Time is the bully anchor of the opposing tug-rope team.
The person with a happy home life tracks glitter through the world; the solitary person leaves snowprints.
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"The grasshopper warbler's song comes up out of the earth just as you think the day is quietening down. It has no prelude or warm-up: it starts midperformance, as if switched on by the dark, as it if has been singing like this beneath the earth until it was dark enough to come to the surface. As if, though we hardly hear it, this singing never stops."
A Year on the Wing (Tim Dee)
All writing and cartoons on this site copyright 2008-2010 Julia Martin, unless otherwise credited.
The person with a happy home life tracks glitter through the world; the solitary person leaves snowprints.
-------------------------------------
"The grasshopper warbler's song comes up out of the earth just as you think the day is quietening down. It has no prelude or warm-up: it starts midperformance, as if switched on by the dark, as it if has been singing like this beneath the earth until it was dark enough to come to the surface. As if, though we hardly hear it, this singing never stops."
A Year on the Wing (Tim Dee)
All writing and cartoons on this site copyright 2008-2010 Julia Martin, unless otherwise credited.
Now I'm trying to figure out if this also correlates with my vision. Like I guess a lot of people, I have a warm eye and a cold eye: things are oranger in one and bluer in the other.
ReplyDeleteIs it truly common for a person to discern that each eye contains a distinct distribution of photopigments, and thus perceives color differently? You've given me a new dinner-table question of the day.
ReplyDeleteSo are you an anomalous trichromat, I wonder, or even in the eight percent of men who are tetrachromat (inherited in photopigment opsin genes on the X)? Or perhaps this is simply the level of discernment that you’ve developed over a lifetime of looking both at nature and art.
Here is a fun paper which examines the color perceptions of female tetrachromats. I love that they test using an anomaloscope.
http://www.klab.caltech.edu/cns186/papers/Jameson01.pdf