Sparkle Pony saying goodbye to the pool at our Omaha apartment.

I don’t often talk about my personal life here on Machina Memorialis, but much has happened of late.

While you wouldn’t know it from this blog, which has been far too quiet during the past few years, 2010 and 2011 were eventful. Among other things, I was dating for the first time in 18 years. In July, 2010, I realized I really wanted to be dating Lisa Schamess, a good friend who has shown up on this blog from time-to-time¹ , but for many reasons—the least of which was that she lived in Washington, DC, about 1,100 miles away—I didn’t expect anything to come of it. The notion was there, though, in the back of my mind, and it subtly changed the way I interacted with her.

US Capitol Building at night.

Fast forward some seven months. To my surprise, Lisa and I were talking the possibility of a relationship. I went out for a visit, things went amazingly well, and on May 30, 2011—seven moths ago today—Lisa, my two kittens Huginn and Muninn, and I arrived in Washington, DC in a car full of stuff to find a moving truck already waiting for us. A while later, she asked me a question to which I said yes.²

Sparkle Pony in Western Massachusetts.

I’ve spent the last seven months getting used to a new life, a  new city, and new roles, including that of step-father-to-be to a most extraordinary 13-year old. Family life suits me, and I’m exceedingly happy.  (As I’ve hinted at occasionally, I haven’t always been able to say as much for most of the time I’ve kept this blog.)

As I get settled into things here, I’ve been looking outward, both in terms of taking advantage of my new city and in returning to things I’d set aside. For instance, I’ve finally met Jeffery Jerome Cohen (something that took far too long), thanks, in part, to the excellent public offerings of George Washington U’s Medieval and Early Modern Studies Institute; I’m gearing up to restart home brewing;³ and I drop in on the Library of Congress when I need to do research or a quiet place to write. I’m still thinking about memory, Walter J. Ong and Marshall McLuhan,⁴ and composition. And medieval studies and science fiction and fantasy too, if you must know. I’ve been too quiet for long enough.

I’m looking forward to what the next seven months shall bring.

1. Her first appearance was in a comment way back in 2005 and most significantly in a post about the courage of two friends.
2. For the record, she did ask in person, under a full moon as we sat beside a small lake in Western Massachusetts, timed to correspond with the online proposal going live.  
3. I’ve got a blog post or two to write about that.
4. I still have a whole box of material from my time in the Ong archives to write about

They’re taking pledges through December 5, 11:21 am EST. A $45 pledge will get you a copy of the game with custom insert. (For those of you who don’t know how Kickstarter works, it’s a “funding platform for creative projects” that runs on an all-or-nothing system. People design projects and then present the concept at Kickstarter. If they reach their funding, pledges are collected and the project goes forward. For more information, check out their FAQ.

A thanks to Brendan Riley for making sure I knew about this.

I’ve not heard of a pecha kucha before, which seems to be a 6 minute 40 second presentation in which 20 slides are shown, each for 20 seconds.

What exactly does this mean? It means that our cognition isn’t confined to our cortices. That is, our cognition is influenced, perhaps determined by, our experiences in the physical world. This is why we say that something is “over our heads” to express the idea that we do not understand; we are drawing upon the physical inability to not see something over our heads and the mental feeling of uncertainty. Or why we understand warmth with affection; as infants and children the subjective judgment of affection almost always corresponded with the sensation of warmth, thus giving way to metaphors such as “I’m warming up to her.”

The post is based upon an interview with George Lakoff, one of the founders of embodied cognition.

There’s nothing new here, at least to me, but I’m sharing this for those who aren’t familiar with embodied cognition and for me to make us of later. As I’ve mentioned many times here on Machina Memorialis, such as in”Conceptual Blending and Metaphor,” embodied cognition and its concepts such as conceptual blending are intimately tied to practices of memoria, the least of not which being the places and images mnemonic of memory palaces and other forms of architectural mnemonics.

A new study led by Gabriel Radvansky shows that the simple act of walking through a doorway creates a new memory episode, thereby making it more difficult to recall information pertaining to an experience in the room that’s just been left behind. [Read more.]¹

1. Radvansky, G., Krawietz, S., and Tamplin, A. (2011). Walking through doorways causes forgetting: Further explorations. The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 64 (8), 1632-1645

From the handbook’s entry on the TM-31 Recreational Time Travel Device, which is the means by which people in Minor Universe 31 travel through time:

One notable quirk of the word recreational in the product’s name, which can be read either of two ways, with a hyphen or without, which some have suspected to be an implicit acknowledgement of the fact that “recreational” use of the machine is also, in a sense, “re-creational” use as well.

This idea is consistent with the current understanding of the neuronal mechanism of human memory, i.e., every time a user recalls a memory, he is not only remembering it, but also, from an electrochemical perspective, literally re-creating the experience as well.

Memory and imagination, recreation and creation, both seem to be intimately tied. Consider, for instance, these three passages, the first two from Mary Carruthers The Craft of Thought (( The Craft of Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric, and the Making of Images, 400 – 1200. Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature 34. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998. )) :

The emphasis upon the need for human beings to ‘see’ their thoughts in their mind as organized schemata of images, or ‘pictures,’ and then to use them for further thinking, is a striking and continuous feature of medieval monastic rhetoric, with significant interest even for our own contemporary understanding of the role of images and thinking. (Craft of Thought 3)

and

Medieval memoria thus includes, in our terms, “creative thought,” but not thoughts created “out of nothing.” It built upon remembered structures “located” in one’s mind as patters, edifices, grids, and — most basically — association-fabricated networks of “bits” in one’s memory that must be “gathered” into an idea.  (Craft of Thought 23)

and the third from Mark Johnson’s “The Imaginative Basis of Meaning and Cognition”² :

According to the view I am espousing, we must understand imaginative activity as including all sensory modalities, motor programs, and even abstract acts of cognition such as the drawing of inferences. In this very broad sense, imaginative activity is the means by which an organism constructs an ordering of its perceptions, motor skills, and reflective acts, as it seeks to accommodate itself to its environment. Imagination, so understood, thus includes the full range of organizing activities, from the forming of images (in different sensory modalities), to the execution of motor programs, to the manipulation of abstract representations, and even to the creation of novel orderings. (79)

All of this is quite interesting in light of research which finds that scene construction is a shared process common to both episodic memory and the creation of fictional experiences as reported by Demis Hassabis, Dharshan Kumaran, and Eleanor A. Maguire in ”Using Imagination to Understand the Neural Basis of Episodic Memory”³:

Functional MRI (fMRI) studies investigating the neural basis of episodic memory recall, and the related task of thinking about plausible personal future events, have revealed a consistent network of associated brain regions. [...]. By using previously imagined fictitious experiences as a comparison for episodic memories, we identified the neural basis of a key process engaged in common, namely scene construction, involving the generation, maintenance and visualization of complex spatial contexts. [...]. We conclude that scene construction constitutes a common process underlying episodic memory and imagination of fictitious experiences, and suggest it may partially account for the similar brain networks implicated in navigation, episodic future thinking, and the default mode.  [Read full abstract.]

All of this seems to suggest that the active creation of one’s own mnemonic images is an important mnemonic practice, something we’ve already known. In other words, this is really just a post connecting contemporary cognitive research to long-established mnemonic practices.

1. Note: The first quote of this post has been sitting around for a few weeks in draft form. At one point, I thought I had something to say about it, but I only have the vaguest notion of what it might have been. As that’s the case, I’m releasing this to the wild, juxtaposed with a few additional quotes in the hopes that something will eventually emerge.
2.  Images of Memory: On Remembering and Representation. Ed. Susanne Küchler and Walter Melion. Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991. 74-86 
3. The Journal of Neuroscience, 26 December 2007, 27(52): 14365-14374

Within a science fictional space, memory and regret are, when taken together, the set of necessary and sufficient elements required to produce a time machine.

I.e., it is possible, in principle, to construct a universal time machine from no other components than (i) a piece of paper that is moved in two directions through a recording element backward and forward, which (ii) performs only two basic operations, narration and the straightforward application of the past tense. — Charles Yu, How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe

Charles Yu’s novel How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe is about a Charles Yu, a time travel technician who lives in Minor Universe 31. In the novel, the character Charles Yu writes the fictional book How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, which is part time travel technical manual, part autobiography. Excerpts from the fictional How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe are scattered throughout the novel How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe. In this post, I’ll refer to the fictional book the character Charles Yu writes as “the handbook” and the novel as the “novel.”¹

The above quote, one such passage from the handbook, strikes a chord. Looking beyond the conceit that a book can itself a time machine, I’m struck by the claim that it takes memory and regret to produce time travel as this suggests that the recollection of contentedness and regret, positive and negative experience, are manifestly different in kind. If recollection is always remembering past experience, why would the recollection of unhappy memories, recollection of moments of regret, be a form of time travel while the recollection of positive experiences—happy memories—not be so? It may be that while the recollection of positive events, like social memory, has to do with identity and sense of self and, therefore, present-focused, regret, like trauma, is past-focused, a past moment that seeks to draw you back into your past.

Still trying to puzzle out what, if anything, this might mean from the perspective of memoria beyond the obvious connection to the rhetorical use of pathos.

1.  As a side note, in the process of composing this post, I found it refreshing to read Ander Monson’s NYTbook review of the novel, “Living in Your Head,” because it is a NYT review of a science fiction novel that doesn’t feel the need to apologize for reviewing a science fiction novel. Sadly, I suspect this has much more to do with the fact that Charles Yu is an award-winning author of literary fiction who has chosen to write a science fiction novel rather than because the NYT has come to terms with science fiction. I’m reminded here of Tom Shippey’s argument in his Forward to J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century that science fiction and fantasy are mainstream and everything else is genre.

Big Fat Chocolate Cake, available at the Parkway Deli, Silver Spring, MD. Picture by Lisa Schamess

We here at Machina Memorialis are shocked to realize we haven’t mentioned, let alone promoted, Cake Day. Let us rectify this oversite.

Simply put, Cake Day is a monthly celebration of life. While we here at Machina Memorialis celebrate Cake Day by eating cake with or as breakfast, the purpose of Cake Day is to take a moment to enjoy something you love, not simply to partake of it, but to marvel and savor the experience of enjoyment. Traditionally, Cake Day is celebrated on the first day of every month, but keeping withing the spirit of Cake Day, it’s a flexible holiday. Since celebrating our first Cake Day in June, we haven’t always managed to celebrate Cake Day on the first day of the month.

For those wanting more information, here’s a short FAQ:

What is Cake Day? Cake Day is a monthly celebration of life. While purists shall celebrate Cake Day by eating cake with breakfast or for breakfast, the purpose of Cake Day is to take a moment to enjoy something you love, something you could enjoy everyday but for practical reasons do not. The goal is to not simply to partake of it, but to marvel and savor the experience.

When do I celebrate Cake Day? Officially, Cake Day is celebrated on the first of every month; however, keeping with the spirit of Cake Day, celebrate the day whenever it best fits your schedule.

What if I don’t like cake or can’t eat cake? Does this mean this I’m left out? Of course not! Excluding people is antithetical to the spirit of Cake Day. As explained above, the purpose of Cake Day is to take a moment to enjoy something you love. And the goal of Cake Day is not simply to partake of it of that thing you love but to marvel and savor the experience of your enjoyment.

Why is Cake Day a monthly event? We wanted Cake Day to be a special occassion but not too special. Making it a yearly event would imbue it with too much significance, and, besides, the goal is to enjoy the moment of doing something you like, something you could enjoy daily but for practical reasons do not. We should take a moment to treat ourselves more than once a year.

Does Cake Day have an official website? Yes. There’s a Facebook event page dedicated to Cake Day. The event date is updated a day or two after each Cake Day.

When was the first Cake Day? The first Cake Day was June 1, 2011.

How did Cake Day start? The inspiration for Cake Day came about one morning as the resident 12-year old and I were sharing the remants of a slice of Big Fat Chocolate Cake (pictured above), and she said, ”I wish we should have cake for breakfast everyday.” My first thought was, “No, not everyday because then it wouldn’t be special,” and then decided that cake for breakfast once a month sounded right.

Bob Eggleton's "Cthulhu Awakens"

Other than Valentine’s Day and Lovecraft’s Birthday, what better day to celebrate all things Cthulhu than Halloween? Here at Machina Memorialis, we’re celebrating the day by downloading and reading the free Complete Works of Lovecraft eBook put together by Cthulhu Chick. Cthulhu Chick offers the eBook in PDF, ePUB and MOBI formats. I’ve downloaded it to my iPad and took a gander and it looks good. It even comes with cover art by cover created by Santiago Casares.

A simple note: This isn’t actually the complete works of Lovecraft but, it appears, the complete stories of Lovecraft, an important distinction for those interested in Cthulhuiana as this excludes his poetry, including the sonnet cycle “The Fungi from Yuggoth” and his essays, such as “Supernatural Horror in Literature.” To see what’s missing, take a look at the H. P. Lovecraft bibliography.

Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn!

I periodically get email from folks who, having read “Accelerando”, assume I am some kind of fire-breathing extropian zealot who believes in the imminence of the singularity, the uploading of the libertarians, and the rapture of the nerds. I find this mildly distressing, and so I think it’s time to set the record straight and say what I really think.

Short version: Santa Claus doesn’t exist. [Read more.]

As preface, he assumes you’ve read:

• Vernor Vinge’s ” The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post-Human Era,”
• Hans Moravec’s “Uploading‘” and
• Nick Bostrom’s “Are You Living In a Computer Simulation?“