A year ago, Microsoft Research Cambridge and Microsoft Office commissioned the RCA to look at how authorship may change in the future and to help design the Future of Writing, and you can read about all the interesting projects in depth (pdf).

But it’s Koby (Yaacov) Barhad‘s Thoughts You May Have that stuck with me the most because it made me think about writing (and) the self. Barhad’s project began with his “desire…to reintroduce writing as a form of thinking” and explore writing as the “externalisation of thought.” Psychologist Lev Vygotsky claimed that “words die as they bring forth thoughts” and Barhad developed a word processor that immediately deleted each word as it appeared on screen — try it out! — thereby forcing the writer to constantly stay in the “now” and type whatever comes to mind. Meanwhile, “all the data that is being typed is constantly saved and processed so that users can read it as soon as they close the application.” Barhad’s exploration of how these “private” conversations can be made “public” — in a shared Cogitos space — is also interesting in terms of how the tool can be used to promote reflexivity and perhaps even reciprocity, and the project raises questions about access to, and control over, one’s stream of thought.

Unfortunately, I read the project documentation several times and couldn’t clearly identify the research questions or methods of analysis, and I think the final result actually suffers from trying to be too many things at once. While not precisely answering the brief, to focus just on writing in the “now” would have made a valuable contribution to understanding how writing works, especially as a form of self-inquiry and self-construction — and I would have liked to know more about that.

Julia Cameron, in her book The Artist’s Way, suggests an activity or tool she calls Morning Pages, which involves starting each day by writing three pages on anything and everything that crosses your mind. This kind of stream-of-consciousness writing has been suggested by many practitioners as a great way to empty out the mind, get unstuck, and otherwise understand things better so that we can get on with other stuff. In fact, Buster Benson created 750 Words as a place online where you can “write 3-pages privately every day, and learn about yourself in the process.”

What makes Barhad’s word processor so interesting, I think, is that it goes beyond writing for ourselves to actually write the self. This difference seems to arise because his tool doesn’t allow the writer to reflect on what is written until after the fact. In other words, the writer is always already in the process of becoming.

It seems like I should have more to say about this but I don’t. All I can say is that this makes me think about writing as a form of inquiry, and about the rise of auto- or self-ethnography in qualitative research. It makes me wonder how different stories — my stories — would be if they were written first on Barhad’s word processor. And I wonder how editing stories would work.

What does it make you think about?

“Sweet Darkness”

When your eyes are tired
the world is tired also.

When your vision has gone
no part of the world can find you.

Time to go into the dark
where the night has eyes
to recognize its own.

There you can be sure
you are not beyond love.

The dark will be your womb
tonight.

The night will give you a horizon
further than you can see.

You must learn one thing.
The world was made to be free in.

Give up all the other worlds
except the one to which you belong.

Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet
confinement of your aloneness
to learn

anything or anyone

that does not bring you alive
is too small for you.

~ David Whyte

Thanks to Sienna for the pointer.

Don’t tell anyone, but it’s my super secret dream to one day have Rafil Kroll-Zaidi‘s skill and writing gig. Yes, I can already imagine how glorious my life will be when each month I search far and wide for the world’s most fascinating or peculiar research, and pull it all together with exceptional verve.

In the meantime, I’ll keep renewing my Harper’s subscription just for the Findings feature, and here’s what else I read this week:

Susan J Matt explains how social media doesn’t cause loneliness, but rather that Americans have been lonely “for at least two centuries” and that contemporary society has become intolerant of those who are not “cheerfully independent.”

Vienna gets its first cat café and Kate Miltner submits a thesis on LOLCats that proves, once and for all, how “seemingly trivial pieces of media — pictures of cats with captions — can act as meaningful conduits to central elements of our humanity.”

Images of soldiers being “led to slaughter” have long represented the tragedy of war, but today’s conflict casualties are more often civilians who suffer brutal, and repeated, rape. Usually treated as a women’s issue, the use of rape during war effects men in different but no less profound ways.

Miranda Trimmier reminds us why we dissect things, and how to do it well.

If selkies are the new heroes of paranormal romance, let’s hope they smell better than seals.

There comes a stage when all researchers find ourselves in the Valley of Shit. When this happens, remember what Winston Churchill said: “If you’re going through hell, keep going.”

Apparently, not everyone is excited about in-vitro meat.

Maurice Sendak, “who wrenched the picture book out of the safe, sanitized world of the nursery and plunged it into the dark, terrifying and hauntingly beautiful recesses of the human psyche,” is dead.

Consumer “infolust” will soon be satisfied by smart-phone apps that make it easy for shoppers to POINT, KNOW and BUY. Cue Austin Powers: “Smashing! Groovy! Yay capitalism!”

Cassie Gonzales wins Granta’s “Fleeing Complexity” competition with this tweetable short story: “It was my turn to wear the dead boy’s glasses.”

Primatologists ask can animals keep pets, and orangutans use iPads to communicate.

Looking, Walking, Being

“The World is not something to
look at, it is something to be in.”
- Mark Rudman

I look and look.
Looking’s a way of being: one becomes,
sometimes, a pair of eyes walking.
Walking wherever looking takes one.

The eyes
dig and burrow into the world.
They touch
fanfare, howl, madrigal, clamor.
World and the past of it,
not only
visible present, solid and shadow
that looks at one looking.

And language? Rhythms
of echo and interruption?
That’s
a way of breathing.

breathing to sustain
looking,
walking and looking,
through the world,
in it.

~ Denise Levertov

Thanks to Virginia for sharing.

“In reinventing the world of intense, unreproducible, local knowledge, seemingly by a denial or evasion of current reality, fantasists are perhaps trying to assert and explore a larger reality than we now allow ourselves. They are trying to restore the sense — to regain the knowledge — that there is somewhere else, anywhere else, where other people may live another kind of life.

The literature of imagination, even when tragic, is reassuring, not necessarily in the sense of offering nostalgic comfort, but because it offers a world large enough to contain alternatives and therefore offers hope.”

~ Ursula K. Le Guin, Cheek by Jowl: Talks & Essays on How & Why Fantasy Matters

Quotes like this remind me of Le Guin’s anthropological approach to storytelling. Hope, for me, has always been most easily grasped through cultural diversity. Somewhere, sometime, there have been people who lived differently–and it worked.

When I was a girl I thought I would grow up to be a scientist. I spent hours at my workbench, patiently cutting cross-sections with a razor blade and drawing liquids into a pipette before placing my specimens on the glass slides and gently dropping the cover slips over them. I painstakingly labelled each one, and dutifully took notes on what I saw through my microscope. There was a comforting carefulness to the work, and the very idea that cells existed was magical to me. I even went through a phase of collecting samples from my own body, marveling at the reality that I was an assemblage of so many different forms of life. I loved what I was doing, and felt as though my love was rewarded with the knowledge I gained.

As a child, the only female scientist I had ever heard of was Marie Curie. My teachers always held her up as a hero, but in retrospect, never as a person. The only thing I knew at the time was that she was brilliant and her work eventually killed her–which I assumed had been worth it because of how beautiful it all was. (For some reason, I thought that was the heroic bit.)

“Certain bodies . . . become luminous when heated. Their luminosity disappears after some time, but the capacity of becoming luminous afresh through heat is restored to them by the action of a spark, and also by the action of radium.

The compounds of radium are spontaneously luminous. The chloride and bromide, freshly prepared and free from water, emit a light which resembles that of a glow-worm. This light diminishes rapidly in moist air . . . but . . . never completely disappears.

These gleamings, which seemed suspended in darkness, stirred us with new emotion and enchantment . . . The glowing tubes looked like faint fairy lights.”

~ Marie Curie, as cited in Radioactive

But of course it was not so simple, and people do not live on research alone. Marya Sklodowska changed her name just so she could go to the Sorbonne and study physics. She became the first female doctorate in France and despite being the first woman to be awarded the Nobel Prize (with her husband Pierre), she was too ill to travel to Stockholm for the ceremony because she had recently suffered a miscarriage. Although she eventually had two daughters, she also noted that reconciling family life with a scientific career was not easy. Marie suffered horrible depression, and even though she was named the first woman professor in the Sorbonne’s 650 year history, it took the death of her husband to achieve that status. Several years later, she fell in love again and became the first person–man or woman–to win a second Nobel Prize. However, her lover and fellow scientist Paul Langevin was married, and his wife made their affair public after he refused to give her money and custody of the children. Marie suffered terribly as a result. At a time when it was not uncommon for her male colleagues to openly have mistresses, she was insulted and ridiculed by the press for her actions.

Fellow scientists wrote to the Swedish Academy, and directly to Marie, suggesting that her behaviour would taint the ceremonies, if not the award itself, and asking her not to accept it in person. To her credit, Marie responded that she would attend the Nobel ceremony because she saw “no connection between [her] scientific work and the facts of private life” and she successfully collected her award in 1911. However, the public scandal effectively ended her romance with Langevin and she eventually suffered a nervous breakdown that led her to leave Paris for some time. Marie returned to France to help in the war effort, bringing X-ray units directly to the battlefields for the first time. Without Pierre or Paul at her side, Marie started working with her daughter Irène, and she gained positive public attention for their work. (In 1935, Irène, with her husband Frédéric Joliot, became the second woman to win the Nobel Prize; she later died of leukemia, also brought on by her research.) But the new found fame proved difficult, and Marie became more and more withdrawn. By the early 1930s, it was clear that she was ill with radiation sickness and only getting worse. She kept track of doctors’ visits and her bodily deterioration like any other experiment, and her last months were spent feeling her way around the lab, as cataracts robbed her of her sight. On 4 July, 1934 Marie’s final words began, “I am absent… I can no longer express myself… ”

Power (excerpt)

Today I was reading about Marie Curie:
she must have known she suffered from radiation sickness
her body bombarded for years by the element
she had purified
It seems she denied to the end
the source of the cataracts on her eyes
the cracked and suppurating skin of her finger-ends
till she could no longer hold a test tube or pencil

She died a famous woman denying
her wounds
denying
her wounds came from the same source as her power.

~ Adrienne Rich, 1974

I understand why Marie Curie is held up as a romantic intellectual hero, and I think it’s a mistake.

Because when I think of her as a person, I know we could have been friends.

And maybe, just maybe, I would have become a life scientist.

I’ve long admired Adrienne Rich and was really pleased to learn that there will be a reading of her work at MEOW next Wednesday the 11th at 7:30pm. I’ll be going to listen, but if I believed I could do it justice I would read Planetarium. The whole poem is glorious (go read it!) but its layout doesn’t replicate here well so I’ll only post the ending:

I have been standing all my life in the
direct path of a battery of signals
the most accurately transmitted most
untranslatable language in the universe
I am a galactic cloud so deep so invo-
luted that a light wave could take 15
years to travel through me And has
taken I am an instrument in the shape
of a woman trying to translate pulsations
into images for the relief of the body
and the reconstruction of the mind.

(from The Fact of a Doorframe: Poems 1950-2001)

Sigh.