I’m reading Jonathan Spence’s book about Zhang Dai at the moment, and Spence certainly succeeds early on in making Zhang seem like the guy of person you would want to hang out with… at least for a while. He was swept up by random, sweeping passions, and a powerful drive to write and write and […]
Mrs. Jiwaku and I saw Whiplash a week or so ago (it’s in theaters here in Jochiwon right now), and I’ve been ruminating. Some thoughts, in no particular order, in a suitably pretentious (and very long) list.
I’m still working my way through the book I mentioned in my last post, Steven Mithen’s The Singing Neanderthals: The Origins of Music, Language, Mind, and Body, and I seem to have come upon a paradox. The paradox has to do with the geographical distribution of perfect pitch and relative pitch ability in adult humans, as it […]
So, a follow-up to my earlier post on Social Networks and how we behave on them: Steven Mithen’s The Singing Neanderthals: The Origins of Music, Language, Mind, and Body is a fascinating book, even if sometimes I feel like the short chapters jolt me out of the experience, and even if his use of the word “ape” as non-inclusive […]