Walter Logeman: Journal
WHO IS KEVIN COOPER?
Kevin Cooper is an inmate on death row at San Quentin State Prison. In 1985 he was convicted of the murder of the Ryen family and a houseguest in San Bernadino county. Much evidence has come forward that was never tested or presented before the jury at Kevin Cooper’s trial that could possibly challenge his conviction.
A moving story and I hope something successful can come from this campaign and excellent website.
religion onlineThis looks like a useful site. Stumbled on it with a Google search – when this item came up From Mimesis to Kinesis: The Aristotelian Dramatic Matrix, Psychoanalysis, and Some Recent Alternati by Ekbert Fass. Here is a quote from the item:
The catharsis concept, then, seems to cover the whole spectrum from Freuds “cathartic method” of acting out repressed experiences, to psychoanalysis proper purporting to cure the patient by making him understand these experiences as being part of his intelligible, consistent, and unbroken case history. The forces at work on the Aristotelian spectator of tragedy are of a similar nature. Without some display of violence or suffering, of course, no fear and pity can be aroused. But to Aristotle, this is not to be misunderstood in the sense of a theater of cruelty. Those, he writes, “who make use of the Spectacle to put before us that which is merely monstrous . . . are wholly out of touch with Tragedy.”39 Similarly, the best way of handling the deed of horror is found in a play like Cresphontes where Merope, “on the point of slaying her son, recognizes him in time.”40 More important than the actual presentation of violence and suffering is the device of peripety in causing surprise while at the same time letting us recognize what surprised us as an ordered sequence of cause and effect. For the arousal of pity and fear, like the emotions felt in reliving a repressed traumatic scene, will be purged by such hindsight. Aristotelian catharsis and Freudian therapy also share an almost exclusive reliance on discursive language. Just as Freud restricts analysis to the patients verbal articulation of his erratic life story towards the logically consistent discourse of his case history, so Aristotle, as already pointed out, prefers to have the cathartic impact of tragedy depend on the spoken word to the exclusion of a spectacle.
The Plot in fact should be so framed that, even without seeing the things take place, he who simply hears the account of them shall be filled with horror and pity at the incidents; which is just the effect that the mere recital of the story in Oedipus would have on one.41
The article goes to the hear of what it is that makes therapy therapeutic. It may even have in it or at least imply what I think is at the heart ofg psychotherapy! Which is that when the emotions of in response to a traumatic scene are aroused, that the traumatised self ‘sees’ that response to his or her trauma, feels seen validated and healed.
This is the final role reversal of most successfully resolved traumatic scenes, where the nurturing is soaked up by the the person while in the tole of the traumatised self.
In grade school this period is called the Renaissance, a flowering of art and intellect, that appeared in Italy for no obvious reason and then spread to the rest of Europe.
Quite why all these geniuses suddenly appear without any warning is not explained by your history teachers (who spend their life pondering deep questions like this), but Jared Diamond (Guns, Germs and Steel, Pub: Norton 1997) is happy to tell you. He says that geniuses like Michealangelo and Einstein are rather commonplace. Most of them are oppressed and are living in abject poverty, and are busy surviving if they even do that. Give them a good feed, treat them well, put them in the company of peers and pretty soon they’ll be coming up with all sorts of things you hadn’t dreamed of.
The Renaissance then was a result of the invention of double entry accounting, not (as we’ve been told) a flowering of intellect and art that happened for no reason at all.
I have been too busy to blog. One thing is that I have been setting up the Accounts for our company “Kate Tapley Horse Treks” – all new to me, but of course I begin to think about the history, philosophy and psychology of accounting – and this page stood out among a Google search. Accounting is a sort of metahorical mirror of life made out of numbers… not really as boring as bean counting.
I am downloading the mp3 here:
James Gleick’s lean, lovely biography is a modern account of Newton’s multiple breakthroughs–and then some. Almost everything we know about apples and moons in motion and at rest, about time, space, gravity, inertia, differential and integral calculus, occurred to Isaac Newton in his early twenties, working in isolation through the London plague years of 1665 and 1666. Gleick’s great gift is making this not merely a lucid history of mathematical ideas but also a meditation on the utterly marvelous, a virtually unexplainable genius. In conversation Jim Gleick underlines the great paradox of Newton. Both medieval and modern, the father of the Enlightenment and modern rationalism was also a determined alchemist and an opinionated Unitarian Christian. Gleick’s book rises to the challenge of that same paradox: it is wise science written with humility and awe. Listen in.
While reading Neal Stephenson’s Quicksilver, Gleick’s book looks like it might be interesting.
Jacob Neilson’s site about the top mistakes. (Alertbox) I’d add one more rule: Making a site really ugly. But mever mind he is right about the ones that he has there, and I stick to them here, but for one:
“8. Non-Standard Link Colors
Links to pages that have not been seen by the user are blue; links to previously seen pages are purple or red. Don’t mess with these colors since the ability to understand what links have been followed is one of the few navigational aides that is standard in most web browsers. Consistency is key to teaching users what the link colors mean.
I think the way that my site is layed out leads one to know what to do… hope so.
Birnbaum does great photos too of his interviewees: image theory – james ellroy, by robert birnbaum
See also his Cuba photos .
This is a great collection of interviews by Robert Birnbaum – here is a link to one of many: identity theory | the narrative thread – howard zinn interview
Zinn says things one might expect in the interview:
HZ: It’s really interesting. Here the guy wins the presidency by the most nefarious of methods and without a popular mandate. Losing a popular vote by a larger margin than Hayes lost the popular vote in 1876, but then moves ahead with aplomb, with total arrogance as if the country is his. My feeling is that we are living in an occupied country. Really, that we’ve been taken over, a junta has taken power and now the problem for the American people is to do what people do in an occupied country…
But there was also something there that was new to me and led to a light going on in my head:
HZ: Yeah. The whole concept of punishment is foreign to me. And revenge. To me the only useful thing about bringing these people before the bar of justice is as an education. In a way, by doing that, we are going back to a very primitive approach to punishment…some of the Indian tribes and other indigenous peoples where their idea of punishment is to shame people before the tribe. They’d exile them or send them out in the forest with a glass of water.[laughs] But they’d shame them and that’s a useful thing to do…more serious than putting them behind bars. So, Kissinger deserves to be shamed and the people who have had him as dinner guest deserve to be shamed. Although we should stop short of putting on trial anyone who made a dinner for him.
Now there is an idea. Punishment cls simply be to have a Justice Dept. Website where people were displayed for a period of time. Removal from the site would be like a parole. Some would never be removed & their current address would always need to be there etc. Anyway that is just me taking Zinn’s idea a bit further.
Later: It occurred to me that this idea might be a bit anti civil liberties, but it would not be if one thought of it as an alternative to goal, and I think it could be in many cases. The idea is a tribute to the power of the word.
The UVic Writer’s Guide Found this while wondering about towards/toward, answer:
Six of one, half a dozen of the other. But be consistent.
Useful link to have.
Found this via the Jung Page website – who took me to: Matthew Clapp. The Nautis Project which concentrates on CG Jung, Henri Bergson, Rupert Sheldrake, and Joseph Campbell. : “Jung, Jungians, and Psychoanalysis” by Kenneth Eisold, PhD. Looks interesting and I have added it to my pile of printouts…
The break between Freud and Jung and the subsequent division between their followers has had profound and continuing consequences for both parties. The Jungians have continued an ambivalent relationship to psychoanalysis, with the effects of internal conflicts and institutional schisms. Mainstream psychoanalysis, for its part, has used Jung, the primary and still most prominent deviant, to inhibit developments in areas associated with his work. This article explores how the pressure to maintain solidarity and conformity in psychoanalysis has curtailed, in particular, thinking in 3 areas: symbolism, lifelong development, and paranormal experience. It concludes with observations about the opportunities and dangers associated with the move toward pluralism being considered in both camps.”
Isaac Newton is talking to his friend about calulus (though that was not his word for it) Neal Stephenson page 83:
But Daniel, the virtue of this approach is that it doesn’t matter what the actual physical situation is, a curve is ever a curve, and whatever you can do to the curve of a river you can do just as rightly to the curve of a weed-we are free from all that old nonsense now.” Meaning the Aristotelian approach, in which such easy mixing of things with obviously different natures would be abhorrent. All that mattered henceforth, apparently, was what form they adopted when translated into the language of analysis. “Translating a thing into the analytical language is akin to what the alchemist does when he extracts, from some crude ore, a pure spirit, or virtue, or pneuma. The feeces-the gross external forms of things-which only mislead and confuse us-are cast off to reveal the underlying spirit. And when this is done we may learn that some things that are superficially different are, in their real nature, the same.”
This is such a simple idea… yet it is really what archetypes are about as well. We can’t come up with a mathematical formulae – but we come up with a powerful myth or symbol!
