The Neuro-Adventures of Oliver Sacks
This week: a conversation with Lawrence Weschler about his friend, the neurologist and author Oliver Sacks. Listen today at 2pm on WBUR or anytime on our website.
After the dismaying stories of entrepreneurial “tech-masters” considered in our “Tech-Master Disaster” series, it was good to remember that the problem is not with—has never been with—science itself. Science is so plainly a source of boundless wonder and discovery, as anyone who first learns of dinosaurs or supernovas or quantum tunneling can attest. In the past decade, we lost one of the writers and doctors who best knew that wonder: Oliver Sacks, the neurologist who saw in medical science a domain for exploring the thrilling, beautiful nature of consciousness.
Our access to Sacks remains, however: through his glittering prose, and through those who remember him, including his friend Lawrence Weschler. Weschler has a new book out, And How Are You, Dr. Sacks?, and he sat down with Chris to talk about his memories of Oliver Sacks. He tells us in our new show, about Sacks:
He was much much more interested in the person who had the disease than the disease the person had. And he was interested in the particular intersection of fate and freedom . . . The fate was whatever had happened to you. But the freedom was your space.
Ren Weschler is an old friend. He introduced many of us to Oliver Sachs in the pages of The New Yorker magazine, and he’s written about so many other artists and interesting characters over the years. Anyone remember J.S. Boggs, the money artist? His book on Sacks, And How are You, Dr Sacks is wonderful and isn’t getting the attention it deserves. He’ll be in conversation with Chris at the Harvard Book Store on November 6th.
Listen: J Dilla
Thinking about the ways health conditions and imaginative freedom might merge had us thinking about music linked so strongly to a musician’s own life story. J Dilla’s masterpiece, Donuts, for instance, is very much associated with a time of illness. From TIDAL Rewind (a few years back):
Donuts is the lionized instrumental hip-hop album by revered producer J Dilla. It was released ten years ago, on February 7, 2006, just three days before his death at the age of 32.
The story of Donuts roots back to 2002, when Dilla was diagnosed with the incurable blood disease known as TTP, which he would battle and manage until his eventual passing. It was during a drawn-out hospital stay in summer 2005 that Donuts came to be. Armed with a Boss SP-303 sampler and a portable 45 rpm record player, brought to him by friends from respected indie label Stones Throw, Dilla would produce 29 of the album’s 31 tracks in the hospital, leaving behind a lingering parting gift that keeps on giving today.
And how much of a gift is Donuts? The Pitchfork review quantifies by itemizing its qualities:
“The Twister (Huh, What)” is the sound of flu-sick flutes chiming in time to a busted weathervane; “Waves”, a hiccuping Hare Krishna class. It’s Dilla’s show-and-tell method, however, that’s most effective, because it illustrates how he’s, more or less, upgrading soul music — we get to see how he unpacked its bag, what spots he told it it missed. This approach also allows Dilla to pay homage to the selfsame sounds he’s modernized; the drums are light, to reflect the original sound from which he’s borrowing. In that sense, Donuts is pure postmodern art — which was hip-hop’s aim in the first place.
Watch: The films of Chantal Akerman
If you’re looking for others who, like Oliver Sacks, pay relentless attention to the world around them, consider the work of Chantal Akerman, who, as Hyperallergic notes,
was one of the most influential directors in film history. She would hate such an accolade, but it’s warranted nonetheless. She often made movies — as well as art installations, photographs, and books — about enduring day-to-day living. Women were at the center of work; she examined their positions in society, their traumas, and the oppressive forces acting upon them.
From the BFI, on Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles:
Cinematographer Babette Mangolte described Jeanne Dielman as “a 40s story shot by a 70s camera,” and critic Manny Farber elaborated upon the camera’s subject, “space… as it becomes spiritualised and proliferates ideas”. That space is Jeanne’s (Delphine Seyrig) tidy, one-bedroom apartment, where she performs daily chores that Akerman felt the cinema had “devalued”. By placing the weight of uncompressed time onto each task — bed-making, potato-peeling, washing up — they become evidence of an unknowable psyche. Jeanne’s routine is so precise that a missed button becomes a forecast of doom, beginning a wrenching undoing of the clockwork pattern that had riveted the first half of this 200-minute masterwork.
That kind of extended attention to things cinema often leaves out pervades Akerman’s films. Je Tu Il Elle begins with a long sequence of shots in a single room and of a solitary character. She sits in this room, eats a little, reviews notes she’s taken, re-situates herself in the room, eats something, re-situates herself once more.
The walls of the room are painted, or anyway covered in two huge horizontal bars of color, above a third shade provided by the floorboard. You’re looking at it for so long that it starts to suggest all kinds of occluded possibilities—the three layers of Neapolitan ice cream, or maybe a landscape (like a sand dune beneath a dark blue sky, at the edge of a salt lake). This is, again, cinema of relentless attentiveness, encouraging a kind of thoughtfully imaginative reflection.
Visit: Miskatonic University
Halloween approaches, and so it’s the time of year when our thoughts turn to the unfathomable horrors of Cthulu. We’re studying up on H.P. Lovecraft’s weird tales, acquainting ourselves with his own version of New England—from Miskatonic to Arkham and beyond. These are troubling stories, and they give you a glimpse of a troubled way of thinking, and they also directly depict one unfortunately common reaction to sublimity: being scared out of your mind. Maybe it’s lucky that, as the narrator of Lovecraft’s “Call of Cthulu” says:
We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity . . .
But does infinity have to be so scary? Surely there are other ways of thinking about the horror in Lovecraft stories. More on this in weeks to come!
This Week’s Ephemeral Library:
More from Lawrence Weschler — on atomic cuneiform. Weschler on Morandi, Longo, and more. Weschler on “the art of the disappeared.” Ronan Farrow’s Black Cube Chronicles. Corey Robin on The Obamanauts. Is Amazon Unstoppable? Zadie Smith In Defense of Fiction.
See you next week. The news never stops, and nor do we! Tweet, like, share, subscribe and support the team that brought you the world’s first podcast!
The OS Neuroromancers.
