Pat Perrin's Blog, page 12

P.S. to “That Other Darwin”

In my previous post, I certainly didn’t mean to “diss” Charles Darwin by calling him the “consummate hedgehog.” The world of ideas must have its hedgehogs as well as its foxes. It is true that Charles’s überfox grandfather Erasmus anticipated a lot of evolutionary theory, including Natural Selection, many years before Charles got around to [...]

That Other Darwin

Here are a few lines to celebrate National Poetry Month … Organic life beneath the shoreless waves Was born and nurs’d in ocean’s pearly caves; First forms minute, unseen by spheric glass, Move on the mud, or pierce the watery mass; These, as successive generations bloom, New powers acquire, and larger limbs assume; Whence countless [...]

Of Fish, Women, and Bicycles

When my teenage daughter broke up with her boyfriend recently, her Awesome Grandma sent her a t-shirt with this slogan:  A WOMAN NEEDS A MAN LIKE A FISH NEEDS A BICYCLE It’s an old maxim, one that I can remember seeing on t-shirts back when I was in high school. I hadn’t seen or heard [...]

Concerning Wisdom—Old and New

“There is no such thing as ancient wisdom; it is always new.” Thus Spake Aforista. Count on the Postfuturist Sage Aforista to say something strident, hyperbolic, and even untrue. Of course there is such a thing as ancient wisdom, and of course we all need to be mindful of it in this speed-of-light age of [...]

Jaynesiana

I must admit that I’m fairly obsessed with the ideas of the late psychologist Julian Jaynes. If you’ve been following these posts, I’m sure you’ve noticed. Just about everything that Pat and I write has been influenced by his mind-blowing classic, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Our latest visionary [...]

Ebook Giveaway

Mayan Interface ebook giveaway on Library Thing through March 11. You can request the book at http://www.librarything.com/er/giveaw...

Mayan Storytelling

“Happens all the time,” says Coyote. “That’s what myths do. They happen all the time.” —Ursula K. Le Guin, Dancing at the Edge of the World Pat and I like this quote so much that we put it at the beginning of our new novel, Mayan Interface. It sums up a lot of our thinking [...]

Shared Story

How much are we shaped by the stories that others tell about us? I left that question hanging at the end of my last post. As it happens, the ever-popular neurologist Oliver Sacks touched on it in a recent article. In his 2001 memoir, Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood, Sacks recalled a childhood [...]

Concerning Bones and Thrones and Parking Lot Stones

It’s a story perfectly suited for a blog entitled “Story.” I mean the recent unearthing of the bones of King Richard III under a parking lot in Leicester—a discovery so fresh that the bones are still cold, so to speak. The find has me thinking about another king, a currently reigning queen, and the power of [...]

Gutenberg-Punk

“Gutenberg-punk?” you ask. It’s not to be a common genre category—�I Googled it and got precisely nothing. Perhaps that’s because, to the best of my knowledge, only one work in all of literature fits it. I’ll get to it shortly In my post of December 10, 2012, I mentioned certain historical catastrophes that heralded the [...]