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SPEAKER 1: Welcome everyone.
Today, I'm delighted to have people from McSweeney's
Publishing here.
We have Brent Hoff, who is the editor of their new DVD
quarterly, Wholphin, from which the short film you just
saw is from.
Lawrence Weschler, the author of 12 books, most recently
Everything That Rises: A Book of Convergences, which I read
over the weekend and is the coolest book I will read this
month, or perhaps for the next few months.
We will see about that.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE].
SPEAKER 1: Yes, well, I've read other
books before this one.
We also have Eli Horowitz, the managing editor of
McSweeney's, and Josh Bearman, who's an editor at the LA
Weekly, and also the editor of the Yeti Researcher.
So for you Yeti fanatics, out there, there's
something for you.
Anyway, I would now like to introduce Eli Horowitz.
Eli--
ELI HOROWITZ: Hi there.
I can't be blamed for anything that happens today, at least
during my portion.
When I first came in, I was pretty excited about your
massage chairs.
And so I went directly to one of those, but my legs are in
agony right now.
I think there's a malfunction.
So I'm not really even paying any attention, and the blood
is pooling in my calves.
But I'll just blunder through real quickly.
And so I'm just going to give you an introduction to
McSweeney's and the different things we do, and I'll bring
on the rest of these guys.
So--
[SIDE CONVERSATION]
ELI HOROWITZ: I'm going to be on Google video.
I've made it.
So we began as a quarterly journal, mostly with short
stories and things like that.
We're based in San Francisco, in the Mission District.
And the journal is mostly short stories, but it's a
little different every time.
So sometimes it's--
Well this one was Issue 16, looks sort of like a book that
folds out like this and like this and like
this, with a comb.
And this book here with some stories, and a novella by Ann
Beattie, and the story written on playing cards.
And you can shuffle, and read in any order.
So that was one issue.
Another was, guest edited by Chris Ware,
and it's all comics.
And it's really, really beautiful.
And the dust jacket comes off, and tucked into it, are two
minicomics.
And then, it folds out into the comic
section of your newspaper.
So doing different things, to keep it interesting.
AUDIENCE: How much does your printer hate you?
ELI HOROWITZ: It depends.
It depends how much I hate them.
It's back and forth.
And this is Issue 17, perhaps the most ridiculous yet, which
we're still kind of reeling from.
This one was supposed to look like a packet of junk mail.
And so you have things like so it just came like this, in a
rubber band.
Barnes and Nobel and Borders refused to carry it.
So we're hoping you'll buy a few thousand today.
And so it's just a normal bundle of mail.
It's got some letters.
It's got this sausage basket catalogue.
This is Pantalaine.
It's like what you get from Mervyn's.
They specialize in plural clothing, multi-user garments.
So you can look at that.
Various other things.
And then some magazines.
There's Unfamiliar, which is a biweekly journal of short
fiction, returning to our mission.
And oh, thanks.
And then there's the aforementioned Yeti
Researcher, which is a scholarly journal from the
Society for Cryptic Hominid Investigation, originally
titled, Yeti Obsession.
But we wanted to keep it restrained and in fact based.
And that's what this is.
This is nothing, if not fact based.
And so I guess we'll begin with that part.
And so I'm going to welcome the editor of Yeti
Researcher--
editor, primary writer, researcher, to some extent,
and enthusiast, Joshuah Bearman.
JOSHUAH BEARMAN: Yeah.
Hi.
And I'm also going to introduce my
lovely assistant, Jordan.
JORDAN: Hello.
JOSHUAH BEARMAN: We've got a slide show here.
We've got to set it up.
Strangely, we had the most technical obstacles, ever,
coming here to Google.
OK.
I think that'll work.
Yeah.
OK.
You're on the controls.
So Yeti Researcher, as Eli mentioned, is a scholarly
journal devoted to research entirely about the Yeti.
I'm going to just raise this for a second.
[SIDE CONVERSATION]
JOSHUAH BEARMAN: I'll do it like this, like John Davidson.
So Yeti Researcher--
this is the first issue.
And there's a lot of important looks at various issues that
are confronting the Bigfoot community right now.
And so there's a piece about the suburban Sasquatch.
Kind of an historical look at the elusive hominids down in
Southern California.
And there's a review of an important book by a
mountaineer, who claims to have seen
a Yeti in the Himalayas.
And then there are a couple of pieces.
There's another historical piece about Teddy Roosevelt
and the Sasquatch.
And that's what I'm going to read today.
This combines two of the pieces.
There's also an article in here, about the kill
controversy, which we'll get to in this piece here.
And so what I'm going to read here, is called "Ferocious
Glee: Teddy Roosevelt and the Sasquatch."
And so again, like Eli pointed out, I shouldn't have to
mention, that this is a work of nonfiction.
This is all fact-based, reported.
Our fact checkers very scrupulously went through this
entire magazine.
I mean, that's true.
This is all actually reported information.
You know, the James Frey thing going on, I just wanted to set
the record straight at the beginning.
AUDIENCE: We'll try to get it up.
JOSHUAH BEARMAN: Yeah I'm sure the Yeti Researcher is on the
short list.
So we start in 1884.
Teddy Roosevelt, age 25, was already a successful New York
legislator, and crusader against corruption.
He was also a world-class hunter, having transformed
himself from a spindly child, into a robust outdoorsman.
That summer, Roosevelt headed into the Dakota Territory, for
a month-long safari in the American West. During which,
he brought down 170 animals, from bunnies to bears.
But Roosevelt may have been looking for something more,
out in the woods.
In addition to Shot Placement Guides for bear and ungulates,
Roosevelt brought with him a royal society publication,
including new anatomy charts from the recently discovered
African guerrilla.
And he was unusually well armed, carrying, according to
his own diary, a number 10 chokebore, 300-cartridge
shotgun, two .45-75 Winchester repeaters, a .40-90 Sharps,
and the incomparable 50-150 Webley Express.
Roosevelt had always extolled the huntsman's journey into
what he called, the border land between savagery and
civilization, where our ancestors lived furtive lives,
among terrible beasts.
Pointing to Roosevelt's mode of equipment, and other
evidence, many Bigfoot scholars suggest that the
future president may have sought the greatest
beast of them all.
Or as Grover Krantz, the wayward anthropologist, who
became one of the world's foremost Bigfooters put it,
when T.R. entered the woods, he was
always loaded for Sasquatch.
Fueling speculation about Bigfoot and Roosevelt, is his
own telling a face-to-face encounter.
This appears in Roosevelt's compilation of frontier tales
called, The Wilderness Hunter.
And it was published in 1893.
And we have a slide about that.
There's a vintage edition, and the frontispiece--
Roosevelt in full hunting regalia.
In this book, Roosevelt recounts a story of a
mysterious frontiersman named Bauman, who was stopped in the
Bitterroot Mountains by, quote, "some great goblin
beast." Bauman and a companion, the story goes, had
bivouacked in an open glade.
At midnight--
this as Roosevelt's words here--
Bauman was awakened by some terrible savage noise, and he
sat up in his blankets.
His nostrils were struck by a strong, wild beast odor.
And he caught the loom of a great body in the darkness, at
the mouth of a lean-to.
Grasping his rifle, he fired at the threatening shadow, but
must have missed.
As the thing, whatever it was, rushed off into the blackness
of the night.
And we have some mood-setting audio here.
[BIGFOOT VOCALIZATION]
JOSHUAH BEARMAN: So that's very likely what Bauman would
have heard.
There's actually, like, 60 minutes of that, on a CD by
Sierra Sounds, which is a compilation of many Bigfoot
vocalizations.
And it's narrated by the guy who plays Number
One, from Star Trek.
I recommended it, highly.
So later, the beast kills Bauman's partner.
Bauman returns from tending beaver traps, and finds his
friend with a broken neck.
"The creature," Roosevelt wrote, "had not eaten the
body, but, apparently, had romped and gambled round it in
uncouth, ferocious glee." In scholarly Bigfoot circles, of
course, this text is vital.
It's one of the earliest Bigfoot records, presidential
or otherwise.
And since the story comes from such an esteemed source, The
Wilderness Hunter forms part of the canon of Bigfoot
documentation.
So agrees Michael Grumley, author of the research volume
There are Giants in the Earth: Survivors Since Genesis, which
we have a slide of that.
There's the cover, which it seems, is fairly self
explanatory.
Grumley takes a Biblical approach.
Not only to the Sasquatch, but also it's historiography.
He calls the Roosevelt story, "The last great chapter of the
early Bigfoot narrative.
The Deuteronomy of the Bigfoot Old Testament."
And going a step further, Christopher Murphy, in Meet
the Sasquatch, draws a direct connection between Roosevelt's
story, and the infamous Ostman incident.
Which occurred years later but in the very same area.
That was when young man, named Albert Ostman, was abducted in
his sleep, by a pod of Sasquatches, causing a brief
sensation in local newspapers.
Ostman eventually freed himself, he said, "by enticing
the lead male to eat an entire can of snuff." And he escaped,
you know, in the ensuing confusion there.
So entering the realm of literary criticism, Murphy
also notes that the dread of Roosevelt's story is well
known from similar tales about the Wendigo.
And so, for those of you who don't know, the Wendigo is the
original name for Bigfoot, before that term was
coined in the '50s.
It comes from Algonquin.
And the Wendigo was always seen as an ill omen.
Advancing his point, Murphy cites Ogden Nash's 1923
stanza, about the Wendigo, that poetically articulates
that dread.
And so I'll quote it briefly here.
"The Wendigo, The Wendigo, Its eyes are ice and indigo, Its
blood is rank and yellowish, Its voice is hoarse and
bellowish, its tentacles are slithery, and
scummy, slimy, leathery.
Its lips are hungry blubbery, and smackey, sucky, rubbery.
The Wendigo, The Wendigo, I saw it just a friend ago.
Last night it lurked in Canada, tonight on your
veranda."
So because there is no external record of Roosevelt's
Bauman character, many Bigfoot scholars believe that
Roosevelt had, in fact, recorded his own experience.
As Bauman was not real, says the moderator of the Crypto
Forums, which is the clearinghouse of Bigfoot
discussion online.
It's because Roosevelt created him as a
proxy for his own eyes.
Wanting more background on this possibility, I called
Loren Coleman.
A noted cryptozoological investigator, and the two-time
winner of the Bigfooter of The Year award.
Coleman is a retired professor in Maine.
And he made his name in Sasquatchery as the author of
a field guide to Bigfoot, The Yeti, and similar creatures
worldwide, like this one from the book, who is a creature so
awful, he apparently has no face.
And there's like 200 drawings, or so, in this book.
All different kinds of Bigfoot-type creatures.
Like this next fellow, which, I don't really even
know what that is.
And somebody was pointing out, in the car, on the way over,
that it's good that, I mean, he's five feet tall, so in
case you see him, you'll know that it's this one, and not a
similar one, that's maybe four feet tall.
And this vantage point, in case you ever happen again
that exact vantage-- like, half below the water and with
the head sticking above.
But Coleman, the author of this book, was ambivalent
about the Baumann story.
It was probably just a bear, he said.
About the theory that Roosevelt was the one stalked
by the creature, he said, well, there's a lot of
theories out there.
Some of these guys will believe anything.
For one thing, Coleman added, the Roosevelt story talks
about two foot-long prints.
Whereas, everybody knows that Bigfoot tracks are 20 inches
long at most. But many Bigfoot hunters say, that Coleman is
just an academic, that he'll never come across a Sasquatch
up in his ivory tower.
That if you understand real field work, it's clear what
Roosevelt was up to.
Anyone familiar with the armaments of the period, said
a Texas Bigfoot hunter, who called himself Huntster, knows
that Roosevelt carried far more firepower than what's
needed for bear, which is true, if you recall his
arsenal from the Dakota trip.
And Huntster also email me a PDF of an article Roosevelt
wrote, in 1906, describing a supposed grisly hunt.
But the detail, Huntster said, really resembles more of a
Bigfoot-type experience.
And we have that.
He, helpfully, highlighted the passages of
that article there.
So I'll spare you the detail from here.
But just know that Huntster is quite convinced about
what he sees here.
And that would make Roosevelt, according to Huntster, the
original Bigfoot hunter in the Americas.
And you can bet, he added, that if T.R. came across the
big guy out there, he was going to take him down.
And Roosevelt would have ended the kill controversy, before
it even started.
So this gets us to the kill controversy, which is the
second article that I folded in here.
And if there are people here, who are not familiar with the
kill controversy--
which may be, I don't know exactly, how up-to-date you
guys are on the Sasquatch research realm.
But I'll fill you in, because what's happening is, that the
Bigfoot community is really in tumult.
And the dividing line runs from Bigfoot symposia, on down
to weekend Sasquatch societies.
Because the question is really quite central.
What is your tactical, and by extension, philosophical
approach to the eventual encounter with
the creature itself?
Because the kill camp says, shoot the Bigfoot.
The argument goes, the world will only believe in the
creature when there's a corpse.
Grover Krantz, the wayward anthropologist we met at the
beginning, was one of the earliest to propose the
scientific value of killing a Bigfoot.
We need a type specimen, he wrote, in his 1986 masterwork,
Big Footprints.
There's no other method for taxonomic verification.
If you see a big foot, kill it, and cut off the biggest
piece you can carry.
And Krantz is actually convinced that--
he lived in the Pacific Northwest, and he built this
homemade helicopter.
He wanted to be able to fly above the forest canopy and to
be able to shoot the Bigfoot.
And that's it.
This thing did not ever leave the ground.
But even without such evidence, Krantz defied
scientific practice, by suggesting a genus name for
the creature.
Raising many eyebrows among is anthropology colleagues.
Gigantopithecus was his speculative designation,
reflecting the common theory, in the Bigfoot realm, that
Bigfoot is a relic population of the very real, but long
since extinct, gigantopithecus apes, that stood 10 feet tall
prehistorically.
And we have a slide showing that.
You guys might have seen the news, that they just
discovered Giganto lived up until about 100,000 years ago.
That's the size comparison.
He's kind of waving it somebody there.
I don't know why.
I have no idea why they decided to make the drawing
showing him reaching out like that.
Because there's no skeletal remains that detailed, at all.
So the no-kill Bigfooters, who are, these days, the majority,
they view Krantz' traditional hunting expedition approach
with horror.
They say that Bigfoot is our sylvan ally, that he's gentle
and deserves our protection.
The Bigfoot they know usually shies away from campers and
forest visitors, or, at worst, alarms them by
trying to make friends.
One man I talked to said that, when he was backpacking near
Lancaster, and saw Bigfoot, he was, at first, scared.
But when he decided not to run, Bigfoot came closer, and
gave him a crystal.
If you want to prove Bigfoot exists, he said, look into
your heart.
I guess I should mention, there's another small,
schismatic faction that says, that the kill no-kill
controversy is moot, because Bigfoot is, in fact, a
transdimensional shapeshifter and cannot be killed.
So the no-kill camp sees the hunters as mercenaries.
They're in the Bigfoot game for the glory,
says Chester Moore.
Moore had something called The Mystery Primate
Conservation Alliance.
And he says, his organization is here to prove this thing is
for real, and protected it at the same time.
Moore has a new book out, along these lines, describing
the press release is a bold declaration about how we can
share North America with this fascinating species.
The book is called Bigfoot Lives: Deal With It!
And, in a roundabout way, the kill camp, conversely, says
that their interests is also to protect the Bigfoot.
Because they have to haul one in to bring science on board,
and get that highly-coveted endangered species status.
For the sake of the species, they say, one must fall.
In kill circles, this hypothetical, sacrificial
Bigfoot is known as the martyr.
Michael Rug hopes this will not have to happen.
Rug just finished building his museum, The Bigfoot Discovery
Project in Santa Cruz.
California, which he conceived as an ode to the intersection
between Roosevelt's
conservation efforts and Bigfoot.
Roosevelt stopped here on his wildlife odyssey as
president, in 1903.
Wright said, when I reached him at the museum's office.
Roosevelt, of course, came to
environmentalism and through hunting.
That's part of the moral of the teddy bear story, when
T.R. refused to shoot a chained animal.
Even T.R. wanted to shoot Bigfoot, Rug says, he believes
the goal was preservation.
T.R. hunted and created the national parks.
He interested that we need to maintain the forests for their
majestic animals, including Bigfoot.
And we at The Discovery Bigfoot Project, want to honor
that foresight.
And you know, my take is that seems to make sense.
Because one of the species of elk, that Roosevelt took down
on that Dakota trip, back in 1884, was
later named after him.
We've got that guy.
This is Cervus roosevelti.
He officially entered the mammology text in 1897, giving
America's grandest dear, the name of the man who first
brought one back for the anatomists.
And there may be a similar opportunity awaiting, because
Grover Krantz died before the taxonomic name for Bigfoot
could be settled.
No one has yet even proposed the specific name, which is
the second part of scientific terminology that identifies a
species itself.
So I suggested to Rug, that if they do find a specimen that
satisfies the scientific community, maybe Bigfoot
should be named after his most famous hunter.
He said that wasn't a bad idea.
Gigantopithecus roosevelti--
I like it, he said.
A noble name for a noble creature.
And that's it.
SPEAKER 1: Thank you, Joshuah.
Joshuah lives in Hollywood, California.
So we're honored to have him with us, in our small town.
OK.
We're just going to keep on moving quickly.
There's a whole bunch of stuff over there, that I can show
you about and talk about in detail--
The Believer and the books we do and all those things, but
were going to keep things moving rapidly, and proceed to
our extra-multimedia portion of the program.
The medias are being amassed at the moment.
The medias are congregating together.
What you're about to see is part of Wholfin, which is our
new DVD project.
Brent did an interview in the back seat of the car on the
way here, because he's an important man.
And he just controls sight and sound at his fingertips.
He's doing that right now.
He's controlling--
if anyone here has watched Best Week Ever, that was
Brent's Waterloo.
[SIDE CONVERSATION]
SPEAKER 1: Hi.
Brent Hoff, everybody!
BRENT HOFF: Sorry, we were planning to be much more
organized, as usual.
But this is Wholfin, and this is our new enterprise at
McSweeney's.
And how that came about, I'd seen a lot of short films,
like the one that you saw at the very beginning, which is
called Are You The Favorite Person Of Anyone?, which was
made by anybody, which was written by Miranda July and
directed by her then-boyfriend, Miguel Arteta.
And they just made that in a weekend.
They went out, they called their friends, John C. Reilly
and Mike Light, and said, hey, let's take a camera, and go
make the script on a Saturday.
They didn't do it to get into the Sundance or any festivals
for any reason.
They just wanted to make it.
And there's a lot of these films like that, that we will
just never see.
And so the idea is to get a bunch of them, and put them on
a little DVD for you.
The reason everyone is talking about this DVD right now, in
our first issue, is because it has footage of
Al Gore body surfing.
And that seems to be what everyone's
really excited about.
Spike Jones, during the 2000 election, made a little
documentary about Al gore and his family.
I don't know if you remember, but going into the election,
everyone thought of Al as a fairly, somewhat tense, man.
Gorebot was the name that people gave him.
And Spike Jones took a camera out, and in 22 minutes, just
kind of wipes that all away.
You can see that Gore is a really nice guy
and has a good family.
And that's another film that we've included on here.
And now, I would just like to show you yet
another of the films..
It's called The Writer, and this was a mostly animated
film by a guy named Carson Mell.
And he just sent it in to us.
So I hope you like it.
[VIDEO PLAYBACK]
[WOMAN MOANING]
-This is siren weed.
When Saturn's purple winds blow through it, it makes the
sound identical to a full-grown
woman having an ***.
Ever heard of it?
Neither had I, until I made it up.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
-You know, they say Leonardo da Vinci was so detached from
his fellow man that he saw him as nothing more than something
mechanical, something to be studied.
And in a way, I'm the same, only I'm opposite.
I'll see something, like an ice machine, and start to
stare it down.
Pretty soon, that little hole where the ice comes out, that
starts to look a whole lot like a mouth to me.
And if there's a light that blinks, if it's out of ice or
whatever, well, then there's your eye.
And all of a sudden, pow, there it is.
It's alive to me.
-Sometimes I hear people complaining about not having
enough ideas.
To be honest, I feel like I have too many.
I'll just be out with my friends, having dinner, and
some image will pop into my head with such clarity that I
won't be able to finish my meal.
I'll just sit there, absolutely mesmerized by this
image I've just conjured up.
-To tell you that most of my ideas are like that, like
lightening just going off in my head, would be a lie.
In all honesty, when I write, I usually just write about
myself and women.
It's a mishmash.
Every monster I've ever created, every lone astronaut
skipping from star to star in search of some shimmering
treasure, each and every last little fremfrula has a little
bit of me or some crazy woman in it.
-Tentacles, like living strands of ground beef, hung
from mouths of the golden bells, dripping a rosy-
smelling grease, that reminded old Rogard of his harpy of an
ex-wife back home, on old planet earth.
See, it's almost literal, there.
And still Helen didn't get it.
And I had to call and tell her, hey, you know those
*** bells?
Those are you, ***.
You know what she said back to me?
She said, you're a skurve.
And yes, like I said, there's a little bit
of me in every monster.
But I'd never consider myself a skurve, so that hurt, Which
brings me to pain, the last, but not least, source of my
inspiration.
You can bet your *** bottom dollar that any time
some space dude's off on some stupid intergalactic star
center getting tortured, I'm off in a hotel room, the
wind's blowing outside, and some ***
has broken my heart.
-The thing is, about writing, it's only writing.
Take a movie you like, you take your *** life, you mix
it up, and you see if anything happens.
[END VIDEO PLAYBACK]
BRENT HOFF: So that was The Writer by Carson Mell.
And there are a lot of other--
I mainly played that one because it was the shortest.
I'm sorry if the cursing offended.
I didn't realize, and I forgot.
Also on this is a Turkish version of The Jefferson's,
which was sent to us in a brown bag.
We just got it.
And also there is this, which kind of defies explanation.
But before I start it, I will say that, apparently, there
are people who pay this guy $50,000 a
time, to perform this.
So I hope you enjoy it.
[VIDEO PLAYBACK]
[MUSIC PLAYING]
[WHISTLING]
-There's a lady who's sure all that glitters is gold, and
she's buying a stairway to heaven.
When she gets there she knows, if the stores are all closed,
with a word she can get what she came for.
Ooh, ooh, and she's buying a stairway to heaven.
There's a sign on the wall, but she wants to be sure,
'cause you know sometimes words have two meanings.
In a tree by the brook--
[END VIDEO PLAYBACK]
BRENT HOFF: So you will notice, the people are walking
backwards here.
He took three months and learned to sing the entire
song backwards.
So he set up his camera in front the chapel, turned on
the tape, and sang the entire thing backwards, and them got
home and run the music over it.
And it's the finale that you look for.
But we'll make you wait for that.
We won't give that away right now.
And that's pretty much it.
That's our first DVD.
Yeah, it goes on from there.
I know, maybe afterwards if you guys want, we'll show it
on the computer or something.
And it goes on from there.
David O. Russell did a documentary.
You know, he made that movie, Three Kings.
And then, I don't know if you remember, there is
controversy.
There was a documentary about an actual situation in Iraq,
where some soldiers found $350 million and tried to take it
for themselves.
And they got caught, because MPs found $600,000 in trees
that had blown out of their pockets as they were walking
back to their base.
So they found all this money and tried to sell-- and he
made a documentary about that.
And it's an amazing documentary about just the
idea of requisitions in the military in Iraq.
And Miramax didn't want to put it on the Three Kings DVD
release, so we have it here.
And that's the kind of stuff that we're going to be having
going forward.
So we'll hope you check it out.
Thanks.
SPEAKER 1: Thank you, Brent.
This is the first issue of Wholfin.
It'll be every couple of months.
It's going to be a quarterly thing, just like a magazine.
But it's a DVD.
So it's mind expanding, but I think it's an idea
whose time has come.
So now we're getting to the climax of the
afternoon, our headliner.
And this is Lawrence Weschler.
He's McSweeney's mainstay.
He's been published in our journal more than any other
man or woman alive.
A long-time New Yorker writer, the head of New York Institute
for Humanities, Pulitzer Prize finalist,
author of many books.
And this most recent one is one of the books that we're
most proud of that we've ever done.
And I guess he'll just tell you everything you need to
know about it.
And maybe we'll be passing some out also, so you can look
and appreciate the many colorful pictures.
If you haven't paid for it, you should probably return it.
And here's Lawrence Weschler.
LAWRENCE WESCHLER: Thank you.
Thank you so much.
Well, I should first, I suppose, describe what a
convergence is.
I am subject, in my daughter's words, to these
loose synapsed moments.
She will say, uh-oh, daddy's having another one of his
loose synapsed moments.
In which I just start free associating with
whatever is before me.
It's going to be difficult to compete with this image.
And over the years, I've kind of let that go.
I mean, I was enormously impressed early and in my life
in the university, by coming upon an essay by John Berger.
And you can see the effect, in what's being
passed out to you there.
Let me find the page.
Go to page 172-173.
John Berger was, in the look of things.
He's a great English art historian, art critic.
And the day that Che Guevara was killed, and all the
newspapers of the world had that picture of him lying on
the table, with the generals who bagged him, standing
behind him and so forth.
He wrote an essay, when he said, we all know what this
picture is based on.
It's based on Rembrandt's Anatomy Lesson.
That is the picture hardwired in people's brains, that
taught the generals where to stand, and the photographer
were to stand, in taking the picture.
I mean, you can get what he's talking about there.
And I remember when I read that, I said, god, this guy
does not read the newspaper the way I read the newspaper.
And, I think, starting with that, I began keeping a file
of my own recollections of that sort of thing.
And they're are a little bit like separated at birth.
But the point is, in these things, the similarity between
two images or a newspaper story and a film or a poem and
an image or things like that, they start
out as just a rhyme.
But if they stay a rhyme, and nothing else, then they are
just separated at birth.
For example, the fact that Don Knotts and Mick Jagger look
identical, that's just a rhyme.
I don't quite know what to do with that.
The fact that Slobodan Milosevic to Newt Gingrich
look identical, turns out to open out onto all kinds of
interesting stuff.
I have an essay in here called "Pillsbury Doughboy Messiahs."
If you've got the book it's on page 160, which talks about
the way that both of them started their lives without
any particular politics.
They were very opportunistic and power hungry, but they
didn't have any particular beliefs.
Milosevic was as shocked as anybody else, when Serbian
nationalism turned out to be a thing that really worked.
In the case of Gingrich, he focus-grouped the
Contract for America.
He didn't have any particular beliefs that he wanted to see.
He went to focus groups and so forth.
And then, eventually, what happens, in both of those
cases, is that they get on this tiger.
And then there are these true believers, who come behind
them, and take things a lot, lot farther than they were
expecting to go.
And you get into notions of what I call, heresy.
And the essay goes from there.
I thought I'd read you two passages from the book, just
to give you a sense of how it goes.
One of them just is a relatively short one.
Let me see, where is it?
It's on page 56-57, if you've got the book, or if you got an
excerpt of this.
For those of you, it's that Magritte painting of the train
coming out of the chimney that you might have seen.
And that's a painting from 1938.
In 1895, when Magritte was very young, or just before he
was born, actually, there had actually been the train that
went right through the Gare du Nord in Paris.
And there's a very famous photograph of this train that
went right through and fell onto the
ground on the far side.
So I write, "In olden days, time was true.
Noon occurred in every village at the very moment that the
sun reached its zenith, over the courthouse steeple.
Trains, in particular, transcontinental rail travel,
changed all of that.
In the era before time zones, passengers on coast-to-coast
trips, might well have had to jimmy their watches dozens of
times, adjusting to the separate temporal reality of
each locality through which they traveled.
Schedules were similarly scrambled.
New York City's noon was Buffalo's 11:40."
And every town was a minute or two off.
In fact, when we talk about longitude and latitude, we
talk about minutes and so forth.
And it was literally one minute over each one.
"For years, people puzzled over the mysteries, and
muddled through the confusion.
What did it mean, for instance, to say that two
events happened at the same time, in different locations?
Until in 1884, an international conference
finally resolved the problem, by decreeing a unified system
of standardized time zones."
That's, by the way, when we get Greenwich Central Time.
Greenwich is decreed as latitude zero, at that point.
That was the Treaty of Washington.
The vote was 42 to 1, that that would be the case.
Anybody know who the one country was that
voted against that?
France.
Yeah.
Which insisted that Paris be latitude zero.
And in fact, kept it has latitude zero until 1914.
So in maps between 1884--
you could do a nice mystery story about this--
and 1914, it depends whether you look at the French map or
the English map or the rest of the world's map, as to what
the zones are.
In any case, "Is any wonder that a genius born in 1879"
and growing up in a world grappling with these issues,
who at the age of five would have been reading papers about
what does it mean that it would simultaneously happen in
Buffalo and in New York and so forth.
"Is it any wonder that such a prodigy would go on to
formulate a theory of relativity, which deployed
trains as one of the principal motifs in the exploration of
simultaneity?
Lightning has struck the rail on our rail embankment at two
places, A and B, a far distant from each other.
And is it any wonder that a generation later, a leading
surrealist painter would have recourse to the same train
motif in his 1938 painting, Time Transfixed." That's the
title of that painting, of a train
coming out of the chimney.
"But what of this coincidence, Rene Magritte was born 1898,
Lessines, Belgium.
The train pictured in the photograph on the right,
overshot the Gare Montparnasse in Paris, on October 22, 1895.
Surely no relation.
Except that it was Magritte himself who gave us to
understand that everything is relative and everything a
simultaneous, always has been, always will be."
I then go on to a further discussion about Einstein
after that.
But anyway, you'll see as you look through, there's all
kinds of different things.
But at a certain point, I go beyond these strange examples.
And this is the thing that I really wanted to read to you,
because at a certain point, I begin to talk about the
convergence of convergences and to talk about the way in
which trees--
and this is something you guys think about all the time--
decision trees, dendrites, river systems, everything
fractally recapitulates the same kind of branching and
trunk system.
I'm sure you guys think about this all the time.
That in fact, if you look at photographs, as you'll see
toward the end of the book, of the dendrites in the brain,
and you look at photographs of representations of the
internet, they often seem strikingly similar.
And the question begins to be, is that because--
do we think of things in decision trees, or because our
brains themselves, the neurons and the
dendrites, are like trees.
Or is that the principal way in which things self-organize
over time and space?
This, by the way-- the image that we have as the
endpapers--
is nothing organic at all.
That is electrons in a supersaturated electron of a
Plexiglas block.
And if you hit it with a knife or a screwdriver, suddenly
every single electron will go racing for the same spot.
They start at completely random places, and
self-organize into this pattern.
Exactly as a lightning bolt does in a cloud.
Only, in a cloud, it goes through vapor, so
you can't see it.
But this is, actually, what it looks like.
So I get to thinking about that, about why does that same
pattern recur over and over again?
And then I end with this coda.
And that's what I wanted to read you.
"Somehow I keep coming back to Nicholas of Cusa, that
late-medieval Renaissance man." Do you any of you know
Nicholas of Cusa?
Is he the god of Google, as he should be, as you'll see in a
second why?
"A devout church leader and mathematical mystic, who was
at the same time one of the founders of modern
experimental science.
Propagator, for example, of some of the first formal
experiments in biology.
An advocate, among other things, of the notion that the
Earth, far from being the center of the universe, might,
itself, be in motion around the sun.
This a good two generations before Copernicus.
And yet, for all that, a cautionary skeptic as to the
limits of that kind of quantifiable knowledge.
Thus, likewise, a critic of the then-reigning Aristotelian
Thomistic worldview.
"No, he would regularly insist, one can never achieve
knowledge of God, or for that matter, of the wholeness of
existence, through the systematic accretion of more
and more factual knowledge.
Picture, he would suggest, an end-sided equilateral polygon
nested inside a circle.
And now, keep adding to the number of its sides, triangle,
square, pentagon, hexagon, and so forth.
The more sides you add, the closer it might seem that
you'll be getting to the bounding circle.
And yet, he insisted, in another sense, the farther
away you would, in fact, be becoming.
Because a million-sided regular polygon, say, has
precisely a million sides.
Whereas a circle has none at all, or at most, maybe one.
"No matter how many sides you add to your polygon--
10 million, 100 million--
if you're ever going to achieve any true sense of the
whole, at some point, you will have to make the leap from the
cord to the arc.
A leap of faith, as it were"--
his words, by the way.
That's the first time you find that word in
language, a leap of faith--
"which in turn, can only be accomplished in or through
grace, which is to say in some significant
way, gratis, for free.
Beyond that is the end-sided language of
mere cause and effect.
"And that rings true to me.
The ring of truth, indeed, it seems to me, being one of the
ways you might know you had popped past the end-sided
polygon and into the realm of the circle.
And yet I also find myself holding with the late Carl
Sagan, who in his 1994, Pale Blue Dot, insisted that,
quote, 'In some respects, science has far surpassed
religion in delivering awe.
How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at
science, and concluded this is better than we thought.
The universe is much bigger than our prophets said,
grander, more subtle, more elegant.
God must be even greater than we dreamed.'"
"'Instead they say, no, no, no, my God is a little god,
and I want him to stay that way.
A religion, old or new, that stressed the magnificence of
the universe as revealed by modern science might be able
to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly
tapped by conventional faiths.
Sooner or later, such a religion will emerge.'"
"That too, seems profoundly true to me,
evinces the ring of truth.
But can Nicholas of Cusa and Carl of Cornell both be right?
Phrased another way, I suppose, is it possible to
imagine a science that, while remaining true to its own
principles and methods, nevertheless manages to break
free of the end-sided polygon and toward the circle whole."
I sometimes wonder whether that's what you're trying to
do here at Google, actually.
One more little passage, and then I'll stop.
"One morning, a while back, over NPR's Morning Edition,
somebody was reporting how scientists have determined
some of the mechanisms, whereby Staph bacilli mutate,
evolve, with astonishing rapidity, so as to outwit
antibiotics, sharing DNA, information across the entire
process in ever more novel ways.
It sounds almost as if Staph as such is thinking, or
rather, maybe daydreaming, or anyway musing, letting its
thoughts, all that genetic information, meander into
whatever available channels present themselves.
That the attempt to counter this tendency, in effect, is
an effort to keep nature's mind from wandering
where it will go.
The mind-body split may constitute a misguided
formulation.
As for that matter, in a sense, may the split between
the in-itself and the for-itself, between the world
of consciousness.
It may not be a matter of [SPEAKING LATIN]
cogito ergo sum.
In fact, in a sense, perhaps, it's that formulation's very
opposite, [SPEAKING LATIN]
sum ergo cogito.
Or better yet, [SPEAKING LATIN]
esse est cogitare: being is itself thinking.
The world, as such, is daydreaming.
Hence, the German word, [SPEAKING GERMAN]
glaube, ich glaube, faith, belief, as in
[SPEAKING GERMAN]
das glaube: If I believe this. this is what I believe.
But also [SPEAKING GERMAN]
der globus, the globe.
The globe glaubs.
All that is wonders and just goes on marveling."
It goes on from there, but I'll stop there.
I did want to say, that in terms of the context of
McSweeney's, this is a book that only McSweeney's was
willing to do.
And Eli, in particular, was a terrific editor for it.
But it's the kind of thing that they are doing at
McSweeney's on a regular basis.
I tend, when I'm there, to be the oldest guy in the room.
But it's a terrific operation, and I'm glad you all came out
to hear more about it.
ELI HOROWITZ: So that's basically that.
We appreciate you all for coming, and for Pam and Rick
and everyone, for inviting us.
But we'll all be very much around, for milling about and
asking or answering questions about any of these things.
And we can talk more about books we've done,
books in the future.
826 Valencia is a tutoring center we help
run, up in the Mission.
If anyone wants to talk about that, we can talk about that--
questions about Wholphin, questions about The Believer.
The point is, anything, we're around, if anyone wants their
book signed.
Please join us.
Thanks for Coming.