Dr. Metablog

Left-right Confusion

As far as I know, there have been exactly zero scientific studies of directional dyslexia.  As a consequence, all of our knowledge is anecdotal.  No one can say for certain whether the condition is inherited or acquired, or whether it's more (or less) common among women, southpaws, redheads, eastern Europeans, bad spellers, or chocoholics.  "Common sense" suggests that it might be associated with right-left confusion, and indeed, a number of the individuals who've commented on ""People who Lose their Way" indicate that they have severe problems telling the one hand from the other.  For example:  one commentator reports that a lifelong problem is that "I've been completely unable to instinctively tell left from right."  The emphasis on the word "instinctively" is meaningful.  Without conscious effort, most unaffected people intuitively and easily understand the difference between right and left;  for another class, some of them DDers, it's something that must be learned by effort, as in the case of the reader who thinks her DD is related to the fact that she "had lots of trouble as a child learning right and left," or of another who, learning to dance, can't consistently raise "right hand and left leg -- or vice versa."  Another non-instinctive person "still doesn't know my left from my right (I have to put my hands out and see which one makes an 'L).'"  A high school student plaintively confesses that her mom "threatened to write the words left and right on the back of my hands before I had to take the test for my driver's license."  It's a frequent complaint:  "I was almost 20 years old before I stopped having to think 'I write with my left hand...  if I were to pick up a pencil which hand would I hold it in.'"

Is there, then, an association between right-left confusion and directional dyslexia?

I don't think that the evidence allows us to conclude so.

Most of the people who commented do not mention any such condition.

Perhaps they take it for granted that everyone in the DD community shares the trait -- but we don't.  Even though I'm among the world's most frequently lost souls, I have not the slightest bit of trouble with left and right.  In fact, I'd say that I'm hyperconscious of my handedness as well as the handedness of others.  I always observe and remember which of my acquaintances are right or left-handed.  And if someone says, "turn left," I turn left.  Unerringly and instinctively.   

Pending further investigation, the evidence suggests that left-right confusion is independent of directional dyslexia.  It's a separate problem (and one which may further disorient those of us who are chronically lost).

Coming soon:  east/west/north/south. 

A Scary Flashback

I watched a part of the Couric-Palin interview (all I could stand).  For me, it was a deja vu experience.  Took me back to the days when I examined students who had missed most of the classes and hadn't done much of the reading but had the effrontery to see if they could bullshit their way through.  It was all there:  the repetition of a handful of memorized phrases, the circumlocutions, the volley of words when an occasional thought entered  the otherwise vacant brain, the telltale fumbling, the sheer unadulterated bluff.  But as for Palin's level of analysis -- it wouldn't have earned a C in any class that I ever taught.  At best, it's at the level required to run for vice president of the student body in a mediocre high school.         

Road to Hannibal

Stepping westward, we left St. Louis behind and detoured northward to enjoy scenic Route 79 to Hannibal. Well worth it --lovely, well-cultivated bottom land and wonderful vistas from the bluffs overlooking the Mississippi.  We toured Louisiana, an old river town where a handful of century-old mercantile buildings are hanging on precariously, waiting to be redeployed for modern uses.  I recommend if, especially for those who are not fazed by a seventy-five mile add-on to a twenty-four hundred mile jaunt.   

While I'm dispensing advice, let me also commend Route 50 between and Bridgeport and Parkersburg in West Virginia -- another less-well-traveled and very beautiful highway.   

Louisiana, Missouri (unknown to me until today) now enters that small but distinguished category of cities that are named according to an unusual template.  Others include Washington, Vermont (and many other states), Delaware, Ohio  and Delaware, Wyoming and Indiana, Pennsylvania. Related but Impure:  Kansas City, Missouri; Michigan City, Indiana. 

What I Learned in Frackville

TV-free for more than three months, we stayed last night at a motel in Frackville, Pennsylvania and couldn't resist taking a gander at the tube.  I was shocked to see how artificial and contrived it all seemed.  The actors were not real people, nor were they actors pretending to be real people.  They were actors trying but failing to act like real people.  They were, at least to me last night, no more convincingl than those archaic Egyptian sculptures.

Try this experiment.  Switch on the TV and then surf from channel to channel.  I guarantee that you'll be able to tell within ten seconds whether the person you see on the screen is acting in a "daytime drama," a TV series, a documentary, or a movie.  The style of performance in each of these genres is so heavily conventionalized that the cues become immediately obvious to the TV-literate.  (By the word "convention." I mean "an agreed-upon departure from reality").  Good actors have assimilated these conventions.  When they appear on screen, they gesture and smile and speak in agreed-upon but unnatural ways.

My new perspective was an artifact of the three-month hiatus.  Temporarily unfamiliar with the style, all I could see were the conventions at work.  Of course actors are always faking, but I had stopped seeing it.  In Frackville, it all became transparent, offensively transparent.  And because it was so transparent, it wasn't worth my time, especially when a little clicking brought me to baseball.

I wonder how long my resistance will continue.  Not very many days, I imagine.  I'll forget.

Expertise by Proximity

Regular correspondent Otis Jefferson Brown inquires whether, in lieu of the precedent by which Sarah Palin claims expertise in foreign affairs because she can almost see Russian from Alaska, he is now a rocket scientist because, through his bedroom window, he can, on starry nights, see the moon.

Otis, I'm sorry to say,  does not grasp the precedent.  Of course he's not a rocket scientist, because he's not educated or practiced in that difficult field.  However, he is certainly qualified, by the principle of expertise by proximity, to become the head of NASA, for which position I urge him to immediately apply, especially if he attended high school with Sarah.

Is each and every Alaskan equally qualified to be Vice President?  Of course they are, but with a caveat.  Those who live in the western part of the state are obviously more knowledgeable and are to be preferred to dwellers in the Alaskan interior.  Eastern Alaskans have not achieved more significant expertise by proximity than what would prepare them to serve as trade representative to the Yukon, or perhaps, ambassador to Canada. 

Citizen Dentist

Sarah Palin is like Jesse Ventura; she's a "novelty" governor.  Every once in a while, Americans like to stick it to the pols by electing an amateur.  It shakes things up for a while.  Sarah Palin is a joke, but now McCain has endangered our beloved nation by taking her seriously. Here's a scenario:  McCain is elected, he dies or is taken out by a conspiratorial maniac, and there's a dangerous small-minded, uneducated, right-wing fringe religious-bigot demagogue in charge of the nuclear stockpile.

Governing is the most difficult of all arts, and yet Americans seem to think it's a snap.  When you take your car in to be fixed, you want an experienced, knowledgeable mechanic, not, not an actor or an athlete.  I'm yet to meet a person who wants his impacted wisdom tooth treated by a citizen dentist.  But to run the government -- let's just hire anyone at all.   

I'm reading Milan Kundera's excellent novel, The Joke.  It's set in 1950s Czechoslovakia, and like all novels of the communist era, portrays a world in which the government is in the hands of mediocre people chosen and promoted not for brains, wisdom, or talent but for ideological orthodoxy.  t's a system that's doomed to failure, but it's exactly the system that has now been imposed on this country by the Bush administration, which regularly hired graduates of Patrick Henry and Liberty --ideologically pure right-wing colleges -- over applicants of genuine distinction.      

Republicans oppose affirmative action when it works to the advantage of the underrepresented, but they are its greatest proponents when it comes to political correctness.  Major examples (there are zillion minor ones) are such disasters as Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, Justice Clarence Thomas, and now likely Vice President Sarah Palin.

The Black Cochin

Cathy: "We have a Cochin.  She's beautiful.  Her feathers are an iridescent black.  With Cochins, the feathers cover the entire leg.  She's a pet, part of the family.  She's four years old and must weigh seven pounds.  But just lately she developed some sort of neurological disease.  She would quiver, shake, sometimes her wings, sometimes all over.  Faint.  We took her to the vet.  We thought she had eaten something bad.  It's such a wet year, there are mushrooms all over the place.  Perhaps she ate mushrooms or some poisonous berries.  The vet took an x-ray.  It cost $400."

Dr. M. (flabbergasted):  "You spent $400 on a ten-dollar chicken?!

Cathy:  "Actually, she was given to us.  Free."

Dr. M.:  "What did the x-ray show?"

Cathy:  "An egg.  You could see it clearly."

Dr. M.:  "I mean about the disease."

Cathy:  "Nothing in particular.  The shaking stopped after a while,  But a few days later she developed bumblefoot because she couldn't perch correctly.

Dr. M.:  "Bumblefoot?"

Cathy:   "Bumblefoot is an infection.  It distorts the shape of the foot.  So we've been giving her antibiotics.  One of us holds her in a towel, then the other pries open her beak.  You insert a mixture of applesauce and antibiotic into her beak. She doesn't like it."

Dr. M.:  "Is it working?"

Cathy:  "It's not clear.  She may have to have surgery. The doctor recommends it."

Dr. M. (in a state of shock):  "Surgery?  On a chicken?  How much is that going to cost."

Cathy:  "The vet says $700.  He's an avian specialist.

Dr. M (astounded):  "Are you going to do it?"

Cathy:  "We don't know.  We're thinking about it."

Dr. M.:  "Have you considered physical therapy?  Massage.  Perhaps acupuncture?

Cathy: "First we're going to try echinacea or goldenseal."

What is a Drag?

What, exactly, is a drag?  Here's a sentence from Kate Chopin's edgy (in a Victorian way) 1899 novel, The Awakening.  "Alcee Arobin and Mrs. Highcamp called for Mrs. Pontellier one bright afternoon in Arobin's drag."  A drag?  Could it be "a large four-horse coach with seats inside and on top."  O my gosh!  It's still another nineteenth-century horse-drawn vehicle!  Along with a cutter and a kibitka.   Memo to self: add to list.

I didn't know of the existence of The Awakening, a novel which had dropped completely off the map, until sometime in the 1980s, when it re-established itself in courses in AmLit.  It was a banned book for a while, not, I would guess, because of the adultery itself, but because Edna Pontellier acknowledges and acts on sexual desire.  Alcee Arobin, drag-owner, senses her vulnerability, but I don't think that in this case the vehicle figures in the seduction.  It's a fine, liberating book, the prose a little on the hothouse-gardenia side, but well worth the re-reading.