Should child-butcherer General Petraeus be strangled in Anders Fogh Rasmussen's Guts?

Or drowned in his blood?

António Damásio 'Self Comes to Mind' (and more Proust)

Just finished reading, then sat through several of Señor Damásio's charming and instructive lectures on the same subject on YouTube. In person, I find myself frankly and cruelly compelled to say, Our Author ineluctably reminds me of Mortimer Mouse, slight and squeaky, and utterly possessed by his subject--with which, of course, there can be no quarrel; not even with the 'Autobiographical Self,' somewhat over-compendious though I do find it, and though I might have preferred in honor of the living memory of the dead Sam D'Allessandro to have called it more súpply and simply the 'Narrative Self.'

But no, what the hell, it is in just such cavils and hesitations and stickings that our real selves and deepest convictions reveal themselves. Okay (we'll get back to mostly unexceptionable, polite and squeaky Señor Mortimer Mouse): First let's settle some hash with Marcel Proust and the 'Sonate pour Violon et Piano de Vinteuil,' which Swann and assorted convives are all the time hearing being performed chez Verdurin by the Young Pianist all by himself--even when he begins, as perforce he must, by rendering the opening "tremolos basses du violon," with no help from a violinist; one emotional "phrase" of which virtually delivers Swann into the arms of Odette de Crécy, every time he hears it or even thinks about it. Got that? Not only is Proust's description of the music perfectly flat-line appallingly stupid, and sickening in his apparent satisfaction at having so successfully rendered so ineffable a subject (which I, for one, would not say was at all successfully rendered), but he nowhere "gets" how perfectly dumb-shit it is to have the Young Pianist play the Vinteuil 'Sonate pour Violon et Piano' all by his stupid self. The French are so stupid when they talk about music. They really approach the imbecility suggested by Steve Martin when he said, "Talking about music is like dancing about architecture."

Back to Self Comes to Mind: Though dry, it does a fair job of estimating the relative importance of the untrammeled Narrative Self to Culture, and of Culture to the Mind. But:

In over-estimating the importance of the Homeric poems Our Author quite neglects the even more significant and thousands of years older Gilgamesh. And, in order not to rock the boat of what is currently deemed to be Tolerably Politically Correct Views of Creeping Evolution of the Development (By no means the Acquisition) of Language, he imagines (a kind of) music preceding speech, in a grotesque fantasy read-down of the Great Leap Forward--that only lacks, for utter noisome idiocy, a 'Dance of the Neanderthal Flower-Maidens.'

À la Recherche du Temps Perdu, relu

Say that I'm a tenth of the way through, and it's taken me a month so far, reading a little bit every morning while I'm waking up. Really, did I read this all the way through, in French, 39 years ago? It's nothing like what I thought I remembered. Just now I'm at the Verdurin dinner party, with everybody (except Swann) being such asses, making such stupid and frequently vulgar jokes, and congratulating themselves on being oh-so-cool, and cutting down their intellectual and aristocratic betters, and putting the real excellencies of Alexandre Dumas fils (Francillon) on a par with the slavering vulgarity and snobbism of Georges Ohnet (Le Maître des Forges and Serge Panine)--whom I happen to know about because because I read (about 20 years ago) in the collected works of my mentor, guide, philosopher and friend Anatole France, mon cher Maître's appallingly brutal literary criticism of Georges Ohnet the man (snob) and the writer (vulgarian). I knew that there was something mean (in the American sense) about Anatole France--and that's why, partially, I liked him; but the Master's deadly venomous evisceration of Ohnet was a shock--almost as doubtful in taste as his taking advantage of his position as the chief eulogist at Zola's funeral to tell the world how bad and ugly Zola's French prose was. Which he did do. Every once in a while you get the impression that being an "Immortal" sort of goes to the head of a Frenchman who's been elected to the French Academy--not unlike the divine afflatus that sometimes seized Roman Emperors--and causes him to lose all sense of human proportion, and, so to say, nominate his horse as Consul.