Itinerantdaughter's Blog

I’ve told her before that she can’t die and leave me here because she’s a much better writer than I am. When she does, which may be soon, all things considered, I’ll fight tooth and nail to be in charge of condensing and editing her writing, but most likely won’t do it justice.

On the title of this blog/the nickname I gave to myself:

Notes of an Itinerant Daughter is inspired by/a smushing of two well known literary works, Notes of a Native Son by James Baldwin and Notes of a Native Daughter by my beloved archnemesis, Joan Didion. Itinerant Daughter came about because I happen to work for an egomaniacal writer whose essential paralysis has not quelled his wanderlust at all, and so I am dragged from place to place in search of the muse, if you will. In the past eight months, I have “lived” in three different places (question: how long should you reside somewhere before you can say that you “live/d” there?), all pretty interesting in their own right.

Now I’m back to my “Native” urban land, and am happily much more appreciative of what this city giveth and taketh away than I was before spending time elsewhere. People love to talk about the authenticity of this city (from my own travels, I’ve determined a little more than most other cities.) It’s not the way it used to be, they lament, all hookers and peep shows and real diversity, not this gentrified BULLshit. The issue is that of course, no one really wants to live in a cesspool, and no one is willing to get rid of their comfy jobs and replace them with gigs as streetwalkers. Can you imagine tearing down the various Le Pain Quotidiens in favor of fifties-style “cafeterias”? In the end, does anybody really miss the old Apple, minus out of work pimps? Those of us who like grit (myself included, even though I maybe just talk a big talk) have to settle for glimpses of the ephemeral “Old” city. I was fortunate enough to get one the other night.

My friend MH and I were in a park downtown eating Thai food and hopping from one small jam session to another. We ended up finding a pretty decent one, with just the right amount of bongos, and parked ourselves next to it listening to the band’s rendition of Wild Horses. A man with a thick Jamaican accent (who, I swear, was the actor who played Sanka in Cool Runnings) walked up to a resting drummer. The two clearly knew each other. They slapped hands.

“Mon, ChiTown just got arrested!”

“Shit, man!” the drummer responded. “What happened?”

“Some cop saw him parking his car, said, ‘You can’t park there, sir!’ ChiTown says, ‘Go fuck yourself!’ and the cop says, ‘Excuse me?’ and ChiTown says, ‘Oh, I’m sorry, fuck your mother!'”

It’s good to be “home.”

From Susie Orbach’s book Bodies, which is a great text on the contemporary conception of the corporal…

“Robert Sylvester, Emeritus Professor of Education at the University of Oregon, asks us to reflect on a very ordinary action between a parent and an infant. The parent sticks out her or his tongue and the baby responds with the same gesture. We might laugh seeing this and think no more about it. But ‘how can an infant possibly master such a complex motor act immediately after observing it?’ It’s a good question. Projecting the tongue is an intricate task. While we respond delightedly to the infant’s action, if we do reflect on what it takes for a baby to reciprocate our sticking-out tongue, we recognise how many processes must be occurring in the baby’s mind to enable that spontaneous response. The baby has to see, then translate that seeing into an invitation to respond and then activate the muscles which control the tongue and the mouth to facilitate the tongue’s extension.

“If we were to look inside the brain, we would see a thin band of cells in the motor cortex which extends from ear to ear and is activated when movement occurs. In front of the motor cortex, closer to our forehead, we’d see action in the pre-motor cortex, the area that prepares for movement. A chance observation by Giacomo Rizzolatti and Vittorio Gallese in a laboratory in Parma, where they were studying monkeys just over a decade ago, led to the naming of a new class of neurons which are involved in this dual phenomenon of seeing and doing. Rizzolatti and Gallese were tracking the firing of brain cells as monkeys stretched their arms out to reach for peanuts. They were interested in what happened in the monkeys’ brains when this movement was made. They observed that every time the monkeys reached for a peanut, a specific group of cells in the frontal lobes fired. One day, a scientist from another lab came in to see Rizzolatti and Gallese and casually picked up one of the peanuts. Rizzolatti and Gallese were astonished to see that the same cells that were fired when the monkeys picked up a peanut fired when the monkeys saw the man picking one up. The act of seeing the scientist pick up a peanut induced the same neural behaviour in the monkeys, as if they were performing the action themselves. This extraordinary and unexpected result implied their brains mirrored the movements the monkeys saw whether or not they were making the movements themselves.

“Many experiments on –– including some involving humans observing other humans in action — this group of cells was named and designated as the mirror neuron system. When we watch another human being making a movement, whether it is sticking out a tongue, carrying packages, swerving, dancing, eating or clapping their hands, our neurons fire in the same way, as if we ourselves were making the movement. From the brain’s perspective, Rizzolatti and Gallese found, watching is pretty similar to doing. The brain has a built-in empathic and mimicking capacity. It translates what is seen through the eyes into the equivalent of doing and is structured to absorb and prepare itself for what we may not yet have mastered.”