Cleveland, Ohio - Tremont neighborhood, autumnal equinox 2010

So here is the dream

This is the photograph of my dream

What do you dream

"Just as a novelist creates a novel, a person creates a sense of being. The self is simply our work of art, created by the brain in order to make sense of its own disunity. In a world made of fragments, the self is our sole 'theme, recurring, half remembered, half foreseen.' If it didn't exist, then nothing would exist. We would be a brain full of characters, hopelessly searching for an author."

- Jonah Lehrer in Proust Was a Neuroscientist

NIGERIA: Two Books A Month (TBAM) with Chioma Chuka

Chioma Chuka is a writer, broadcaster, producer, editor, columnist, blogger, compere, and post- graduate student at Birmingham City University in the UK, who blogs at fairygodsister,wordpress.com.

Check out her TBAM plan here and lmk (or let Chioma know) if you want to help.

"To be buried in lava and not turn a hair, it is then a man shows what stuff he is made of."

— Samuel Beckett, Malone Dies

"We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love. But always meeting ourselves."

—James Joyce, Ulysses

"I just write a song and I know it's going to be all right. I don't even know what it's going to say."

— Bob Dylan, 1965, KQED-TV

To know yourself, abandon your position

Dialogue requires that in some way one abandons one's own position to enter into that of the other. The more I give myself to the other, the better I know myself and the more I acquire a unique identity. - Louis Dupré

quoted in THE EMPATHIC CIVILIZATION by Jeremy Rifkin (184)

International Peace Day - September 21

Peace Through Fiction Intro: Fight Club, True Blood & Lara Croft

Twenty men crossing a bridge,

Into a village,

Are twenty men crossing twenty bridges,

Into twenty villages,

Or one man

Crossing a single bridge into a village.

(page 71)

NEOMFA lit course with Emily Mitchell -

Here's our reading list for Emily Mitchell's NEOMFA lit course (Fall 2010).

Click on a book cover for more info.

"The fourth culture"

The first culture: art

The second culture: science

The third culture: "scientists who communicate directly with the general public"

The fourth culture: "one that seeks to discover relationships between the humanities and the sciences."

"This fourth culture. . .will ignore arbitrary intellectual boundaries, seeking instead to blur the lines that separate. It will freely transplant knowledge between the sciences and the humanities, and will focus on connecting the reductionist fact to our actual experience. It will take a pragmatic view of the truth, and it will judge truth not by its origins but in terms of its usefulness. What does this novel or experiment or poem or protein teach us about ourselves? How does it help up to understand who we are? What long-standing problem has it solved?"

-Jonah Lehrer in Proust Was a Neuroscientist

"To understand ourselves as works of fiction..."

"New psychologies have come and gone, but our self-awareness continues to haunt our science, a reality too real to be measured. As Woolf understood, the self is a fiction that cannot be treated like a fact. Besides, to understand ourselves as works of fiction is to understand ourselves as fully as we can. 'The final belief,' Wallace Stevens once wrote, 'is to believe in a fiction, which you know to be a fiction, there being nothing else.'"

-Jonah Lehrer in Proust Was a Neuroscientist

Novels or scientific psychology?

"It's quite possible — overwhelmingly probable, one might guess — that we will always learn more about human life and personality from novels than from scientific psychology."

- Noah Chomsky, via Jonah Lehrer in Proust Was a Neuroscientist

"Just as a novelist creates a novel, a person creates a sense of being..."

"Just as a novelist creates a novel, a person creates a sense of being. The self is simply our work of art, created by the brain in order to make sense of its own disunity. In a world made of fragments, the self is our sole 'theme, recurring, half remembered, half foreseen.' If it didn't exist, then nothing would exist. We would be a brain full of characters, hopelessly searching for an author."

- Jonah Lehrer in Proust Was a Neuroscientist

"Life is not a clock..."

"Life is not a clock, it is a cloud." — Karl Popper

(via Jonah Lehrer in Proust Was a Neuroscientist)

"I refuse to adopt any formula..."

"I refuse to adopt any formula which does not get itself clothed for me in some human figure and individual experience." — George Eliot
(via Jonah Lehrer in Proust Was a Neuroscientist)

"...but where on this moonlit and dream-visited planet..."

‎"Objective evidence and certitude are doubtless very fine ideals to play with, but where on this moonlit and dream-visited planet are they found?" - William James (via Jonah Lehrer in Proust Was a Neuroscientist)

Helping Janeth Msumba, young librarian in training in Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania

I’m hoping to raise enough money for a wonderful young woman, Janeth Msumba, to continue her Librarianship studies at Tumaini University in Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania. Janeth plans to use her degree to work in a library or other organization in Tanzania to support literacy and education in her home country.

Janeth has already earned her Diploma in Librarianship at the School of Library, Archives, and Documentation Studies (SLADS). Click here to visit the SLADS website. The Diploma is a two-year program and a prerequisite to the Bachelor of Arts program.

Janeth has been accepted into the three-year Bachelor of Arts program in Library Studies at Tumaini University, but cannot afford the tuition and expenses, which are out of reach for most of Tanzania’s working-poor citizens: about $1,700 tuition for one year, and $1,100 for books, supplies, and practicum fees. Janeth applied for a government grant, but Tanzania is a poor country and the government was unable to provide the funds.

Through the compassionate support of good people like you, I’m hoping to raise the total of $2,800 to fund Janeth’s first year in the Library Studies program, via fundraisers and private donations.

For more information on the Librarianship program: Click here for Tumaini University, Dar Es Salaam College, 2009-2011 Prospectus. See page numbers 36 – 39 for the Bachelor of Arts in Library Studies three-year curriculum. See page numbers 15 -17 for tuition and fees; amounts are listed in Tanzanian shillings.

Please let me know if you’re able to help -- email, FB, tweet, or leaving a comment here -- and feel free to forward this post to others who may be interested.

Helping Janeth to continue her education in Library Studies will assist a dedicated young woman and advance literacy in Tanzania, for as we know, one person can change the lives of many others.

Asante Sana

"This is what Proust knew..."

"This is what Proust knew: the past is never past. As long as we are alive, our memories remain wonderfully volatile. In their mercurial mirror, we see ourselves." - Jonah Lehrer

I write like
David Foster Wallace

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

From rafiki yangu Muhidin Issa Michuzi in Dar Es Salaam

PROUST WAS A NEUROSCIENTIST by Jonah Lehrer

Now reading -- notes to come.

IMAGINATION 2010: "Sentimental Journey - A week in dreamland" by Leslie Pearce-Keating

Read about the Imagination 2010 conference at Cleveland State - in this column by Wooster Daily Record columnist Leslie Pearce-Keating, my energizing and inspiring workshop-mate in creative nonfiction:
The-Daily-Record.com - Sentimental Journey A week in dreamland

I ♥ The Prop

Peace Through Fiction - June and July

Pepsi Refresh updates:

Thanks to everyone for energizing me with your support, votes, and love!

Peace Through Fiction didn’t win the grant in June -- but it finished in the Top 100 so it automatically rolled into the July voting period.

However, I'm now shifting my focus away from Pepsi Refresh to connecting directly with middle schools -- providing teachers with free Peace Through Fiction materials for their classroom use.

Cheers and gratitude from my heart,
Nicole

Google Map: The 13 "Peace Through Fiction" cities for Pepsi Refresh Grant

Click on controls in upper left of map to zoom and pan.

View Larger Map

The Peace Through Fiction creative reading method

Click here for the Peace Through Fiction creative reading method.

Educators and innovators in related fields

Peace Through Fiction is based on classic principles of reading, conflict resolution and dialogue.Click here for more information on educators and innovators in those fields.

Awards and endorsements

Click here to read about awards and endorsements for Nicole Hunter’s work on Peace Through Fiction and her novel Waiting for the World to End.

Creative Commons License

Peace Through Fiction is available for noncommercial use under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. Click here for details.

Click here to get the Peace Through Fiction creative reading method.