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Jun. 17th, 2011 10:15 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seekingferretGood time last night. Went to another of freeradical42's salons. The topic was targeted erasure of memory. We sprawled all over- erasing memories from trauma victims, either episodic memory or emotional memory, was a big topic, but we discussed the ethics of this as a tool of warfare and interrogation, whether the fact that you could erase a traumatic memory from a victim of war would make it easier to wage war. And we discussed erasing a whole section of your life, or a continuous block of time from your memory, and what that experience might be like. People mentioned various interesting neurological cases involving loss of memory, like a man permanently stuck thinking he's 22 years old. I raised the troubling possibility that one might erase memories recreationally, just for the odd sensation of having a gap in your memory. We discussed the way some people really do that, through alcohol abuse and other drug abuse, and this led to a discussion of whether blacking out from alcohol abuse provides an appropriate analogy to consider this kind of memory loss, given that none of us had any real direct experience with the kinds of amnesia we talked about. And with all this conversation, there was a tendency to shrug, say "Yeah, that's a tough question", and move on to the next idea because the topic was difficult, complicated, and full of interesting questions. Eventually this broke up into a series of small satellite conversations, so I can't quite faithfully reproduce everything that was said, but it was fun.
And I drank a reasonably considerable quantity of Guinness in honor of Bloomsday, and others drank considerable amounts of wine. And I kept making jokes about not remembering the topic and people kept laughing. And at some point a pretty girl I'd never met before licked my beard.
And then I sobered up a bit and drove home to the sound of Molly Bloom's soliloquy on WNYC, broadcast from the annual Bloomsday on Broadway celebration. and yes i said yes i will yes. Oh, I do love Penelope more than almost anything in the world. I don't think I'd realized before the link between Molly's comment about performing fellatio on a statue and Stephen's A Pisgah Sight of Palestine, but it was lovely and surprising. Joyce is so good at making parodies of faith weirdly devotional.
freeradical42's salons. The topic was targeted erasure of memory. We sprawled all over- erasing memories from trauma victims, either episodic memory or emotional memory, was a big topic, but we discussed the ethics of this as a tool of warfare and interrogation, whether the fact that you could erase a traumatic memory from a victim of war would make it easier to wage war. And we discussed erasing a whole section of your life, or a continuous block of time from your memory, and what that experience might be like. People mentioned various interesting neurological cases involving loss of memory, like a man permanently stuck thinking he's 22 years old. I raised the troubling possibility that one might erase memories recreationally, just for the odd sensation of having a gap in your memory. We discussed the way some people really do that, through alcohol abuse and other drug abuse, and this led to a discussion of whether blacking out from alcohol abuse provides an appropriate analogy to consider this kind of memory loss, given that none of us had any real direct experience with the kinds of amnesia we talked about. And with all this conversation, there was a tendency to shrug, say "Yeah, that's a tough question", and move on to the next idea because the topic was difficult, complicated, and full of interesting questions. Eventually this broke up into a series of small satellite conversations, so I can't quite faithfully reproduce everything that was said, but it was fun.And I drank a reasonably considerable quantity of Guinness in honor of Bloomsday, and others drank considerable amounts of wine. And I kept making jokes about not remembering the topic and people kept laughing. And at some point a pretty girl I'd never met before licked my beard.
And then I sobered up a bit and drove home to the sound of Molly Bloom's soliloquy on WNYC, broadcast from the annual Bloomsday on Broadway celebration. and yes i said yes i will yes. Oh, I do love Penelope more than almost anything in the world. I don't think I'd realized before the link between Molly's comment about performing fellatio on a statue and Stephen's A Pisgah Sight of Palestine, but it was lovely and surprising. Joyce is so good at making parodies of faith weirdly devotional.