Isolated Transient Alexia — a migrainous accompaniment — ever had it?

JAMA Neurology abstract: "Alexia as a transient or paroxysmal neurologic event is a rare clinical finding. John Hughlings Jackson made reference to the paroxysmal occurrence of 'word blindness' as a temporary sequela of neuronal exhaustion at an epileptogenic focus.... A transient episode of alexia in the absence of accompanying neurologic deficit is exceedingly rare.... We recently observed a patient who experienced an isolated, transient alexia that appears to have been a migrainous accompaniment...."

I suspect this happened to me. Here's what I was trying to read and could not make any sense of it, and I struggled from all different angles: "The Story of the Foul-Mouthed Parrot Andrew Jackson Once Had" (an episode of a podcast I like: "Boring History for Sleep"). 

Now, I think that's a type of headline that is objectively hard to puzzle out. I encountered another one this morning in the NY Post: "Missouri foster mom accused of trading teen for monkey avoids prison." Something about the sequence "monkey avoids prison" sends your thoughts tripping over the precipice. 

But that "Foul-Mouth Parrot" headline was entirely undecipherable to me. I searched for an entry point: What is "Story"? What is "Andrew"? "Foul"? I couldn't even think of how to begin to pronounce those words or how words work together to mean something. This not-knowing lasted for about 15 minutes, and of course, I queried A.I. about it. That was after Meade had consulted a different A.I.

And I believe all A.I.s will tell you the same thing if you put this story into it — not the story of Andrew Jackson's parrot or the story of the foster mom's monkey — the story of a reading human suddenly completely unable to read. And we did what A.I. told us to do. That's why there was no sunrise photo yesterday. Our sleep was massively disrupted. I had to get my head examined.

ADDED: I omitted a crucial detail that is why I was thinking in terms of a migrainous accompaniment. About an hour before the alexia, I experienced a scintillating scotoma — a glittering arc'd zigzag in my visual field. I've had that twice before, in 2004 and 2014. In 2014, I treated it as nothing, but it felt like a big deal in 2004. I blogged it as "My scotoma" (deliberately evoking "My Sharona"):

Recent birds.

Caught by Meade. On Monday, a great blue heron made good use of its long skinny legs:

 

Yesterday, there was a turkey vulture on the path:

"In the mid-eighteen-hundreds, amid the advent of photography, the Victorians shot still-life arrangements of lizards crawling over fruit and dead game birds hanging from a nail..."

"... capturing with their new technology the savagery of hunger, the oneness between natural decay and human appetite. For much of the following century, food photography functioned as a sort of ethnographic art, a form of restrained realism preoccupied with light and shadow, shape and symbolism. But, in the nineteen-thirties, the introduction of color printing to advertising changed how food was shot on camera, and thus conceived of culturally. Dishes were now a thing to be drooled over and sold, products that emphasized the sensual, the luscious, the beautiful.... The surreality of commercial food photography and its later evolution into food porn may have been an artificial and sensationalist representation of the things we ate, but it at least managed to seduce.... Restaurants choosing to showcase computer-generated approximations of the dishes they serve inspire neither gluttony nor lust...."

Writes Brady Brickner-Wood, in "The Unique Horrors of A.I. Food Slop/Why does it feel so unsettling when restaurants use generative A.I. to create their menus and promotional materials?" in The New Yorker.

No 19th century photographs at that link, so I found 2 for you: "The First of September" (1855)(showing 2 dead game birds hanging from a nail) and  William Louis Henry Skeen, "Still Life of Exotic Fruits & Lizard from Ceylon" (c. 1880)(with, of course, lizards crawling over fruit).

Those 2 old photographs are not as exciting as I'd leapt to imagine they were. I should have noticed the promise of dreariness in those words "ethnographic art" and "restrained realism."

My imagination was fueled with images of old still-life paintings like this:

Accepting accolades.

Patience rewarded.

If you had to argue that birds are right wing or left wing, what side would you take and how would you support your position?

That's a prompt I used on Grok this morning after seeing the typo — speako, really — I'd made in a prompt earlier this morning when I used AI to identify a bird. It was a Rose-breasted Grosbeak. I'd said: 

"It's got black and white on top and white on the bottom and there's some right orange patches."

"right" = bright, of course.

Meade said, "Yeah, 'right' orange patches sounds nazi." Hence, my new prompt.

Do not click for more if you don't want to read AI-written material, but I do think this one is at least worth scanning. It's a crisp outline. Grok takes the position that birds are right wing:

Why did the bird cross the road? For dark and unknowable reasons?

Yesterday, we were talking about Arthur Miller's aphorism: "Glamour is a bird that for dark and largely unknowable reasons decides to light on this branch rather than another."

My reaction: "Birds don't have dark reasons." You might have read that as if I were saying, birds are, in fact, thoroughly virtuous. I should have allowed for darkness, at least, in some birds. What about Poe's "Raven" or the albatross in "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner"? But it was more a matter of choosing to talk only about the possible dark side of birds, because that's all Miller brought up.

If the Glamour bird's motivations are unknowable, how does Miller know they are dark? Maybe Miller thought of that question and threw "largely" into the sentence as a quick fix. I don't know much about the mind of Miller, but I read it to think: I don't know much about the mind of the bird, but I do know this: The one called Glamour has dark reasons.

In the comments tcrosse said, "Why did the chicken cross the road? For some dark reason?"

We thought that was a very funny line and laughed about it before we went out for the sunrise. Driving home in the sun, we saw an odd bird standing in the road, then 2 birds. The light side of birds was demanding attention. Baby sandhill cranes just had to cross the road.

Why? No reasons at all. Never any reason. 

"Arthur Miller described the voluptuous yet fragile woman he wed as 'a poet on a street corner trying to recite to a crowd pulling at her clothes.'"

"When Miller left out his journal open to a page saying that she had embarrassed him in front of his intellectual peers and Marilyn read it, she wrote, 'I guess I have always been deeply terrified to really be someone’s wife since I know from life one cannot love another, ever, really.' Like everyone else, Miller was mesmerized by his wife’s power of enchantment. 'Glamour is a bird that for dark and largely unknowable reasons decides to light on this branch rather than another,' he once wrote...."

From Maureen Dowd's new column, "Norma Jeane’s Still Got It!" (NYT).

You know what's embarrassing? 1. Writing down that your wife is embarrassing — can't you just remember it and squirm silently in your dark and unknowable mind? — and leaving your journal open to the page where she'll see it, 2. Writing "Glamour is a bird that for dark and largely unknowable reasons decides to light on this branch rather than another." Birds don't have dark reasons.

IN THE COMMENTS: Bob Boyd provides this:

"A friggin' bird will swoop down from a bough and peck your eyes out as you lie helpless and half frozen in the snow without ever having felt sorry for you." 

— Thought to be an early, rough draft of 'Self-Pity' scribbled in the margin of A Field Guide to the Dark Thoughts of North American Birds found in D.H. Lawrence's library after his death.

BY THE WAY: When I was writing this post, I wanted an illustration and asked Grok to give me an image of "a bird that for dark and largely unknowable reasons decides to light on this branch." I didn't say Arthur Miller wrote those words.

Grok gave me an image that was too dull to use, but it also added this ridiculous caption: "A solitary bird, wings half-folded in that decisive instant of landing, perches on a gnarled, ancient branch silhouetted against a brooding twilight sky. The air feels heavy with unspoken intent—shadows pool beneath the feathers like secrets, and the bird’s eye catches a glint of something ancient and unknowable. Dark pines loom in the distance, mist curls low, and the branch itself seems to have been waiting for this exact, inscrutable visitor."

So I was all: "Yeah it's purple prose isn't it? I got it from Arthur Miller."

"[Jill] Biden is a longtime English professor who casually uses the correct group noun for starlings ('murmuration')."

"She quotes many writers here — Albert Camus, Robert Frost, Nikki Giovanni, James Salter — but the author the book recalled most vividly to me, in its careful catalog of small details, was William Carlos Williams, who in his epic poem 'Paterson' wrote 'no ideas but in things.' This tracks, because Biden acknowledges the help of Ada Calhoun, the author of [a book] about Frank O’Hara. Indeed, Biden’s description of being hustled for security reasons through the service entrance to hotels made my O’Hara stand on end, so cleanly could it be broken into stanzas, if you’ll forgive the liberty: 'right by garbage cans/ reeking of rotting room service leftovers/mixed with discarded mini shampoos/ — an odor so sour and pungent/that it almost knocks you down.'"

So writes Alexandra Jacobs in "Jill Biden’s New Memoir Shows Off a Sharp Eye, if Not a Sharp Elbow/Beyond a few pointed digs at her husband’s successor, 'View From the East Wing' largely sticks to the head-spinning details of first lady-hood" (NYT).

Speaking of "no ideas but in things," we're told that, in her new memoir, her second, Jill Biden "marvels at the perks of the office, the masses of flowers, attentive staff and fine art, such as 'Morning on the Seine, Good Weather,' the oil painting that Angela Merkel said Trump called 'my Monet.' ('Our Monet,' Biden corrects, meaning the American people’s.)"

I looked it up. Here's "Our Monet":

According to The White House Historical Association's Facebook page: "On December 4, 1963, the family of John F. Kennedy donated the painting 'A Morning on the Seine; Good Weather' to the White House collection in memory of the late president." That was 2 weeks after the assassination. I'm only noticing this painting now, because I'm reading about Jill and Donald verbalizing possessively about it. And now I feel as though I can see, in that fuzzy image, 2 profiles yelling at each other. And both look like Trump.

Oh! The derangement! An odor so sour and pungent....

ADDED: Did Trump say "my Monet"? It's hearsay — at least double hearsay. Jill Biden is asserting that Angela Merkel said that Trump said something. There's room for mishearing, misquoting, misinterpreting, and lying from Merkel (supposedly hearing Trump) and Biden (supposedly hearing Merkel) and from anyone else who's passed this statement along.

Interestingly, Trump has used the phrase "my Monet," but not to refer to an artwork by Claude Monet. Trump has called one of his golf courses "my Monet": "I have friends who buy Monets. Turnberry is my Monet and it’s far more beautiful." But that quote too is hearsay. Eric Trump wrote it in a book, it says here: "Donald Trump: Turnberry is my Monet — and it’s more beautiful/US president ‘obsessed’ with details about his golf courses in Scotland and continually makes suggestions to improve them, according to his son Eric’s book" (London Times).

Googling for more reporting of Trump's use of the phrase "my Monet," I got a good laugh:

 

I'd like to hear the "Apprentice" theme song with "Monet!" taking the place of "Money!":

Coot fluffs its pillow at dawn.

This was yesterday, at 5:07 a.m., on Lake Mendota. I'm concentrating on the coot with its improbably pillowy white breast, and Meade's remark — "Everyone's being so quiet and serene" — refers to the geese in the background. They usually make a big honk over our arrival in their territory. 

"This particular vehicle, a King Ranch edition that costs about $90,000, has more than 500 horsepower in its engine, a 'concert-quality' Bang & Olufsen sound system..."

"... two-tone paint trim and 34-inch Bridgestone tires. But it’s most notable feature is the nest resting on top of the front passenger-side tire where four robin chicks are maturing...."

I'm reading "A Ford Truck, Home to Newborn Robins, Is Stuck at a Kansas Car Dealer/Employees of a dealership in Olathe, Kan., found the nest, which is protected under federal law, on top of one of the truck’s tires" (NYT).

Just ordinary robins. And the $90,000 truck has a buyer. But the resolution is that the buyer will wait 4-6 weeks for the robins to leave the nest. 

I'd always thought woodpeckers were in it for the insects, but now I see at least this one guy is in it for the music.

He's into the metallic resonance. Listen all the way to the end:

This was out at our sunrise vantage point this morning. The boxes are part of the equipment attached to a pole out there. It's a bit unsightly, but I believe it's for science — weather, maybe, or is it surveillance?

Wherever music has emerged, hasn't the first musical instrument always been the drum? (That is, the first instrument beyond the musician's own mouth.) Or is it the flute?

"The cloud-being in the pictograph... includes the symbols of a snake, which is associated with lightning, and a hummingbird, which is believed to be..."

"... a messenger with prayers to bring rain. The outstretched arms of the cloud being have rain as well as its full body consisting of rain. The lightning snake under its arm is stimulating the rain to fall. It looks like a storm cloud with lightning that has a heavy downpour in one region and lighter rain falling in others. There are examples of cloud beings with lighting that have a very similar appearance to modern photographs of storm clouds that have captured lightning bolts. Clouds can seem to be standing on lightning feet, which look like plant roots going down into the ground...."

From "Prehistoric Art of the Colorado Plateau: It’s All About Clouds!" (Cloud Appreciation Society).

The morning puddle.

That crane video is by me, emphasizing the puddle. Here's Meade's crane video, stressing the freneticism of the feeding:

It was a chilly, cloud-covered sunrise this morning.

That's my photograph. Later, it got warm and sunny and you can see the blue sky as the background for an eagle in flight, video'd by Meade:

Write about whatever you want in the comments... except the return to Earth of the Artemis astronauts. Go one post down for that.

"You stay to the left and then you lean to the right..."

The horizontality tells you that this video is mine, not Meade's.

A mellow visual, but this is here for the audio:

More vivid visuals, including a cloud portending storms:

"Oh, those coots are so coot-y with their white bills."

I enthuse about the recognizability of the coots in the sunrise light as I watch Meade's video:

"The once ubiquitous bird has suffered a catastrophic decline.... As many as 98 per cent disappeared from some states."

"Rats and feral dogs flourished in their place, spreading diseases, including rabies. As a result, the human death toll rose significantly. And further to that, Schama adds, an ancient cultural ritual risks being lost. Zoroastrians, no longer able to perform their traditional 'sky burials' — in which corpses are carried to a 'tower of silence' to be picked clean by vultures — are forced to consider cremation instead. 

This chain of collapse between human culture and the lives of birds set me thinking,' Schama says...."

From  "Simon Schama: 'Our fascination with birds is rooted in envy'/The historian has curated an exhibition that explores the relationship between birds and humans" (London Times).

"'What are they, these creatures, two-limbed like us and yet nothing like us at all?' he wonders. 'Human culture is arranged around the perfection of the human,' he says. 'We are seen as God’s greatest works. But one thing we have not been able to do is fly.' Our fascination with birds, he suggests, 'is based around a sort of envy.' Because what we call flying is not really that, it’s just 'sitting in a metal tube with the blinds shut looking at old movies.' It is not about the glorious freedom that we dream of, about the transcendence we desire, the celestial state that we yearn for. That freedom of spirit will always elude us.'"

"A day into the silence, I felt like taking a nap, and the urge intensified into thorough exhaustion. I took a walk outside..."

"... and gobbled a few cookies in hopes of a sugar boost, to no avail. I fell asleep before dinner and, after rallying for the evening meditation session, was out for the night by 8:30 p.m. The instructor said she often sees this reaction. Some people experience an adrenaline crash as their stressed minds and bodies adjust to the calm. But it also turns out that suddenly shutting off external stimuli and turning attention inward can demand a startling amount of energy."

Writes Dana Milbank, in "I went into phone-free silence. Something disturbing happened. Suddenly shutting off external signals and focusing inward can demand a startling amount of energy" (WaPo)(free link).

I was surprised to see the cookies, especially the gobbling thereof. Even if cookies are available at a silent retreat, I would think slow, mindful nibbling would be seen as necessary. I mean, gobbling, it suggests obnoxious sounds coming from the mouth, and it is the word we use for the alarming awful sound made by turkeys.