sleeps.
* * * *
"Remembrance Is Something Like a Houseâ started as a crime tale with a supernatural element, a house crawling across the country to confront a murderer. I had a tough time finding the correct voice and point of view in the first few attempts, but everything changed when I said, âTo hell with it. I wonder what would happen if I told it from the perspective of the house?â It was a strange, risky, and counterintuitive choiceâone I couldn't have made earlier in my career when I was still scared to break rules.
If âRemembranceâ is anything to go by, interstitial fiction is fiction that, regardless of the tropes and traditions involved, taps into universal emotions with a certain verve, awe, voice, enthusiasm, risk, and abandonâa tossing aside of normalcy in the brave pursuit of some aesthetic or thematic end. Interstitial stories tend not to care what genre they belong to, what traditions they confront or invent, what audience they find. Their writers have simply written with every tool they've got: robots, ghosts, creeping houses, whatever. They've held nothing back, even risking embarrassment or failure.
"Remembranceâ is good only because I took a big, scary chance that it would be bad. Perhaps that is what makes interstitial fiction so powerful.
Will Ludwigsen
[Back to Table of Contents]
The Long and Short of
Long-Term Memory
Cecil Castellucci
It had been forty-six years since Dunbar had visited the moon. He stood in his bathrobe at the scenic window taking in the view. The black sky, the craters, the landscape were exactly as he remembered.
He cursed.
* * * *
Dunbar was a research scientist at McGill University. He thought it was funny that he was studying the biology of memory in Quebec, a province whose motto was âI remember.â He saw it everywhere on the license plates. âJe me souviens."
I remember.
Dunbar remembered many things from his past. He remembered his first telephone number. The number of steps from his front door to the playground two blocks over. The exact color of his shirt when he graduated from sixth grade. The words to the poem âKubla Khan.â The way the first car he owned had to be finessed when he shifted from first to third.
Je me souviens.
Was the province worried that it would forget? What would it forget? Dunbar could find no clear answer.
He had come here to study memory so that he could learn how to forget.
* * * *
"One interesting aspect of animal and human behavior is the ability to modify behavior by learning."
"There are two kinds of memory. There is declarative and procedural."
"The number of neurons in the brain is 10 to the power 10. Each neuron in the brain receives, on average, 2,000 to 20,000 synapses, or connections, from other neurons."
"Every human brain has the same general blueprint for organization, but the experiences that you have make every single brain unique."
Each semester, Dunbar told his students all of these things in his Intro to Neuroscience lecture. It was always the same lecture, because even if more and more was discovered about the mechanics of memory, the basics didn't change.
Each semester, the students were the same. They sat, sleepy eyed, scratching the words that he said into their notebooks or laptops, hoping that something that he said would be on the exam.
He wanted to tell them that there was no way to be sure that we remembered anything correctly; something would be lost, something would be discarded.
But in the end something would also be retained. Even if it was something that you wanted to be forgotten.
* * * *
Slide 1: The Neuron
* * * *
* * * *
"The neurons in the brain produce action potentials. In other words, they secrete neurotransmitters to communicate with each other at the synapses. The chain of neurons creates various neural pathways. Some neural connections are stronger than others and they can be modulated, or changed, following
* * * *
"Remembrance Is Something Like a Houseâ started as a crime tale with a supernatural element, a house crawling across the country to confront a murderer. I had a tough time finding the correct voice and point of view in the first few attempts, but everything changed when I said, âTo hell with it. I wonder what would happen if I told it from the perspective of the house?â It was a strange, risky, and counterintuitive choiceâone I couldn't have made earlier in my career when I was still scared to break rules.
If âRemembranceâ is anything to go by, interstitial fiction is fiction that, regardless of the tropes and traditions involved, taps into universal emotions with a certain verve, awe, voice, enthusiasm, risk, and abandonâa tossing aside of normalcy in the brave pursuit of some aesthetic or thematic end. Interstitial stories tend not to care what genre they belong to, what traditions they confront or invent, what audience they find. Their writers have simply written with every tool they've got: robots, ghosts, creeping houses, whatever. They've held nothing back, even risking embarrassment or failure.
"Remembranceâ is good only because I took a big, scary chance that it would be bad. Perhaps that is what makes interstitial fiction so powerful.
Will Ludwigsen
[Back to Table of Contents]
The Long and Short of
Long-Term Memory
Cecil Castellucci
It had been forty-six years since Dunbar had visited the moon. He stood in his bathrobe at the scenic window taking in the view. The black sky, the craters, the landscape were exactly as he remembered.
He cursed.
* * * *
Dunbar was a research scientist at McGill University. He thought it was funny that he was studying the biology of memory in Quebec, a province whose motto was âI remember.â He saw it everywhere on the license plates. âJe me souviens."
I remember.
Dunbar remembered many things from his past. He remembered his first telephone number. The number of steps from his front door to the playground two blocks over. The exact color of his shirt when he graduated from sixth grade. The words to the poem âKubla Khan.â The way the first car he owned had to be finessed when he shifted from first to third.
Je me souviens.
Was the province worried that it would forget? What would it forget? Dunbar could find no clear answer.
He had come here to study memory so that he could learn how to forget.
* * * *
"One interesting aspect of animal and human behavior is the ability to modify behavior by learning."
"There are two kinds of memory. There is declarative and procedural."
"The number of neurons in the brain is 10 to the power 10. Each neuron in the brain receives, on average, 2,000 to 20,000 synapses, or connections, from other neurons."
"Every human brain has the same general blueprint for organization, but the experiences that you have make every single brain unique."
Each semester, Dunbar told his students all of these things in his Intro to Neuroscience lecture. It was always the same lecture, because even if more and more was discovered about the mechanics of memory, the basics didn't change.
Each semester, the students were the same. They sat, sleepy eyed, scratching the words that he said into their notebooks or laptops, hoping that something that he said would be on the exam.
He wanted to tell them that there was no way to be sure that we remembered anything correctly; something would be lost, something would be discarded.
But in the end something would also be retained. Even if it was something that you wanted to be forgotten.
* * * *
Slide 1: The Neuron
* * * *
* * * *
"The neurons in the brain produce action potentials. In other words, they secrete neurotransmitters to communicate with each other at the synapses. The chain of neurons creates various neural pathways. Some neural connections are stronger than others and they can be modulated, or changed, following
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