Also see my website, my Live Journal, my Facebook profile, my Twitter profile, my Friendfeed, and my virb. My co-author and I are writing I Am My Beloved's, a collection of interviews and photographs of Jewish-American couples that explores the intersection of each couple's identities as a couple and as Jews and will reflect the diversity of the Jewish-American community. My translation of Israeli poet Rachel Eshed's book "Little Promises" is published in a bilingual edition by Mayapple Press. In its Hebrew original, this collection of intense erotic poetry won the 1992 AKUM prize in Israel. Novelist Tsipi Keller says, "It is hard to speak of Rachel Eshed's poetry without mentioning 'fire' : her poems virtually burn on the page, and David Cooper's renditions not only do justice to the original but magnify its richness." I am the author of two poetry collections, "Glued To The Sky" and "JFK: Lines of Fire" (Burlington VT: PulpBits, 2003). PulpBits went out of business in March 2007. Email me for free PDFs of these ebooks or download them on my website. I cover the NY Jewish Culture beat for Examiner.com . I have taught history, poetry, and writing on the middle school, high school, and college levels.
My interests include Poetry, Literary Fiction, Modern Art, Jazz, Art House and foreign Cinema, Sex, Judaism, History, and Liberal Politics. I'm married to absract painter Shoshana Cooper, and we share our home with Sasson, a Peterbald cat. My Jewish identity is very strong, and on most Saturday mornings and early afternoons you would probably find Shoshana and me at our local synagogue , Park Slope Jewish Center. For those familiar with the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator I am an INFP or maybe an XNFP since the I is not very pronounced. I have non-hyperactive ADD ( the quiet version) and am fairly even tempered.
In addition to non-hyperactive ADD I also have allergies, asthma, osteoarthritis, fibromyalgia, and primary lower limb lymphedema. Lymphedema occurs when the lymphatic system is unable to adequately drain lymph fluid from an affected and thus swollen limb. I control my condition by performing a time consuming maintenance regimen which includes keeping to a low fat, very low sodium diet, sleeping in a soft cast with velcro straps that I can tighten to the correct degree of compression, wearing thigh high compression stockings in the daytime, showering in the evening before putting on the cast, performing a form of gentle self- massage to open the lymph vessels, prescribed breathing and floor exercises wearing the cast before going to bed at night, and repeating the exercises in the morning. I usually eat breakfast before exercising--it's well into the morning before I can actually start my day. Performing the evening part of the regimen precludes going out at night and has curtailed our social life somewhat.
Shoshana and I both look forward to the day thirteen years from now when she can retire from her day job, leave its stresses behind, and be a full time artist. I also look forward to the day when medical science finds cures for my various chronic ailments, especially lymphedema.
Happy Thanksgiving!
I have a lot for which to be thankful including everyone who reads this. To all my fellow Americans have a safe and festive Thanksgiving!
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1 day agoSurprise! Your Skin Can Hear | LiveScience
We not only hear with our ears, but also through our skin, according to a new study.
The finding, based on experiments in which participants listened to certain syllables while puffs of air hit their skin, suggests our brains take in and integrate information from various senses to build a picture of our surroundings.
Along with other recent work, the research flips the traditional view of how we perceive the world on its head.
“[That’s] very different from the more traditional ideas, based on the fact that we have eyes so we think of ourselves as seeing visible information, and we have ears so we think of ourselves as hearing auditory information. That’s a little bit misleading,” study researcher Bryan Gick of the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, told LiveScience.
“A more likely explanation is that we have brains that perceive rather than we have eyes that see and ears that hear.”
With such abilities, Gick views humans as “whole-body perceiving machines.”
The research, funded by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Council of Canada and the National Institutes of Health, is detailed in the Nov. 26 issue of the journal Nature.
How we perceive
Gick’s work builds on past studies showing, for instance, that we can see sound and hear light, even if we don’t consciously realize it. Other studies show if you�observe another person’s lips moving and think that other is speaking, your brain’s auditory regions would light up, Gick said.
Scientists had explained such sensing prowess as the result of experience, as we see and hear people speaking all the time and so it’d be only natural to learn how to integrate what we see with what we hear.
The alternative would be an innate ability. And so Gick and his colleague Donald Derrick, also of the University of British Columbia, studied two senses that aren’t generally paired — auditory and tactile — to figure out the root of perception.
How skin hears
The team focused on aspirated sounds, such as “pa” and “ta” that involve an inaudible burst of air when spoken, as well as unaspirated sounds, such as “ba” and “da.”
Blind-folded participants listened to recordings of a male voice saying each of the four syllables and had to press a button to indicate which sound they heard (pa, ta, ba or da). Participants were divided into three groups of 22, with one group hearing the syllables while a puff of air was blown onto their hand, the other had air blown onto the neck, and the control group heard the sounds with no air.
About 10 percent of the time when air was puffed onto the skin, participants mistakenly perceived the unaspirated syllables as being their aspirated equivalents. So when the guy said “ba,” such participants would indicate they heard “pa.” The control group didn’t show such mistaken perceptions.
A follow-up experiment in which participants got a tap on the skin rather than a puff of air showed no such mix-up between aspirated and unaspirated sounds.
Next, Gick is working with scientists from the University of California, San Francisco, to figure out how the brain allows such multi-sense integration.
Our synaesthetic senses; how about that!
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2 days agoJewish Communities 101: The Abayudaya, Uganda's Jews
Abayudaya representative J.J. Keki’s talk relates the history and current circumstances of Uganda’s Jewish community.
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3 days ago