Dear readers and friends,

June has provided a number of surprises for me. Please bear with me a little bit longer while I navigate some of these changes.

I have been having some excellent conversations about poetry and art — only in the real world, not online. I have been working on my own writing — just not my blog — and nothing that I am quite ready to share. I have begun to swing dance, in addition to the other dancing I already do, so I have even less time than I did before.

So, while I adjust to the new schedule, please be patient with me. I will have some good posts in the next week and I will try to make it up to you for the two Wednesdays I have missed.

Sincerely,

Matthew Koslowski

In This Essay

The Mystery of the Messy Notebooks: Why Agatha Christie’s method was utterly deranged by Christine Kenneally, Slate, April 12, 2010.

Agatha Christie’s Secret Notebooks: Fifty Years of Mysteries in the Making by John Curran

On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft by Stephen King

Letters on Life: New Prose Translations by Rainer Maria Rilke (Ulrich Baer, ed. and trans.)

On Monday, I was reading Slate. What inspired me to read it that day, I am not sure: it has not been one of the sources that I regularly turn to for my news.

Perhaps because I want to be a writer myself, I have always found it fascinating to listen to stories about how artists, musicians, and authors create their work. Without any real study, the descriptions of the creative process stick with me.

For example, years ago I listened to part of an interview with Michael Stipe of R.E.M. (Perhaps the entire band was being interviewed, my memory is vague.) I remember nothing about that interview, save this one thing: R.E.M. records the music without Michael Stipe present and then they give him the rough cut on a tape. He walks around listening to the tape again and again until he is able to put words to the music.

But I am glad that I decided to read Slate this week. Otherwise I would have missed a great article about the writing process that Agatha Christie employed. If you can call how Agatha Christie wrote a “process.”

A Little Here, A Little There, Maybe a Little Lost

John Curran studied 73 of Agatha Christie’s notebooks and published a book on them that after reading the article in Slate I desperately want to read, Agatha Christie’s Secret Notebooks: Fifty Years of Mysteries in the Making.

Christie did not work sequentially through one notebook. According to Christine Kenneally’s article, Curran was able to trace three notebooks that Christie used for “at least 17 years and 17 novels.” She would write her thoughts in whatever notebook was nearest at hand when she needed to write, as long as it had empty pages to fill.

And Christie did not separate her writing life from her personal life in the notebooks. Grocery lists and bridge scores adorn the pages. Her husband’s calculations and notes are there too, as well as her daughter’s penmanship exercises.

Though not a method I would like to employ, Christie’s method has me captivated. Did the search for bits and pieces of story through multiple notebooks remind her of devices she’d used previously? Remind her of ideas she had had long ago and discarded only to realize how they could be employed now?

Two Pens

I envy Curran the opportunity to study one his beloved author’s notebooks. What wouldn’t I give up if someone gave me the opportunity to study Rainer Maria Rilke’s letters and notebooks? How could I even begin to ascribe a value to seeing his writing process, watching his chipping the raw stone of an idea down until it becomes a fully sculpted poem?

But I will need to learn German first, if that dream has any chance of becoming a reality. (It’s on my to do list after mastering Italian.)

Although I do not much care for the book Letters on Life, I am grateful for having read the introduction. In the introduction, Baer describes the poet sitting at his desk and staring at two pens: one dedicated to his Muse, exclusively for use in crafting of poetry; the other dedicated to life, used for correspondence and grocery lists.

This is all I know of the poet’s method. And it may be a fiction.

I wonder if I had looked further in Letters on Life what I might have found on Rilke’s method. The book lifts excerpts from Rilke’s massive correspondence and arranges them, without context or addressee, into sections. Perhaps there was a section on craft that I missed by trying to read the book sequentially, rather than using it as Baer had intended.

The Terror of the Blank Page

Although I know little about the process of Rilke but much of his work, those elements of knowledge are reversed when it comes to Stephen King.

Since college some of my friends who write have been recommending that I read On Writing but I have resisted. A snobbish sentiment long prevented me from reading it. Although he is a New York Times Bestselling Author, I think of Stephen King’s work as pulp writing. I admit this is a prejudiced opinion: I can claim to vividly remember reading only one story by King, about a laundry press that develops a taste for human blood, and may have read a few other stories from that collection.

I am glad to have had the good sense to challenge my prejudice at least in regards to On Writing. And I think that I may further challenge it by borrowing my girlfriend’s copy of Hearts in Atlantis.

Stephen King sits down every day and writes. He carries a book with him wherever he goes because he is as passionate about reading as he is about writing. Although I don’t know if he writes long hand or on a computer or how he organizes his drafts, I doubt his method resembles the one employed by Agatha Christie. After he finishes a draft, he puts in a drawer for months — a technique that even Horace advises — until he has half forgotten the story.

The advice that I’ve read in On Writing is the same that I’ve read in The Lie That Tells a Truth by John Dufresne or The Writing Life by Annie Dillard or an article by Andre Dubus in The Writer Magazine from the 1960s which was reprinted recently or The Creative Habit by Twyla Tharp.

Glue your ass to a chair and write. Face the terror of the blank page and realize it is not so terrifying.

Whatever method you use — whether it resembles Agatha Christie’s or a more orderly method — nothing will happen unless you put pen to paper or fingers to keys.

Since dedicating myself to fulfilling my dream on April 2nd — 12 days ago now — I have written 8 of the last 12 days. From those eight hours of work, I have grown my novel from the seed of three handwritten pages to 55 handwritten pages.

And if I can keep this up, perhaps my oeuvre will rival Agatha Christie’s: 66 novels, 22 plays, over 140 short stories, and many poems.

Last night at Porter Square Books in Cambridge, I saw a joint reading of Andre Dubus III and one of his mentors, Thomas E. Kennedy. During the question and answer session following the reading, Andre answered questions about his forthcoming memoir.

One thing that he said really caught my attention and I have been thinking about it since he said it.

That’s the wonderful thing about writing. The writing is smarter than the writer. I set out to write an essay and then realized this would take a book to tackle. I learned more about myself and the history of my life. My only hope is that I write something useful that people can relate to. Besides my wife.
– Andre Dubus III, with the poetic license that is memory.

Not too long ago I stumbled across Everett Bogue’s blog Far Beyond the Stars and Colin Wright’s blog Exile Lifestyle. Both blogs are very, very good. Even before reading these two advocates of minimalism, I had thought that I would like to reduce my belongings to a trunk worth of clothes and a trunk worth of books. They make the goal seem even more worth pursuing.

Today, while the idea that the writing is smarter than the writer was rolling around in my head, I was reading Everett Bogue’s free ebook How to Create a Movement and Colin Wright’s free ebook How to be Remarkable.

Both ebooks talked about the importance of having passion.

So, I stopped to ask myself, “What is my writing telling me? Where is my passion?” I thought about Literature&Literacy, about the post that generated the most interesting discussion. What did I come back to again and again?

Poetry.

My real passion has always been poetry. I love to read novels and probably have read more novels than poems in my life time. But there is something in the poetry that strikes me, something I retain from poetry that I don’t as much with a novel.

Perhaps that’s not entirely fair. I remember my Senior Directed Readings in the Humanities at Ohio Wesleyan University. I studied the development of the sonnet from Petrarch to John Donne. One of the first things I read was Sir Philip Sidney’s Defense of Poetry along side his sonnet cycle Astrophel and Stella. When Sidney defends “poetry” he’s defending what we would now call literature, novels as well as poems.

I have read novels like Tahar Ben Jelloun’s novels The Sand Child and The Sacred Night which were poems. And I have read and heard recited “poems” which were not even prose.

So, I am going to start following my bliss. I don’t know how that may change my writing. But Sir Philip Sidney might have an idea.

I.

Loving in truth, and fain in verse my love to show,
That she (dear she) might take some pleasure of my pain:
Pleasure might cause her read, reading might make her know,
Knowledge might pity win, and pity grace obtain,
I sought fit words to paint the blackest face of woe,
Studying inventions fine, her wits to entertain:
Oft turning others’ leaves to see if thence would flow
Some fresh and fruitful showers upon my sun-burned brain.
But words came halting forth, wanting Invention’s stay,
Invention, Nature’s child, fled step-dame Study’s blows,
And others’ feet still seemed but strangers in my way.
Thus great with child to speak, and helpless in my throes,
Biting my truant pen, beating myself for spite,
“Fool,” said my Muse to me, “look in thy heart and write.”
–Sir Philip Sidney from Astrophel and Stella

He grimaced after he realized what I had asked. He thought of how to phrase what he had to say. He was not happy that I had asked the question. He took sip of his drink. While he was fidgeting, I figured out what he was thinking. He tossed around for what else he could do to avoid answering the question.

“You don’t think my writing has much potential,” I answered for him. I had heard it before, though before it had been about my poetry and not about my fiction.

“Well, here’s the thing, Matthew, you’re a friend and I like you.”

“That is true, but that doesn’t change the quality of my writing.”

I thought about what he had said about the piece I shared with him. At first he had thought it was a thinly veiled diary entry. When I told him I’d never experienced anything as painful as my character had, he complimented my imagination.

“I think you may well be published and you will well get some good reviews. But is it enduring? When I think of a novel, I think of a piece that is art for art’s sake. I don’t see the art there.”

I thought about Stephen King’s On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft which I’ve been reading. He writes that he think it is possible for a competent writer to become a good writer, but it’s never possible for a good writer to leap the chasm, becoming a great writer. Since reading that I have been wrestling with the idea.

If, for example, there is a limit to how quickly an individual can run — only a limited number of people can run at Olympic speeds — does it follow that there is a limit to how well one can write? Perhaps writing talent is like singing talent: everyone is born able to sing in a specific range, with some training someone can reach some notes higher or lower, but a bass will never be a tenor.

As I sipped my own drink, I thought about how just the other night after reading a friend’s work, I told her that I wasn’t sure if there was any there there. And now I was hearing the same thing. I thought about what he said.

What I had shared were five and a half double-spaced pages of my first foray into writing after a long absence. Could Faulkner’s friends see the art in his first attempts? Didn’t Shakespeare’s genius develop through his first plays before he had fully mastered his craft? Some critics say that Shakespeare’s first plays show strong attempts to emulate the more established playwrights of his day.

My friend smiled. “What the hell do I know? Every genius was underestimated in his day. Here’s to your writing!”

About the Exhibition

The exhibition An Artist + A Poet runs in the Norma Jean Calderwood Gallery of the Boston Athenaeum from February 10, 2010 through April 10, 2010. This exhibition is open to the public. The Boston Athenaeum, 10½ Beacon St., Boston, Massachusetts 02108.

I had never heard of George Nama nor Charles Simic before seeing an announcement for a joint exhibition of their works at the Boston Athenaeum. But after spending time in the exhibition, I am glad that I know them now. I wish that I had known about them sooner.

The opening reception was last night, one of the Boston Athenaeum’s event open to the public. I was not quite sure what to expect.

The Athenaeum puts on a lovely reception. The reception was an excellent opportunity to become acquainted with these two artists. A nice selection of cheeses; two nice wines — Trapiche Malbec and Ca Donini Pinot Grigio; and orange punch. A jazz trio played throughout the evening.

I liked the way the work was presented. About two dozen poems by Charles Simic were presented on the same page with etchings by George Nama. These were no ordinary pages, however. If I were to hold each page by its short edge, it would be about the width of my shoulders along the short edge and the distance from my shoulders to my knees along the long edge.

George Nama did versions of works as both etchings and paintings. Several paintings were on display. Many paintings hung near the page that included the etched version.

The presentation of Charles Simic’s poetry reminded me of the work The Malady of Death by Marguerite Duras. When you get close enough, the poem takes up your whole field of vision. I felt the world slip away, leaving nothing but me and the poem. Even the etchings faded away.

One poem, in particularly, called to me. It seemed to sit inside a larger world than some of the other poems.

The Vices of Evening

It’s the way the light and shadow
Pair off at the corner
While the night crowds to see
Behind our backs,

Perhaps catch us by surprise
With a single burnt matchstick
Left in someone’s hand,
Who forgot why he lit it

Unless it was for a lost dog
To find his way home
Through weedy lots
And past the painted women.

Charles Simic

There’s a good sampling of figuration and variations on figuration in George Nama’s work. I thought of the progressively more abstract sculpture series by Henri Matisse, The Back. In some of Nama’s works, you could see where he began with a human form and then created something abstract from it. I would hate to admit this to my art history professor, but I was more interested in Charles Simic’s work than I was in the abstracted figures of George Nama.

As I was leaving the lobby, I noticed a bas relief portrait of Dante that I hadn’t noticed before. I could not help thinking, “Abandon all hope, ye who exit here.”

Form Your Own Opinion.
Buy works by the artists from Amazon.com.

• The Book of Gods and Devils by Charles Simic
• That Little Something by Charles Simic
• The Malady of Death by Marguerite Duras (Barbara Bray, trans.)

In This Essay

Steppenwolf: A Novel by Hermann Hesse (Basil Creighton, trans.)

The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats (Richard J. Finneran, ed.)

Don Juan in Hell: From Man and Superman by George Bernard Shaw

Last night I finished rereading Steppenwolf. I had put it down for a while and flitted among the arts.

I know for certain I am in the middle of two other novels. But I think I may have forgotten that I am in the middle of any number of others.

The past few weeks have been filled with theatre and opera.

As if that were not enough, I have been reading from the poetry of Rumi, W.B. Yeats, and John Keats. In fact, I have been working on memorizing Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale.” I have the first stanza of ten lines memorized; only seventy lines left to commit to memory.

“Why are you spreading yourself so thin?” I asked myself earlier.

Castles Built in the Air

I looked at the stacks of books piled up around my room. Looking at my room, I could not stop thinking of the descriptions of Harry Haller’s room nor the scenes of Will Hunting’s room. I have towers and towers of precariously balanced books; so many that I spend much of my time at work worrying if my cats have knocked them over.

These towers of covers, these garrets of paper, these gates hinged with glue enclose a beautiful courtyard of thoughts and ideas.

But they are also doorways to the Magic Theater.

The Magic Theater: For Madmen Only

What is the Magic Theater?

This little theater of mine has as many doors into as many boxes as you please, ten or a hundred or a thousand, and behind each door exactly what you seek awaits you. It is a pretty cabinet of pictures, my dear friend; but it would be quite useless for you to go through it as you are. You would be checked and blinded at every turn by what you are pleased to call your personality. You have no doubt guessed long since that the conquest of time and the escape from reality, or however else it may be that you choose to describe your longing, means simply the wish to be relieved of your so-called personality.
–Pablo to Harry Haller in Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf, page 176.

Who has not had the desire to lay his personality, her self, aside for a few hours? Each of us, I believe, gets tired of the little dramas and games that occur in our day to day lives. We seek out the adventure and the relief of being someone else.

And this is why I am myself enmeshed in so many different books right now. I enjoy the intensity of Elena Ferrante’s characters who are both interior and self-aware while being bundles of chaos, drives, and impulses. But equally I enjoy the the relaxed stateliness of Jane Austen’s austere character dramas. I see myself as much in the personal poetry of John Keats as I do in the more affected poetry of W.B. Yeats.

The times that I most enjoy a book are those times when I can lose myself in a book. That is what Pablo is asking Harry to do on entering the Magic Theater. That is what so many of us do when we sit down with a book or in front of a television screen, when we enter a theater or a cinema.

Many great thinkers since the time of Socrates, if not before, have had their own variation on this theme. Socrates asks us why we run when what we run from is ourselves, the very thing we cannot escape through running. Seneca writes the same.

And Laughing Break the Mirror Sweet

And looking in the mirror, I asked myself again, “Why are you spreading yourself so thin?” And laughing, I realize it is because I want to escape for a little while from myself that I have spread myself so thin.

The mirror breaks.

And the image of myself dissolves. In my pocket I find a number of figures, each of them my self — each at least a sliver of self — that I can assemble into a number of different constellations. Some grow big, take on aspects that I do not recognize, while others recede, shrink away until they have almost disappeared.

I observe all this happening to me just as it happened to Harry.

The Wolf and the Scholar

As I was reading through Harry’s adventures in the Magic Theater, especially when he enters the box “All Girls Are Yours”, I found myself thinking of one of my favorite poems by W.B. Yeats.

The Scholars

Bald heads, forgetful of their sins,
Old, learned, respectable bald heads
Edit and annotate the lines
That young men, tossing on their beds,
Rhymed out in love’s despair
To flatter beauty’s ignorant ear.

All shuffle there; all cough in ink;
All wear the carpet with their shoes;
All think what other people think;
All know the man their neighbour knows.
Lord, what would they say
Did their Catullus walk that way?

–W.B. Yeats

Early in the novel Harry became disillusioned at seeing someone else’s painting or bust of Goethe, thinking his own image of Goethe — because it was in his mind and not vulgarly committed to clay or canvas — was any less a graven image. He believed he inhabited a more rarefied air than his contemporaries until he began to find the sweetness of popular entertainments.

Throughout the book, Harry Haller realizes that he has made quite a hash of his own life by creating these false dichotomies between the high arts and the low arts. Within his soul, Harry under Hermine’s tutelage found that he could find as much enlightenment in dancing a foxtrot as he could in listening to Mozart.

The Great Divide

I do not wonder, though, that he makes the dichotomies that he does, however. This idea of the gulf is pervasive. Shaw speaks to it in Don Juan in Hell. The Devil says:

The gulf is the difference between the angelic and the diabolic temperament. What more impassable gulf could you have? Think of what you have seen on earth. There is no physical gulf between the philosopher’s class room and the bull ring; but the bull fighters do not come to the class room for all that.
– The Devil in George Bernard Shaw’s Don Juan in Hell, page 15.

Mozart’s Don Giovanni, which Harry hints at throughout the novel but does not cite by name until the end of his time in the Magic Theater, and much of Goethe’s poetry is in praise of life’s pleasures. Perhaps Harry took Don Giovanni’s punishment too much to heart. That Harry takes things outside of the Magic Theater too seriously and that he cannot become enlightened because he has no sense of humor are major themes of Steppenwolf.

Entering the Magic Theater, Harry begins to take things less seriously. Through the illusions and entertainments of the Magic Theater, he begins to learn. At the critical moment, though, he lapses into his past thoughts and forgets the good humor he has learned.

And so it is with us, is it not? We close a book or leave a movie, in good cheer, in good humor, thinking we have learned to be better people — more loving, more generous, and more good-humored — and then our old selves come crashing down on us.

Is there no hope, then? Harry will tell us:

I understood it all. I understood Pablo. I understood Mozart, and somewhere behind me I heard his ghastly laughter. I knew that all the hundred thousand pieces of life’s game were in my pocket. A glimpse of its meaning had stirred my reason and I was determined to begin the game afresh. I would sample its tortures once more and shudder again its senselessness. I would traverse not once more, but often, the hell of my inner being.

One day I would be a better hand at the game. One day I would learn how to laugh. Pablo was waiting for me, and Mozart too.

–Harry Haller in Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf, page 218.

Running a blog is a job in and of itself. Since starting this blog, my respect for journalists has grown because I have learned how much time it takes to craft a single post.

My essays are pure opinion pieces. I read a book, a poem, an essay, or a news article. Then I think about what I’ve read and then look at my world and see if its relevant, judge if I think others might enjoy reading about my interaction with that work.

And it takes me between two and four hours to write these essays.

Yet I’m hooked. I love writing here because I feel more alive because I am again engaging the world in ways that I haven’t since college. Each essays calls upon me to look at my world and analyze it and reflect upon it.

This is another great gift of literature.

And, yes, I call even bad newspaper essays literature.

These Things Caught My Eye

• Finger, Painting
• Do You Want Factory-Farmed Children?
• When the High Jump Becomes a Pole Vault
• Mommy, Am I Responsible Yet?
• Judging Motives to Evaluate Blame

Finger, Painting

• Art experts find possible new Leonardo drawing, Rob Gillies, boston.com
• Painting Could Be Previously Unknown da Vinci Work, All Things Considered, NPR.
• Fingerprint May Reveal the Handiwork of Leonardo Da Vinci by Dave Itzkoff, Arts Beat, The New York Times.

Known by many names this portrait of a woman in profile may be a Leonardo da Vinci. (Photocredit: Wikimedia Commons)

A painting previously thought to be a 19th-century German work may be an unknown Leonardo da Vinci work.

Da Vinci was said to use his hands and fingers to spread paint on his works. The experts who have examined the work found what seems to be a fingerprint and palm print on the work. Using sophisticated imaging techniques, they have isolated the supposed fingerprint.

It matches known fingerprints of Leonardo da Vinci in 8 points, a respectable match. According to art collector Peter Silverman, the man who first bought the painting for $19,000, a match of 11 points is enough to convict someone.

I have my doubts about this painting. Although I’ve not made an exhaustive study of Leonardo’s catalogue, the supposed work is not in the style that made him famous. A quick Google search turned up only one drawing of a woman in profile. His other portraits of women tend to be show the women in three-dimensions instead of two. Consider Lady with an Ermine and Mona Lisa.

Fun fact about this style of painting. In the Italian nobility, this style of painting was passed from household to household as a sort of primitive dating service. Eligible males would be shown the painting and, if they were interested, would arrange to meet the woman pictured.

Do You Want Factory-Farmed Children?

• Teaching, Farming, and the American Way by Michael Doyle, Science Teacher

It would be, I think, a good deal more accurate to call it an art, for it grows not only out of factual knowledge, but out of cultural tradition; it is learned not only by precept but by example, by apprenticeship; and it requires not merely a competent knowledge of its facts and processes, but also a complex set of attitudes, a certain culturally evolved stance, in the face of the unexpected and the unknown. That is to say, it requires style in the highest and richest sense of that term.
–From “Discipline and Hope” by Wendell Berry

Where do you think the above quote came from? A book about education? This is an blog about education, after all, isn’t it? The quote comes from a book on essays about agriculture and culture.

From the beginning of that quotation, I deleted an important sentence: “The fact is that farming is not a laboratory science, but a science of practice.” What Berry writes is applicable to a wide range of fields. Teaching, counseling, and selling all first come to mind.

I found this quote at a blog I’ve discovered in the past week Science Teacher by Michael Doyle. He uses that quote in arguing that just as we have lost something by handing over our farms to large corporations — so-called “factory farms” — we risk losing something in handing our education over to what may become “factory schools.”

His philosophy of teaching messes well with my own as well as the philosophies of Jonathan Kozol and Mike Rose. He reminds us of the purpose of education, writing “Historically, public education’s priority has been to create a functioning citizenry; the current trend is to produce careerists. The two have critical, but subtle, distinctions. A citizenry that cannot grasp subtle but critical distinctions will ultimately fail as a republic.”

I look forward to exploring more of what he has to say.

When the High Jump Becomes a Pole Vault

• Raising the Bar for Public Education by Signe Wilkinson

I appreciate the editorial cartoons that I’ve seen from Signe Wilkinson. After some investigation, I learned that reprinting her comics here may be an infringement of copyright and will post links to her comics from now on.

Mommy, am I Responsible Yet?

• When Does Responsibility Begin? by Neal Conan, Talk of the Nation, NPR
• What is the Age of Responsibility? by Aaron Greenblatt, Governing Magazine

A lot of our rules on when people are responsible enough to assume tasks are arbitrary: 16 for most to get a driver’s license; 18 to vote, enter into contracts and join the military; 21 to drink alcohol; and 25 to rent a car from most car rental places. Many of these rules came about in a hodgepodge manner.

I know in Massachusetts in general and Boston in particular, with our large student populations, there have been some concerns about the drinking age. The drinking age is 21 because the Federal Government mandates that the drinking age in order for states to receive federal monies for highways. Some groups such as the Amethyst Initiative argue that the high drinking age just promotes binge drinking. Others quote statistics that show once the drinking age was increased incidence of fatal car accidents fell.

Can we judge responsibility for these tasks in an age-based manner? I don’t know that we can, but I don’t know how we could do it any differently. License people to drink alcohol? That would have people up in arms and would not solve any problems. We can get into circular arguments about American versus European attitudes towards responsibility and drinking.

According to neuroscience and cognitive science, the prefrontal cortex — that part of the brain that regulates decision making and self-control — continues to develop until around the age of 30. Should we prohibit the entering into contracts prior 30? Should we prohibit marriage until 30 so that executive function can fully grow and mature? Abuse of drugs including alcohol can inhibit the full maturation of the brain, how do we consider that?

Judging Motives to Evaluate Blame

• How we read each other’s minds by Rebecca Saxe, TED

I love TED Lectures.

I have watched a handful of them and most of them have been fascinating and engaging. The title of this one, however, is inaccurate. The webpage file name is more accurate (”rebecca_saxe_how_brains_make_moral_judgments.html”).

There seems to be a specialized area in the human brain dedicated to the interpretation of people’s motives and assessment of moral responsibility. When we listen to stories of actions, we consider if what the person was thinking and intending when assigning blame.

Rebecca Saxe designed an experiment. She told a story of a woman called Grace who was making coffee for her friend and sweetened it with a white powder. There were three versions of the story:

• In one version of the story, the box was labeled poison, Grace believed it was poison but put it in her friend’s coffee anyway;
• in the second version, the box was labeled poison, Grace believed it was sugar but it turned out to be poison;
• and the final version the box was labeled sugar but turned out to be poison.

Rebecca and her team measured brain activity in this region and saw that the amount of activity corresponded with how much blame the test subjects though Grace deserved in each case.

But what if they used magnetic interference to affect the functioning of that part of the brain? They did that. Watch the presentation to find out if it made a difference.