New York Times
Jennifer Schuessler
Writers working on new books often complain about the pressure. But on a recent evening, the Dutch novelist Arnon Grunberg was sitting at a cluttered desk in his shoe-box apartment in Midtown Manhattan, with more reason to kvetch than most.
First, there was the novella he was trying to get off the ground, the
latest in a string of more than a dozen books that have made him, at 42,
perhaps his country’s most celebrated novelist and a literary star in
Europe.
But more pressing — quite literally — was his headgear, a sort of
bathing cap affixed with 28 electrodes that made him look like an extra
in a mermaid mash-up of “A Clockwork Orange.”
“After about a half-hour, your head starts to hurt,” Mr. Grunberg said,
as a technician from a Dutch software company carefully poured water
over some of the electrodes to improve their conductivity. “Also, it can
get a bit drippy.”
The cap, the novella and the technician were all part of Mr. Grunberg’s latest project, a literary stunt turned lab experiment that combines the rigor of academic neuroscience with the self-obsessive spirit of the “quantified self”
movement, which has inspired people to track (and broadcast) the
minutiae of their lives, down to the last step taken, penny spent and
milligram of caffeine ingested.
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