Tuesday, May 03, 2016
ON THE HEARTBREAKING DIFFICULTY OF GETTING RID OF BOOKS
Summer Brennan in Literary Hub:
Like a lot of avid readers, I enjoyed Marie Kondo’s The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up but bristled when it came to the section about books. The gist of her now-famous method is this: go through all your possessions by category, touch everything, keep only that which “sparks joy,” and watch as your world is transformed. It seems simple enough, but Kondo gives minimalism the hard sell when it comes to books, urging readers to ditch as many of them as they can. You may think that a book sparks joy, she argues, but you’re probably wrong and should get rid of it, especially if you haven’t read it yet.
Paring down one’s wardrobe is one thing, but what kind of degenerate only wants to own 30 books (or fewer) at a time on purpose? What sort of psychopath rips out pages from their favorite books and throws away the rest so they can, as Kondo puts it, “keep only the words they like?” For those of us for whom even the word “book” sparks joy, this constitutes a serious disconnect. Still, as the weather gets warmer, many readers will tackle their spring cleaning with The Life-Changing Magic in hand.
I wondered, can Kondo’s Spartan methods be adapted for someone who feels about books the way the National Rifle Association feels about guns, invoking the phrase “cold dead hands”? I decided to give it a try.
More here.
Posted by S. Abbas Raza at 10:29 AM | Permalink
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Inside OpenAI, Elon Musk’s Wild Plan to Set Artificial Intelligence Free
Cade Metz in Wired:
The Friday afternoon news dump, a grand tradition observed by politicians and capitalists alike, is usually supposed to hide bad news. So it was a little weird that Elon Musk, founder of electric car maker Tesla, and Sam Altman, president of famed tech incubator Y Combinator, unveiled their new artificial intelligence company at the tail end of a weeklong AI conference in Montreal this past December.
But there was a reason they revealed OpenAI at that late hour. It wasn’t that no one was looking. It was that everyonewas looking. When some of Silicon Valley’s most powerful companies caught wind of the project, they began offering tremendous amounts of money to OpenAI’s freshly assembled cadre of artificial intelligence researchers, intent on keeping these big thinkers for themselves. The last-minute offers—some made at the conference itself—were large enough to force Musk and Altman to delay the announcement of the new startup. “The amount of money was borderline crazy,” says Wojciech Zaremba, a researcher who was joining OpenAI after internships at both Google andFacebook and was among those who received big offers at the eleventh hour.
More here.
Posted by S. Abbas Raza at 10:21 AM | Permalink
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Bosch Mania
Morgan Meis in The Easel:
This year is shaping up to be downright Boschian. We are speaking here of Hieronymus Bosch, the painter. 2016 happens to mark the five-hundred-year anniversary of Bosch’s death. So, Bosch’s home and eponymous town, Den Bosch (or, more correctly but much harder to say, ‘s-Hertogenbosch), has assembled the largest retrospective of Bosch’s work ever to be exhibited. The exhibit (Jheronimus Bosch – Visions of a Genius) is at the Noordbrabants Museum through May 8th. Such is public demand to see the show that this normally sedate regional museum has extended its opening hours until past midnight. And Bosch mania will not end there. The Prado in Madrid, for example, is hosting its own blockbuster Bosch exhibit beginning at the end of May and running into September. The crowds at the Noordbrabants Museum and the activity in the global press suggests that Bosch is more relevant, more interesting to the public mind than ever. Bosch mania is set to peak at the same time as the heat of the Northern summer, with festival events scheduled throughout the summer.
This extraordinary level of interest is generated by the simple fact that whosoever sees the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch does not soon, it is safe to say, forget them. That’s because they are fantastic works of art. There’s so much going on in a typical Bosch painting (more on that later) that the eye cannot but dart around, taking in the strange imagery. For that reason, Bosch’s work was popular from the very beginning—that beginning being the 15th century, when Bosch was alive and painting away in the lands of Northern Europe we now call The Netherlands. Throughout the ensuing years, Bosch’s star waxed and waned, but his work never passed out of public consciousness completely. Then, in the early part of the 20th century, he was “rediscovered” in full force. The 20th century public loved the outrageous scenarios to be found in Hieronymus Bosch’s paintings, artists especially. Salvador Dalí, Max Ernst, and Leonora Carrington explicitly referenced Bosch in their own work, just to name a few.
More here.
Posted by S. Abbas Raza at 10:17 AM | Permalink
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The Evolution of Males and Females - with Judith Mank
Posted by S. Abbas Raza at 10:11 AM | Permalink
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The Triumph of Piero
Willibald Sauerländer at the New York Review of Books:
But let us turn to the most important work that has survived from Piero’s oeuvre, the frescos of the Legend of the True Cross in the church of San Francesco in Arezzo. They were the donation of a rich family, the Bacci, and took a long time to be completed. Piero joined the project in 1452 at the latest and created one of the most imposing fresco cycles of the early Renaissance. In fourteen scenes he depicts—probably following the text of the Legenda Aurea—the Legend of the True Cross from the death of Adam to the Cross’s entrance into Jerusalem. Again it is perspective in its interplay with light that gives the scenes their vivid presence. He places his powerful figures near the front edge of the pictures, so that in their statuesque physicality and colorful garments they move as if on a stage. Piero is a gripping narrator who never diverts our attention from the main figures and the predominant events.
In the depiction of emotional agitation, emphatically recommended by aesthetic theories of the time, Piero is restrained. For him, it is gesture and especially gaze that are most important. We encounter only one figure who is emotional in the expressive sense defined by the art historian Aby Warburg: the mourning woman at the burial of Adam who raises her arms and opens her mouth in a wail. The gracefulness Vasari praises in Piero is evident in the female figures surrounding the Queen of Sheba and the Empress Helen. Piero’s sensitive feeling for light culminates in the scene of the slumbering Constantine, where the dark of night is wonderfully illuminated by the heavenly messenger bringing the dream in which he is shown the True Cross by an angel.
more here.
Posted by Morgan Meis at 08:54 AM | Permalink
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Beyoncé’s agitpop: it’s really about what it means to be a black woman in America
David Bennun in More Intelligent Life:
“Lemonade” is about race and sex, subjects which are now at the forefront of the American political landscape, as the Black Lives Matter movement gains momentum and women find themselves fending off those who would strip them of their reproductive rights. “Lemonade”, the visual album, combines these subjects: it is explicitly about female blackness. It isn’t a manifesto – it’s not that coherent, nor does it attempt to be – but it is by its existence both a kind of mutiny and a proclamation of solidarity. It is defined by who it is for: black women.
Yet at no point does Beyoncé fall short as an entertainer. This is agitprop with a sky-high budget; “Lemonade” is lavishly styled, immaculately shot and full of beautiful people. Often surreal, it taps deep into a psychosexual dream world, and borrows from the visual language of Buñuel and Dali.The effect is unsettling. Among the unsettled is Piers Morgan, who wrote about how uncomfortable it makes him, and how much he preferred it when Beyoncé was fun and apolitical. In my book, you should as a rule take note of Morgan’s opinions only to assure yourself they do not align with your own. But in this case Morgan is useful: he stands in for the kind of person Beyonce is trying to disturb, which is anybody unnerved or threatened by a black woman who doesn’t conform to their expectations. “Lemonade” isn’t meant to be easy going: it’s high-gloss art that’s disruptive and subversive (all the more so because it will probably sell in the millions). It’s no doubt clever and calculated, but so what? When, in pop music, did that become a sin? This record wants everything its own way, to be at once shiny mass-market product and gritty sedition – and it just about pulls it off. “Lemonade” lives up to its title: acid-sharp, amply sugared and mightily refreshing.
More here.
Posted by Azra Raza at 08:53 AM | Permalink
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Poetry among the Peshmerga
Michael Singer at the Times Literary Supplement:
Though shy by nature, Farman is a writer and singer of Kurdish music, who started at the age of twelve performing for the Kurdish diaspora in Streatham, south London. He returned to this region in 2013 and now gets by performing at weddings and cafés to the accompaniment of electric organ or the more traditional tembûr. With wages usually several months in arrears, most Peshmerga have a second job when not at the front, but to our constant surprise they still turn up to train and fight whenever called to do so. Farman’s repertoire, though traditional in style, covers subjects as conventional as unrequited love and as contemporary as the economy and the victims of the current war. It includes elegies to those who have died in flight, drowning in their bid to cross the Mediterranean. But when among his comrades, the most popular tunes are his paeans to the Peshmerga – “those who face death”. These are always well received and have the ability to animate a group of tired fighters training in a cold, steady drizzle in a way that we, with our translated encouragements, can only long for.
Slowly catching the attention of his fellow Peshmerga who begin to gather round, weapons slung and cigarettes lit, he starts to sing. Quietly at first, retaining a youthful self-consciousness, he soon gets into his stride, encouraged by the increasing accompaniment of the clapping crowd, who by the end, arms linked, have broken into a dance. Sometimes another Peshmerga will dare to join in, to the delight of everyone, as we are now in for a treat. The resulting lyrical exchange – part duet, part duel – is a tense one and clearly hard fought (even to those who can’t fully comprehend it). The result rarely seems in doubt, with the youthful and diminutive Farman usually emerging victorious. The encounters hold a particular appeal for some of our younger soldiers, attuned as they are to a similar style of adversarial performance in rap music.
more here.
Posted by Morgan Meis at 08:50 AM | Permalink
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Terrence Malick’s long, slow game
Tom Shone at The New Statesman:
One of the unusual things about Malick is how much life he lived before he was bitten by the film-making bug. He studied philosophy at Harvard and Oxford, where he wrote a doctoral thesis on the concept of the world in Kierkegaard, Heidegger and Wittgenstein; then he worked as a photographer and wrote for theNew Yorker, before studying film at the American Film Institute Conservatory under George Stevens.
He did a rewrite on the Dirty Harry script for Warner Bros – the serial killer in his version was a vigilante – and Marlon Brando was considered for the lead part. When Clint Eastwood was cast, however, Malick’s script was dropped in favour of an earlier one. The thought of American cinema’s premier Emersonian polishingDirty Harry’s one-liners (“You’ve gotta ask yourself one question: ‘Do I feel lucky?’ Does your ruin benefit the earth, does it help the grass to grow? Well, does it, punk?”) remains in the realm of conjecture.
So, the man who made Badlands was no neophyte film geek, but an accomplished person, a student and a writer, fluent in Spanish and French, possessed of a quiet confidence that led people to predict great things. While shooting Badlands, he fed Sissy Spacek her lines on rolled-up pieces of paper like love notes, peppering her with questions: “What do you think of this? How do you think Holly would do this?” Spacek remembers, “Right away, he gave me ownership of the character.”
Malick told Sheen, “That gun is like a magic wand.” The spell under which the actors worked was so intense that the finished film came as something of a shock. “He’s a killer . . . a horrible killer,” said Sheen of the character he played, after seeing the film for the first time, as if he had realised it only then.
more here.
Posted by Morgan Meis at 08:46 AM | Permalink
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1 Minute of All-Out Exercise May Have Benefits of 45 Minutes of Moderate Exertion
Gretchen Reynolds in The New York Times:
For many of us, the most pressing question about exercise is: How little can I get away with? The answer, according to a sophisticated new study of interval training, may be very, very little. In this new experiment, in fact, 60 seconds of strenuous exertion proved to be as successful at improving health and fitness as three-quarters of an hour of moderate exercise. Let me repeat that finding: One minute of arduous exercise was comparable in its physiological effects to 45 minutes of gentler sweating. I have been writing for some time about the potential benefits of high-intensity interval training, a type of workout that consists of an extremely draining but brief burst of exercise — essentially, a sprint — followed by light exercise such as jogging or resting, then another sprint, more rest, and so on. Athletes rely on intervals to improve their speed and power, but generally as part of a broader, weekly training program that also includes prolonged, less-intense workouts, such as long runs.
But in the past few years, exercise scientists and many of the rest of us have become intrigued by the idea of exercising exclusively with intervals, ditching long workouts altogether. The allure of this approach is obvious. Interval sessions can be short, making them a boon for anyone who feels that he or she never has enough time to exercise. Previously, I have written about a number of different interval programs, involving anywhere from 10 minutes of exhausting intervals in a single session to seven minutes, six, four and even fewer. Each program had scientific backing. But because of time and funding constraints, most studies of interval training have had limits, such as not including a control group, being of short duration or studying only health or fitness results, not both.
More here.
Posted by Azra Raza at 08:42 AM | Permalink
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Monday, May 02, 2016
Current Genres of Fate
by Paul North
In these monthly posts I will survey the landscape of "fateful thinking," as we glimpse it on the moons orbiting old Europe today. The premise will be that in politics, culture, academia, medicine, economics, and private life, among other regions of experience, we—those in charge and those charged up and those under the thumb of others in this orbit—tend to express ourselves, on the most important matters, in fateful terms. "It has to be like this or that." Whether we are correct or not when we say "it is" and mean "it must be," "it has always been," we regularly call on such statements to support our most critical decisions. Let us assume provisionally that, despite so much hurried change, with all our freedom of imagination and all our progress, we still tend to base our decisions on what must be the case, what could not be otherwise, what comes out of a finished past or certain future and determines the core of our being. In our times these sound like old-fashioned, even ancient sentiments. For the purposes of this survey, I shall assume that "fateful thinking" is as at home in the new as it was in the old. Fate ideas operate equally in science and religion, although "fate" certainly takes distinct forms in each. What remains then is to describe and analyze those forms, the current genres of fate, in hopes of discovering by chance a way of living in which the idea of life has not already been settled in advance.
Current Genres of Fate 1: Kafka's Innocents
When did the idea of fate arise, the one in which every tiny detail of life, every twist in life's way is a sign that says: "no way out." Classical labyrinths have exits, though they are hard to find. When did the intuition of a labyrinth whose doors open back into itself take over the imagination? When did we enter into zones of experience in which the exit brings us back to square one? Some think it was the work of the Protestant Reformation. Iris Murdoch attributed it to the rise of science: "The idea of life as self-enclosed and purposeless is of course not simply a product of the despair of our own age. It is the natural product of the advance of science and has developed over a long period." Whatever its origins, when certainty about the destiny of any single human life is taken away, every tiny event becomes a possible portal to destiny. When fate toppled from its throne at the end of history, fateful thinking seeped back into everyday life, filling its crevices. Institutions like law and bureaucracy grew exponentially alongside the rise of science, and this only intensified the seepage of fate into the crevices of life. Institutional protocols took on the offices of destiny and made destiny into a matter of finding the right office.
Life's suffusion with fate had a peculiar consequence: we became innocent again. It is a new Eden, except that, under this version of fate, whereas in the Garden we could do nothing wrong because there was not yet any wrong in the world, now we can do nothing wrong because our actions are so severely limited by the strictures that surround us. We can do nothing really wrong because we really can do so little. Kafka wrote about this constricting context and its new innocence.
Continue reading "Current Genres of Fate"
Posted by Paul North at 01:00 AM | Permalink
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Beethoven's Democracy
by Michael Liss
If you love classical music, there is a place in your imagination that takes you back 192 years, to May 7, 1824, and puts you at one of the most extraordinary moments in musical history—the first public performance of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony.
You want to be there. You want to see Beethoven himself raise his hands for the first downbeat, that odd woosh that then unfolds almost like an orchestra tuning up. You want to hear those crisp, slashing sounds as it moves through the second movement, and swirling cloud of notes, floating above you, that is the third. But the payoff comes in the fourth, when Beethoven surpasses himself, first trying, and then rejecting, the themes of the first three to resolve by joining instrumental beauty to vocal, fused in the pure elation of Schiller's "Ode to Joy. "
If you were there, you would do as every other person in attendance did—leap to your feet and roar your approval. And you would be witness to the most dramatic, even shattering moment in music history—when one of soloists, Caroline Unger, gently turns the ailing, unhearing Beethoven to receive their adoration.
As the historian (and musicologist) Edmund Morris recounts in "Beethoven, the Universal Composer," if there was any silence in the house, it could have only come from the Imperial Box, which was empty. Beethoven, a man underwritten for decades by the aristocratic and wealthy, had begun to edge away from them, and they from him. The Ninth is not only revolutionary in its form, it is perhaps the first large-scale truly democratic work. With one 74-minute effort, Beethoven created an entirely new vocabulary, one that not only spoke of a stateless universal brotherhood, but in form and delivery, frees the individual to participate to the extent of his abilities.
To put Beethoven in better context, it's useful to place him, and two of the great composers before him, Bach and Mozart, in "political-musical" time, or perhaps more accurately, "political-musical-economic" time.
Continue reading "Beethoven's Democracy"
Posted by Michael Liss at 12:55 AM | Permalink
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On Our Critical Categories: Pretentiousness
by Ryan Ruby
"Ordinary men commonly condemn what is beyond them." —François de La Rochefoucauld, Maxims
For the American reader Dan Fox is an ideal guide to the murky space where class overlaps with taste. His position in the art world—he is a co-editor of the renowned contemporary art magazine frieze—has furnished him with ringside seats to some of the "nastiest brawls over pretentiousness." Moreover, he is British. The class education the English receive as a matter of their cultural heritage enables them to view the matter more clearly than their American counterparts, whose understanding of class has been systematically retarded by taboo, ideology, and denialism, resulting in a deeply classed society that has no idea how to talk about this aspect of itself.
Class is not "just a question of money and how you spend it," Fox helpfully reminds us in his book-length essay Pretentiousness: Why It Matters (Coffee House Press, 2016). It's also "about how your identity is constructed in relationship to the world around you." When we divide classes solely on the basis of wealth—into upper, middle, and lower—as we tend to do in America, it becomes easy to forget that the division is not only arbitrary, but also a gross simplification. In fact, the more generally we talk about class, the easier we fall into confusion. The so-called upper, middle, and lower classes are by no means unified groups, whose members view themselves as bound by the same interests. Every member of the "upper class," for example, may be considered an elite, but this elite group is comprised of a number of class segments, whose members may in turn be ranked on the basis of their access to various kinds of capital (financial, educational, social, cultural, geographical, symbolic, etc.) whose relative importance is in a permanent state of flux.
Continue reading "On Our Critical Categories: Pretentiousness"
Posted by Ryan Ruby at 12:50 AM | Permalink
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Perambulating
by Evan Edwards
In September of 1851, a word enters the journal of Henry David Thoreau: perambulation. An inveterate enthusiast of walking, as well as a voracious collector of words, such a sudden introduction of this peculiar peripatetic term, which is an antiquated relative of the more familiar ‘ambulation,' or ‘to amble,' (from the Latin Ambulare, ‘to walk') should stand out to us as readers. He writes that "[o]n Monday, the 15th, I am going to perambulate the bounds of the town," and later, "Sept. 17. Perambulated the Lincoln Line," and "Sept. 18. Perambulated Bedford line." This word begins to cross Thoreau's mind more and more steadily for the better part of a month until, in October, he gives up ‘perambulating,' and instead uses a near synonym, ‘surveying,' (which, like perambulating, has to do, at least on the surface, with the work he was doing at the time) to describe his activities. He then rarely returns to ‘perambulation' for the rest of his life. At least in word.
Instead, in October, he begins to speak exclusively of ‘surveying,' ‘walking,' or elsewhere, ‘skating to,' and then, as he enters the late 1850s, in the last half-decade of his life, he all but ceases to lead journal entries with a description of his own activity at all, perambulation or otherwise, referring instead to the conditions of the environment and then, occasionally, drifting into descriptions of his own mind and body. Although the term does not seem to return, it tells us worlds about Thoreau's philosophical position.
In order to understand the significance of the brief intrusion of this term, we should keep two things in mind: first, the time at which he was writing these entries; and second, the difference between ambulating and perambulating. Attending to these two points should help us not only understand Thoreau, but also something about our own relationship to nature.
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Posted by Evan Edwards at 12:45 AM | Permalink
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perceptions
Sughra Raza. Black Ducks, Winter 2016.
Digital photograph.
Posted by Sughra Raza at 12:40 AM | Permalink
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What to say to an 8th grader with math anxiety
by Dave Maier
Math is pretty easy when you’re just starting out. You’re just adding and subtracting and multiplying and dividing. They might even let you use calculators, but even if they don’t, you’re just dealing with whole numbers, the kind you use when you’re counting on your fingers. (Sometimes they spring some newfangled versions of the multiplication algorithm on you, but it’s still just multiplication.)
Some students first run into trouble when they get to fractions, usually in sixth grade or so. Now we are writing the same number in rather different ways (1/2 = 2/4 = 0.5, and so on), and we can’t really count on our fingers either. All of a sudden there are a whole bunch of numbers between 2 and 3. In fact, as it turns out, there are an infinite number of such numbers. Infinity was okay when it was the biggest number of all, all the way on the end (or ends) of the number line and thus safely out of the way, but now we’re using it to count things, and those things are themselves not only the things we count with, but the numbers between what we seem now to be calling the “counting” numbers. (It even turns out – although they don’t make a big deal of this in sixth grade, thank goodness – that there are more numbers between 2 and 3 than there are “counting” numbers on the whole number line, even though both numbers are infinite. Yikes!)
Again, though, in arithmetic at least we’re just talking about numbers. Every problem has a single right answer, even if we now get to write that answer in different ways. But then, all of a sudden, straight up ahead: algebra.
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Posted by Dave Maier at 12:35 AM | Permalink
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Transgender bathrooms, evolution, climate change, and the Ten Commandments
by Paul Braterman
Toilet etiquette is where prudery meets absurdity. Your chance of being embarrassed, let alone molested, by a transgender person in a US public toilet is probably zero, and certainly less than your chance of being shot dead at home by a toddler playing with a gun; after all, the only public display of genitalia is at the men's urinal, and you can always use a booth if you prefer.
It is said that an undergrad once asked Sir John Pentland Mahaffy, Provost of Trinity College Dublin, where he might find a lavatory. "At the end of the corridor," Mahaffy grandly gestured, "you will find a door marked GENTLEMEN; but don't let that stop you." In the UK, of which Dublin was stll part at the time, class trumps gender. Incidentally, Trinity had been admitting female undergraduates since 1903, 74 years before Harvard; I assume that sanitary arrangements were instituted to cope with this.
It is established law in the US that the teaching of creationism serves a religious, rather than scientific or educational, purpose. It follows (Edwards v. Aguillard) that such teaching is unconstitutional in US public schools, since it violates the First Amendment separation of Church and State. There is no prospect of this ruling being overturned, unless we end up with a Supreme Court nominated by President Ted Cruz.
It has also been repeatedly established that display of the Ten Commandments on Government property violates the US Constitution, for much the same reasons.
So why do we have States bringing in transgender bathroom laws, scientifically baseless (as discussed here by my friend Faye Flam), whose only effect would be to inconvenience and offend one particular small minority? Why has this monumental non-issue even spilled over into the moronic drivelfest that is now the Republican Party's nomination debate?
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Posted by Paul Braterman at 12:30 AM | Permalink
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Prince, Bowie, and Glenn Frey: 21st Century Public Mourning as a Rejection of Cold War Culture, or, Why Nobody Really Gives a Shit About that Guy from the Eagles
by Akim Reinhardt
David Bowie was a white Englishman. Prince was a black American. Bowie was deeply rooted in the riffs, major/minor chords, and melody of rock-n-roll. Prince was grounded in the syncopated rhythms and arrangements of funk and R&B.
Prince's and Bowie's careers did overlap to a degree. Their biggest selling albums, Bowie's Let's Dance and Prince's Purple Rain, were released within a year of each other. But of course Let's Dance was Bowie's capstone in many ways, his big pop breakthrough after nearly 15 years of churning out music, whereas Purple Rain came fairly early in Prince's career, establishing him as an international pop icon for decades to come. So despite the kissin' cousin chronology of their biggest albums, the respective heydays of David Bowie and Prince were, in many ways, separated by about a decade. That makes sense since Prince was ten years younger than Bowie.
Despite all these differences, however, their deaths, coming three months apart from each other, produced similar strains of public mourning. In particular, many people confessed how one or the other artist had profoundly affected them during their formative years. And this heartfelt influence, many said, came not just from Bowie's and Prince's music, but especially from their artistic personae.
In between Bowie's and Prince's passing came the death of Glenn Frey, one of the two lead singer/songwriters of the Eagles, one of the most successful bands in the history of recorded music.
I have yet to see anyone write an essay, post a facebook comment, tweet, or make any other public expression of their deep gratitude for the vital role Glenn Frey played in helping them cope during their formative years.
Why? I suspect the answer is the Cold War.
Posted by Akim Reinhardt at 12:25 AM | Permalink
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CATSPEAK
by Brooks Riley
Posted by Brooks Riley at 12:20 AM | Permalink
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Dreaming of the Madonna
by Leanne Ogasawara
Last summer, marooned with a large group of astronomers in a remote 11th century abbey in the Tuscan countryside, I found myself growing increasingly antsy. Hatching a plan to break out, I dragged my astronomer off on what should have been one of the great pilgrimages of our lifetime--for as luck would have it, just down the road lay what Aldous Huxley considered to be the greatest picture in the world.
I am referring to one of the paintings on the famous Piero della Francesca trail. To see those masterpieces in situ is astonishing, and I consider the Piero Pilgrimage to be one of the great art historical experiences in the world.
Like all pilgrimages, however, this one was not without its mishaps.... Flushing my phone accidentally down the toilet after seeing the astonishingly beautiful and transportive fresco cycles in Arezzo was bad enough; but then to finally arrive at the climax of the pilgrimage where Aldous' "best picture on earth" stood, only to find it unavailable for viewing (and not just that but veiled in such a way as to tantalize us about what glorious beauty we were missing)-- was close to unbearable.
Our biggest blunder, however, came when we willfully decided to skip driving an extra half hour to go see the Madonna del Parto. Yes, I want to kick myself! Located in Monterchi, the Madonna del Parto is an extremely rare (perhaps the only?) treatment in Christian art of the Virgin pregnant. "Del Parto" can mean labor or childbirth--and in the picture, Piero depicts a very pregnant Mary.
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Posted by Leanne Ogasawara at 12:10 AM | Permalink
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Strained Analogies Between Recently Released Films and Current Events: Zootopia and Young Voters
by Matt McKenna
Zootopia’s target audience may be a tad younger than Bernie Sanders’ target audience, but youthful Sanders supporters should nonetheless consider watching the film in order to see a dark vision of their potential future. Like many animated Disney films, Zootopia includes talking animals working together to solve a problem. Also like many animated Disney films, the audience is bludgeoned with allusions comparing the cartoon animals’ society to our own (in Zootopia, institutions are specist like real world institutions are racist). There’s nothing wrong with talking animals or ham-fisted moralizing--after all, the film is for kids. What differentiates this Disney film from previous Disney films is that a young voter--pro-Sanders or not--may well see their dreary, hopeless future in Officer Judy Hopps’ transition from plucky bunny to establishment stooge.
The hero of Zootopia is Judy Hopps who, like young voters in reality, starts out as an ardent advocate for the downtrodden. Though she is but a humble rabbit, a child to carrot farmers, Judy dreams of becoming a police officer in the big city of Zootopia, which is an interesting choice for the name of a city built by animals since (at least for me) the name conjures up images of caged creatures on display for human amusement. Anyway, young and full of hope, Hopps enrolls in the police academy, lands a job as the city’s first rabbit cop, and quickly thereafter becomes disillusioned by her role in the force. You can probably guess the challenges she faces: the chief is a jerk, the sleazy Mayor Lionheart (he’s a lion) cares about his image and not about the city’s crime wave, and the people Officer Hopps attempts to protect eventually take advantage of her naïveté. At the film’s emotional nadir, Hopps falls into a depression and heads home to farm carrots with her parents. It's the classic tale of a kid rebelling at twenty only to go mainstream at thirty. Admittedly, Hopps speeds through this transition much faster than a decade, but that shortened time period may be narratively justified by converting the film’s timeline into rabbit-years or something.
Posted by Matt McKenna at 12:05 AM | Permalink
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Ecstasy at Baltimore’s Left Bank Jazz Society
Duke Ellington was one of the great composers and bandleaders of the last century, and his band was one of the great bands. Touring, however, is unforgiving. Long hours sitting in a bus, meals if and when you can grab them, and gigs every night. And when you’ve played the same tunes with the same cats for decades, well, it can be rough to get up for a gig. Fact is there were times when Ellington’s musicians looked like they were asleep on the stage.
That’s how they appeared the one time I saw Ellington live. It was at one of those sessions held by the Left Bank Jazz Society in Baltimore’s Famous Ballroom on Sunday afternoons. This was probably in 1970, 71, or 72, long after Ellington’s prime years in the second quarter of the century. The Famous Ballroom was on North Charles Street, not too far from the train station, and up three flights of fairly wide stairs. It too was past its prime years, but the patrons of the Left Bank, they were always primed for good music. Some were dressed to the nines in their church Sunday best, the men in sharp suits, the women in elaborate hats; and some were dressed casually in jeans and sneakers.
That’s generally how it was, but I only specifically remember three things from that concert. Ellington dressed well and had a line of patter smooth as silk and brittle as glass. He’d been doing this a long time. That’s one. The guys slumped in their chairs like they’d just gotten off an all-night flight from Timbuktu. Perhaps they had. That’s two.
And three: Paul Gonsalves burned the place down with his tenor sax. I forget what the number was. All I remember is that Gonsalves strode out on stage to play a solo, but he didn’t position himself in front of the microphone. He stood to one side. A helpful member of the audience moved the mike directly in front of him as he started to blow. He stopped playing for a second, grabbed the mike angrily and shoved it aside. Not for him the brittle reverberations of amplified sound. Then he started blowing again. The pure juice of the natural human essence flowed from his sax to embrace us in its majesty and urgency.
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Posted by Bill Benzon at 12:02 AM | Permalink
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Sunday, May 01, 2016
An Ode to Shakespeare from Kurt Vonnegut
Patrick Sauer in Signature:
In his works, Vonnegut’s fondness for the Bard can be traced from Kurt Sr.’s 1949 woodworking through a 2005 essay in A Man Without A Country, the last work published in his lifetime. In that piece, Vonnegut compares Hamlet to Cinderella and Kafka’s cockroach, expounds on how apparitions are not to be trusted, compares Polonius to Rush Limbaugh, and commends Shakespeare for doing what so few people do: Telling the truth, admitting we know so little about life. It’s a theme mirrored throughout Vonnegut’s career, even if the Bard’s technique didn’t require as many authorial surrogates. Tomato, Tomahto, so it goes…
The paths of Shakespeare and Vonnegut crossed multiple times, once through dimensions only known by the Tralfamadorians. In God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian, which originated as a series of 90-second public radio pieces, Vonnegut interviews people about the afterlife. The “tongue-tied, humiliated, self-loathing semi-literate Hoosier hack” is fisked by a feisty William Shakespeare who starts out by mocking Vonnegut’s dialect, calling it the “ugliest English he had ever heard, ‘fit to split the ears of groundlings.’” The Bard is salty throughout, responding to Kurt’s congratulations on all the Oscars Shakespeare in Love won by retorting the movie is “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” Both novelists and playwrights love a good callback.
More here.
Posted by S. Abbas Raza at 02:12 PM | Permalink
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Why We Likely Are Monogamous – And Why Most Men Should Be Glad We Are
David P. Barash at the History News Network:
For now, I want to focus on why monogamy has become so popular, at least in the modern Western world, and at least in theory, if not always in practice. Although monogamy is exceedingly rare in the animal world, it is found in a few cases, and nearly always, the payoff seems to be associated with the adaptive benefit of biparental childcare, something that Homo sapiens finds especially beneficial, given that we are unusual in that our offspring are profoundly helpless at birth, remaining needy for an extraordinarily long time. Nor is it absolutely necessary that the cooperating adults be man and woman; we know from abundant sociological data that two women or two men can do an excellent job, and that when it comes to child rearing, two – of any sex – are better than one. But we also know that prior to the cultural homogenization that followed European colonialism, more than 83% of human societies were preferentially polygamous, and that polygamy was also prominent in the ancient Near East from which that presumed Western move to monogamy originated.
So my question for now is: why did such a large segment of human society switch from polygamy to monogamy? And my first answer is: at present, we don’t know. My second answer is a guess, which goes as follows. (I propose it simply as a hypothesis, in the hope that readers will not only find it interesting but also useful in generating informed discussion and, if possible, meaningful research.)
Imagine a polygynous society with an average harem size of, say, ten. This means that for every male harem-keeper, there are nine unsuccessful, sexually and reproductively frustrated, resentful bachelors. The simply reality is that polygyny is disadvantageous not only for women – for complex reasons – but even more so for men, since with a 50/50 sex ratio, there are unmated men in proportion as polygyny obtains. This, btw, runs counter to the lascivious imaginings of many men, who, when I describe the evidence for primitive human polygyny, often express regret that they weren’t alive in those days, imagining that they would be a happy harem-holder.
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Posted by S. Abbas Raza at 02:02 PM | Permalink
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Francine Prose on "The Course of Love" by Alain de Botton
Francine Prose in The Guardian:
Late in Alain de Botton’s engaging novel, a married couple, Rabih and Kirsten, find that the demands and stresses of ordinary life – work, domestic chores, financial worries, the harrowing expenditure of energy required to raise their two adored children – have made them irritable and contentious. In part, the narrator concludes, they are at odds “because they have so seldom seen their struggles sympathetically reflected in the art they know … Were Rabih and Kirsten able to read about themselves as characters in a novel, they might ... experience a brief but helpful burst of pity at their not at all unworthy plight, and thereby perhaps learn to dissolve some of the tension that arises on those evenings when, once the children are in bed, the apparently demoralising and yet in truth deeply grand and significant topic of ironing comes up.”
Presumably, the novel that Rabih and Kirsten need to read is the one De Botton has written: a sympathetic account of the relationship that begins only after the besotted courtship has ended. Having fallen deeply in love, the couple “will marry, they will suffer, they will frequently worry about money, they will have a girl first, then a boy, one of them will have an affair, there will be passages of boredom, they’ll sometimes want to murder one another and on a few occasions to kill themselves. This will be the real love story.”
Rabih and Kirsten are well-drawn, individualised characters, with distinct and separate backgrounds (he’s half-Lebanese, half-German; she’s Scottish), careers (he’s an architect working in an urban design studio; she’s a surveyor employed by Edinburgh City Council) and personalities (she’s confident and feisty; he’s dreamy and insecure). But what’s interesting is De Botton’s decision to make their experience so thoroughly ordinary that their lives seem emblematic, their stories interchangeable with those of countless couples.
More here.
Posted by S. Abbas Raza at 01:55 PM | Permalink
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HOW THE CIA WRITES HISTORY
Jefferson Morley in The Intercept:
Last summer I paid a visit to Georgetown University’s Lauinger Libraryas part of my research on legendary CIA counterspy James Jesus Angleton. I went there to investigate Angleton’s famous mole hunt, one of the least flattering episodes of his eventful career. By the early 1960s, Angleton was convinced the KGB had managed to insert a penetration agent high in the ranks of the CIA.
In researching and writing a biography of Angleton, I constantly confront a conundrum: Was the man utterly brilliant? Or completely nuts?
Angleton is one of America’s archetypal spies. He was the model for Harlot in Harlot’s Ghost, Norman Mailer’s epic of the CIA, a brooding Cold War spirit hovering over a story of corrupted idealism. In Robert De Niro’s cinematic telling of the tale, The Good Shepherd, the Angletonian character was a promising product of the system who loses his way in the moral labyrinth of secret intelligence operations.
In real life, Jim Angleton was a formidable intellectual and canny bureaucrat who helped shape the ethos of the Central Intelligence Agency we have today.
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