Michael Pollan talked with Google last month about his latest book, In Defense of Food. He’s funnier than I expected. My doodles:
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David Byrne has a new art installation that connects an organ keyboard to various parts of a large building. Playing the Building makes a giant musical instrument out of the structure of columns, walls, pipes:
I’d like to say that in a small way it turns consumers into creative producers, but that might be a bit too much to claim. However, even if one doesn’t play the thing, it points toward a less mediated kind of cultural experience. It might be an experience in which one begins to reexamine one’s surroundings and to realize that culture—of which sound and music are parts—doesn’t always have to be produced by professionals and packaged in a consumable form.
Also via DesignNotes, a new Flickr group for Tables of Contents.
Nothing happened today. Sometimes I wish news were like that every day.
Then!
A short story written by the 6-year-old brother of one of my co-workers:
One day I woke up. I was haf chipmunk and bus. Then! I stareted to driv bep bep. Then I stareted to run wee. Thes is fun driving and runing. Then I crasht in to a treey. Ach
The third sentence is one of the best bits of writing I’ve seen in a while.
Alex Ross writes about the life and music of John Luther Adams.
Adams is an avid art-viewer, and is particularly keen on the second generation of American abstract painters: Frank Stella, Ellsworth Kelly, Jasper Johns, and Joan Mitchell. There are more art books than music books on the shelves of his studio, a neat one-room cabin that faces south, toward the Alaska Range.
Adams says, “I remember thinking, To hell with classical music. I’m going into the art world; I’m going to do installations. But I was really just interested in working with new media. And it doesn’t matter what I think I’m doing. The work has a life of its own, and I’m just along for the ride. Richard Serra talks about the point at which all your influences are assimilated and then your work can come out of the work.”
One of Adams’ experimental works is a room that generates the music based on external happenings.
The mechanism of “The Place” translates raw data into music: information from seismological, meteorological, and geomagnetic stations in various parts of Alaska is fed into a computer and transformed into an intricate, vibrantly colored field of electronic sound.
“The Place” occupies a small white-walled room on the museum’s second floor. You sit on a bench before five glass panels, which change color according to the time of day and the season. What you notice first is a dense, organlike sonority, which Adams has named the Day Choir. Its notes follow the contour of the natural harmonic series—the rainbow of overtones that emanate from a vibrating string—and have the brightness of music in a major key. In overcast weather, the harmonies are relatively narrow in range; when the sun comes out, they stretch across four octaves. After the sun goes down, a darker, moodier set of chords, the Night Choir, moves to the forefront. The moon is audible as a narrow sliver of noise. Pulsating patterns in the bass, which Adams calls Earth Drums, are activated by small earthquakes and other seismic events around Alaska. And shimmering sounds in the extreme registers—the Aurora Bells—are tied to the fluctuations in the magnetic field that cause the Northern Lights.
I’d love to check that out.
This interview with Bill Bishop, about the increasing social segmentation in America, has some cool tie-ins with a book I’ve been loving lately, Lawrence Levine’s Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America. Levine touches on the changing use of public space in the early 1900s as “Culture” was increasingly associated with the wealthy, and patrons and directors exerted more control over how we experience art:
The relative taming of the audience at the turn of the century was part of a larger development that witnessed a growing bifurcation between the private and public spheres of life. Through the cult of etiquette, which was so popular in this period, individuals were taught to keep all private matters strictly to themselves and to remain publicly as inconspicuous as possible… People were similarly taught to remove from the public to the private universe an entire range of personal reactions… The individual mirrored the increasing segmentation of society in a segmentation of self.
Bishop mentions in the interview that “The best-educated citizens are the least likely to have a political discussion with someone with a different opinion.” Public spaces and self-selection. Two interesting ideas that I hope Bishop talks about in his upcoming book, The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America Is Tearing Us Apart. It’s on my reading list. [via book design review]
There’s a really good, really funny interview with Richard Price in the Believer:
I have to be a little intimidated by what I’m writing about. I have to feel a little bit like I don’t think I can do this, I don’t think I can master this, I don’t think I can get under the skin of this, because when you’re a little scared, you’re bringing everything to the table because you’re not sure you can do it unless you bust your balls and really, really get into it. Terror keeps you slender. I need a sense of awe. Oh, shit! I can’t believe I just saw that! But then what do you do with what you saw? That’s the bottom line. That’s the novel.
On writing novels vs screenplays:
BLVR: Do you wake up every morning and write right away?
RP: It depends. It depends if there’s anybody waiting for it. If there’s not anybody waiting for it, I can get slack. That’s also the good thing about screenwriting, is that there are other people involved. If you’re writing a novel, once you sign a contract and have a couple years to write it, that’s it. You’re on your own. You can have cobwebs, you can look like Miss Haversham’s wedding cake before anybody gives a shit.
PLEASE STOP MOWEING YOUR LAWN SO EARLY
Today I spent some time sorting through a bunch of old documents, notes, letters, tickets, playbills, etc. I came across an old letter placed in the mailbox back home when I was away at college. A summer of cutting the grass earned me a bad reputation that Dad must have continued into the fall that year.
Gemma Bovery (review: 4/5)
Posy Simmonds originally wrote Gemma Bovery as a 100+ episode serial in The Guardian. The story is told with a cool mix of comics panels, splash illustrations, big chunks of text. It all mixes in together.
The narrator is a baker living in Normandy, who becomes obsessed with Gemma’s adultery as it happens and as it’s later revealed in her diaries. The story pokes a lot of fun at the stereotypes of the English and the French, and the absurdities of middle-class escapism. It’s dark, but not cynical. A lot of fun even though the impending doom is spelled out in the first page (and in its inspiration, Madame Bovary). There are some more samples on the publisher’s website.
Here’s a funny bit from an interview with Simmonds in the Comics Journal:
I would ask lots of French people, “Tell me the eight or 10 best things about France and then the things you like best about England.” They’d enthuse about le vin [wine], le fromage [cheese], le paysage [landscape], the fashion, the food, the roads, the culture, etc. in France… and when they got to England they would go, “Err, whiskey,” and they’d think very hard and go, “Harrods,” or they’d go, “London taxis,” and someone said, “Scaffolding, your scaffolding’s very good.”
Opolis is a comic made from photographs of paper cut-outs in a 3-dimensional office building. I’d have a hard time thinking of something more exhausting. Cool results, though. [via waxy]
Against Happiness (review: 2.5/5)
Eric Wilson’s book Against Happiness: In Praise of Melancholy “challenges the recent happiness trend and celebrates the meditative virtues of melancholy.” He’s most successful when talking about the meditative virtues. The argument is simple: acknowledging the tragic, the struggle, the rain, and the inevitable decline of all things makes joy, success, the sun, and livelihood all the richer in the here and now.
Our manic urge to avoid mere discomfort keeps us from exploring these fuzzy edges, keeps us from knowing the whole. At our most important and emotional events like birth, death, and marriage, these edges become painfully, joyfully clear:
The tiny body quickly follows the head. A baby appears. You who have been watching are torn between weeping and laughing. You lament this infant’s tragic fall into the pain of time; you celebrate new life. While the baby cries in lamentation and celebration, you join it, with your tears washing over your ridiculous grin. You at this moment are two and one at once, melancholy and joyful, sorrowful and ebullient. You realize that the riches moments in life are these junctures where we realize, in our sinews, what is true all the time: the cosmos is a danced of joggled opposites, a jolted waltz.
The first quarter of the book, on challenging the happiness trend, should have been either much abridged or much expanded. It falls back on some tired excoriations of modern America (hitting all the right buzzwords: SUV, suburbs, McDonald’s, Botox, etc.), and ends up a little too thin and editorial. But later he does have some pretty interesting discussions of specific people, talking about the struggles of Colerige, Beethoven, and Keats, among others. On Beethoven:
Even though he clearly hates his inherited troubles—his melancholia, his gastric disorders, his hearing loss—he also acknowledges, though indirectly, that these very constraints are his muse. In rebelling against his “fate” by creating vital music, he actually transforms this same fate into an inspiration.
There are some funny parts, too, like talking about the strangeness of American Protestantism as a feel-good “happiness companies,” with “Jesus as some sort of blissed-out savior”.
Lastly, here are some works that Wilson referenced in his book that I also liked:
- Emily Dickinson’s poem “Essential oils are wrung“
- Walker Percy’s essay The Loss of the Creature [pdf] [wikipedia summary]
- Beethoven’s Heiligenstadt Testament
Graphing the accepted spelling of “ThunderCats, ho!”
Based on some keyword research I did this afternoon. “ThunderCats, ho!” is a natural winner in Google search results. The long tail of enthusiasm extends to over 35 o’s, after which point I gave up.
The most interesting part is that HUGE drop in hits for the 3-o version. Among its neighboring easy-to-type competitors, “ThunderCats, hooo!” is a clear loser. If you want to stay in the safe, accepted, comfortable range, stick with the 1-, 2-, 4-, 5-, or 7-o versions. I’m drawn to the 10+ range for sheer exuberance.
How We’re Wrecking Our Feet. It’s the shoes. Old news, but worth hearing again and again.
Foot freedom is a movement in the ultralight hiking community as well. Once you realize that you don’t need to carry 50lbs for a weekend trip, you realize that you can ditch the leather boots and hike with shoes. And after that, for me at least, it’s been an ongoing search for the lightest, most flexible shoes I can find. I really like Inov8’s line of “trail slippers”. The Vibram Five Fingers models were mentioned in the article. Shoes from Vivo Barefoot were also mentioned but I have no idea why even their cheapest models cost over $120. [via link banana]
The Most Wanted Song and the Most Unwanted Song were written in response to survey results, just like the earlier creation of the world’s Most Wanted Paintings. The Most Unwanted Song features an operatic, rapping soprano and children singing a holiday polka:
The most unwanted music is over 25 minutes long, veers wildly between loud and quiet sections, between fast and slow tempos, and features timbres of extremely high and low pitch, with each dichotomy presented in abrupt transition. The most unwanted orchestra was determined to be large, and features the accordion and bagpipe (which tie at 13% as the most unwanted instrument), banjo, flute, tuba, harp, organ, synthesizer (the only instrument that appears in both the most wanted and most unwanted ensembles). An operatic soprano raps and sings atonal music, advertising jingles, political slogans, and “elevator” music, and a children’s choir sings jingles and holiday songs. The most unwanted subjects for lyrics are cowboys and holidays, and the most unwanted listening circumstances are involuntary exposure to commericals and elevator music. Therefore, it can be shown that if there is no covariance—someone who dislikes bagpipes is as likely to hate elevator music as someone who despises the organ, for example—fewer than 200 individuals of the world’s total population would enjoy this piece.
A collection of 100 great opening lines. I wonder, for comics, what a collection of great opening panels would look like…? [via sbh]
The Well-Dressed Man With A Beard.
After the final no there comes a yes
And on that yes the future world depends.
No was the night. Yes is this present sun.
If the rejected things, the things denied,
Slid over the western cataract, yet one,
One only, one thing that was firm, even
No greater than a cricket’s horn, no more
Than a thought to be rehearsed all day, a speech
Of the self that must sustain itself on speech,
One thing remaining, infallible, would be
Enough. Ah! douce campagna of that thing!
Ah! douce campagna, honey in the heart,
Green in the body, out of a petty phrase,
Out of a thing believed, a thing affirmed:
The form on the pillow humming while one sleeps,
The aureole above the humming house…
It can never be satisfied, the mind, never.
Man, I really like Wallace Stevens. [via 1000timesno]
The Best American Science & Nature Writing 2007 (review: 3.5/5)
I found The Best American Science & Nature Writing 2007 when I was out hiking a couple few weeks ago. An Appalachian Trail hiker left it behind, recommending to whoever came by. I snagged it.
Any anthology will have some hits and misses. At least, in contrast with my frustrating experience with Flash Fiction Forward, all of my favorites from this book are available online, and only two of those are behind paywalls. Score. These were the ones I especially liked:
- In Rome’s Basement by Paul Bennett
- Fishering by Brian Doyle (my top pick)
- Cooking for Eggheads by Patricia Gadsby
- Cyber-Neologoliferation by James Gleick
- The Final Frontier by John Horgan
- How to Get a Nuclear Bomb by William Langewiesche
- The Flu Hunter by Michael Rosenwald
- Ruffled Feathers by John Seabrook
- The Rape of Appalachia by Michael Shnayerson
- Delusions of Space Enthusiasts by Neil deGrasse Tyson
John Mark Harris arranged a piece for piano by Iannis Xenakis to make it, y’know, playable by a human. You can see and hear the graph for Evryali.
Harris comments:
The title refers to the “Medusa, with head of writing snakes”, as well as “the open sea”. Both allusions have clear meanings upon hearing the piece…
Evryali was composed without regard to the limitations of the human anatomy, as the branching often expands beyond the range of two human hands. In more than one instance, the branching has caused bushed to appear at the extreme right and left of the keyboard, yet there are also bushes in the center of the piano. The performer must obviously edit the score. The graph I made became a tool for determining what I would leave out…
The music that remains, after editing, is anatomically possible. Yet the performer is left with an undertaking that can not be thought of as reasonable. The relentless repetitive motions, wide leaps, and awkward streams of chords directly challenge the pianist’s need for fluid fingers and free arms. The pianist runs the risk of gazing into Medusa and freezing solid. Brute force and physical endurance are not enough to solve the difficulty. Only through the same imagination that one finds the music “possible” can one find the answer to its realization.
As one can never view Medusa directly, without cheating in the manner of Perseus, one can never hear the piece performed exactly as composed. The audience is not granted a true image of Evryali, but must, like Perseus, experience only a reflection of the monstrosity.
Further commentary from Marc Couroux:
Evryali is not virtuosic, nor is it anti-virtuosic. It is highly unlikely that this state could have come about as a result of the composer’s insufficient command of pianistic technique. The gauntlet is so clearly thrown down that the difficulties cannot be anything other than premeditated… The fact that one cannot physically realize the totality of Evryali makes it seem unnecessarily utopian. The task of any performer is to strive, regardless of difficulty, to achieve every detail and to project them into a broader context.
[via phil harnish]
ROTHKOesque, a group of photos with Mark Rothko-ish qualities.
A video of Bob Becker playing some novelty xylophone tunes with a college group. I saw Becker playing with Nexus a few years back. He’s insanely skilled.
Not Ideas about the Thing but the Thing Itself by Wallace Stevens.
Audio and video from the New York Public Library is now on iTunes.
An interview with Mythbusters:
We’re just trying to see what happens. And we have relatively little time and a whole lot of curiosity, so the most efficient way to get there is what we do, and that often happens to be some form of science… That being said, the fact that we don’t have formal training, that makes what we’re experiencing a little bit more accessible to the viewers. If we actually knew what we were doing ahead of time, it would just be like talking at you, instead of experiencing the situation with you.
“As unseemly as it is for America’s wealthiest people to strive for more money, America’s political class is far worse. They have a ridiculous excess of power, and yet they only want more.”
10 Things I Have Learned, Milton Glaser’s life lessons.
Eddie Murphy riffs on wanting McDonald’s food when you were a kid. “I had one of those mothers, no matter what you want, she has the ingredients at home.” It’s Eddie Murphy so, nsfw.
How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read (review: 3/5)
The title of Pierre Bayard’s book How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read is a bit misleading. Don’t get your hopes up for any on-the-ground tactics for escaping awkward conversation. Bayard spends a couple hundred pages, illustrated mostly with stories and examples from his specialty in French literature, talking about why you shouldn’t feel awkward in the first place.
Assuming “cultivation” is a worthy goal, you have to remember that “being cultivated is a matter not of having read any book in particular, but of being able to find your bearings within books as a system, which requires you to know that they form a system and to be able to locate each element in relation to the others.”
It boils down like this: There are a lot of books out there. You can’t read them all. As soon as you begin to read, you begin to forget what you’re reading. What you actually remember is incomplete, anyway, and the way you remember it changes. Lastly, the way we actually use our incomplete, mutable memories of books varies from time to time, place to place, person to person, conversation to conversation.
In the end, Bayard says, “what we talk about is not the books themselves, but the substitute objects we create for the occasion.” This makes me think of the idea of social objects in marketing.
Hugh MacLeod: “The interesting thing about the Social Object is the not the object itself, but the conversations that happen around them.”
Compare Bayard: “The books themselves are not at stake; they have been replaced by other intermediary objects that have no content in themselves, and which are defined solely by the unstable social and psychological forces that bombard them.”
There’s also the interesting idea of ambiguity when these discussions come up:
Like words, books, in representing us, also deform what we are. In talking about books, we find ourselves exchanging not so much cultural objects as the very parts of ourselves we need to shore up our coherence during these threats to our narcissistic selves. Our feelings of shame arise because our very identity is imperiled by these exchanges, whence the imperative that the virtual space in which we stage them remain marked by ambiguity and play.
Ambiguity and play comes out because most of our conversation isn’t about books per se, it’s about situating ourselves to each other. It’s about relating. This brings to mind a Chuck Klosterman essay on why we like the music we like:
When someone asks me what kind of music I like, he is (usually) attempting to use this information to deduce things about my personality… But here’s the problem: This premise is founded on the belief that the person you’re talking with consciously knows why he appreciates those specific things or harbors those specific feelings. It’s also predicated on the principle that you know why you like certain sounds or certain images, because that self-awareness is how we establish the internal relationship between a) what someone loves and b) who someone is.
Shakespeare in the Bush. “An American anthropologist set out to study the Tiv of West Africa and was taught the true meaning of Hamlet.”:
I decided to skip the soliloquy. Even if Claudius was here thought quite right to marry his brother’s widow, there remained the poison motif, and I knew they would disapprove of fratricide. More hopefully I resumed, “That night Hamlet kept watch with the three who had seen his dead father. The dead chief again appeared, and although the others were afraid, Hamlet followed his dead father off to one side. When they were alone, Hamlet’s dead father spoke.”
“Omens can’t talk!” The old man was emphatic.
“Hamlet’s dead father wasn’t an omen. Seeing him might have been an omen, but he was not.” My audience looked as confused as I sounded. “It was Hamlet’s dead father. It was a thing we call a ‘ghost.’” I had to use the English word, for unlike many of the neighboring tribes, these people didn’t believe in the survival after death of any individuating part of the personality.
“What is a ‘ghost?’ An omen?”
“No, a ‘ghost’ is someone who is dead but who walks around and can talk, and people can hear him and see him but not touch him.”
They objected. “One can touch zombis.”
“No, no! It was not a dead body the witches had animated to sacrifice and eat. No one else made Hamlet’s dead father walk. He did it himself.”
“Dead men can’t walk,” protested my audience as one man.
I was quite willing to compromise.
“A ‘ghost’ is the dead man’s shadow.”
But again they objected. “Dead men cast no shadows.”
“They do in my country,” I snapped.
Stefanie Posavec made a diagram of every sentence in On the Road organized by words per sentence. Here are more literary diagrams.
Pecha Kucha Night is an informal gathering of presenters who are limited to 20 slides of 20 seconds each. So, theoretically, it’s a forum with less rambling and more variety in the course of an evening. Lots of cities are having them now. Could be cool. The next Atlanta Pecha Kucha will be next Sunday at Octane Coffee. The Atlanta Pecha Kucha also has the previous podcasts available on iTunes.
Eyeglasses and the pushing up thereof, an analysis of optical adjustment techniques. Good commentary from the audience.
This interview with Philip Gourevitch is mostly about interviewing, but I like this, too:
My guilty pleasure reads are things that are just fabulously written. I don’t know how to say it without it being pretentious—I’ll read a chapter from Moby Dick or Adventures of Huckleberry Finn at random, where the language is just rocketing around, where there’s absolutely no urgency to read it. It’s like putting on one of your great anthem songs. It’s like cranking the stereo.
This fictional Paris Review Interview with “Constance Eakins” is a clever bit of promotion for The Mayor’s Tongue. Here’s a pdf of the interview [1.5mb]. Eakins started with comics:
Interviewer: Was it when you ran away from home that you began to feel that you were going to be a writer?
Eakins: No, I always wanted to be a writer, even before I was born. My first story was what I like to call an image-story. When I hadn’t yet learned how to speak, my dear mother would give me a parcel of rusty nails, which I used to draw abstract shapes on the walls of our home.
I: How do you know that these were stories? I mean, doesn’t every child make drawings if given some sort of writing implement?
E: They were image-stories and if you went to look at them now they would make you weep from the beauty of their narrative swoop.
The classic nuts and bolts…
I: When do you begin writing each day? As soon as you wake up?
E: Yes, when I wake up in the morning I always have the desire to sit down to write. The first thing I do is write down my dreams, then I get to my fiction, poetry, theater, film scripts, monographs, critical essays, and journalism—in that order. But then I constantly am receiving telephone calls, gawking fans come up to my house, friends try to visit, and I am all the time interrupted. Somehow I manage to keep on writing.
[via maud newton]
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