Arts

Shelagh Delaney has died aged 71, having written something extraordinary when she was 18. “Guardian obituary”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2011/nov/21/shelagh-delaney

Over the last two years, I’ve given a couple of interviews to journalists, mainly about my research on issues of justice, or, sometimes, about my reasons to swap economics for political philosophy, and my views on those fields. But now those same journalists are calling or e-mailing me back with questions where I really don’t have any expertise at all. They could ask any of us, really. Here’s one, that I thought is interesting to share.

A religiously-inspired progressively-leaning magazine is starting a new series, namely asking people which book “provides support, or is a book to which one often returns”. And the answer cannot be the Bible. I actually don’t think I can answer this question. Most fiction, with very few exceptions, I’ve only read once. Non-fiction I read is either informative (like King Leopold’s Ghost, or Joris Luyendijk’s book on the Middle East), or else it is scholarly, but then I don’t think I see it as providing (moral) support or as an inspirational book. Of course, I’ve opened A Theory of Justice or Inequality Reexamined or Justice, Gender and the Family many times, but that’s mostly because I want to return to the arguments to examine them. Moreover, most of the (non-professional) reading I do is on blogs and the internet.

So what, if anything, could be similar to an atheist as the Bible is to a Christian? I really don’t know. But if I’m forced to give an answer, I would say: I prefer talking to people over reading books if I need (moral) guidance or support, and if I need inspiration or some distance and non-analytical reflection, I turn to poetry. I still have, ripped from a student’s magazine when I was studying in Göttingen in 1994/5, a page with a Poem written by Nazim Hikmet, translated in German – a poem to which I have returned many, many times:

Leben
einzeln und frei
wie ein Baum
und brüderlich
wie ein Wald
ist unsere Sehnsucht.

So give me poetry and people if I need inspiration or support. And you?

Next week in my Philosophy of Literature module I’ll be talking about pareidolia and theories of how and and why it works. How and why pretty much any closed loop with three dots in it is a face, because it ‘looks like’ one. The occasion for burdening my students with this is discussion of overly-linguistifying (in my view) theories of how literature ‘works’ and, more grandly, linguistifying theories of what Aristotle called mimesis, a.k.a. that whole ‘poetics’ ball of wax. I posted some of my thoughts about pictures and pictoriality before: it’s important to realize that even though a smiley face is an utterly conventional icon, it doesn’t follow that it works by convention.

Anyway, I thought it was a nice coincidence that Andrew Sullivan linked to this today, for his Faces of the Day thing.

Also, I just stumbled on a real sparklepop/powerfolk earworm of a tune by Vetiver, “Wonder Why”, which turns out to have a a pareidolia-based video. Great track. Get it free from Amazon.

The maps and the video are good examples for me because they preemptively emphasize something that is often raised as an objection to efforts to ‘naturalize’ the pictorial function: namely, it’s a learned process. By the end of the map series, and the video, you are more sensitized to faces and figures in maps, mailboxes and trashcans than you were at the start. To that extent your responses are ‘conventional’, in the sense of learned (when you could perfectly well have been learning something else, so the result is somewhat ‘arbitrary’). Fine, fine. But the point still stands. From the fact that a result is path-dependent, it may follow that it is conventional (in a perfectly good sense of that word). But, again, it does not follow from the fact that something is conventional in that sense that it ‘works by’ convention in some other senses that tend to be carelessly bundled in. The mechanism by which we recognize things as faces is cognitively distinct from the mechanism by which we recognize that ‘faces’ denotes faces. My target here is Nelson Goodmanian thinking, which tries to explain pictorial resemblance and representation on the model of linguistic denotation. He doesn’t say it works exactly the same, all the way up and down; that would be pretty obviously crazy. But he pushes the line that, in order to theorize how pictures work, you have to build on a kind of denotational foundation. I think the opposite: theories of linguistic denotation need to rest on a foundational theory of pictoriality. But enough about me. Enjoy the video and the song. Great song, I think.

I’m a fan of the artist and illustrator “Ian Miller”:http://www.ian-miller.org/, much of whose work combines very fine ink drawing with watercolor and collage, and among my most precious possessions are a couple of the illustrations from his graphic novel collaboration with M. John. Harrison, “The Luck in the Head”:http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1878574469/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=henryfarrell-20. He’s been working together with a couple of other people on a short animated film, which provides a good sampling of his combination of the sinister and the jolly. Work in progress is “here”:http://www.behance.net/gallery/Jacobs-Lament/1355483 for those who are interested.

I remember back when it seemed like, maybe, in the future everyone would get paid in whuffie. If we all worked together. Now I think I know better. In the future, everyone will get paid in ukelele covers of pop songs from the 80’s. If we all work together.

I just pledged $40 to kickstart LINDA, ‘a hollow earth retirement adventure in 23 singing, illustrated installments’. I am very far from saying you should do the same. Daniel Davies, just for instance, is sure to find the artist’s vocal and instrumental stylings intolerably twee. He will prefer to spend his money on Budweiser. But if none of you do as I do, I am perhaps going to keep my money and not get any adventure or singing. But it’s up to you. (The story is going to run on hilobrow.com, whose editors are my friends. They aren’t your friends, I assume, so that may weigh in your calculations.)

In related news, I see on boingboing that someone else is trying to Kickstart “a huge 20-foot-tall kinetic sculpture with a 25-foot long spinning painting in the center, which include a zoetropic animation.” I think I might chip in $11 so I can get the coloring book.

But this is unrealistic, you say. In the sense that it is not a model for a barter economy based on ukelele covers and giant zoetropes (which would, after all, make using giant stone discs with holes in them as your currency seem comparatively sensible.) No no no. This is just the first stage. Next, we build a kind of cross-kickstarting platform on which the people trying to kickstart their crazy art follies do so via complicated latticeworks of artistic cross-commitments. ‘I’ll cover a song of your choice on the ukelele, and knit you a badge, if you build a 20 foot tall zoetrope in Michigan, and send me a coloring book.’

Next, we get Wall Street hipsters to pool all the Kickstart projects, slice them into tranches, resell these collateralized aesthetic obligations to … oh wait.

The current issue of New Left Review has an article by Franco Moretti applying a bit of network analysis to the interactions within some pieces of literature. Here is the interaction network in Hamlet, with a tie being defined by whether the characters speak to one another. (Notice that this means that, e.g., Rosencrantz and Guildenstern do not have a tie, even though they’re in the same scenes.)

The Hamlet network

And here is Hamlet without Hamlet:

Hamlet without Hamlet

I think we can safely say that he is a key figure in the network. Though the Prince may be less crucial than he thinks, as Horatio seems to be pretty well positioned, too. Lots more in the article itself.

Per recent posts, I’m teaching “Philo and Film” this semester, with a focus on sf film. Here’s more of that, if you like that sort of thing. [click to continue…]

I’m almost reluctant to add to the hype, but the story is so unusual, and the pictures so good, that I think I’ll overcome that. In brief, then: Chicago is about to see the first exhibition of the photography of Vivian Maier, a recently-deceased, partly-French, nanny who seems to have neither sought nor received any exposure or recognition in her lifetime. Thousands of negatives were then bought by a real-estate agent at a flea market. Astonished at what he found, he’s now promoting her work, making a documentary film, putting a book together and so on. Well, I know, it all sounds too good to be true. But the pictures (at least the ones we’ve seen) are superb. I have some qualms about the ethics of developing unprocessed rolls of a photographer’s work. (Famously, Garry Winogrand had tons of these.) This is for the simple reason that the photographer may just have know that that roll contained crap. Unprinted negatives get you a bit closer to the finished article, but there too, there’s the matter of editing, selection, etc. So the world will never see the work the Maier would have chosen to represent herself, if she’d have wanted exhibiting at all. But, still, the pictures are wonderful.

Links: “New York Times”:http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/07/new-street-photography-60-years-old/ (great slideshow – view it full screen); Blog post at “The Operable Window”:http://theoperablewindow.blogspot.com/2011/01/vivian-maier-chicago-street.html (with link to TV news item); Chicago “exhibition”:http://www.explorechicago.org/city/en/things_see_do/event_landing/events/dca_tourism/FindingVivianMaier_ChicagoStreetPhotographer.html details; John Maloof’s “site”:http://vivianmaier.blogspot.com/ (he’s the real-estate agent); “details of the documentary film”:http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/800508197/finding-vivian-maier-a-feature-length-documentary (and scroll down for many more links).

Speaking of Tove Jansson: when I got home from vacation, a prize awaited me. Just before I left I scored a cheap 1st edition of Jansson’s illustrated Alice In Wonderland on Abebooks. (And – oh look! [UPDATE: you didn’t look quick enough] – there’s another one available for only $38. Which is quite reasonable, compared to the prices for all the other available copies.) Mine is an ex-library copy, of the sort disdained by collectors, particularly where children’s books are concerned. (Nasty things, with their sticky, mauling, foxing fingers! thinks the collector.) But it’s in good shape, and I appreciate how it came complete with an envelope-tucked library card, earnestly autographed by several young ladies – no boys – who I like to think will now go through life with quite un-Tennielish notions of these characters (not that there’s anything wrong with Tenniel, good heavens. But it’s just funny to imagine not being able to imagine the Hatter as looking like anyone but Snufkin) … [click to continue…]

I’m sure I first heard Joan Rivers the same way I did Bob Newhart and Woody Allen, on Frank Muir Goes Into… but she never entered my consciousness really till I moved to LA in the mid-80s and started seeing her on daytime TV. I found her captivating — the only thing on TV worth watching a lot of the time. Rude, self-deprecating, very funny, and very clever. So when Swift and I wandered past a theater showing her new movie last night we decided, whimsically, to go in after dinner.

I’d recommend it to just about anybody over 21. It certainly deserves to be seen by a wider audience than the scattering of old Jewish women and two middle-aged Englishmen who saw it in our theater. At first, Rivers simply appears to be a grotesque — right from the opening shot, through the introduction to her diminished life, whining about her lack of success and how it sucks being old. But slowly, gradually, the film humanizes her, never refraining from showing the warts. It is also very funny (not least because she is very funny).

Googling her afterwards I found this delightful profile from which comes this plausible, but odd, story:

As we wait for it to start, she tells me a story about Prince Charles, with whom she has been friends for several years. (“Not inner circle,” she says. “Outer-inner circle.”) HRH sends her a Christmas gift every year, which, more than once, has been two very fancy teacups. “One year,” she says, “I took a picture under my Christmas tree with the teacups and wrote, ‘How could you send me two teacups when I’m alone?’ Another time I wrote, ‘I’m enjoying tea with my best friend!’ and I sent a picture of me in a cemetery. And he never acknowledges it! He never says to me when I see him”—doing his accent perfectly—“ ‘Ohhhh, funny funny funny!’ So this year I thought, I’m just going to write him a nice thank-you note. And the other day our mutual friend calls and says, ‘Just spoke to Charles! He said, “I can’t wait to see Joan’s note this year!” ’ ”

When Alan Sillitoe died I experienced a moment of sadness that evaporated when I realized that it was, indeed, Sillitoe, and not Plater, who was gone. But now it is, indeed, Plater. Guardian obit here. A gorgeous appreciation by Tom Courtenay here. Z Cars, Softly Softly, Selwyn Froggitt, Fortunes of War, A Very British Coup (enormously superior to the book), Close the Coalhouse Door, it seems that for decades he was everywhere, words just spilling out. And all those radio plays, including the brilliant Roll Jordan Roll saga — many being replayed over and again on Radio 7. But above even the radio plays there is what for me was his masterpiece — the Beiderbecke Trilogy — a long, long, mood piece with lots of talk in which, by the end of each part, you realize belatedly that nothing has really happened. Brilliant.

I’m reading Lessing’s Laocoön, An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry (how’s by you?) Consider:

It is an intrusion of the painter into the domain of the poet, which good taste can never sanction, when the painter combines in one and the same picture two points necessarily separate in time, as does Fra Mazzuoli when he introduces the rape of the Sabine women, and the reconciliation effected by them between their husbands and relations, or as Titian does when he presents the entire history of the prodigal son, his dissolute life, his misery, and his repentance. (91)

[click to continue…]

Those who have followed CT from before its inception will know about the important role of Ladybird Books in our intellectual formation. Here, via Jacob C and via the Guardian’s NZ-Slovakia commentary, is “Naranjito: World Cup Final in Danger”:http://www.pointlessmuseum.com/museum/blog/index.php/2010/06/06/naranjito-world-cup-final-in-danger/ from 1982, featuring an Adolf Hitler lookalike.

More at “The Pointless Weblog”:http://www.pointlessmuseum.com/museum/blog/index.php/2010/06/06/naranjito-world-cup-final-in-danger/ .

A bit of mindless surfing had me looking at the execrable Instapundit for the first time in ages … but there was actually something interesting there: a link to Sally Mann, talking about memory, uncertainty and the collodion process. Those 19th-century photographers who managed to produce near-flawless images using the process were really something.