Lobster and Canary

Seven Songs To Celebrate The Full Moon On Monday

2012-01-07T15:06:00.000-08:00

The lobster and the canary share with you seven new (or at least new-ish) songs that we find ourselves listening to frequently at the moment-- songs that help bring us to a vibrant yet contemplative place when we need such a refuge or niche. Enjoy.

---Regina Carter, "Artistya" (2010).

---Marcus Miller and Alex Han, "Claptrap" (2010).

--- Karsh Kale, with Gaurav Raina (from Midival Punditz) and others, "Milan" (live, 2006).

---Yoshida Brothers, "Rising" (2008)

---Thomas Pridgen, drum solo (2008)

---Medeski, Scofield, Martin & Wood, "A Go Go" (2007)

---Anoushka Shankar, with Javier Limon and Sandra Carrasco, "Inside Me" (2011)

Remembering Helen Frankenthaler

2012-01-01T09:06:00.000-08:00

Lobster & Canary welcomes the new year by celebrating the work of Helen Frankenthaler, who died December 27th at age 83. For an especially insightful obituary, click here for Lance Esplund's "Frankenthaler Bridged Genres, Created Worlds of Burning Color"; and click here for the write-up, with slide show, in the New York Times.

May her visionary use of color and her inspired wanderings with form continue to nurture our spirits in the new year.

Melora Griffis at 571 Projects

2011-12-11T08:39:00.000-08:00

--Melora Griffis, empty room (2010; acrylic, gouache, pastel on paper).

--Griffis, blue sun (2010; acrylic, gouache, pastel on paper).

In mid-November, the Lobster & Canary made our first visit to 571 Projects, a beautiful small art gallery in NYC's Chelsea founded by Sophie Brechu-West two years ago ("571" refers to the gallery's square footage). We were rewarded with a gem of a show: wings and murmurs, paintings by New York artist Melora Griffis.

Griffis's work has great narrative power, stories emerging from depths below the carefully muted surfaces, and spurred by the enigmatic shapes and figures (many half-rendered, or veiled) the painter places on the canvas. The overall effects are of restraint and solemnity, possibly remonstrance and mourning, overlaid with spectral uncertainty and a sense of things perceived rather than formally witnessed (fittingly, one of Griffis's paintings is titled unsichtbar, which is German for "invisible, unseen, hidden"). Griffis works small wonders with her chalky/milky backgrounds supporting flares of subtle, slightly slurred color. She calls to mind Pousette-Dart's mostly white paintings, the pale mysterious abstractions of Adele Sypesteyn, the finely calibrated gestures on corrugated white done by Saul Fletcher. Her eerie personages recall those of Ensor, and --while her style differs often substantially from each of the following--the tone is similar to those suffusing Marsden Hartley, Johns, Bonnard, Rauschenberg, Gorky, Tamayo, and O'Keefe.

--Griffis, schlossgespenst (2010; oil on linen)

571 Projects is an arts space to watch, a welcome newcomer to the Chelsea scene. The warmly dynamic Brechu-West has a sharp eye, and a strong sense of how the space interacts with and supports the artwork, how the space becomes a part of the overall aesthetic experience. She chose the locale for-- among other things-- its large windows with their unobstructed views of Chelsea Piers, so that the rays of the afternoon sun and of the sunset play a role in how viewers see the art.

Brechu-West is also willing to cross disciplinary boundaries. As an example of the latter drive, 571 Projects hosted a talk last week by Griffis along with three poets-- Betty Harmon, Alystyre Julian, and Shelly Stenhouse--reading poetry inspired by Griffis's displayed work. Alas, the Lobster & Canary could not attend the event, but we love the concept and look forward to more such salons at 571 Projects.

Visit 571 Projects. For more information, click here.

The Freedom Maze, by Delia Sherman

2011-11-27T05:00:00.000-08:00

Lobster & Canary was at the November 22nd book launch party at The Center for Fiction (NYC) for Delia Sherman's The Freedom Maze (published by Small Beer Press's Big Mouth House imprint).

We have not yet finished the book, but it promises to be one of the best for 2011. (Don't just take our word on that: Kirkus Reviews has already selected The Freedom Maze as a best children's book of the year, and strongly positive advance reviews are in from--among others-- Alaya Dawn Johnson, Gregory Maguire, Cory Doctorow, Holly Black, N.K. Jemisin, Jane Yolen, Nisi Shawl and Terri Windling).
It's a time-travel story with some great twists. It provides us with a set of powerful lenses through which to explore, imagine and think about race and gender-- in the antebellum South and as that period continues to impact the present day.

Here's the synopsis Small Beer supplies (you can download the first chapter at the Small Beer site by clicking here):

"Set against the burgeoning Civil Rights movement of the 1960s, and then just before the outbreak of the Civil War, The Freedom Maze explores both political and personal liberation, and how the two intertwine.

In 1960, thirteen-year-old Sophie isn’t happy about spending summer at her grandmother’s old house in the Bayou. But the house has a maze Sophie can’t resist exploring once she finds it has a secretive and playful inhabitant.

When Sophie, bored and lonely, makes an impulsive wish inspired by her reading, hoping for a fantasy adventure of her own, she slips one hundred years into the past, to the year 1860. On her arrival she makes her way, bedraggled and tanned, to what will one day be her grandmother’s house, where she is at once mistaken for a slave."

You can read more about Delia at her site by clicking here.

Shahzia Sikander & Du Yun at Sikkema Jenkins

2011-11-13T05:34:00.000-08:00

Shahzia Sikander's current show at Sikkema, Jenkins (in NYC's Chelsea) includes a 10-minute animated video projected on a large wall, entitled Last Post, with accompanying music by Du Yun.

The animation is kaleidoscopic, constantly changing, with forms collapsing and fragmenting, colors shifting, ghostly calligraphy floating in the background. The main character is an English East India Company officer, at first stolidly implanted within the world of a Mughal miniature painting, then balancing precariously and ultimately dissolving. Jewel-like shapes detach themselves, become floating corpuscles--to our eye the opium derived from the poppy and shipped from India to China in the 19th century.

The music is perfectly suited to the images; one is lured into the viewing room-- which is separate from the large, open main gallery-- by the deep, melancholy themes. Together, moving images & flowing music, tell a story of transcultural exchange, of disparities in power and unbalanced power, of decay and renewal.

Above all, Sikander (trained at the National College of Arts, Lahore before moving to RISD, and living now in NYC) and Yun (trained at the Shanghai Conservatory before moving to Oberlin and Harvard, and living now in NYC) are superb at re-contextualizing traditional forms and at mixing different genres without resorting to pastiche or the lowest common denominator. In this, they remind Lobster & Canary of Yinka Shonibare and of Kehinde Wiley, artists who are in the vanguard of our emerging globalized world, knitting us together while retaining the granular, organic individuality of each of us and the authenticity of our constituent local cultures.

As Sikander puts it in an artist statement on the Sikkema, Jenkins site:

"I find the terminology and the referencing of work in terms of an east and west paradigm, simplistic and dated. It robs the work of all nuances in meaning. In fact these days the world is small and one should really consider work in terms of some sort of global context of ideas. Work I believe should stand on its own, irrespective of geography."

For more Sikander, click here and click here (a filmed conversation between Sikander and MoMA director Glenn Lowry).

For more Du Yun, click here (scroll far down on the right-hand side to check out her list of influences!).

Berman, Delany, Hairston, Hernandez, Johnson & Kushner at The Center for Fiction (NYC): Celebrating Le Guin

2011-11-06T01:48:00.000-07:00

Last month The Center for Fiction in midtown Manhattan presented a reading series as part of the NEA's Big Read (in partnership with Arts Midwest) celebrating Ursula K. Le Guin's A Wizard of Earthsea. (The Center is an elegant haven for books and book-lovers in the midst of Manhattan's roar and hustle, reminding Lobster & Canary of the wizard's school on the island of Roke in Le Guin's Earthsea; visit the Center, support the Center.) Click here and here for information on the entire series. Lobster & Canary was in the audience October 24th for one of the panels: "Outsiders In/Of Science Fiction and the Fantastic," moderated by Ellen Kushner, and featuring Steve Berman, Samuel R. Delany, Andrea Hairston, Carlos Hernandez, and Alaya Dawn Johnson.

The panel was everything such an event should be, i.e., a warm, smart and authentic conversation both among the panelists and with audience members, deftly moderated; a lively give-&-take, laced with inclusive humor.

Kushner launched the discussion by asking whether speculative fiction is inherently an "outsider genre." Lobster & Canary is happy to report that we could not discern a clear consensus among the many and quickening responses (what a dull panel it would have been had a consensus emerged). The garden simply has too many blooms--as Le Guin notes in her essay collection, Cheek by Jowl (referenced by Hairston on the panel), fantasy is necessarily about "reinventing the world of intense, unreproducible, local knowledge" as a way to deny or refute simplistic conclusions, false unanimity and soul-flattening homogenization.

Or perhaps there was agreement that spec fic is intrinsically outsider art but the panel was eager to move on to two other (related) questions:

* Is spec fic friendly to writers other than straight white males (corollary: friendlier than other genres)?

* Is the boundary between speculative fiction and other forms of fiction (what Delany called here "Big Lit") clear, hierarchical and fenced?

Not surprisingly, opinions varied on both themes. Responses were thoughtful and nuanced inside their "yes but..." and "maybe, sometimes" wrappers. Le Guin was the stalking horse throughout, The Left Hand of Darkness and The Lathe of Heaven referred to as much as or more than The Wizard of Earthsea, the critical essayist of "From Elfland to Poughkeepsie" and The Wave in the Mind as honored as the novelist.

A few flowers from the garden:

Berman suggested that the speculative elements in a story are akin to the tools a carpenter uses, that speculation is not present merely as either ornamentation or an end in itself, but as a means to address deeper societal issues.

Hairston spoke of spec fic as writing in the subjunctive, the "what might be." She interleaved that concept with the drive to identify and then recover what we have lost, the right and need to imagine worlds when "the film stock has dissolved" in ours. She also reminded us that, even with super powers, there is no guarantee that one will be able to change the world-- spec fic is not simple escapism or wish fulfillment.

Johnson emphasized the playful use of spec fic to "twist the world," to see what the twisting reveals about how we live today, and how we might live otherwise now or in the future.

Johnson also highlighted (citing David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas as an example) that the boundaries between speculative fiction and the other kind appear to be getting more porous, as genre fiction experiments with literary techniques and mainstream fiction adopts speculative tropes.

Delany took a less sanguine view, arguing that the border is very real and patrolled by power brokers who only now and then allow, say, a Vonnegut up and through. He used Sturgeon as the counter-example of a great writer who has gone unheralded by "Big Lit."

Hernandez turned the map inside out, leaving the border police ineffectively guarding checkpoints that no longer matter, by saying all fiction is speculative--it is just that self-proclaimed spec fic writers are more honest about what they are up to.

The fact that The Center for Fiction hosted the Le Guin series suggests that the borders may be fairly open, or at least that visas are no longer necessary. (But see the P.S. to this entry). The panel discussed Nabokov, Flaubert and Morrison along side Russ, Disch, and of course Le Guin.

Lobster & Canary regrets only that we were unable to attend the other panels and readings in the series!

P.S. Then again, perhaps Delany is right to be skeptical of claims about genuine understanding and rapprochement between Spec Lit and Big Lit. Four days after this panel, Glen Duncan opened his review of Colson Whitehead's Zone One in The New York Times Book Review this way: "A literary novelist writing a genre novel is like an intellectual dating a porn star. It invites forgivable prurience: What is that relationship like? Granted the intellectual’s hit hanky-panky pay dirt, but what’s in it for the porn star? Conversation? Ideas? Deconstruction?" *Sigh*

Toronto SpecFic Colloquium: Modern Mythologies

2011-10-23T06:28:00.000-07:00

The Lobster and Canary hugely enjoyed participating in the Toronto SpecFic Colloquium on October 15th. Toronto has deep roots in speculative fiction and a robust specfic scene (it is no surprise that Toronto will host next year's World Fantasy Convention)--all of which were on display at the Colloquium.

Sandra Kasturi and Helen Marshall of Chizine Publications did a superb job organizing the event (full disclosure: CZP publishes my work, but truly I would say this even if I were published elsewhere). Other sponsors included Toronto's leading comix/ graphic novels store, The Beguiling, and Toronto's specialty science fiction/ fantasy/ horror bookstore Bakka Phoenix, plus the specfic magazine Ideomancer and poetry small press Kelp Queen.

For details, click here. A short summary:

Guest of honor Mike Carey -- author of the Felix Castor novels, of X-Men, Hellblazer, Lucifer, the graphic novelization of Gaiman's Neverwhere, and many other good thing--delivered an elegant, thought-provoking, very well received keynote address entitled " 'Speak of the Dazzling Wings': Myth, Language, and Modern Fantasy," on how metaphor works for and sometimes against intended meaning in fiction generally. I cannot do justice to the address here--I urge Mike to get it published, so that our wider community can read and comment. Delivered with humor and without presumption, Mike's lecture spanned evolutionary biology (touching on Brian Boyd's On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition & Fiction), T.S. Eliot, hard-boiled detective novels, comic books, Owen Barfield (perhaps the least-remembered Inkling, whose Poetic Diction: A Study in Meaning from 1928 is steadily gaining more notice and adherents), and much, much more. Mike's central concepts derived from and played with the work of Wallace Stevens ("Speak of the Dazzling Wings" is the last line in the Stevens poem "Some Friends From Pascagoula").

Mike's performance was all the more impressive, since he must have been fairly massively jet-lagged: he and his wife Linda (who is herself an accomplished fantasy author, writing as A.J. Lake) had just stepped off the plane from London!

The Colloquium also featured (in no particular order): Hugo Award-winner Peter Watts demonstrating that none of us has free will and that there is no such thing as "reality" (one of those talks that reminds us of an intricate machine whose purpose is not fully understood, that may even be slightly sinister, yet lures us in for closer inspection-- against our will); Daniel Heath Justice providing an excellent overview of Native American specfic and scholarship on the same (I look forward to hearing more from and about Daniel, and likewise more about the many authors and scholars he summarized); a lively exchange on how writers use and re-use classical mythological themes, complete with readings from Shakespeare, Tennyson and Homer, between Lesley Livingston and Caitlin Sweet; a very interactive session on utopias and activism with Emily Pohl-Weary; and an insightful, spirited roundtable with booksellers and publishers on the state of the specfic field in commercial/market terms.

And, of course, the power of the gathering includes the many conversations struck up by and among participants. For instance, we were delighted to meet Diana Kolpak, whose just-released collaboration with photographer Kathleen Finlay, entitled Starfall, certainly intrigues.

The 2012 edition of the Toronto SpecFic Colloquium-- with World Fantasy Award winner Robert Shearman as GoH-- will be October 20th. Go get your tickets now.

Bureau and Thierry Goldberg on the Lower East Side; Mary Tompkins Lewis on Chardin

2011-10-10T05:19:00.000-07:00

Many of Lobster & Canary's favorite art galleries are in NYC's Chelsea, but we're excited by the blossoming of interesting new (or renewed) places on the Lower East Side. Two weeks ago (Sept. 25th entry) we looked at one of those-- the DODGEGallery--and today we will feature two more, both of which nestle in the midst of bustling neighborhoods, cheek by jowl with playgrounds, nondescript apartment buildings, houses of worship, laundromats, barber shops, bodegas and bars: Bureau, and the Thierry Goldberg Gallery.

Bureau is a tiny but well-curated space on Henry Street, currently showing Painted Bones--some reliquaries by Tom Holmes. Click here for more.

[untitled Program (feathers red yellow green blk), 2011]

Thierry Goldberg's space is on Norfolk Street, hard by the ramp to the Williamsburg Bridge. Equally crisp and inviting, the gallery is currently featuring various of its house artists (click here for more). We were especially taken by Marianne Vitale's Model for Torpedo (2011):

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Mary Tompkins Lewis, a professor of art history at Trinity College (Hartford, CT), is one of our most astute commentators on painting. In her occasional essays for The Wall Street Journal, she returns our gaze to iconic images from the Western tradition, and never fails to uncover a theme or element that we might have missed in earlier visitations-- she finds something new to say about that which we believed we knew intimately.

Her most recent essay, "A Monumental Moment" (WSJ, Oct. 8th-9th, 2011) is a good example of Lewis at her best, as she unpicks the meaning of Chardin's paradigmatic still life The Ray (1728).

Lewis on The Ray:

"We hardly notice, however, Chardin's studious balance of opposites—the crafted, manmade objects squared off against those of nature; one side carefully orchestrated, the other casually strewn—because our gaze is so riveted by the ghastly specter of the gutted ray fish that hangs from a meat hook on the wall. Butchered cartilage and bloodied entrails spill forth from its luminous, silvery flesh. A hideous, half-human "face" seems to grimace in our direction; drops of moisture glimmer on its sparkling but slimy surface. The painting, closer to 17th-century Spanish scenes of disemboweled martyrs than to the decorous tradition from which it emerged, rejects both the menial stature of still life (and by extension that of its artists) and its subject of conventional beauty to celebrate the painter's virtuoso touch."

The Spectral Beauty of Decay at Temple Court in Lower Manhattan

2011-10-02T07:14:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, as the sun set and rain fell intermittently, the lobster and the canary had a rare treat:

We got to visit the interior of the recently rediscovered Temple Court at 5 Beekman Street in lower Manhattan, just off Broadway by City Hall and across from the Woolworth Building-- a few blocks from the World Trade Center site. (A friend of ours is a wedding photographer who got permission to do a shoot yesterday in the now-famed building-- we tagged along).

Temple Court: a spectacularly gorgeous interior, now decayed after decades of abandonment, soon to be restored (plans are afoot to rehab the building as a luxury hotel). An oddity of life: beauty and romance hidden in plain sight. The lobster works very close to 5 Beekman, has walked past the building hundreds of times, and never paid it much mind. Until last year, no one paid the dilapidated hulk any attention, when suddenly a scene scout for films stumbled upon it. Click here for details, and for many pictures.

Built in 1881-1883 as one of the first nine-story buildings that marched up from Bowling Green (as NYC's commercial expansion drove the need for office space beyond the narrow confines of Wall Street and its immediate environs), 5 Beekman had 212 suites housing law firms, advertising and insurance companies. Above all, it had a glass-roofed central atrium, ornate iron grill work (some in the form of dragons), fireplaces, trapdoors for the hauling of safes, terra cotta and brick, colorful tiles on the floors.

The building began to shutter in the 1940s, and apparently wound down almost completely over the next decade. Today the interior is a ghostly, gaping place, with the names of long gone (indeed, long defunct) tenants etched palely on dusty glass. The walls are blotched and shadowed, the rooms empty except for echoes, the floors stippled with vague piles of refuse, oblique shards of light filter in from the panes far above.

Think of the Bradbury Building in Blade Runner.

Think of the decayed surfaces Rosamund Purcell captures in her photographs.

Here are photographs the lobster & canary took yesterday, to give you a sense of the layered mystery of Manhattan's Temple Court:

More on Lorna Williams at DODGEgallery

2011-09-25T11:05:00.000-07:00

A quick addendum to today's posting about Lorna Williams at DODGEgallery in NYC:

The gallery kindly supplied these two images of Williams pieces in the current show.

Please note that these images and the long view of the gallery in this morning's post are photographs by Carly Gaebe, courtesy of the artist and DODGEgallery.

Lorna Williams Weaves Space; Dafnis Prieto Flicks Time

2011-09-25T06:29:00.000-07:00

[Last week's post on feminist approaches to fairy tale and myth has been formally posted to the Toronto SpecFic Colloquium blog, with all the promised album cover images: click here to see them.]

Lorna Williams is an astonishing young talent, whose current exhibition Brown Baby is on display through October 2nd at Dodge Gallery (on Rivington Street in NYC's Lower East Side). The lobster & canary visited the exhibit last week, straying into Williams's world of plaited beings, assemblages of found wood and fetal bone, pendulous chains and bits of bead, of forms both comforting and disturbing (sometimes at the same time). Williams has an eye for the sinuous shape. Most interesting to us was the recurring theme of birth and becoming...but birth at best endured (seemingly not celebrated), and what becoming unto what?

Here are some views. Click the Dodge Gallery site for more.

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The lobster & canary were thrilled to learn that last week the MacArthur Foundation named the jazz drummer Dafnis Prieto as one of their "genius grant" award winners. We caught Prieto with his group a few years ago at the Jazz Standard in NYC and still marvel at his fluid dissection of time. Here he is-- possibly at the very concert we attended (we did not take this video, but it is from one of his Jazz Standard gigs)-- playing "New Elephant." Pay special attention to the rhythm change-up at c. 3 minutes, 10 seconds.

A Dragon of Their Own: Fairy Tale & Myth From a Feminist Perspective (With Guest Appearances by Janelle Monae, P.J. Harvey, Rachelle Ferrell, Cecile Corbel, Kate Bush, Loreena McKennitt, and Rihanna)

2011-09-18T09:07:00.000-07:00

Happy fall to you all, from the lobster & canary in NYC.

We are presenting at the Toronto SpecFic Colloquium next month. Here is the teaser the Colloquium organizers asked us to send to the event's blog:

A Dragon of Their Own: Fairy Tale & Myth From a Feminist Perspective
(With Guest Appearances by Janelle Monae, P.J. Harvey, Rachelle Ferrell, Cecile Corbel, Kate Bush, Loreena McKennitt, and Rihanna)

By Daniel A. Rabuzzi
drabuzzi@earthlink.net
http://lobsterandcanary.blogspot.com/

Preview of a larger discussion to be held at the Toronto SpecFic Colloquium, October 15th, 2011.

“Benedick: Well, you are a rare parrot-teacher.

Beatrice: A bird of my tongue is better
than a beast of yours.”

--- Much Ado About Nothing, (Act I, scene 1: lines 138-140), William Shakespeare, c. 1600.

Fairy tales, myth, legend and other traditional story genres have long provided women (almost universally it seems, though that hypothesis needs to be tested) with subtle and subversive vehicles for self-expression.

If men controlled and commanded the power of words in the front room—consider, for instance, the etymology of “parliament”—women crafted a contrapuntal commentary in the back room. The counterpoint continues to this day in modern speculative fiction, not least in the many explicitly feminist retellings of traditional tales of the marvelous. The power and appeal of the old stories as ways for women to contest male speech or to reshape discourse altogether seem undiminished (if anything, they may be growing). Most intriguing, woman-centered fairy tale themes and motifs thrive today not only in written form but influence, often strongly, popular music and the visual arts.

Since the 1960s, feminist and/or post-modernist scholars have studied vigorously and with great insight both the original fairy tales and myths of the world and literary adaptations of the same. See work by, for instance, Ruth Bottigheimer, Maria Tatar, Steven Swann Jones, Marina Warner, Cristina Bacchilegia, Kay Stone, Vanessa Joosen, Valerie Paradiz, Jack Zipes, Daryl Cumber Dance, Donald Haase, Helen Pilinovsky, Elizabeth Wanning Harries, Lewis Seifert, Marcelle Maistre Welch. (I will include a bibliography in my full-length SpecFic Colloquium paper). Their findings have become a core part of feminist theories of reading, poetics and literature generally, and have –somewhat more tentatively—been connected to the work of scholars exploring issues of race, ethnicity, colonialism and class. Among many others, see work by Sandra Gilbert & Susan Gubar, Elaine Showalter, Patricia Meyer Spacks, Oyeronke Oyewumi, Valerie Lee, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Susan Sellers, Toi Derricotte, Sheila Rowbotham, Cheryl Wall, Margaret Ezell, Beverly Guy-Sheftall.

Over the past few decades, writers of many stripes have continued to revise and re-fashion fairy tales (and/or folkloric elements more generally) to make feminist points, in a project that goes back at least to Marie-Jeanne Lheritier de Villandon’s “Les Enchantements de l’eloquence” and Madame d’Aulnoy’s Histoire d’Hypolite in the 1690s. To name a handful from a long list:

Nalo Hopkinson, Sonya Taaffe, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, A.S. Byatt, Jane Yolen, Midori Snyder, Ursula K. Le Guin, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Tanith Lee, Angela Carter, Terri Windling, Kate Bernheimer, Theodora Goss, Joan Aiken, Virginia Hamilton, Robin McKinley, Ellen Kushner, Cat Valente, Margaret Atwood, Emma Donoghue, Erzebet YellowBoy, Nnedi Okorafor, Patricia McKillip, Malinda Lo, Theodora Goss, Bharati Mukherjee, Jeanette Winterson, Delia Sherman, Helen Oyeyemi, Gail Carson Levine, and Margo Lanagan.

Even when folklore or fairy tale do not frame or focus a modern work of fiction, themes from folkloric traditions crop up in “mainstream” works more frequently than is sometimes acknowledged. Toni Morrison’s work comes to mind, and that of Dacia Maraini, to name just two. Modern poetry is also full of fairy tale references, even that published far from the usual fantasy genre outposts.

“Imaginary gardens with real toads in them” fascinate so much that a growing number of journals and sites devote themselves to the sub-genres: The Endicott Studio for Mythic Arts (founded 1987), SurLaLune Fairy Tales (1998), Cabinet des Fees (2005), Fairy Tale Review (2005), Goblin Fruit (2006), Enchanted Conversation (2010). And then there are the anthologies, above all the Windling & Ellen Datlow series begun in 1993 with Snow White, Blood Red.

At the SpecFic Colloquium we will talk about the resurgent interest in fairy tale and myth, specfically the desire to write and read them “against the grain.” I particularly want to learn more about traditions other than the various European ones and about current literary practice that is not Eurocentric.

Most of all: I want to explore how the renewed excitement for fairy tales-- and especially the subversive elements of fairy tales (pace fans of Disney)—has spread into other popular media, in particular music. Just as women have (re)shaped the fairy tale canon on the page over the past several centuries, they appear to be doing the same in the musical realm.

Male composers have freely used motifs from fairy tales and myths to create some of the dominant pieces in the Western canon. Think of Mozart’s The Magic Flute, Haydn’s The Fishwives and The World on the Moon, Mahler’s Wunderhorn sequence, Maeterlinck’s The Blue Bird and Princess Maleine, Stravinsky’s The Firebird, and—towering over them all in its attempt to produce a Gesamtkunstwerk, a myth updated to encompass and overwhelm all other works—Wagner’s Ring.

In the past few decades, female musicians have been (re)claiming those themes, reworking them into works of their own, often in opposition to the dominant male canon, sometimes (most subversive of all!) indifferent to the male perspective—creating music that is not defined or definable in terms of male categories.

Working in and around a wide variety of musical forms, and with a wide sweep of perspectives, the following artists nevertheless appear to share an underlying approach in terms of deploying fairy tale and mythic motifs in their music: Angelique Kidjo, Bjork, Missy Elliott, Grace Jones, Enya, Tori Amos, Annie Lennox, Sarah McLachlan, Rihanna, Kimberly Perry, Mediaeval Baebes, Alison Krauss, The Dixie Chicks, Anoushka Shankar, Goldfrapp. Yes, an idiosyncratic list...very far from complete...and begging to be queried and to be added to!

Surely one major impulse came from the British Neo-Folk movement of the ‘60s and ‘70s, led by Sandy Denny of Fairport Convention, Annie Haslam of Renaissance, and Maddy Prior of Steeleye Span. Stevie Nicks further propelled Faerie onto the concert stage and into popular music (and I think Diana Ross, Chaka Khan and Patti LaBelle did the same, each in her own inimitable style). Sometimes the fairy tale overlay is explicit, self-referential even, as with many of those working the (all too often twee) Celtic Twilight angle. Othertimes it is less self-conscious, and more oblique.

I will end this teaser with album cover images [Lobster says: For some reason, I am having trouble porting these into the L & C blog, so will point to the SpecFic blog when this essay is posted] to bolster my suggestion about the inroads of fairy tale into modern pop music—and to spark the conversation when we meet in Toronto in October.

See you there and then!

Fall Arts Preview in NYC: Neely, Ventura, Holmes, and More

2011-09-11T06:31:00.001-07:00

The fall arts season has begun here in New York City: the usual horn of plenty spilling out its wonders, far more offerings than any one of us could see!

Some shows the lobster & canary have their eyes on:

--- Anne Neely, Aglow (2011)

The Neely show at Lohin Geduld in Chelsea. Judging from the gallery website, this is a series of luminous landscapes, drawing one into enchantment. (See our November 25, 2010 entry for our last review of a Lohin Geduld exhibition, the Laura Battle show).

--- Tom Holmes, untitled Program (feathers red yellow green blk) (2011)

The Holmes show at Bureau on Henry Street (Lower East Side), entitled Painted Bones-Some Reliquaries. The title alone draws us.

--- Jackie Saccoccio, Left Portrait (2011)

Saccoccio, with Andrew Gbur and Keltie Ferris, at Eleven Rivington (LES).

--- Paolo Ventura, Behind the Walls #3 (2011)

The amazing Ventura, once again at Hasted Kraeutler in Chelsea (we reviewed his last show there, Winter Stories, in January 2010). This one is called The Automaton of Venice, and we are already immersed in his miniature fantasy world...which brings to mind Benjamin's Passagenwerke, the labyrinths of Borges, the languid melancholia of Zweig, the wanderings of Sebald.

--- Sarah Walker, Masses and Forces (2010)

Walker, with fellow abstract painters Douglas Melini and Gary Petersen, at McKenzie Fine Art in Chelsea (whose shows we have described on several occasions). Explorations of geometry compressed, tangled and skewed.

Just a few leaves in a forest! Plus, of course, all the coming attractions at the museums, e.g., the Ingres show at the Morgan, the Goddess/Mother in Indian painting at the Metropolitan, the Spirals show at the Studio Museum in Harlem (the Norman Lewis paintings look particularly intriguing), and others.

Fall Arts Preview in NYC: Neely, Ventura, Holmes, and More

2011-09-11T06:28:00.000-07:00

--- Tom Holmes, untitled Program (feathers red yellow green blk) (2011)

The Holmes show at Bureau on Henry Street (Lower East Side), entitled Painted Bones-Some Reliquaries. The title alone draws us.

--- Jackie Saccoccio, Left Portrait (2011)

Saccoccio, with Andrew Gbur and Keltie Ferris, at Eleven Rivington (LES).

--- Paolo Ventura, Behind the Walls #3 (2011)

The amazing Ventura, once again at Hasted Kraeutler in Chelsea (we reviewed his last show there, Winter Stories, in January 2010). This one is called The Automaton of Venice, and we are already immersed in his miniature fantasy world...which brings to mind Benjamin's Passagenwerke, the labyrinths of Borges, the languid melancholia of Zweig, the wanderings of Sebald.

--- Sarah Walker, Masses and Forces (2010)

Walker, with fellow abstract painters Douglas Melini and Gary Petersen, at McKenzie Fine Art in Chelsea (whose shows we have described on several occasions). Explorations of geometry compressed, tangled and skewed.

Just a few leaves in a forest! Plus, of course, all the coming attractions at the museums, e.g., the Ingres show at the Morgan, the Goddess/Mother in Indian painting at the Metropolitan, the Spirals show at the Studio Museum in Harlem (the Norman Lewis paintings look particularly intriguing), and others.

Toronto SpecFic Colloquium (Mike Carey is Keynoting)

2011-09-06T15:41:00.000-07:00

The lobster and the canary apologize to all patient readers for the long hiatus; we were taking a rest during August, but are back now.

We are excited about the Toronto SpecFic Colloquium on October 15th (full disclosure: we are one of the guest speakers there). A newcomer to the scene-- this being its second year--the Toronto SpecFic Colloquium is set to become a "must attend" on the circuit, a great companion piece to gatherings in the Northeast/Middle Atlantic such as Readercon, Arisia, and Capclave.

As their website notes:

"The Toronto SpecFic Colloquium is a one-day event featuring a series of lectures, readings and discussions from major authors and industry professionals."

This year's keynoter is Mike Carey, the graphic novelist, whose talk is entitled "Speak of the Dazzling Wings": Myth, Language, and Modern Fantasy.

We'll be writing more about the Colloquium over the next few weeks. In the meantime, learn more by clicking here.

Better yet, why not come to Toronto and attend in person?

With Eyes Like a Lynx: Using Computers to See The Otherwise Hidden

2011-08-07T08:56:00.000-07:00

We love the ever-expanding use of digital tools, especially in the arts and humanities. Not only for what we learn about specific artists, aesthetics and audiences, but because using computers to analyze arts and letters helps us bridge the (artificial) divide between the Arts and the Sciences.

Bits and bytes are helping us reunite the Two Cultures of the 20th century, bringing us back to the integrated, holistic approach that existed at least until the early 19th century (yes, speaking here of Western learning and the so-called common era; Lobster & Canary is always curious to know more about how other traditions of inquiry have contemplated the issues discussed here). Echoes of the days when a Goethe focused on optics and color theory as much as poetry, when a Humphry Davy and an Erasmus Darwin expressed their chemical and biological findings in poetry, when a Shelley and his Romantic peers made technology and science the serious object of their poetry.

Back to the Lunar Society of Birmingham, and to Diderot and the Encyclopedistes in the 18th century!

Back, back to the Lincean Academy in 17th-century Rome, and the Dutch and German polymaths of that same era!

Back, back, back to Da Vinci, Alberti, and Aldus Manutius!

Two areas of computer-aided inquiry particularly intrigue us:

* Image analysis: Taking the venerable techniques of connoisseurship to new levels, computer scientists have recently put forth interesting hypotheses on image identification and artistic affinities.

For instance (chosen more or less at random from among many possible examples), here is the opening to "Image Processing for Artist Identification; Computerized Analysis of Vincent van Gogh's Brushstrokes" by C. Richard Johnson jr. et al. (IEEE Signal Processing Magazine, July 2008):

"As image data acquisition technology has advanced in the past decade, museums have
routinely begun to assemble vast digital libraries of images of their collections. The
cross-disciplinary interaction of image analysis researchers and art historians has reached a stage where technology developers can focus on image analysis tasks supportive of the art historian’s mission of painting analysis in addition to activities in image acquisition, storage, and database search. In particular, the problem of artist identification seems ripe for the use of image processing tools. In making an attribution, experts often use not only
current knowledge of the artist’s common practices, in combination with meticulous comparisons of a variety of technical data (acquired, e.g., through ultraviolet fluorescence, infrared reflectography, x-radiography, paint sampling, and/or canvas weave count ), but they also include a visual assessment of the presence of the artist’s “handwriting” in the brushwork. This suggests that mathematical analysis of a painting’s digital representation could assist the art expert in the process of attribution."

(For more, click here.)

* Textual analysis: Humanists of all stripes were among the first to see the benefits of digital tools, for everything from raw set-construction and recurrence compilation to sophisticated pattern recognition.

The journal Literary & Linguistic Computing is a good gateway. Here you find articles like these:

"Constructing readings of damaged and abraded ancient documents is a difficult, complex, and a time-consuming task. It frequently involves reference to a variety of linguistic and archaeological datasets and the integration of previous knowledge of similar documentary material. Due to the involved and lengthy reading process, it is often difficult to record and recall how the final interpretation of the document was reached and which competing hypotheses were presented, adopted, or discarded in the process of reading. This article discusses the development of the application called DUGA, which uses Decision Support System (DSS) technology to aid the day-to-day reading of damaged documents. Such an application will facilitate the process of transcribing texts by providing a framework in which scholars can record, track, and trace their progress. DUGA will include a word search facility of external resources such as the Vindolanda ink tablets through the knowledge base Web Service called APPELLO. This functionality will support the scholars through their reading process by suggesting words, which may confirm current interpretations or inspire new ones. Furthermore, DUGA will allow continuity between working sessions, and the complete documentation of the reading process, that has hitherto been implicit in published editions." [Abstract for "Towards a decision support system for reading ancient documents," by Henriette Roued-Cunliffe, in the December, 2010 issue].

"The use of corpus material and methods represents a major methodological innovation in Chinese historical linguistics. The very exciting findings uncovered in this article may be seen as the first systematic large-scale investigation of the various morpho-syntactic patterns underpinning the evolution of Chinese lexis. In this article, we have made a ground-breaking investigation into the diverse lexical modes and patterns which have emerged and developed in each major period in Chinese history, in which the generation of corpus linguistic data and the subsequent computational statistical modelling have been essential." [Abstract of "A corpus-based study of lexical periodization in historical Chinese,' by Meng Ji, in June, 2010 issue].

"This article provides quantitative evidence for a hypothesis concerning fourth-century translations of Indian Buddhist texts from Prakrit and Sanskrit into Chinese. Using a Variable Length n-Gram Feature Extraction Algorithm, principal component analysis and average linkage clustering we are able to show that 24 sutras, attributed by the tradition to different translators, were in fact translated by the same translator or group of translators. Since part of our method is based on assigning weight to n-grams, the analysis is capable of yielding distinctive features, i.e. strings of Chinese characters, that are characteristic of the translator(s). This is the first time that these techniques have successfully been applied to medieval Chinese texts. The results of this study open up a number of new directions for the lexicographic and syntactic study of early Chinese translations of Buddhist texts." [Abstract for "Quantitative evidence for a hypothesis regarding the attribution of early Buddhist translations, " by Jen-Jou Hung, Marcus Bingenheimer and Simon Wiles, in April, 2010 issue}.

For more from Literary & Linguistic Computing, click here.

Hobbits in Fiscal-Land (And a Nod to Daniel Abraham)

2011-07-31T04:55:00.000-07:00

Middle Earth found itself embroiled this week in the American debt ceiling and budget negotiations, as the Wall Street Journal labeled the Tea Partiers "debt-limit hobbits." Senator McCain quoted at length from the WSJ editorial on Wednesday, sparking a series of Tolkien-inspired retorts from the Tea Party (among others, Senator Rand Paul said he would rather be a hobbit than a troll) and commentary from Stewart and Colbert, all of which led the WSJ to editorialize again yesterday about hobbits as relating to the current financial debate.

Two thoughts come to mind, one particular, one general:

* To the extent that there is a tea party and an extremely urgent time limit, and a set of definitions, principles and posturings that seem to hail from the other side of the looking glass, I think we are in the adventures of Alice rather than those of Frodo & Sam.

* Middle Earth, and very nearly all other worlds created within speculative fiction, is curiously devoid of financial elements. In most fantasy worlds-- no matter how gritty and real-- the economy is primitive, formal economic principles unstated or unknown, the study of economics non-existent or, at best, ill-defined. Middle Earth is seemingly a cash-&-carry place, without fiscal policy or possibly any taxation whatsoever-- these matters simply do not rise to the level of importance held by, say, rings of power, the flight of the elves, and the return of the king. Dragons and dwarves make terrible bankers, being content to hoard without circulating wealth, let alone extend credit. (Smaug's reaction to a withdrawal from his accumulated riches is not one intended to gain him a commercial franchise). For the most part, "the merchant" is a stock figure in fantasy, especially of the swords-&-sorcery variety, but the mechanics of wealth creation, of investment, risk, innovation, return, etc. find no foothold in the genre.

All of which is a pity because the genre would benefit from including economic and financial aspects in the plot and in the development of characters. The majority of generic fantasy worlds are modeled on medieval Europe... yet, by 1200 western Europe had built a sophisticated economy based on technological gain, division of labor, local markets, long-distance trade, nuanced and voluminous banking networks, and emerging states increasingly successful in gathering tax and creating currency. The sophistication is even greater in the medieval Islamic world and in the Chinese Empire.

(A wonderful exception to genre fantasy's economics blindspot: Daniel Abraham, whose Long Price quartet and The Dragon's Path make the workings of trade and finance integral to the plot; he has clearly studied Renaissance Italian banking and merchanting, and put what he learned to very good use.)

So, if by "hobbit" the Wall Street Journal and Senator McCain mean "economic know-nothings", the appellation is pretty close to the mark. It remains to be seen if other hobbitish traits are in evidence as well, for instance, the hobbits' great common sense and pragmatic nature, and -- above all-- their deep caring for one another, especially in times of dearth. The hobbits triumphed, not because they sought or wielded great power, but because they took pains to care for their little Elanors and their Old Tooks. In the end, their larders are full and they have in their dwellings items worth more-- as Gandalf says to Thorin Oakenshield--than those in the halls of some dwarves.

Rod Serling in Ithaca; Phantasmaphile Covers Vienna; The Cascadian Subduction Zone, and Sundry Other Good Things

2011-07-24T07:20:00.000-07:00

We're melting like votive candles here in New York City, smothered by record-setting heat and humidity along with the rest of the Northeast. Too hot and exhausted to think original thoughts, the lobster and the canary will instead find refuge in the cool ideas of others.

Some recent good things that have landed in our mailbox:

* The Rod Serling Conference at Ithaca College (NY): Elena Pizarro writes to announce that this year's conference takes place September 9-10. Serling taught at Ithaca College 1967-1975; the college houses his archives. Click here for more information.

* Valerie McKenzie sends her gallery's summer newsletter (McKenzie Fine Art is on W. 25th in Manhattan). She represents some very interesting, and underrated, artists- I especially love Jim Dingilian's spectral etchings inside bottles ("Hiding Places: Memory in Art"). Click here for more.

* Pam Grossman is always cutting-edge! On her blog Phantasmaphile she finds the most interesting art with a baroque, occult and fabulistic mentality. Recently she noted the opening of the Phantasten Museum in Vienna ("visionary art/ fantastic realism/ surrealism")-- like her, Lobster & Canary want to go! For more, click here and here.

* The Boston Review's latest is out. The BR offers, besides its incisive political and investigative reporting, some of the best fiction anywhere. (With Junot Diaz as their fiction editor, how could they not?) Among other things, they published NoViolet Bulawayo's Caine Prize-winning short story last year. Click here for more.

* Aqueduct Press has launched The Cascadian Subduction Zone: A Literary Quarterly-- the third issue just arrived, and it continues this newcomer's strong debut. Kristin King's feature essay "Can Science Fiction Change the World?" should prompt thoughtful debate. Also, many good book reviews, plus suitably strange artwork by "Mr. Mead." Check it out here.

* Charity Shumway writes to announce the launch of an urban gardening & cookery site, Spade & Spatula ("growing and cooking in the city"). Great quick recipes, anecdotes, and luscious photographs of tomatoes, flowers, pie, vases... Makes us hungry for brunch. Check it out here.

* The Academy of American Poets July newsletter includes a provocative interview with Kenneth Goldsmith, who says (among other things): "The best thing about conceptual poetry is that it doesn't need to be read. You don't have to read it. As a matter of fact, you can write books, and you don't even have to read them." Click here for more.

* Omnidawn's blog continues to share generously of their writers' work. Most recently I have been struck by Christine Hume's "Self-Stalked," which starts this way: "I looked in all eight directions then spread out my tiger’s skin. Before the public mind kicked in, I surveyed an inner shore. Its facets operated on me. I lost my lights and began my midnight thus: mental feet, mental lake, little mental pines, mental mile around the muzzle." And also Aaron Shurin's "Bruja," which opens: "Alcove of the shade tree, under which they neck and whisper… and gather their tribe. She stencils the tilt of their heads from her perch on the iron bench, their dreamy eyes and smiles. Migrating neurons: It’s as if a baton streaking the air laid them bodily onto her page…" Click here for more.

* The Pedestal Magazine's June issue features speculative poetry selected by Marge Simon and Bruce Boston, and a range of other good items. I particularly liked Steven Peck's "The Complete Text of the First Ten Volumes of Dr. Fleckwain’s Very, Very Short Steampunk Novels," and JoSelle Vanderhooft's review of God's Optimism by Yehoshua November. Vanderhooft: "This near-mystical belief in the goodness of God, God’s love, and the worthiness of human life reflect the optimism that underpins this all-too-small collection, whether its contents deal with joy or sorrow, divinity or earthliness, the spiritual or the secular. In most cases, these poems incorporate all of the above simultaneously. For these are poems about what it means to dwell in an imperfect and painful world that is nonetheless touched by the divine—or, as November said in a recent interview with The Jewish Week when explaining a teaching of the kabala, a Jewish mystical text: 'God created the world because he wanted to dwell in the lowest realm, our realm.' Thus, the most intensely spiritual moments in God’s Optimism delineate not grandiose gestures or Technicolor visions, but quiet encounters, as sharp as a needle and often unexpected." Well said! Click here for more... and then stay cool in the heatwave.

Harry Potter Lives!

2011-07-17T03:22:00.000-07:00

We saw the final Potter movie last night, and were as moved, thrilled and delighted by it as we were by the previous films and all the books.

Rowling has given us all a powerful gift, one added to by the various film directors and cinematic technologists who realized her world and the acting corps that interpreted her characters. (Surely Rickman is Snape and Smith is McGonagall, just as McKellen is Gandalf.) As Morgenstern put it in the Wall Street Journal, this one is Harry Potter and the Fantastic Finale.

Several quick thoughts about the appeal of the series, both on paper and on screen:

* Rowling understands that the fantastic is not merely about "special effects" and weirdness for its own sake. The heart of the matter is the strange magic of the Ordinary, and especially the ability of Ordinary People to tell Right from Wrong, and to overcome their own fears and weaknesses on the way to doing what is Right. Rowling loves her wizards but she loves her Muggles most of all (or rather, the Muggle qualities that her good wizards possess), just as Tolkien held his hobbits above the elves, the kings and the wizards. Pullman builds his neo-Miltonian epic on this concept as well. The theme suffuses Dickens and Chesterton, Hardy, Greene, Orwell. Rowling's world is deeply demotic, full of common sense, hard work, goofy and irreverent humor, optimism (tempered by the realization that suffering is inevitable), and the enduring sinews of love and friendship that defeat and transcend the inequities of power and those who seek it.

* The scenes of Harry's parents sacrificing themselves for him, and of the Weasleys as a family defying all comers-- in that slightly bumbling, cup-of-tea Weasley way, a bit vague at the start but ultimately decisive--are highlights in the film, as they are throughout the books. I choked up at the scene in the movie (okay, I cried here in the book too) where the shades of Lilly, James, Remus and Sirius reassure Harry that they are always with him, living on in his heart and to the end.

* If I have one complaint, it is that the films shunt Ginny Weasley aside, focusing almost entirely on Harry, Ron and Hermione. Yet Ginny is willing to sacrifice herself for Harry, while I am never quite sure that Hermione would do the same for Ron (and sometimes it feels as if neither of the lads is truly prepared to die for their swain; for each other, yes, but not for the girls).

* Snape is one of the most complex characters ever to appear in the spec fic genre. I keep coming back to his hidden love for Lilly, the impulse that drives his actions all the way to his death. "Always," says Snape (in Rickman's deliberate tone) to Dumbledore.

* I keep thinking about the words Rowling puts in Dumbledore's mouth when he and Harry are reunited in the place that reminds Harry of King's Cross Station, i.e., during the respite in the battle with Voldemort. Words about language being true magic, the incantatory power of words themselves. Words about what is most real being those things within our heads. Rowling understands the deepest truth of Power, that it exists not in weapons or armor, not in turrets or crenellations, but in the wellsprings of imagination and the flow of language therefrom. And she has demonstrated this through the thousands of pages and hours of film that constitute the Potter mythos.

"Step into the sun, Step into the light"-- Gay Marriage Legalized in New York

2011-06-26T05:45:00.001-07:00

"You're out of the woods, You're out of the dark, You're out of the night.
Step into the sun, Step into the light.

Keep straight ahead for the most glorious place
On the Face of the Earth or the sky.
Hold onto your breath, Hold onto your heart, Hold onto your hope.
March up to the gate and bid it open."

"New York Allows Same-Sex Marriage, Becoming Largest State to Pass Law

By Nicholas Confessore and Michael Barbaro
Published: June 24, 2011. The New York Times

ALBANY — Lawmakers voted late Friday to legalize same-sex marriage, making New York the largest state where gay and lesbian couples will be able to wed and giving the national gay-rights movement new momentum from the state where it was born.

The marriage bill, whose fate was uncertain until moments before the vote, was approved 33 to 29 in a packed but hushed Senate chamber. Four members of the Republican majority joined all but one Democrat in the Senate in supporting the measure after an intense and emotional campaign aimed at the handful of lawmakers wrestling with a decision that divided their friends, their constituents and sometimes their own homes.

With his position still undeclared, Senator Mark J. Grisanti, a Republican from Buffalo who had sought office promising to oppose same-sex marriage, told his colleagues he had agonized for months before concluding he had been wrong.

“I apologize for those who feel offended,” Mr. Grisanti said, adding, “I cannot deny a person, a human being, a taxpayer, a worker, the people of my district and across this state, the State of New York, and those people who make this the great state that it is the same rights that I have with my wife.”

Senate approval was the final hurdle for the same-sex marriage legislation, which was approved last week by the Assembly. Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo signed the measure at 11:55 p.m., and the law will go into effect in 30 days, meaning that same-sex couples could begin marrying in New York by late July.

Passage of same-sex marriage here followed a daunting run of defeats in other states where voters barred same-sex marriage by legislative action, constitutional amendment or referendum. Just five states currently permit same-sex marriage: Connecticut, Iowa, Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Vermont, as well as the District of Columbia.

At around 10:30 p.m., moments after the vote was announced, Mr. Cuomo strode onto the Senate floor to wave at cheering supporters who had crowded into the galleries to watch. Trailed by two of his daughters, the governor greeted lawmakers, and paused to single out those Republicans who had defied the majority of their party to support the marriage bill.

“How do you feel?” he asked Senator James S. Alesi, a suburban Rochester Republican who voted against the measure in 2009 and was the first to break party ranks this year. “Feels good, doesn’t it?”

The approval of same-sex marriage represented a reversal of fortune for gay-rights advocates, who just two years ago suffered a humiliating defeat when a same-sex marriage bill was easily rejected by the Senate, which was then controlled by Democrats. This year, with the Senate controlled by Republicans, the odds against passage of same-sex marriage appeared long."

Color Coordinated

2011-06-19T05:13:00.000-07:00

[Hans Hoffman, Indian Summer, 1959]

[David Gates, Color Run Riot, set to "Invisible Colors" by Russ Malone, posted May, 2011]

"There is a surprising disconnect between what children seem to know about colors and numbers and what they actually know when tested," writes Melody Dye of Stanford University in the latest issue of Scientific American Mind ("Why Johnny Can't Name His Colors," SAM, May/June 2011, pg. 48). "Nailing down just what 'red' or 'three' means is a difficult hurdle in mastering language, and even older children sometimes slip up and reveal a less than expert grasp of the concept."

[Anish Kapoor, Dismemberment of Jeanne D'Arc, 2009]

Dye's research demonstrates that, even after hours of drilling, most two- and three-year-olds and children as old as six cannot identify colors accurately without contextual prompts. It appears that context is critical, which "may explain why children, across every language studied, invariably learn their nouns before their colors."

[Frank Stella, Hyena Stomp, 1962]

In English, color words may be especially tricksy because we tend to say "red balloon" rather than "the balloon that is red" (i.e., we typically use the adjective prenominally instead of postnominally). Order provides context: the brain must process the prenominal without the "hook" provided by the noun, so has a much wider spectrum of possible meanings to search. Using a postnominal construction helps "narrow 'red' to being an attribute of the balloon and not some general property of the world at large."

[Scarlet Tanager]

[Indigo Bunting]

Also, children tend to understand a color word used postnominally as a descriptor like "wet" or "sharp," whereas they see a color word used prenominally as being part of the object's name ("Indigo Bunting" versus "the bunting that is indigo").

[Yves Klein, his patented blue]

Dye's findings slot in with the provocative research on the linguistic classification of color perception sparked by Brent Berlin & Paul Kay's Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution (1969), and most recently updated with the 2009 publication of The World Color Survey (Kay et al.) Click here and here for more.

Revisiting Bordertown; Returning to the Shire

2011-06-12T05:52:00.000-07:00

The Way from the fields we know to the Border has re-opened: Holly Black and Ellen Kushner have edited a new volume of tales, poems and art from the Borderlands, Welcome to Bordertown (released last month by Random House).

Lobster & Canary was delighted this past Thursday evening to attend the NYC debut of the new collection, at Books of Wonder (an exceptionally appropriate venue; if you ever have a spare hour or three in the city, find your way to this Chelsea/Flatiron bookstore, which Lobster & Canary has known since its original site near Barrow & Hudson in the West Village). Kushner, Black, and co-authors Delia Sherman, Cory Doctorow, Alaya Dawn Johnson, and Annette Curtis Klause read to a large and appreciate audience, answered questions, and signed copies of the book. There was even a brilliant fiddler on hand-- Joe Kessler, a friend of Ellen's, a jack o' the green-- playing klezmer, bluegrass and other faerie reels, hints of the music along the Border.

We look forward to delving into the tome (a very generous 500-plus pages, all for just $20), whose authors are a Who's Who of speculative fiction, from bright new stars like Johnson, Cassandra Clare and Amal El-Mohtar (who presumably grew up with the original Bordertown stories) to established talents such as Kushner, Sherman, Doctorow, Neil Gaiman, Nalo Hopkinson, Jane Yolen, Patricia McKillip, Charles de Lint, Emma Bull, and Steven Brust. Christopher Barzak is here, Cat Valente, and Tim Pratt...and Terri Windling.

This is a reunion of Diana's tribe, Titania's court, our best modern-day druids...with wine in humble containers at Tompkins Square Park, over coffee at a diner on Queens Boulevard, in a tagged doorway on the Bowery. Somewhere Lord Dunsany and Hope Mirrlees are smiling.

*** *** ***

Meanwhile, in other news:

Unless you've been waylaid by goblins ("of the worst possible description") or trapped in conversation with Smaug ("it does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him"), you know that two weeks ago Warner Bros., New Line and MGM announced the release dates for the two Peter Jackson-directed films of The Hobbit: December, 2012 and December, 2013. Most of the cast from LOTR will be back, and shooting has begun on the WETA-designed sets in New Zealand.

Here is Jackson's first vlog of production on The Hobbit:

Remembering Gil Scott-Heron

2011-06-05T07:38:00.000-07:00

Gil Scott-Heron died May 27th, just 62 years old.

I grew up on his music, his poetry, his philosophy: "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised," "The Bottle," "Winter in America," "We Almost Lost Detroit," "Pieces of a Man," "Whitey on the Moon," "Home is Where the Hatred Is," "Johannesburg."

I saw him only once, decades ago-- with Brian Jackson, at Brandeis University-- but the memory after all these years is like a ruby, red hot and burning in the night.

Scott-Heron never got his full due, but his influence is deeper than many realize and will--here's a prediction from Lobster & Canary-- continue to grow.

He called himself a "bluesologist." He was a cousin to the Beats, an uncle to the first rappers, a great-uncle to later hip-hop artists. Listen for his influence in work by Mos Def, Kwalib Tweli, Public Enemy, Erykah Badu, Arrested Development, Meshell Ndegeocello, The Roots, Common, Ludacris, Kanye West...too many to list.

Scott-Heron wrestled mightily, like Jacob at Peniel, with addiction and its collateral damage for many years, yet continued to produce art and was in the midst of a comeback with last year's
album I'm New Here.

He had regained his power. This is "Me and the Devil" from I'm New Here:

As Lobster & Canary mourns his passing, we think of his tribute to Billie Holiday and John Coltrane, and imagine him making music with them in some other place:

"Ever feel kinda down and out,
Don't know just what to do?

....

Ever feel that somehow, somewhere,
You lost your way?

And if you don't get a help quick,
You won't make it through the day?

Or could you call on Lady Day?
Or could you call on John Coltrane?

Now, they'll wash your troubles, your troubles,
Your troubles, your troubles
Away."

Click here and here for more on Scott-Heron.

Leonora Carrington: Viva la reina!

2011-05-29T09:39:00.000-07:00

The grande dame of Surrealism, Leonora Carrington, died last week at age 94. One of modernism's greatest (if under appreciated) minds leaves us with a vibrant legacy of dream landscapes, obscured figures, hybrid animals, the eye of mythos.

Carrington was one of the pioneering women who broke into the new old boy's club of modernist art (why was the "anxiety of influence" primarily a revolt of sons against fathers?). Her life-story was dramatic, her friends and rivals included Kahlo, Ernst, Dali, Miro, Picasso. For more, click here and here .

Lobster & Canary think we see her subterranean influence on many writers (Angela Carter perhaps) and artists (Marina Abramovic, Rebecca Horn) since. What a study that would be! And most intriguing: Carrington's putative, if unrealized, impact on many popular musicians of the past few decades. Think Madonna, Patti LaBelle, Annie Lennox, Grace Jones ("Slave to the Rhythm" reads like a Carrington painting come to life), Bjork, Missy Elliott.

Right down to relative newcomers such as Rihanna ("Disturbia," "Party Like A Rockstar"), Janelle Monae, Lady Gaga, and the Katy Perry of her Kanye West collaboration on "E.T."

Long Island City Open Studio Tour: "An Alien with Extraordinary Abilities" (Jose Carlos Casado); "A Numerical Family Portrait" (Tania Alvarez); "Numbers" (David Ferris)

2011-05-22T05:49:00.000-07:00

Yesterday afternoon the Lobster & Canary visited dozens of artists in their open studios as part of the first-ever Long Island City Arts Open Festival (click here for more).

Long Island City (on the westernmost edge of Queens, with spectacular views of midtown Manhattan right across the East River) has a long-standing community of artists and the community is growing. LIC is-- along with Mott Haven in the Bronx, and Gowanus, Red Hook, Greenpoint and Bushwick in Brooklyn-- becoming what Soho and East Village were in the 1980s and DUMBO and Williamsburg were at the turn of the century: a hotbed of eclectic artistic innovation.

We saw many finely wrought, beautiful and thought-spurring works by established artists, e.g., Elliott Lloyd, Marilee Cooper, Janya Barlow, Gustavo Schmidt. We'll feature them in future posts, but want today to highlight three up-and-coming talents to watch: Jose Carlos Casado, Tania Alvarez, and David Ferris.

Casado (his site is here) is a surrealist of the first order. We loved his 3-D film-- part of his "An Alien with Extraordinary Abilities" series-- of an ostrich (slightly Looney Toon-ish) running in slow motion and in place, in the foreground of a very pedestrian, slightly smudged, greyish village scene. (You can watch this, and other of his mystifying short films, on his website). He inserts elephants in domestic settings, entices viewers with sly-looking dragons, merges bodies in his "Matrix" and "New Bodies" series and more.

Alvarez (her site is here) is developing a vocabulary of memory, loss, and the passage of time with her multi-media works. We were enthralled with two of her pieces in particular, paintings with ticking clocks embedded in a canvas carefully strewn with letters and numbers. When we asked the title of the larger piece, Alvarez smiled and said that she had not yet found a suitable title, but that the painting was a "numerical family portrait." (Her disregard for title, at least for the moment, reminds me of the Baziotes quote: "One can begin a picture and carry it through and stop it and do nothing about the title at all"; indeed, though her style differs greatly from that of Baziotes, Alvarez's oblique narratives share something of Baziotes's sensibility). Alvarez reminds us of Twombly with her calligraphic elements, and of Stephen Hannock's miniscule, half-hidden textual contours to his Oxbow paintings. Alvarez's sense of composition also brings to mind Guston. In short, Alvarez has much to say and an intriguing way to say it...watch her closely.

Ferris also has a thing for numbers and letters, in his case creating almost Platonic ideal versions of them in exquisitely hand-carved and finished wood. Ferris is thinking about space and form in ways that echo Brancusi and Lewitt, combining a keen artisanal hand with the fractionating eye of a logician. His walls are covered floor to ceiling with supple drawings that both are and document the evolution of the form that Ferris then calls out of the wood. Click here for more of his beauty.

Design Week in New York City: Cowardly Lion Mirror at Wanted Design

2011-05-15T09:13:00.000-07:00

It's international Design Week in Gotham, with shows large (the International Contemporary Furniture Fair and the National Stationery Show at the Javits Center) and small (pop-ups and individual boutique & gallery appearances) all over Manhattan and Brooklyn.

Lobster & Canary was at the Friday opening of a new show, Wanted Design, at the refitted Terminal Warehouse show space at 28th & 11th in Chelsea. Sponsors include Dwell magazine, the Institut Francais, and Bang & Olufsen, with exhibitors including Ligne Roset, Objeto Brasil, Voos Furniture, Normann Copenhagen, Triode Design, Les Heritiers...and Brooklyn's own rising stars Colleen & Eric.

Colleen & Eric featured prominently the "Cowardly Lion Mirror," whose signature paws were carved by our very own Deborah A. Mills. In this case, the Lobster & Canary make no pretense of impartiality: those paws rock, and so does their creator!

For more information click here:

Deborah A. Mills Woodcarving

Colleen & Eric

Wanted Design

International Contemporary Furniture Fair

National Stationery Show

Alchemically Yours (Pam Grossman; The Observatory; Visions of Golden Moons, Antimony and the Nix Alba)

2011-05-08T07:36:00.000-07:00

[Robert M. Place "Caduceus" detail 2011]

Lobster & Canary attended last night's thronged opening at The Observatory in Gowanus (Brooklyn) of the Pam Grossman-curated art show, Alchemically Yours. Pam-- who is also the author of Phantasmaphile (a must-read blog; if you like L & C, you will like Phantasmaphile)-- has a luscious and graceful approach, with an unswerving ability to find and juxtapose "the beautiful detail" around a common theme. We especially like her talent for calling forth depths of emotion and mystical understanding from within a small ambit: the exhibit space at The Observatory is intimate, and the works selected by Pam are like narrow apertures into half-dark worlds where suns are twinned and manticores slide silently through thickets of silver-leafed trees.

This etching-- "Abraxas" by Marina Korenfeld (2004)-- called to me from across the room. Korenfeld is a relative newcomer, most definitely a talent to watch. Her early training included puppetry, which shows in the balanced, floating quality of her figures, in their lines and ranginess (she has a series of fish drifting above people and landscapes that epitomizes her "aeriality"). She calls on East European folklore and the works of Klee, she points to Eco, Borges, Hesse and Marquez as literary influences. She says on her website: "I deeply believe that only by delving into the enigmas of the self and moving the boundaries of your knowledge, can an individual truly engage with the world and bring about change in a profound, meaningful way. These are the principles my paintings are about, symbolized in my mystical blue bird, imaginary fishes, and flying women."

Other highlights included catching up in person with Adela Leibowitz, whom L & C interviewed February 10, 2010 ("Luminous Dreamscapes"). Adela's two paintings in this show are a departure for her, being close-ups of individuals, but they glow with the same force as her more expansive work.

Molly Crabapple has a piece in the show (a sort of Elvis character with devil horns crooning to a theater full of pigs in hats), likewise Sarah Antoinette Martin (whose work always feels alchemical to me). "Old Mistress" Ann McCoy has several stunning variations on her rose-bird themes-- I love her Pfauinsel installation from 2005, the story for which begins "In the reign of the endless winter the sun was a pale memory in the heavens and dark clouds covered the palaces of the East and the West."

Alchemically Yours is self-assured, vibrant, evocative. Much good to see and feel, plus a library of works on alchemy, and the usual eccentricity of The Observatory space (Oulipo "writhing" cheek by jowl with neo-Cornellian boxes, Victorian morbidity, odd taxidermy, specimens in jars, etc.).

Runs through June 12th-- highly recommended.

"Sleep No More": The Memory of Sinful Loss; The Terrible Presence of Absence

2011-05-01T05:11:00.000-07:00

"He asked me if in fact I had not found some of the movements of the puppets (especially the smaller ones) very graceful during their dance. This conclusion I could not deny."

---Heinrich von Kleist, "On the Marionette Theater" (1810; Lobster & Canary trans.)

On Wednesday evening, we saw Sleep No More, the sold-out hit play by the U.K. troupe Punchdrunk (it opened in March this year--its initial six-week run has been extended into June). This is only the second appearance in the U.S.A. by Punchdrunk; they presented a smaller version of Sleep No More in 2009 in Boston.

Click here and here for more information.

Sleep No More is an adaptation of MacBeth. True enough, but that is like saying the Empire State Building is an adaptation of Cleopatra's Needle. Sleep No More is a brilliant, interstitial phantasmagoria, an explicit homage to Hitchcock (including use of Bernard Herrman's scores), a chimera combining elements of the haunted house on the midway, the Theater of Cruelty, Man Ray's juxtapositions, The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari, Cocteau's Beauty & The Beast, a designer showroom, Ernst's Une Semaine de Bonte, an experimental sound concert (think DJ Spooky or John Zorn), film noir, a film by Bunuel, a novel by Sebald, a passion play, a pantomime, Alice, medieval bestiaries and Renaissance theories of the grotesque, an art installation (by Anselm Kiefer, for instance, or Leonardo Drew, or Louise Nevelson), the old Catholic Tenebrae Mass, a touch of Tim Burton and a dash of Edward Gorey, an interactive video game (Silent Hill comes to mind), a graphic novel drawn by Moebius, cabaret, a music box, a museum of the damned, a cabinet of curiosities.

The set is an entire building in NYC's Chelsea district, six floors with c. 90 rooms, each room meticulously and elaborately dressed, encrusted with details that are clues to the mystery of Macbeth. The audience-- each member donning a white, beaked mask as if on the Rialto, and sworn to silence-- participates in the unfolding event, with the actors embracing Grotowski's direct-engagement principles. Sleep No More is utterly immersive, in essence a massive LARP (live-action role-playing game) where the script is plastic and no one knows for certain what comes next.

We chose to wander at will through the rooms, creating multiple narratives from the mass of things presented, which were periodically pierced by the arc of Macbeth (the sudden eruption of a fight in front of our faces, wails and cries in the distance, a tailor or a detective sitting focused on his or her inscrutable work, the banquet scene viewed from the railing of an amphitheater). Here is what we experienced:

Time compressed and collapsed upon itself. 2011 became 1933 (Sleep No More's central conceit is having the action occur in a hotel and nightclub in that year), became c. 1605 when Shakespeare wrote MacBeth, which relates events from the Middle Ages and themes that stem from ancient Greek tragedy, all interleaved with motifs from the Renaissance, the Baroque and the Victorian periods. Like Woolf's Orlando, we lived in all and none of these eras simultaneously.

Space distorted and elongated itself. We wandered through a labyrinth, Borgesian circular ruins, Benjamin's Passagenwerke come to life, the decrepit, ominous streets of Lovecraft's Innsmouth, a Joseph Cornell box grown monstrously large. Tangled, imbricated space, washed in sepia and the color of soot. We were in October Country, taken into the fairy howe.

We lost our sense of scale. Were we giants observing the details of small lives, or were we ourselves become miniatures surveyed by a demiurge unseen? We were grotesques viewing grotesqueries, such that reality merged with unreality to become hyper-reality. As Joyce Carol Oates says: "...we should sense immediately, in the presence of the grotesque, that it is both 'real' and 'unreal' simultaneously, as states of mind are real enough--emotions, moods, shifting obsessions, beliefs--though immeasurable."

Space took on a life of its own, like the fugitive, predatory streets in China Mieville's story "Reports of Certain Events in London" (2004) or the oppressive, endless, self-referential corridors in Peake's world-castle Gormenghast (1946). Like the living architecture in the Hypnerotomachia Poliphilli (1499) and Piranesi's Imaginary Prisons (1745-1761). Or the Theater of Memories built by Giulio Camillo in the sixteenth century, of which a correspondent with Erasmus wrote "the beholder may at once perceive with his eyes everything that is otherwise hidden in the depths of the human mind." Like the scene-changing, wish-fulfillment rooms in the vampiric Holiday House, in Clive Barker's The Thief of Always (1992), or the lair of The Other Mother in Coraline by Neil Gaiman (2002). Like the ballroom in the house of the gentleman with the thistle-down hair, where the guests dance all night every night while their true selves languish elsewhere, in Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell (2004).

We walked a queer street of shops, dimly lit by candles that seemed to make the cornered darkness deeper. A grisaille scene, with cloudy windows full of obscure items. Inside, dusty vitrines--trollish-- presented ill-defined artifacts. A candy store with rows of back-lighted candy jars, but what floats in the large smoky-ruby-red jars on the topmost shelf? An herbarium with sheaves and sheaves of dried plants hanging, witch bottles suspended from branches, bones (animal, we think) crossed in boxes of dirt on the tables, a sickle lies athwart, alchemical signs chalked on the walls.

Rooms and rooms. A nursery, with an empty antique crib, above which float-- like dozens of balloons-- stuffed, headless baby clothes, an enormous dangle-toy for the missing infant. Next door is a room with a bed empty save for a teddy bear, but, wait, in the misty mirror there is a pool of blood on that bed, spin round to examine the bed and it is once more pristine. A room with nothing but ranks of deep tubs, each with a scrub brush and a weighing scale neatly set beside it. A room naked except for twenty suitcases hanging from the ceiling. A room with crumpled clothes, in the midst of which sits a stuffed dog, silently howling. A vast chamber containing a blue-lit forest, a path within winding to a spindly, wrought-iron gate and fence enclosing a stuffed goat. Hecate's land.

Nestled and jumbled within the rooms, all manner of cabinets, garderobes, chests, more cabinets, drawers and drawers and drawers, wardrobe drawers, some half-open, revealing the leavings of a lifetime. (As Bachelard puts it, "Does there exist a single dreamer of words who does not respond to the word 'wardrobe'?"). Involute, the endless fractioning of space, ever more intimate, ever more secret, for the holding and treasuring and ordering of things.

Above all, a multiplicity, a surfeit of things. Every surface, vertical or horizontal, smothered by things. Realia, archived and indexed in accordance with enigmatic systems, a slantwise abecedarium, a cryptic reliquary, "from wonder to insight; uncommon arrangements and smart things" (to use a phrase by Barbara Stafford). But, in Sleep No More's MacBeth, insights into what? Framed pictures covering the walls from floor to ceiling (sometimes turned to face the wall), walls reticulated with mysterious notes, cuttings, empty envelopes pinned up. Here sprung into mute and eerie life are the over-stuffed interiors described by Wharton and James, by Proust, the "queerest of rooms" in Our Mutual Friend, the dining room at the opening of Buddenbrooks, the dismal parlor Balzac describes at the very start of Pere Goriot. Chandeliers shrouded in white muslin, acres of plush carpet, flocked wallpaper. Crumbling surfaces and detritus, like the images staged and preserved by Rosamund Purcell.

Things, as Susan Stewart notes, can open themselves to "reveal a secret life--indeed, to reveal a set of actions and hence narrativity and history outside the given field of perception."

Things: inkwells, keys, manual typewriters, carefully bundled samples of human hair, playing cards, braces of dead pheasants hanging from the ceiling, killing jars, stuffed and mounted birds and animals by the score, rotary phones, apothecary jars, dental tools, rows and rows of moldering books (hymnals, Wilhelmine scientific treatises, forgotten poetry), spools of thread, bell jars, papers, mirrors, many packages and boxes bound and tied, musical scores, crucifixes and statues of the Virgin Mary in myriad small alcoves, knives and forks set upright as crosses in tiny plots of sand, bibelots of every description, clocks, ledgers, anatomical specimens, memento mori.

What then finally to make of (in Marianne Moore's words) "this dried bone of arrangement...the vast indestructible necropolis"? Under the mortmain of its huge array of things and beneath its pervasive musical accompaniment (the hiss and pop of 1930s records crooning, interspersed with the rush of wind and roll of thunder), Sleep No More presents the spectator/participant with a hollow at its core. A moth-silence, a stillness. A congealed impasto of memory, the residue of the murder and torment that has taken place in these rooms. In every room an empty tableaux but there is fresh hair in the hairbrush, human warmth on the piano keys, today's date on the half-finished letter...the inhabitants seem only to have just stepped out, perhaps mere minutes before we arrived. They might return.

Or they might not. Sleep No More's hotel for us appears as a cenotaph, filled with ghosts and shadows clinging to the possessions of both the murderers and the victims, and all those who (like us) just stood and watched. Encyclopedic memory embalmed; in Pierre Nora's words, "remembrance within the sacred." A submerged and crimson version of the house described by Woolf in her "Lady in the Looking Glass: A Reflection" (1929): "The house was empty.....The room that afternoon was full of ...lights and shadows, curtains blowing, petals falling - things that never happen, so it seems, if someone is looking. The quiet old country room with its rugs and stone chimney pieces, its sunken book-cases and red and gold lacquer cabinets, was full of such nocturnal creatures. ...And there were obscure flushes and darkenings too, as if a cuttlefish had suddenly suffused the air with purple; and the room had its passions and rages and envies and sorrows coming over it and touting it, like a human being."

This then is Punchdrunk's remarkable achievement with Sleep No More: they conjure forth "passions and rages and envies and sorrows" by embedding (entombing?) the theater-goer into a world of memory. Their nautilus-chambered set and profusion of props create story-- a singular and praiseworthy feat. By insisting that we seek for understanding in things as they are possessed and ordered by people rather than interrogating the people themselves, Punchdrunk enables and simultaneously forces us to live vicariously through a sinful loss and abide with the painful presence of absence.

Suggestions for Further Reading

Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (Beacon, 1994; orig. French, 1958).

Philipp Blom, To Have and to Hold: An Intimate History of Collectors and Collecting (Overlook, 2002).

Pierre Nora, "Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Memoire," Representations 26 (Spring, 1989).

Joyce Carol Oates, "Reflections on the Grotesque" (afterword to Oates, Haunted: Tales of the Grotesque, 1994).

Rosamund Purcell, Bookworm: The Art of Rosamund Purcell (Quantuck Lane, 2006)

Purcell et al., Egg and Nest (Belknap/Harvard, 2008).

Barbara Stafford, Good Looking: Essays on the Virtues of Images (MIT, 1996).

Stafford & Frances Terpak, Devices of Wonder: From the World in a Box to Images on a Screen (Getty Research Institute, 2001).

Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Duke, 1993).

Back Before Babel

2011-04-24T04:07:00.000-07:00

All languages spring from the speech of our African ancestors. Two weeks ago, Quentin Atkinson of the University of Auckland published his findings on linguistic evolution. Here's the abstract ("Phonemic Diversity Supports a Serial Founder Effect Model of Language Expansion from Africa", Science 4/15/2011):

"Human genetic and phenotypic diversity declines with distance from Africa, as predicted by a serial founder effect in which successive population bottlenecks during range expansion progressively reduce diversity, underpinning support for an African origin of modern humans. Recent work suggests that a similar founder effect may operate on human culture and language. Here I show that the number of phonemes used in a global sample of 504 languages is also clinal and fits a serial founder–effect model of expansion from an inferred origin in Africa. This result, which is not explained by more recent demographic history, local language diversity, or statistical non-independence within language families, points to parallel mechanisms shaping genetic and linguistic diversity and supports an African origin of modern human languages."

Interstitial Arts Foundation: Megan Kurashige, Junot Diaz, Mores McWreath, S.J. Tucker, Cat Valente, et al.

2011-04-17T02:59:00.000-07:00

As I have blogged before, the Interstitial Arts Foundation is on the move! (Full disclosure: I am a member of the IAF's Working Group, but my contribution to the IAF's dynamism is very modest, at best.) I encourage all lobsters and canaries to check out three new developments at IAF:

1. "March Madness": 32 insightful, clever, provocative and, yes, interstitial posts-- one for each day of the month, plus a bit of lagniappe. Dance, the plastic arts, chapbooks, and much, much more...

2. (Free) Study Guide for Interfictions 2.

3. Interfictions Zero, "the rolling online anthology of interstitial criticism on interstitial texts, launched April 1 – no kidding!" Read Carlos Hernandez on Junot Diaz.

The Lure of Paradise: J.T. Burke's Worlds

2011-04-10T04:28:00.000-07:00

The lobster & canary encountered the worlds of J.T. Burke-- and had a chance to briefly meet the artist himself-- two weeks ago at The Artist Project show at Pier 92 in NYC. We have not stopped thinking about those worlds since.

Burke, a successful commercial/advertising photographer, turned to his art full-time in 2006. His technique is a blend of the old and the new: he scours flea markets and estate sales for jewelry and gewgaws (preferably with some wear and tear), then arranges these items into phantasmagorical landscapes, photographs the image, and finally distorts and alters the image digitally.

The jewelry and bric-a-brac he uses are ornate, baroque, all those animals that live as brooches on lapels, the bees and hummingbirds, the lions and tigers. Originally shiny, garish, out-sized, having now acquired a patina from use, the creatures come alive under Burke's tutelage.

The resulting vistas swarm and seethe with strange life. They evoke rococo wall-paper and Bosch's tryptichs, psychedelic errata, the half-melted landscapes of Max Ernst, and the infinities of mandalas. They pull the viewer into their bizarre but unthreatening beauty. Bravo J.T. Burke-- click here for more on his work.

Sunday Dinner in Cockayne

2011-04-03T04:02:00.000-07:00

Why don’t we feature food more centrally in speculative fiction?

I do not mean mere descriptions of food, of which the genre abounds. Hobbits are always hungry, the students at Hogwarts enjoy their butterbeer, Cugel the Clever dines on some intriguing dishes in the Dying Earth, and so on. Steven Brust, Jo Walton, and Anne McCaffrey, among others, make the food in their invented worlds something you would like to find in your neighborhood bistro.

I mean rather a focus on food as an end in itself, not as a tool to build a world or adorn an exotic setting. I want food as the central element in the plot, food as a synecdoche for the culture the author is conjuring forth, food as the means to understand the soul of the protagonist. Think the Turkish Delight with which The White Witch snares Edmund. Think Swelter's kitchen-realm in Gormenghast. "Eat me, drink me" in Wonderland.

I want the definition, preparation and delectation of food as an object of philosophy, aesthetics and desire. Food as Brillat-Savarin wrote of it, as M.F.K. Fisher wrote it, as Lidia Bastianich writes, Madhur Jaffrey, Marcella Hazan, Patricia Wells. Food as fantasy itself, not as an ingredient in a fantasy.

For a sense of what I want, check out two newish literary/philosophical magazines about food: Gastronomica and Alimentum . In their pages we live within food as Persephone tastes it in Hades, as Grendel experiences it looking in at Hrothgar’s meadhall, as the banquet-goers savor it in Gabriel Axel’s film Babette’s Feast (“Caille en sarcophage avec sauce perigourdine”!), as the “boeuf en daube” conducts the action in To the Lighthouse, as the timbale summarizes an entire way of life in The Leopard (“The burnished gold of the crusts, the fragrance of sugar and cinnamon they exuded, were but preludes to the delights released from the interior when the knife broke the crust,” in Archibald Colquhoun’s translation).

Singing Together in the Boundless Night (Rusty Schweickart; Dave Matthews; Robert Randolph)

2011-03-27T04:45:00.000-07:00

Rusty Schweickart came back from the Apollo 9 mission in 1969 with a profoundly altered sense of relationship with our planet. As he later wrote about circling Earth every 90 minutes (click here for more):

"And the contrast between that bright blue and white Christmas tree ornament and the black sky, that infinite universe, really comes through, and the size of it, the significance of it. It is so small and so fragile and such a precious little spot in the universe that you can block it out with your thumb. And you realize that on that small spot, that little blue and white thing, is everything that means anything to you - all love, tears, joy, games, all of it on that little spot out there that you can cover with your thumb. And you realize from that perspective that you've changed, that there's something new there, that the relationship is no longer what it was."

So what do we do on our tiny island in the midst of the endless sea?

We sing and we dance, like Tolkien's elves under the stars, like the inhabitants of Le Guin's Earthsea every New Year. Together, weaving from our individual solitudes a chorus to defy the night, bonding ourselves to ourselves with inimitable rhythms.

Like this (with thanks to the Dave Matthews Band, and to Robert Randolph & The Family Band respectively):

H.P. Lovecraft and the Language of Nuclear Meltdown

2011-03-20T07:26:00.000-07:00

Lovecraft's prose is empurpled, histrionic, so over the top that it is therefore perfect for capturing what he sought to capture: the immensities of time and space (especially as compared to our fragile and foreshortened human vistas), the menace of unknowable things lurking in deep places, the folly of dabbling in arcana beyond our ken, the indifference of the universe to the fate of humankind.

The lobster & canary were reminded of how apposite Lovecraftian prose can be while reading the newspaper this Sunday morning. The lead story in the "Week in Review" section of the New York Times is "Lessons from Chernobyl for Japan" by Ellen Barry. (Click here for the full story.) Of course, I am not saying that Ms. Barry has consciously adopted Lovecraftian language to describe the ongoing travails of Chernobyl; she may never have read Lovecraft, for all we know. The point is that some events defy our sense of scale and mock our ability to respond, pushing us to linguistic extremes in our attempts to describe-- with Beckett perhaps representing the absurdist, stripped-down end of the spectrum, and Lovecraft the fevered, rococo opposite. And just as Beckett's mode is part of our linguistic armory-- even for writers who may have never read End Game-- Lovecraft's idiom is likewise a part of our shared toolkit.

From one of the first paragraphs in Barry's report:

"Water cannot be allowed to touch the thing that is deep inside the reactor: about 200 tons of melted nuclear fuel and debris, which burned through the floor and hardened, in one spot, into the shape of an elephant’s foot. This mass remains so highly radioactive that scientists cannot approach it."

These lines could be straight out of "The Dunwich Horror," The Shadow out of Time, or At the Mountains of Madness.

Making this passage all the more eldritch (to use a word so favored by the Gentleman from Providence), the workers at Chernobyl call the structure enveloping the reactor "the sarcophagus."

As Barry notes, a nuclear meltdown "is a problem that does not exist on a human time frame." We are here confronting the mind-breaking trajectories Lovecraft laid out in, for instance, "The Whisperer in Darkness" and "The Color out of Space."

Barry evokes the eerie emptiness of the deserted bedroom community for Chernobyl's workers:

"... wallpaper has slipped down under its own weight and paint has peeled away from apartment walls in fat curls. Ice glazes the interiors. On a residential street, where Soviet housing blocks tower in every direction, it is quiet enough to hear the sound of individual leaves brushing against branches.

The wild world is gradually pressing its way in...[...] ...wild boars and foxes had begun to take shelter in the abandoned city..."

Echoes here of Lovecraft's decaying town of Innsmouth, with a deformed secret at its core, and of other ruins populating his work.

So there dwells a monstrous mass within its hastily erected tomb at Chernobyl, and we face a similar entombment possibly at Fukushima. Like the inhuman Cthulhu dreaming in his stone house, a force manifesting on planes outside those humans readily grasp. Cthulhu, central figure of the Lovecraftian Mythos, whose half-life dwarfs our understanding. As Lovecraft put it, in one of his most famous lines:

"That is not dead which can eternal lie.

And with strange aeons even death may die."

Interstitial Arts Foundation "March Madness"; The Witches of Lublin (Ellen Kushner, Tovah Feldshuh, Neil Gaiman)

2011-03-13T08:45:00.000-07:00

First, the lobster and the canary thank all of you who sent comments about last week's posting (on fairy tales, film, and income inequality). Besides the three comments posted here, we received sixteen equally positive and insightful notes from readers via e-mail...making the post the most widely commented upon in our history. Special thanks to Terry Weyna and Chris Nakashima Brown for blogging and/or tweeting about the post.

Meanwhile, the canary is tweeting and the lobster is making whatever sounds lobsters make about two really exciting events:

"MARCH MADNESS"---no, not that one, but the one over at the Interstitial Arts Foundation (disclosure: I am an IAF working group member). Every day this month the IAF is posting a review, or an interview, or other commentary on Things Interstitial. Click here to check out some of the smartest discussion on the Web about art that crosses, erases, ignores or just plain confounds genre boundaries. (How do you spell "unclassifiable" in Klingon? in Sindarin?).

There you will find, inter alia, Erin Underwood's review of the Indy Convergence, and her interview with Nicole Kornher-Stace (whose poetry I have praised here at L & C), Mike Allen on "jubilant irreverence" (an interview with Brian Counihan, founder of the Marginal Arts Festival), and Ellen Kushner commenting on Michael Swanwick's discussion of T.H. White.

Speaking of Ellen Kushner, the other event L & C highlights over this morning's coffee is the audio drama The Witches of Lublin. Co-written by Kushner, with Elizabeth Schwartz and Yale Strom, with music by Strom, and directed & produced by Sue Zizza, The Witches of Lublin is a 59-minute story based (per their website) "on Jewish women's lives in eighteenth century Europe, klezmer music, and feminist history, with a healthy dose of magical realism thrown in." What a wonderful brew!

Click here for details.

It gets even better: Tovah Feldshuh and Neil Gaiman have roles in the production. Oh lovely, sings the canary; lobster claps claws. The Witches is available for airing, starting in April-- just in time for Passover.

Can't hardly wait.

Who's Been Eating My Porridge?; or, Growing Income Inequality and the Resurgence of Fantasy in Film

2011-03-06T07:35:00.000-08:00

Fairy tale remakes, the old gods resurrected, the fabulistic and super-heroical in many shades and sizes have dominated American cinema since c. 1990, at least in terms of audience size and revenues. Hollywood has found that updating the oldest stories and mining the Marvel and DC universes (themselves populated by updates of the oldest stories) are far more lucrative than producing the realistic dramas and satires that led their offerings in the late '60s and throughout the '70s.

Check out here the top hundred all-time grossing films in the U.S.A. Here are The Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, soul searching by Spiderman and by Batman, spaceships and dragons in Avatar (having your science fiction and your fantasy all in one go), The Lion King, various scherzi from Pixar, the adventures of Indiana Jones, the bravado of Iron Man, The Matrix series ("how deep does the rabbit hole go?"), Alice in Wonderland, Harry Potter and his friends growing up to face Voldemort, Twilight, the capers of Shrek, How to Train Your Dragon, slow-motion whimsy in Kung Fu Panda....and on and on, with the Hollywood A List on all sides of the cameras and computers, the highest production values, the fattest budgets.

The last time Hollywood invested this heavily in fantasy was in the 1930s and early '40s, when The Wizard of Oz and Disney's Sleeping Beauty, Fantasia and Snow White hit the screens.

Why then, and why now? The violence and illicit romance/sex of fairy tales surely appeal to audiences, but we can (and do) get massive dollops of those things from other genres as well. I suggest that the answer lies rather in the deeper thrust of the old stories, which typically celebrates the feisty underdog and offers a chance for the oppressed and marginalized to turn the tables on their superiors. The plucky tailor vanquishes the ogre and wins the princess, the goose-girl or cinder-lass reveals her innate worth, the bones of the murdered call out from the fir-tree to accuse their murderer...

Hence the thirst for such stories during the Great Depression and now during the Great Recession. Not just because the average American feels economically insecure but because he and she perceives that a few others do not seem to be suffering much or at all, that those few appear to be elevating themselves above the rest of the citizenry. And, in fact, since 1980 income has gone disproportionately to a very few, creating the largest inequality in wealth in the U.S.A. since the 1920's. (*)

As Louis Brandeis said in 1941: "We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we cannot have both." For the descendants of serfs and slaves, the sons and daughters of peasants and laborers who suffered a near-infinite variety of peonage and servitude, a defiant alarm is ringing, a challenge to any nascent aristocracy. In truth, we side with the hobbits-- to be left alone with a pint of ale by the fire-- and do not really want the return of the king.

The dance scene that ends the first Shrek movie epitomizes the will to overcome the fear of losing our democracy. To the tune of "I'm a Believer," a motley assortment of fairy tale figures dance in unison, a wildly diverse, rag-tag group (some not logical allies otherwise), the huddled masses, the little people...celebrating the overthrow of the grotesque, venal overlord. "Sure, we're plebes who live in a swamp, lack manners and grace, and like our humor rude and rough, but we will control our own fate, thank you very much." (**)

"I'm a believer," says the lobster. "Bring me my seven-league boots," chirps the canary. "We just found a magical bean..."

(*) For data and documentation on the rise in income and wealth inequality in the U.S.A., click here for work by University of California-Berkeley economist Emmanuel Saez (especially his summary "Striking It Richer," and his studies with Thomas Piketty); click here for analysis by Daniel Weinberg (U.S. Census Bureau); click here for study by Gary Burtless (Brookings); and click here for Timothy Noah's series in Slate. More generally, Paul Krugman and Janet Yellen have written persuasively on the topic.

(**) Another favorite-- both of mine and of audiences-- is Johnny Depp's "futterwacken" dance in Alice. Note also the portrayal of the Red Queen; the film lingers long on her depravity, on her utter disregard for her subjects, her complete selfishness and lack of compassion. "Bring me a pig!" she cries, from her rapacious red lips in her oversized bobble-head...

Immersed in Fragonard's World, or, A Kiss at the Frick

2011-02-27T09:13:00.000-08:00

One of Lobster & Canary's favorite places is the "Fragonard Room" at the Frick Museum in NYC. (Click here for the Frick's description of the room, and scroll down especially for the superb virtual tour.) We could sit for hours there, moving only to shift our gaze from one painting to another, deepening our selves into what Fragonard portrayed, until we are wholly absorbed into the Arcadia, flowing with the progression of love, until we are part of the story and indeed make the story our own.

But where is this place? It is a fantastical world created through the ever-changing interaction between Fragonard's paintings, their positioning in the physical space at the Frick, and the viewer-- an immersive, interactive, multimedia game avant la lettre. (*) It is a play setting, with a narrative suggested, yes, but waiting for the viewer to complete it, make it real-- to join it. An enclosed garden of the mind, lush, feathery and fronded; Fragonard takes us into the mysterious woods-- those copses striated with walls and statuary-- other artists put in the background of their grand historical or religious paintings, the vistas glimpsed from the window behind a duke or on a hillside above the procession. Fragonard puts us inside, and teases us to fulfill and participate in a story of intimacy, desire, pursuit, consummation and contemplation. (**)

We are surely near the enchanted wood in A Midsummer Night's Dream:

"Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows,
Quite over-canopied with luscious woodbine,
With sweet musk-roses and with eglantine:
There sleeps Titania sometime of the night..." (Act II, scene 1/ Oberon speaking to Puck).

And to the Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia:

"Does not the pleasantness of this place carry in itself sufficient reward for any time lost in it, or for any such danger that might ensue? Do you not see how everything conspires together to make this place a heavenly dwelling? Do you not see the grass, how in color they excel the emeralds [...]? Do not these stately trees seem to maintain their flourishing old age, with the only happiness of their seat being clothed with a continual spring, because no beauty here should ever fade? Doth not the air breathe health which the birds (both delightful both to the ear and eye) do daily solemnize with the sweet consent of their voices? Is not every echo here a perfect music?"

And who are the players? She seems startled, he uncertain, or is that merely a trick of our eye? Have they a prior connection? Is he agent for another, or a principal in Cupid's game? What words does he use to entreat and plead his case? What words does she use to deflect, encourage, taunt or reassure?

Is he doomed Acis and she Galatea? ("Not Showers to Larks so pleasing,/ Nor Sunshine to the Bee;/ Nor Sleep to Toil so easing/ As these dear Smiles to me," as Pope said of them). Is the giant Polyphemous lurking just beyond the pastoral gate?

Perhaps he is Amadis of Gaul, reuniting with Oriana, to protest his faithfulness after his long absence on the Insola Firme, and to plan how best to overcome the enmity of her father, King Lisuarte?

Or maybe she is Aricia, overcome with relief to be welcoming Hippolyte in the Forest of Erymanthus, protected by Diana, and to have survived the rage of his stepmother?

Then again: could this be Polexandre, finding at last after so many adventures on strange and elfin shores, his Alcidiane, heretofore only a vision and a hope?

Finally, what is to become of the young lovers? As Dryden posed the question in "The Flower and the Leaf; or, The Lady in the Arbour":

"...she gave her maid to know
The secret meaning of this moral show.
And she, to prove what profit I had made
Of mystic truth, in fables first conveyed,
Demanded till the next returning May,
Whether the leaf or the flower I would obey?"

If ever you can, dream yourself a while into the Progress of Love in the Fragonard Room at the Frick-- it will well repay your effort.

(*) Scholars have done good work exploring how Fragonard and the Madame du Barry envisioned the placement of the original four paintings at her chateau and how Fragonard might then have positioned the four plus the additional two in his relative's house when du Barry rejected the paintings. The lively academic debate underscores the importance of understanding the context of the art, of seeing these scenes not in isolation but as a unified composition...stills from a movie or play, as I view it.

(**) A brilliant riff on Fragonard's "Progess of Love" is Yinka Shonibare's "Jardin d'amour" installation at the Musee du quai Branly in 2007. Click here to see this. Lobster & Canary is a huge fan of Shonibare's ongoing revisionist interpretations of Western art (we noted his recent show at the Brooklyn Museum of Art). Fragonard to Shonibare, in the garden of love-- a multi-player game that has been "online" for centuries, drawing on themes and characters going back to Homeric times...

A Picnic Along a River Flowing In Several Directions At Once

2011-02-20T10:59:00.000-08:00

The Thames that housed the prison-hulk holding Magwitch, the Trave along which the fate of the Buddenbrooks unfolds, the Seine that bisects the drama of the Comedie Humaine are no less invented than the Rain Wild River up which both dragons and Bingtown Old Traders sail, the rivers Tar, Gross Tar, and Canker that feed “morbific” New Crobuzon, and the River Moth that sustains Ambergris (sv. “Festival of the Freshwater Squid” in Duncan Shriek’s history). The mainstream literary world periodically forgets, ignores or even tries to dam the shared headwaters and the connecting rivulets. Happily the currents seem to be converging once again, the latest eddying in the long-running debate over the idea and utility of fiction, a debate tinged in Western thought with wariness over the seductive but potentially misleading powers of mimesis.

David Hartwell has charted the creation of a mainstream literary world in the United States that excluded by the mid-twentieth century what is now sold as fantasy & science fiction. He captures the process with this anecdote:

“Late in this process of marginalization, I recall that in an English Literature course at Williams College in 1961, when I was assigned E. M. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel, the chapter on fantasy was the only one skipped. ... Realism was good art; the novel of the inner life of character was good; the fantastic was not.”

Michael Moorcock traces a similar course for fantasy in his native England:

“It’s probably fair to say that the rift between romanticism and realism began to manifest itself in the mid-19th century... [...] While Jane Austen established our taste for the subtle social novel, it took F. R. Leavis to insist that moralistic realism was the only serious form of fiction. ....we are still haunted by the more old-fashioned school of criticism with which I grew up and which believes fantasy to be not quite kosher.”

A few readers—Colin Wilson, Guy Davenport, George Steiner, famously Auden—continued to discuss, say, Tolkien along side Musil, Broch and Mann, but for decades they were lone eels against the stream. (Might we see Virginia Woolf—who died in 1941--as their forerunner; the Woolf of Orlando, and essays such as “The Strange Elizabethans” and “The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia”?). Remarkable in its uniqueness, The New Yorker published fourteen of Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Broceliande tales between 1972 and 1976, including “The Duke of Orkney’s Leonardo.” In the past fifteen years or so, however, and with accelerating vigor, the stream has reversed itself—the eels, now numerous, are racing with the current.

Dating the points at which the river undid the oxbow is hard. Moorcock suggests as one juncture Philip Pullman’s The Amber Spyglass winning the Whitbread Award for best children’s novel in 2001. Certainly the river spills its banks from that point, with the unprecedented success of Rowling’s Harry Potter series (1997-2007) and the Lord of the Rings films by Peter Jackson (2001-2003), the National Book Foundation’s awarding Stephen King its Medal for Distinguished Contributions to American Letters in 2003, the Man Booker long-listing Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell in 2004, and the Library of America issuing editions of H.P. Lovecraft (2005) and Philip K. Dick (2007-8).

Acceptance—indeed, canonization—of these authors by an expanded and expanding mainstream is the waterfall. Earlier came a hundred upwellings, spates dragging up the riverbed, the subtle redirecting of currents that ultimately forced the banks to collapse. Some notable waves along the way include Moorcock’s Mother London shortlisted for the Whitbread in 1988, and Octavia Butler receiving, as the first-ever writer of speculative fiction, a MacArthur Foundation “genius award” in 1995. I suspect Angela Carter’s many essays in the London Review of Books, The Guardian and elsewhere in the 1970’s and ‘80s also did much to validate the fantastic for the “common reader.” Joyce Carol Oates, Marina Warner, A.S. Byatt, Umberto Eco, Salman Rushdie and Jeannette Winterson were (and are) other good friends to the genre, likewise Borges, Calvino, Cortazar and Carpentier in their times, making the fantastic salonfaehig without taming or stunting it.

In short, “fantasy and science fiction”—I prefer Clute’s term “Fantastika” and Mieville’s “the weird fiction axis”—looks more and more like the books shelved over in the “literature” section. And vice versa: think Junot Diaz, Helen Oyeyemi, David Mitchell, Rabih Alameddine, Ben Okri, Michael Chabon, W.G. Sebald, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, among others. Our meta-discourse sounds more and more like that attending “literary production.” Whether the bywater came to the river, or the river to the slough, is less interesting than the fact of conjunction. More interesting still is where the conjoined river will take us next.

[Citations & References:

Hartwell, “The Making of the American Fantasy Genre,” in Peter S. Beagle (ed.), The Secret History of Fantasy (Tachyon, 2010; orig. pub. 2009), p. 368.

Moorcock, Wizardry & Wild Romance: A Study of Epic Fantasy (MonkeyBrain, 2004; revised ed., orig. pub. 1977), p. 16.

For the nineteenth century’s rejection of the “falsifying genres,” see George Levine, The Realistic Imagination (U. Chicago, 1981). On the downstream impact of rigid genre channeling, see Nancy Ellen Batty, “ ‘Caught by Genre’: Nalo Hopkinson’s Dilemma,” in A.L. McLeod (ed.), The Canon of Commonwealth Literature (Sterling, 2003). For insights on current genre-blurring: Neal Stephenson, “Science Fiction Versus Mundane Culture,” at Science Fiction as a Literary Genre symposium, Aug. 5, 2008 at Gresham College, London, http://www.gresham.ac.uk/event.asp?PageId=45&EventId=728

Wilson, Tree by Tolkien (Capra, 1974); Davenport, The Geography of the Imagination (North Point, 1981); Ross Smith, “Steiner on Tolkien,” Tolkien Studies 5 (2008); Auden, The Dyer’s Hand & Other Essays (Random House, 1990; orig. pub. 1962).

Chabon, Maps & Legends: Reading & Writing Along the Borderlands (Harper, 2008); Conjunctions:39—The New Wave Fabulists, ed. by Peter Straub (Fall, 2002); Okorafor, “Is Africa Ready for Science Fiction?,” www.nebulaawards.com (August 12, 2009); Jas. Patrick Kelly & John Kessel (eds.), Feeling Very Strange: The Slipstream Anthology (Tachyon, 2006); Rusty Morrison & Ken Keegan (eds.), ParaSpheres: Extending Beyond the Spheres of Literary and Genre Fiction (Omnidawn, 2006); the two Interfictions anthologies, edited by Sherman with resp. Theodora Goss and Christopher Barzak (Interstitial Arts Foundation, with Small Beer Press, 2007 & 2009); Goss, Voices from Fairyland (Aqueduct Press, 2008); Laura Miller, The Magician’s Book (Little, Brown, 2008). Also: Matthew Cheney’s blog The Mumpsimus; VanderMeer’s Ecstatic Days; Cory Doctorow’s column in Locus; John Scalzi’s Whatever.]

The Tao of Tiepolo (Gesturing with Roberto Calasso)

2011-02-13T15:03:00.000-08:00

I remember staring at the vistas painted by Tiepolo in the Residenz at Wurzburg, yearning to float up and join the jolly, sleek figures in their billowing clouds, bathed in milky light. That was 25 years ago, and still I dream of Tiepolo's celestial fields and the swirling squadrons of gods, angels, wise men, and cherubim.

No one captures the essence of Tiepolo-- and the sheer in-sighing of his works-- better than Roberto Calasso, whose study of the painter was published by Knopf in 2009 (well translated by Alastair McEwen) as Tiepolo Pink. Calasso is one of the most original thinkers alive today: polymathic, eccentric, finding connections that others miss, making his case with gentle flamboyance (some of his points seem innocuous at first glance, only to reveal their ambition upon closer reading). He dares the reader to follow him along strange trajectories, using his erudition not as a bludgeon but as a diviner's rod.

Lobster and Canary will come back to Calasso and Tiepolo Pink in later postings. For now, we are tasting this amuse-bouche by Calasso, half-understanding what he means, and anticipating the teasing forth of further meaning:

"Tiepolo is an extreme example of Taoist suppleness in art, a quality inconceivable before him, and never attained after him. If he was shelved for a century, if certain canvases of his lay rolled up in storehouses, it was only because history rightly perceived him as an intruder, while it stubbornly worked to make sensibilities denser, more unsophisticated." (pg. 32, Calasso, Tiepolo Pink).

Hubble Ultra Deep Field; Kepler-11

2011-02-04T15:09:00.000-08:00

* Peering back to the Big Bang...

Last week astronomers announced in Science that they have found what might be the oldest object ever observed in the universe, a galaxy known as UDFj-39546284 in a part of the heavens known as the Hubble Ultra Deep Field.

The galaxy appears to have born just 480 million years after the Big Bang, i.e., some 13 billion years ago.

What a glorious discovery! Piercing the veils of night to find the Old Ones, original star stuff.

* Finding new worlds....

Also last week another group of astronomers, analyzing data from NASA's Kepler space telescope, announced in Nature the discovery of over 100 Earth-size planets in other solar systems.

My favorite so far is a clutch of six planets circling a star called Kepler-11, c. 2,000 light-years away. Five of the six may have atmospheres, although none of them appear capable of supporting life.

These discoveries (we only found the first exo-planets in 1995) make our Earth a little less lonely. Just knowing we have siblings, however remote and however silent, brings extra cheer to the canary.

Nabokov's Butterflies; Ellen Stewart's Death (La MaMa)

2011-01-29T13:30:00.000-08:00

[The lobster & the canary will be moving their physical abode to Manhattan's Lower East Side this week, so may be a little delayed in posting. But please stay tuned!]

C.P. Snow famously wrote of the two cultures-- science and the arts-- as sundered, incommensurate endeavors, a dialogue of the deaf. Yet, as Snow knew well and lamented, the bifurcation is recent. Goethe made a serious study of optics, Erasmus Darwin and Humphrey Davy promoted in verse some of their discoveries, while Keats and Shelley keenly followed the latest scientific news. Richard Holmes's The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science (2008) is a particularly fine survey of how poets, artists, naturalists and chemists found common ground for discussion two centuries ago.

Thus, it pleases me greatly to read this past week that entomologists have vindicated Nabokov's theory on the origins of the Polyomattus blue butterflies. Nabokov once said: “A writer should have the precision of a poet and the imagination of a scientist.” This is how Erin Overbey starts a January 27th essay on The New Yorker blog, that in turn links to the Jan. 25th New York Times article reporting on scientists' acceptance of what had been Nabokov's long-spurned hypothesis.

Click here for more.

The other news that hits is the death at age 91 on January 13th of Ellen Stewart, a protean, hugely influential figure in 20th-century American culture. Founder 50 years ago of LaMaMa ETC (Experimental Theatre Club) on Manhattan's Lower East Side, Stewart pioneered Off Off Broadway, broke and bent all sorts of genre rules and artistic protocols, helped invent new aesthetic vocabularies, and launched/collaborated with an enormous range of the country's best stage and musical talent. (Among many others: Pacino, DeNiro, Olympia Dukakis, Harvey Keitel, Richard Dreyfuss, Bette Midler, Sam Shepard, Harvey Fierstein, Nick Nolte, Elizabeth Swados, Meredith Monk, Philip Glass.)

Many of the techniques and attitudes she helped foster have moved from the fringe into the American mainstream. Many folks who have never heard of Stewart or LaMaMa are nevertheless conversant now in the styles she and they pioneered, much as people who have never heard of Schwitters are comfortable with collage. That's a deep and pervasive legacy.

For more, read Mel Gussow's obituary in the NYT: click here.

Arisia-- A Wonderful Gathering in Boston

2011-01-24T16:19:00.000-08:00

Lobster & Canary heartily recommends to you the fantasy/science fiction extravaganza that is Arisia, a four-day, entirely fan-run convention in Boston.

First held in 1990, Arisia this year had record attendance of c. 3,000. In Boston. In very, very cold weather.

Like most cons, Arisia is a smorgasbord...with a little something for just about everyone. The fact that Boston is home to so many colleges and universities may contribute to the wide-ranging, idiosyncratic nature of the offerings. Certainly it means no one bats an eyelash when a panelist refers to his day-job programming robots as he talks about Asimov's Three Laws. Or when someone in the audience brings out a dog-eared copy of the Grimm's fairy tales, in German, while making a point about Rumpelstiltzchen or Rapunzel.

Among many other things, Arisia features the Carl Brandon Awards (click here for more information). The con is also a good place to talk about the use of folklore, mythology and fairy tale in modern spec fic. The art show is a cut above the usual at cons. The steampunkery is impressive, the anime/manga components appear (I am no expert) robust, the LARP and gaming sections (again, no expert) seem to thrive. Arisia is a good, thoughtful, safe place for discussions about sexuality and gender. There are readings by authors almost around the clock.

And the food in the green room is really tasty (not always the case at other events).

I thank the organizers for their good work, and especially Shira Lipkin for her welcoming self. I could name many others whom I enjoying meeting but, since one always runs the risk of leaving someone out inadvertently, I will stop here.

For much more on Arisia, click here.

Deborah Mills On The Martha Stewart Show

2011-01-22T15:54:00.000-08:00

Dear friends,

I am thrilled to say that my artistic collaborator, the designer and woodcarver Deborah A. Mills (who is also my wife), appeared this past week on the Martha Stewart Show.

Click here for more information.

Deborah is on the far right of the picture below, holding one of her guardian angel sculptures.

Heading to Arisia

2011-01-14T17:43:00.000-08:00

Lobster & Canary will be at Arisia in Boston this weekend.

Arisia claims to be "New England's largest and most diverse science fiction and fantasy convention."

We had a marvelous time there in 2010, so are looking forward to Arisia again this year.

We promise to report upon our return.

In the meantime, check out the con here: Arisia.

Sunday Morning Coffee: One Million Words!; Culturomics; Seamus Heaney

2011-01-09T06:20:00.000-08:00

1.1 million words...1.1 million words!

That is the total English-language lexicon estimated last month by The Cultural Observatory at Harvard, directed by Erez Lieberman Aiden and Jean-Baptiste Michel. (For more, see Patricia Cohen at the NY Times-- click here-- and the team at io9-- click here.)

The Cultural Observatory's mission is (per their website) "to enable the quantitative study of human culture across societies and across centuries...[by]...:

* Creating massive datasets relevant to human culture
* Using these datasets to power wholly new types of analysis
* Developing tools that enable researchers and the general public to query the data."

They call this approach "culturomics," describing it in a December 16th paper in Science, (Michel et al., "Quantitative Analysis of Culture Using Millions of Digitized Books"). Here's the article abstract:

"We constructed a corpus of digitized texts containing about 4% of all books ever printed. Analysis of this corpus enables us to investigate cultural trends quantitatively. We survey the vast terrain of "culturomics", focusing on linguistic and cultural phenomena that were reflected in the English language between 1800 and 2000. We show how this approach can provide insights about fields as diverse as lexicography, the evolution of grammar, collective memory, the adoption of technology, the pursuit of fame, censorship, and historical epidemiology. "Culturomics" extends the boundaries of rigorous quantitative inquiry to a wide array of new phenomena spanning the social sciences and the humanities."

Michel, Lieberman and their colleagues co-authored the paper with a team from Google, and together they have launched Ngram, Google's freely available, searchable database of the 5.2 million scanned books referenced in the abstract above, comprising c. 500 billion words and phrases.

Which leads us back to their estimates that the English language contains c. 1.1 million words, with about 8,500 new words entering every year. The Oxford English Dictionary includes perhaps half that total; one of culturomics first claims is that dictionaries miss 50-60% of the words actually in the lexicon, because low-frequency words do not make the cut. (A truly exhaustive dictionary would be a Borgesian venture, it seems to me, truly exhausting the capacity of humans to document; culturomic datasets such as Ngram complement and augment but do not replace dictionaries.) Ngram is a tool--like the specialized telescopes that search for quasars in the infinite-- to explore what The Cultural Observatory calls linguistic/lexigraphical "dark matter."

Let's plunge into this dark matter, this hitherto unrecognized aquifer, a river-ocean flowing beneath the sunlit waves we think we know. Let's dig deep through the strata of words, hunt for truffles in the roots, find the still-living marrow in ancient bones.

As Seamus Heaney puts it in "Bone Dreams":

"Bone-house:
A skeleton
in the tongue's
old dungeons.

I push back
through dictions,
Elizabethan canopies,
Norman devices,
the erotic mayflowers
of Provence
and the ivied Latins
of churchmen

to the scop's
twang, the iron
flash of consonants
cleaving the line."

New Year's Wisdom: Festina Lente-- The Long Now Foundation--The Planetary Skin Institute

2011-01-02T04:31:00.000-08:00

Welcome to a new year, another revolution around the star that warms us, another 5.3 million intakes of breath, another 36.8 million heartbeats.

Another year to peer a little deeper into time itself, and into space, to gain another scrap--small but real and nourishing--of knowledge about ourselves and the world. (Whether we act wisely upon that hard-won knowledge is another matter altogether). At the hinge of the year, we might contemplate the wider "Now," try to imagine the arc of consequence beyond our most immediate heartbeats.

Pause to think about the words of computer scientist Daniel Hillis (born 1956):

"When I was a child, people used to talk about what would happen by the year 02000. For the next thirty years they kept talking about what would happen by the year 02000, and now no one mentions a future date at all. The future has been shrinking by one year per year for my entire life. I think it is time for us to start a long-term project that gets people thinking past the mental barrier of an ever-shortening future. I would like to propose a large (think Stonehenge) mechanical clock, powered by seasonal temperature changes. It ticks once a year, bongs once a century, and the cuckoo comes out every millennium."

To realize this vision, Hillis (co-founder of Applied Minds Inc., a pioneer in massively parallel supercomputers) in 01996 co-founded The Long Now Foundation with creator of the Whole Earth Catalog Stewart Brand. I encourage you to click here for more on the "Long Now."

To act based on a knowledge of Deep Time, we need to see temporal effects from a new vantage point. Happily, well-resourced players are creating structures for us to do so. For instance, in 2009, Cisco and NASA formed the independent non-profit Planetary Skin Institute (PSI). The PSI states its mission this way:

"Two powerful trends are re-shaping the world as we know it. The first trend is resource scarcity, the result of demand growth (water, energy, food, land, etc) driven by growing populations with rising incomes and increasing constraints on the supply of these resources given environmental degradation, land use change, inherent variability of weather conditions and resource productivity, and the threat of climate change. The second trend is information abundance, driven by a massive increase in data and information processing capabilities, driven by new sensor networks and a host of emerging information and communication technologies.

The...PSI aims to address the challenge posed by the first trend with the opportunity presented by the second. In short, PSI aims to harness the power of information technology and networks to help decision-makers manage scarce resources and risks more effectively in a changing world>"

Click here for more on the PSI.

The Long Now Foundation and the Planetary Skin Institute embody truths known to humans from the beginning, and well stated in Classical Roman and Renaissance Italian terms as "festina lente," i.e., "make haste slowly." Roman emperors favored this adage, as later did the Medicis, Erasmus, Aldus Manutius, Shakespeare.

Festina lente: Aldus symbolized it as a dolphin and an anchor. The Romans visualized it as a crab and butterfly. I think a lobster and canary might also fit the description.

Reasons To Be Cheerful, Part Four

2010-12-29T06:03:00.000-08:00

Our final post for 2010...another gleaning of reasons to be cheerful as we enter 2011.

The Shahnameh (the Persian Book of Kings), compiled and composed by Hakim Abu’l-Qasem Ferdowsi (940–1025, common era).

The Fitzwilliam Museum at the University of Cambridge mounted a major exhibition of the Shahnameh this fall. In the words of curator Barbara Brend: "The most important creation of New Persian literature – the Shahnameh, or the ‘Book of Kings’ – has been defined as the national epic of the Iranian people, their ‘identity card’ (shenas-nameh) and an encyclopaedia of Iranian culture. It celebrates the survival of a civilization that originated some 7,000 years ago at a dynamic crossroads of cultures, the Iranian Plateau, extended at its peak from Anatolia and the Caucasus across Transoxiana to China, withstood countless invasions, absorbed diverse influences, and conquered its conquerors by virtue of its timeless values.

Twice as long as Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey taken together [!!-Lobster & Canary], the Shahnameh blends Iran’s ancient myths and legends with accounts of major events in its past. Its 55,000 rhyming couplets chart the history of the Iranian world from its creation to the fall of the Persian Empire in the seventh century".

Ferdowsi is at once the preserver of Persian culture and one of the world's great authors. The Shahnameh is one of the great epics, Persian at its core yet a gift for all of us. For more, click here, and click here.

Paul Klee, The Goldfish (1925).

I have a framed reproduction at my work-desk, and another one at home. The first time I saw the original in Hamburg's Kunsthalle I stood transfixed for half an hour, a votary at the altar, glimpsing the numinous just beyond our daytime vision.

Kingdom of Ife: Sculptures from West Africa, a major exhibition mounted this year by and at the British Museum. I wish I could have seen this, but the photographs alone indicate the stunning beauty, the detail, the empathy of these pieces, created c. 1200-1400 common era. (The photos above are--to the best of my knowledge-- copyright of the photographer Karin L. Wills; no infringement intended.) The "Ife Heads," produced by Yoruba peoples in what is today Nigeria, must surely put to rest outmoded ideas about what constitutes "African art." For more, click here and click here.

Michael Hedges, "Aerial Boundaries."

Victor Wooten, "Amazing Grace."

Reasons To Be Cheerful, Part Two

2010-12-26T07:16:00.000-08:00

Following on December 24th's "Reasons To Be Cheerful, Part One," here is "Part Two." So much Beauty to celebrate, so much Truth to confirm, so much Love to feel. I will post "Part Four" as this year's final Lobster & Canary entry on Wednesday. "Part Three" is, of course, always reserved for Ian Dury and his cheerful Blockheads-- see the December 24th entry for more on that.

In no order of priority:

Jennifer Crow's "Tasting Books on her Lover's Hands" in Ideomancer (vol. 9, nr. 1, June 2010).
Click here for the original source, at Ideomancer. (Bravo to Ideomancer also for its handsome re-design this year.)

Kate Bernheimer, Horse, Flower, Bird (Coffee House Press, 2010), illustrated by Rikki Ducornet. One of my favorites for the year. Bernheimer, founding editor of The Fairy Tale Review (see my praise Dec. 19th for the FTR), is one of the best at reworking and re-imagining fairy tales. Less sanguinary than Angela Carter (less visceral than Margo Lanagan--but then who isn't?), less melancholy than Theodora Goss, Bernheimer has a style all her own: charming but with an edge, eccentric, sometimes reading like Edward Gorey, sometimes like Calvino or Borges. How to resist lines like these? "When first she found me, my friend and I and her sisters slept in a drawer" (p. 45). "And the girl's grandmother had a vengeance for birds. (She had very bad vision and once, mistakenly, got a chair upholstered in a fabric that depicted garish birds. Strangely, the girl's mother, whose mother this was, seemed to take some kind of wicked glee in the error, and never revealed it to her" (p. 97). Ducornet's delicate, shaded line-drawings perfectly complement Bernheimer's stories; each creature has his/her/its own personality, and -- as Bernheimer's prose does-- avoids mere whimsy with a sly turn of an eye, an enigmatic and possibly minatory gaze. Click here for more.

Kate Castelli's "Chairs at Twelve Chairs," an exhibition of her multitudinous studies of chairs, an exploration of line, form, and space. Kate makes us re-evaluate what we thought we knew about the most mundane of objects. Through March 1, 2011 at Twelve Chairs in Fort Point, Boston, sponsored by GLOVEBOX, a organization that links artists with non-traditional exhibition spaces. For Kate, click here; for GLOVEBOX, click here; for Twelve Chairs, click here.

Pascal's Triangle playing "Time Remembered" (by Bill Evans), at the Blue Note, NYC, in May, 2010. Pascal Le Boeuf on piano, Linda Oh on bass, Joe Saylor on drums.

Nicole Kornher-Stace's Demon Lovers and Other Difficulties (a chapbook produced by Goblin Fruit, 2009). I mentioned this in my 2009 round-up; I continue to immerse myself in Kornher-Stace's powerful vision. One passage to whet your desire: "Oh, I could draw you stars: such stars/ as shatter into tesseracts, a sun and moon/ contained in each, and angels wandering the vertices,/ wayward as a wish. ..." (pg. 11). Kornher-Stace tells a story, linking our daily reality with the fears and suspicions we harbor beneath. Her language is powerful without being overly rich, her imagery rooted in folktale and the European Romantics without being trite. For Kornher-Stace, click here. For Goblin Fruit (which I note in the Dec. 19th entry), click here.

Dutch Still Life Paintings from the 17th Century. Here is "Still Life with a Chinese Porcelain Jar" completed by Willem Kalf in 1669. I spend hours gazing at works like this (see also van Beyeren, Aelster, van Huysum, Heda, Bosschaert, Claesz, de Heem) losing myself in the virtuosity of the surfaces, the mimetic brilliance leading me into the painter's fabulistic world of roemer glass, half-peeled oranges, flowers combined out of season, reflections, hams with knives embedded, lutes, globes, skulls, ornate time-pieces, birds bundled and dead...and lobsters on platters. The Dutch "Golden Age" genre painters would be tickled to know that centuries later we are still fascinated by the calm worlds they purported merely to depict, and that we continue to debate their meaning.

Sarah Monette & Elizabeth Bear, "Mongoose" (in Lovecraft Unbound, edited by Ellen Datlow, 2009 from Dark Horse Comics), which starts this way:

"Izrael Irizarry stepped through a bright-scarred airlock onto Kadath Station, lurching a little as he adjusted to station gravity. On his shoulder, Mongoose extended her neck, her barbels flaring, flicked her tongue out to taste the air, and colored a question. Another few steps, and he smelled what Mongoose smelled, the sharp stink of toves, ammoniac and bitter."

Stories like this are rare for many reasons: collaborations seldom work well; humor, empathy and horror almost never appear (convincingly) in the same story; an action tale that makes you think is hard to pull off; getting us to believe in an entire universe within the span of c. 25 pages is a feat worthy of Poe or Lieber. Monette & Bear overcome all these challenges. You can hear the story told at Norm Sherman's The Drabblecast (click here, and go to Episode 170, posted July 3, 2010, and Episode 171, posted July 10, 2010). You also read their first story in this series, "Boojum" (published in 2088, and anthologized several times already), at the Wired site: click here.

Edith Wharton's gloriously named A Motor-Flight through France, originally published in 1908, and re-issued in 2008 by Atlas & Co., Publishers (NYC). Light-hearted, with superb renderings of the architecture, and especially the frisson one feels approaching a French town for the first time, through the inevitable allee of pollarded lime trees, into the central market place with its church to one side and cafes on the other. Although a memoir of a journey, the book might as well be a novel, given Wharton's technique and colorings. "After packed weeks of historic and archaelogical sensation, this surrender to the spell of the landscape tempts one to indefinite idling" (pg. 145). Indeed! Atlas deserves kudos not only for the authors they are republishing in their "Pocket Classics" series, but for the attractive book design and high-quality production at reasonable price to the reader.

Uncork a favorite wine, bring out your favorite cheese...reasons to be cheerful!

Reasons To Be Cheerful, Part One

2010-12-24T06:37:00.000-08:00

'Tis the season for thoughtful happiness, and giving thanks for beauty discovered, re-discovered, and won. Here are a few of the many things that made me happy this year:

Richard Barnes, "Animal Logic" (2009).

Barnes, "Murmur" (2005).

Barnes kindly met with me in April; Lobster & Canary hopes to feature him in 2011. Barnes captures the natural world through his lens better than anyone since Elliot Porter, and no one equals him at unveiling the interplay behind the scenes of humans with other species. For more, click his site here.

Vicki Graham's The Tenderness of Bees (Red Dragonfly Press, 2008) was a lovely revelation, full of succinct, warm,evocative observations and queries on nature and our place in it. (Read Graham while looking at Barnes.) Hints of Dickinson and Gerald Manley Hopkins, with a touch of Annie Dillard. Two samples: "Sing. Take the warbler's note/like a bead in the throat/ let the sound fill/ the heart's silent spaces." "No poem has the symmetry, the stark clarity/ of the Golden Crowned Kinglet's eye stripes/ white on black." For more on Graham, click here.

Helen Oyeyemi, White is for Witching (Doubleday, 2009). One of the most remarkable novels I have ever read: quite literally haunting, macabre, weird, a story of retribution. Oyeyemi is a Wunderkind, having written her first novel while in high school; she is today just barely 26 (!), with three novels and two plays published. Her prose startles in its originality, her plots are unexpected, her characters troubled and troubling. For another review of White is for Witching, click here.

D.M. Cornish, The Foundling's Tale, Part Three: Factotum (Putnam, 2010). At last! The finale of Cornish's brilliant Monster Blood Tattoo trilogy was published mid-November...I am setting aside time in January to read and savor this, to learn the fate of Rossamuend Bookchild. Cornish's illustrations are the cherry on top. For more on the Monster Blood Tattoo, click here.

Kenny Garrett, "Beyond the Wall" (from the Nonesuch album of the same name, 2006).

A trip to China inspired Garrett to create the album Beyond the Wall. The influence of Coltrane and McCoy Tyner is evident. Pharoah Sanders partners with Garrett on sax, and Brian Blade provides his usual combination of delicacy and decisiveness on the drums. For more on Garrett, click here.

John Brunner, The Traveler in Black (Ace, 1971). A favorite from my youth, which I bought used at Arisia this year. I wrote about The Traveler on June 13. "As you wish, so be it."

Pam Grossman, Phantasmaphile (ongoing). Pam's Phantasmaphile is a must-read blog--special bliss for me every couple of days when I get the latest addition dropped into my e-mail box. Pam has a discerning eye for the occult, the arcane, the off-kilter; she is, no surprise!, a co-founder of the innovative, weird arts & event collective The Observatory in Gowanus, Brooklyn. She and her playwright husband Matt (Blue Coyote Theater Group) are a warm-hearted, multi-talented pair to watch. Check out Phantasmaphile here.

Josh Dorman, Equine (2010). Serendipity of the purest sort on a cold winter day earlier this year when we happened to stumble upon the Dorman exhibition at the Mary Ryan Gallery in Chelsea...down the rabbit-hole, through the looking-glass, we never wanted to leave his endlessly engaging geographies and bestiaries. Many artists pretend to creating other worlds: Dorman is the true sorcerer who does so. See more of his work by clicking here.

Ellen Kushner, The Man with the Knives (special limited edition, illustrated by Thomas Canty, April 2010, by Temporary Culture/ Henry Wessells, New Jersey). A strong tale, beautifully depicted, by two of the best (reunited!) in the speculative arts. A memorable moment for the Lobster and the Canary: Ellen signing our copy at the NYRSF December reading (which she and Delia Sherman headlined, as is becoming tradition). You can read the entire story and see even more of the illustrations at Tor.com: click here.

Poets House (Battery Park City, NYC). I spent many hours at Poets House this year, immersed in their peaceable kingdom, surrounded by poetry beyond measure, breathing in that vatic air. Poets House is one of my all-time favorite reading places...I encourage you to make it yours, if you are in the NYC area. Click here for more.

Timothy O'Keefe, "Poem in the Key of Luminarias" (The American Poetry Review, Sept./Oct., 2010). O'Keefe's debut collection won this year's FIELD Poetry Prize. "Luminarias" grabbed me from its first lines: "A pack of doorways pressing relentless together/ so as to form the hall in which I walk toward/ famous blackout you." Whoomph, right in the mind that one goes. Later in the poem: "We are overfluent in coral days/ where each sky is a cake, a birthday cake/ because we've candled it so." O'Keefe is one to watch as well-- click here for another example of his craft.

Anoushka Shankar, talking about her CD Rise (2006). Shankar describes the traditions she has woven together to create her Grammy-nominated Rise. I've blogged about her cross-cultural work with The Orpheus Chamber Orchestra-- her commentary on the act of creative collaboration is both insightful and inspiring.

Rachel Contreni Flynn, "Small Gray House" (in jubilat 17, published 2010). A compact poem of belonging, self-exile and protection, encompassing home, with echoes of Grendel's longing. "The red house frightened her/with its furious air." "She often wakes to a shadow in her room,/a smoky-black curve darting backward." Don't read this while reading Oyeyemi's White is for Witching...or you will not sleep at night.

On Sunday I will present more Reasons to be Cheerful (call it Part Two). In the meantime, here is "Reasons to be Cheerful, Part Three"...from the late, lamented Ian Dury and his inimitable Blockheads (1979):

Favorite New Periodicals

2010-12-19T07:28:00.000-08:00

So much doom-laden talk in 2010 about The End of Publishing and The Death of Books and The Demise of Reading...obviously much is afoot, with digital devices upending distribution and the recession continuing to take its toll on traditional publishers and booksellers...yet, in the midst of the upheaval, innovators are making their way, often using the digital tools that have so unsettled the established players...so, here are Lobster & Canary's favorite literary newcomers, all periodicals founded within the last five years, in no particular order:

Goblin Fruit: A Quarterly Journal of Fantastical Poetry (launched in 2006). Founders Amal El-Mohtar, Jessica P. Wick and Oliver Hunter have a keen eye and ear for verse that is fey without being twee. Consistently good, with a unified style across the many contributors, the whole adorned with perfectly matched drawings. Drawing primarily on European folk traditions, grounded in the English and German Romantics, Goblin Fruit poets include modern stylists such as Sonya Taaffe, Thedora Goss, Nicole Kornher-Stace, JoSelle Vanderhooft, Jane Yolen, and Cat Valente.

The Fairy Tale Review (launched in 2005). Founding editor Kate Bernheimer has set up a caravanserai for marvelous new takes on our oldest tales. The FTR, with its cover illustration by Kiki Smith, brings together scholarly experts (Marina Warner, Maria Tatar, Jack Zipes) and a dazzling array of authors as diverse as Dan Beachy-Quick, Jedediah Berry, Rikki Ducornet, Francine Prose, Donna Tartt, Kim Addonizio, Paula Bohince, and Aime Nezhukumatathil. Stir in a dash of, say, Rimbaud or Kurt Schwitters, and FTR dishes out a heady meal.

Alimentum: The Literature of Food (founded in 2005) is literally a feast! Apercus about appetizers, descriptions of all that makes us enjoy dining, notes and art about food preparation...and handsomely produced. Check out their reviews, their art gallery, and-- how cool is this?--their "Menupoems."

Uppercase: A Magazine for the Creative and Curious (first issue, spring 2009). Oh bliss! Janine Vangool opened UPPERCASE Gallery in Calgary four years ago--the magazine is an extension for the eclectic, dynamic community of artists, designers, artisans, and "visual enthusiasts" she has assembled there. One of the best launches in the past decade, with an idiosyncratic mix of bold, playful work, spanning font design, textiles, film, elegant scrapbooking, Pantone chips, all manner of ephemera, with good reading recommendations and smart essays.

Elephant Magazine (started in 2009). "The Art and Visual Culture Magazine," Elephant takes us to artist studios around the globe (Paris, Sao Paolo, Berlin, Madrid), and explores the crossroads of artistic practice. Who else inquires into the "world of Do Not Disturb signs," analyzes "the Incredible Shrinking Subject, or, the art of miniaturized worlds," wonders how "bicycles influence fashion," or peers at how artists are updating the collage? Best of all: thoughtful manifestos. Writing about art for folks who believe in the power of art.

The Sienese Shredder. Artists Trevor Winkfield and Brice Brown founded this ambitious, weighty, beautifully produced and cleverly curated annual in 2006. In their own words: "Each issue brings together poetry, critical writing, visual arts, unpublished rarities, oddball ephemera and other culturally significant material in a way that is exciting, contemporary and fresh. Contents can include writings by visual artists; art by writers; poets as installation artists; photographers as poets, and the range of contributors moves from the well-known and up-and-coming to the unknown or forgotten. As an archival project, each issue of The Sienese Shredder comes with a CD recording of a well-known poet reading or a musician presenting a retrospective sampling their work."

Slice (begun in 2007), featuring poetry, fiction, non-fiction, artwork in a happy melange. Most important: Slice is committed to finding and helping launch the careers of promising new talent, showcasing such alongside heavyweights on the order of Salman Rushdie, Tana French, Lisa See, Paul Auster, and Jonathan Lethem. Slice has quickly become a darling of the Brooklyn lit scene.

A Public Space (started in 2006) is another meteoric success out of Brooklyn, erupting seemingly fully formed. Founded by former Paris Review executive editor Brigid Hughes, APS is "an independent magazine of art and argument, fact and fiction.....to give voice to the twenty-first century." I am most taken with their essays, which illuminate a hidden corner or unexpected turn.

Shimmer Magazine (started in 2005). Shimmerzine, founded by Beth Wodzinski, offers "speculative fiction for a miscreant world." Quirky, hard-to-classify stories, often with a dark undertone, typically with lush prose. Lots of metamorphoses. Some issues are themed, e.g., "the clockwork jungle book," "the pirate issue." Some of the authors: Jay Lake, Nir Yaniv, Claude Lalumiere, Kuzhali Manickavel, Aliette de Bodard. Plus, always gorgeous cover art and intriguing illustrations (Mary Robinette Kowal is art director).

The Quarterly Conversation (begun in 2005). Some of the very best reviews and criticism anywhere. Founder Scott Esposito and his team (spiritual descendants of Walter Benjamin!) are trenchant, fiercely intelligent, honest. Good at covering literature from around the world, and excellent at ignoring (or deriding) "genre boundaries." No holds barred, e.g., "Contra Lev Grossman," "The Bolano Myth." High expectations on themselves and on their readers, with the earnest punch of the Modernists. Who else is crafting manifestos like their "On the Right Way to Write Criticism (wherein we do something we have never yet attempted: we direct our Editorial Energies against our own publication)"? Be sure also to read Esposito's editor's blog, Conversational Reading.

Three Percent (launched in 2007, at the University of Rochester), "with the lofty goal of becoming a destination for readers, editors, and translators interested in finding out about modern and contemporary international literature." With effective, clean lay-out, a growing inventory of reviews, and a great set of links, Three Percent is an essential clearinghouse for Anglophones looking to connect with other literatures.

More Novels

2010-12-18T08:40:00.000-08:00

So many stories yet to swim in...

Three more that I must get to before (before, before), at least judging from their opening lines:

"I arrived in this port with very few belongings: four shirts, my calligraphy implements, and a heart in a glass jar."

Pablo de Santis, Voltaire's Calligrapher (orig. 2001; translated from the Spanish, 2010 by Lisa Carter).

"That winter there were reports in the newspaper of an iceberg the size of a galleon floating in creaking majesty past St. Hauda's Land's cliffs, of a snuffling hog leading lost hill walkers out of the crags beneath Lomdendol Tor, of a dumbfounded ornithologist counting five albino crows in a flock of two hundred. But Midas Crook did not read the newspaper; he only looked at the photographs."

Ali Shaw, The Girl with Glass Feet (2009).

"Her father had laid his magnifying glass down on the map unrolled before him. A mournful sea monster loomed below the lens. Although it was the middle of the day, the blindness shrouded the bookshelves that rose behind him in false dusk. Only the large window over his head and the desk were still bright and clear.

'Nonna was blind when she died,' Carolina said."

Carey Wallace, The Blind Contessa's New Machine (2010).

Favorite Novels Read This Year

2010-12-11T06:33:00.000-08:00

A few fish plucked from the oceans...

David Anthony Durham, The Other Lands (2009). See my full review here October 17th, which begins: "David Anthony Durham's Acacia Trilogy is one of the most important projects within speculative fiction at the moment. (The first book-- The War with the Mein-- came out in 2007; the second-- The Other Lands-- in 2009; the third is due out fall, 2011; all from Random House). Having mastered the tropes of epic fantasy on his first time out (Durham won the 2009 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer), he is exploring in the Acacia series the intent and self-mythologies of slavers and the impact of enslavement on a global-societal scale. Acacia is world-building as a means to sophisticated, ambitious ends, the use of fantasy to comment on social relations and to imagine alternative power dynamics in our own world-- without resorting to allegory or sermon. Acacia thus belongs to the lineage that includes Plato's Republic and Timaeus, Campanella's City of the Sun, Johnson's Rasselas, besides Persian Letters, Candide, Diderot's Supplement au voyage de Bougainville, and so on down to Orwell."

Joyce Hinnefeld, In Hovering Flight (Unbridled Books, 2008). Delicately drawn, a moving exploration of memory, desires unclear even to those who harbor them, fraught relationships. All wound around the search for "Cuvier's Kinglet," a bird species that may or may not exist.

Olga Slavnikova, 2017 (Overlook, 2010, trans. from Russian by Marian Schwarz). The "most difficult-to-classify book of the year." Enjoyed without grasping its entirety, which was part of the enjoyment. Michael Froggatt, in his review (Strange Horizons, October 1, 2010), gets it precisely right: "Olga Slavnikova's 2017, the winner of the 2006 Russian Booker Prize, is a novel which confounds the reader at every turn: its prose style, characterization and narrative consistently refuse to conform to expectations. It stubbornly refuses to depict people or events in a way which recognizably reflects real life..."

Alastair Reynolds, House of Suns (2010). Another one of his love stories wrapped inside a billion-year epic. Reynolds is a poet of technology: clones are "shatterlings"; "aspic-of-machines" is the term for the nanobots and other medicinal therapies one applies as an unguent to wounds. Reynolds is especially good at the toss-off line that illuminates the deep trend, the broad sweep: "Cloning is a technology like making paper: it is not difficult if one knows how to do it, but extraordinarily tricky to invent from scratch..." (p. 97).

Iain M. Banks is the other current master of the billion-year spree, painting on an enormous canvas but always keeping individual human lives in the forefront. Banks and Reynolds are the heirs of Asimov and Herbert, and especially the Vance of the Demon Princes series and the Alastor novels. (Scalzi and Haldeman as the left-handed heirs to Heinlein?) Banks's Matter, another novel of The Culture, published in 2008 (Orbit), is at its heart a picaresque, with some of the best pert servant-clueless king dialogue since the 17th century. Or maybe it is a novel of ideas in the 18th-century manner, an anthropological inquiry...

Carmine Abate, Between Two Seas (Europa Editions, 2008, trans. from Italian by Antony Shugaar). My find of the year, as in "how come I had never heard of this author before?" Obsession in a Calabrian village, the pursuit of truthful memory, layers of history and emotion, the rebuilding of the ruined family inn (the myth-shrouded Fondaco del Fico)...

Gemma Files, A Book of Tongues (Chizine Publications, 2010). The debut of her Hexslinger series, set in a hyper-brutal American Wild West. Not for the faint-hearted. As Faren Miller put it in her Locus review (April, 2010): "...amping up the horror of a very dark tale...Files describes [the action] with a graphic, unflinching eloquence...Violent, sometimes foulmouthed, explicit in many ways, A Book of Tongues may discomfort anyone except the most seasoned fan of horror or homicidal westerns. More than one passage made me [i.e., Miller] wish I could 'read' with my eyes tight shut." Lobster & Canary felt the same way, and yet-- as Miller also goes on to say--the writing is so powerful and truthful that it elevates the story above mere squalor or obscenity. The gore reflects the horror as it is also depicted in the Iliad, in the Norse sagas, in Goodbye to All That.

Another fantastical, bloody Western--this time transported to Medieval Central Europe--is presented by Jesse Bullington, in his debut The Sad Tale of the Brothers Grossbart (Orbit, 2009). "We ain't thieves and we ain't killers," proclaim the thuggish brothers (latest in a long line of grave-robbers, murderers, and sundry scoundrels), "We's just good men been done wrong." Where Files is relentlessly grim, Bullington is funny, making slapstick out of bloodshed, antics out of death. His novel is one long yarn, the mayhem so outsized, the descriptions so broad that the entire thing is a burlesque. Rabelaisian. Mix Sam Peckinpah with Terry Gilliam, and you have the sense of The Brothers Grossbart.

Moving to the polar opposite end of the literary spectrum, I loved Eline Vere by Louis Couperus (Archipelago, 2010, trans. from Dutch by Ina Rilke). Originally published in 1889, Eline Vere is routinely compared to novels by Flaubert, Thomas Mann, Henry James, Edith Wharton. A novel of manners about the cloistered, asphyxiating world of the 19th-century haute-bourgeoisie in The Hague. The eponymous heroine is an eccentric, subject to romantic fits and self-doubt. The pace is meandering, the details of drawing rooms numerous. Nothing violent happens...except once.

Galen Beckett, The House on Durrow Street (Ballantine, 2010), the sequel to The Magicians and Mrs. Quent. Likewise a doorstop novel about the haute-bourgeoisie...but with sorcery, Lovecraftian threats, skulduggery in high places, mysterious doorways long bricked over... The prose lopes along, like a genial hound,resembling a cozy mystery (with Cthulhu lurking along the edges).

Danielle Trussoni's Angelology (Viking, 2010) is uneven but -- in its best bits-- engrossing. If you like Lukyanenko's Night Watch trilogy, or any of the urban vampire-hunter series (Saintcrow, Butcher, etc.), you will enjoy Angelology...and its likely sequel(s).

The King's Gold by Yxta Maya Murray (from Harper, 2008) is a good romp, "an old world novel of adventure" as the sub-title has it. Sharp and witty characters, literary/historical riddles, pulp action, a wash of the Gothic supernatural...Reminds me of the Special Agent Pendergast series by Preston & Child, also a little bit of Eco, and of Carlos Ruiz Zafon's The Shadow of the Wind.

We highly recommend N.K. Jemisin's debut, The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms (Orbit,2010). Jemisin has created a distinctive world, with idiosyncratic characters, vaguely Peakean in flavor, but entirely her own. We especially enjoy her dry wit, precise prose, and intricate plotting. Above all, we like her portrayals of the gods who have been enslaved: they are both more and less than human, raising a chill up the reader's spine while also tugging at our heart. We love them, fear them, do not understand them all at once-- we are as baffled, entranced and repelled as the heroine Yeine is by the immortal trickster youth Sieh and the terrifying (and terrifyingly erotic) Nightlord Nahadoth. Jemisin promises us two more in this series-- we await these eagerly.

Cherie Priest also does a fine job creating alien (eldritch, to use an overused but in this case very appropriate word) characters in Fathom (Tor, 2008, first paperback release February, 2010). The water elemental Arahab seeks to awake Leviathian from his slumbers deep below the earth's crust-- which will destroy the world. Yet Arahab is no caricature of evil: her actions have a defensible if wholly alien logic and ethic; she is willful, mercurial, but she weighs and measures, ponders, has doubts, is not merely hateful. If anyone is truly and one-sidedly evil in Fathom, it is the human Berenice, who betrays everyone, including her savior and patron Arahab. And then there is the enigmatic spirit called Mossfeaster: "From the feet up, the creature began to dissolve itself, not so much collapsing as letting the ground absorb it. But before the last of the shoulders, neck and head disappeared, it offered one final thought. 'You can help a thing who loves the world destroy it; or you can help a thing who hates it save it'" (page 100).

Spiritual quandaries also pervade Steal Across the Sky by Nancy Kress (Tor, 2009, first paperback edition 2010). Extraterrestials arrive to atone for a crime against humanity that no one on Earth knows anything about. "The Atoners" take selected humans to other planets to witness the consequences of this crime. Kress combines fast-paced drama with thought-provoking propositions. The revelations of the witnesses challenge deeply held beliefs; Kress is very good at describing how humanity reacts, in ways both trivial (celebrity tours, pop culture engulfment) and mortally important.

Incarceron by Catherine Fisher (Hodder U.K., 2007; first U.S. edition, Dial/Penguin, 2010) is really, really good. Finn has no memories of his past, but is now a Prisoner in the unimaginably vicious, squalid and vast prison-world of Incarceron-- a prison that is itself coldly intelligent, indifferently manipulating the fates of its inhabitants. There is and can be no escape from Incarceron. But where is Incarceron? That is the question for Claudia, daughter of the Warden, and her tutor, the Sapient Jared. As Finn and his deceitful, half-crazed companions desperately seek to escape the inescapable, Claudia (about to be married against her will to the Crown Prince) is furiously trying to locate Incarceron...all the more so when she and Finn stumble into conversation via a matched set of scientifico-magical Keys. Incarceron has it all: a twisting plot, flawed and believable characters, settings that live on after you shut the page. Peake and Vance come to mind, The Man in the Iron Mask, Dickens, Suzanne Collins's Hunger Games... we look forward to Incarceron's sequel, Sapphique.

Speaking of Collins, Mockingjay (2010, the finale of her Hunger Games trilogy) was everything we could have wished for. No punches pulled...down with the old boss, here's the new boss, same as the old boss...fight until the end and then fight some more. If dystopian our future be, let no one say that Collins did not prepare us...

Sharon Shinn, Fortune and Fate (2008, pb 2009), another in her Twelve Houses series. A melancholy tale of a knight errant (who reminds me a little bit of Lara Croft and Aeon Flux). Amadis of Gaul, Tirant lo Blanc, Palmerin of England, updated, clothed in sienna and umber. If you like Ellen Kushner's Swordspoint, or Marie Brennan's Witch and Warrior, you'll like Shinn.

Warren Fahy, Fragment (2010). Best beach-read of the year! A loving pastiche, with nods to Jurassic Park, King Kong, Alien, and a thousand pulp stories and B-movies. Cries out to be made into a movie in its turn. (I love the details, such as the drawings of the spygers.)

Sunday Morning Coffee: Porcelain Old as Tomorrow: Weiser, Isupov, MacDowell, Boyle, Antemann

2010-12-05T07:10:00.000-08:00

[Greg Weiser, Idle Hands, c. 2005]

[Greg Weiser, Many, 2005]

[Sergei Isupov]

[Kate MacDowell]

[Shary Boyle; Lobster is uncertain, but believes this and the next are from Lace Figures exhibition, 2006]

[Shary Boyle]

[Chris Antemann, Highboy, from "Battle of the Britches," 2009]

[Chris Antemann]
[All images copyrighted by the respective artists, and displayed here solely for purposes of commentary; please respect the artists' rights.]

Porcelain as an art form appears to be making something of a comeback in the U.S.A. (Perhaps related to the resurgence of China?) Several artists are creating work as technically adept and aesthetically captivating as anything produced by Meissen, Sevres and the other 18th/19th-century European masterworkers...and arguably on par with the imperial Chinese themselves.

Among the "New Masters": Sergei Isupov, Kate MacDowell, Kurt Weiser, Shary Boyle, and Chris Antemann. Sharing a dedication to craftsmanship, each of the five has a distinctive style...and each is distinctively modern in their themes, ironic senses of humor, and use of the medium for social commentary. We get the best of all worlds, i.e., a classic medium updated to meet our current concerns.

Here at Lobster & Canary we raved (November 21, 2010) about Isupov's current show at the Barry Friedman Gallery in NYC, and we had the great pleasure of interviewing MacDowell (September 19, 2009) as well as noting that her work featured prominently in the NY Times (January 30, 2010). Please go to those Lobster entries for more, and for links to the artists' work (and their gallery representation).

Weiser is a master potter, and possibly the most traditional in his themes and style. He does not experiment much with the form of the objects, but uses the teapot, the globe, etc. to paint lush scenes that appear didactic without the lesson being immediately clear. Another twist: his style and use of color reminds me of Baroque Spanish and Italian still life (bodegones) painters such as Zurbaran and Garzoni, a tradition that pre-dates European porcelain production. For more on Weiser, click here and here.

Boyle is a multimedia artist who uses the porcelain not as a canvas but as sculpture. Her figurines and tableaus make powerful statements about voice and identity. But she too is interrogating the past, for instance, in recent work responding to Foggini bronzes as part of a commission from the Art Gallery of Ontario. For more on Boyle, click here.

Antemann takes Meissenware to its licentious, decadent extreme...her set-pieces lure in the viewer, who thinks the scene is a reproduction, until close examination reveals otherwise. Her puckish sense of humor prevails: these are delightfully devious works that enthrall in every sense of the word. For more on Antemann, click here.

For years I have enjoyed the solitude of porcelain galleries at the Museum fuer Kunst und Gewerbe in Hamburg, at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, and at the Metropolitan in NYC. I wonder if I will soon get company!

Sunday Morning Coffee: Erik Mohr's Chizine Design; Deathly Hallows "Three Brothers" Animation

2010-11-28T08:10:00.000-08:00

* Erik Mohr is the immensely talented creative director & designer who is responsible for the beauty of the books Toronto-based Chizine Publications produces (CZP is owned and run by Sandra Kasturi and Brett Savory). Full disclosure: CZP published my novel The Choir Boats, the cover of which Mohr designed based on original art made by Deborah A. Mills. So, this is an unashamed plug for a colleague!

This week Mohr put up on his Facebook page all the CZP covers he has done-- a handsome sight.

If you sign in to Facebook, plug in this URL and you will see the covers: http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?pid=2333902&id=540785915#!/album.php?aid=2008405&id=1493778832

For more on Mohr, click here. For CZP, click here. For Mills, click here.

* Enjoyed The Deathly Hallows, Part I this week...was most struck by the 3-minute animated "Tale of Three Brothers" segment...beautiful, shadowy puppet-like figures...by Swiss animator Ben Hibon...he is slated to direct a new version of Peter Pan...

Thanksgiving Thoughts: Laura Battle at Lohin Geduld; Bono and Spiderman; Van Eyck's Ghent Altarpiece

2010-11-25T10:42:00.000-08:00

[Laura Battle, Numinosum, made 2010; all images by Battle are copyright of the artist, who is represented by Lohin Geduld Gallery, NYC]
[Battle, Charm, 2010]
[Battle, detail from Timeline, 2010]

[Van Eyck's Adoration of the Mystic Lamb, in St. Bavo Cathedral, Ghent, Belgium, completed 1432]

Thanksgiving here in the U.S.A.-- a calm, grey Hudson outside our window as we prepare a feast for friends. We thank the winds and tides that have brought us all together. We thank each other for each other. We thank creators for bringing beauty into the world.

One creator who grabbed our attention earlier this week is Laura Battle, whose third solo show of paintings and drawings opened Nov. 17 at Lohin Geduld. If you are in NYC, make this show a priority--it closes December 23.

Battle takes us to new territories, mapping them with the precision of NASA and the imagination of Paul Klee. (In Battle's deft hands, Klee's "taking a line for a walk" is given fresh discipline and direction.) Her images grip us with their finely balanced tension between exactitude and intuition. She uses color subtly, as the suffused substrate for the trajectories of her lines and glyphs, as the field for controlled wanderings. These are cadastral surveys of new-found places...places we want to go.

For more, click here and click here.

Another blessing this week: Peter Schjeldahl's article in The New Yorker
on the restoration of van Eyck's Ghent Altarpiece ("The Flip Side; The Secrets of Conserving the Wood Behind an Early Masterpiece," Nov. 29, pp. 42-47). Schjeldahl reminds us of "the eloquence of van Eyck's glazes, which pool like liquid radiance," which "generate a sweet and mighty visual music."

His main focus, however, is on the restoration of the altarpiece--the first in over fifty years--being done by an international team of all-stars funded by The Getty Foundation's Panel Paintings Initiative. Schjeldahl details all of the craftsmanship and connoisseurship that goes into making and preserving a piece like the Ghent Altarpiece. The wood bends and exhales, the paint blisters and seams, the restorers battle to mend and prevent.

Schjeldahl emphasizes the tactile nature of art-making and of art's enjoyment, an artisanal turn in a world where sight is privileged. The restoration experts distinguish themselves here "from academics who are numb to the muscular feel of planes and chisels wielded with hair's-breadth precision."

Another item that struck us this week: the Broadway version of Spiderman is nearing its opening, directed by Julie Taymor, with music by Bono and The Edge.

Bono is quoted in the NY Times (Nov. 23, article by Patrick Healy):

“We’re wrestling with the same stuff as Rilke, Blake, ‘Wings of Desire,’ Roy Lichtenstein, the Ramones — the cost of feeling feelings, the desire for connections when you’re separate from others...[...] If the only wows you get from ‘Spider-Man’ are visual, special-effect, spectacular-type wows, and not wows from the soul or the heart, we will all think that we’ve failed.”

I am not sure about Rilke, but I believe Blake would have liked the Spiderman epic...I can absolutely imagine Blake etching, lettering and inking Peter Parker, Mary Jane Watson, Doc Oc, and The Green Goblin, maybe including the story in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell or The First Book of Urizen.

Happy Thanksgiving to all.

Sunday Morning Coffee: Sergei Isupov's Narrative Sculpture; Super-Cats Save San Francisco

2010-11-21T04:57:00.000-08:00

[As always, all copyright held by the artist, in this case Sergei Isupov.]

Sergei Isupov is draftsman of the enigmatic, a craftsman of the uncanny. (Click here for Isupov's website.) We were enthralled yesterday at his new show, at the Barry Friedman gallery in Chelsea (NYC). We first encountered his magical creations as part of the Ferrin Gallery presentation at the SOFA show in NYC two years ago.

Isupov is hard to categorize, a visual polymath, a throwback to an earlier age of studied technique, connoisseurship, and historical research. He seems first and foremost a Rabelaisian teller of stories, a sketcher of epigram and mysterious vignette...who chose to paint his stories...and who then decided that traditional canvas and paper were not sufficient and so turned to porcelain and stoneware as his main media. So: enigmas draped over and around busts and boots, like minor deities protruding into our world from some other dimension.

His huge stoneware heads are serene, contemplative, but their foreheads and cheeks are covered by human bodies, or small faces, or limbs...and they usually have an utterly different face on the back of the skull. Further adding to the ambiguity are the tableaus painted on the base of the statues, scenes of nets, horses, naked bodies in flight, men and women reaching out uncertainly to one another. The thinker's thoughts made visible, the agitation beneath the surface.

My favorites are his polychromatic porcelain boots, each about two feet tall, with titles like "Flight in the Dreams and Awake." Frequently there are disembodied hands attached to the boot, like the hands of God so typical of religious imagery from the European Renaissance. Boots left by Mercury after a long night's travels, emblazoned with the stories of those he encountered along the way?

Isupov is a warm spirit, his grotesques presented with love and a genuine desire to understand humanity in all our strangeness.

Speaking of strangeness, I cannot resist sharing this image (which I found at io9):

To quote the io9 article by Annalee Newitz: "...a group of San Francisco artists decorated the front of the boarded-up Harding Theater with the greatest work of LOL-based art the world has ever seen.

Aggressive Panhandler's Andrew Dalton is responsible for spotting this artwork with his laser eyes....

Find out more about the artists who created this mural: Bunnie Reiss, Ezra Li Eismont, and Garrison Buxton."

Sunday Morning Coffee: Giants in the Earth Appearing Now on a Billboard Near You

2010-11-14T04:48:00.000-08:00

While strolling around Tribeca yesterday afternoon, the lobster and the canary came upon this poster...a reminder that fantastical beings and the Old Ones are all around us, if we care to look... which reminded us of a few other Curious Creatures hidden in plain sight:

Sunday Afternoon Tea: NY Art Book Fair / Kate Castelli

2010-11-07T10:02:00.000-08:00

The wonderful graphic designer & illustrator Kate Castelli visited us this weekend-- what a treat to explore The NY Art Book Fair at MOMA/PS 1 with her.

(For more on Kate, see the Lobster & Canary interview August 1, 2010, and her website http://katecastelli.com).

In only its fifth year, the NY Art Book Fair, organized by Printed Matter, Inc., has become a "must see" on the fall arts circuit. The show was utterly packed on Saturday afternoon, standing room only in some places...

...for good reason, as c. 300 exhibitors treated us to a riot of interstitial, interdisciplinary, innovative, beautiful, bizarre, and sometimes just plain "huh?"-inducing books, journals, (maga)zines, broadsides, posters, prints, text/object mash-ups, and other less definable items.

Kate, the lobster, and the canary left delightfully overwhelmed. A few notes from a pile of impressions:

The Center for Book Arts (NYC), for their poetry chapbook collaborations (co-curated by Sharon Dolin, who we interviewed here March 13 & May 22, 2010).

Studio on the Square Book Arts Collective (NYC), for crisp composition and stand-out craftsmanship. (The small book entitled "Sacred Tables" glowed with a Klee-like combination of formal gridwork and subtly leaping colors.) Plus, the Studio on the Square's Intima Press featured the "Goddard Declaration of Independence": "Many of the names associated with the Declaration of Independence-John Hancock, Samuel Adams, Samuel Chase-are household names. Another one-Mary Katherine Goddard-is probably not. But Goddard played a central role in this foundational American document-she printed it. At the time she was living in Baltimore and was in fact Baltimore’s Postmistress."

Artspeak (Vancouver) for intriguing dialogue between practitioners and critics. From their website: "Artspeak presents contemporary practices, innovative publications, bookworks, editions, talks and events that encourage a dialogue between visual art and writing."

The Department of Interdisciplinary Arts at Columbia College Chicago, for their Journal of Artists' Books.

Siglio Press for their exquisite productions, especially of work by Nancy Spero and by Denis Wood. From their website: "SIGLIO is a new, independent press in Los Angeles dedicated to publishing uncommon books that live at the intersections of art and literature. Siglio books defy categorization and ignite conversation: they are cross-disciplinary, hybrid works that subvert paradigms, reveal unexpected connections, rethink narrative forms, and thoroughly engage a reader's imagination and intellect."

Proteus Gowanus (NYC) for their boldness, their hints of melancholy and outright morbidity, and the sheer volume & variety of their output. As they put it, they "extend an interesting train of thought into print."

e-flux for international interconnections and clever use of the chalkboard. As they put it: "Established in January 1999 in New York, e-flux is an international network which reaches more than 50,000 visual art professionals on a daily basis through its website, e-mail list and special projects. Its news digest – e-flux announcements – distributes information on some of the world's most important contemporary art exhibitions, publications and symposia".

The Silas Finch Foundation (NYC) for arresting, make-you-think imagery. From their website: "We work collaboratively with artists to produce, publish and promote ambitious photographic projects. We also work to develop and support new platforms for the publication and distribution of photographic art in the 21st century."

De Appel (Amsterdam) for its public art projects. From their website: "Since 1975 it has functioned as a site for the research and presentation of contemporary visual art through exhibitions, publications and discursive events. De Appel also functions as a platform for performances by visual artists, choreographers and theatre makers. [...] It has a special thematic focus on 'context-responsive' curating and the presentator [sic] of art in the 'public sphere'."

And these worthies only head a long list of appealing presenters at the NY Art Book Fair in 2010.

Photographs from October Country: Sam Jury; Michael Kenna; Gail Olding

2010-10-31T04:59:00.000-07:00

[Sam Jury, "Disjecta Membra 6"]

[Three from Michael Kenna, "Silent World" series]

[Two from Gail Olding, "Flunkus Mortati" series]

We've arrived at the harvest home, crossed the wet earth, watched the birds fly with Uncle Einar. We're arranging the feast for the visitors on All Hallow's Eve. We're deep into October Country, "that country [as Ray Bradbury says] where it is always turning late in the year. That country where the hills are fog and the rivers are mist; where noons go quickly, dusks and twilights linger, and midnights stay."

Others have sent back postcards from this liminal country. To see some of these, visit:

Olding's website here.

Kenna's website here.

Jury's website here.

Sunday Morning Coffee: A jizai okimono of a dragon; Amy Leach on a dragon's last thoughts

2010-10-24T05:43:00.001-07:00

Bonhams offers at auction (in London, November 11th) "a fine, rare and large iron jizai (fully articulated) okimono of a dragon; Myochin School, Edo Period, 18th/19th century
Realistically rendered with a long serpentine and undulating body, forged with numerous hammered scales joined inside the body with karakuri tsunagi, the leg joints, head, mouth and ears each constructed of moving parts, unsigned; with wood storage box. 137cm (54in) overall length."

Canary & Lobster fell in love with this powerful beauty. To enlarge the picture and learn more, click on the Bonhams site here, and enter "jizai okimono" in the search panel (upper right of screen).

Here is more from Bonhams about the piece:

"Of all the categories of Edo-period artefacts eagerly collected outside Japan for the last century and a half, articulated animals have the least trace of documentary evidence concerning their origin and development. Even the Japanese word for them, jizai or jizai okimono, appears to be a post-Edo term. [...]

According to Harada Kazutoshi, Special Research Chair at the Tokyo National Museum, the earliest-known jizai okimono dates from 1713. It is not clear for what purpose they were made, or from where the complicated manufacturing techniques originated. [...]"

Canary thinks the jizai okimono are the equivalent of death-masks or funerary puppets, honoring a dragon who once lived regally among humans. Maybe the living dragon's memories are stored within the okimono, are stirred to life when the construction's hinged limbs are moved.

And what might those memories consist of? Who can say, who has not recently conversed with dragons? But Amy Leach offers some ideas in her essay "Complexions," published in the Autumn, 2010 issue of The Gettysburg Review:

" 'To whom, then, does the earth belong?' said the dragon as he was being slain. 'Sometimes it seems to belong to dragons; at other times to dragon gaggers. Sometimes it seems to belong to the hot harmattan wind . . . then to the descuernadragones, the wind that dehorns dragons . . . and then to the doldrums. Sometimes it seems to belong to the slaves, when the sea parts to let them through, and sometimes to the sea when the sea does not part. Now to the siskin finch and sablefish; now to smitheries and smelteries. Perhaps the earth is neutral, like a bridge between two cities, traveled on but possessed by no traveler.' Such are the behindhand ponderings of a doomed dragon."

2010-10-24T05:43:00.000-07:00

Saturday Matinee: People Live Still in Cashtown Corners

2010-10-23T05:31:00.000-07:00

Wickedly atmospheric trailer for People Live Still in Cashtown Corners by Tony Burgess (Chizine Publications, fall 2010).

The trailer was directed by noted Canadian filmmaker Bruce McDonald (Pontypool).

For more information, visit Chizine Publications's website (full disclosure: they published my novel, The Choir Boats). Click here.

Midweek Meditation: Kodomo ("Concept 16"); Mary Frey ("Imagining Fauna")

2010-10-20T18:01:00.000-07:00

[Kodomo, "Concept 16" from Still Life, 2010]

After you listen to Kodomo, click here for photographer Mary Frey's "Imagining Fauna."

A Barn Owl stares right through you...mouth askew, a squirrel holds a nut...a crow is a blank...an egret poses in shadow...odd edges of very fine feathers...

Relics of a subtly altered past...inside a bell jar that fell through a worm-hole...

Here is Frey on her creatures:

"Photography invites us to pay attention. It describes with economy, precision and detail. It enables us to stare, scrutinize, and become voyeurs. Taxidermy allows us to do the same. Its complete replication of an animal’s stance, gesture and look provides us a way to study and comprehend its existence. Yet I find that these animals, often portrayed in suspended animation, seem simultaneously strange, ghostly and beautiful. Their gaze is both familiar and unknown. I intend this work to move beyond what is merely seen to the territory of the imagination, where what is remembered and known is transformed into something new."

Sunday Morning Coffee: The Acacia Trilogy by David Anthony Durham

2010-10-17T06:09:00.001-07:00

David Anthony Durham's Acacia Trilogy is one of the most important projects within speculative fiction at the moment. (The first book-- The War with the Mein-- came out in 2007; the second-- The Other Lands-- in 2009; the third is due out fall, 2011; all from Random House). Having mastered the tropes of epic fantasy on his first time out (Durham won the 2009 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer), he is exploring in the Acacia series the intent and self-mythologies of slavers and the impact of enslavement on a global-societal scale. Acacia is world-building as a means to sophisticated, ambitious ends, the use of fantasy to comment on social relations and to imagine alternative power dynamics in our own world-- without resorting to allegory or sermon. Acacia thus belongs to the lineage that includes Plato's Republic and Timaeus, Campanella's City of the Sun, Johnson's Rasselas, besides Persian Letters, Candide, Diderot's Supplement au voyage de Bougainville, and so on down to Orwell.

Acacia is especially powerful because Durham's narrative style is understated, leanly descriptive, matter-of-fact. (Reminds me of Steinbeck, Ursula K. Le Guin, Sinclair Lewis). He understands that the real story is in the mundane details underpinning and connecting all the surface events. Call it the fictional equivalent of Annaliste deep history a la Braudel or Wallerstein. Without slowing down the quick-paced intricacies of the plot, Durham makes the bones of his world visible.

For instance (from The Other Lands, pb version, pg. 166):

"It was so much worse than when she had last been here. Even then, two years ago, the northern Talayans had been complaining about the lack of rainfall. [The Empress] Corinn had thought their fears exaggerated. To her eyes the fields looked like...well, like fields of growing plants, rows and rows of short trees, fields of golden grasses. She understood that this apparent bounty was achieved only because the staple crops that required the most most water had already been replaced by sturdier varieties. [...] Not so, as the scene before her eyes now confirmed. It was a vision of devastation, as full of death as any battlefield. ...withered trees stood naked of leaves or fruit, blackly skeletal...some grain crop glittered as if the stalks were silvered strings of glass, ready to shatter underfoot. [...] The irrigation channels were completely dry, their beds cracked."

Another example (also, The Other Lands, pb, pg.222):

"The trio traveled inland and together explored the region for several days. The area's loamy soil produced bountiful crops of sweet potatoes, carrots, onions, and massive turnips the size of a man's head. Unlike the plantations of northern Talay or the state-run croplands of the Mainland, the region was too rocky to be sectioned off in a grid pattern. The land was irregular, broken by hills and stands of recalcitrant short pines, and not suited to mass labor forces. Instead, small family farmsteads patchworked the area, as they had for centuries. And, as had been the case for centuries, these farmers were forced to pay such a large portion of their crops into the empire's coffers that they little more than subsisted from their labor and their land's bounty."

Such descriptions could be from Defoe's Tour Through The Whole Island of Great Britain (1726), Arthur Young's travel accounts from Ireland (1780) and France (1790), and particularly Cobbett's Rural Rides (1830). Or from the countless surveys, reports, and descriptions of pre-emancipation plantations in the Caribbean and the American South.

Durham takes the reader, with unadorned prose, into the heart of a relentlessly inhumane system. He is a master of the mysterious detail that freezes the heart when its meaning is revealed. For instance, we learn that the wooden slats shipped to the quota-plantations on the Outer Islands are for cribs, in which thousands of kidnapped children will be reared for a life enslaved.

He knows that Acacia's horrors are rendered all the more horrible for being described so clinically. Some of the enslaved children literally have their souls snatched and embedded in the bodies of their owners. Others are physically deformed and remolded to suit their master's whims, to "belong" (as it is called) within the owner's clan. Some fight and die for their masters, others work the fields that produce the poppy-like drug used to pay for fresh slaves...completing the circle of their damnation.

The quota cull evokes the miseries of Goree and Elmina, the soul-eating machine on Lithram Len calls up the horrors of Sullivan's Island. Reading the Acacia novels, one reaches for Gilroy's The Black Atlantic, for Du Bois, Orlando Patterson's Slavery and Social Death and his Freedom in the Making of Western Culture. One turns to Ernst Moritz Arndt's History of Serfdom in Pomerania and Ruegen (1803), to Lampedusa's The Leopard, to accounts of mezzadria sharecropping systems throughout pre-industrial Italy, and so on and on...

In sum: read the Acacia novels, pay attention to Durham. He is not only a gifted storyteller, but a practitioner of speculative fiction as a moral science, a corrective to willful ignorance and the deliberate effacement of memory.

For more on Durham, click his website here.

Wednesday Evening Meditation: Dragon on Mt. Fuji; Seriously Deep

2010-10-13T17:05:00.000-07:00

[Suzuki Kiitsu, "Rising Dragon & Mount Fuji," oil painting, first half 19th century C.E.; click on the image to enlarge]

[Eberhard Weber, "Seriously Deep," from Silent Feet, recorded 1977]

Why does the dragon ascend the mountain?

Will she reach the summit, to speak to the wind?

... on her silent feet...

Sunday Morning Coffee: KAHIBA; Gossart

2010-10-10T05:49:00.000-07:00

[Jan Gossart, The Deposition, c. 1520; oil on panel; The Hermitage, St. Petersburg]

[Gossart, St. Anthony with a Donor, c. 1508; oil on panel; Galleria Doria-Pamphilis, Rome]

[Gossart, Jesus, The Virgin & the Baptist, c. 1510-1515; oil on panel; Prado, Madrid]

[Gossart, St. Luke Painting the Virgin, c. 1520-1525; oil on panel; Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna]

["Rejoycing" by KAHIBA, 2008]

A gentle river, filled with one- and two-masted tall ships, the great black-backed gulls patrolling the marina and promenade, wings outstretched in a mild blue sky...the grace notes of summer's out-procession...

(The German-Swiss-Austrian trio KAHIBA plays music to fit the season in-between, a Mitteleuropaische village dance tune with jazz overtonings, lively as we bring in the gourds and beans, with the saxophone reminding us of winter to come.]

Fabulous show opened at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC last week: Man, Myth, and Sensual Pleasures: Jan Gossart's Renaissance. As the Metropolitan describes it:

"The first major exhibition in forty-five years devoted to the Burgundian Netherlandish artist Jan Gossart (ca. 1478-1532) brings together Gossart's paintings, drawings, and prints and places them in the context of the art and artists that influenced his transformation from Late Gothic Mannerism to the new Renaissance mode."

(For more on Gossart from the Met, click here, then scroll down second item on the left. For Roberta Smith's strong review in the New York Times, click here.)

One of the most deliciously exhausting shows we have seen in years, overflowing with embellishment and detail. The oil paintings transport the viewer with their vivid and innovative colors (not least the polychrome wings of Gossart's angels), the flesh you are certain you could touch, the folds of velvet and satin that you are certain you can see shift and rustle. Deborah said Gossart was "drunk on architecture," that we can "almost smell the fresh air" emanating from his paintings.

Gossart is a genius at expressing religious passion-- not through anguished faces and gouts of blood-- but through composition, gesture, and the contours of the flesh.

As impressive as the oil paintings are, Gossart's ink/chalk drawings draw a viewer into a teeming, ornamented world that repays close inspection. "The Conversion of Saul" (from the 1520s) is a thunder of horsemen, "The Lamentation" (also c. 1520s)a quiet study of grief.

The show at the Met is large, and includes not only many of Gossart's master-works on loan from collections across the world, but many smaller pieces rarely seen. I especially liked the sketches of "standing warriors in fantastic arms," with their wildly bouffant sleeves, exaggerated plumes and epaulettes, their encrusted breastplates.

The show runs through January 17, 2011.

Sunday Morning Coffee: The Queen of Elfland's Drummer, at Cabinet des Fees

2010-10-03T07:20:00.000-07:00

Cabinet des Fees (and its offspring, Scheherezade's Bequest and Demeter's Spicebox) is a must-read if you love fairytale, folklore and myth, especially as reworked, re-configured, and re-imagined for modern times.

Last week the Cabinet des Fees blog featured a longish piece by me entitled "The Queen of Elfland's Drummer."

The essay starts this way:

"Music is a compass and pass-key to Faerie. We keep an ear cocked hoping to catch the notes of “a far distant post-horn across the silent, starlit land” as von Eichendorff put it…sometimes we are fortunate, most times we are not. Still, we persevere, seeking ever the chords to both express and guide our Sehnsucht. The kind of music is irrelevant – any and all kinds can take one beyond the fields we know (music of whatever sort poorly played is, of course, another matter altogether). Many conveyances, the same destination…"

To read more, and to add a comment to the blog thread (oh, oh, please do!), click here to the CdF main page and scroll down to find my essay on the left-hand side.

Sunday Morning Coffee: The Art Instinct; Herbie Hancock; Roy Hargrove; Frank Zappa; Jean-Luc Ponty; Dave Matthews

2010-09-26T04:55:00.000-07:00

[Herbie Hancock & the Headhunters, "Chameleon", 1973]

[Roy Hargrove & RH Factor, "Riff," live 2005]

[Frank Zappa, with Jean-Luc Ponty, "Greggary Peccary Suite," live 1973]

[Dave Matthews Band, "You & Me," 2009]

Ever read a book that you agree with heartily...right up until the final few pages? Denis Dutton's The Art Instinct; Beauty, Pleasure, and Human Evolution (Bloomsbury, 2009)is that book for me right now. I recommend The Art Instinct-- it is cogent, thought-provoking, stylish (Dutton writes very well, as we would expect from the founding editor of Arts & Letters Daily).

Dutton is bold: he seeks to explain the arts as a necessary driver and outcome of our biological evolution. In doing so, he sets his views against both many biologists on the one side, and many philosophers of arts and aestheticians on the other. If you like books by Steven Pinker, Steven Jay Gould and E.O. Wilson, you'll like The Art Instinct.

I was nodding my head on just about every page...until I got to page 223 and the first of Dutton's four assertions about what makes a masterpiece:

"The arts are not essentially social."

The bolding and italics are in the original-- Dutton is stressing his assertion, and then takes the next four pages to support his point. Dutton-- as he is throughout the book-- is nuanced and balanced. He acknowledges that the arts demonstrably enhance empathy, group solidarity, and cooperation. But he argues ultimately that the primary, most important role of art-making is to enhance the individual's ability to compete for a mate.

"My [i.e., Dutton, page 226] own view is that traces of sexual selection, a process that pits suitors against each other in a competition with real winners and losers, tends partially to undermine the communal spirit as having a defining role in the arts. [...] The motives of art, as even Darwin knew, are ancient and complicated-- directed towards a community, perhaps, but also created to captivate an audience of one."

Fair enough, and nicely qualified... and no one could doubt that music can play a significant part in sexual display/ selection. I would just flip the priority, and emphasize instead the group dynamics.

Quick example:

Decades ago, I was a stagehand for a musical in college. As we dimmed the lights to signal the end of intermission at one of the shows, the pit orchestra began to tune up. Imagine the usual sounds of spectators rustling and talking as they return to their seats, and the musicians noodling around, with random toots, plinks, and honks. Suddenly-- and now the lights were out entirely-- one line cut through the hub-bub: the bass player thrumming the unmistakable opening riff from Herbie Hancock's "Chameleon."

"Boim boim boim boim bummmm-bump, boim boim boim boim bummmm-bump..."

Over and over. If you can hear a smile in the dark, spreading from face to face on silent feet, then we heard the broadest of collective smiles.

The drummer joined in, and then the guitarist. For a minute or so, in the shared darkness, entirely impromptu (as far as any of us outside the pit could tell), the band jammed and the audience murmured and clapped and whistled.

And then, with a flourish, the band shifted into the entirely unrelated overture to the musical and we brought up the lights and raised the curtain.

One of those moments in life when you are randomly yet very certainly, viscerally, connected to a hundred strangers. Music did that-- it could have been any one of the arts, a painting, a poem. We could not see each other, and I do not recall (though I could be wrong) audience members rushing to the band afterwards for post-play erotics. The impact was profound-- a spark to defy the dark, a human note to defeat the emptiness that stretches out into infinity.

YouTube is a trove of live music. I picked three from hundreds of favorites. Watch for the joy communicated from face to face.

Sunday Morning Coffee: Romanticism in Pomerania; Teofilo Olivieri; Graham Franciose

2010-09-19T06:06:00.000-07:00

[Caspar David Friedrich, Greifswald in Moonlight, 1816/17]

[Three by Teofilo Olivieri]

[Two by Graham Franciose]

Fall is here at last in New York City: shadows ever longer, goldenrod coming into bloom on Chelsea Piers, the sun still fierce but knowing her power is waning, fleets of Monarch Butterflies sailing by (as far up as thirty stories)...

It is autumn in Pomerania too, along the southern shores of the Baltic, where I lived for over a year. The Pomeranian State Museum in Greifswald (where I spent a great deal of time) just opened what must be a wonderful exhibit on the "Birth of Romanticism," featuring work by three native sons: Friedrich, Runge and Klinkowstroem. Most exciting: the National Museum in Oslo (where I lived for six years) has sent Friedrich's Greifswald by Moonlight, the first time I believe that it has ever been displayed in its hometown. For more, click here.

Closer to home, the lobster and the canary last month stumbled across the artist Teofilo Olivieri and his work. He was selling his boldly delineated, vibrantly colored, enigmatic pieces on the street just south of Union Square-- we bought one of the ambiguous horned owl-people. For more, click here.

Graham Franciose sent me a link to his new website-- for which, click here. I love his mournful, pensive, rum little people...and the way they twine with and are entwined by the natural world (birds, roots, nests).

Sunday Evening Soup: Brooklyn Book Festival

2010-09-12T16:49:00.000-07:00

Today the lobster and the canary enjoyed the fifth annual Brooklyn Book Festival, undeterred by a mizzle of rain.

Was good to talk with the ever-jovial Gavin Grant, staffing the booth at Small Beer Press.

Ditto our good friends at Brooklyn's own Greenlight Bookstore.

We also spoke with (and bought books from!) the good folks at:

* NY Review of Books Classics

* Archipelago Books

* Coffee House Press

* Poetry Society of America

* New Directions

* Europa Editions

If you are in or around Brooklyn next September, visit the Festival!

Click here for more information.

Sunday Morning Coffee: Visual Arts in NYC This Fall

2010-09-05T05:15:00.001-07:00

[Jocelyn Hobbie, Pilgrim]

[TM Davy, untitled]

[Louise Despont, moonface & his carrier birds]

[Dante Horoiwa, Distracted, We'll Win]

[Alex Gross, Discrepancies]

[Flor Echevarria, Torres]

[Hugo Martinez Rapari, La Tierra Sopla-Tormenta! Earth Blows: Sand Storm!]

[Fred Tomaselli, Big Raven (2008)]

First cool breezes off the Hudson, the first slants of sunshine in Central Park this weekend...fall is on its way.

Some exhibitions we are looking forward to this autumn in the city:

* Fred Tomaselli at the Brooklyn Museum.

* Miro at the Metropolitan, and also the Gossarts at ditto.

* At the MoMA: "On Line: Drawing Through the Twentieth Century," which (per the museum website)"...explores the radical transformation of the medium of drawing throughout the twentieth century, a period when numerous artists subjected the traditional concepts of drawing to a critical examination and expanded the medium's definition in relation to gesture and form. In a revolutionary departure from the institutional definition of drawing, and from the reliance on paper as the fundamental support material, artists instead pushed line across the plane into real space, thus questioning the relation between the object of art and the world."

* The group show "Ain't I a Woman" at The Museum of Contemporary African Diaspora Arts.

* Hugo Martinez Rapari, Flor Echevarria and others at Agora Gallery's "Masters of the Imagination" group show.

* Alex Gross at Jonathan Levine.

* Dante Horoiwa and others in RH Gallery's inaugural show, The Third Meaning.

* Louise Despont's House of Instruments show at Nicelle Beauchene.

* TM Davy at Eleven Rivington.

* Jocelyn Hobbie's "portraits of imaginary women" at Kerry Schuss.

And-- the lobster clacks his claws in anticipation, the canary whistles praise in advance!-- that just scratches the surface.

Sunday Morning Coffee: Herbie Hancock/ The Imagine Project; Fall Reading List

2010-08-29T05:24:00.000-07:00

[Herbie Hancock, The Imagine Project, released June 21, 2010.]

Herbie Hancock does it again, finding the beauty and strength in our differences, while reaffirming and celebrating our unity. "Peace through global collaboration," he says. "Perhaps you could say the recording studio is a model for peace, camaraderie and mutual respect."

Hancock creates thoughtful happiness, blending ingredients from many cultures judiciously, effectively. He's joined here by-- among many others-- Anoushka Shankar, Pink, John Legend, Derek Trucks, The Chieftains, Manu Katche, Seal, Chaka Khan, Jeff Beck, India.Arie, Oumou Sangare. ("Imagine" is-- yes-- John Lennon's, and there is also a wonderful rendition of Dylan's "The Times, They are A-Changing.")

Hancock again: "Every human is a creator...what can we do to help design the human orchestra of life?"

From music to books:

Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins arrived this past week...well worth the wait...I am on page 107, and loving it...

On my fall list:

*Nnedi Okorafor, Who Fears Death, published in June by DAW.

*David Anthony Durham, The Other Lands (the second in the Acacia trilogy), out in paperback on August 31.

*Ken Scholes, Antiphon (the third book in The Psalms of Isaak series), due from Tor on September 14.

*Erzebet Yellowboy, Sleeping Helena, due from Prime, November 16.

*D.M. Cornish, Factotum (the final book in The Foundling's Tale trilogy), from Putnam, November 11.

*Catherine Fisher, Sapphique (the sequel to Incarceron), first American release, Penguin, December 28.

"Imagine all the people
Living life in peace

You may say that I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope someday you'll join us
And the world will be as one."

Sunday Morning Coffee: Long Live Literature in the Digital Age!

2010-08-22T05:18:00.000-07:00

In the midst of worries about the future of fiction in a digital age, literature (still) matters enough that Jonathan Franzen made the cover of Time two weeks ago. Click here for Lev Grossman's article on Franzen, and Franzen's notes on the novels that most influenced him.

Denis Dutton -- in The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure & Human Evolution (Bloomsbury, 2009; out now in pb)-- argues that fiction is a crucial adaptation for our survival:

"The basic themes and situations of fiction are a product of fundamental, evolved interests human beings have in love, death, adventure, family, justice, and overcoming adversity. 'Reproduction and survival' is the evolutionary slogan, which in fiction is translated straight into the eternal themes of love and death for tragedy, and love and marriage for comedy. [...] Story plots...inevitably follow, as Aristotle realized and Darwinian aesthetics can explain, from an instinctual desire to tell stories about the basic features of the human predicament." (page 132).

For a smart, complex exchange on the value of fiction-- and particularly fiction's relationship to non-fiction-- see Scott Esposito's "On the Insufficiency of Fiction For Our Times." Esposito, editor of The Quarterly Conversation, is responding to recent posts by a number of other critics.

Riffing on Esposito's essay, Levi Stahl (on August 6, in The Constant Conversation) notes: "Outside of the storied coffeeshop of Johnsonian days, there’s never been anything like the Internet for facilitating–hell, even generating–this sort of discussion. If the very idea of a golden age didn’t give me hives, I’d say we were living in it right now."

"Yes, yes!" sings the canary, while lobster claps his claws.