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

[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

[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

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

[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

[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!

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.

Sunday Morning Coffee: Sybil's Garage; Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet; Greer Gilman (Readercon20)

Lobster & Canary happily subscribe to Sybil's Garage (from Senses Five Press) and to Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet (from Small Beer Press). We encourage you to do the same.

The latest Sybil's (no. 7, arrived last week) is the biggest ever at nearly 200 pages, and is as well produced as always. We're still reading our way through, but so far we are impressed. For instance, check out "The Unbeing of Once-Leela" by Swapna Kishore, and "An Orange Tree Framed Your Body," by Alex Dally MacFarlane. Also, poems by Sonya Taaffe, and Amal El-Mohtar.

The current LCRW (no. 25, published in May) is the usual omnium gatherum of delightful things. Jeannine Hall Gailey's poems about The Fox-Wife stood out for us, likewise Daniel Braum's "Music of the Spheres" and "Elephants of the Platte" by Thomas Israel Hopkins. Above all: "Exuviation" by Haihong Zhao, which strikes just the right balance between the utterly alien and the entirely plausible.

Thinking of Small Beer Press reminded us of one of their authors, Greer Gilman, whom we heard read from her then just-published Cloud & Ashes at Readercon 20 in July, 2009. (And Sonya Taaffe sang as part of that recital...lovely.) We heard Greer read "Down the Wall" the year before at KGB.

In the Readercon 20 souvenir book, Greer -- one of the guests of honor-- said: "I pretty much wrote the book backward and inside out. ... It's maze-making. Once you get the torch to light--and it can take years to get the torch alight--that makes the maze. The rooms unfold only if you are already in the light. If you're in the dark, you can't find the way."

If you are keen to find your way, we urge you to buy and read Greer's work.

Sunday Morning Coffee: Lady Gaga; Hannah Hoch: Rebecca Horn; Marina Abramovic

[Lady Gaga on the cover of Rolling Stone, issue 1108/1109, July 8-22, 2010]


[A montage of works by Hannah Hoch]


[Hugo Ball, in costume to recite his sound-poem "Karawane", at the Cafe Voltaire, Zurich, 1916]


[Theatre of Marionettes, Automata and Dolls, at the Bauhaus, c.1925 ]


[Rebecca Horn, "White Body Fan," 1972; photo by A. Thode]


[Rebecca Horn, still from the film Unicorn, 1970-1972; photo by A. Thode]


[Marina Abramovic, interview connected to her show "The Artist is Present," at the Museum of Modern Art in NYC, March 14-May 31, 2010.]

Thinking about Lady Gaga as a performance/installation artist as much as a musician.

She has sparked much conversation about the "machine-gun bra" that she sports on the cover of Rolling Stone, and that she wears in her latest video, "Alejandro," but the concept is hardly new. Madonna famously wore an exaggerated conical bra in "Vogue" and on tour; Rebecca Horn sketched a design for "breast extensions" in the late 1960's.

Horn's early work was all about body extensions of various sorts, presaging Gaga's (and Beyonce's and Rihanna's) fascination with the same.

Other pop music antecedents: David Byrne's "big suit," Peter Gabriel in his days with Genesis, David Bowie as "Ziggy Stardust," George Clinton, Bootsy Collins and the entire Funkadelic Parliament band, Elton John's eyewear (pairing Elton with Gaga at this year's Grammy Awards was a natural).

Shared models from experimental theater and the visual arts might include the "mechanical ballet" and "theater of dolls" staged by Schlemmer at the Bauhaus in Weimar, and the work of Hannah Hoch and other Dadaists, especially Hugo Ball with his bruitist presentations at the Cafe Voltaire.

Mix in Berlin cabaret and German Expressionism, some Grand Guignol, a dash of Artaud and a pinch of Mummenschanz, and a big swirl of vaudeville and burlesque.

Oh, and science fiction... surely the costumed Gaga and dancers who emerge from the pods at the start of her video "Bad Romance" owe something to the Giger/Scott creature in Alien?

Whatever her sources of inspiration, Gaga is reminding audiences that performance matters. The question is whether she will dare as much as some others have done, for instance Marina Abramovic, for whom performance is unique, unsettling, and authentic.

Sunday Morning Coffee: "Wake Up"; Kate Castelli

"Wake Up," by The Arcade Fire (2007); a theme song for the Spike Jonze/Dave Eggers film of Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are.

"Wake up, lobster, wake up!" Translucent chalk edgings on the Hudson's waves, the faintest blue wash above, the gulls are calling out..."Look at all the sailboats! Little ones for exploring the river and the bay...here and there: giant ocean-going ones, all the way from London or the Caribbean."

As we set sail, let us think of Calvin & Hobbes, and the Pevensies (especially Lucy) on the Dawntreader, Ged and Vetch in the Lookfar seeking Ged's bane on the open sea, Lyra (and Pantalaimon!) sailing north with John Faa and the Gyptians to rescue the kidnapped children, and of course Max wearing his animal-suit as he careens across the waves to meet the Wild Things.

An artist who captures the expectancy, the shimmery promise, of our trip is Kate Castelli. I urge you to spend time with her sketchbooks online (some of which will tour nationally in early 2011), and to read her blog, "Wandering But Not Lost." Click here for these.

Kate kindly answered a few questions for us:

Lobster & Canary, question 1:

The thesis of the 2009 Hayward Gallery/London show­ entitled ­The end of the line- attitudes in drawing:

“In the Western tradition, drawing was the foundation of art education, the essential discipline underlying all others. In the second half of the 20th century, a more academic approach to art making threatened the authority of drawing as a 'pure' art form, as a result, many schools cast it out as a throwback to past times. Recently drawing has returned to the mainstream as a cheap and autonomous activity, a democratically available form of image making, uniquely capable of intimate, spontaneous self-revelation.”

There certainly seems to be increased curatorial and scholarly interest in drawing. Some examples of this include the first-ever comprehensive exhibition of Bronzino’s drawings (at the Metropolitan, NYC earlier this year), the ground-breaking show of Parmigianino’s drawings in 2004 at the Frick (NYC), and books like Roberto Calasso’s 2006 (English translation, 2009) Tiepolo Pink on the painter’s Scherzi and the first-ever survey of conceptual/”interior space” artist Rachel Whiteread’s drawings, published this month. Collecting activity also seems to be picking up, judging from the successful launch ten years ago of Master Drawings, London and of its counterpart in New York four years ago.

But are we truly seeing a revival of interest in drawing in the art schools?

Kate's Response: "I don’t think there was ever a loss of interest in drawing. It is too vital of a skill to ignore. When you enter art school, drawing serves as a fundamental building block to engage in the visual language of the world. It is a way to make sense of what you are seeing. You become facile and adept. Eventually you realize that recording what you see is not enough, you are not a camera after all. This is the other side of drawing in art school, the expressive. Developmentally this can only happen after a rigorous and academic foundation. You choose what to keep and what to disregard. It is this intuitive editing combined with a skill set that really develops the artistic voice.

I think the renewed interest in drawing is more rooted in the dialogue between the artist and their voice. It’s not about what they see, but how they see it".

Lobster & Canary, question 2:

“If there is a renaissance of drawing taking place, it is not driven by the art market, but by something inside the artists themselves. It is driven, I suspect, by something innate and human, by a constellation of long-standing behaviors and impulses shaped as much by human nature as by culture.” Says Peter Steinhart in his The Undressed Art: Why We Draw (2004), p. 9.

Your thoughts on this?

Kate's Response: "There is a visceral immediacy to drawing. It is the relationship between the eye and the hand, or the head and the hand. It is a process and a product. I am more interested in the process, the intuitive, the compulsion to put a mark on a surface. I think the art market is generally interested in the product, something authentic and elemental. It is the dual nature of drawing; a place to begin and an end unto itself."

Lobster & Canary, question 3:

Talk to us about your sketchbooks. How much is spontaneous observation, how much an accretion of ideas, how much intended as a finished product, how much as preliminary to a final work? Do you study the sketchbooks of other artists?

Kate's Response: "I always carry a sketchbook, I feel naked without one. I’ve done 2-4 a year for the last couple of years. I think I’m on number 14. My sketchbooks are constantly evolving. They have always been a beginning and an end. I move seamlessly between the sketchbook and my finished work. The sketchbooks inform my work but I also consider them objects unto themselves.

The current incarnation is a combination of observational line drawings, collected ephemera, ink explorations, hand lettering and stitching. In this particular sketchbook I have been looking at how the spreads relate to each other. Sometimes I over think my sketchbook and have to remind myself that it is a place to play. That is the beauty of sketchbooks: they don’t have rules. They don’t have to be polished or edited.

I am fascinated by other artists’ sketchbooks. They allow you to not only engage in dialogue about process, but also about passion. Sketchbooks are deeply personal in an unexpected way. I show certain pages but rarely reveal the whole book. Only one person besides myself has seen all of them.

And I never draw or do anything on the first page. It is a little superstition of mine, but I always begin on the second page."

Lobster & Canary, question 4:

On your blog, "Wandering But Not Lost", you recently draw a series of airships inspired by Italo Calvino. Talk about some of your favorite authors, and how they may spur your creativity.

Kate's Response: "Invisible Cities was an interesting read. I enjoyed the ephemeral nature of the narrative structure. Calvino’s descriptions were both evasive and vivid.

I am rarely directly inspired by what I read. Reading offers a respite from the visual overload of the everyday world. I feel it engages a different part of my mind, a guilty pleasure of sorts. My tastes vary greatly, although I generally stick to fiction or art history and criticism. Being a visual creature, I have to admit I do pick books by their cover. This method, combined with roaming around bookstores aimlessly has rarely left me disappointed. Some of my recent favorites have been The Painter of Battles by Arturo Perez-Reverte, Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita, and The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery.

Some perennial favorites include Sherlock Holmes, Pride and Prejudice, and Kim by Rudyard Kipling."

Lobster & Canary, question 5:

On your blog, you also note your love for the music of the Rolling Stones. Tell us something about how music (Stones or others) may inspire your art.

Kate's Response: "I love the Rolling Stones for their music and their mythology. I have been listening to them since I was a little kid, but it was only later that I truly began to understand and appreciate what the Stones are really about. They don't apologize for who they are or who they were. Keith Richards famously says at every concert, “It’s good to be here, it’s good to be anywhere.” They’ve been making music for over four decades and show no signs of stopping. There is always room to grow.

Stones or otherwise, music is a vital part of my creative process. I have to listen to music when I am working in the studio. I can’t stand silence, it feels too fragile. Sometimes it is a certain album, mostly it is whatever comes up on iTunes shuffle; anything from Copland to the Stones, to Phoenix."

Lobster & Canary, question 6:

If you could talk with a dead artist, who would it be? What would you want him or her to tell you?

Kate's Response: "As a student and lover of art history this is quite the question. Must I pick only one?

I’d love to play chess with Duchamp, ask Calder about the color red, or accompany Joseph Cornell on his ephemeral wanderings in New York City. I’d ask them about these seasons of self-doubt, how to stay engaged and inspired in this world, their favorite color."

Canary's final words: "Thank you Kate! And, look, I spy land away on the far, far horizon...a line of hazy green...Get ready, lobster!"

Sunday Morning Coffee: Saltillo; Mau Pilailug; Sunken Ship at WTC; Jonathan Barnes

[Saltillo, "Remember Me," from Ganglion, released 2006]

Heat inescapable...canary seeks shade in a sycamore...lobster offers coffee infused with a spoonful of cold, cold vanilla ice cream...

One of the world's greatest navigators, Mau Piailug, died last week. A Micronesian, in 1976 he sailed alone-- and without compass, sextant or charts-- the 2,500 miles of open ocean from Hawai'i to Tahiti, demonstrating that the peopling of the Pacific islands was deliberate, not due to chance or accident. The Economist in its obituary describes Piailug as a poet of the trek (for the full obit, click here):

"...he would point his canoe into the right slant of wind, and then along a path between a rising star and an opposite, setting one. With his departure star astern and his destination star ahead, he could keep to his course. By day he was guided by the rising and setting sun but also by the ocean herself, the mother of life. He could read how far he was from shore, and its direction, by the feel of the swell against the hull. He could detect shallower water by colour, and see the light of invisible lagoons reflected in the undersides of clouds."

Two weeks ago, in the layers beneath the city, construction crews at the World Trade Center site in lower Manhattan uncovered the bones of an 18th-century ship. As David Dunlap wrote in the New York Times (for full story, click here):

"In the middle of tomorrow, a great ribbed ghost has emerged from a distant yesterday."

Lobster and canary are reading The Domino Men by Jonathan Barnes (Harper 2009; first pb 2010). What a great read! If you like Gaiman's Neverwhere, you will like The Domino Men. Think also Clive Barker and Ramsey Campbell mashed with John Le Carre. The protagonist reminds me of Jimmy Stewart in The Man Who Knew Too Much, or Cary Grant in North by Northwest, with a Lovecraftian cabal as his enemies.

Sunday Morning Coffee: "Television Man"; Tony Judt, Matthew Cheney, Jeff Spock

[The Talking Heads, "Television Man," from Little Creatures, 1985]

Wake up Canary, wake up! Dawn is upon us, words there are to sing...

We enjoyed three good short musings this week on language, its challenges, possibilities and limits:

Tony Judt has a beautiful essay, "Words," in the current New York Review of Books . He defends rhetorical style and worries about the corrosive effects of inarticulacy. "When words lose their integrity so do the ideas they express," Judt writes. "If we privilege personal expression over formal convention, then we are privatizing language no less than we have privatized so much else. [...] The wealth of words in which I was raised were a public space in their own right...If words fall into disrepair, what will substitute?"

Matthew Cheney, writing as The Mumpsimus, consistently offers some of the most incisive (yet warm-hearted) commentary on speculative fiction and movies. His report on Readercon earlier this month includes this meditation:

"I'm [i.e., Cheney] not very good at inserting myself into conversations, so I did a lot of observing during the panel, piping up only to offer a sort of counter viewpoint from Gary's [i.e., Gary Wolfe] -- where Gary was in some ways agreeing with Paul Witcover's assertion that writers like T.C. Boyle are just using science fiction as "a trip to the playground". I was hoping we'd be able to discuss this idea a bit more, but time didn't allow it. Had it, I suppose I would have tried to say that to me the resentment of writers not routinely identified with the marketing category of "science fiction" or the community of fans, writers, and publishers that congregates under the SF umbrella -- the resentment of these writers for using the props, tropes, and moves of SF is unappealing to me for a few reasons. It's a clubhouse mentality, one that lets folks inside the clubhouse determine what the secret password is and if anybody standing outside has the right pronunciation of that password. It is, in other words, a purity test: are the intentions in your soul the right ones, the approved ones?"

Read the rest of Cheney's Readercon notes here.

Jeff Spock, a leading digital game designer, suggests some solutions to the challenge of telling stories in the very short form of the "casual game," in "Short Games, Long Stories" (originally in the International Game Developers Association newsletter, reposted to Gamasutra last week).

Spock writes:

"Basically, I [i.e., Spock] recommend (against my better instincts) using traditional story structures and stereotypical characters in order to simplify the player's task of digesting the plot. The analogy that I used in the article, and that I really like, is the "gutter" in comic strips. That white space between two panels has nothing in it, but the human imagination fills in everything that could have been written there. In much the same way, all you need to do to create a story is to suggest where you are in the story arc and what the characters are thinking; there is no need to be more explicit than that. The player's imagination is more than capable of connecting the links and filling in the details."

Read the rest of Spock's suggestions here.

Sunday Morning Coffee: Recommended Reading, Second Quarter 2010

We adore Alastair Reynolds. Out last month in U.S. paperback from Ace is his House of Suns, 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?) I am halfway through Banks's Matter, another novel of The Culture, published in 2008 (Orbit). At its heart this is 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...

Am also partway through Olga Slavnikova's 2017 (translated from the Russian by Marian Schwartz; from The Overlook Press, 2010). Will review in more detail when I finish, but worth the reading: 2017 is genuinely strange, hard to classify, like the reflection you think you see on the edge of vision or the shadow of a bird that flies across your path. "Krylov for some reason lost his sense of his own height and couldn't tell whether he was in fact taller or not." That captures the mood of the book.

Danielle Trussoni's Angelology (from 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.

Two that I did not finish, despite high expectations: The Swan Thieves by Elizabeth Kostova, and A Dark Matter by Peter Straub. I need to explore why I did not enjoy either of these, what failed to work for me. Both are well written, thoughtful, serious of purpose. I was pre-disposed to like them: I devoured Kostova's 2005 debut The Historian, and I have long enjoyed Straub's work (regardless of my opinion, he is clearly one of the modern masters of horror and the supernatural) ...so I want to understand what mechanic on my side as a reader rendered these two particular novels cold for me.

Sunday Morning Coffee: Natalie Merchant; The Decay of Contemporary Art; Solar Sails

Natalie Merchant puts poems to music on her new album (released in April this year). See the PBS video above. Canary especially likes Merchant's stated emphasis on rediscovering and exploring the spoken, rhythmic elements of poetry.

Lobster likes Ben Lewis's polemic, "The Dustbin of Art History," in the current issue of Prospect. Some delicious quotes from Lewis:

"The paintings in Damien Hirst’s exhibition at the Wallace Collection last October were execrable. Most critics fulminated that these works of art should never have been hung in close proximity to masterpieces by Poussin and Rembrandt. [...] ...as I made my way hastily to the exit—down the grand staircase past vast pompous canvases of sunrise and sunset by the 18th-century French painter François Boucher, full of pink putti and topless girls in diaphanous dresses—I realised that those critics were wrong. The Wallace, famous for its collection of French rococo, was actually the perfect setting for Hirst’s exhibition, titled “No Love Lost, Blue Paintings.”

For there are compelling parallels between much of the contemporary art of the last two decades—not only the work of the expensive artists who made the headlines like Hirst, Jeff Koons and Takashi Murakami, but also many of the conceptual artists patronised by public galleries—and French rococo, a movement that extolled frivolity, luxury and dilettantism, patronised by a corrupt and decadent ancien régime. Boucher’s art represented the degradation of the baroque school’s classical and Christian values into a heavenly zone of soft porn, shorn of danger, conflict and moral purpose. Similarly, Hirst’s work represents the degeneration of the modernist project from its mission to sweep away art’s “bourgeois relics” into a set of eye-pleasing and sentimental visual tropes."

"There is a pattern typical of these end-phase periods, when an artistic movement ossifies. At such times there is exaggeration and multiplication instead of development. A once new armoury of artistic concepts, processes, techniques and themes becomes an archive of formulae, quotations or paraphrasings, ultimately assuming the mode of self-parody."

Finally, on a muggy Sunday morning in New York City, the canary sighs in envy of the silken wings that sprouted this week on the Japanese experimental satellite Ikaros, 6 million miles out in space. Click here for photographs of the Ikaros solar sail. Perhaps one day such sails will take our craft to the stars, powered by the force of sunlight alone.

Sunday Morning Coffee: Terje Rypdal; John Brunner.

[Terje Rypdal, from Odyssey, 1975]

John Brunner's The Traveler in Black (1971) is a quiet, unsung gem. I revisited it recently, having purchased a used copy from one of the dealers at Arisia. Uncorking the bottle, I found the wine as full-bodied and heady as it was when I first savored it...I first met the Traveler c. 1970, in the two Traveler short stories that appeared in the Ted White-edited Fantastic.

Less precious than Dunsany, less mordant and cynical than Vance, not so filigreed as Clark Ashton Smith-- though owing a debt to each of these--Brunner in his Traveler tales finds hope in the melancholy, taps into a wry pity for human folly.

I love most of all his terse style. Few fantastistes (Leiber also comes to mind) conjure so much strangeness with so few words. Listen:

" 'Igoroth!' said Gostala in exasperation. 'Dumedinnis! And likewise Algorethon!'

Three odd-looking gentlemen--one in blue, one in white, one in green-- walked through a nearby wall and stood before her. None of them was entirely normal in appearance, though it was hard to say in what particular respect.

'Get rid of that--object!' directed Gostala forcefully.

The three peculiar personages looked at her, then at each other, then at her again. Premeditatedly, they shook their heads, and departed, taking her with them."

And this:

"...after great labor he incarcerated Wolpec in a candle over whose flame he smoked a piece of glass which thereupon showed three truths: one ineluctable, one debatable and one incomprehensible."

And this:

"Tyllwin's huge round head, like a turnip-ghost's, turned to watch them, and a smile curved his dusty lips."

Long live the Traveler in Black!

Sunday Morning Coffee: Jacky Terrasson; Christopher Beha;"Year's Best SF 15"; "Whitechapel Gods"

[Jacky Terrasson and friends]

* Lobster at the lectern:

Christopher Beha (an editor at Harper's) in the current issue of BookForum (page 39), reviewing Gary Shteyngart's latest novel:

"...Chekhov's genius lay precisely in revealing the complex interiority that energizes the most mundane human moments. [//] Shteyngart makes a compelling case that we lose that interiority-- the very thing that gives us depth and richness-- when we abandon literary culture. It may be, as so many want to tell us, that this loss is bad for democracy. But that is almost beside the point: It is bad for our souls."

* Canary in a hammock:

David G. Hartwell & Kathryn Cramer are up to their usual excellent curatorial standard in Year's Best SF 15 (Eos, 2010). A few favorites:

"Edison's Frankenstein" by Chris Roberson, a clever riff on yesterday's future and the perils of prediction. "But he realized now it wasn't a hope for a new world to come, but a kind of nostalgia for a future that could never be" (page 491).

"The Island" by Peter Watts (whose novel Blindsight is one of my favorites of the past few years), a compact meditation on free will and evolution. " 'You're only following orders from a bunch of other systems way more complex than you are.' You've got to hand it to them, too; dead for stellar lifetimes and those damn project admins are still pulling the strings" (page 197).

"The Fixation" by Alastair Reynolds, also focuses on free will, the what-if's of alternate realities, the perils of unintended consequences. "Ghosts are not the souls of the dead, but the souls of people written out of history when history changes" (pg. 317).

* Lobster, after burnishing his claws on the cogs of a sunken ship, is relaxing with Whitechapel Gods by S.M. Peters. Not done yet, but impressed so far with this tale. Reminds us of China Mieville's work, of Gaiman's Neverwhere and The Light Ages by Ian MacLeod.

Enjoy your Sunday.

Sunday Morning Coffee: "Pavane" (Regina Carter); The Singularity on a Sunday

[Regina Carter, "Pavane," from her album Paganini-After a Dream, 2003]


Across the Hudson, mist like the film attaching to the inside of eggshell...the river's surface (the first time in weeks) nearly as smooth as the shell's exterior...

What promises will the egg bring forth?

With the elegant phrasing of Regina Carter in our heads, the lobster (nutmeg and cloves in his hot chocolate) and the canary (brown sugar, one more spoonful please) contemplate the Singularity.

Someone-- John Scalzi? Cory Doctorow?--has noted that science fiction is not in the prediction business, but is a means to imagine how humans will react to various future scenarios.

So, Mr. Nutmeg and Mr. Turbinado are parsing current and potential reactions to recent news:

* Last Thursday, the J. Craig Venter Institute announced that it has created a synthetic cell, controlled by man-made genetic instructions. (The media is calling the cell "Synthia"; Venter sails in a yacht called "Sorcerer II.") Creating life? "Merely" mimicking life? Playing God (or the Devil)? "Simply" demonstrating the chemical composition of life, a technical trick akin to coding a new PC OS?

* Also last Thursday, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission Chairman Gary Gensler, testifying to the U.S. Congress, said about the still-unexplained May 6th free fall in U.S. stocks: "On this day, however, high volume could have beena misleading indicator of liquidity to market particpants and their preprogrammed algorithms" (quoted in Sarah N. Lynch, "Gensler Puts Blame on Math,"May 21 Wall Street Journal, pg. C2). As WSJ journalist Lynch explains: "In algorithmic or 'algo' trading, market players use computers to establish the parameters of an order in advance. The orders are directed into an electronic trading venue, and computers can carry them out without human intervention." (We seem to recall that Skynet did not become self-aware until 2017...?)

* Last week came further concerns about use of private data by various digital social networks. Among other things, an international campaign is calling for May 31st to be "Quit Facebook Day." Tempest in an electronic teapot? Libertarian revolt against the nascent hive-mind?

Sharon Dolin: Of Hours

[Ellen Wiener, "Moon & Lillies (Vespers)," painted 1999]

The lobster, with canary riding on his carapace, is delighted to present a coda to the Sharon Dolin interview (March 13th, "Composing for the Eye"). Sharon very wonderfully sent us more thoughts on ekphrasis, and a generous preview of her as-yet-unpublished work, Of Hours.

From Sharon:

"My Book of Hours

I have been working on another ekphrastic sequence that came to me by chance when the contemporary artist Ellen Wiener showed me her series of paintings that are a Book of Hours. She said she was looking for someone to write about them. So I began, in the summer of 2006, to work on my own Book of Hours and my 24 poem sequence, entitled Of Hours, has been the result. The best way to explain the project is by giving you the introductory note I wrote for the as-yet unpublished collection.

A NOTE ON OF HOURS AND THE BOOK OF HOURS

Of Hours is a contemporary book of hours for the twenty-first century and its reader could be someone from the Judaeo-Christian tradition or anyone with a devotional bent. The poems were initially inspired by a collection of paintings by Ellen Wiener entitled An Album of Hours. The paintings provided the framework for the sequence (each painting has its companion poem, though the poems and paintings can stand alone) as well as some images that served as a jumping-off point for my own reflections on a specific hour.

The canonical hours, upon which the paintings are based, were devised by the Catholic Church, and practiced as an official set of prayers by monks as well as lay people, since the sixth century of the Common Era. The hours or divine office are divided into eight daily prayers as well as several nightly divisions, the major ones being: Matins (at dawn); Lauds (praises, also at dawn); Prime (at 6 a.m., the first hour); Terce (9 a.m., the third hour); Sext (at noon, the sixth hour); Nones (at 3 p.m., the ninth hour); Vespers (at sunset); and Compline (at bedtime).

The devotional hours grew out of the Jewish practice of reciting prayers at certain times of the day, though not at a set hour. Observant Jews still recite prescribed morning (shacharit), afternoon (minchah), evening (ma’ariv), and bedtime prayers for weekdays and additional (mussaf) prayer for the sabbath (Shabbat) and holidays. All but the last correspond to the times when sacrificial offerings were brought to the Temple. In his Psalms David wrote: “Evening, morning and afternoon do I pray and cry, and He will hear my voice” (Psalm 55). Since the destruction of the Temple, all observant Jews recite devotional prayers, including specific psalms as well as a recitation of the sacrificial offerings, in lieu of the sacrifice.

In writing my book of hours, I sought to wrest back from Christian practice the book of hours which, during the medieval period was often a sumptuously illuminated manuscript owned by noble men and women as their private book of prayer. While Les très riches heures du Duc du Berry from the early 15th century is probably the most famous example of such an illuminated book of hours, women were often patrons or owners of such books. One of the earliest surviving examples of a book of hours was made in Oxford, England by William de Brailes in the mid-thirteenth century, who designed and illustrated it for a young woman who is depicted within the book.

As well as the paintings, I was inspired above all in personal tone, subject matter, and lyric intensity by the Psalms, the great Hebrew cycle of lyric poems (though not pinned to a specific hour), traditionally attributed to King David. The Hebrew psalms (Tehillim) provide a record of an individual’s experience of the Divine, passing through all the modes of individual prayer: praise, petition, doubt, despair, faith, exaltation, humility, defiance, and thanksgiving. Specific psalms are incorporated into Jewish liturgy, and are recited daily and on the Sabbath at set times as well as during Jewish holidays. Finally, this book of hours is inspired by the great devotional poets writing in English: George Herbert, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and Hart Crane, and any echoes you might hear are intentional homage to them.

It is my wish that Of Hours, in the tradition of the Psalms, can serve as a vehicle for personal devotion: to inspire, to exhort to pray, to provide a space for contemplating your life’s path as it evolves hour-by-hour.

"He put a new song into my mouth,
a praise to our God, so that many may see and fear,
and trust in the Lord."
—Psalm 40

May these “new songs” accompany and fortify you as you live through each day’s manifold hours. Selah!


Here’s the opening poem to Of Hours:


"Psalm of the Flying Shell (4:30 a.m.)"


"At what solstice hour do I arise
(at what daybreak dark do wingtips whir)

knowing I can never see Your face

knowing my life is spiraled in the conch
of consciousness (inside the solar plexus

of space) how can I see in
to the wings’ filigree I’m fused within—

what does the sea-rushing sound announce—
how decipher the architecture of cells alchemy

of stars as angels for Your will?
My heart is a volute inside a body-whorled

spire that obelisks
the air I am thrumming

Your praises as the only way to hear
with the soul’s inner ear.

Tell me what You require of me>"

(published in American Literary Review, Twentieth Anniversary, Issue Spring 2010)


Others may be found at the following links:

“Blue Ladder (9 a.m.)”
The Cortland Review

Electronic Poetry Review

“Psalm of Morning Mist,” “Duet of Tree House and Rain”
InPosse (online)

“With Roses (6:30 a.m.),” “Green Laddered Thanksgiving (11 a.m.),” “Blackberry City and Sun Dial Talk (4pm) Time”
RealPoetik

“Window with Wild Garlic in Wellfleet (5 a.m.),” The 22nd Annual
Anna Davidson Rosenberg Awards for Poems on the Jewish Experience

Many of Ellen Wiener’s paintings from An Album of Hours may be found here ."

Canary sings her thanks, lobster thrums from his grotto.

Sunday Morning Coffee: "Touch"; Mills (The Blue Hour); Ponge

[Eberhard Weber, "Touch," from Yellow Fields]

Deborah A. Mills, an artist walking along the promenade on the lower Hudson, captured l'heure bleue in all its cobalt beauty yesterday evening.

She sees the inner being of things, how they manifest themselves as fields of color, color we can almost (but not quite) touch.

See deeply, see the thing-in-itself, and then search for the words to be that thing.

Francis Ponge phrased it this way:

"...man will make marvelous strides if he returns to things (just as we must return to the level of words in order to express things properly) and applies himself to studying them and expressing them, trusting simultaneously his eye, his reason, and his intuition, with no encumbrance to keep him from pursuing the novelties they contain--and knowing how to consider them in their essence as in their details."

---Ponge, Mute Objects of Expression (orig. 1938, trans. Lee Fahnestock, 2008, Archipelago Books).

From Beyond Raging Seas, Comes The King-Herring

[DJ Krush & Shinichi Kinoshita, "Beyond Raging Waves"}

Last week a Giant Oarfish, also known as the King of the Herrings, washed up on a Swedish beach near the Norwegian border. The beast-- the first found in Sweden in 130 years-- was nearly 11 feet long.

The Giant Oarfish is the largest living bony fish, reaching 35 feet. Ten specimens washed up in Japan this spring. The Oarfish is usually found 650-3,200 feet below the surface.

Traditionally in Japan, sightings of the Oarfish were considered ominous. Many in Europe and Asia think stories of the "sea serpent" may stem from pelagic sightings of the Oarfish.

Sunday Morning Coffee: Mother's Day

[Heitor Villa-Lobos, Magnificat-Alleluia]

Happy Mother's Day from the lobster and the canary.

Picasso Record, and the Impact of the Volcano

[Picasso's Nude, Green Leaves and Bust, sold via Christies last week for an all-time record $106.5 million for an individual art piece.]


[Last month's volcanic eruption in Iceland]

Lobster lifts a quill from the ledger-book, pondering the price paid by an anonymous bidder for Picasso's 1932 painting...

Canary is glad not to fly through volcanic ash...the Icelandic eruption caused last month's Art Cologne, Art Brussels and London Book Fair to suffer many no-shows and delayed shipments...

Sunday Morning Coffee: "Jackals & Vipers in Envy of Man"; "Pyracantha & Plum."

[Sixtoo, Jackals and Vipers in Envy of Man, Parts 2 & 4, released 2007]
Spring, with muggy airs and green, sprang over us this week...from a hint of snow on Tuesday, to temperatures yesterday in the eighties (Fahrenheit)...

The vicissitudes, les ondes... lobster and canary this week celebrated their 101st birthday... a time for reflection on the season(s)...threads of winter woven into the verdant explosion...last fall's leaf mold wrapping the roots of the budding bush...

As Jane Hirshfield writes in "Pyracantha and Plum":

"Last autumn's chastened berries still on one tree,
spring blossoms tender, hopeful, on another.
The view from this window
much as it was ten years ago, fifteen.
Yet it seems this morning
a self-portrait both clearer and darker,
as if while I slept some Rembrandt or Brueghel
had walked through the garden, looking hard."

May Day Celebration: The Queen of Roses

May Day is here at last...the Queen and her court rouse themselves from sleep...hear the drums, the deep-lute strumming...with roses in her hair...

"A rose, but one, none other rose had I.
A rose, one rose, and this was wondrous fair,
One rose a rose that gladden'd earth and sky,
One rose, my rose, that sweeten'd all mine air--
I cared not for the thorns; the thorns were there."

(Tennyson, from Pelleas and Ettarre).

Interstitial Arts Foundation: Interfictions Zero// Call for Papers

Lobster and canary are members of the Working Group for the Interstitial Arts Foundation. The IAF just issued a very interesting call for papers, which we reprint in full below (for more, click the IAF site here):

"Interfictions Zero, to be edited by Delia Sherman and Helen Pilinovsky, will be published online by the Interstitial Arts Foundations in late August of 2010.

Submission Guidelines for 
Interfictions Zero: The Virtual Anthology of Interstitial Writing and Original Essays

What Is Interstitial Writing? Interstitial writing breaks rules, ignores boundaries, cross-pollinates the fields of literature, and helps them grow and develop. It’s about working between, across, through, and at the edges and borders of literary genres. It occurs in the cracks between other movements, terms, and definitions. Interstitial isn’t a genre, but many interstitial pieces serve as the germs of new genres that develop over time.

What is Interfictions Zero? Interfictions Zero is an online virtual anthology, comprised of a Table of Contents listing seminal pieces of published interstitial writings (with live links to those texts where possible) and original essays about the focus pieces listed in the TOC. With the online publication of Interfictions Zero, the Interstitial Arts Foundation will begin to create a historical context for how interstitial writing affects the growth and development of literature over time.

What Are We Looking For? We’re seeking original essays that examine seminal pieces of interstitial writing.

What piece should you choose to examine in your essay? Our only requirement is that the piece must have been published before 2009 and that it can be considered interstitial for the time it was written. Focus pieces can be from any genre or form, including but not limited to fiction (contemporary realism, classic literature, mystery, historical, fantasy, thriller, western, whatever), poetry, non-fiction, plays, and graphic novels/series.

If your essay is accepted for Interfictions Zero, the title of your essay’s focus piece will be added to the Table of Contents for the virtual anthology. Your essay will be published online as part of Interfictions Zero and linked to the Table of Contents. It will be featured on our blog and it will be archived in the Recommendations section of the IAF web site.

Who Are We Looking For? We’re looking for writers and academics who have a critical interpretation of a piece of interstitial writing that challenges genre tropes and expectations.

Practical Matters Our submission period will be from June 1, 2010 to June 30, 2010. Electronic submissions only. Overseas submissions are welcome. Send your essays as Word or .rtf attachments to: interfictions@interstitialarts.org. You will hear from us after July 31, 2010.

Submissions should include a 750-2,500 word essay that examines why the focus piece is interstitial and discusses its relationship with the writer and/or the writer’s body of work and/or other writing contemporary with the piece.

Please follow standard manuscript formatting and submission conventions: ie, double-spaced, with 1” margins, and the title of the essay on each page. No simultaneous or multiple submissions. Payment will be a $25 honorarium per essay for non-exclusive world anthology rights, payable upon publication.

Any questions? Write to us at interfictions@interstitialarts.org