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

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

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)

[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

"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

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.

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

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

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)

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

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)

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

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

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

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)

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

* 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)

[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

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

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

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

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

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

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."