June 4, 2008
Review of American Earth
My review of American Earth: Environmental Writing Since Thoreau, an anthology edited by Bill McKibben and published by the Library of America, appears in this week's Detroit Metro Times. The opening:
The reality of climate change is now beyond doubt in the scientific community. We also now know that it will take more than technological innovation to stave off its potentially devastating environmental consequences. As academic and laboratory squabbles about our planet's ills begin to fade, the arduous task of correcting past and current negligence becomes, to a significant degree, an effort of rhetoric. Environmentalism today is in large part a campaign for the world's hearts and minds, which makes the present a useful time to think deeply about the literature that addresses these concerns. American Earth: Environmental Writing Since Thoreau, a 1,000-page anthology, represents a Herculean effort on the part of author and activist Bill McKibben, its editor, to bring together the texts most relevant to an audience unfamiliar with the topic. It is matchless in its heft, generous in scope (included are Sierra Club founder John Muir and Marvin Gaye), and, with a detailed chronology in its back matter, serviceable in its depth.To read the rest, click here.
Posted in Books, Papers & Periodicals. Permanent link here.
June 2, 2008
New Artforum.com
On Saturday we launched the newly redesigned and expanded Artforum.com, which I hope you'll visit.
Posted in Around the web, Papers & Periodicals. Permanent link here.
May 23, 2008
More weekend reading
My review of Urs Fischer and Gavin Brown's group exhibition at Tony Shafrazi Gallery is now online at Artforum.com. An excerpt:
Walking through the show is an uncanny delight: Like an autofocus lens unable to locate its subject, one’s mind and eyes strive to unscramble the artworks actually present from those that are verisimilar copies. A 1943 portrait by Francis Picabia is centered on the image of a Donald Baechler painting of a dandy and some beach balls; on an adjacent wall, Malcolm Morley’s Age of Catastrophe, 1976, a large painting, seems planted in the middle of an even larger Keith Haring.
To read the rest, click here
Posted in Art. Permanent link here.
Weekend reading
The June/July/August issue of Bookforum, on the theme "fiction and politics," is now online. Enjoy!
Posted in Papers & Periodicals. Permanent link here.
May 22, 2008
"Does Time Run Backward in Other Universes?"
In the May issue of Scientific American, which I have begun skimming online since the novelist Marilynne Robinson cited it several times in a lecture I saw her deliver last month and an artist friend in Miami explained to me his recent fascination with theoretical physics, has a fascinating article on the arrow of time.
The arrow of time is arguably the most blatant feature of the universe that cosmologists are currently at an utter loss to explain. Increasingly, however, this puzzle about the universe we observe hints at the existence of a much larger spacetime we do not observe. It adds support to the notion that we are part of a multiverse whose dynamics help to explain the seemingly unnatural features of our local vicinity.
The article goes on to explain entropy, discuss gravity's relationship to entropy, explain what the distant future of our known universe might look like (total emptiness), and then gets to the subject of time:
The striking feature of this story is the pronounced difference between the past and the future. The universe starts in a state of very low entropy: particles packed together smoothly. It evolves through a state of medium entropy: the lumpy distribution of stars and galaxies we see around us today. It ultimately reaches a state of high entropy: nearly empty space, featuring only the occasional stray low-energy particle.
Why are the past and future so different? It is not enough to simply posit a theory of initial conditions—a reason why the universe started with low entropy. As philosopher Huw Price of the University of Sydney has pointed out, any reasoning that applies to the initial conditions should also apply to the final conditions, or else we will be guilty of assuming the very thing we were trying to prove—that the past was special. Either we have to take the profound asymmetry of time as a blunt feature of the universe that escapes explanation, or we have to dig deeper into the workings of space and time.
The author, Sean M. Carroll, explains several theories for time's asymmetry, then introduces his own:
In our new scenario, the preexisting universe was never randomly fluctuating; it was in a very specific state: empty space. What this theory claims—and what remains to be proved—is that the most likely way to create universes like ours from such a preexisting state is to go through a period of inflation, rather than fluctuating there directly. Our universe, in other words, is a fluctuation but not a random one.
This scenario, proposed in 2004 by Jennifer Chen of the University of Chicago and me, provides a provocative solution to the origin of time asymmetry in our observable universe: we see only a tiny patch of the big picture, and this larger arena is fully time-symmetric. Entropy can increase without limit through the creation of new baby universes.
Best of all, this story can be told backward and forward in time. Imagine that we start with empty space at some particular moment and watch it evolve into the future and into the past. (It goes both ways because we are not presuming a unidirectional arrow of time.) Baby universes fluctuate into existence in both directions of time, eventually emptying out and giving birth to babies of their own. On ultralarge scales, such a multiverse would look statistically symmetric with respect to time—both the past and the future would feature new universes fluctuating into life and proliferating without bound. Each of them would experience an arrow of time, but half would have an arrow that was reversed with respect to that in the others.
To read the rest, click here.
Posted in Papers & Periodicals. Permanent link here.
Gura and Dickinson
On The Book Bench, the New Yorker's new books blog, Jenna Krajewski discusses Transcendentalism scholar Philip Gura's odyssey with what might be the second known picture of poet Emily Dickinson:
In 2000, Rebecca Mead wrote about the possible discovery of a new photograph of Emily Dickinson, which would be in direct competition with the presumed-to-be singular Amherst daguerreotype. Since bidding close to five hundred dollars on the albumen print, Philip Gura, a professor at U.N.C.-Chapel Hill, has worked feverishly to prove, or disprove, the authenticity of the photograph, which he at one point calls his “albatross.” In 2004, he published a lengthy article in Common-Place: The Interactive Journal of Early American Life, which details his pursuits and replicates both the photographs and the original eBay listings. As with all good obsessions, at some point his commitment takes a slightly sordid turn...
Gura's 2007 book American Transcendentalism: A History is currently at number two on my to-read pile, just after I re-read Emerson's essays.
Posted in Papers & Periodicals. Permanent link here.
May 21, 2008
Susan Jacoby's Freethinkers
I’ve just finished Susan Jacoby’s 2004 book Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism, which I enjoyed reading. It is an account of freethought from Thomas Paine’s The Age of Reason and Virginia’s 1786 Act for Establishing Religious Freedom to present-day battles between those supporting and fighting the teaching of evolution. The book’s tone remains fairly measured throughout, and her gallery of “infidels”—Paine, William Lloyd Garrison, Lucretia Mott, Robert Ingersoll, Emma Goldman, Roger Nash Baldwin, Madalyn Murray O’Hair—provides a welcome counterpoint to the figures that usually crop up in histories of American thought. Ingersoll in particular comes across as a winning figure, and Jacoby includes the eulogy he delivered at Walt Whitman’s funeral, on March 30, 1892, as an appendix. From that oration:
He came into our generation a free, untrammeled spirit, with sympathy for all. His arm was beneath the form of the sick. He sympathized with the imprisoned and despised, and even on the brow of crime he was great enough to place the kiss of human sympathy.
One of the greatest lines in our literature is his, and the line is great enough to do honor to the greatest genius that has ever lived. He said, speaking of an outcast: "Not till the sun excludes you do I exclude you."
His charity was as wide as the sky, and wherever there was human suffering, human misfortune, the sympathy of Whitman bent above it as the firmament bends above the earth.
He was built on a broad and splendid plan -- ample, without appearing to have limitations -- passing easily for a brother of mountains and seas and constellations; caring nothing for the little maps and charts with which timid pilots hug the shore, but giving himself freely with recklessness of genius to winds and waves and tides; caring for nothing as long as the stars were above him. He walked among men, among writers, among verbal varnishers and veneerers, among literary milliners and tailors, with the unconscious majesty of an antique god.
That last word brings to mind Michael Robertson’s new book, Worshipping Walt: Whitman’s Disciples (Princeton), which I have not yet seen, but which various reviews have made sound appealing (see brief commentaries in the New Yorker and the New York Observer).
Posted in Books. Permanent link here.
A little thread concerning the nature of inventiveness
In his review of Silvan Schweber's Einstein & Oppenheimer: The Meaning of Genius (Harvard), Eric Ormsby summarizes a key part of Schweber's argument thusly:
Mr. Schweber draws out the contrasts between these two extraordinary men in great detail, but he's really interested in something more fundamental, which their parallel careers exemplify. He wishes not only, as his subtitle suggests, to explore "the meaning of genius" but in fact "to banish the term," especially with regard to Einstein. "Calling Einstein a 'genius' dwarfs the background against which his work was done," he argues. Though Einstein saw himself as "a loner," his epochal discoveries of 1905 — of which the special theory of relativity is only the most celebrated — did not emerge out of "pure thought" alone. Einstein drew on the scattered insights and discoveries of others; he was active in conferences and maintained a far-flung and intensive correspondence. Even in the Bern patent office he remained in the thick of things. None of this, of course, diminishes Einstein's achievements; as Mr. Schweber emphasizes, it is simply the way groundbreaking research works. Scientific discovery is collaborative even in seclusion.
This rhymes with an article by Malcolm Gladwell in the May 12 issue of the New Yorker, which profiled entrepreneur Nathan Myhrvold, and his company Intellectual Ventures, and make a similar point:
In 1999, when Nathan Myhrvold left Microsoft and struck out on his own, he set himself an unusual goal. He wanted to see whether the kind of insight that leads to invention could be engineered. He formed a company called Intellectual Ventures. He raised hundreds of millions of dollars. He hired the smartest people he knew. It was not a venture-capital firm. Venture capitalists fund insights—that is, they let the magical process that generates new ideas take its course, and then they jump in. Myhrvold wanted to make insights—to come up with ideas, patent them, and then license them to interested companies. He thought that if he brought lots of very clever people together he could reconstruct that moment by the Grand River.
How useful is it to have a group of really smart people brainstorm for a day? [...] But then, in August of 2003, I.V. held its first invention session, and it was a revelation. “Afterward, Nathan kept saying, ‘There are so many inventions,’ ” Wood recalled. “He thought if we came up with a half-dozen good ideas it would be great, and we came up with somewhere between fifty and a hundred. I said to him, ‘But you had eight people in that room who are seasoned inventors. Weren’t you expecting a multiplier effect?’ And he said, ‘Yeah, but it was more than multiplicity.’ Not even Nathan had any idea of what it was going to be like.”
Of course, as Kevin Kelly noted on May 9 (via kottke.org):
Gladwell's article is terrific, as usual, but there is a very odd absence. It lacks any reference to others doing exactly the same thing as Myhrvold's Intellectual Ventures. For instance it does not mention Jay Walker, of Priceline fame. Walker runs Walker Digital Labs, which does exactly what IV does. At the labs a bunch of interesting folks sit around with patent lawyers coming up with one idea after the next, which they patent at a furious rate. And then licence to others to develop. Thats' the entire business model of the outfit, just like IV.
Recognition of other people who, like Myhrvold, got the idea to manufacture patents without physical research would have been a great way to conclude this wonderful introduction to simultaneous invention. It's a rare miss for Gladwell.
I also tend to discount the "rare genius" model of invention and pathbreaking intellectual work. I take as my cues the acknowledgements page of any important book as well as my own experience in matters of the mind, both as the shepherd of an idea and as the aide who helps bring it to fruition.
Posted in Papers & Periodicals. Permanent link here.
May 20, 2008
Visual Interlude: Prayer Book of Claude de France
Above is a spread from the Prayer Book of Claude de France, which went on view today at the Morgan Library & Museum. Here's some info from the museum:
The Morgan Library & Museum presents a special exhibition of an extremely rare Renaissance illuminated manuscript, the Prayer Book of Queen Claude de France, created around the time of her coronation in 1517. It is the most important single illuminated manuscript acquired by the Morgan in the last twenty-five years and on view in the East Room of the historic McKim building.
The tiny, jewel-like book, measuring just 2 3/4 by 2 inches, is richly illustrated with 132 scenes from the lives of Christ, the Virgin Mary, the apostles, and numerous saints. The work was created by an artist known as the Master of Claude de France and can be characterized as the pinnacle of delicacy in Renaissance illumination. The artist, named after this prayer book and a companion manuscript, was active in Tours during the first quarter of the sixteenth century. Barely a dozen of his works survive.
This trip down art history lane affords me the opportunity to recommend a book I received as a Christmas gift and have savored poring over since: Eamon Duffy's Marking the Hours: English People and Their Prayers, 1240–1570 (Yale University Press). (I know, one is French and the other English...) I discovered the book by reading Ben Schwarz's extremely favorable review in the October 2007 issue of The Atlantic. An excerpt from that piece:
The study of Books of Hours was confined mostly to art historians—the finest volumes, sumptuously illuminated and hand-scripted, contain some of the supreme paintings of the late Middle Ages. But in a feat of inspired scholarship, Duffy has turned to the very features of these books that have rankled those who study them as works of art: the jottings in the margins and on the flyleaves made by their owners, hitherto regarded as defacements at worst and proof of provenance at best. He’s examined the marginalia of a small number of the extant Books of Hours made for English use (some 800 handwritten volumes survive, along with a few thousand early printed editions), and has discovered “a series of unexpected windows into the hearts and souls of the men and women who long ago had used these books to pray.”
Posted in Art, Books, Papers & Periodicals. Permanent link here.
Tod Papageorge on contemporary photography
My friend Christine Smallwood interviews photographer Tod Papgeorge for the "Back Talk" column in The Nation. Here's part of the interview:
CS: What do you think of contemporary photography?
TP: This work, and work of this ilk, came out of a group of photographers who were working in the '60s and the '70s in New York who were all, I think, radicalized by the publication of Robert Frank's The Americans. So I guess consistent with all of this work is a kind of negative view of America, a critique of America, done, again, in the interest of nothing but aesthetic or artistic success. In other words, there's no money to be made doing this. There was something very pure about it. As Garry Winogrand once said, it's fit work for a grown man. Or a grown woman.
CS: I understand. It was a different time.
TP: [Laughter] That's right. And Diane [Arbus], Diane was working then! But with the success of the galleries, the defining energy became that provided by money. And so what do you see now when you go to a gallery that's selling photography? You see big, huge color prints, most of which really aren't about very much. They're illustrations. [Points to the cover of his book] No mind could ever imagine that concatenation of forms. I mean, maybe Velázquez could, but it would take him eight months to paint it out. So I'm not very interested in most photography today, because it is defined by the galleries. It's going to be very interesting to see what's going to happen with the economy going down the tubes.
To read the rest, click here.
Posted in Papers & Periodicals. Permanent link here.
Calvin Tomkins on Paul Chan in the New Yorker
This week's New Yorker contains Calvin Tomkins's profile of artist Paul Chan, which I've been looking forward to since first hearing a while ago that he was at work on it. The magazine has not made the article available online, so consider this post a notice of its presence in the publication and a suggestion that you read it. It's instructive to those of us in the art world any time an artist of Chan's caliber is assessed by an intelligent writer for a large-circulation general interest magazine. An excerpt:
Ever since his student days, Chan has been engaged in social activism as well as in art, even while insisting, not entirely persuasively, that the two are not only separate but incompatible: politics is about concentrating power, he says, and art is about dispersing it. Certain works of art resist our attempts to interpret or explain them, Chan believes, and that resistance—what he calls their "articulate speechlessness"—is what gives them enduring power.
Posted in Papers & Periodicals. Permanent link here.
May 19, 2008
Am I the last person to learn this?
Ira Glass and Philip Glass are cousins. Who knew? Not me.
Do you have a relationship with your cousin, composer Philip Glass? —David Potosky, MINNEAPOLIS
When I was growing up in Baltimore, he had long moved away to become [laughs] one of the most famous composers of the 20th century. I remember when I was thinking of leaving Baltimore to do journalism, my mom said to my dad, "Well, Philip moved away, and he did O.K." And I remember thinking, Can we lower the expectations a little here?
From Time magazine's "10 Questions" feature.