tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37901585399276424502024-03-12T19:06:24.443-04:00Notebooks of the Visceral RealistsDavid McDougallhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11020826602374694194noreply@blogger.comBlogger20125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3790158539927642450.post-40039510653643323062008-11-25T14:40:00.006-05:002008-11-26T15:04:55.528-05:00Things I learned from Wikipedia, Volume 1<blockquote>"[Paul] Krugman says that his interest in economics began with Isaac Asimov's Foundation novels, in which the social scientists of the future use "psychohistory" to attempt to save civilization. As psychohistory does not currently exist, Krugman turned to economics, which he considered the next best thing."</blockquote> (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Krugman"target="_blank">via</a>)David McDougallhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11020826602374694194noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3790158539927642450.post-73310454882300056072008-11-18T21:16:00.003-05:002008-11-18T21:25:01.116-05:00Tweets from Undergroundfar and away the funniest email message I received in 2008:<br />"<a href="http://twitter.com/Dostoyevsky"target="_blank">Fyodor Dostoyevsky</a> is now following you on Twitter!"David McDougallhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11020826602374694194noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3790158539927642450.post-700922263911015012008-06-26T14:45:00.000-04:002008-06-26T14:46:20.117-04:00philosophical trajectoriesNassim Nicholas Taleb offers some speculative refutations of the European assumption that philosophy's geographical trajectory flows from Greece eastward (Read <a href="http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/notebook.htm"target="_blank">notes 94 and 94b</a>). His thesis is interesting, but I don't believe that he successfully makes his case, in part because he's doing little more than inverting the wrongheaded Eurocentric knowledge-transmission paradigm he's critiquing. I'd argue that the paradigm is wrong, not just the directionality implied in Western historical account. <br /><br />[Do read Taleb's account even if you're not particularly interested in speculative philosophical histories, as his opening paragraph offers some great observations on poverty and elegance in India vs. The West, among other things, and there's a terrific excerpt from a Herman Hesse short story (in French) at the end of 94b.]<br /><br />I agree with Taleb's assertion that the Syriac roots of many later Academy philosophers implies that the pre-Umayyad Levant was likely a center of a now-lost philosophical tradition. However, I think that the timeline offered by Taleb's evidence for Syriac import in the Greek philosophical tradition implies that this center may have been a product of Hellenization. One could plausibly argue that Neoplatonic thought was largely spearheaded by a Syrian tradition that existed in both Syria and Greece (Agathias attests to the Syrian influence in Athens; the lack of Syrian sources leaves an open question as to Syrian side of the equation). Perhaps there was an Apameia-Athens Axis in this period? Iamblichus founded a school in Apameia, where Numenius also practiced (and where Posidonius was born in the waning days of the heavily Hellenizing Selucid Empire). This idea of a Syrian-Greek philosophical axis fits with Taleb's suggestion that Greek was a <span style="font-style:italic;">lingua franca</span> for Syrian intellectual life even during the Umayyad. Doesn't this imply the deep impact of Greek culture in Syria during the post- Alexander period? Taleb also points to the prevalence of Syrain skeptics to support his thesis. I'm not familiar with the specific skeptics he cites, but Pyrrhonism and Academic skepticism are both products of the Hellenized period. <br /><br />The roots of this Syriac philosophical tradition could be from one of two sources: an already established Syrian philosophical tradition is fused into / incorporated within Greek traditions, or Greek cultural influence creates a philosophical tradition in Syria that draws on Syrian intellectual heritage while existing simultaneously under Greek and Syrian cultural umbrellas. The line between these two concepts is very close indeed, as all societies have implicit ontologies that can be found in (and grow from) language and social structure, and few societies find themselves without a philosophical tradition of some sort. What's perhaps most important are the mechanisms of transmission and incorporation, a process we can explore through one of Taleb's other examples: Pyrrho. <br /><br />Taleb's note that "Pyrrho went east with Alexander & almost certainly encountered all the syncretistic systems developed there" is extended in note 94b, where Taleb 'traces' the notion of αταραξια (ataraxia) to the philosophical worldview of the "Orient." There's not much of a case made here for sourcing the concept; instead he explicates αταραξια via 2 stories: one in Arabic (which I cannot read) and another fragment from Hesse in French (which I recommend). Taleb's claim that this sort of knowledge seems irrevocably a part of his experience with Arabic wisdom strikes me as irrelevant to the source of this knowledge, an anecdote that says more about the legacy of these ideas than their source. <br /><br />The task of actual conceptual sourcing is of course impossible, but we can establish a few basic principles of cultural transmission. First, we should remember that at certain moments in human history there are ideas that seem logically inevitable next steps. Human culture frequently finds itself addressing the same dilemmas even in distant locales. Secondly, we should note that cultural transmission invariably entails the work of translation in more than just a linguistic sense: concepts must be made to fit into different systems of knowledge than the one(s) from which they come. An idea lifted from one place may become something entirely new upon landing in a new one. The processes by which it changes are multiple, but I consider two main modes of change to be primary ones. The new cultural contexts may be different enough that a faithfully-rendered concept becomes something entirely new (as cinematic montage changes the meaning of shots by way of changing the surrounding material). Alternately, the mediator may be responsible for choosing methods of mediation that warp the original meaning and create a new set of contexts that would be new even in the original language and culture. <br /><br />We can see the combined approaches of these first two methods of concept-transmission in the development of Christian religious ideology in the first 100 or 200 years after the death of Jesus. I'm referring to the way in which Christianity is a remolding of various ideas common in the mystery cults of the Graeco-Roman world. Most of these mystery cults themselves were products of this process, with roots in deities worshiped in conquered lands (though the resultant belief systems had little to do with the original beliefs associated with the deities). Early Christian iconography seems closely related to the iconography of Mithraism. The cult of Isis and that of the Magna Mater seem to prefigure the special roles assigned to the Virgin Mary. Resurrection is an important theme in these mystery religions (easily seen in the cults of Osiris, Attis, Adonis, Dionysis, etc). The Eucharist combines traditions of sacral kingship and theophagic rituals that entail eating the body of a fertility god. There was even a Christian defense of these prior practices as false imitators set forth by the devil through interpretation of the Hebrew Bible's prophetic references to Jesus. Justin Martyr, in his <span style="font-style:italic;">Dialogue with Trypho</span>: <blockquote>"For when they tell that Bacchus, son of Jupiter, was begotten by intercourse with Semele, and that he was the discoverer of the vine; and when they relate, that being torn in pieces, and having died, he rose again, and ascended to heaven; and when they introduce wine into his mysteries, do I not perceive that the devil has imitated the prophecy announced by the patriarch Jacob, and recorded by Moses?" </blockquote>It's also important to mention that these mystery cult beliefs - which were widespread throughout the Roman Empire of the early days of Christianity - lay a partial groundwork for conversion that helps Chrisitianity flourish, but that also effects Church doctrine as the Church hones its message to broaden its reach [think of the importance of the Council of Jerusalem in making Christianity available to the cultures of the Roman Empire].<br /> <br />Sandmel makes the point that these connections are not necessarily influences but perhaps natural expressions of tendencies of human mythmaking. All this implies the question: is Pyrrhonian αταραξια a philosophical 'discovery' common to humans, or is it (also) the product of a world of influences? <br /><br />An excellent example of the third method of appropriation is the development of 20th Century philosophy in France, a story that 'begins' with Alexandre Kojève. Kojève (Kandinsky's nephew, incidentally) studied philosophy in Germany, where his major influences included Heidegger and Marx in addition to his primary interest in Hegel. From 1933 to 1939, Kojève lectured on Hegel's <span style="font-style:italic;">The Phenomenology of Spirit</span> at the École Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris. For his seminar, Kojève translated Hegel himself, as well as translating on the fly from German to French during his lectures. Kojève's translations reflected an idiosyncratic post-Hegelian system of his own creation, combining a Marxist teleology with a rereading of Hegel using the vocabulary of Heideggerrian subjectivity (sadly, my notes on his rpecise chocie of words in French are not at hand). In fusing Heideggerrian terms to Hegelian ontology Kojève plants the seeds of postwar Continental philosophy in any number of directions: his students included Raymond Queneau, Georges Bataille, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Andre Breton, Jean-Paul Sartre, Jacques Lacan and Raymond Aron, and his influence has also been cited by Derrida and Foucault. The encounter of these thinkers with Hegel (and Heidegger) via Kojève is a traceable root of many works by these thinkers. <br /><br />Similarly, Pyrrho's return to Greece with a modified "Eastern" notion of αταραξια was a tremendous influence on later Greek thought, though not directly through Pyrrho. Pyrrho's influence was mainly felt after Aenesidemus's publication of the Pyrrhonian Discourses more than 200 years after Pyrrho's death. Likewise, it seems that Pyrrho's pupil Timon was mainly influential for his poetic and dramatic works - until his philosophical influence was picked up by Sextus Empiricus in the 2nd (?) Century AD. <br /><br />Timon is an important stepping stone towards our quest for sourcing Pyrrhonian skepticism and the (translated) wisdom of "the East"; when Timon was asked by Aratus how to obtain the pure texts of Homer, he answered: "If we could find the old copies, and not those with modern emendations." We encounter the same problems not just with Syriac philosophical traditions, but also with the Greek, and with Pyrrho in particular. Pyrrho seems not to have written down his ideas (shades of Socrates); Timon, like Plato for his teacher, is the key written source for Pyrrho's later disciples. <br /><br />Pyrrho's travels with Alexander's army led him to study with Indian Gymnosophists and Persian Magi. However, to attribute his knowledge to encounters with eastern philosophers seems misleading; Pyrrho's thought seems in many ways an extension of the skepticism of Zeno of Elea and the Sophists (a form of acatalepsia), combined with the Cynicism of Antisthenes (a precursor to ataraxia?). I find it plausible that his studies in the "East" allowed for a renewed approach toward the knowledge of his Greek philosophical tradition, and that his thought upon returning is a sort of reverse-Hellenistic syncretism - that is, a return of the foreign ideas to Greece in the form of already-existent Greek philosophical ideas. That these ideas are not picked up by the Greek philosophical tradition in earnest until centuries later adds another level of abstraction and cultural translation, but we should be aware that our contemporary view of the Greek and Asian philosophical traditions is colored by the incompleteness of our knowledge and the works now forever lost. <br /><br />How did the Pyrrhonian skeptics arrive at their ideas of happiness and possible knowledge? We cannot know; we can only be happy that they did.David McDougallhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11020826602374694194noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3790158539927642450.post-72042022350343263542008-06-20T03:28:00.002-04:002008-06-20T03:35:12.082-04:00Cowboys Don't Cry Because Rape is Not Sex in Desolation Row<a href="http://www.avclub.com/content/files/images/b4.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px;" src="http://www.avclub.com/content/files/images/b4.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a><br /><br />If you can look at this without giggling in a pained oh-god-the-labels way, you are a better person than I. Note: the Statue of Liberty is not Bob Dylan. This is a painting <i>by</i> Bob Dylan.<br /><br />This can never touch my love for Tangled Up in Blue, of course, but my enjoyment of Temporary Like Achilles has been retroactively damaged.Mike Russohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16875295164111148699noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3790158539927642450.post-81505338364199142892008-06-11T18:59:00.005-04:002008-06-11T19:07:57.078-04:00Rolling over, lazily swatting a fly, returning to sleepThis is far too trivial a post with which to return to blogging on this blog. I have firm, fine intentions about once again putting up actual honest-to-YHWH substantive posts which merit reading, consideration, and commentary, commentary which exists at a higher intellectual level than simply pointing out that I should have said "that," not "which," in the front end of this sentence. However, the gap between intentions and actions is the fuel of all good drama, and it'd be churlish and gradgrindian to simply bridge it over so soon after introducing it. Let's all just take a moment to appreciate the gap. The gap abides.<br /><br />But so anyway, in working on state health care reform, you look at what other states have done quite a lot, and there have been a few that've done pretty large-scale reforms lately. Among these is Vermont, which a couple years back set up a reasonably well-subsidized program to help lower-income folks get coverage. They unfortunately haven't had as many people enroll as they'd predicted, however. The conventional explanation for this is that the economy is bad, and uninsured people are getting squeezed in other ways so they still don't want to pick up insurance. I, however, have an alternate explanation:<br /><br />The name of Vermont's program is Catamount Care.<br /><br />If you are like me, you have no idea what a catamount is. Probably some region in Vermont? I dunno; see the first sentence of this paragraph.<br /><br />However, if you are like me, you might know what a <a href="http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/catamite"><i>catamite</i></a> is.<br /><br />Maybe this is an implausible assertion, but given e.g. the U.K. examples of mobs going after registered paediatricians living in the neighbourhood, maybe it isn't. At any rate the association isn't pleasant: "We'll take care of you like you're the kept boy-toy of a sexual predator!", etc.Mike Russohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16875295164111148699noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3790158539927642450.post-23834049209454299142008-04-10T08:02:00.002-04:002008-04-10T08:07:07.206-04:00Don't Forget to Vote- for me and Nikhil for our class president and vice president. :) (Yes, I am shamelessly plugging for my campaign on our blog.) Check your email first for a message from Exeter providing your ID and password. On an unrelated note - no one is at all as surprised as I was at the cargo cult around Rambo among the Kamula in PNG? or the one about submarines?cuenonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04605107185264775806noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3790158539927642450.post-23302234237105955622008-02-19T23:44:00.002-05:002008-02-20T00:13:44.896-05:00Anthology of Interest!Or, <i>Tit-Bits</i> for the <i><a href="http://crookedtimber.org/2008/02/13/we-were-never-this-harsh-even-with-david-bernstein/">Verodobbsically</a> inclined</i>.<br /><br />["Verodobbsical" is not a word, but 1) I find it hilarious and 2) using it on this page cruelly denies the good folks at Crooked Timber a Googlewhack. Mwa-ha!]<br /><br />* * * * * <br /><br />I just purchased the new Sons and Daughters album on iTunes (preliminary assessment, three tracks in: I am annoying my downstairs neighbor with my stomping, and my across-the-way neighbors with my manic air-guitaring. Approval!) and on said iTunes page, there is this one-star review: "For the rest of us with good taste in music we'll head over to Three Days Grace and Linkin Park - Where REAL rock is formulated!" All [sics] originally [sicced], of course. But <i> seriously</i>. Linkin Park -- where real rock is <i>formulated</i>. I know this is too good to be anything but taking the piss, but had to share.<br /><br />* * * * * <br /><br />Similarly, you might have noticed that <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/19/world/asia/19pstan.html?ex=1361163600&en=ad937552375690ad&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink">on Monday, Pakistanian elections dealt a severe blow to Pervez Musharraf</a>. Then this morning, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/20/world/americas/20cuba.html?ex=1361163600&en=0a94cef8293ef91e&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink">Castro relinquished his grip on power</a>. Pundits might expel much ink searching for the root causes of this bad week for tyranny (I have high hopes for Thursday!) but I feel the need to point out a simple fact: <a href="http://www.4ad.com/releases/heretic-pride-1/">new Mountain Goats album</a>.<br /><br />* * * * *<br /><br />I very much enjoyed <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/18/nyregion/18semicolon.html?ex=1361163600&en=1f4b96ff6a13e0b6&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink">this NYT article</a> on how amazed everybody was that an MTA employee correctly used a semicolon on a subway sign. The semicolon, as the trail of my writings well attest, is the punctuation mark most surrounded by flowery pink hearts in the Trapper Keeper of my mind. But this discussion of mild literacy of the subway put me in mind of what I pass every morning on my commute:<br /><br /><img src="http://www.publicartinla.com/Metroart/erenberg.jpg"><br /><br />This is an art installation, currently in the Wilshire/Normandie Metro stop in LA, entitled "The Complete Works of Roland Barthes." It's a series of photos of people holding up (unattractive editions of) every one of Barthes' books in turn. The <a href="http://www.publicartinla.com/Metroart/erenberg.html">artist's blurb</a> on the side says that "[e]ncountering images of people reading may trigger a reminder that reading might be a good idea." Also, "[t]hese Los Angeles artists, interacting with books, represent a cross-section of the City." I know I am not one to talk, but this strikes me as the most hilariously pretentious thing ever -- I am trying to estimate in the history of the LA subway system how many times anyone has read anything by Barthes while riding on it, and if that number is in the three digits I'll be surprised.<br /><br />* * * * * *<br /><br />I dunno whether you guys have seen <a href="http://www.prospect.org/csnc/blogs/tapped_archive?month=02&year=2008&base_name=the_pete_rose_of_politics#104506">this,</a> but as best I can determine (and this is all quite tentative, since it's complicated enough I don't have a great grasp of things), McCain secured a loan for his campaign by putting up public financing as collateral -- that is, he took out a loan from a bank, and promised that if he couldn't repay it, he'd stay in the presidential race and request public funding (the system in which candidates can opt out of raising money from donors and get money from the gov't instead -- you have an option of checking a box in your taxes to fund this), then use that to pay back the loan. There are more complications -- he had public financing, then he didn't, then he was maybe thinking of getting back in. And because it is so wonky, there's no way the story will ever have any traction in the media or with the public. But it's sufficiently slimy that I'm wracking my brains for comparable examples of legal legerdemain that don't end in someone going to jail.Mike Russohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16875295164111148699noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3790158539927642450.post-22257258775066271362008-02-16T11:50:00.002-05:002008-02-16T13:38:30.378-05:00My Sweetest DownfallSo I was thinking this morning in the shower about Oedipus Rex.[1] When we highly self-impressed people refer to Sophocles' play, we invariably say Oedipus Rex, not the English translation of "Oedipus the King." Well, of course -- far better to say things in their original tongue, after all. You just sound *smarter* if you say "Shichinin no Samurai," or "Malleus Malificarum," or whatever. And even if we don't say "A la Recherche du Temps Perdu," we do prefer to say "In Search of Lost Time" rather than "Remembrance of Things Past," these days.<br /><br />Problem is, I thought to myself in the shower, the name of the play obviously can't be "Oedipus Rex." Rex is Latin, which Sophocles surely wasn't writing in! So Oedipus the King -- king in ancient Greek is usually "basileus," I thought, though now that I check the title of the play is actually Oedipus Tyrannus. The Greek title's clearly the more authentic, so why hasn't it caught on?<br /><br />I've done only some lackadasical Googling on this, but I have turned up <a href="http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/cgi-bin/ptext?lookup=Soph.+OT+toc">an 1880s translation</a> that uses the proper title, and some more recent scholarship seems to push for the original name. But I'm deeply curious as to how this change happened -- I presume it has to do with available translations and when scholarly attention was first focused on the play. Aristotle's Poetics mentions the play several times, I know, and <a href="http://www.csuohio.edu/english/earl/nr110.html">this helpful page on The Name of the Rose</a> points out that post-Medieval knowledge of the Poetics is traceable to translations of the work into Arabic and Latin, which would seem to tell a simple-enough story -- given Aristotle's intellectual dominance, having the primary references to Oedipus be in the Latin translation available to scholars would create a great structural bias in favor of the Rex appelation (apparently the direct Greek-to-Latin translation was mostly ignored in favor of a Latin translation of the Arabic translation, but the point stands).<br /><br />The only problem with this is that Aristotle refers to the work as "the Oedipus" or "Sophocles' Oedipus" (I've checked this, as best as I'm able, against the <a href="http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/cgi-bin/ptext?doc=Perseus:text:1999.01.0055:section=1452a">Greek original</a> of the text; I don't speak the language, of couse, but "toi oidipodi" seems clearly to omit the "king" portion). And at any rate this noodling about omits the critical question of when the play first received concentrated attention from the scholarly community -- it might have been in the humanist revival of the Renaissance that attitudes and appelations were fixed, after all, in which case we'd still expect Latin but Aristotle's hegemony would be less, er, hegemonic.<br /><br />Probably this is overthinking the question far too much -- Latin dominated scholarly discourse for centuries, so of course there's a structural bias in favor of the Latin name -- but still, the fact that it's persisted, when other Greek works are known by their orginal titles (cf. the Odyssey, which is a slight bastardization of Oduessia or however you want to transliterate it, but clearly cues off of the Greek rather than the Latin Ulysses) is a bit puzzling. An intro to the play would probably be handy for laying out the scholarly treatment of Sophocles, which would likely provide further clues, but sadly I didn't bring my copy out to CA with me, and I'm too lazy to check further online, since it's time for breakfast.<br /><br />[1] This is not as perverse as it sounds. I've been reading a book on the bible[2], and, before going to sleep last night, I'd read through a bit about Samson. Predictably, I was thinking about this as I woke up -- wondering about the similarities in the birth stories between Samson and Samuel, for example, though I think the coincidences there really are just coincidences, inasmuch as there was a whole class of "nazirites," so-called, holy men who refused to cut their hair, and you'd need some etiological explanation for why their parents had so dedicated them. Infertility until god intervenes is a logical place to go. Anyway, but so this got me singing the Regina Spektor song <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p62rfWxs6a8">Samson</a>, because I enjoy singing in the shower far too much. But in turn that got me thinking about how Regina means "queen" in Latin, a fact which for the first time prompted me to think how weird it would be if the name Reginald was somehow a masculinized version of Regina and derived indirectly from Rex (usually the feminine forms derive from the masculine, I've found) (and it turns out Reginald is actually from the German, ragin=advice + wald=rule, which further confuses things because those sure sound like the attributes of a king, don't they?). At any rate, I had "rex" on my mind, which led inevitably to Oedipus.<br /><br />[2] Specifically, I'm reading <a href="http://www.amazon.com/How-Read-Bible-Guide-Scripture/dp/074323586X/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1203181154&sr=8-1">How to Read the Bible</a>, by <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/16/books/review/Plotz-t.htm">James Kugel</a> (first link goes to the Amazon page, second to the NYT review). It goes through more or less chapter by chapter comparing the way that the traditional interpretation was constructed, and then walking through the modern scholars' historical and interpretive findings. It's quite a lot of fun, though -- one short section on how Jacob tricked Esau out of his birthright is headed "Jacob's Back Pages," for example. "My Back Pages" is a Bob Dylan song -- even if you don't know the name, you've heard it: "I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now" -- and the title plays with the facts that 1) Dylan's son is named Jacob and 2) Dylan is another Jew who changed his name.Mike Russohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16875295164111148699noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3790158539927642450.post-62015431127908448972008-01-23T22:09:00.000-05:002008-01-23T22:24:39.250-05:00Hippies and VaselineSo I get email from Greenpeace. Usually I just delete without reading it, because you know how that goes, but they're doing one of their hippies vs. whalers things, where they have their ship physically tail whaling vessels and try to get them not to kill the whales and then bring them forward in time to save the Federation. True Story Swear To God. Anyway. So I'm reading it and I read:<br /><br />"For eleven days, we've been chasing the Japanese whaling factory ship Nisshin Maru through Antarctic waters."<br /><br />And thought, "hang on!" <br /><br />Quick Googling confirmed that my brain was not misfiring, and that as I thought, this is the same ship used in the filming of Matthew Barney's Drawing Restraint 9.<br /><br />One constructs scenarios. Are captured Greenpeace activists dismembered until they turn into whales? What happens if the whalers' strategic supply of vaseline is disrupted? Which poor sailor has to sleep in the cabin where Barney and Bjork had cinematic kinky whale-sex? <br /><br />[I should note before closing that I know I owe more substantive posts; unfortunately, life's been busy; viz., I'm red-eyeing it to DC tonight, and am posting this from the Sacramento airport, where I've just left a 9.5 hour hearing that hadn't quite finished by the time I left because I had to catch my flight, and which parenthetically looks set to kill the big health care bill I've been working on these past four months. Which is to say, my brain is too fried to post anything involving big words, likely will be so fried in the immediate future, but if the bill gets voted down I should have some more free time!]<br /><br />[Incidentally, that post title should really bring in the perv demo to our humble blog. I do my bit!]Mike Russohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16875295164111148699noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3790158539927642450.post-81407877469003962832008-01-12T12:21:00.000-05:002008-01-12T12:23:54.813-05:00What We Talk About When We Talk About Love ReduxFor any Raymond Carver fans out there, <i>The New Yorker</i> recently published an early draft of the story <i>What We Talk About When We Talk About Love</i>, titled <i><a href="http://www.newyorker.com/fiction/features/2007/12/24/071224fi_fiction_carver">Beginners</a></i>.<br /><br /><a href="http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/12/24/071224fa_fact">An accompanying article</a> and some <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/online/2007/12/24/slideshow_071224_carver">additional supplementary material</a> demonstrate the influence of Carver's editor, Gordon Lish, who turns out to have had a larger than usual impact on Carver's writing.<br /><br />I went back and re-read <i>What We Talk About When We Talk About Love</i> and then read <i><a href="http://www.newyorker.com/fiction/features/2007/12/24/071224fi_fiction_carver">Beginners</a></i>. <i>What We Talk About</i> is definitely the better story. It's tighter, less self-indulgent, and cuts out a lot of the fat and redundancy of <i>Beginners</i>. <br /><br />Carver's widow and past collaborator, Tess Gallagher, wants to republish more of his works in their "original" form. <i>Beginners</i> is just a start. She feels that Lish crossed a line and compromised Carver's artistic integrity in the drastic edits. Granted, the edits were pretty severe in the case of <i>What We Talk About</i> but the work as a whole was definitely better for it. What we lose is not the rambling genius of a Melville or a Thackeray, as Gallagher might want us to believe. We simply lose much of the redundant and frankly unnecessary description. It is a matter of greater artistic discipline, the outcome of which is reaching a place of meaning previously unattainable.Davidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00674119473032281935noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3790158539927642450.post-8479210174876642322007-12-26T12:48:00.000-05:002007-12-26T12:46:06.290-05:00Crimen Falsi Redux, Part 1: The Theory of the Image<a href="http://bp2.blogger.com/_tzV4YgJo42w/R3CNEqZKcOI/AAAAAAAAANE/4IgzprWNi_M/s1600-h/Vietnamshooting.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://bp2.blogger.com/_tzV4YgJo42w/R3CNEqZKcOI/AAAAAAAAANE/4IgzprWNi_M/s400/Vietnamshooting.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5147769485323301090" /></a><small>"General Nguyễn Ngọc Loan Executing a Viet Cong Prisoner in Saigon" by Eddie Adams</small><br /><br /><blockquote>"The general killed the Viet Cong; I killed the general with my camera. Still photographs are the most powerful weapon in the world. People believe them, but photographs do lie, even without manipulation. They are only half-truths... What the photograph didn't say was, 'What would you do if you were the general at that time and place on that hot day, and you caught the so-called bad guy after he blew away one, two or three American soldiers?'" - Eddie Adams<br /><br /><center>***</center><br /><br />"a photograph does feel more like a verification of an event than an eyewitness statement (often for good reason). A story is just a story, and it's as easy to make them false as true, but a photo, or a film recording, <b>is a literal imprint of the world</b> (until it gets altered, of course -- the epistemological difficulties that photo manipulation cause for, e.g., consumers of the daily newspaper, are an interesting problem). Without very aggressive framing, it's hard to communicate to an audience that what they're seeing might not be true ... We're trained to think of the camera's eye as impartial, unless we have good reason to think otherwise." {emphasis mine} - <a href="http://visceralrealists.blogspot.com/2007/12/crimen-falsi.html"target="_blank">Crimen Falsi</a><br /><br /><br />"Seeing is believing" - proverb</blockquote><br />A photo or film recording is not a literal imprint of the world. In the capturing and transmission of the image much is lost. We can call this lost material context, which is the supplement to the image: both the missing piece, and the extra one. <br /><br />An image is framed, chosen, represented; it lacks history, smell, sound. All this serves as alteration whether or not what lies inside the frame is "manipulated." "Manipulation," though, also exists in choices most viewers aren't conscious of. Lenses - which affect depth of field, among other things; the size of the image (a combination of lense choice and distance from camera from subject); the angles chosen (is the camera above or below the subject? are speakers shot head-on, at a slight angle, or at a greater one? Is a conversation shown by a shot / reverse shot patter, or in a two shot? What does lighting emphasize/deemphasize/obscure?) These choices create emotional resonances in images that do not mirror the world itself. The camera does not see as the eye sees. The eye shifts attention along with consciousness, adjusts to varying lighting conditions, grabs peripheral information without directing attention on it. The tricks of the filmmaker or photographer can attempt to mimic these perceptual schema. The tools of cinema (focus, editing, lighting et al) can be controlled to simulate human perceptual conditions and construct the perception of a narrative. <br /><br />Filmmakers create meaning and context through montage. The image, like the word, contains meaning only in the interplay between context and image, whether the context is intrinsic or extrinsic to the image itself. <br /><br /><blockquote>"Montage means the assembly of pieces of film, which moved in rapid succession before the eye create an idea." - <a href="http://youtube.com/watch?v=lmRdOYsib2A"target="_blank">Alfred Hitchcock</a></blockquote><br /><center><object width="425" height="355"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/lmRdOYsib2A&rel=1"></param><param name="wmode" value="transparent"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/lmRdOYsib2A&rel=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" wmode="transparent" width="425" height="355"></embed></object></center><br /><br />The basic psychological principles of montage have been known since at least the late 1910s, when <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuleshov_Effect"target="_blank">Lev Kuleshov</a> showed how juxtaposed images cause audience members to assert certain relationships between the two images (Hitchcock explains this process in his third example in the video clip). <br /><br /><center>***</center><br /><blockquote>"The cinema is truth 24 times a second." - Jean-Luc Godard <br /><br />"The cinema lies 24 times a second." - Brian DePalma</blockquote><br />Godard is almost universally skeptical of the truth-value of the image (strictly defined, by which I mean: the kind of truth that Mike assigns to the photographic image in his post). Godard's "truth" is the revelatory impact of the image, but for Godard the truth and the lie of cinema is it's ability to represent the material conditions of reality. If my turn of phrase sounds explicitly Marxist, it's because Godard's political radicalism informs his ideas about the truth-value of the moving image with increasing directness as the 1960's progress. After the near-miss of revolution in France in 1968, Godard's work becomes more explicitly didactic. His work as part of the Dziga Vertov Group sets itself up as a lesson plan but rather than obfuscate the manipulations of the image, Godard and his comrades (Jean-Pierre Gorin, among others) foreground the manipulations of the image so as to undercut them. He's laying bare the structures by which this manipulation takes place, undercutting the cinematic illusion as a lesson in radical media literacy [Godard's use of the image to this effect begins well before this, but 1968 is the breaking point, the moment when his ideological agenda moves to the fore]. The final Dziga Vertov Group film, <i><a href="http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/cteq/01/19/letter.html"target="_blank">Letter to Jane</a></i>, explores the process of assigning meaning to a single photograph of Jane Fonda with a North Vietnamese communist soldier. <br /><br /><a href="http://bp3.blogger.com/_tzV4YgJo42w/R3BSq6ZKb6I/AAAAAAAAAKk/rSjKs0K81vc/s1600-h/letterj.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://bp3.blogger.com/_tzV4YgJo42w/R3BSq6ZKb6I/AAAAAAAAAKk/rSjKs0K81vc/s400/letterj.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5147705271267258274" /></a><br /><br /><center>***</center><br /><br /><blockquote>"Look however in <i>Kapo</i>, the shot where Riva commits suicide by throwing herself on electric barbwire: the man who decides at this moment to make a forward tracking shot to reframe the dead body – carefully positioning the raised hand in the corner of the final framing – this man is worthy of the most profound contempt." - Jacques Rivette's “<i>Of Abjection</i>”, a review of Gillo Pontecorvo's <i>Kapo</i> for <i>Cahiers du cinéma</i>, June 1961; cited by Serge Daney in his seminal essay <i><a href="http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/04/30/kapo_daney.html"target="_blank">The Tracking Shot in Kapo</i></a><br /> <br /><br />"Tracking shots are a question of morality." - Jean-Luc Godard</blockquote><br />The choices of presentation of an image are moral concerns precisely because they are images and not the world. <br /><br /><center>***</center><br /><br />If Godard is interested in the truth as a lie, DePalma seems intent on creating truth by using lies as his raw material. DePalma understands all images as considered, i.e., "fictional," even (especially?) documentary ones. His newest film <span style="font-style:italic;">Redacted</span> follows through on his previous work by addressing the 'reality' of images <span style="font-weight:bold;">as images</span>; it ends with a montage that takes "true" (i.e., documentary) images and combines them with a culminating "false" one (i.e., created by DePalma rather than documentary) that supports the 'truth' behind his political point. Why didn't he use a "real" image here? Were there no appropriate "real" images to be had? <br /><br /><center>***</center><br /><blockquote>"Art is a lie that tells the truth" - Pablo Picasso<br /><br />"There are deeper strata of truth in cinema, and there is such a thing as poetic, ecstatic truth. It is mysterious and elusive, and can be reached only through fabrication and imagination and stylization." - Werner Herzog; from <a href="http://www.wernerherzog.com/main/de/html/news/Minnesota_Declaration.htm"target="_blank">Minnesota declaration: truth and fact in documentary cinema</a></blockquote><br /><center>***</center><br /><blockquote>"We know that behind every image revealed there is another image more faithful to reality, and in the back of that image there is another, and yet another behind the last one, and so on, up to the true image of that absolute, mysterious reality that no one will ever see." - Michelangelo Antonioni (<a href="http://www.luminous-landscape.com/essays/Framing%20Art.shtml"target="_blank">via</a>)</blockquote><br />DePalma's best work, <span style="font-style:italic;">Blow Out</span>, remakes Antonioni's <span style="font-style:italic;">Blow Up</span> and stars John Travolta as a Hollywood sound man who accidentally records the sounds related to the "accidental" death of a politician. DePalma's film, unlike Antonioni's, arrives at certainty about the mystery at the film's core. Antonioni's film is not about sound but about image; a photographer captures an image that provides evidence of a murder. Or perhaps the image offers illusions instead of evidence; the image is too hard to analyze, the photographer doesn't know all the facts, and the physical evidence is not verifiable (or rather, it is verifiable but not <b>re</b>verifiable). In <span style="font-style:italic;">Blow Up</span>, Antonioni explores the creation of ambiguous images and the roots of meaning in the physical, contextual world. <br /><br /><br /><a href="http://bp3.blogger.com/_tzV4YgJo42w/R3BSq6ZKb7I/AAAAAAAAAKs/YwxrN96GUtM/s1600-h/Picture1.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://bp3.blogger.com/_tzV4YgJo42w/R3BSq6ZKb7I/AAAAAAAAAKs/YwxrN96GUtM/s400/Picture1.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5147705271267258290" /></a><br /><a href="http://bp2.blogger.com/_tzV4YgJo42w/R3BTSqZKb_I/AAAAAAAAALM/7KtAQ35sqFg/s1600-h/blowup1.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://bp2.blogger.com/_tzV4YgJo42w/R3BTSqZKb_I/AAAAAAAAALM/7KtAQ35sqFg/s400/blowup1.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5147705954167058418" /></a><br /><a href="http://bp3.blogger.com/_tzV4YgJo42w/R3BSq6ZKb8I/AAAAAAAAAK0/VDJoTaTao2k/s1600-h/Picture2.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://bp3.blogger.com/_tzV4YgJo42w/R3BSq6ZKb8I/AAAAAAAAAK0/VDJoTaTao2k/s400/Picture2.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5147705271267258306" /></a><br /><a href="http://bp0.blogger.com/_tzV4YgJo42w/R3BSrKZKb9I/AAAAAAAAAK8/bG87FwA9JOk/s1600-h/Picture3.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://bp0.blogger.com/_tzV4YgJo42w/R3BSrKZKb9I/AAAAAAAAAK8/bG87FwA9JOk/s400/Picture3.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5147705275562225618" /></a><br /><br />Antonioni's is frequently a cinema of ambiguity for the viewer, as his films create images whose meaning can't be discerned at first glance - or even upon closer examination. Rather than emphasize the illusions of the image as moral concerns (a la Godard), Antonioni focuses on the epistomological dilemmas of the uncertainty of the process of image-making. See, for example, the incredible final shot of <i>The Passenger</i>. We see only ambiguous evidence, the leadup and aftermath of the climactic moment. Antonioni calls forth the unimaginability and unrepresentability of death; he shows us things we cannot know by emphasizing the fact that we cannot know. <br /><br /><br /><a href="http://bp1.blogger.com/_tzV4YgJo42w/R3BaUaZKcHI/AAAAAAAAAMM/-nNnIxk3dm4/s1600-h/passenger-watch.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://bp1.blogger.com/_tzV4YgJo42w/R3BaUaZKcHI/AAAAAAAAAMM/-nNnIxk3dm4/s400/passenger-watch.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5147713680813224050" /></a><br /><a href="http://bp2.blogger.com/_tzV4YgJo42w/R3BaUqZKcJI/AAAAAAAAAMc/INZC59a_OIY/s1600-h/passenger051.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://bp2.blogger.com/_tzV4YgJo42w/R3BaUqZKcJI/AAAAAAAAAMc/INZC59a_OIY/s400/passenger051.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5147713685108191378" /></a><br /><a href="http://bp2.blogger.com/_tzV4YgJo42w/R3BaUqZKcII/AAAAAAAAAMU/2ufeEaz41zA/s1600-h/passenger3small.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://bp2.blogger.com/_tzV4YgJo42w/R3BaUqZKcII/AAAAAAAAAMU/2ufeEaz41zA/s400/passenger3small.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5147713685108191362" /></a><br /><a href="http://bp3.blogger.com/_tzV4YgJo42w/R3BaH6ZKcDI/AAAAAAAAALs/iYTssWixGaU/s1600-h/18793179_w434_h_q80.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://bp3.blogger.com/_tzV4YgJo42w/R3BaH6ZKcDI/AAAAAAAAALs/iYTssWixGaU/s400/18793179_w434_h_q80.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5147713466064859186" /></a><br /><center>***</center><br /><a href="http://bp2.blogger.com/_tzV4YgJo42w/R3BaHqZKcCI/AAAAAAAAALk/zvZzfaJZIus/s1600-h/1antonionipassengerjacknicholsondvdreviewpdvd_013.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://bp2.blogger.com/_tzV4YgJo42w/R3BaHqZKcCI/AAAAAAAAALk/zvZzfaJZIus/s400/1antonionipassengerjacknicholsondvdreviewpdvd_013.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5147713461769891874" /></a><br /><a href="http://bp1.blogger.com/_tzV4YgJo42w/R3BaUaZKcGI/AAAAAAAAAME/WruYeiJY92U/s1600-h/passenger-thru-bars.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://bp1.blogger.com/_tzV4YgJo42w/R3BaUaZKcGI/AAAAAAAAAME/WruYeiJY92U/s400/passenger-thru-bars.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5147713680813224034" /></a><br /><blockquote>“We translate every experience into the same old codes.” - David Locke, in Michelangelo Antonioni's <i>Professione: reporter</i> / <i>The Passenger</i> (<a href="http://elusivelucidity.blogspot.com/2007/12/martin-walsh-on-passenger.html"target="_blank">via</a>)</blockquote><br /><center>***</center><br /><br />Hitchcock makes flawless use of these codes into which we translate experience, manipulating his audience by way of tension and misdirection. His characters, like Shakespeare's, frequently misapprehend the narrative of which they a part. Hitchcock differs from Shakespeare because in Hitchcock's narratives we see through the eyes of these characters <b>and misapprehend what they misapprehend</b>. Take <i>Suspicion</i>, one of his myriad masterworks of subjective point of view. Hitchcock's creation of point of view isn't limited to subjective camerawork; it's the creation of a worldview in which knowledge is constructed through one person's understanding. Our information is incomplete but suggestive enough to allow us to draw conclusions; only later will we be presented with enough information to make sense of events in a concrete way. <br /><br />Some suggestive stills from <i>Suspicion</i>:<br /><br /><a href="http://bp3.blogger.com/_tzV4YgJo42w/R3Byt6ZKcKI/AAAAAAAAAMk/jq-qkVCc-rE/s1600-h/PDVD_01699.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://bp3.blogger.com/_tzV4YgJo42w/R3Byt6ZKcKI/AAAAAAAAAMk/jq-qkVCc-rE/s400/PDVD_01699.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5147740507178954914" /></a><br /><a href="http://bp3.blogger.com/_tzV4YgJo42w/R3Byt6ZKcLI/AAAAAAAAAMs/0xkS5PM2aVU/s1600-h/PDVD_02147.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://bp3.blogger.com/_tzV4YgJo42w/R3Byt6ZKcLI/AAAAAAAAAMs/0xkS5PM2aVU/s400/PDVD_02147.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5147740507178954930" /></a><br /><a href="http://bp0.blogger.com/_tzV4YgJo42w/R3ByuKZKcMI/AAAAAAAAAM0/hcaLsS7rUxU/s1600-h/PDVD_02162.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://bp0.blogger.com/_tzV4YgJo42w/R3ByuKZKcMI/AAAAAAAAAM0/hcaLsS7rUxU/s400/PDVD_02162.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5147740511473922242" /></a><br /><a href="http://bp0.blogger.com/_tzV4YgJo42w/R3ByuKZKcNI/AAAAAAAAAM8/Mx6M-pprJyY/s1600-h/PDVD_02468.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://bp0.blogger.com/_tzV4YgJo42w/R3ByuKZKcNI/AAAAAAAAAM8/Mx6M-pprJyY/s400/PDVD_02468.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5147740511473922258" /></a><br /><br /><center>***</center><br /><br />Mike's point is not about the actual fact-value of the cinematic image; he asserts that audiences have a "greater susceptibility to moving-pictures-plus-sound than words"; and that "the degree of processing that needs to occur between the art and its consumption is higher with novels, leading to a greater opportunity to audit for a sense of falseness." There's no comparison here; it's like comparing apples and Chicago. The modes of procesing might be more conscious in literature, assuming the cinematic illusion is well-kept. The mode of cinematic storytelling that sidesteps any the sense of 'artificiality' draws on a preexisting set of codes that signal verisimilitude. We may be "trained to think of the camera eye as impartial," but this is a lie. The cinematic image is not <i>a priori</i> more capable of creating the illusion of reality than any other form is. Most cinema situates itself within a certain Regime of Truth (Foucault) that represent reality using certain forms. These forms qualify as 'realism' in the cinema because viewers have been trained to accept these codes as real; David Bordwell has done extensive formalist work on the develoment of the codes in Hollywood's Regime of Truth. [To counteract the Hollywood Regime of Truth, "art cinema" has created (itself as) an alternate Regime of Truth with codes of its own. I'm not sure that this is a positive development]. The establishment of any artistic Regime of Truth consists of the codification of a set of approaches toward the representation of truth. What begins as an exercise in <span style="font-style:italic;">appearance-making</span> (as opposed to <span style="font-style:italic;">copy-making</span>, the two types of artistic endeavor in Plato's <i>The Sophist</i>) becomes instead hyperreal, dependent on the Regime of Truth for its truth value. The problem of hyperreality is one of <span style="font-style:italic;">quidditas</span>: Does an image have quidditas any more than a word does? Do 24 images shown in rapid succession contain an essence? Can an image ensconced in a Regime of Truth reveal truth?<br /><br />For Heidegger, truth (<a href="http://www.mun.ca/phil/codgito/vol2/v2doc3.html"target="_blank">ἀλήθεια</a> / <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aletheia"target="_blank">Aletheia</a>) is a process of revealing, an uncovering. The image at once covers and uncovers. In Heidegger's <i>The Origin of the Work of Art</i>, art reveals the thingliness of things [Heidegger doesn't say 'quidditas,' though he might]; Heidegger considers this revealing to be the purpose of art. A pair of shoes painted by Van Gogh differs from the shoes themselves in that they serve different purposes: the shoes themselves cover feet; the work of art reveals the nature of shoes ("lets us know what shoes are in truth"). A work of art differs from its subject even when the image is exact, for it takes its place as an image, a tool of uncovering. <br /><br /><a href="http://bp2.blogger.com/_tzV4YgJo42w/R3A55qZKb5I/AAAAAAAAAKc/VxsanQDCtUE/s1600-h/VanGoghShoes1885.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://bp2.blogger.com/_tzV4YgJo42w/R3A55qZKb5I/AAAAAAAAAKc/VxsanQDCtUE/s400/VanGoghShoes1885.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5147678036879634322" /></a><br /><br /><center>***</center><br /><br /><blockquote>"What the moving pictures lack is the wind in the trees." - D.W. Griffith</blockquote><br /><br /><br /><center>***</center><br /><br /><br />Another essential commentary to refute the radical reality of the camera’s eye:<br />Documentary filmmaker Errol Morris examines 2 iconic images from the Crimean War to determine in which order they were shot. A fascinating, multifaceted, essential series, taking place on his blog Zoom at the New York Times website. <br />(<a href="http://morris.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/09/25/which-came-first-the-chicken-or-the-egg-part-one/"target="_blank">Part One</a>)<br />(<a href="http://morris.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/10/04/which-came-first-part-two/"target="_blank">Part Two</a>)<br />(<a href="http://morris.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/10/23/which-came-first-part-three-can-george-lionel-and-marmaduke-help-us-order-the-fenton-photographs/"target="_blank">Part Three</a>)<br />and<br /><a href="http://morris.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/12/10/primae-objectiones-et-responsio-auctoris-ad-primas-objectiones-part-one/"target="_blank">Cartesian Blogging, Part One</a> (in which Morris answers reader questions on the first three parts)<br /><br /><a href="http://bp1.blogger.com/_tzV4YgJo42w/R3AuraZKb3I/AAAAAAAAAKM/0gDVVl8XjmE/s1600-h/21morris_OFF.533.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://bp1.blogger.com/_tzV4YgJo42w/R3AuraZKb3I/AAAAAAAAAKM/0gDVVl8XjmE/s400/21morris_OFF.533.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5147665697438592882" /></a><br /><a href="http://bp1.blogger.com/_tzV4YgJo42w/R3AuraZKb4I/AAAAAAAAAKU/9FFHES_6R2Q/s1600-h/21morris_ON.533.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://bp1.blogger.com/_tzV4YgJo42w/R3AuraZKb4I/AAAAAAAAAKU/9FFHES_6R2Q/s400/21morris_ON.533.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5147665697438592898" /></a><br /><br /><br /><center>***</center><br /><br /><br />Or, I could have just suggested you see <a href=http://www.criterion.com/asp/release.asp?id=138target=”_blank”>Rashômon</a>. <br /><br /><a href="http://bp0.blogger.com/_tzV4YgJo42w/R3AuKKZKb2I/AAAAAAAAAKE/DB_H_wd4i5M/s1600-h/rashomon_uk3.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://bp0.blogger.com/_tzV4YgJo42w/R3AuKKZKb2I/AAAAAAAAAKE/DB_H_wd4i5M/s400/rashomon_uk3.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5147665126207942498" /></a><br /><center><object width="425" height="355"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/pXhTGpDLLGQ&rel=1"></param><param name="wmode" value="transparent"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/pXhTGpDLLGQ&rel=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" wmode="transparent" width="425" height="355"></embed></object></center>David McDougallhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11020826602374694194noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3790158539927642450.post-29661926010463787772007-12-24T10:50:00.000-05:002007-12-24T10:58:39.828-05:00Dinosaurs and ArtCheck out the last Dear Diary entry in the <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_0">NYTimes</span> Metropolitan Dairy today:<br /><br /><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/24/nyregion/24diary.html?ref=nyregion">http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/24/nyregion/24diary.html?ref=nyregion</a><br /><br /><span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_2">Apparently,</span> the Art part of "The Metropolitan Museum of Art" did not tip off this young woman to the Museum's content.<br /><br />Still, her comment does inadvertently elicit curiosity as to what The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Dinosaurs might be like. Or, better yet, what would Metropolitan Museum of Dinosaur Art be?cuenonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04605107185264775806noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3790158539927642450.post-36899115646058698182007-12-20T11:16:00.000-05:002007-12-20T11:17:23.009-05:00Physics works!Great <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/19/education/19cnd-physics.html"target="_blank">NYTimes article</a> about the stardom effects of charismatic faculty in the age of freely reproducable teaching via podcasting and the internet. <br /><br /><br /><a href="http://open.yale.edu/courses/"target="_blank">Yale Open Courses</a><br /><a href="http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/web/home/home/index.htm"target="_blank">MIT OpenCourseWare</a><br /><br />I'm really excited to start <a href="http://open.yale.edu/courses/religious_studies/introduction-to-the-old-testament-hebrew-bible/home.html"target="_blank">Introduction to the Old Testament</a> with Yale Professor Christine Hayes<br /><br /><br />I'd love to see lectures from Econobloggers <a href="http://gregmankiw.blogspot.com/"target="_blank">Mankiw</a> and <a href="http://www.marginalrevolution.com/"target="_blank">Cowen</a> as well. (If you're not familiar with <a href="http://www.marginalrevolution.com/"target="_blank">Marginal Revolution</a>, get thee to the Cowen link immediately).David McDougallhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11020826602374694194noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3790158539927642450.post-58426250351061572122007-12-18T15:22:00.000-05:002007-12-18T17:53:25.244-05:00Crimen FalsiI've been thinking lately about unreliability (not unreliable narration as such) in books and film. This post contains a massive spoiler for Atonement, so if you haven't read the book or seen the movie -- and really, you should read the book or see the movie, preferably reading if you have to choose but both worth doing -- I'd recommend skipping this post, or at least jumping a few paragraphs down where I start speaking in generalities once more.<br /><br />Atonement isn't, properly speaking, a "twist" story -- you know, the M. Night Shyamalan style of storytelling in which the lurching mindfuck 3/4 of the way in is the engine that makes the story go. But there is a bit of a twist, and if you've managed to make it this far into the post without heeding the spoiler warnings, get ye gone here or make peace with missing out on an unsullied encounter with one of the greatest works of modern English letters. Seriously. <br /><br />For the sake of discussion, I'll give some context. The scene I'm interested in comes in what I think is part 3 of the book (and is clearly part 3 of the movie, which to its credit divides just as neatly as the novel). At the end of part 2, Robbie, our male lead, has finally found a place to rest after being wounded during his flight to the British retreat-point at Dunkirk. The section closes with him drifting into unconsciousness, and the reader (by which I mean "I," at least) can be forgiven for assuming that he is off to that undiscovered country from whose bourne etc. etc. But then, after the action's shifted back to London, Briony visits her sister Cecilia, and is surprised to find Robbie in the flat as well. Due to the events of the opening section of the book, confrontation and drama ensue. <br /><br />The twist, as you all know who are reading this far, is that this last scene doesn't actually happen. Briony invents it when she writes a novel around the story of Robbie, Cecilia, and herself, because she can't bear to recapitulate the reality that Robbie died at Dunkirk, as did Cecilia in an air raid. Leaving aside the compelling way this dramatizes the simultaneous power and powerlessness of art, what I'm most interested in now are the dynamics of that false scene. Because when reading the novel, I was in fact struck by a sense of falseness about it -- I wanted to believe that Cee and Robbie had gotten their version of a happy ending, but I didn't buy it, being utterly convinced that he had perished. I don't think I resolved this tension during my first read-through, but I definitely felt it, and when I discovered my instinct was right I felt a sense of rightness (and pleasure at having understood what was going on, of course). <br /><br />The film, however, doesn't project this sense of falseness to nearly the same degree. Part of this is due to how section 2 is presented; Robbie's wound is shown, but the state of his health is not well-established, which makes his lapse into unconsciousness at the end far more equivocal. But there's something about how the scene itself plays out that feels too naturalistic, I suppose -- in the book, the dialogue feels more stilted, the characters don't seem to act quite like they should, and Robbie seems to hover within the scene like a ghost before crashing in and causing a stagey confrontation. The film matches the book to a great degree, as far as I can recall (I've loaned my copy to my sister, and thus lack access), but these same elements don't have quite the same effect. The characterization and dialogue similarly feel strained, but here they come off as the effect of passed time and strained, brittle emotions. And Robbie does flit about in the frame, starting off half-glimpsed, rushing, seen only in profile -- but this reads more as a tease towards the reveal that he survived Dunkirk, than as an indication of his true, phantom status.<br /><br />[<strong>This marks the point at which reading becomes plausible once more for those of you sadly unfamiliar with Atonement</strong>]<br /><br />In trying to figure out why the book works and the novel doesn't, obviously there are questions of craft involved. It's not as if all novels that attempt this feat succeed -- in fact, I've just finished reading a novel which didn't pull it off, The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield (it was bought for me as a gift, and a bit outside my usual genres of choice, for what it's worth). <br /><br />In that book, an aged writer is telling the gothicized, heavily Jane-Eyre-inspired story of her life to an eager biographer; the writer's already been established as having a slippery relationship with the truth, and so the pump theoretically should be primed for the reader to expect unreliable narration. And there's a pivotal scene where something along these lines happens -- the writer is a twin, and she and her sister were raised somewhat feral by insane incestuous jazz-age aristocrats (and more usefully, by a pair of their servants). Throughout the story, the girls have been utterly indifferent to others, barely taking note of them and engaging in thoughtless cruelties. But after one of the servants dies, suddenly the writer becomes inconsolable, worries about how to set up a funeral, and has to struggle with bottling up her tears. Given the previous characterization, my eyes began to roll quite robustly at this point.<br /><br />Now, there is a good reason for this emotional-affect whiplash (it's too complicated to go into in detail, and is ultimately not hugely interesting), but instead of reading it as an ambiguity or strangeness in the text, I took it as a mistake of the author's. She'd already made a few missteps -- especially a number of significant ones in the early pages of the book, including having everybody in the book sport the same idiosyncratic literary style, and making the writer the Most! Famous! Writer! Of! All! Time!, who wrote 56 bestselling novels over the past 56 years. Given that track record, attempting to underplay your twist doesn't work particularly well (I am reminded of The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood, which I also recently finished reading, also features a child of aristocracy mostly raised by servants, and also has a twist or two that are clued by inconsistencies in the facts that the reader thinks he knows -- difference being, the quality of the writing makes one think "there's something odd here," rather than "this book needed a better editor.")<br /><br />Anyway, the point of that aside being that implementation matters, so that the comparative-media analysis I'm about to embark upon should be seen as an attempt to grapple at one piece of the question, rather than any stab at a definitive resolution. But with that said, it seems to me that the nature of cinema, as against the nature of a novel, conspires to make this sort of scene more difficult to pull off. The first factor I'd point to is the viewer's greater susceptibility to moving-pictures-plus-sound than words. The act of responding to a movie is much more direct and visceral than that of responding to words on a page -- not to say that one is stronger than the other (I cry much more frequently reading books than watching movies), but the degree of processing that needs to occur between the art and its consumption is higher with novels, leading to a greater opportunity to audit for a sense of falseness. The cinema's been compared to a magic circle, and I think the unity of that image rings true -- if we accept one part, we accept all of it. <br /><br />Relatedly, we're more accustomed to think about the slipperiness of words, compared with the unambiguity of light and sound. Words may lie but the eye never does, etc. But even beyond such cliched formulations, a photograph does feel more like a verification of an event than an eyewitness statement (often for good reason). A story is just a story, and it's as easy to make them false as true, but a photo, or a film recording, is a literal imprint of the world (until it gets altered, of course -- the epistemological difficulties that photo manipulation cause for, e.g., consumers of the daily newspaper, are an interesting problem). Without very aggressive framing, it's hard to communicate to an audience that what they're seeing might not be true (in fact, I had a friend who wrote a screenplay that failed to work for precisely this reason -- there was a scene midway through that was actually a post-hoc reconstruction of someone's incomplete memories, but even though I'm generally very good at picking up on twists, it totally sailed by me. We're trained to think of the camera's eye as impartial, unless we have good reason to think otherwise).<br /><br />Finally, I think the fact that actors portray characters who in a novel are simply words on a page is perhaps the largest single factor. If the dialogue is stilted and the affect seems odd, there at least are people on screen saying and emoting them -- the same people who were doing the exact same thing before. Drawing a line between the impersonation that's happened earlier and that which is happening now is hard -- there is a living, breathing person on the screen, and the continuity of their existence is a very difficult thing to reject. Ascribing falseness to a physical, breathing person is not a natural act. We're much more likely to invent a psychologizing explanation of inconsistencies to explain why this self-evidently self-identical person is not behaving in the way we expect, than when confronted with simple print that needs to be enlivened and personified by an act of imagination.<br /><br />Of course, all of this discussion is premised on a framework that makes no sense in a very deep way. All fictions are false, so what's "true" and "false" within that context is a problematic question. We could just say it's all simply a matter of narrative causality, I suppose, but that seems rather impoverished. I think it ultimately winds up being a clash of aesthetics; a good work of art establishes the frame in which it functions, and a scene or character or note is false where it clashes with that frame ([<strong>Atonement spoiler</strong>: the hard, rather dark reality that the novel establishes is betrayed by the happy-ending of Robbie surviving his wound, one notes]). But this is insufficient too, because obviously many works of art function by harnessing an internal aesthetic clash or contradiction, without exalting one to "truth" and demoting the other. And recourse to this whole line of approach as simply a cheap effect in the service of juvenile plot-twist plotting also strikes me as unsatisfyingly glib. Some scenes are true and some scenes are false, and we can feel the difference, after all. <br /><br />[<strong>final Atonement spoiler</strong>:]<br /><br />Is this a fuzzy-minded retreat to a reactionary, Potter-Stewart aesthetics? Perhaps. But, be that as it may, it's clear that Robbie really is dead, the reader knows it, and the viewer should know it too. <br /><br />[I'm suddenly reminded of the Tim-Robbins-killing scenes in High Fidelity, where the viewer's reluctance to parse a scene as false is used to considerable comedic effect. But my lunch break is over and this is sufficiently long that a click on the post button is in order]Mike Russohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16875295164111148699noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3790158539927642450.post-80190009227202265792007-12-17T11:11:00.000-05:002007-12-18T22:45:15.337-05:00to remember better, to part with less painLet us touch each other<br />while we still have hands,<br />palms, forearms, elbows . . .<br />Let us love each other for misery,<br />torture each other, torment,<br />disfigure, maim,<br />to remember better,<br />to part with less pain.<br /><br />from <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/fiction/poetry/2007/07/30/070730po_poem_pavlova"target="_blank">Four Poems by Vera Pavlova</a>David McDougallhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11020826602374694194noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3790158539927642450.post-80431648666280438692007-12-17T09:42:00.000-05:002007-12-17T09:55:47.233-05:00DOC Required Viewing: Shawshank RedemptionAn intriguing article came across the AP wire today that informs us we can no longer send wall decorations to our friends in New Jersey state prisons:<br /><br /><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Jail-Escape.html">http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Jail-Escape.html</a><br /><br />I'm not sure what I find more entertaining - that Stephen King actually divised a ligitimate form of escape from prison or that the DOC didn't see this coming.cuenonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04605107185264775806noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3790158539927642450.post-79623624640024288732007-12-15T02:06:00.000-05:002007-12-15T02:35:44.553-05:00No hazard labels requiredThis box was delivered to the lab recently. I find it interesting in a few ways.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://bp2.blogger.com/_XA8Es3vXcuw/R2N9JvXHIiI/AAAAAAAAAzQ/n_fJJOrxVp4/s1600-h/IMG_2197ps.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://bp2.blogger.com/_XA8Es3vXcuw/R2N9JvXHIiI/AAAAAAAAAzQ/n_fJJOrxVp4/s400/IMG_2197ps.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5144092805672935970" /></a><br /><br />1. Do you really need a label saying you need no labels?<br /><br />2. Which label do you believe? The Department of Transportation (DOT) label or the label from the company shipping (Sigma-Aldrich)? One of them is not assessing the situation correctly. Do you believe in government regulation or are you a libertarian socialist (aka anarchist)?<br /><br />3. The Mister Fantastic cameo appearance on that DANGER label is pretty awesome. The DANGER label is pretty awesome overall.<br /><br />To Sigma-Alrich's credit, thioglycol is pretty pungent stuff. But it's not going to explode or kill anyone.<br /><br />I wonder if this is a sign of things to come. Maybe in the future McDonald's will have coffee cups printed with both CAUTION: CONTENTS HOT and a Federally-mandated NO HAZARD LABELS REQUIRED.Davidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00674119473032281935noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3790158539927642450.post-85955107201386663252007-12-12T07:17:00.000-05:002007-12-12T07:21:09.794-05:00Gladwell on James Flynn on I.Q.<a href="http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2007/12/17/071217crbo_books_gladwell ">Malcolm Gladwell writes about the mutability of I.Q.</a> in this week's issue of <i>The New Yorker</i>.<br /><br />The article gives a very brief history of I.Q. tests in America and a few consequences of those tests. It also addresses issues of race and eugenics, and nature vs. nurture.<br /><br />What I found particularly striking was the Chinese-American example of high achievement preceding high I.Q. on the generational level. It is an obvious consequence of Flynn's ideas, but nonintuitive nonetheless.Davidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00674119473032281935noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3790158539927642450.post-56652885628794146042007-12-08T13:04:00.000-05:002007-12-08T13:11:15.908-05:00The Philosophy of DestructionI'd intended my first post to be a bit more, uh, <i>substantive</i> (I have thoughts stored up on Pynchon, Murakami, and nostalgia via Kundera -- I have an hour-long commute and fly a lot these days, which means I'm doing a lot of reading!). But as is often the case, all my best intentions are no match for serendipity. Via <a href="http://www.crookedtimber.com">Crooked Timber</a>, whence many glories:<br /><br /><a href="http://myspacetv.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.individual&videoid=22947011">Kant Attack Ad</a><br><embed src="http://lads.myspace.com/videos/vplayer.swf" flashvars="m=22947011&v=2&type=video" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="430" height="346"></embed><br> <br /><br />I want the whole series, now. K can really slash back, I feel. <i>Ecce Homo</i> is not going to go over well with today's values voter, I can tell you that much.Mike Russohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16875295164111148699noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3790158539927642450.post-15544579184818045852007-12-05T16:48:00.000-05:002007-12-05T16:55:37.797-05:00We were all like that once; or if we weren't, we probably wish we had been.<br><a href="http://www.thesavagedetectives.com/"target="_blank">The Savage Detectives</a> by Roberto Bolaño<br /><br /><blockquote>The Savage Detectives is a grubby epic, part road movie, part joyful, nostalgic confession. It starts as a diary, written by the 17-year-old Juan García Madero, who comes under the spell of the revolutionary-minded poets Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima (for whom read Bolaño himself and his friend Mario Santiago) and their "visceral realism" movement, in Mexico City in 1975.<br /><br />These pages read like a homage to Kerouac's The Dharma Bums, as Juan learns to drink, argue, screw and write. They are at once brimming with exuberant, innocent depravity, and open to mature condescension. We were all like that once; or if we weren't, we probably wish we had been.<br /> - <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2007/08/02/boboh128.xml"target="_blank">On the trail of the runaway poets</a> </blockquote>David McDougallhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11020826602374694194noreply@blogger.com1