The two weeks I spent in an unknown and slightly hostile environment were my novel's and my fast's undoing. I made the mistake of using those around me as models for characters and thus found myself monumentally uninterested in writing about them when the models started ticking me off on an hourly basis... and I soon ran into the waiting arms of Algernon Blackwood (short stories... weird tales) for solace.
But I still maintain the idea is a sound one, and so will try it again sometime. Maybe after my irritation at the world has worn off some.
And now, to "The Willows"...
17 November, 2006
29 October, 2006
Algebra the Easy Way - 29 October
I've experienced a bit of a change of venue as I prepare, strongly under the influence of Ian Stewart, to see how much algebra I still remember and if I'm really as bad at it as my high school grades (never could get above a B+, dammit. Blew my average!) always suggested.
I'm posting here from the Wyoming Law Enforcement Academy in Douglas, Wyoming instead of my more usual haunts. For the next two weeks (and yes, this includes the starting ten days of NaNoWriMO) I am here to learn "Basic Spanish for Law Enforcement."
Those who know me may be a bit surprised at this; I've always been a language nerd (having studied ten in all) and Spanish is the easiest of the languages I've studied (the others, for the nosy, are Latin, Ancient Greek, Modern Greek, Portuguese, Mandarin Chinese, Japanese, Urdu and Arabic). But, partly because Spanish is the least demanding, it is also the least interesting to someone like me. Plus it's becoming more and more common in the US, thus losing its last whiff of exoticism and thus even more of its appeal to Your Humble Blogger.
I read Spanish fairly well, needing a dictionary handy for any heavy duty stuff (of which there is a lot, given my liking for authors like Jorge Luis Borges and Ernesto Sabato) but still able to do pretty well on my own. Speaking it is another story (I'm told I've finally mostly lost the "Nazi Spanish" accent I acquired from hanging about a German guy who grew up in Barcelona. Mostly.); listening comprehension, ow, something just bit me on my Achilles tendon!!!
So here I am, hopeful and, for the moment, alone in the dorms in Douglas of a Sunday night. But hey, I found a computer with internet access, so thought I'd post.
I brought not a page of fiction with me: the little bookshelf in my room contains:
The House of Medici: Its Rise and Fall -- Christopher Hibbert
The Revolution of Peter the Great -- James Cracraft
On the Growth of Form -- D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson
Nature's Numbers -- Ian Stewart
Alegebra the Easy Way -- by some textbook people
Master Math: Pre-calculus and Geometry -- by some other textbook people
Dark Life: Martian Nanobacteria, Rock-Eating Cave Bugs, and Other Extreme Organisms of Inner Earth and Outer Space -- Michael Ray Taylor
I decided to save the Spanish translations of H.P. Lovecraft as a reward for after November ends and I've completed this course.
I'm posting here from the Wyoming Law Enforcement Academy in Douglas, Wyoming instead of my more usual haunts. For the next two weeks (and yes, this includes the starting ten days of NaNoWriMO) I am here to learn "Basic Spanish for Law Enforcement."
Those who know me may be a bit surprised at this; I've always been a language nerd (having studied ten in all) and Spanish is the easiest of the languages I've studied (the others, for the nosy, are Latin, Ancient Greek, Modern Greek, Portuguese, Mandarin Chinese, Japanese, Urdu and Arabic). But, partly because Spanish is the least demanding, it is also the least interesting to someone like me. Plus it's becoming more and more common in the US, thus losing its last whiff of exoticism and thus even more of its appeal to Your Humble Blogger.
I read Spanish fairly well, needing a dictionary handy for any heavy duty stuff (of which there is a lot, given my liking for authors like Jorge Luis Borges and Ernesto Sabato) but still able to do pretty well on my own. Speaking it is another story (I'm told I've finally mostly lost the "Nazi Spanish" accent I acquired from hanging about a German guy who grew up in Barcelona. Mostly.); listening comprehension, ow, something just bit me on my Achilles tendon!!!
So here I am, hopeful and, for the moment, alone in the dorms in Douglas of a Sunday night. But hey, I found a computer with internet access, so thought I'd post.
I brought not a page of fiction with me: the little bookshelf in my room contains:
The House of Medici: Its Rise and Fall -- Christopher Hibbert
The Revolution of Peter the Great -- James Cracraft
On the Growth of Form -- D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson
Nature's Numbers -- Ian Stewart
Alegebra the Easy Way -- by some textbook people
Master Math: Pre-calculus and Geometry -- by some other textbook people
Dark Life: Martian Nanobacteria, Rock-Eating Cave Bugs, and Other Extreme Organisms of Inner Earth and Outer Space -- Michael Ray Taylor
I decided to save the Spanish translations of H.P. Lovecraft as a reward for after November ends and I've completed this course.
23 October, 2006
Letters to a Young Mathematician -- 23 October
I picked up Ian Stewart's Letters to a Young Mathematician mostly on a lark the other day at the library, attracted by the jacket blurb that suggested it as a charming read that even non-mathematicians (of which I most certainly am one) can enjoy. It is so, it is so, but it's having some surprising side-effects, this little book.
I've long had a sort of sick fascination with mathematics and mathematicians and what they can do, but always from a distance (which is why I describe it as sick). I have always taken my math at one remove, usually via fiction. Neal Stephenson is a constant favorite, and Alastair Reynolds (whose Diamond Dogs gets a mention in Letters but not entirely a favorable one*), and I still dive in occasionally to see how far I can go in Douglas Hofstadter's Godel ,Escher ,Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (about halfway, generally, though I have finished the book once, back in my Bard College days with the help of a cute computer science professor). I am, therefore, not entirely one of the "non-mathematcians" whom Stewart describes as automatically equating mathematics with arithmetic and thus finding it all so horribly dull and tiresome and limiting. Sure, I still have that basic gut reaction when I look something up and get a page full of parentheses, operands, italic type and Greek letters, and most of the time I am too lazy to even try to see if I can follow the operations, but still my imagination is captured; I feel awe that we have made as a species so much progress in finding ways to describe and imagine what is going on beyond the brute evidence of our senses, when creamer swirls into coffee, when a semi slides across an icy road at tremendous speeds and smashes into another, when we find the urgent need to encrypt streams of data that represent the fincancial doings of millions of individuals using the internet or ATMs or the international banking system.
Stewart's book has re-awakened all of this curiosity and more, and along with it a tenuous kind of hope. He points out, in blunt and critical terms, that much of what is taught under the name of mathematics in primary schools (i.e. elementary, middle and high schools) is really just dull old arithmetic, and that the algebra, trig and calculus that eventually confronts students is also very limited and unimaginative, gives not even the slightest hint of how creative math really is when it only presents problems that have solutions, and not just that have solutions "in the back of the book" but only have one solution each, which the student who still finds himself drawn, usually alas on his or her own, to go beyond high school requirements quickly finds are not necessarily the norm. Many problems have many solutions, or no solutions. And then there are things like number theory and non-Euclidian geometry (just that phrase has always kind of thrilled me)... and as Neal Stephenson taught me the history of math itself is fascinating and sometimes (Newton vs. Leibniz anyone?) very dramatic. You don't get a hint of that in school, though, as you stand up in front of the blackboard solving a crappy quadratic equation in front of the rest of the class, your teacher standing beside you mocking your slowness and tendency to make fluff-headed mistakes under pressure ("3+3 is not 5, you dumb broad" -- but that's a tale for another day).
Like everyone I know who took math at my particular high school, like pretty much everyone I know except for a few funky math majors at Bard, the odd professor, and a math graduate student I met about a month ago at Starbucks, I let that unpleasant experience give me a poor attitude towards my own prospects for and prowess at math for a long time. My one attempt to see beyond was more or less deliberately (unconsciously?) sabotaged by my choice to take college calculus the same semester I also piled on four other heavy duty courses (Philosophy of Language, some deconstructionist American history course, a computer programming class the title of which I forget but had us working a lot in Modula 2, and Joseph Conrad -- I was, after all, a literature major) and so I tanked badly (kicked ass in everything else, though).
But now as I read and enjoy Stewart's book, and look up what other of his stuff my local library has or can ILL for me, I'm brought around again to wanting to take the time to settle a question that has plagued me since college: is my mathematical ignorance a result of actual incapacity, or of laziness?
*Stewart is critical of Reynolds' underlying notion that our mathematics is somehow universal, that concepts like number and so on would necessarily be a part of the math of any alien intelligence we might encounter. Reynolds story centers on a series of puzzles posed by an alien intelligence, which the human explorers of a structure must solve to progress (or die!). An amusing quotation: "It includes topology and an area of mathematical physics known as Kaluza-Klein theory. You are as likely to arrive on the fifth planet of Proxima Centauri and find a Wal Mart."
I've long had a sort of sick fascination with mathematics and mathematicians and what they can do, but always from a distance (which is why I describe it as sick). I have always taken my math at one remove, usually via fiction. Neal Stephenson is a constant favorite, and Alastair Reynolds (whose Diamond Dogs gets a mention in Letters but not entirely a favorable one*), and I still dive in occasionally to see how far I can go in Douglas Hofstadter's Godel ,Escher ,Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (about halfway, generally, though I have finished the book once, back in my Bard College days with the help of a cute computer science professor). I am, therefore, not entirely one of the "non-mathematcians" whom Stewart describes as automatically equating mathematics with arithmetic and thus finding it all so horribly dull and tiresome and limiting. Sure, I still have that basic gut reaction when I look something up and get a page full of parentheses, operands, italic type and Greek letters, and most of the time I am too lazy to even try to see if I can follow the operations, but still my imagination is captured; I feel awe that we have made as a species so much progress in finding ways to describe and imagine what is going on beyond the brute evidence of our senses, when creamer swirls into coffee, when a semi slides across an icy road at tremendous speeds and smashes into another, when we find the urgent need to encrypt streams of data that represent the fincancial doings of millions of individuals using the internet or ATMs or the international banking system.
Stewart's book has re-awakened all of this curiosity and more, and along with it a tenuous kind of hope. He points out, in blunt and critical terms, that much of what is taught under the name of mathematics in primary schools (i.e. elementary, middle and high schools) is really just dull old arithmetic, and that the algebra, trig and calculus that eventually confronts students is also very limited and unimaginative, gives not even the slightest hint of how creative math really is when it only presents problems that have solutions, and not just that have solutions "in the back of the book" but only have one solution each, which the student who still finds himself drawn, usually alas on his or her own, to go beyond high school requirements quickly finds are not necessarily the norm. Many problems have many solutions, or no solutions. And then there are things like number theory and non-Euclidian geometry (just that phrase has always kind of thrilled me)... and as Neal Stephenson taught me the history of math itself is fascinating and sometimes (Newton vs. Leibniz anyone?) very dramatic. You don't get a hint of that in school, though, as you stand up in front of the blackboard solving a crappy quadratic equation in front of the rest of the class, your teacher standing beside you mocking your slowness and tendency to make fluff-headed mistakes under pressure ("3+3 is not 5, you dumb broad" -- but that's a tale for another day).
Like everyone I know who took math at my particular high school, like pretty much everyone I know except for a few funky math majors at Bard, the odd professor, and a math graduate student I met about a month ago at Starbucks, I let that unpleasant experience give me a poor attitude towards my own prospects for and prowess at math for a long time. My one attempt to see beyond was more or less deliberately (unconsciously?) sabotaged by my choice to take college calculus the same semester I also piled on four other heavy duty courses (Philosophy of Language, some deconstructionist American history course, a computer programming class the title of which I forget but had us working a lot in Modula 2, and Joseph Conrad -- I was, after all, a literature major) and so I tanked badly (kicked ass in everything else, though).
But now as I read and enjoy Stewart's book, and look up what other of his stuff my local library has or can ILL for me, I'm brought around again to wanting to take the time to settle a question that has plagued me since college: is my mathematical ignorance a result of actual incapacity, or of laziness?
*Stewart is critical of Reynolds' underlying notion that our mathematics is somehow universal, that concepts like number and so on would necessarily be a part of the math of any alien intelligence we might encounter. Reynolds story centers on a series of puzzles posed by an alien intelligence, which the human explorers of a structure must solve to progress (or die!). An amusing quotation: "It includes topology and an area of mathematical physics known as Kaluza-Klein theory. You are as likely to arrive on the fifth planet of Proxima Centauri and find a Wal Mart."
Oh no! Get thee behind me, Nyarlathotep!
While innocently searching around for my next round of non-fiction (honest!) I came across an item available at my local public library that is my worst temptation towards fast-breaking yet.
They have a collection of H.P. Lovecraft's stories translated into Spanish called "La Ultima Prueba." And I am due in one week's time to spend two weeks at the law enforcement academy taking an intensive course in law enforcement Spanish. What an enjoyable study tool this would otherwise be, especially as (sigh) Halloween approaches.
Of course, I already read Spanish fairly well; it's the speaking and (worse) listening, especially to agitated persons on bad cell phone connections who desperately need my help and seem to have forgotten what "mas despacio, por favor" means. But still.
But still...
They have a collection of H.P. Lovecraft's stories translated into Spanish called "La Ultima Prueba." And I am due in one week's time to spend two weeks at the law enforcement academy taking an intensive course in law enforcement Spanish. What an enjoyable study tool this would otherwise be, especially as (sigh) Halloween approaches.
Of course, I already read Spanish fairly well; it's the speaking and (worse) listening, especially to agitated persons on bad cell phone connections who desperately need my help and seem to have forgotten what "mas despacio, por favor" means. But still.
But still...
20 October, 2006
Genghis Blues - 19 October
Few films have ever made me so just plain happy as the 1995(?) documentary Genghis Blues, about American blues singer Paul Pena's trip to the land of Tuva to compete in a throat-singing symposium.
A little background on why I was so happy watching this. When I was 16, I attended the second ever University of Wyoming Summer High School Institute, an absolute life-changing experience when I first began truly to believe that it's fun to be smart. At Institutes end, we all were presented with a big box of books, lots of intellectual time bombs that are still exploding in our lives to this day like Kurt Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle, John Edgar Wideman's Brothers and Keepers, Russel Baker's Growing Up and my all-time favorite, Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman by Nobel-winning physicist Richard P. Feynman.
Surely You're Joking is still one of my favorite books and definitely my favorite bit of autobiography, the subtitle "Adventures of a Curious Character" telling all. It's an utterly charming look at selected memories from the childhood, early education, and even the Los Alamos years of the guy in charge of many of the calculations used in making the first atomic bomb. Some people dislike its honesty about Feynman's attitude towards women, his impatience with stupid or unimaginative people, and the fact that he had fun doing the research that led to the unleashing man's most destructive invention to date, but as a story of how being willing to ask why, experiment and try new things can lead to a satisfying and interesting life it can't be beat.
A few years later, I happily watched a Nova special on PBS entited "Last Journey of a Genius" or some such, all about the last years of Richard Feynman, his friendship with Ralph Leighton, and their mutual obsession with discovering whatever happened to Tannu Tuva, a country that had issued a series of beautiful postage stamps in the 1930s and then disappeared. Turned out Tuva had been absorbed by the Soviet Union but its people were still doing their best to preserve their native culture, including nomadic herding, fantastic costuming and throat singing, which is the coolest sounding music in the universe, hands down. Feynman didn't know so much about the throat singing at first, but the fact that the country's capital city is Kyzyl was enough for him. He was that kind of guy.
The end of the special played a recording that Feynman and Leighton's Tuvan pen pal had sent them of this throat singing, and it blew my 18-or-so-year-old mind, that music.
Years later, I was living in Somerville, MA, a somewhat far-flung suburb of Boston, and lo and behold, a group called Huun Huurtu, Tuvan throat-singers, was doing an American tour and had a date at the Somerville Theater. I grabbed all my best pals and went. Best concert of my freaking life. The performers even gave a little workshop afterwards to teach some of the basics of throat singing, which allows the singer to emit two or even three notes at the same time; a basic note and one or two harmonizing tones above or below it. There are something like six different styles, each achieved a different way: sygyt, which imitates whistling breezes and birdsong, kargyaa, more like howling winds and very deep and earthshaking when done by a master, khoomei, more in the middle range, dumchukataar, more like throat humming, ezengileer which mimics the rhythms of horseback riding (horses being a big, big deal in a steppes culture --these people also drink fermented mare's milk) and some more styles that I can no longer read off the notes I took all those years ago. Accompanied by drums and very cool-looking stringed instruments with names like igyll which I may have misspelled but I don't care I just freaking love this stuff.
I have all of Huun Huurtu's albums and listen to them very, very often.
So, back to Genghis Blues and Paul Pena, a blind blues singer who discovered throat-singing on shortwave radio while looking for a Korean language program and taught himself how to sing in the kargyaa style. He managed to show off his skills after a concert by Kangar-ol, another famous Tuvan on a world tour and Pena and Kangar-ol have been friends ever since.
During the backstory that served as the films first act, the participation of Ralph Leighton and reference to Feynman's last obsession were heavily referenced and Leighton helped with the assembling of a group of documentary filmmakers, sound engineers, a public radio host and a few musicians to accompany Paul on a visit to Tuva. They took with them some Feynmanalia including a bumper sticker that says "Feynman Lives!", the presentation of which to Kangar-ol put big wet tears in my eyes.
I got to see the rivers, hear the spoken language and see the scenery of Tuva. I heard examples of all the styles of throat singing, even as demonstrated by little elementary school kids. And I watched Paul Pena's very emotional personal journey through the land whose people nicknamed him "Earthquake" for his powerful kargyaa.
Oh, good god did I love this film.
A little background on why I was so happy watching this. When I was 16, I attended the second ever University of Wyoming Summer High School Institute, an absolute life-changing experience when I first began truly to believe that it's fun to be smart. At Institutes end, we all were presented with a big box of books, lots of intellectual time bombs that are still exploding in our lives to this day like Kurt Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle, John Edgar Wideman's Brothers and Keepers, Russel Baker's Growing Up and my all-time favorite, Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman by Nobel-winning physicist Richard P. Feynman.
Surely You're Joking is still one of my favorite books and definitely my favorite bit of autobiography, the subtitle "Adventures of a Curious Character" telling all. It's an utterly charming look at selected memories from the childhood, early education, and even the Los Alamos years of the guy in charge of many of the calculations used in making the first atomic bomb. Some people dislike its honesty about Feynman's attitude towards women, his impatience with stupid or unimaginative people, and the fact that he had fun doing the research that led to the unleashing man's most destructive invention to date, but as a story of how being willing to ask why, experiment and try new things can lead to a satisfying and interesting life it can't be beat.
A few years later, I happily watched a Nova special on PBS entited "Last Journey of a Genius" or some such, all about the last years of Richard Feynman, his friendship with Ralph Leighton, and their mutual obsession with discovering whatever happened to Tannu Tuva, a country that had issued a series of beautiful postage stamps in the 1930s and then disappeared. Turned out Tuva had been absorbed by the Soviet Union but its people were still doing their best to preserve their native culture, including nomadic herding, fantastic costuming and throat singing, which is the coolest sounding music in the universe, hands down. Feynman didn't know so much about the throat singing at first, but the fact that the country's capital city is Kyzyl was enough for him. He was that kind of guy.
The end of the special played a recording that Feynman and Leighton's Tuvan pen pal had sent them of this throat singing, and it blew my 18-or-so-year-old mind, that music.
Years later, I was living in Somerville, MA, a somewhat far-flung suburb of Boston, and lo and behold, a group called Huun Huurtu, Tuvan throat-singers, was doing an American tour and had a date at the Somerville Theater. I grabbed all my best pals and went. Best concert of my freaking life. The performers even gave a little workshop afterwards to teach some of the basics of throat singing, which allows the singer to emit two or even three notes at the same time; a basic note and one or two harmonizing tones above or below it. There are something like six different styles, each achieved a different way: sygyt, which imitates whistling breezes and birdsong, kargyaa, more like howling winds and very deep and earthshaking when done by a master, khoomei, more in the middle range, dumchukataar, more like throat humming, ezengileer which mimics the rhythms of horseback riding (horses being a big, big deal in a steppes culture --these people also drink fermented mare's milk) and some more styles that I can no longer read off the notes I took all those years ago. Accompanied by drums and very cool-looking stringed instruments with names like igyll which I may have misspelled but I don't care I just freaking love this stuff.
I have all of Huun Huurtu's albums and listen to them very, very often.
So, back to Genghis Blues and Paul Pena, a blind blues singer who discovered throat-singing on shortwave radio while looking for a Korean language program and taught himself how to sing in the kargyaa style. He managed to show off his skills after a concert by Kangar-ol, another famous Tuvan on a world tour and Pena and Kangar-ol have been friends ever since.
During the backstory that served as the films first act, the participation of Ralph Leighton and reference to Feynman's last obsession were heavily referenced and Leighton helped with the assembling of a group of documentary filmmakers, sound engineers, a public radio host and a few musicians to accompany Paul on a visit to Tuva. They took with them some Feynmanalia including a bumper sticker that says "Feynman Lives!", the presentation of which to Kangar-ol put big wet tears in my eyes.
I got to see the rivers, hear the spoken language and see the scenery of Tuva. I heard examples of all the styles of throat singing, even as demonstrated by little elementary school kids. And I watched Paul Pena's very emotional personal journey through the land whose people nicknamed him "Earthquake" for his powerful kargyaa.
Oh, good god did I love this film.
16 October, 2006
Lost Landscapes, Failed Economies - 16 October
A fine, fine re-examination of a lot of the tenets of what author Thomas Michael Power and others refer to as "folk economics" and how folks' clinging to them in spite of all evidence and reason does more harm than good to economic development efforts is in my bookbag tonight. Lost Landscapes, Failed Economies: The Search for a Value of Place is an undeniably cool book (maybe not as sexy as Freakonomics but actually more challenging to a lot of shibboleths), but it's kind of making me tired - Power is preaching here to the screwball tenor section of the choir. I already know that the notion that small rural communities cannot survive without their 19th century extractive industrial employers is fallacious, and have the psychic scars from a few years' service in municipal government and chamber of commerce work to prove it. Which is probably why I'm having trouble keeping on task with this book, engaging though it is.
I've also still got a book by and a book about Aby Warburg with me as discussed in my previous post, but both of those volumes are of imposing physical size and heft and there's not much room for them at my work station (for I am at work; it's just a nice, slow night and my employer is one who doesn't mind if we read on the job as long as nothing else gets neglected. Graveyard shift. Ahh.). Plus, well...
I'm longing to lose myself in a simple, fun story. I'm craving fiction like my colleagues crave chocolate. Perhaps I should take this energy and start writing some -- there is ample scratch paper about after all, and this experiment of mine has definitely left me brimming with ideas.
But what I really, really want right now is a nice "shaggy shogguth" story...
I've also still got a book by and a book about Aby Warburg with me as discussed in my previous post, but both of those volumes are of imposing physical size and heft and there's not much room for them at my work station (for I am at work; it's just a nice, slow night and my employer is one who doesn't mind if we read on the job as long as nothing else gets neglected. Graveyard shift. Ahh.). Plus, well...
I'm longing to lose myself in a simple, fun story. I'm craving fiction like my colleagues crave chocolate. Perhaps I should take this energy and start writing some -- there is ample scratch paper about after all, and this experiment of mine has definitely left me brimming with ideas.
But what I really, really want right now is a nice "shaggy shogguth" story...
15 October, 2006
The Revival of Pagan Antiquity - 14 October
I'm in general a pretty careful reader, especially when I'm deep in a book for which I have long waited or about whom I've heard a great deal -- and both conditions prevail regarding Aby Warburg's The Revival of Pagan Antiquity, a massive (nearly 900 pages!) collection of his essays and articles on Renaissance art and history that definitely qualifies as a TOME -- really, I've not given myself a cramp like this since I carried Infinite Jest around the Boston area in the 1990s!*
As I say, generally I am a close reader but somehow this time around I found myself, most of the way through an analysis of Domenico Ghirlandaio's Confirmation of the Franciscan Rule before realizing that a change of subject midstream had actually occurred only in my misreading. I felt very silly when I realized this, mortified even, but then I went back to the passage where I thought the subject had been changed a bit and, well, I maintain my hair color has nothing to do with it.
The first third or so of the essay introduces the theme of the relationship between the painter and subject of a portrait in general as well as in particular, and then quickly goes into a comparison between Ghirlandaio's (his name derived from his goldsmith father's specialty of creating garlands of metal flowers for the elegant ladies of 15th century Florence, we learn. I had, in fact, been curious) fresco in the Santa Trinita church and an earlier and more famous treatment by Giotto of the same subject in Santa Croce. I see a lot of this kind of discussion in what little art history I read -- Giotto is always held up as an example of the "old way" of doing things to contrast with whatever Renaissance hot-shot is under discussion and I always stick out my bottom lip a little for Giotto, whose funky, slightly creepy way of rendering human faces and profiles I've always admired. It's not realistic, it's not very individualistic (they do all kind of look alike, Giotto's heads) but it's distinctive and haunting and I dig it. But Warburg had a point; there is a dramatic difference between these two treatments; Giotto's is formal and somewhat flat and very iconic; Ghirlandaio's is naturalistic and humanizing and features depictions of lots of people who, of course, were not present at the original scene.
Among those present are Ghirlandaio's patron, Francesco Sassetti and several members of his family, depicted in the grand votive tradition that is the subject of the next third or so of the analysis as bystanders off to the side of the main action of the Pope and College of Cardinals presiding over the birth of the Franciscan order -- and, my oh my, a good bit of the household of Lorenzo "High and Mighty"** d' Medici, including his sons and several key retainers who themselves have quite a lot to do with Florentine art history in ways I'll leave the really interested to discover by delving more into Warburg or other historians.
The votive tradition Warburg connects to the tendency of important 15th century Florentines to turn up in images of events in ecclesiastical history from long before is pretty interesting in its own right. Per Warburg, the Etruscan-descended Florentines "cultivated the magical use of images in the most unblushing form, right down to the 17th century" by placing in churches various forms of effigies, sort of permanent proxy presences. This tradition left a lot of churches crammed with life-sized wax figures, prefiguring Madame Tussaud in both degree and time. When there was no more floor space, these figures were hung from the walls on cords. "It was not until worshippers had several times been disturbed by falling voti that the whole waxworks was banished to a side courtyard," Warburg writes of the Annunziata, and I laughed out loud, never having ever heard of this detail before and WOW. Anyway, eventually this tradition was replaced out of space-conserving necessity by incorporating these people's images into the 2-D art on the walls.
And so, and so, to the beginning of the last act of "Art of Portraiture and the Florentine Bourgois" and the origin of my error. I will quote and paraphrase from this at length because, well, I can't be the only one who read this and reached the conclusion I did, that this last third was about a whole 'nother fresco:
These marvelous portrait heads by Domenico Ghirlandaio have still to receive their critical due, whether as unique documents of cultural history or, in art-historical terms, as unsurpassed pioneer examples of Italian portraiture. This applies even to the life-size portrait of Lorenzo Il Magnifico himself, though it is the sole surviving, authentic, datable, contemporary portrait of him in the monumental fresco style by a maser of the first rank. Although the work has long been known to art history, no one has yet performed the simple, obvious duty of having a large-scale detail photograph taken, or at least subjecting the image to a thorough scrutiny. This can be accounted for, to some extent, by the fact that the fresco is very high up, seldom well lit, and even then hard to discern in detail.
What follows this passage is a lengthy and very charming look at close-up views not only of the famously ugly Lorenzo himself, who appears here as not so very ugly at all with "the upper lip not ominously pressed against the lower lip but rests lightly on it, conveying an expression of effortless superiority" and so on, but also at his three sons. And it is in looking at each of the sons in turn that Warburg gets to what is for me the charming heart of what he does, seeing in their portraits a sort of preview of their adult characters in a manner that must please Michael Ventura and James Hillman very much. Thus Piero, age 12 or so in this fresco, is every bit the haughty heir (and we are reminded that as an adult he would only allow himself to be painted in full armor "a typical and fateful sign of the superficiality of a man who, when only good generalship could have saved his position as ruler of Florence, proved to be barely more than a decorative tournament figure"). Giovanni already looks like his Papal self his medal portrait as Pope Leo X (and is really one of the ugliest kids I've ever seen in art; he'd be right at home in Goya's painting of the horrible royal family of Spain). And little Giuliano d'Medici, who would one day be a great jouster in his own right and who held a tournament in honor of Botticelli's favorite model, Simonetta Vespucci, is the only one of the kids with the curiosity and the courage to turn his head, just for a moment, and look back at the centuries of people who journey from near and far to the church of Santa Trinita to see his four-year old self paying a surprise visit to Daddy and his friends in the middle of a religious painting.
But so, hey, doesn't this last third sound an awful lot like it's about some other fresco than The Confirmation of the Franciscan Rule? I mean, really?
So imagine my surprise when I took another look at the little 3"x4" black and white reproduction (only about a half-inch or so bigger than the close-ups discussed above) of the Confirmation at the beginning of the article and everything suddenly clunked into place that all of these portraits were all part of this same fresco after all. Surprise and chagrin and maybe a little irritation, which only grew after I re-read the whole thing and came to the passage quoted at length above. I think it's the "even" and the sudden emphasis of the inaccesible location of the fresco that threw me. Is this Warburg's fault, or the translator's?
And, am I the only one ever to have made this mistake?
Will I make it again through the rest of Warburg, or will I now be on my guard?
We'll see, won't we?
*And how can I mention David Foster Wallace's footnote-riddled claim to literary glory without a footnote myself? So I'll just mention that the first 77 pages of this book are about, rather than by, Warburg and that I skipped the lengthy introduction by Kurt W. Forster partly because I have a whole 'nother book on my plate, that being E.H. Gombrich's biography of him, and partly because this is an interlibrary loan sent all the way from Florida (as is the biography) and I only have it for a week.
**Warburg says, and I don't have any reason to dispute it, that "High and Mighty" is a much better translation of his Italian epithet "Magnifico" than the usual "The Magnificent."
As I say, generally I am a close reader but somehow this time around I found myself, most of the way through an analysis of Domenico Ghirlandaio's Confirmation of the Franciscan Rule before realizing that a change of subject midstream had actually occurred only in my misreading. I felt very silly when I realized this, mortified even, but then I went back to the passage where I thought the subject had been changed a bit and, well, I maintain my hair color has nothing to do with it.
The first third or so of the essay introduces the theme of the relationship between the painter and subject of a portrait in general as well as in particular, and then quickly goes into a comparison between Ghirlandaio's (his name derived from his goldsmith father's specialty of creating garlands of metal flowers for the elegant ladies of 15th century Florence, we learn. I had, in fact, been curious) fresco in the Santa Trinita church and an earlier and more famous treatment by Giotto of the same subject in Santa Croce. I see a lot of this kind of discussion in what little art history I read -- Giotto is always held up as an example of the "old way" of doing things to contrast with whatever Renaissance hot-shot is under discussion and I always stick out my bottom lip a little for Giotto, whose funky, slightly creepy way of rendering human faces and profiles I've always admired. It's not realistic, it's not very individualistic (they do all kind of look alike, Giotto's heads) but it's distinctive and haunting and I dig it. But Warburg had a point; there is a dramatic difference between these two treatments; Giotto's is formal and somewhat flat and very iconic; Ghirlandaio's is naturalistic and humanizing and features depictions of lots of people who, of course, were not present at the original scene.
Among those present are Ghirlandaio's patron, Francesco Sassetti and several members of his family, depicted in the grand votive tradition that is the subject of the next third or so of the analysis as bystanders off to the side of the main action of the Pope and College of Cardinals presiding over the birth of the Franciscan order -- and, my oh my, a good bit of the household of Lorenzo "High and Mighty"** d' Medici, including his sons and several key retainers who themselves have quite a lot to do with Florentine art history in ways I'll leave the really interested to discover by delving more into Warburg or other historians.
The votive tradition Warburg connects to the tendency of important 15th century Florentines to turn up in images of events in ecclesiastical history from long before is pretty interesting in its own right. Per Warburg, the Etruscan-descended Florentines "cultivated the magical use of images in the most unblushing form, right down to the 17th century" by placing in churches various forms of effigies, sort of permanent proxy presences. This tradition left a lot of churches crammed with life-sized wax figures, prefiguring Madame Tussaud in both degree and time. When there was no more floor space, these figures were hung from the walls on cords. "It was not until worshippers had several times been disturbed by falling voti that the whole waxworks was banished to a side courtyard," Warburg writes of the Annunziata, and I laughed out loud, never having ever heard of this detail before and WOW. Anyway, eventually this tradition was replaced out of space-conserving necessity by incorporating these people's images into the 2-D art on the walls.
And so, and so, to the beginning of the last act of "Art of Portraiture and the Florentine Bourgois" and the origin of my error. I will quote and paraphrase from this at length because, well, I can't be the only one who read this and reached the conclusion I did, that this last third was about a whole 'nother fresco:
These marvelous portrait heads by Domenico Ghirlandaio have still to receive their critical due, whether as unique documents of cultural history or, in art-historical terms, as unsurpassed pioneer examples of Italian portraiture. This applies even to the life-size portrait of Lorenzo Il Magnifico himself, though it is the sole surviving, authentic, datable, contemporary portrait of him in the monumental fresco style by a maser of the first rank. Although the work has long been known to art history, no one has yet performed the simple, obvious duty of having a large-scale detail photograph taken, or at least subjecting the image to a thorough scrutiny. This can be accounted for, to some extent, by the fact that the fresco is very high up, seldom well lit, and even then hard to discern in detail.
What follows this passage is a lengthy and very charming look at close-up views not only of the famously ugly Lorenzo himself, who appears here as not so very ugly at all with "the upper lip not ominously pressed against the lower lip but rests lightly on it, conveying an expression of effortless superiority" and so on, but also at his three sons. And it is in looking at each of the sons in turn that Warburg gets to what is for me the charming heart of what he does, seeing in their portraits a sort of preview of their adult characters in a manner that must please Michael Ventura and James Hillman very much. Thus Piero, age 12 or so in this fresco, is every bit the haughty heir (and we are reminded that as an adult he would only allow himself to be painted in full armor "a typical and fateful sign of the superficiality of a man who, when only good generalship could have saved his position as ruler of Florence, proved to be barely more than a decorative tournament figure"). Giovanni already looks like his Papal self his medal portrait as Pope Leo X (and is really one of the ugliest kids I've ever seen in art; he'd be right at home in Goya's painting of the horrible royal family of Spain). And little Giuliano d'Medici, who would one day be a great jouster in his own right and who held a tournament in honor of Botticelli's favorite model, Simonetta Vespucci, is the only one of the kids with the curiosity and the courage to turn his head, just for a moment, and look back at the centuries of people who journey from near and far to the church of Santa Trinita to see his four-year old self paying a surprise visit to Daddy and his friends in the middle of a religious painting.
But so, hey, doesn't this last third sound an awful lot like it's about some other fresco than The Confirmation of the Franciscan Rule? I mean, really?
So imagine my surprise when I took another look at the little 3"x4" black and white reproduction (only about a half-inch or so bigger than the close-ups discussed above) of the Confirmation at the beginning of the article and everything suddenly clunked into place that all of these portraits were all part of this same fresco after all. Surprise and chagrin and maybe a little irritation, which only grew after I re-read the whole thing and came to the passage quoted at length above. I think it's the "even" and the sudden emphasis of the inaccesible location of the fresco that threw me. Is this Warburg's fault, or the translator's?
And, am I the only one ever to have made this mistake?
Will I make it again through the rest of Warburg, or will I now be on my guard?
We'll see, won't we?
*And how can I mention David Foster Wallace's footnote-riddled claim to literary glory without a footnote myself? So I'll just mention that the first 77 pages of this book are about, rather than by, Warburg and that I skipped the lengthy introduction by Kurt W. Forster partly because I have a whole 'nother book on my plate, that being E.H. Gombrich's biography of him, and partly because this is an interlibrary loan sent all the way from Florida (as is the biography) and I only have it for a week.
**Warburg says, and I don't have any reason to dispute it, that "High and Mighty" is a much better translation of his Italian epithet "Magnifico" than the usual "The Magnificent."
08 October, 2006
The Weird Tale - 8 October
It's now the evening of the same day on which I first encountered real temptation to break my fast, and I'm happy to report success! I am strong. I have willpower. I rock.
Once home many things vied at once for my attention - the need to walk my dog, another great edition of The Commonwealth Club of California on public radio, a shower, a meal - and then, mercy of mercies, a new Netflix disc, this being Disc 1 of Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth, a great program I last saw when it was broadcast in the 1980s.
So, it wasn't without help, but I did it! I did it!
But it was a close call.
Once home many things vied at once for my attention - the need to walk my dog, another great edition of The Commonwealth Club of California on public radio, a shower, a meal - and then, mercy of mercies, a new Netflix disc, this being Disc 1 of Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth, a great program I last saw when it was broadcast in the 1980s.
So, it wasn't without help, but I did it! I did it!
But it was a close call.
The Weird Tale, by S.T. Joshi - 8 October, 2006
I'm facing the first serious test to my resolve here at FictionFast2006 in the form of S.T. Joshi's really excellent (I was about to say "fantastic" but that would, in this context, quite confuse matters) study of The Weird Tale.
This is a quite serious work of literary criticism, comparing, contrasting and attempting to establish this genre as something worthy of same. As he discusses very intelligently the work of Arthur Machen, Lord Dunsany, Algernon Blackwood, M.R. James, Ambrose Bierce and H.P. Lovecraft, Joshi also includes very effective synopses and a selection of excerpts that are like the most seductively persuasive description of the contents of the dessert cart ever given by a suave and unctuous waiter in a fancy-ass bistro. And I, the diner on a diet, consider myself a tough customer until I come against a real test.
Now, of the writers he discusses in this book I've not read any but my beloved Lovecraft, but clearly this needs remedied post haste (I've always had a mind to, but had more of a "someday when I get around to it" attitude), and so already I've surfed over to Amazon and bought some collections of Lord Dunsany's and Algernon Blackwood's short fiction (edited and compiled by Joshi)... And now, as I prepare to go home from work and having just completed the final chapter, all about Lovecraft, I'm sorely, sorely tempted to crack into the stories Joshi singled out for particular attention like "The Whisperer in Darkness" and "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward."
So there's a little bit of internal wiggling/dithering going on; does re-reading count as cheating on my fiction fast?
I have to be strong. Wish me luck!
This is a quite serious work of literary criticism, comparing, contrasting and attempting to establish this genre as something worthy of same. As he discusses very intelligently the work of Arthur Machen, Lord Dunsany, Algernon Blackwood, M.R. James, Ambrose Bierce and H.P. Lovecraft, Joshi also includes very effective synopses and a selection of excerpts that are like the most seductively persuasive description of the contents of the dessert cart ever given by a suave and unctuous waiter in a fancy-ass bistro. And I, the diner on a diet, consider myself a tough customer until I come against a real test.
Now, of the writers he discusses in this book I've not read any but my beloved Lovecraft, but clearly this needs remedied post haste (I've always had a mind to, but had more of a "someday when I get around to it" attitude), and so already I've surfed over to Amazon and bought some collections of Lord Dunsany's and Algernon Blackwood's short fiction (edited and compiled by Joshi)... And now, as I prepare to go home from work and having just completed the final chapter, all about Lovecraft, I'm sorely, sorely tempted to crack into the stories Joshi singled out for particular attention like "The Whisperer in Darkness" and "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward."
So there's a little bit of internal wiggling/dithering going on; does re-reading count as cheating on my fiction fast?
I have to be strong. Wish me luck!
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