Philip-Lorca DiCorcia. Joe Whitman, 24, Los Angeles, California. 1990-92.
Photograph.
Month: June 2007
On Why and When Fiction Writers First Publish
“If you don’t make masterpiece by time you twenty five you nothing,” went the advice of a drunk literature professor. I was a sophomore. The nineteenth century authors I admired had all first published before the age the professor put forward. Twenty five became the longitudinal line where my flat world ended. Twenty-five was crossed without masterpiece or incident. I found solace in the biographies of contemporary writers, most of whom first published at an older age.
Why the age difference from one century to the next?
To begin I posit that the apprenticeship period of a writer, before a publishable novel is completed, lasts approximately eight years and involves three components: 1) lots of writing, much of it crap, an unfinished or rejected opus or three, a novel that was talked about more then it was ever written, some short stories; 2) A fair amount of reading, not from any cannon in particular, enough to get a sense of what is out there; 3) Life experience—bullfighting and shooting heroin, sure—but more having lived and become aware of one’s existence in a way that can be processed many many times over to be used in stories. The healthy realization that instead of writing the greatest book ever one should focus on a good story one can tell well can be filed under the third component. Factor in necessary talent and the budding writer is on his or her way to a literary debut.
(The debut may never take place and occasionally occurs after less time).
Tolstoy completed his apprenticeship young in part because he was mind numbingly rich—he lived on a Rhode Island sized farm that was worked by slaves—and had lots of free time. By free time I mean the time to work as an around the clock unpaid writer, which in Tolstoy’s case meant he was able to pump out short stories thick enough to qualify as assault weapons by 23. Dostoevsky’s provenance was more middle class, his father was a doctor to the indigent, but a middle class that came with amenities far greater then full cable and a second car. The Western world was less equitable with a lot of poor people available to do chores and errands that would be done by the budding author today. Dostoevsky too, pre-gulag, had his free time, first publishing to great fanfare at 23.
For those with access to it, education was better in the nineteenth century. The richest writers had private tutors. The writers who went to school, Balzac, Dickens intermittently, received better more thorough educations then are readily available today. Memorization of poems was central to understanding literature, languages were rigorously taught, correspondence and the discipline to write constantly were imperatives. Without looking far beyond the routines that were handed to them as adolescents, they fulfilled large parts of their apprenticeship.
The broadly romanticized lost generation of the 1920s first published at a slightly later age. The middle class was larger, education was more universal. They came from a range of households and schoolings—Dos Passos, loaded, boarding school and college; Hemingway, not so loaded, public school and no college. But the available education was still better then today’s. Reading was more a core part of curriculums, correspondence remained essential, Greek and Latin were taught. And it is not that I believe a classical education is best, simply that writing is an exercise in shaping language and early knowledge of its anatomies feeds when a person starts thinking as a writer. The challenge was finding the time to write, which is part of why they all went to Paris—still reeling from the WWI, economically brittle Paris was cheap. The ability to live well for not much gave them the incentive and time to finish their first works. Getting to Paris meant time working and traveling and that interval tacked on about two years to their debuts.
Why and when people published in the 19th century was mostly a matter of pedigree. Why and when people first published in the 20th century was a matter of cheap rent. From Paris, to the West and East Village, to Berlin, writers roamed much of the Western world looking for cities in economic decline where they could work unperturbed.
Today education is essentially universal, but of mixed quality. In the United States the solution is a masters degree in writing where the differing levels of education can be calibrated, the safety of a campus buffering young writers from economic ebbs and flows. A student at NYU or Columbia can live in currently unaffordable New York thanks to subsidized low rent and money from a job teaching undergraduates once or twice a week. Because the youngest a person would likely enter grad school is 22, masters programs have pushed the age of debuts up as people fulfill the requirements of their apprenticeship at a later age.
I am ignoring will. Irregardless of provenance, schooling and available time, where the writer has had the will and talent he or she has published. Kafka had a full time job at an insurance company. The Chilean writer Roberto Bolano, the son of a truck driver, traveled the world, holding jobs no more exalted then security guard. Both men wrote at night and published late in life, their reputations propelled far into the future by the forces of their wills. Black writers of the mid-century, Baldwin and Wright, wrote their first works in the vacuum of a society closed off from their voices. They established places for themselves with their wills. Masters programs have had the positive effect of honoring and financing the bright talents who earlier pushed forward alone. But the rest must pay, a lot, and the programs have had the inverse effect of excluding those of mixed or still growing talent and little funds, and not just from an education, but from direct avenues to agents and publishing houses.
A corrective mechanism exists. During economic downturns the plights of the excluded are chronicled and sensationalized in pulp. Pulp’s goal of titillating is easier to achieve then literature’s goal of moving the reader. The apprenticeship is shorter and can respond to social changes more swiftly. New York currently has 800,000 millionaires and the poorest urban county in the nation, the Bronx, splitting the city between a community who can afford graduate schools and comes from a decent education and another which comes from stunted public schools, 20 percent and up unemployment and high crime. In the Gilded Age, when the Lost Generation fled to Europe, pulp was a local reaction by those who could not afford a ticket out of the country. The best pulp works are considered literature. The rest are no better then the genre exercises they aspire to be.
On fold out tables on 125th Street in Harlem, near the court houses on Chambers Street, on Fulton Street in Brooklyn and on Third Avenue in the Bronx, a new pulp is sold under the moniker of urban literature. A handful of titles have sold in the hundreds of thousands; Borders and Barnes and Noble, depending on the store location, dedicate sections to the genre. I have attempted reading some urban literature and found them on the whole unmoving and conventionally titillating; but I am open to attempting more titles. I contacted the office of Triple Crown Publications, which specializes in the genre, wanting to know what the average age of their authors was. The answer was between 20 and 30, the youngest, Mallori McNeal, was 16 when she first published. If literature is what Ms. McNeal wants to write, a couple drafts and some experience from now, she’ll be 24.
monday musing: loving michnik
I can’t pinpoint the specific day or time that I fell in love with Adam Michnik. Most likely it is something that crept up on me slowly. I liked him, I read him, I liked him, I read him some more, and then suddenly, I loved him. I finally came to see all of this just recently, thumbing through the essays and interviews collected in “Letters From Freedom: Post-Cold War Realities and Perspectives.”
These are the thoughts of a man who was of his time, acting in his time, and yet simultaneously able to see it all as if from on high, as if a version of himself was hovering above the other him, watching himself and reassuring himself from the late ’60s until the early ’90s as he turned into one of the preeminent dissidents of the Eastern Bloc. Anyway, something must have been guiding him, some impish little daimon sitting on his shoulder and convincing him through imprisonments by the communist government in Poland that history was on his side—or at least basic decency—although that proposition often must have seemed utterly laughable. Perhaps he now takes on a special glow precisely because he won, because he was right that a dogged emphasis simply on telling the truth, on the basic dignity of an individual human being, would rise to the top through tough times.
If he had been wrong, if he had failed, if history had broken differently, then Adam Michnik wouldn’t have the glow. On the cover of my copy of “Letters From Freedom” there’s a picture of Michnik. He has his right hand on his forehead and he’s looking out through the crook of his arm with a faraway gaze. It is the gaze of a cocky son-of-a-bitch who got it right. And he not only got it right, he got it right and refused to gloat about it very much, was constantly aware that you never get vindication until you stop looking for it and even then life goes on. That’s why he always stressed that all he really ever wanted for Poland was normalcy, boredom. “Grey is beautiful,” he said, and “democracy is a continuous articulation of particular interests, a diligent search for compromise among them, a marketplace of passions, emotions, hatreds, and hopes; it is eternal imperfection, a mixture of sinfulness, saintliness, and monkey business.”
He was tired of all the crap, all the weird and shitty historical promises that continuously clowned the 20th century. That’s the truly funny, maddening, and then eventually loveable thing about his cocky son-of-a-bitch gaze. It is the cockiness of modesty. This is a man who wrote a book in prison that concluded with a delicate quote from Julian Tuwim directed to the communists of the world: “Kiss my Ass.” He’s pretty sure he’ll get the last laugh because he’s the only one in the room who isn’t promising much, who’s just fighting for a political arrangement whereby everyone has the opportunity to make an ass of himself. That is his vision of civil society and it is inspiring in its mundanity. Let us have, Michnik says with a Polish twinkle in his eyes, a civil society whereby we can parade down the street like the fools we are and be reasonably sure that none of our neighbors are reporting that fact to the local branch of the secret police. There are loftier visions for humankind no doubt. But I’m not sure that there are any more humane.
It is that goofy beautiful vision of civil society that enabled Michnik to put his cocky son-of-a-bitch gaze on and stare down General Jaruzelski from across the historical divide when martial law was declared on December 13th, 1981. Let us not forget that those were scary times, big times. Michnik had his gaze but Jaruzelski had his huge tinted glasses that he must have smuggled out to Kim Jong-il after The Wall came down. Michnik stuck to his guns, the small and harmless guns of a civil society for normal people. He was convinced that he would eventually emerge into “the bright square of freedom” but he also worried that he and his contemporaries might “return like ghosts who hate the world, cannot understand it, and are unable to live in it.” He prayed that “we do not change from prisoners into prison guards.” After Michnik got his victory he was still happy to sit down with General Jaruzelski and have a friendly chat about those days and their disagreements. You can read the exchange. It is published as “We Can Talk Without Hatred.”
And that is why, I suppose, I have fallen in love with Mr. Michnik. It is a special category of love. Its broader genus could be labeled ‘literary love’; This is when we fall in love with those individuals who have written things that confirm for us our deepest and innermost sense of what we hope the world can be, if only in bits and patches. This kind of communication is intimate and powerful, and literary love—for its lack of physical expression—can be a swoonful and insistent kind of love. One must read ever more works from the hand of the beloved. Even the crappiest short story carries with it portentous weight and is scoured for secret messages from the writer to the one and only person who truly understands that writer, ‘Me’, whoever that ‘me’ may be. Within the species ‘literary love’ is the genus ‘dissident-writer love’. ‘Dissident-writer love’ has all the intensity of ‘literary love’ with the added bonus that the dissident writer not only pens brilliant essays, but is also wrapped in a veritable halo of personal courage and potential martyrdom made all the more enticing if, like that cruel seducer Michnik, the dissident downplays and sidesteps every attempt to crown him as hero. It certainly worked for me. I confess myself a man in love.
Dennett and others on Rorty
Richard Posner, Brian Eno, Mark Edmundson, Jurgen Habermas, Martha Nussbaum, Virginia Heffernan, Michael Berube and Stanley Fish remember Richard Rorty. This is Daniel Dennett writing, in Slate (via Jonah Lehrer at The Frontal Cortex):
I first met Dick Rorty in 1970 when he invited me (all the way from UC Irvine) to give a talk at Princeton—the first talk I ever gave to an audience of philosophers—and then hosted an unforgettable party at his house afterward. His two 1972 papers “Dennett on Awareness” in Phil. Studies and “Functionalism, Machines, and Incorrigibility” in J.Phil. put my work in the limelight, and he continued through the years to write with insight and appreciation about my work, so I owe a great debt to him over and above all I learned from him in his writing and in our conversations and debates. Dick was always trying to enlist me, an avowed Quinian, to his more radical brand of pragmatism, and I always resisted his inducements, feeling like a stick in the mud. But this didn’t always stop Dick from re-creating me—or others he more-or-less agreed with—in his own radical image. In one of these discussions, which took place in St. Louis in 1981 or thereabouts, I decided to tease him by inventing the “Rorty Factor”: Take anything Dick Rorty says and multiply it by .742 to get the truth! (See his “Contemporary Philosophy of Mind” and my “Comments on Rorty” in Synthese in 1982.)
We continued in this vein for years. At one three-hour lunch in a fine restaurant in Buenos Aires, we traded notes on what we thought philosophy ought to be, could be, shouldn’t be, and he revealed something that I might have guessed but had never thought of. I had said that it mattered greatly to me to have the respect of scientists—that it was important to me to explain philosophical issues to scientists in terms they could understand and appreciate. He replied that he didn’t give a damn what scientists thought of his work; he coveted the attention and respect of poets!
More here.
unbearable lightness todAY
The Unbearable Lightness of Being elicited considerable interest after its publication (in French in 1984, in Czech in 1985) and ultimately became Milan Kundera’s best-known novel. A major discussion took place in the exile journal Testimony, in which Milan Jungmann reproached Kundera for pandering to his readers, for dealing too loosely with the details of real life under the normalization regime,[1] and for his “method of beautiful fabulation.” After the critical Jungmann, some voices spoke out defending Kundera (including Kvetoslav Chvatik, Petr Kral, Ivo Bock, and Josef Skvorecky), pointing out that irrational anti-Kundera positions were determined by something “essential to the whole Czech character” (Kral). In 1988, Jaroslav Cejka added salt to the wounds with another criticism of Kundera, calling the novel “third-generation kitsch”. In essence, Cejka repeated Jungmann’s reproaches to the effect that Kundera merely wanted to gratify his readers, as well as (and here he was also in accordance with Jungmann) rebuking him for his erotic scenes and meditations on defecation. How strange: Jungmann, a dissident writing unofficial samizdat, and Cejka, an official critic from the very top of the Communist establishment who wrote for the principal cultural-political weekly, both managed – where Kundera was concerned – to agree.
How does The Unbearable Lightness of Being look more than twenty years after its original publication? Answering this question means hunting through our memory to track down just what Kundera’s novel did to us in the mid-1980s.
more from Eurozine here.
there is a role for art as irritant
Richard Phillips makes jpeg art — that is, imagery that looks absolutely fantastic when transferred digitally from gallery to collector, curator, critic or magazine art director. The paintings themselves are enormous, and there is no denying the fact that images of bare-breasted babes and Nazi insignia still pack a wallop in a media-glutted world. In fact, this is partly what the work is about, the backbreaking effort to make “paintings as such” while burdened with a head full of Yale-induced Postmodern critical theory.
“Is it a vital medium or a redundant object of nostalgia connoisseurship?” intones the Gagosian Gallery press release. If the answer to that question is based on Phillips’ paintings, the answers would have to be no and yes. The act of laying paint on canvas is not Phillips’ gift. His paintings have none of the fluidity of Tom Wesselmann or the eroticism of David Salle.
more from artnet here.
an eerie “lived with” aura
The curiosity shop that artist Nancy Shaver runs in Hudson, N.Y., is named Henry. It is an antique store filled with non-art objects in display cases that customers pay cash for and carry away. In one sense Shaver makes straightforward modernist/minimalist sculptures: brightly colored or patterned little boxes that are lined up or stacked on object pedestals such as wheeled dollies or handmade shelving units or placed on the walls in object frames such as musical instrument cases and in handmade wooden boxes. In another sense, Shaver transforms, through an intuitive predominantly visual decision making process, real objects she does not modify in any way into expensive art objects. Shaver’s exhibition at Feature Inc. includes non-art objects from Henry, sculptures that are completely handmade by the artist and sculptures that combine the handmade and the found object. This work is all about the nexus of the utilitarian object that has hidden poetic qualities and the self-consciously constructed art object. Shaver’s art is also about accumulation, juxtaposition, and the visual habits we form with objects that we live with day to day.
more from artcritical here.
IN THE YEAR 2030, THE YOUNG HOTSHOT AT MY OFFICE TRIES TO WALK ME THROUGH “CENTAUR,” APPLE’S NEW MIND-ORB-BASED OPERATING SYSTEM
ME: For some reason, I can’t get this report orb to beam.
HOTSHOT: Well, go ahead and materialize the topaz orb first. That should launch your facefield preferences.
ME: OK, here goes … Wait, remind me, how do I get to the topaz orb? Sorry, I knew how to do this just a second ago—I imagine a shape, right?
HOTSHOT: Kind of. Defocus your eyes and visualize a beam of light illuminating a rhombus. That will materialize the topaz orb.
ME: Hmm … It’s still not working.
HOTSHOT: OK, let’s back up a step. Which wormhole did you do your push-up in?
ME: I’m pretty sure it was Wormhole Gamma. But I did a sit-up. Does a sit-up not work?
HOTSHOT: Oh, you did a sit-up? (Smirk.) Yeah. That’s probably why it’s not working. Try it again.
more from McSweeney’s here.
self-healing plastic
Prachi Patel-Predd in Technology Review:
Researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) have made a polymer material that can heal itself repeatedly when it cracks. It’s a significant advance toward self-healing medical implants and self-repairing materials for use in airplanes and spacecraft. It could also be used for cooling microprocessors and electronic circuits, and it could pave the way toward plastic coatings that regenerate themselves.
The first self-healing material was reported by the UIUC researchers six years ago, and other research groups have created different versions of such materials since then, including polymers that mend themselves repeatedly when subject to heat or pressure. But this is the first time anyone has made a material that can repair itself multiple times without any external intervention, says Nancy Sottos, materials-science and engineering professor at UIUC and one of the researchers who led the work.
More here.
electric salvation
Wolfgang Schevilbusch in Cabinet:
Émile Zola was one of countless literati who formulated this hopeful vision. In his utopian novel Work (1900), the factory environment is entirely electrified:
The machines did nearly everything. Driven by electricity, they formed an army of obedient, enduring, and indefatigable workers. If one of their steel arms broke, it could simply be replaced without any pain. The machines had now become the worker’s friend and no longer his competitors as before. They were liberating machines, universal tools that toiled for man while he rested. The only thing that remained for him to do was to monitor and control the machines by pushing levers and buttons. The workday lasted no more than four hours, and no worker was occupied with the same task for more than two of those. When a colleague replaced him, he occupied himself with something else-in public life or in culture-altogether. After electrification had freed factory-halls from their earlier deafening noise, these were filled with the workers’ merry singing. These songs, combined with the quietly and powerfully working machines, produced a hymn to the justice, glory, and redemption of work.2
…The literary imagination went even further, it represented the equation “life = electricity” as reversible. Dead matter without a soul could be animated by introducing electrical current. In “Some Words with a Mummy,” Edgar Allan Poe resuscitates an ancient Egyptian corpse in this fashion. Mary Shelley’s Dr. Frankenstein brings his monster, constructed from dead body parts, to life with a force like electricity but without referring to it by name (it was the twentieth-century film version that first did that). In his novel l’Ève future, Villiers de l’Isle-Adam creates the ideal woman as an electrically animated automaton. A latecomer to this tradition is the demonically destructive female robot in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, likewise given life by electricity.
More here.
From the borderline
From The Harvard Gazette:
Under a big tent set for lunch in breezy Radcliffe Yard on Friday (June 8), Nobel Prize-winning novelist Toni Morrison offered a gathering of 950 graduates, fellows, and friends a brief meditation on the oblique efficacy of the humanities. She said these “creative, imaginative arts” counsel, goad, and interrogate American culture from its own borders. The humanities still function “best, and most brilliantly, from the edge,” said Morrison. The meditation was delivered in her trademark style. Measured and slow, each word was spoken as if it were wrestled into precision at that moment. Morrison was awarded the Radcliffe Medal and delivered the keynote address at the luncheon on Radcliffe Day. “Book by book, Toni Morrison has confronted the national memory,” said Faust. “And word by word, she has cleansed it.” The cleansing came from the power of Morrison’s beautifully written stories, said Faust, “filled with loss, haunting, beauty, cruelty, and catastrophe.”
Morrison, who twice won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, took the praise with good humor, and a dose of salt. “I really adore my life as recorded and delivered by Drew,” she said, since it leaves out all the “doubts and regrets and mistakes” there were along the way. “It just flows along in an organized fashion.” If there was an organizing principle to Morrison’s life, she said, it was learning to read at age 3, and falling under the spell of the written word. Reading marked her path from high school graduation in Lorain, Ohio (1949), when opportunities were not plentiful for “an African-American female without money, who was simply fairly well-read,” Morrison said. “So I just followed the books.”
More here.
Some Blood Diseases May Stem from Cells’ Environment
From Scientific American:
Researchers believe they may have unlocked the mystery behind a set of blood disorders called myeloproliferative syndromes—precursors to conditions such as leukemia that are triggered by an excess of stem cells. If so, the finding could set the stage for ways to prevent and treat such conditions—some of which can lead to heart disease, abnormal bleeding and even death.
Scientists long believed that these diseases were caused by disruptions in the normal cycle of blood stem cells that prompted them morph into progenitor cells, an intermediate phase when stem cells have been programmed to become a certain type of tissue cell, but have not fully matured into that form. But two new studies published this week in the journal Cell indicate that outside factors rather than flawed cells may be to blame. Specifically, scientists found that blood stem cells may go haywire because of defects in the bone marrow, where they are manufactured.
More here.
History Boys
George Packer in The New Yorker:
The crucial moment of Peter Morgan’s new play on Broadway, “Frost/Nixon,” about the four ninety-minute interviews that David Frost conducted with Richard Nixon in 1977, comes not during the famous final session, on Watergate, but the night before. Nixon, who has been drinking, places an imaginary but not unimaginable phone call to Frost, who has been agonizing over his abject failure to direct the conversation in the first three interviews. The ex-President, played by Frank Langella, points out that both men rose up from nowhere and, at that moment, as the decade meanders to a close, both seem bound for oblivion. “If we reflect privately just for a moment,” Nixon muses, “if we allow ourselves a glimpse into that shadowy place we call our soul, isn’t that why we’re here now? The two of us? Looking for a way back? Into the sun? Into the limelight? Back onto the winner’s podium? Because we could feel it slipping away? We were headed, both of us, for the dirt.” Frost, played by Michael Sheen, accepts the truth of this but adds, “Only one of us can win.” And Nixon warns him, “I shall be your fiercest adversary. I shall come at you with everything I’ve got. Because the limelight can only shine on one of us. And for the other, it’ll be the wilderness.”
“Frost/Nixon” is about the struggle to control historical memory, with television the medium, self-explanation the means, and redemption the prize.
More here.
The Hidden Herds
Carl Zimmer in his excellent blog, The Loom:
Nine years ago I had the opportunity to visit southern Sudan. With a few other reporters, I flew from Nairobi to Lokichokio in northern Kenya, where we prepared to cross the border. A man took our passports and told us he’d hold onto them till we got back. We climbed into another plane loaded with medical supplies and took off again, into a land that had been at war for 15 years.
I found the place eerie in its quiet. We were far from the front lines, and so you could forget that there was a war going on, except for the occasional word of government planes in the air, potentially carrying bombs. The war made itself known where we were in subtler, but no less devastating ways. Sleeping sickness, which had been brought under control in the years before the war, was on the rise again, and only a few doctors were braving the war to try to stop it. For more on that particular story, see this piece I wrote in 1998 for Discover, which I adapted for my book, Parasite Rex. Also, the doctors later published a paper describing the outbreak you can read for free here. Everyone who came on that trip was struck by the beauty of the place, the strange fields of termite mounds, the wooded slopes. But we could never imagine how many people could ever come to see it.
Things have changed. The civil war in southern Sudan is over. Sleeping sickness has been reined in, although not wiped out. And, as I report in today’s New York Times, wildlife biologists have conducted the first aerial survey of southern Sudan.
More here.
White Is the New Green
Via Redorbit.com:
Many techniques promise to mitigate global warming — planting forests, nuclear power, bioethanol, and cars with better gas mileage, to name a few. The problem is so enormous and the potential adverse effects so disturbing that we may have to simultaneously implement all available solutions to make the slightest dent in rising carbon dioxide levels.
Unfortunately, we are often slaves to preconceived notions such as “complex problems require complex solutions.” Take the surprising trade-offs between even the most technologically advanced solar panel and plain white paint. Which product would make you a better environmental citizen?
To arrive at an answer, consider the following:
Our sun illuminates the earth with a steady 1,350 watts per square meter. Some of this energy is absorbed by the atmosphere, some is reflected back into space, and some makes it to the earth’s surface, where it might be absorbed or reflected as well. A black earth, like a black leather car interior, would be very hot indeed. Fortunately, white clouds, polar ice caps, and even deserts keep the earth’s average reflectivity [“albedo” to planetary scientists] at around 30% — giving our planet more of a beige leather interior, so to speak.
More here.
The Life of the Chinese Gold Farmer
Julian Dibbell in the New York Times Magazine:
It was an hour before midnight, three hours into the night shift with nine more to go. At his workstation in a small, fluorescent-lighted office space in Nanjing, China, Li Qiwen sat shirtless and chain-smoking, gazing purposefully at the online computer game in front of him. The screen showed a lightly wooded mountain terrain, studded with castle ruins and grazing deer, in which warrior monks milled about. Li, or rather his staff-wielding wizard character, had been slaying the enemy monks since 8 p.m., mouse-clicking on one corpse after another, each time gathering a few dozen virtual coins — and maybe a magic weapon or two — into an increasingly laden backpack.
Twelve hours a night, seven nights a week, with only two or three nights off per month, this is what Li does — for a living. On this summer night in 2006, the game on his screen was, as always, World of Warcraft, an online fantasy title in which players, in the guise of self-created avatars — night-elf wizards, warrior orcs and other Tolkienesque characters — battle their way through the mythical realm of Azeroth, earning points for every monster slain and rising, over many months, from the game’s lowest level of death-dealing power (1) to the highest (70). More than eight million people around the world play World of Warcraft — approximately one in every thousand on the planet — and whenever Li is logged on, thousands of other players are, too.
More here.
The Blurred Borders Of a State of Crisis
Blake Gopnik in the Washington Post:
One measure of an artwork’s success might be the time you give to it, especially when there are lots of other things you could do. Surrounded by another thousand or so works of current art, and with the older glories of Venice just a bit farther off, the Dutch pavilion of the Venice Biennale kept me captive for hours over several visits. Aernout Mik, who’s filling it this year, makes art that is too complex to take in all at once and too compelling to pass by.
Mik works at the border between politics and play, reality and drama. His Venice project, called “Citizens and Subjects,” includes a series of video projections of disasters and crises that raises the stakes for what theater means.
One pair of screens shows footage from the news, of such things as illegal immigrants being rescued from the ocean or a wrecked train being hoisted by a crane. Those same screens also present images of emergency personnel pretending to deal with such events, in rehearsal for the real thing. The crux of the work is that it’s not easy to tell when you’re seeing truth and when you’re watching fiction — or rather, real documentation of a staged event.
More here.
May the sanctity of the sink prevail
So how funny is our sense of humour?
Amelia Hill at The Observer:
After hearing jokes across Britain, Lenny Henry’s verdict offers little cheer:
From The Office to Little Britain and Peep Show, British comedy is as robust as it has ever been. But are Cockneys really funnier than Scousers? What about the Welsh? The British take their humour seriously, but do the one-liners people tell really reveal something about society, about who people are and how people have changed? What, in short, is in a joke? To get under the skin of the British sense of humour, the Open University has carried out a unique survey of the jokes people tell.
‘The defining trait of Britishness is our sense of humour, but although we all tell funny stories and jokes, not all of us get a laugh from them,’ said Dr Marie Gillespie, professor of sociology and anthropology at the Open University. ‘Jokes are not just a bit of fun. Yes, they play with the taboo and the forbidden, with the rules of language and logic, but jokes are also a barometer of the social and political climate. They reveal a great deal about social conventions and expose established pieties.’
More here.
Daniel L. Everett: questioning Chomsky?
From Edge:
As I look through the structure of the words and the structure of the sentences, it just becomes clear that they don’t have recursion. If recursion is what Chomsky and Mark Hauser and Tecumseh Fitch have called ‘the essential property of language’, the essential building block–in fact they’ve gone so far as to claim that that might be all there really is to human language that makes it different from other kinds of systems–then, the fact that recursion is absent in a language–Piraha–means that this language is fundamentally different from their predictions…
My original concern was to think about Language with a capital ‘L’. Human Language, what it’s like in the brain, what the brain has to be like to sustain the capacity for Language. The most influential ideas for me in my early research were the ideas of Noam Chomsky, principally the proposal that there is an innate capacity for grammar in our genes, and that the acquisition of any given language is simply learning what the different parameter-settings are. What is a parameter?
More here.