As many older Israelis evidently remember, the then-new nation was afflicted by a perverse pop-culture craze in the early ’60s, at a time when nearly half the population consisted of Holocaust survivors, nationalist sentiment ran high and moral codes were extremely puritanical. Yet the newsstands in the Tel Aviv bus station sold racks of semi-pornographic pulp novels known as “Stalags,” whose utterly implausible, Penthouse Forum-meets-Marquis de Sade plots ventured into the most forbidden terrain imaginable. Stalags all followed essentially the same formula: An American or British World War II pilot (generally not Jewish) is shot down behind enemy lines, where he is imprisoned, tortured and raped by an entire phalanx of sadistic, voluptuous female SS officers. His body violated but his spirit unbroken, the plucky Yank or Brit escapes in the end to rape and murder his captors.
Stalags thrived for a few years and then disappeared, banished to the memory hole as a massive cultural embarrassment.
Our ability to use words is a critical part of our species’ mastery of language. In practice, that mastery comes down to saying what we mean without having to think too much about it. When we have something to say, we first retrieve the correct words from memory, then execute the steps for producing the word. When these cognitive processes don’t mesh smoothly, conversation stops.
Suppose you meet someone at a party. A coworker walks up, you turn to introduce your new acquaintance and suddenly you can’t remember your colleague’s name! My hunch is that almost all readers are nodding their heads, remembering a time that a similar event happened to them. These experiences are called tip-of-the-tongue (or TOT) states. A TOT state is a word-finding problem, a temporary and often frustrating inability to retrieve a known word at a given moment. TOT states are universal, occurring in many languages and at all ages.
People resolve TOT states using a variety of methods. Some are conscious strategies, such as mentally going through the alphabet to find the word or consulting a book or person. However, the most common method for resolving TOT states is an indirect approach: relaxing and directing one’s attention elsewhere. The missing word suddenly comes to mind without thinking about it. These “aha!” moments are known as “pop-ups.” The purpose of this article is to explore the cognitive processes that cause pop-up resolutions and to document changes in these processes with healthy aging. The ability to resolve TOT states changes significantly in old age, which is particularly important because older adults have more TOT states than do younger adults.
Video artist Bill Viola first came to Death Valley with a friend in 1973. A child of the green summers and freezing winters of New York, he had just graduated from university. He was 21, a student of religions. He stood in the middle of a salt flat, simultaneously inconsequential and enveloping, and felt his horizons extend.
“For the first time in my life I felt like my senses were liberated,” he remembers. “I felt completely open. I felt part of me was going out that hundred miles to the mountain range and encompassing that whole thing. I get goosebumps just thinking about it.
“At a certain point I became frightened. I felt like the landscape was so vast, if I got lost out here, they would never find me. And God could come down and [as if I was] a little bug, just flick me away.
Darfur’s staggering figures make the question of international response all the more exigent: hundreds of thousands already dead; 2.5 million displaced, most losing everything; and 4.2 million human beings dependent on the world’s largest and most endangered humanitarian operation.
Answers are at once numerous and complex—and bluntly obvious. There has simply never been any stomach to confront, in effective and concerted fashion, the ruthless tyranny of the NIF. The regime came to power by military coup in 1989, deposing the elected government of Sadiq el-Mahdi and deliberately aborting Sudan’s most promising chance for peace since independence. Yet there have never been coordinated economic sanctions targeting the NIF leadership. There have never even been effective diplomatic sanctions, although the UN nominally imposed them in 1995 following the NIF’s role in the conspiracy to assassinate Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak in Addis Ababa. On the contrary, commercial and capital investment in the Khartoum-dominated economy has been massive, coming from Europe, Canada, and Asian countries, primarily China.
Moreover, Khartoum has never faced a serious threat of non-consensual military action to halt genocide, even in Darfur, where the realities of large-scale, ethnically-targeted human destruction have been consistently and unambiguously reported since 2003.
Professing Literature, Gerald Graff’s history of American English departments, has just been reissued in a twentieth-anniversary edition (Chicago, $19). Published at the height of the culture wars–it came out a month before Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind–Graff’s book brought a cooling sense of historical perspective to the inflamed passions of the moment. We’d been having the same arguments, it turned out, since universities started teaching English literature in the middle of the nineteenth century. The positions may have changed, but the issues had not. Classicists had been deposed by humanists, humanists by historians, historians by critics and now critics by theorists, but across the barricades of each revolution, the same accusations were flung: obfuscation, esotericism and overspecialization; naïveté, dilettantism and reaction. Teaching versus research, humane values versus methodological rigor, “literature itself” versus historical context.
The Royal Shakespeare Company in staging the whole of the History Cycle, 8 plays in 72 hours. Colin Murphy on the performance in Le Monde Diplomatique:
I couldn’t sleep last night. They kept on coming. Kings, rebels, ghosts, traitors. In my mind’s eye, at 3am, they marched again, spoke, warned. Richard the Second, vainglorious, doomed. Henry the Fourth, stout and fierce, his purchase on the throne tenuous. Falstaff, hale and hearty, but cut through with self-deception. Warwick, twin sword blades slicing the air. Henry the Fifth, the hero king. And Henry the Sixth, almost mystical, his eyes suffused with the loneliness of absolute power.
For twenty-four hours I sat in their company, through eight of the History plays of William Shakespeare, staged by the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) back to back across a weekend in Shakespeare’s birthplace, Stratford-upon-Avon (1). The feat was unprecedented: the same company of 34 actors performed 264 roles across 72 hours, in eight three-hour plays.
Over breakfast in my B&B, we wondered whether there was any possibility of redemption or sympathy for the hunchback Richard the Third. At lunchtime I strode into Stratford in search of a quick sandwich, and saw one of the cast breeze by on her bicycle, presumably doing the same thing. During an interval, a man leaned deeply into a stretch against a tree outside. At night, we retreated to the local pub, The Dirty Duck, attempting to quiet the voices in our heads with pints of ale, found the Duke of Exeter and Earl of Warwick there ahead of us, and fell into conversation with them about their roles and the plays.
Ida B. Wells was in England in 1894 when she heard that white Southerners had put a black woman in San Antonio, Tex., into a barrel with “nails driven through the sides and then rolled [it] down a hill until she was dead.” The 31-year-old Wells, a black Southerner, was seasoned to the widespread phenomenon of mob torture and murder that went by the shorthand “lynching”; in fact, she was abroad on a speaking tour denouncing it. Nonetheless, she shed tears over the latest “outrage upon my people.”
Her call to speak out against lynching had come just two years earlier, when a Memphis mob murdered her close friend and neighbor Thomas Moss. The incident started as a dispute among white and black boys playing marbles, but it quickly evolved into an excuse to murder Moss, a successful businessman who was drawing patrons away from a nearby white grocer. White Southerners explained to Northerners that they lynched only when they had to: when black men threatened, assaulted and raped white women. Wells was determined to expose that lie.
Read it and weep. Then give it to the last person who told you that ideals are a waste of time. ·
A Dangerous Liaison by Carole Seymour-Jones. It was Dostoevsky who first espoused the notion that if God is dead, everything is permissible. It became one of the founding tenets of existentialist philosophy, but until reading Carole Seymour-Jones’s excellent new biography of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, I hadn’t quite realised the diabolic glee with which this pair applied the belief to their daily lives. Having got the business of God out of the way with precocious ease before they hit puberty (for de Beauvoir, He ‘ceased to exist’ at secondary school; for Sartre, God ‘vanished without explanation’ when he was 12), they launched themselves into a vortex of depravity with all the alacrity of teenagers breaking a parental curfew.
For five decades, they pursued an open partnership that allowed them to engage in ‘contingent’ relationships with others. It was their radical answer to the outworn convention of marriage: in achieving total transparency with each other, they hoped to experience the true freedom of essential love. ‘To have such freedom, we had to suppress or overcome any possessiveness, any tendency to be jealous,’ said Sartre. ‘In other words, passion. To be free, you cannot be passionate.’ They hoped to devise new ways of living in a godless world, unrestricted by detested bourgeois institutions. But, in reality, Seymour-Jones demonstrates that their quest became a darker, more collusive joint enterprise through the 51 years of their partnership, with deeply unpleasant consequences for those who found themselves towed under by the viscous currents of the Sartrean ‘family’.
De Beauvoir became a glorified procuress, exploiting her profession as a teacher to seduce impressionable female pupils and then passing them on to Sartre, who had a taste for virgins. One of them, Olga Kosakiewicz, was so unbalanced by the experience that she started to self-harm. In 1938, the 30-year-old de Beauvoir seduced her student Bianca Bienenfeld. A few months later, Sartre slept with the 16-year-old Bianca in a hotel room, telling her that the chambermaid would be surprised as he had already taken another girl’s virginity the same day.
At the Un-national Monument Along the Canadian Border William Stafford
………………………………………………………………………………… This is the field where the battle did not happen, where the unknown soldier did not die. This is the field where grass joined hands, where no monument stands, and the only heroic thing is the sky.
Birds fly here without any sound, unfolding their wings across the open. No people killed — or were killed — on this ground hallowed by neglect and an air so tame that people celebrate it by forgetting its name.
…………………………………………………. ………………………………………………….. …………………………………………………. Painting by Richard Herman
In the early 90s our own Morgan Meis founded the brilliantly innovative arts collective, Flux Factory. He remains its uninterrupted president. (When I told Morgan recently that I wish I were president of something, he advised me to declare myself president of 3 Quarks. 🙂 Anyhow, here is a nice article about Flux:
Ben Davis in Artnet:
When people ask me what my favorite gallery is, I always answer Flux Factory. This has been the case at least since I first reviewed a show at the energetic Long Island City nonprofit-cum-artist collective, a solo exhibition by the very-cool sculptor Paul Burn, back when I wrote the culture page for the Queens Courier.
Sadly, I might have to make a new choice. Flux Factory has just opened what looks to be its final show in its current space, aptly titled “Everything Must Go.” The MTA has announced the eminent domain takeover of the block to make way for a rail link to Grand Central Terminal.
“Shitty,” is the answer Flux Factory’s Stefany Anne Golberg gives when asked how the group feels about this state of affairs. “The MTA has made this about as difficult as they could.” Information has been impossible to get, she says. “We’ve known about the possibility for two years, and then it’s just like, you’ve got 90 days to clear out.”
Golberg, one of the Flux Factory’s core members along with Jean Barbaris, Morgan Meis and Chen Tamir, says the organization is looking for a new building. It is likely, however, that after “Everything Must Go” closes, the 18-odd artists who currently live and collaborate in the space will disperse.
More here. [Photo, taken by me at a Flux party, shows Morgan with his wife Stefany.]
Also check out this video from the New York Post about Flux:
ON JANUARY 29, 2008, an e-mail began making the rounds of the art world. Originally sent by artist Nancy Holt to a small group of friends and colleagues, and rapidly forwarded on, the message contained an urgent appeal: Holt had been alerted, just the day before, to the existence of plans to drill for oil in the Great Salt Lake, near Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, 1970, and she was asking people to contact the Utah state government to express their opposition before a rapidly approaching deadline for public comment. The drilling in question (a “wildcat,” or speculative, operation) calls for a series of exploratory wells to be sunk, using equipment on floating barges, some 3,000 feet into the lake bed of an area called the West Rozel Field Prospect—a parcel in the North Arm of the Great Salt Lake leased in 2003 from the state of Utah by Pearl Montana Exploration and Production, a Canadian oil and gas company. The site lies approximately five miles southwest of Rozel Point—roughly halfway between Gunnison Island, a wildlife sanctuary that is home to one of the world’s largest breeding populations of American white pelicans, and Spiral Jetty, the 1,500-foot-long coil of basalt and earth that is Smithson’s most famous, and Land art’s most celebrated, artwork.
In 1988, Princeton University accepted an orphan with an eye-catching résumé. Seventeen-year-old Alexi Santana hadn’t been to school but had picked up his education while working in Utah as a cattle herder, a construction worker and a racehorse exerciser. He had read Plato while sleeping under the stars. He could be reached only by post office box, he said, because his home address was the Utah-Arizona line. It all sounded very romantic, very Huck Finn. He also had outstanding SAT scores. What clinched the deal, though, was that Santana could run like the wind, and the Princeton track coach saw him as an invaluable addition to the team…
Then the roof caved in. In February 1991, Santana was spotted at a Harvard-Yale-Princeton track meet by somebody who knew him from, literally, another life. The truth came out: Alexi Santana was more than 10 years older than he claimed to be and wasn’t even Alexi Santana. His real name was James Hogue, a serial impostor who had been born in Kansas and delayed his entry to Princeton because he’d been in jail for theft.
Nothing about the founders seems as interesting or as timely to us, 200 years and more farther on, as their religious views — who, if Anyone, they worshiped, how they marked the boundaries of church and state. As a Washington biographer, I have been assured, during the Q. and A. periods after talks, that George Washington saw the Virgin Mary at Valley Forge and converted to Roman Catholicism on his deathbed (why wait, if he had seen the Virgin 21 years earlier?). I was also once asked if he was an “illuminated Freemason”; I sped away from that question as fast as possible. Whether in legal briefs or op-ed articles, we are as passionate about religion as the founders were. Unfortunately, our passions make for a lot of sloppy and willful historical thinking and writing. In “Founding Faith,” Steven Waldman, a veteran journalist and co-founder of Beliefnet.com, a religious Web site, surveys the convictions and legacy of the founders clearly and fairly, with a light touch but a careful eye.
In his recent speech on race, Barack Obama spoke about the legacy of racial hatred and resentment in America. One of the events he probably had in mind was the controversy over busing that erupted in Boston in the mid-1970s. A single photograph epitomized for Americans the meaning and horror of the crisis. On April 5, 1976, at an anti-busing rally at City Hall Plaza, Stanley Forman, a photographer for the Boston Herald-American, captured a teenager as he transformed the American flag into a weapon directed at the body of a black man. It is the ultimate act of desecration, performed in the year of the bicentennial and in the shadows of Boston’s Old State House. Titled The Soiling of Old Glory, the photograph appeared in newspapers around the country and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1977. The image shattered the illusion that racial segregation and hatred were strictly a Southern phenomenon. For many, Boston now seemed little different than Birmingham.
Me love cookies. Me tend to get out of control when me see cookies. Me know it not natural to react so strongly to cookies, but me have weakness. Me know me do wrong. Me know it isn’t normal. Me see disapproving looks. Me see stares. Me hurt inside.
When me get back to apartment, after cookie binge, me can’t stand looking in mirror—fur matted with chocolate-chip smears and infested with crumbs. Me try but me never able to wash all of them out. Me don’t think me is monster. Me just furry blue person who love cookies too much. Me no ask for it. Me just born that way.
Me was thinking and me just don’t get it. Why is me a monster? No one else called monster on Sesame Street. Well, no one who isn’t really monster. Two-Headed Monster have two heads, so he real monster. Herry Monster strong and look angry, so he probably real monster, too. But is me really monster?
Me thinks me have serious problem. Me thinks me addicted. But since when it acceptable to call addict monster? It affliction. It disease. It burden. But does it make me monster?
The Afterlife: Letter to Sam Hamill Hayden Carruth
You may think it strange, Sam, that I’m writing a letter in these circumstances. I thought it strange too–the first time. But there’s a misconception I was laboring under, and you are too, viz. that the imagination in your vicinity is free and powerful. After all, you say, you’ve been creating yourself all along imaginatively. You imagine yourself playing golf or hiking in the Olympics or writing a poem and then it becomes true. But you still have to do it, you have to exert yourself, will, courage, whatever you’ve got, you’re mired in the unimaginative. Here I imagine a letter and it’s written. Takes about two-fifths of a second, your time. Hell, this is heaven, man. I can deluge Congress with letters telling every one of those mendacious sons of bitches exactly what he or she is, in maybe about half an hour. In spite of your Buddhist proclivities, when you imagine bliss you still must struggle to get there. By the way the Buddha has his place across town on Elysian Drive. We call him Bud. He’s lost weight and got new dentures, and he looks a hell of a lot better than he used to. He always carries a jumping jack with him everywhere just for contemplation, but he doesn’t make it jump. He only looks at it. Meanwhile Sidney and Dizzy, Uncle Ben and Papa Yancey, are over by Sylvester’s Grot making the sweetest, cheerfulest blues you ever heard. The air, so called, is full of it. Poems are fluttering everywhere like seed from a cottonwood tree. Sam, the remarkable truth is I can do any fucking thing I want. Speaking of which there’s this dazzling young Naomi who wiped out on I-80 just west of Truckee last winter, and I think this is the moment for me to go and pay her my respects. Don’t go way. I’ll be right back.
Emerging more than twenty years ago from the San Francisco Bay Area, Deborah Oropallo (b. Hackensack, New Jersey, 1954) has moved from traditional painting and printmaking to incorporating digital media and imagery into her work, creating printed canvas paintings and related editions of pigment prints.
Oropallo has always regarded her artwork as based in photography. In her early work she painted imagery from found photographs. Later, she placed objects on a stat camera, capturing a shadow or silhouette from which she made silkscreens and stencils that transformed images of mundane objects into visual abstractions. Recently, Oropallo has been using her own photography, and digital work as a natural evolution. She says:
“I use the computer as the tool, but painting is the language of deliberation that is running through my head. I do not want to just repaint an illustration of what the computer can do, but to push the pixels themselves as paint, and to layer imagery and veils to create depth and volume. Like painting, this process can engage nuance and subtlety. It also has the ability to alter an image in a way that no other medium can deliver or predict.”
The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments by George Johnson,
Beauty is truth, Keats declared, and truth beauty. Many prominent scientists have wished a version of this famous equation described their own work. The British quantum theorist Paul Dirac, for one, called his career “a search for pretty mathematics.” Most scientific aesthetes gaze fondly upon equations or arrangements of facts. A few, like the science writer George Johnson, also see beauty in the act of research. Johnson’s new book, “The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments,” is an appealing account of important scientific discoveries to which a variation of Keats applies: occasionally, beauty yields truth.
Johnson’s list is eclectic and his outlook romantic. “Science in the 21st century has become industrialized,” he states, with experiments “carried out by research teams that have grown to the size of corporations.” By contrast, Johnson (a longtime contributor to The New York Times) favors artisans of the laboratory, chronicling “those rare moments when, using the materials at hand, a curious soul figured out a way to pose a question to the universe and persisted until it replied.”
His selections include the canonical and the overlooked. The first chapter describes Galileo’s studying motion by rolling balls down an incline, often considered the founding experiment of modern science. Another chapter recounts Isaac Newton’s using prisms to grasp the nature of color. But Johnson also brings to life less familiar figures like Luigi Galvani, who illuminated the nature of electricity; Albert Michelson, who (with Edward Morley) determined the constant speed of light; and — a particularly inspired choice — Ivan Pavlov, whose famous dog experiments advanced physiology and neurology.
Though he lacks Will Eisner’s urbane, insouciant spirit and Jack Cole’s sensuous, ever-surprising plasticity, comic-book artist Jack Kirby (1917–94) more than deserves the royal sobriquet with which he’s been crowned. King Kirby embodies the drama of his medium as well as the drama of its history—how, starting on the eve of World War II, a bunch of mainly working-class, first-generation Jewish kids created a garish, subliterary mythology of fantastic supermen. Kirby’s first such creature, created with Joe Simon, was Captain America: The premiere issue, which appeared nearly a year before Pearl Harbor, has the masked and star-spangled hero using his shield to deflect Nazi bullets even as he knocks Hitler off his feet with an explosive right hook to the kisser.
In a general sense, Kirby’s is the saga that Michael Chabon mythologized and made literary with The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (2000). In his author’s note, Chabon acknowledges his “deep debt” to Kirby, not just in this novel but in “everything else I’ve ever written.” Most likely, Chabon was thinking less of Kirby’s wartime comics than of the pop deities the artist drew and/or invented twenty years later for Marvel Comics—the Fantastic Four, the Incredible Hulk, the uncanny X-Men, the Mighty Thor, and the Silver Surfer—or the even crazier characters that he would develop for Marvel’s rival DC in the early ’70s.
These hallucinations flowed from an unlikely source. A feisty five-foot-two-inch fireplug, the artist was born Jacob Kurtzberg in a Lower East Side tenement.
As many older Israelis evidently remember, the then-new nation was afflicted by a perverse pop-culture craze in the early ’60s, at a time when nearly half the population consisted of Holocaust survivors, nationalist sentiment ran high and moral codes were extremely puritanical. Yet the newsstands in the Tel Aviv bus station sold racks of semi-pornographic pulp novels known as “Stalags,” whose utterly implausible, Penthouse Forum-meets-Marquis de Sade plots ventured into the most forbidden terrain imaginable. Stalags all followed essentially the same formula: An American or British World War II pilot (generally not Jewish) is shot down behind enemy lines, where he is imprisoned, tortured and raped by an entire phalanx of sadistic, voluptuous female SS officers. His body violated but his spirit unbroken, the plucky Yank or Brit escapes in the end to rape and murder his captors.
