Jeff Cowen is one of those restless artists who is always challenging himself to do something new and different and better. When he fears he might be getting complacent, he picks up his entire studio and his life and moves to a new place just to shake things up. In the past 8 years he’s lived in New York, Paris, and now Berlin (and he’s also accomplished unique bodies of work in Cuba, Romania, and rural areas of France and Spain). Each of those places has born creative fruit for him.
A one-man show at the A/34 Gallery in Barcelona this summer includes work from each of those periods (including a few earlier works that have never been exhibited before), but focuses mainly on new work — and there is a lot of it.
“……I understand there is a Ph.D. thesis somewhere which displays a list of Hardy’s novels in the order of the percentages of gloom they contain, but one does not feel that that sort of procedure should be encouraged.”
Over the last decade or so, however, a cadre of literary scholars has begun to encourage exactly that sort of procedure, and recently they have become very loud about it. The most prominent (at least in the nonacademic media) are the Literary Darwinists, whose work emphasizes the discovery of the evolutionary patterns of behavior within literary texts — the Iliad in terms of dominance and aggression, or Jane Austen in terms of mating rituals — and sets itself firmly against 30 years of what they see as anti-scientific literary theories like poststructuralism and Marxism. In the past few years, such critics have had the honor of a long, if quizzical, New York Times Magazine profile and, in May, a place on the Boston Globe’s Ideas page, where Jonathan A. Gottschall, a leading proponent of Literary Darwinism and an adjunct English professor at Washington and Jefferson College, explained why the approach is for him, as he says, “the way and the light.”
Before I begin, I’d like to apologize for sending a mass e-mail.
I’m writing because I’ve lost my cell phone, and I’d really appreciate it if each of you could reply to this message with your phone number, home address, and any other pertinent information I might need to get in touch with you. I kept all that information in the cell phone that I lost. I never wrote it down on a piece of paper or in a book, or backed it up on a computer, because cell phones are historically quite dependable, and not prone to getting lost or stolen—at least, not where I come from, a place where there is neither crime nor personal failure. I come from Iceland.
I’d also appreciate it if you could send me your e-mail address. I already have your e-mail address, which I’m using to send the e-mail you’re currently reading, but I plan to delete it from my memory after I’ve finished typing, because I really prefer to keep this sort of thing in my cell phone. I find that it frees up my “brain space” for other important things, like meditation and prayer and comparing and contrasting the prices and features of various cell phones.
If it’s not too much trouble, I’d also like to know your birthday, preferably with the year included. This is so I can send you one of those electronic birthday cards. I’ll send it to your e-mail address, which I plan to enter into my future cell phone before subsequently losing it in a public rest room. So, actually, what would be really helpful is if you could let me know your birthday, then wait three weeks, then send me your e-mail address, so that I can store it in my two-phones-in-the-future phone for use on your next birthday.
Some years ago, the novelist David Foster Wallace submitted himself to a long television interview with Charlie Rose, the PBS chat-show host. It was a terrific performance, and in it Wallace talked about why, in much of his work, narrative is split into body-text and footnotes:
There’s a way, it seems to me, that reality’s fractured right now, at least the reality that I live in. And the difficulty about . . . writing about that reality is that text is very linear and it’s very unified, and . . . I, anyway, am constantly on the lookout for ways to fracture the text that aren’t totally disorienting – I mean, you can take the lines and jumble them up and that’s nicely fractured, but nobody’s gonna read it.
Last year, Helen DeWitt posted this passage on paperpools, her blog: it ‘says everything I might have wanted to say about life, the universe, postmodernism and Your Name Here.’ Your Name Here is a 120,000-word novel; DeWitt is one of its authors, the category of authorship itself having been split. (At this point, it might have been appropriate to spin off into a footnote about its other author, Ilya Gridneff, an Australian journalist of Russian origin, born in Sydney in 1979 and currently working in Papua New Guinea for the Australian Associated Press, except that the DeWitt/Gridneff partnership doesn’t do much fracturing with footnotes. Epistolary structure and multiple avatars, yes, scans of original documents, including contracts, because ‘without the contractual details any book is just fogbound Jamesian kitsch,’ but not really footnotes: perhaps because, since it’s an authorship made up of two people, the challenge is to discover how, like Bloom and Stephen Dedalus, Don Gately and Hal Incandenza, they might ever be brought together at all.)
Sarah Palin has a pregnant teenager. And, she’s not alone. According to a report published in 2007, there are more than 400,000 other American girls in the same predicament.
In fact, a 2001 Unicef report said that the United States teenage birthrate was higher than any other member of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. The U.S. tied Hungary for the most abortions. This was in spite of the fact that girls in the U.S. were not the most sexually active. Denmark held that title. But, its teenage birthrate was one-sixth of ours, and its teenage abortion rate was half of ours.
If there is a shame here, it’s a national shame — a failure of our puritanical society to accept and deal with the facts. Teenagers have sex. How often and how safely depends on how much knowledge and support they have. Crossing our fingers that they won’t cross the line is not an intelligent strategy.
To wit, our ridiculous experiment in abstinence-only education seems to be winding down with a study finding that it didn’t work. States are opting out of it.
In January 2007, the price of oil was less than $60 per barrel. By the spring of 2008, the price had crossed $100 for the first time, and by mid-July, it rose further to a record $147. At the end of August it remains over $115, a 90 percent increase in just eighteen months. The price of gasoline at the pump has risen commensurately from an average of $2.50 to around $4 a gallon during this period. Transportation and manufacturing costs have risen sharply as well. All this has occurred at the same time as a world credit crisis that started with the collapse of the US housing bubble. The rising cost of oil, coming on top of the credit crisis, has slowed the world economy and reinforced the prospect of a recession in the US.
The public is asking for an answer to two questions. The principal question is whether the sharp oil price increase is a speculative bubble or simply reflects fundamental factors such as rapidly rising demand from developing nations and an increasingly limited supply, caused by the dwindling availability of easily extractable oil reserves. The second question is related to the first. If the oil price increase is at least partly a result of speculation, what kind of regulation will best mitigate the harmful consequences of this increase and avoid excessive price fluctuations in the future?
This column marks an anniversary: It has been 25 years since I began writing these essays on the pleasures and possibilities of computation. My first columns appeared in Scientific American ; later I wrote for Computer Language and then The Sciences ; since 1993 the column has been happily at home here in American Scientist . (Some of my earlier essays are newly available online at bit-player.org/pubs .)
For my very first column, in October of 1983, I chose as an epigraph some words of Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz: “Let us calculate!” In Leibniz’s Latin this exhortation was actually just one word: “Calculemus!” Leibniz was an optimist—he was the model of Voltaire’s Dr. Pangloss—and he saw a bright future for what we would now call algorithmic thinking. Calculation would be the key to settling all human conflicts and disagreements, he believed. I can’t quite match Leibniz’s faith in attaining world peace through computation, but in my own way I’m an algorithmic optimist too. I see computing as an important tool for helping us understand the world we live in and enriching our experience of life.
When I wrote that first column, the idea of a personal computer was still a novelty, and there was some question what it might be good for. Now the computer is a fixture of daily life. We rely on it to read the news, to keep in touch with friends, to listen to music and watch movies, to pay bills, to play games, and occasionally to get a bit of work done. Oddly enough, though, one thing we seldom do with the computer is compute. Only a minority of computer users ever sit down to write a program as a step in solving a problem or answering a question. In this column I want to celebrate the rewards of programming and computing, and cheer on those who get their kicks out of this peculiar sport. I also have a few words to say about the evolution of tools for programming.
Pete Lunn and Tim Hartford debate the question in Prospect:
Dear Tim 12th August 2008
These are exciting times to be an economist. The whirligig of international finance has come crunching to a halt. The British housing market inflated until we could hardly bear to watch, then popped in a destructive, sticky instant. The prices of food and oil are yo-yoing on speculative strings. And the textbooks still tell us that markets populated by rational, selfish, independent agents allocate resources efficiently.
Meanwhile, a revolution is under way in economic thought. Behavioural economics is no bell or whistle on the contraption of traditional economics; it is a big departure which will deliver a revolutionary new way of understanding the world. The founding assumptions of orthodox, neoclassical economics—that people can be thought of as rational, selfish and independent—are collapsing under the weight of empirical refutations…
Dear Pete 13th August 2008
I’m disappointed. I had assumed, given your opening paragraph, that you were going to explain how behavioural economics might have predicted the credit crunch and the commodity boom, or offered a new way to regulate banks. That really would have been revolutionary. Instead, you offer the dear old ultimatum game. I was not surprised to read your lop-sided and unconvincing caricature of orthodox economics (“textbooks” are such a convenient straw man), but I was astonished to see you present a caricature of the subject you claim to be championing…
The Wittgenstein family was one of the richest, most talented and most eccentric in Europe. While the youngest son, Ludwig, became one of the great philosophers of the 20th century, three of his seven siblings committed suicide, and all struggled to grow up in the shadow of their bullying father, Karl. In an extract from his book about the Wittgensteins, Alexander Waugh describes a unique dynasty.
LUDWIG AND PAUL WITTGENSTEIN
In adult life Paul Wittgenstein was far more famous than his younger brother, but nowadays it is the other way round: Ludwig, or Lucki to the family, has become an icon of the 20th century – the handsome, stammering, tortured, incomprehensible philosopher, around whose formidable personality an extraordinary cult developed in the years that followed his death in 1951. At the time of Gretl and Jerome’s courtship, Paul – attractive, neurotic, learned, nature-loving and intense – was 17 and about to sit his final school examinations at the classical Gymnasium in Wiener Neustadt. Ludwig, a year and a half younger, was lodging during term-time with a family in Linz where he attended lessons at the Staatsoberrealschule, a semi-classical state secondary school of 300 pupils.
According to the recollection of one of his fellow pupils, the majority of the school’s teachers were mentally deranged, and quite a few ended their days as honest-to-God lunatics; their collars were unkempt, their external appearance exuded uncleanness, they were the product of a proletariat denuded of all personal independence of thought, distinguished by unparalleled ignorance and most admirably fitted to become the pillars of an effete system of government which, thank God, is now a thing of the past.
That pupil – just six days older than Lucki – was Adolf Hitler.
Researchers have discovered that the same nerve cells involved in forming memories also are involved in replaying them. The finding, published today in the online edition of Science, provides new insight into how complex memories are laid down in a single neuron (nerve cell) and how neural firing, or communication, patterns created during memory formation are maintained during recall. Scientists at the University of California, Los Angeles, (U.C.L.A.) showed 13 volunteers—epilepsy patients with therapeutic electrodes implanted in their brains—several five- to 10-second clips from videos such as The Simpsons. The researchers found that a small sample comprising some 50 neurons in the hippocampus and entorhinal cortex (memory centers in the brain) fired in distinctive repeatable patterns that differed for each clip.
“The results were quite astounding,” says senior study author Itzhak Fried, director of the U.C.L.A. Health System’s Epilepsy Surgery Program. The same neuron that activated during the original viewing of a specific snippet also fired during recall, and the action began a second or so before the patient reported seeing the clip. That means, Fried says, that “the very neuron that was selectively active during the encoding, during the original viewing, suddenly came to life. It essentially replayed that memory by firing.”
Like a peddler just arrived in town, or a traveler come from foreign shores, Salman Rushdie spreads before us his magic carpet of stories. Rushdie has been many things–political novelist, national epicist, probing essayist, free-speech icon out of force of circumstance–but he has always been, first and last, a storyteller. As Conrad sought to return to fiction the immediacy of the sailor’s tale–one man entertaining his mates over claret and cigars–so Rushdie seeks to reanimate the printed page with the exuberance and exoticism of legend and fable, fairy tale and myth: the province of the wanderer, the yarn spinner, the bard. More than Ulysses or The Tin Drum, his most persistent models have been the Thousand and One Nights and the Hindu epics, The Wizard of Oz and Bollywood. He doesn’t want to be Joyce; he wants to be Scheherazade. His greatest works engage the tragedies of modern history through the most audaciously archaic of narrative devices. Midnight’s Children hinges on the switching of two babies in the cradle; The Satanic Verses features flying carpets and Ovidian metamorphoses.
Late in the afternoon of June 10, during a firefight with Taliban militants along the Afghan-Pakistani border, American soldiers called in airstrikes to beat back the attack. The firefight was taking place right on the border itself, known in military jargon as the “zero line.” Afghanistan was on one side, and the remote Pakistani region known as the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, or FATA, was on the other. The stretch of border was guarded by three Pakistani military posts.
The American bombers did the job, and then some. By the time the fighting ended, the Taliban militants had slipped away, the American unit was safe and 11 Pakistani border guards lay dead. The airstrikes on the Pakistani positions sparked a diplomatic row between the two allies: Pakistan called the incident “unprovoked and cowardly”; American officials regretted what they called a tragic mistake. But even after a joint inquiry by the United States, Pakistan and Afghanistan, it remained unclear why American soldiers had reached the point of calling in airstrikes on soldiers from Pakistan, a critical ally in the war in Afghanistan and the campaign against terrorism.
The mystery, at least part of it, was solved in July by four residents of Suran Dara, a Pakistani village a few hundred yards from the site of the fight…
In April, Mr. Zardari told Ishaq Dar, the finance minister at the time and a member of Mr. Sharif’s party, which has since broken with Mr. Zardari, that he wanted the price the government paid farmers for wheat to be raised substantially as a way of rewarding an important constituency in Punjab Province, the nation’s most populous, according to two participants in the discussion with Mr. Zardari. The government would then have to heavily subsidize the cost of wheat to the consumer.
When Mr. Dar asked Mr. Zardari how he thought the government would pay for the subsidy, Mr. Zardari replied, “Print the notes,” according to the two participants, a government official and an associate of Mr. Zardari’s. In an effort to solve the impasse over the subsidy, it was suggested that Mr. Zardari form a committee of experts.
“ ‘I am the expert,’ ” Mr. Zardari said, according to his associate.
A child wakens in a cold apartment. The windows are frosted. Outside he hears words rising from the streets, words he cannot understand, and then the semis gear down for the traffic light on Houston. He sleeps again and dreams of another city on a high hill above a wide river bathed in sunlight, and the dream is his life as he will live it twenty years from now. No, no, you say, dreams do not work that way, they function otherwise. Perhaps in the world you’re right, but on Houston tonight two men are trying to change a tire as snow gathers on their shoulders and scalds their ungloved hands. The older one, the father, is close to tears, for he’s sure his son, who’s drunk, is laughing secretly at him for all his failures as a man and a father, and he is laughing to himself but because he’s happy to be alone with his father as he was years ago in another life where snow never fell. At last he slips the tire iron gently from his father’s grip and kneels down in the unstained snow and unbolts the wheel while he sings of drinking a glass of wine, the black common wine of Alicante, in raw sunlight. Now the father joins in, and the words rise between the falling flakes only to be transformed into the music spreading slowly over the oiled surface of the river that runs through every child’s dreams.
Ted Muehling: A Portrait of His Work by Don Freeman by Sarah Yelavich. South, below Grand Street and just above Canal — beyond the scene at the Mercer Hotel and at Balthazar, beyond those transplants from uptown (Prada, Bloomingdale’s, the MoMA store, the Guggenheim), past the chain stores and the weekend throngs and those “galleries” that remain — SoHo quiets down into a calmer, still-bohemian enclave (or at least a semi-bohemian one). There, tucked on a short stretch of the four-block, semi-hidden Howard Street — reportedly the last street in Manhattan to get streetlights — cluster some of the city’s most discerning specialty stores. Two are long-established anachronisms: E. Vogel, which has been making riding boots and men’s shoes by hand since 1879; and the Putnam Rolling Ladder Company, which has been building library ladders since 1905. Two came recently: the winningly inventive Opening Ceremony, selling pioneering, quirky international fashion — long black Brazilian capes, finely knitted German undershirts — by designers and manufacturers you’ve almost certainly never heard of; and De Vera, a sort of hyper-curated flea market — a Wunderkammer, really — where necklaces made from ancient intaglios are displayed in artfully crammed vitrines alongside antique opium pipes and Victorian mourning jewelry.
And then there’s the small, high-ceilinged store that serves as the magnet for newer boutiques — an ethereal place that draws the great fashion designer Narcisco Rodriguez when, he told me, “I need some peace or an inspirational jolt,” a store whose subdued atmosphere, invariably described as “magical,” is accentuated by the intermittent ting of a jeweler’s hammer from the studio in the back. This is the shop and workroom of Ted Muehling, whose jewelry and decorative objects have for 32 years been venerated among his fanatically devoted customers, a group that includes the most discriminating figures in the world of fashion and design. “Ted has the most refined aesthetic of any person I know, period,” says Sally Singer, Vogue‘s fashion news/features director. “I’ve never heard anyone say his work is other than perfection.”
Hopes that large studies of cancer genomics will justify their high cost by offering a fast-track to cures have been dealt a blow by a series of papers. The controversial Cancer Genome Atlas, run by the US National Institutes of Health, is analysing genetic and epigenetic changes in cancers. Still in its pilot phase, the project could eventually cost up to $1.35 billion. But it does not include ‘functional’ studies that investigate how the mutations aid tumour development and what drugs might target the pathways essential to tumour survival. Yet functional studies are exactly what two papers, from a group led by Bert Vogelstein of the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in Baltimore, Maryland, suggest are needed. He and others say that the focus should shift from hunting for individual genes that cause certain cancers, to disrupting the broader biological pathways that support cancer growth.
“It is apparent from studies like ours that it is going to be even more difficult than expected to derive real cures,” says Vogelstein. Two papers from his team, plus one from the Cancer Genome Atlas group, appeared on 4 September in Science and Nature. The studies find that individual cancer patients each carry dozens of genetic mutations — an average of 63 alterations in pancreatic cancer and 47 DNA mutations in one type of brain cancer. Similar results have been found in previous studies of other cancers. This makes it unlikely that the cancers will be cured by drugs that target just one or a few genes, the researchers say.
David Byrne and Brian Eno were the songwriter and producer on the most radical albums by Talking Heads, and they collaborated on a 1981 album, “My Life in the Bush of Ghosts.” Now, 27 years later, they have reunited to make their second duo album, “Everything That Happens Will Happen Today.” It is being released digitally on Aug. 18 via everythingthathappens.com, a month later on major commercial download sites and, as soon as it can be manufactured and distributed, as a physical CD.
For most of the album’s yearlong process the songwriting partners were an ocean apart, Mr. Eno in London and Mr. Byrne in New York City, though both are globe-hoppers. They also kept their jobs separate. By and large, Mr. Eno provided the music, and Mr. Byrne topped it with melodies, words and vocals.
More here. I’ve been listening to the album a lot (for example, when I am doing 3QD posts) and it is very addictive (in a nice way). Here David mentions the album in his own journal:
I’m also wondering whether the web-curious will allow news of the album to spread more or less by itself. In the past, I might have undertaken all kinds of expensive marketing plans to prepare for a record release: there would be a teaser, live shows, posters, magazine ads, interviews, and advance CDs sent to writers and reviewers. We’ve done a few interviews, but that’s about it. It will be interesting to see if audiences find out about this song — and the record — without all those marketing techniques, and solely through Internet word-of-mouth.
The following is from the albums website:
Brian Eno and I recently finished our first collaboration in about 30 years. The name of the new record is Everything That Happens Will Happen Today. For the most part, Brian did the music and I wrote some tunes, words and sang. It’s familiar but completely new as well. We’re pretty excited.
The album is available exclusively from this Web site. You can stream all of the songs for free and purchase it in a variety of digital and physical formats, including a limited edition Deluxe Package designed by Sagmeister Inc. All formats can be downloaded immediately and physical CDs will be shipped in the Fall.
David Byrne Midtown
PS: If you like what you hear, please share the streaming player [below] with your friends, or embed it on your Web site, blog or profile. Just click Embed/Share and you’re good to go.
Jeff Cowen is one of those restless artists who is always challenging himself to do something new and different and better. When he fears he might be getting complacent, he picks up his entire studio and his life and moves to a new place just to shake things up. In the past 8 years he’s lived in New York, Paris, and now Berlin (and he’s also accomplished unique bodies of work in Cuba, Romania, and rural areas of France and Spain). Each of those places has born creative fruit for him.
Night Words
