“Shape” as an issue for painting was the demon spawn of the critical program initiated by Greenberg and elaborated by Michael Fried. Most notoriously, Frank Stella’s manipulation of the shape of the physical support in his work of the ’60s was seen as an inevitable evolutionary step in the reduction of painting to its own medium-specific essence, and perhaps also as a way out of the cul-de-sac of graphic decorativism. In Stella’s case this reasoning eventually resulted in weird objects that were difficult to accept as either radical or profound, but younger artists of a non-Greenbergian bent surprisingly found rich potential in this train of thought. In the late ’60s Mangold, Murray’s contemporary in age but forerunner on the curve of artistic self-realization, began exploring the reciprocity, implied by Stella’s earlier forays, between a shaped support and the marks on its surface. Throughout the ’70s and beyond, Mel Bochner, Dorothea Rockburne, and Richard Tuttle worked with shape in their pictorial investigations of thought’s relationship to material, and Ron Gorchov made truculent and repetitive canvases with round corners and a surface curved in two directions like a saddle. Always present in the minds of Murray’s generation of painters was the example of Ralph Humphrey, a currently underestimated figure who began a series of ethereal surfboard-shaped paintings in 1970 and who continued to develop his extremely specific supporting structures until his death twenty years later.

more from Artforum here.

From The New York Times:

Hypnosis, with its long and checkered history in medicine and entertainment, is receiving some new respect from neuroscientists. Recent brain studies of people who are susceptible to suggestion indicate that when they act on the suggestions their brains show profound changes in how they process information. The suggestions, researchers report, literally change what people see, hear, feel and believe to be true.

Brain scans show that the control mechanisms for deciding what to do in the face of conflict become uncoupled when people are hypnotized.

More here.

From Scientific American:

On September 13, the New York Times ran an article that discussed how the documentary March of the Penguins was a big hit among some groups because of the lessons it imparted. A reviewer in World Magazine thought that the fact that any fragile penguin egg survived the Antarctic climate made a “strong case for intelligent design.” Conservative commentator Michael Medved thought the movie “passionately affirms traditional norms like monogamy, sacrifice and child rearing.”

Penguins are not people, despite their natty appearance and upright ambulation. Their traditional norms include waddling around naked and regurgitating the kids’ lunch. But it would be as absurd to castigate them for those activities as it is to congratulate them for their monogamy. Besides, the movie clearly notes that the penguins are seasonally monogamous–like other movie stars usually reviled by moralists, the penguins take a different mate each year. And there are problems with them as evidence of intelligent design. While caring for the egg, the penguins balance it on their feet against their warm bodies; if the egg slips to the ground for even a few seconds, it freezes and cracks open. A truly intelligent design might have included internal development, or thicker eggshells, or Miami. Finally, penguin parents take turns walking 70 miles to the sea for takeout meals. The birds have to walk.

From tribulations to trials. On September 26, I sat in a federal courtroom in Harrisburg, Pa., where a lawyer said for almost certainly the first time ever, “Can we have the bacterial flagellum, please?”

More here.

Danah Boyd writes about how youth culture is treated in the US and examines the connections between Columbine and banning MySpace:

“I’m tired of mass media perpetuating a culture of fear under the scapegoat of informing the public. Nowhere is this more apparent than how they discuss youth culture and use scare tactics to warn parents of the safety risks about the Internet. The choice to perpetually report on the possibility or rare occurrence of kidnapping / stalking / violence because of Internet sociability is not a neutral position – it is a position of power that the media chooses to take because it’s a story that sells. There’s something innately human about rubbernecking, about looking for fears, about reveling in the possibilities of demise. Mainstream media capitalizes on this, manipulating the public and magnifying the culture of fear. It sells horror films and it sells newspapers.

…The effects are devastating. Ever wonder why young people don’t vote? Why should they? They’ve been told for so damn long that their voices don’t matter, have been the victims of an oppressive regime. What is motivating about that? How do you learn to use your voice to change power when you’ve been surveilled and controlled for so long, when you’ve made an art out of subversive engagement with peers? When you’ve been put on drugs like Strattera that control your behavior to the point of utter obedience? “

More Here

Huang con Chang I, II, and III. Miguel Trelles, 2003

MT recently exhibited at the wonderful new Boston gallery SpaceOther.

More here.

Jane Elliot writes for the BBC:

“As Bill Bundock’s Alzheimer’s progressed he became more and more locked into his own world.

He withdrew into himself and stopped communicating with his wife, Jean.

Jean said Bill lost his motivation, and his desire and ability to hold conversations, but all this changed when the couple started attending a local sing-song group, aimed especially for people with dementia.

Jean said Singing for the Brain had unlocked Bill’s communication block. “

From The New York Times:

IN January 1915, when Virginia Woolf was 33, she and her husband, Leonard, resolved to do three things: lease a house outside London; acquire a printing press; and buy a bulldog. As Julia Briggs recounts in her intelligent and well-researched new biography of Woolf, the couple never got the dog, but the creation of the Hogarth Press – named after Hogarth House, their new home – significantly influenced 20th-century literature. Purposely seeking out “work that might not otherwise get into print,” they published T. S. Eliot, Katherine Mansfield and Woolf herself. Freed from commercial pressures, Woolf could now pursue her most “radically experimental” leanings, and in her formal innovation, she became a pioneer of modernism.

Today, some of Woolf’s books seem stylized, at times experimental for the sake of being experimental – “The Waves” comes to mind – but her most widely read and admired works, including “To the Lighthouse” and “Mrs. Dalloway,” are read and admired for a reason. Briggs’s subtitle pays tribute to Woolf’s exploration of the inner life, her ability to capture the nebulousness of the human experience as it plays out second by second and translate it, in thrillingly nuanced ways, into words.

More here.

From The Guardian:

Ever found yourself between a rock and a hard place? You loathe George Bush, for example, yet feel queasy looking to Michael Moore or George Galloway as your lodestar. You want to demonstrate against the war, or just against the handling of its fallout, but aren’t sure you want to march under the same banner as Bolsheviks for the Republic of Palestine.

If this strikes a chord, Al Franken is for you. As a hammer of Bush, Karl Rove and Co, the liberal comedian and nemesis of the right-wing shock-jocks has all of Moore’s wit and audacity and perhaps a touch of his ego, but avoids sounding like a propagandist. His latest book, subtle, laugh-or-cry-out-loud and ultimately devastating, is Michael Moore without the exclamation marks.

More here.

Italo Calvino never wrote a bad book. Yet an author of such diffusion, without a single, encompassing magnum opus to embrace (some readers will argue for “Invisible Cities,” but that ineffably lovely book shows too narrow a range of Calvino’s effects, too little of his omnivorous exuberance) needs a beginner’s entry point, as well, perhaps, as a compendium to point toward posterity. Does it seem sacrilegious to propose a fat volume called “The Best of Calvino”? Call it “Tales,” then, or “Sixty Stories.” Does it seem to do violence to choose from linked pieces, or from books long since enshrined in reader’s hearts in their present, inviolate state? It isn’t as though the individual volumes need to go out of print to make room for the career-spanning omnibus I have in mind. Perhaps you consider it impossible to choose from within a structure as organically perfect as “Invisible Cities”? Fine, then include the entirety of that short book, just as “The Thurber Carnival” found space for the whole of “My Life and Hard Times.”

more form the NY Times Book Review here.

Throughout the book, there are faint resonances of the intellectual prepossession with language that marked the era when “Cosmos” was written: the structural linguistics of Roman Jakobson, semiotics, the echo of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis of “linguistic relativity” (which posits not consciousness but language itself as the human capacity that creates and organizes reality).

I don’t know whether Gombrowicz was deliberately playing with the intellectual currents of his day or whether he was one of those seminal artists who give voice to questions scholars will later rationalize. It doesn’t really matter. What’s important is that the insight in these remarkable pages is creatively captivating and intellectually challenging. Perhaps Gombrowicz’s break-out attempt from the Nietzschean “prison house of language,” in which postmodernism so blithely accepts its life sentence, feels a bit quaint today. But it’s also true that in the 40 years since “Cosmos” was published, no one has done any better.

more from the NY Times Book Review here.

From The Washington Post:

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — International donors have pledged $5.4 billion in quake aid to Pakistan, surpassing the amount sought by the government, the prime minister said Saturday. The U.S. nearly tripled its pledge to more than half a billion dollars in a show of support for a key ally in the war on terror. The new pledges came at a donors conference attended by about 50 nations. Pakistan had hoped to get $5.2 billion for rebuilding from the Oct. 8 quake, which killed 86,000 people in its territory and another 1,350 in neighboring India. Before the conference, aid pledges totaled $2.4 billion but Pakistan had only received about 10 percent of it.

Musharraf said the calamity provided an “an opportunity of a lifetime” for Pakistan and archrival India to improve relations and resolve their dispute over Kashmir.

“If leaders fail to grasp fleeting opportunities, they fail their nations and peoples,” Musharraf told the conference. “Let success and happiness emerge from the ruins of this catastrophe, especially for the people of Kashmir. Let this be the Indian donation to Kashmir.”

More here.

From The New York Times:

APOCALYPTIC literature naturally gravitates toward the maudlin, lamenting that the world is going to hell in a handbasket, usually courtesy of someone like Eminem orTom DeLay. This is what makes Greg Critser’s “Generation Rx” such an unexpected delight. Although his message is unrelievedly depressing – drug companies, with the nation’s physicians and the federal government already on the payroll, have transmogrified a self-reliant nation into a herd of functional drug addicts – there is something so congenial and non-self-righteous about the way he tells his story that few of the scoundrels singled out for public obloquy will take personal offense.

Thus, describing the evolution of Glaxo from a sleeping giant to a juggernaut, Critser says that “in the boggy pharma jungle,” the company “swung on the vine of prior greatness while withering on stultifying British business practices.” Marveling at the liver, he writes, “It is the only organ that can, with time, regenerate itself, a kind of Donald Trump of the human body.” And he identifies Washington as “an unfathomable brothel to all but the Reverends Rove and Cheney.”

More here.

With how many people did people used to sleep? It’s hard to tell. Language changes, and there’s the problem of bragging. Take the French. Stendhal in his treatise on love is expansive on the seduction strategies of his friends (hide under the bed; announce yourself so late in the night that kicking you out would already be a scandal), but in The Red and the Black Julien Sorel sleeps with exactly two women—and for this they cut off his head! A generation later, the dissipated Frédéric Moreau hardly does any better in Sentimental Education. Flaubert himself mostly slept with prostitutes. In Russia, one could always sleep with one’s serfs, as Tolstoy did. (He felt terrible about it.) But peers, acquaintances, members of one’s own class? America was the worst. Henry James in his notebooks wonders if he should write a story about a man, “like W. D. H. [Howells], who all his life has known but one woman.” James had known zero women! Twenty years later, there was Greenwich Village. Edna St. Vincent Millay, riding back and forth all night on the ferry, was the most promiscuous literary woman of her time. But her biographer puts the grand total of her conquests at fourteen, and some of these, according to a rival biographer, are questionable—and three were “well-known homosexuals.” So ten. For the modern college senior, this is a busy but not extravagant Spring Break.

more from n+1 here.

The American painter Richard Pousette-Dart (1916-1992), whose very large late paintings are the subject of an enchanting exhibition at Knoedler & Company, was often described in his lifetime as the youngest of the Abstract Expressionist painters of the New York School. He was indeed younger than Pollock, de Kooning and a few other artists in that group, and his paintings were often exhibited with theirs. Yet in neither his art nor his life did Pousette-Dart have much in common with the artists of that group. For one thing, he was never any sort of Expressionist. The bravura gestural style that we associate with Pollock, de Kooning et al. was entirely alien to Pousette-Dart’s sensibility; so was the hard-drinking bohemian lifestyle of the painters who made the Cedar Tavern a favorite destination of art-world groupies. Pousette-Dart’s interest in the social life of the fashionable art world was practically nil. By temperament and conviction he was a family man, and his was a family of artists: His father was a painter and art writer; his mother a writer; and his children, too, have pursued careers in art and music.

more from Hilton Kramer at The New York Observer here.

His enemies, and God knows he has a few, often complain that Sewell’s love of art ends with Poussin. Anything later and he just isn’t interested. This is inaccurate. He has a ‘quite unreasonable passion’ for Joseph Beuys and loves the Chapman brothers. On balance, however, it is fair to say that he thinks that modern art is rubbish. ‘We’ve reached the point where Laurence Llewellyn-Bowen might as well be an artist; all he needs is an empty room and some chalk. We pee on things, we pee into things, we pee over things… and call it art.’ He is especially contemptuous of women artists. ‘Women are no good at squeezing cars through spaces. If you have someone who is unable to relate space to volume, they won’t make a good artist. Look at Barbara Hepworth – a one-trick pony. Look at that pile of rubbish in the Tate by Rachel Whiteread.’ I choose not to respond to this. He moves on. ‘This will end in disaster. In another generation, it will be inconceivable that anyone will be taught how to paint. The blind are leading the blind. The head of painting at the Royal College couldn’t paint a Christmas card.’ Does he find this depressing? ‘Not enormously. I’ve looked over the edge at death in the past few years enough times; when you’ve done that, you no longer find anything much very depressing.’

more from The Observer here.

From Science:

Humans and chimpanzees share at least 98% of their DNA, yet chimps are an endangered species while people have used their superior cognition to transform the face of the Earth. What makes the difference? A new study suggests that evolutionary changes in the regulation of a gene implicated in perception, behavior, and memory may be partly responsible.

Thirty years ago, geneticist Mary-Claire King and biochemist Allan Wilson proposed that changes in how genes are regulated, rather than in the proteins they code for, could explain important differences between chimps and humans (Science, 11 April 1975, p. 107). To test this hypothesis, an international team led by evolutionary biologist Gregory Wray of Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, focused on the gene that codes for the protein prodynorphin (PDYN), a precursor to a number of endorphins, opiatelike molecules involved in learning, the experience of pain, and social attachment and bonding. Humans carry one to four copies of a region of DNA that controls the expression of this gene. Human copies had five DNA mutations not seen in the other primates. The team concludes that the pattern is a solid example of natural selection acting on the human lineage after it split from the chimp line from 5 million to 7 million years ago.

More here.

From MSNBC News:

Wednesday’s appearance at the Paramount Theatre — presented by the Oregon-based Institute for Science, Engineering and Public Policy, or ISEPP — was the last of three scheduled stops on the Cambridge professor’s U.S. lecture tour. Hawking, who suffers from a progressive neurodegenerative disease that has almost completely paralyzed him, was due to travel to Seattle from San Francisco. But when he was taken off his respirator Monday morning, “he basically flat-lined,” said Terry Bristol, ISEPP’s president and executive director. “They had to resuscitate, and that panicked a few people,” Bristol told the audience. “But he’s been there before.” Once the crisis had passed, Hawking wanted to go ahead with the Seattle leg of the trip, but his medical caretakers — including his wife, Elaine — thought he should stay put awhile longer, Bristol said. So Hawking and his aides worked with Intel, ISEPP and the Paramount to set up a Web-based teleconferencing link from a Bay Area hotel.

“Many scientists were still unhappy with the universe having a beginning, because it seemed to imply that physics broke down,” Hawking said. “One would have to invoke an outside agency, which for convenience one can call God, to determine how the universe began.” Hawking traced how scientists have tried to address that conundrum using quantum theory, inflationary Big Bang theory and observations of the cosmic microwave background radiation — sometimes known as the Big Bang’s “afterglow.”

More here.

Said Hyder Akbar in Slate:

Here at Yale, most students turn to teachers and friends for advice in figuring out what they really want from college. But for me, the person who really helped me understand what I wanted was a guy writing to his wife in 1780. John Adams, in a letter to Abigail Adams, wrote, “I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain.” The quote, which I first read at the library while researching for a paper, really resonated.

When my native country, Afghanistan, was turned upside down in the fall of 2001—my senior year in high school—I became involved with a place I had never seen before. (I call it “native” because I was born a refugee in Pakistan, and my parents lived in Afghanistan for most of their lives.)

More here.  [Akbar is on the right in the picture.]

From The New Yorker:

George MacDonald Fraser’s twelfth book about the Victorian rogue and soldier Flashman, finds both the author and the hero in dauntless fettle, the former as keen to invent perils and seducible women as the latter is, respectively, to survive and to seduce them. Fraser, an Englishman schooled in Scotland, served with the Highland Regiment in India, Africa, and the Middle East, before settling on the Isle of Man. He has written other fiction, plus history, autobiography, and film scripts, besides serving as Flashman’s assiduous editor; the series is presented, under the over-all title “The Flashman Papers,” as its protagonist’s memoirs, which need only a few footnotes and spelling corrections to become excellent entertainments. It was a brilliant stroke of Fraser’s, in the first volume, “Flashman” (1969), to retrieve a minor figure in Thomas Hughes’s greatly popular, intensely Christian best-seller “Tom Brown’s School Days” (1857) and reanimate him as a lauded though inadvertent hero in the service of the British Empire.

More here.

Elizabeth Svoboda reviews The Lifebox, the Seashell and the Soul: What Gnarly Computation Taught Me About Ultimate Reality, the Meaning of Life and How to Be Happy by Rudy Rucker, in the San Francisco Chronicle:

A human brain, the assumption goes, is far more complex, incisive and unpredictable than any mere rules-governed machine.

Rudy Rucker thinks we’re all missing the point. If the affable computer scientist and sci-fi novelist had a mantra, it would be “Existence is computation.” Part technical treatise, part polemic, with a smattering of philosophy, Rucker’s magnum opus advances a red-hot firecracker of a thesis: Pretty much everything in the universe — Deep Blue, the human brain, the natural world and the way a soda can sprays when it’s cracked open — operates according to the same kinds of basic computational principles. He proposes that computation is everywhere in the same way pantheists assert that God is all around us.

Though Rucker defends this so-called “computational worldview” with all the zeal of a recent convert, his enthusiasm never becomes grating. His written demeanor is much more M. Scott Peck than Pat Robertson, and he is masterful at predicting and dispelling readers’ misgivings.

More here.