Justin E. H. Smith

We may as well start with a joke:

Primatologist to chimpanzee: “Bongo, bring me some food.”
(Bongo brings a pile of stones instead of food, and shows a wide, teeth-bearing grin.)

Alright, perhaps not a joke, really. More a primate proto-joke. However we classify it, though, I believe this report (based on a true story), gives us everything we need to generate a theory of humour. To get there, we will have first to do some propaedeutic work, in order to determine exactly what such a theory ought to explain, as also some metatheoretical work to explain where exactly such a theory fits in relation to other, similar projects.

1. The Funny and the Beautiful

Arthur Danto has noted that every systematic philosopher, whether a refined aesthete or a complete philistine, has at some point taken on the topic of art. One might add that nearly every one of these has included an account of wit, humour, jokes, comedy, or laughter, or some combination of these, within his theory of art and beauty. Why is this? Is gelastics –to borrow a neologism coined by Mary Beard from the Greek ‘gelan’: ‘to laugh’– a subdomain of aesthetics? Let us consider some of the reasons for holding such a view.

There seems to be a great similarity between the way people talk about the ‘aesthetic stance’ and the way they conceive the ‘sense of humour’. The perception of something as a joke or as a work of art requires a certain stance or perspective. Even if it is hard to say what this will be, it seems that the explanations for the one often serve just as well as accounts for the other. For example, Edward Bullough’s criterion of psychical distance, which would account for the reluctance theatre-goers feel at the thought of getting up to save Desdemona from Othello, seems to function in the same way to provide the moral distancing that enables one to laugh at a cruel joke (and most, perhaps all, jokes are cruel, a point to which we might return later).

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Anything to Declare?

My baby came to me this morning
She said “I'm kinda confused
If me and B. B. King were both drowning –
Which one would you choose?”

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By Namit Arora

The US pulled out of Vietnam (video) in 1975 after more than a decade and a humiliating defeat. The war had been expensive, the draft unpopular, and too many white boys had come home in body bags. A strong antiwar mood had set in amidst the public and the Congress. Most Americans now believed it was never their war to fight. The Nixon Doctrine held that “Asian boys must fight Asian wars.”[1] At least in the short term, direct military engagement in the third world seemed politically unviable for any US administration.

Besides Vietnam, the US had fought and lost another war in Indochina – in Laos – but rather differently. This was a proxy war, sponsored by the US but led by Hmong mercenaries on the ground. It was waged in relative secrecy, far from “congressional oversight, public scrutiny, and conventional diplomacy.” The advantages of such a war were soon evident: “Even at the end of the war, few Americans knew that in Laos, the USAF had fought ‘the largest air war in military history … dropping 2.1 million tons of bombs over this small, impoverished nation — the same tonnage that Allied powers dropped on Germany and Japan during WWII.’”[2]

In the 60s and 70s, anti-colonial and nationalistic struggles were cropping up in Africa, Latin America, and Asia. Blinded by its anti-commie paranoia, the US saw even popular movements for social and economic justice as precursors to communism, their leaders as Soviet proxies, and was determined to combat and crush them. But, given the unviability of direct military engagement on so many fronts, proxy war was the only military option left to the US. There was one minor obstacle though: how to finance all these proxy wars? Many Congressmen asked awkward questions, especially after the disaster in Indochina. When they agreed to fund, they wanted debates and oversight. The idea of a new, recurring source of money — bypassing the Congress — gripped the minds of many.

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Elatia Harris

Not long ago, I was leafing through an old notebook, of the kind kept by artists on the prowl for imagery. I found some 16th century recipes I’d copied out, lines rich with imagery that never made it into a painting. “If you yearn to turn a woman green,” one recipe urged, “decoct a chameleon into her bath.”

Whose thinking was this? I had his name, Giambattista Della Porta of Naples, and the work referenced was his 20-volume Magia naturalis ( The Book of Natural Magic), a compendium of popular science of the 1550’s that gave its author, then a very young man, renown almost beyond telling. Prof. Louise George Clubb, a scholar of Italian studies, writes of his reputation as a “wonder-worker who had penetrated the secrets of nature, and was expected at any moment to discover the philosopher’s stone.” The Duke of Mantua came to Naples for his sake, the Duke of Florence and the Emperor Rudolph sent emissaries. He was a seer, a cryptographer, a dramatist, a mathematician, a horticulturist, a physician – and so much more. A polymath, it used to be called.

And he could spare a thought for how to turn a woman green.

The painting under the title, Caspar van Wittel's View of the Largo di Palazzo, was painted after Della Porta's death, but shows a Naples that would have been familiar to him. That's the Royal Palace on the right, the old seat of the Viceroy, built in 1533. In the 1830's, it made room for the Teatro San Carlo. The church buildings on the left were demolished in the Neoclassical period for something grander — the ecclesiastical complex of San Francesco di Paola, with its vast colonnades. And it's no longer the Largo di Palazzo, but the Piazza del Plebiscito, renamed for the plebiscite in 1860 that brought Naples into the unified kingdom of Italy. So this is neither a view nor even a viewpoint — you can't stand just there — that can any more be had. Della Porta of Naples might recognize it today only as the largest public space in the city, with the red-walled Royal Palace, currently the National Library, a persistent gracious feature.

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by Meghan Falvey and Asad Raza

In 1981, Irish republican prisoners, led by Bobby Sands, conducted a hunger strike at HM Maze prison near Belfast. Steve McQueen's Hunger is an account of that strike. It opened in New York City on Friday, and we recommend you see the film before reading this.

Meghan: The restraint of your summary suits the movie, I think. I come to any movie or story about sectarian violence in Northern Ireland expecting that I'm going to be attacked with sentiment, with a light scrim of history thrown over a pretty standard David vs Goliath root-for-the-underdog set up. It bothers me that that stuff can get into my Irish-American lizard brain– I cried watching Ken Loach's The Wind That Shakes the Barley, and it was only partly out of frustration that I was susceptible to romantic nationalism. Also I expected another exercise in telling stories about recent history that are meant as metaphors for the American invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq and the War On Terror's illegal captures and torture. At the beginning of Hunger I felt like I braced for a similar assualt, and then it never came– I almost relaxed as it went on! The two Thatcher voiceovers were the closest thing to melodrama– what a ham she was! But that's enough, maybe, about what Hunger isn't. I watched it as a– well, what did you make of it?

Asad: The first thing that occurs to me to say to readers is: please see this beautiful, terrible film. I watch a lot of movies, and this one, from the first pounding sequence, felt fresh. More than fresh: new. There's lot to be said for letting a talented visual artist try to make a movie with total control–McQueen's technical confidence and maturity are so… there. There's a moment in the film where the Bobby Sands character breathes and as he does, there are three very brief dissolves to birds flying, and then back to Sands. He's near death. That brilliant use of an age-old technique–the dissolve–was so evocative and so sad that I cried. Even as a structure, the movie is very bold–it's a triptych in which the parts are almost totally distinct. (We have to talk about that middle “panel” in more detail below.) As for the politics of the film, which you bring up, I think they are my favorite kind: the politics of the body and not the body politic. Know what I mean?

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by Jennifer Cody Epstein

Online social networking is in the news of late–particularly as it applies to active, “older” users. Technically, that is me, though I’m inclined to dispute “older” as a demographic label (I’m 39! At least, according to Facebook’s Realage application). But I can’t argue that I’m active. Over the past year, in fact, I’ve gone on something of a cybernetworking binge, re-connecting with former classmates, “meeting” other writers, and composing lists of random facts, desert island playlists and theoretical “bail” estimates (645, if you’re interested. O.K., 645.50).

Like many earnest writers, I rationalize these lost hours as a sunk cost of doing e-commerce in the new millenium. After all, I have an upcoming paperback to promote. And with many publishers just discovering the brave new world of online publicity and the industry itself in screaming freefall, an internet presence seems as crucial to authors these days as family money, or jobs that actually pay. Which might explain why on some “work” days, I spend more time on my status update then I do on my second novel.

What I’ve had more trouble rationalizing, however, is the increasing chunk of time cybernetworking takes up in the lives of my daughters, eight and five respectively. Neither is on Facebook yet (a good thing, as I’d hate to defend my bail score to them. Particularly that last 50 cents). But they are both staunch fans of Club Penguin, a site that some see as a Facebook training ground of sorts.

I first learned about this parallel penguin world last year, when my eldest interrupted an important Facebook dispatch (a self-assessment of my general high school nerdiness) with a somewhat alarming question: “Hey Mom! What’s your Paypal password?”

“Uh–why do you need it?” I asked.

“I’m buying a penguin.”

Granted, a better answer than some of the alternatives (I’m getting a Snuggie! A Nigerian’s sending us money! Or worst of all: We’re eligible for a Disney cruise!) Still, the idea of a wet bird joining our psycho cat, attention-starved dog and two surly salamanders (soon to become one, thanks to either the dog or the cat) halted me in my cybertracks. And not only because the dog also happens to be a birder.

Putting aside, for the moment, the pressing question of whether or not my teen self was “considered a flirt” (it was not) I joined my eldest daughter—who was still trying to crack my bank account–on the couch. Repossessing my backup laptop, I backtracked a few pages. I found myself on a snow-covered island with several cheerful, oddly-dressed penguins. “Welcome to Club Penguin!” the site greeted me. “Waddle around and make new friends!”

“What is this?” I asked.

“Club Penguin,” Katie said, in a tone that suggested I’d just asked her to remind me of her name.

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by Jeff Strabone

Two famous men known for reinventing themselves have spent most of this decade in hiding: Osama bin Ladin and David Bowie. Away from the public eye, Bin Ladin has been busy releasing mixtapes of varying quality over the past few years, but Bowie not so much. Bin Ladin's listeners, at the CIA and around the world, are very devoted to his work: no matter the content or the production values, they really get into each of his new releases and perform close readings in order to make sense of the man and his œuvre. Bowie has his share of fans, too, myself included, who stand ready to parse his latest offerings, but he has not released a new album in almost six years. I think it's time he came out of his cave and faced the music. Aside from a handful of guest appearances with everyone from TV on the Radio to Scarlett Johanson, Bowie has been missing in action as a recording artist since September 2003 when he released his latest album Reality.

My friend Daniel F has suggested that it's far better for Bowie to wait out a potential creative dry spell than to make bad music. I intend to argue the exact opposite: that it is far better for a great artist to make bad work than to make no work. Yes, you read that right: I am demanding more bad art. And in Bowie's particular case, I hope to convince you to join me in asking him to get off the couch and release some new music, no matter how good or bad it may turn out to be.

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By Olivia Scheck

Whatever role one believes emotions should play in moral judgment, new research demonstrates that the influence of these low-level passions is profound. In fact, a study published in Science earlier this month suggests that many moral judgments are mediated by the same emotional mechanism that is activated by rotten leftovers and dirty socks.

“We started from this funny phenomenon where people will describe…moral offenses as ‘disgusting’…and we were wondering whether that actually means that people are feeling disgust,” explains Hanah Chapman, a graduate student in Psychology at the University of Toronto and the study’s lead author. “In its basic form [disgust] has to do with food and eating and really concrete things. So it was surprising to us that it might be involved in something as abstract as moral codes.”

To test this question, the authors used electromyography to compare the activation of facial muscles in response to bitter tastes, pictures of physically disgusting stimuli and, finally, moral transgressions. Not only was the disgust expression elicited in all three conditions, it was also shown to predict future moral decisions – suggesting not only that moral disgust exists, but that it is – to a surprising degree – driving our behavior.

Is disgust just a metaphor?
As Chapman notes, we often employ notions of disgust when describing social violations, claiming that such behaviors make us “sick” or leave “a bad taste” in our mouths. And in certain cases this makes some sense. Popular “moral” issues like abortion and sodomy may include elements of physical contamination, so it’s possible that this is what people are responding to when they describe these practices as disgusting.

But we also use these terms to describe moral violations that don’t involve physical contaminants – transgressions like dishonesty and theft. (As Adam Anderson, another of the study’s authors, points out, a Google search for “Blagojevich and disgust” yields around 49,000 hits. “Madoff and disgust” yields around 658,000.) Are we actually expressing disgust – the kind that is inspired by cockroaches and flatulence –in these instances? Or are these invocations simply metaphorical?

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On “the sequencing of the mathematical genome”

Mathematics is funnier than it gets credit for, and the best laugh I ever had about math involved a friend in college and a course so intimidating he almost quit his mathematics major after hearing the name. “Advanced Calculus—A rigorous approach,” it was called, a title that betrayed a martinet attitude. Whereas your average multivariable calc class was flabby and slack-ass, here you’d finally get some goddamn discipline, boy. You will throw up.

Word around the chalkboard was that every homework problem in “Advanced Calculus—A rigorous approach” required six sheets of paper, because you wrote out every nitpicky step and made every assumption explicit, no matter how obvious—not even arithmetic was taken for granted. For some reason I got endless delight terrorizing Mark by pointing out all the horrid, spindly-legged theorems in other books he would have to dissect in “Advanced Calculus—A rigorous approach,” predicting the logic would drive him actually mad. Every time I mentioned the class, I used its full draconian title, “Advanced Calculus—A rigorous approach,” and fear of it drove him to the brink both of hyperventilation and of dropping his major, which probably would have meant him dropping out of college.

Mark was spared by an administrative overhaul of the department, so he never took the class. For my part, I’d almost forgotten the whole incident until I came across a curious bundle of papers in a recent issue of the Notices of the American Mathematical Society—four treaties on the future of mathematical proofs, and specifically on how computers were going to take over a large burden of the work in mathematical proofs. However unpromising that topic sounds, it soon had my thoughts dilating like a marijuana smoker’s thoughts into all sorts of wild conjectures, because it turns out (1) “Advanced Calculus—A rigorous approach” was flabby and slack-ass compared to what’s coming in formal mathematics, and (2) the idea of mathematical beauty might soon be extinct.

First, a few lines of history (cribbed from the papers, natch): The first great revolution in math came from Pythagoras, Euclid, and the rest of the Greeks, who introduced the concept of proofs. You saw examples of this in your high-school geometry class. Next, in the 1800s, came the next big thing, rigor. Oddly, rigor in math is most easily recognized as a feeling—the scrotum-shrinking embarrassment that even people really, really good at college math feel upon realizing that some people are way the hell smarter. Namely, people who do original work in rigorous mathematics.

The next and latest revolution in math was the subject of the NAMS papers—formalization. Formalization means tracing math back to fundamental axioms, the kind of migrainous set theory that takes pages to explicate just why two is the successor of one. It turns out there’s currently a movement in mathematics—and the authors of the quartet of papers claim that not even most mathematicians realize at, or at least don’t admit it—but there’s a movement to make all mathematical proofs fully formal. To basically take a six-page homework problem from “Advanced Calculus—A rigorous approach” and apply even more destructive methods to every single line of that problem, expanding the amount of rigor geometrically if not exponentially.

Why? Because when you tease apart every atom of every line, you can actually convert very hard mathematical concepts into a series of very simple steps. The steps might seem stunted and overly obvious and useless, but they lo and behold add up to something in the end. It’s like someone explaining how a car engine works by starting with the theory of bolts screwing onto threads and going into incredibly arcane detail about it, and then repeating that nut-and-bolt explanation every time you came across another screw. You’d get pissed off, but you’d also probably understand how a car engine worked if he continued to break everything down to concepts that simple. That’s formal mathematics. And once you’ve checked all the ticky-tack steps between lines of a proof, you can be pretty darn sure it’s correct. One paper’s author called this “the sequencing of the mathematical genome.”

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By Maniza Naqvi

I focus hard on being polite to him. I don’t want to give myself away.

I ingratiate myself with every sentence and every gesture. I reach out and touch his arm, replenish the wine in his glass. He is visiting from Belgrade.

I gush about how wonderful this town is. How friendly and warm everyone is in Sarajevo, how kind and welcoming they are to strangers.

He smiles and asks me, 'Could you please tell me where is that place in the world where you have been and people are not friendly? Is there such a place where people are not nice to foreigners?

I keep my voice friendly. I could tell him of a few places he knows well. But I don’t say that. I keep smiling and talking.

I make sure that I'm smiling and so I send a mental message to my eyes to make sure they are complying and smiling too. I must appear easy, someone he can trust.

I look for points of commonality

I want to show him how a Pakistani and a Muslim is completely sympathetic, friendly, likable.

And I notice that as I listen to him—I believe him—I see his narrative as worthy of sympathy and plausibility.

He is showing me how a Serb, a Christian, is completely friendly, likable.

He is trying so hard—I can see through his smoothness.

I seize on the opportunity when he speaks nostalgically about the wonderfulness of Yugoslavia and how the Serbians miss the good times.

I tell him that the Bosnians feel the same way about Tito and Yugoslavia.

His eyes flash, 'I don't need to be told that,' he says. 'We know that—us—we Yugoslavians know how each other feels.'

It's as though he is saying to me, the foreigner, that he is so done with this, our outsiders interpretations, our interlocutions on his peoples’ behalf—and our narratives of them and on their behalf. He is done with the foreigners’ narratives of the people of Yugoslavia as though these were the truth itself.

His anger touches me. I feel the same way when 'foreigners' speak and write about Pakistan, India and Islam.

I am determined to ignore his constant need to counter each praise or nice word said about Sarajevo or Bosnians. And the constant undermining of what happened in the war. What happened in the war? I suddenly realize that my understanding is based on what has been told to me by Bosnians in the Federation and in the RS who are Muslims, Orthodox Christians and Catholic. I don't have any understanding of how things are understood in Serbia. How they view the world. It seems as though he sees Serbia as a place that is pristine and its people innocent of any crime at all. If there are any crimes, in his view, then they have been committed as crimes that any oppressed group is likely to commit. And have been committed by a lesser quality of Serb—the ones that reside in Bosnia.

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Part One: Grapholectic Thought and the Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness

by Daniel Rourke

“There are things,” Christoph Martin Wieland… contended, “which by their very nature are so dependent upon human caprice that they either exist or do not exist as soon as we desire that they should or should not exist.”

…We are, at the very least, reminded that seeing is a talent that needs to be cultivated, as John Berger saliently argued in his popular Ways of Seeing (1972) “…perspective makes the single eye the centre of the visible world.”

John A. Mccarthy, Remapping Reality

From the Greco-Roman period onwards humans have perceived themselves at the centre of a grand circle:

• The circle is physical: a heliocentric vision of the cosmos, where the Earth travels around the sun.

• The circle is biological: an order of nature, perhaps orchestrated by a benign creator, where the animals and plants exist to satisfy the needs of mankind.

• And according to Sigmund Freud, in his Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, the circle is psychological: where a central engine of reason rules over the chaos of passion and emotion.

The history of science maintains that progress – should one be comfortable in using such a term – contracted these perceptual loops. Indeed it was Freud himself, (the modest pivot of his own solar-system) who suggested that through the Copernican, Darwinian and Freudian “revolutions” mankind had transcended these “three great discontinuities” of thought and, “[uttered a] call to introspection”.

If one were to speculate on the “great discontinuities” that followed, one might consider Albert Einstein’s relativistic model of space-time, or perhaps the work carried out by many “introspective” minds on quantum theory. Our position at the centre of the cosmos was offset by Copernicus; our position as a special kind of creature was demolished by Darwin’s Theory of Evolution. From Freud we inherited the capacity to see beneath the freedom of the individual; from Einstein and quantum theory we learnt to mistrust the mechanistic clock of space and time. From all we learnt, as John Berger so succinctly put it, that “…perspective makes the single eye the centre of the visible world.”

Of course my mini-history of scientific revolution should not be taken itself as a “truth”. I draw it as a parable of progress, as one silken thread leading back through time’s circular labyrinth to my very own Ariadne. What I do maintain though, is that all great moves in human thought have come at the expense of a perceptual circle. That, if science, sociology, economics – or any modern system of knowledge – is to move beyond the constraints of its circle it must first decentre the “single eye”.

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Krzysztof Kotarski

Meanwhile Daedalus, hating Crete, and his long exile, and filled with a desire to stand on his native soil, was imprisoned by the waves.

‘He may thwart our escape by land or sea’ he said ‘but the sky is surely open to us: we will go that way: Minos rules everything but he does not rule the heavens.’

***

Sometime in 2003, after the ratings success of the tacky 100 Greatest Britons on BBC, a Polish polling company took a sample of its countrymen, asking for the “most outstanding Pole of the 20th century.”

Who polled first is probably no surprise. John Paul II always had a special hold on his countrymen, and by 2003, the aging pontiff was treated like a living saint. However, Nobel Prize laureates such as Marie Curie and Lech Wałęsa, or Golden Palm winner Andrzej Wajda, all took a backseat to a surprising second-place finisher.

Recognize him? Neither did I.

Adam Małysz, a ski jumper, came in second, behind the Polish Pope.

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Michael Blim

“This is America. We don’t disparage wealth. We don’t begrudge anybody for achieving success. And we believe that success should be rewarded. But what gets people upset – and rightfully so – are executives being rewarded for failure. Especially when those rewards are subsidized by U.S. taxpayers.”

Barack Obama, February 4, 2009

Barack Obama is a man of eminent good sense, whose strivings for balance and good measure are made more notable by the absence of similar aspirations among many members of the American political class. So, when it comes to America’s rich, he’s inclined to be benign, so long as they behave themselves and are benevolent in turn toward their fellow citizens. All he asks is for fairness in the marketplace and in the tax return. And the rich can be source of additional revenues, a sort of cash cow for the revised welfare state. As he told Joe “the Plumber” Wurzelbacher during the campaign: “I think when you spread the wealth around, it’s good for everybody.”

Obama’s moderation appears lost on America’s immoderate rich. Bonuses flow while the streams of jobs, credit, and profits run dry. They have driven the American economy over a cliff, but having clawed back their astonishing share of America’s income and wealth beginning with Reagan, they are not about to give it up. Instead, America’s rich are ginning up the corporate lobbies, right-wing think tanks, and suck-up foundations and charities to do battle for their privileges. The President during the last days of the campaign took to quoting the old leftist adage that “power is not going to give up without a fight,” while now he is content to rule in the name of simple fairness. Even the standard of fairness is anathema for all but a few of the rich, and they are throwing everything they have at him to drive the budget back from their corpulent comfort zone. Barack Obama, you were right: power won’t give up without a fight.

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I don't agree with most anything the pundits say about Obama's first weeks on the job, so I feel a little like a hooker working the Vatican: naked and cheap, with nothing but my distrust of men's motives to earn me a quick rhetorical buck.

I think Obama could be a transformative president a la George I'm-not-your-King Washington, or Abe Save-Our-Union Lincoln, or Teddy Trust-Buster Roosevelt, or Franklin New-Deal Roosevelt, or Lyndon Great-Society Johnson, or that poodle of the vampire elite, Ronald Trickle-Down Reagan.

After all, going by his budget, it looks like Obama is bringing back a New New Deal with a liberal vengeance. Through the smoke and ashes of our financial meltdown one can espy labor unions dancing on the graves of the rentiers. We finally have a president who is taking grownup responsibility for our country of childish things, and who is not, like most of his countrymen, quite ready to throw the least among us under the bus. He's smart enough and bold enough and kind enough to change our nation for the better, something it hasn't been since Martin Luther King got LBJ to sign off on Civil Rights.

But as smart as Obama is, he's got one major blundering bat in his belfry: he's still drinking the Kool-Aid of free-market fundamentalism — the vile, vicious, virulent voodoo virus that causes our otherwise sturdy capitalism to shit itself every few years.

Our pragmatism-over-ideology First Egghead has gone and attached to his nimble ankles a vexingly solid ball and chain.

The ball is Larry Summers, the Chief of the White House National Economic Council.

The chain is Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner.

Together they could drag Obama down to a one-term presidency.

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This text, which appears on 3QD as the third of a four-part post, was begun as a musing on the theme of series and repetitions in modern and contemporary art inspired by a challenge issued by an art historian colleague of mine. This post addresses the work of Georges Seurat, one of many artists who’ve worked in this manner. For the previous posts (parts I and II, considerations of Wade Guyton’s and Frank Stella’s work), click here and here.

Georges Seurat (1859–1891)

Best known for his bright pointillist paintings, Seurat was also a prolific draughtsman. While his paintings tended to feature large, multi-figure scenes, his drawings were more intimate. They can generally be divided into two categories—preparatory (or preliminary) versus primary: preparatory works such as Clowns and Banquistes (Street Performers) and Au Concert Européen (At the Concert Européen, MoMA) directly relate to his paintings; primary pieces like Groupe de gens (Group of People), Dans la rue (In the Street, also called The Couple), Promenoir (also called La dame en noir—Night Stroll or The Lady in Black), Au crepuscule (At Dusk), and Les jeunes filles (The Girls) were instead explorations done solely as drawings. Although his series of street scenes falls into the latter category, there are two drawings—both titled L’invalide (The Invalid) and completed between 1879 and 1881—which fall somewhere in between these two classifications. One is in Conté crayon (fig. 1), the other in pastel (fig. 2), and though both are illustrated in an early catalogue of his drawings [1], I was able to locate only the latter in a more recent text [2].

Fig. 1. Georges Seurat, L’invalide (The Invalid) Fig. 2. Georges Seurat, L’invalide (The Invalid)

Conté crayon on laid paper Pastel on wove paper, 1879–1881

Dimensions unknown 9 9/16 x 6 1/16 in. / 24.5 x 15.5 cm

Present location unknown Private Collection [3]

The so-called Invalid was a recurring theme in both art and literature, particularly in Germany and France in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and its popularity may have related to the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763) and the Franco-Prussian War (1870–1871), which left many wounded veterans in their wake. Plays dealing with the subject were popular [4], and a brief passage from Victor Hugo’s novel Les misérables could perfectly fit the figure in Seurat’s drawing: as the protagonist is crossing the Pont d’Austerlitz, he passes l’invalide du pont, a disabled war veteran who collects tolls from those crossing the bridge [5].

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One of the great achievements in the art of today will draw to its conclusion this Friday on the Sci-Fi Channel. If you're not familiar with Battlestar Galactica, but you admire superb filmmaking, literature, or the languages of symbol and myth; if the sci-fi genre gives you the geeky creepies, but you consider issues of government, history and technology to be critically important for our collective future – if you want to provide a superior education for your children of teenage years or above – I recommend marathoning the DVDs. The four-season show caps an extraordinary decade of accomplishment in a medium that we, for the moment at least, refer to as as “television”; however increasingly antiquated that word might sound.

A completely new type of televisual art has bloomed right under our noses, so quickly it's only just acquired a genre. (I hope the name's provisional. “Mega-movie” is pretty bad.) I prefer the term “video literature,” or “VidLit,” as the the college shorthand would have it: densely woven, symbolically rich, long-arc dramas with a large ensemble cast of rounded, three-dimensional characters who mature and evolve. In this category we'd place, among others, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Firefly, The Wire, Deadwood and Veronica Mars.

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Hydrant
Jim Culleny

Steel sentinel on our street.
Its domed yellow cap
topped with a wrench-ready fitting,
its three short blue arms wrench-ready too,
its stumpy red torso squat in the snow
ringed round its base with brown March mush
in late winter when our longing for sun
is most poignant; when it hallucinates
buds and birds;
when it wants to crank the earth
a little further along in its revolution
at least a months-worth more into its arc
to sooner reach that sweet relationship with Ra;

—it’s then I ask Ra to ask you to love me
as I love you until Hell freezes over or
until Ra’s firemen hook-up the waters of love
to douse the devil’s rival flame, or till I wise up,
whichever comes last.

His name is Sandor Krasna, and that's most of the information we have about him. All other qualities of Sans Soleil's verbose, peripatetic protagonist must be inferred from the wrong side of several layers of intermediation. Practically all the footage shown resides on film attributable to Krasna's camera, and practically all the words spoken reside on letters attributable to Krasna's pen. Krasna's shots are linked into a 100-minute collage atop which a nameless female voice, presumably that of Krasna's pen pal, reads the traveling cameraman's meandering, observational missives. The result is one of the most remarkable essay films ever assembled.

The trouble with whipping out the phrase “essay film” is, of course, the need to define the phrase “essay film”. Why not just call Sans Soleil a documentary? The most basic objection is that, well, Sandor Krasna isn't real. He's a fictional character, just like his electronic composer brother Michel Krasna (credited with the score); just like his unidentified female friend, the recipient of so much correspondence. The movie has a whole, if small, cast of players that go unseen, existing only as text, voice, music and an eye through a lens. Marker's choices about how to convey these characters, like many of the choices that make up Sans Soleil, allow — and in fact, force — so much to be generated solely in the viewer's imagination. One might loosely describe the film as a travelogue through time and geography, from mid-1960s Iceland to early-1980s Guinea-Bissau, Cape Verde and Japan, but only because those places are where most of Krasna's footage is shot and provide the raw subject matter for his ruminations. It's up to the mind, conscious or unconscious, of each individual audience member to construct the connective tissue between the shots, the words and the observations. It's not a non-narrative film, exactly; it's simply a film with an emergent narrative, one that differs from mind to mind.

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by Asad Raza

Denis Dutton is the author of The Art Instinct.

Dear Professor Dutton,

Thanks for agreeing to read this; your generosity is much appreciated. Your book is wide-ranging and compendious, so I'll confine my remarks to three topics: landscape painting, Austen's Pride and Prejudice, and Duchamp's Fountain. One thing I am not very interested in, I will say up front, is replaying another of the confrontations that have marked so many discussions of the application of Darwinian ideas to higher human functioning (think: Eagleton v. Dawkins). Those antagonisms, in my opinion, are much more symptomatic of a two-cultures clash than of any useful disagreement, and, worse, they prevent any meaningful conversation: each side simply rejects the other tout court. I hope to avoid the aggrieved and defensive tone of such confrontations. I will, however, try to speak my mind as clearly as I can, with the object of a generative exchange, rather than a head butt.

I'll start with the thing that confused me most about the book: I thought it would be more scientific. As you know, Darwinians are often charged with coming up with only quasi-plausible stories about the Pleistocene Era origins of some human behavior and asserting them without any evidence: “Just So Stories,” after Kipling. I assumed you would attempt to counter this by basing your observations on universal tendencies in art-making (if there be any such). Your first chapter cites a survey finding that human beings are attracted to a certain type of landscape, which you point out resembles the most habitable savanna landscapes of the Pleistocene: “a landscape with trees and open areas, water, human figures, and animals.” You hypothesize that people are attracted to such landscapes innately, and that is why calendars tend to feature them. When we are pleased by such a landscape, you conclude magisterially, “we confront remnants of our species' ancient past.”

It seems to me that two problems occur here. First, this is a classic Just So story: you present no genetic evidence for this affinity for savanna landscapes. A love of sunsets and sunrises seems equally popular around the world; let's say I argue that that is an innate preference. You might reply that your landscape is the best one for human habitation–hunting and shelter and running water and so on–and thus a preference for it would be an adaptive advantage. I might reply that the preference for sunsets and sunrises confers an advantage because those times have a heightened importance, as periods in which the sun signals that one should plan for the coming day or ready oneself for the fall of night, as a great but short time to hunt and fish, etc., etc. A third person comes along and says, “You're both being silly. Both preferences are obviously adaptive. That's why there are so many beautiful paintings of landscapes at sunset and sunrise!” In the absence of evidence, we are left with a contest of who has the more compelling anecdote. This is not the scientific method.

The second problem has to do with the identification of landscape painting with universal pleasure. Obviously, some landscape painting is meant to be beautiful and thus pleasurable, especially in European painting between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. But just because this particular genre of painting (lasting only ten generations or so) has some analogues in Eastern painting does not establish, to my satisfaction at least, that humans innately take pleasure in such pictures. To the contrary, most forms of painting, including that which decorates the caves in Lascaux, do not depict perspectival landscapes. Also, much landscape painting does not produce pleasure but fear and awe (think of Friedrich, or Turner). Isn't it just as likely that landscapes with a certain perspective view, from high ground, with sublime natural features such as high mountains at a safe distance, but with an enticingly serpentine river or path winding from foreground to background, producing a sense of exploration and travel, became popular when they did for historical reasons? And, having become popular, were later spread around the world, after technologies for the mass reproduction of images were invented, in the lowbrow form of calendars? Finally, even if you had a strong scientific case as to why humans take pleasure in looking at certain kinds of landscapes, that doesn't explain why paintings of such landscapes have at some times in some places been considered art, which does not mean simply pleasurable things–what you are arguing for (a love of calendar landscapes) might be better called “The Kitsch Instinct.”

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You know, I don't like asteroids. I don't know why. I just don't like them.

The International Commission On Planetary Dangers was formed in the year 2011 to protect Earth from asteroids, comets, and other space objects. One such object created a 15 megaton explosion when it hit the remote Tunguska region of Russia in 1908. A larger strike could well cause the extinction of all life on the planet.

An orbiting ring of space stations was created to meet the threat, each armed with an array of telescope 'eyes' and a set of nuclear missiles. The system's computers were linked via the “Interplanetary Internet” so that they formed a seamless whole, a meta-computer capable of simulating cognition and intelligent behavior.

The only thing missing was an overall “personality” for this intelligent system. After all, it would need to interpret incoming information, make decisions, and be prepared to act decisively – and it had to be willing to do so for all eternity. A human model was needed, one with precisely the right combination of drives, obsessions, and talents. After an exhaustive search the team settled on an aging but still-popular newsman and television personality: Andy Rooney.

Rooney's personality was ideally suited to the task. Researchers found that he was capable of forming lasting dislikes for inanimate objects …

Asteroids? Lovely? Not in my book. They're stubbly, gray, and pockmarked.

If Richard Nixon were a planet he'd be an asteroid.

I just don't like the look of them.

He had an irresistible urge to catalog the objects of his dislikes …

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