June 16, 2017 On the Shelf The Silicon Valley Cult Wants to Eat Your Brain, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Join us, won’t you? Liberal-arts majors: no matter how bad things get, how valueless your diploma seems to be, or how limited your employment opportunities are, never forget that you can always just pack it in and become a tech bro. It’s true: Silicon Valley, the utopia of our time, will always be there, waiting to suck the marrow from your bones in an exchange for a six-figure salary and an “office culture” that boasts free microbrews (and rampant sexism). So don’t get depressed—just join the baddies! In a new review of Scott Hartley’s The Fuzzy and the Techie—a book that argues for more liberal-arts values in the tech industry—Tom Slee sees merely another effort to get humanities types to drink the Palo Alto Kool-Aid: “Hartley’s The Fuzzy and the Techie (fuzzy being a Stanford nickname for humanities and social science students) is a clarion call for you to join the world of digital disruption, innovation, and entrepreneurship. The author contends that Silicon Valley needs you if it is to fulfill the next stage of its disruptive vision: your creativity and your skills of ‘critical thinking, logical argumentation, and complex problem solving’ will make for better technology; your insights into our public institutions and what makes us human will guide technology to build a better world … But there is a critical failure at the heart of The Fuzzy and the Techie: in his eagerness to portray fuzzies doing well by doing good in the technology industry, Hartley too readily accepts Silicon Valley’s flattering self-descriptions of its values and vision for the world. The positivity of entrepreneurship does not sit comfortably with the skeptical outlook that the liberal arts nurture, and Hartley fully embraces entrepreneurship.” Today’s arts conservators, Jacoba Urist writes, face an unprecedented variety of materials and media—the burden of preserving a piece of art has never been more fraught: “It’s difficult to imagine bologna portraits transcending millennia like a classical marble bust or centuries like a Rembrandt. Getting a sculpture made of deli meat to survive the decade could even be a stretch … Today’s art world is filled with artists using seemingly banal, yet wacky household items—from a miniature Algerian town made of couscous to a huge Styrofoam cup cloud—elaborate, significant work that challenges not only what art is, but how exactly, future generations will be able to experience it … These artists are using products that are meant to decompose rapidly by design. For this segment of twenty-first-century art, museums are consciously conserving art as it’s created. Now, scientists must invent ways to preserve the most tenuous of materials, rather than simply restoring pieces to their original—or most authentic—luster.” Read More
June 15, 2017 On the Shelf Long May Your Walrus Snooze, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring From Conrad Gesner’s Icones Animalium, 1560. Image via Public Domain Review. Ours is a sad era, for we have lost our ability to marvel at the walrus. We may chuckle at the walrus, sure, or name magazines after it, or claim that it is Paul McCartney. But just look at the walrus! Have you ever seen something so extraordinary? In the sixteenth century, a walrus marked the outer limits of exotica—to conceive of one was to dabble in a realm of chimera and myth. As Natalie Lawrence writes, Olaus Magnus’s seminal History of the Northern Peoples (1555) sought to portray the wonders of the far-off north—mostly by concocting them or stealing them from other old books—and one of these wonders was the walrus, or morse, a creature so inexorably magical that it was liable to fall asleep while clambering around and supping the dew from the wet grasses: “Magnus wanted to present the North as an impenetrable region of wonders and marvels—flesh-eating Scricfinns, magicians, vast whirlpools, and flaming volcanoes—at the very edge of the known world. Importantly, he wanted to portray wonders that were resonant to an audience in Catholic Southern Europe … To do so, he used practical, local information, but, ironically, also based much of his description on classical scholarship and Southern European perceptions of the north. He was reigniting images of the ‘septentrional lands’ rather than generating them: selling mythologies back to the traditions that had created them. The morse was one such arctic wonder. Magnus went on to relate how ‘using their tusks, these animals clamber right up to the cliff-tops, as if they were going up a ladder, in order to crop the sweet, dew-moistened grass, and then roll back down into the sea again, unless, in the meantime, they have been overcome with a heavy drowsiness and fall asleep as they cling to the rocks.’ Hunters would sneak up on the napping behemoths, tie ropes around their tails, and, from a safe distance, wake the animals with a hail of stones.” At an exhibition of diaries in London, John Mullan has chanced upon something sublime: “One of the weirdest diaries (if that is the right word) sampled here is one Peter Fletcher’s record of all his sneezes since July 2007. Each entry describes where he was and what he was doing when he sneezed. Not very interesting, you might think (perhaps not very trustworthy: Can he always be recording the circumstances before they are forgotten?). Yet Fletcher’s filmed commentary on his project is an absurdist version of what was once the religious self-discipline of diary-keeping. The point, he explains, is to cheat his own preconceptions about what is important in his life. Which is just what a true Christian was once trying to do.” Read More
June 14, 2017 On the Shelf Your Patron Is Holding You Back, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring No place for decent people. If you’re buying a new home, avoid the intersection of Art and Commerce. It’s no place to raise a family. Out on the streets you’ll find foppish aesthetes and sturdy banker types in three-piece suits, variously copulating with and murdering one another at all hours of the night. The sidewalks are littered with cigar butts and paperbacks, many of them used. This week has seen an especially nasty accident there: Delta Airlines and Bank of America pulled their funding from a Shakespeare in the Park production of Julius Caesar in which the emperor takes on a distinctly Trumpian tint. (Spoiler: he is stabbed.) As Justin Davidson argues, the takeaway here is not that the American public is too foolish to “get” Caesar or that corporations are lumbering, amoral agents of ignorance and destruction—we knew that already. Instead, the controversy illustrates just how vexed our expectations of corporation patronage have become: “Neither art nor money is a neutral force … To pretend that people who write checks have an abstract duty to fund an artistic enterprise without caring about the result is naïve. Most of the time the decision whether to fund a novel, a new piece of music, or an exhibition is made long before these works see the light of day. The Public’s Julius Caesar is a rare instance of a donor’s after-the-fact judgment, but that doesn’t make it outrageous … Corporations often fund the arts as a way of cleansing reputations they have sullied through their business practices or products, and money-hungry organizations have to decide how willing they are to play the game … Organizations slaver over big-ticket philanthropists who can jump-start a construction project, ensure a blockbuster exhibition, or pay for a production by writing a single check. Pursuing them usually means arguing that the work they’re paying for will exhilarate more people than it will anger. Dependence on donors, by its nature, nudges the arts toward traditionalism and conservatism.” Lynette Yiadom-Boakye is a portraitist with a devastating secret: none of her subjects are real. I, too, gasped. The impudence. The temerity! And yet, as Zadie Smith writes, it all works out: “Yiadom-Boakye’s people push themselves forward, into the imagination—as literary characters do—surely, in part, because these are not really portraits. They have no models, no sitters. They are character studies of people who don’t exist. In many of Yiadom-Boakye’s interviews, she is asked about the source of her images, and she tends to answer as a novelist would, citing a potent mix of found images, memory, sheer imagination, and spontaneous painterly improvisation (most of her canvases are, famously, completed in a single day). From a novelist’s point of view, both the speed and the clarity are humbling. Subtleties of human personality it might take thousands of words to establish are here articulated by way of a few confident brushstrokes. But the deeper beguilement is how she manages to create the effect of wholly realized figures while simultaneously confounding so many of our assumptions about the figurative … Who is this? The answer is both literal and liberating: No one.” Read More
June 13, 2017 On the Shelf Prog Rock Will Not Save Your Soul, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring The gatefold cover of King Crimson’s LP In the Court of the Crimson King. Why prog? Of all the varieties of music that can or could exist, what made progressive rock come slithering out of the human mind and into the historical record? These questions haunt everyone but certain British and American men, who regard prog as their birthright: in the glittering virtuosity and nonsense mythology of bands like King Crimson and Yes, they hear the drumbeat of some distant utopia. Critics have tried and tried again to figure out why certain white men enjoy prog while the rest of us back away slowly from it. Reviewing David Weigel’s new book on prog, The Show That Never Ends, Kelefa Sanneh samples a few compelling explanations: “In 1997, a musician and scholar named Edward Macan published Rocking the Classics … Noting that this artsy music seemed to attract ‘a greater proportion of blue-collar listeners’ in the U.S. than it had in Britain, he proposed that the genre’s Britishness ‘provided a kind of surrogate ethnic identity to its young white audience’: white music for white people, at a time of growing white anxiety. [The philosophy professor] Bill Martin, the quasi-Marxist, found Macan’s argument ‘troubling.’ In his view, the kids in the bleachers were revolutionaries, drawn to the music because its sensibility, based on ‘radical spiritual traditions,’ offered an alternative to ‘Western politics, economics, religion, and culture.’ ” Here’s some cocktail-party humiliation that’s sure to land with a splash. Ask a fellow partygoer, Which Cyril Connolly book have you been reading? If they answer at all, they very probably will not say The Unquiet Grave—and when they fail to say it, you can laugh at them mercilessly and then cite this Brian Dillon piece, which argues for The Unquiet Grave as an interesting flop: “If his friends are to be believed, Cyril Connolly was a monster of sloth and self-regard. And yet, what an endearing figure he cuts—if that’s the verb, with Connolly—through their letters and memoirs: maundering over failed affairs of heart or wallet, brimming with excuses for his books unwritten, ever ready to start afresh with the bubbles when the night wore on. Connolly’s narrow reputation now rests largely on the mixture of memoir and high literary journalism in Enemies of Promise (1938), and not on his single novel The Rock Pool (1936), or the several collections of reviews he later packaged in lieu of proper books. Fewer still today are references to The Unquiet Grave: the odd, fragmentary ‘word cycle’ he published under the pen name Palinurus in the autumn of 1944. But this is the book—an essay, an anthology, a complaint—in which the contradictions in Connolly’s talent and personality fail to resolve with the strangest, most seductive results. Here he anatomizes his worst traits: laziness, nostalgia, gluttony, hypochondria, some essential frivolity of mind that means his writing will always be summed up as ‘brilliant—that is, not worth doing.’ ” Read More
June 12, 2017 On the Shelf Paper Does the Impossible, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Photo: Craig Kaplan, via Nautilus. It’s always nice to discover a new use for paper. Sometimes it seems as if all the good ones have been taken. Writing on it, wrapping fragile objects in it, wiping with it—these are old news. But, as Evelyn Lamb writes, mathematicians have fairly recently begun to use it to make impossible objects. Paper’s “wiggle room” affords it a kind of impossible latitude: “Using stiff paper and transparent tape, Craig Kaplan assembles a beautiful roundish shape that looks like a Buckminster Fuller creation or a fancy new kind of soccer ball. It consists of four regular dodecagons (twelve-sided polygons with all angles and sides the same) and twelve decagons (ten-sided), with twenty-eight little gaps in the shape of equilateral triangles. There’s just one problem. This figure should be impossible. That set of polygons won’t meet at the vertices. The shape can’t close up. Kaplan’s model works only because of the wiggle room you get when you assemble it with paper. The sides can warp a little bit, almost imperceptibly … It is a new example of an unexpected class of mathematical objects that the American mathematician Norman Johnson stumbled upon in the 1960s … Not only does this niggling near-perfection draw the interest of Kaplan and other math enthusiasts today, it is part of a large class of near-miss mathematics.” Andrew Sean Greer has your occasional reminder that the literary-prize racket is an ego parade with no value whatsoever to writing and reading: “There’s a great book by James English, The Economy of Prestige, in which he examines literary prizes and what they are about. Basically: an exchange of prestige for either money or another kind of prestige. Prizes evolve to serve themselves. They have nothing to do with actual writing … It’s like wanting a wedding—that’s not something to want. A wedding? Then what? You want a good relationship. A prize? Then what? You want to write something you’re proud of. Like, today, on the page. It’s easy to forget that’s the only real pleasure that writers have. And yet all the writers I know seethe when they aren’t acknowledged … But what if you knew a masterpiece had been written that year? And was ignored?” Read More
June 9, 2017 On the Shelf We Deserve a Pink Guggenheim, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring What might have been. Image via the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives (The Museum of Modern Art | Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York). Name a building that’s whiter than the Guggenheim. I’ll bet you can’t—no matter which sense of white you’re using. But let’s go with the most literal one. The museum used to be a beige, inoffensive, neutral color that probably everyone was fine with except for Robert Moses, who compared it to “jaundiced skin.” And so it was whitewashed. But Frank Lloyd Wright, as Michael Kimmelman notes in a new piece, had toyed with the idea of making it pink or even magenta—one way to make it pop off the sidewalk amid the drab skyline of a city he hated. Kimmelman writes, “In 1957, Frank Lloyd Wright, ninety and still tirelessly hawking himself as America’s greatest architect, sat for a television interview with a young, chain-smoking Mike Wallace. Does New York’s skyline excite him, Wallace asks. ‘It does not,’ Wright says. ‘Because it never was planned—it’s all a race for rent, and it is a great monument I think to the power of money and greed’ … Wright is still, sixty years after his death, a man for our times, image savvy, fighting to stay on top of the architectural heap by mastering a swiftly evolving media landscape … New York was never Wright’s idea of America. Elizabeth Hawley, from City University of New York, digs into archival drawings for Nakoma Country Club, a golf resort in Wisconsin, where Wright appropriated Native American art and artifacts for a decorative scheme as part of his larger project to define and own ‘Americanness’ … Wright was also a man of his own times, in other words, a bundle of competing ideas.” Emily Bloom looks at the influence of BBC Radio on Irish writers, especially Seamus Heaney, who credited the sounds of the radio for launching “his journey into the wideness of the world beyond”: “The ‘gutturals and sibilants’ of the foreign broadcasters initiate Heaney into the diversity and complexity of the spoken word … Earlier generations of Irish writers, including W. B. Yeats, Elizabeth Bowen, Louis MacNeice, and Samuel Beckett, describe similar experiences beginning in the 1930s. For these writers, radio was an important influence, offering a powerful mass medium for the spoken word. For the first time, people could listen to a distant speaker in the privacy of their homes. Writers were especially drawn to the new medium because it created a platform for the spoken word at a time when print culture had all but erased the last vestiges of oral traditions on the British Isles … When I began researching in the BBC archives I was surprised both by the number of Irish writers who turn up and at the ways they credit the radio medium with shaping not only what they write, but how they write.” Read More