On the Conservation of Matter and Greed

Aesthetics & Objects: Through the Glory Hole

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Bleg: Stepping in Tristram Shandy

I vaguely recall there was a point in Tristram Shandy when Walter was coming down the stairs and, in mid-step BIG DIGRESSION it goes on for some 10, 20, 30 pages and then rejoins Walter on the stairs, completes his step, and rejoins that thread of the story. Does anyone know where that was?

String 'em up!

Heart of Darkness: Some Working Papers

I have prepared three working papers based on my Heart of Darkness commentary to date. These are available on my SSRN (Social Science Research Network) page as follows:

The Nexus in Heart of Darkness: A Working Paper

Abstract: Heart of Darkness is a novella that is roughly 38,000 words long and divided into three sections. The longest paragraph in the text, the nexus, is in the second half of the second of the three sections. It is structurally central to the text, making it a tale3 (the nexus) within a tale2 (Marlow’s tale) within a tale1 (the unnamed narrator’s tale). Within the nexus we find a phrase, a so-called Latour Litany, that spans the ontological dimensions of the story. This paper concludes with an annotated copy of the nexus paragraph.

Includes these posts:

• “Ontology at the Heart of Darkness”
• “The Heart of Heart of Darkness”
• “Heart of Darkness 6: Some Informal Notes about the Nexus”

Tytla and the Devil

Michael Sporn's just published scans of some of Bill Tytla's drawings for Chernobog, the devil/demon from the "Night on Bald Mountain" sequence of Fantasia. Must See.

Moral Imperative, Yeah!

We’ve Got the Time (to Rationalize the Text)

A humanist function for the academic literary critic

Over at Andrew Goldstone’s Arcade discussion of close reading, I made a comment about evaluation, one of the issues raised in the discussion. Here’s much of what I said:

Evaluation is a tricky business. I've recently been looking at Apocalypse Now and came across this 2001 review of Apocalypse Now Redux by AO Scott. To simplify a bit, what he says is: a) this is the greatest film since sliced bread, but b) the ending didn't make a lick of sense then (the 1979 'original' cut) and doesn't make any sense now, but at least there's proportionally less of it (because new footage has been added). So, how can it be great while at the same time having an ending, THE ending no less! that doesn't at all work? Sure, call it a flawed masterpiece. But that's an awfully big flaw in something you declare to be a masterpiece.

What I'm wondering is this: Did the ending fail for Scott in the theater, which is why he's mentioning it in his review? Or did it work for him in the theater, but, when he puts on his critic's hat, he can't for the life of him rationalize it. It doesn't fit any pattern of story logic that he knows so it must be incoherent.

There’s a bit more, but we can skip it for now. I want to dwell on the fact that evaluation is difficult. Actually, I don’t even want to get that far. I want to think about the fact that talking about texts, including, of course, movies, in a precise and apt way, is difficult. It’s a learned skill, preferably learned under the tutelage of expert teachers.

I remember how I felt in literature courses during my first two years at Johns Hopkins. I was lost when I came to commenting on the texts myself and amazed at the things my professors did manage to say. The fact of the matter is that, for any given text, I was pretty much at the mercy of the last thing I’d read about it or heard in lecture. Without those prompts I had no way in. Once someone else had taken me into the text, then I could begin to move around and see a thing or two for myself.

But it wasn’t until my senior year that I felt at all comfortable “breaking open” a text (almost, more or less) on my own. Of course it had taken me three years worth of literature courses—but also philosophy, psychology, and anthropology—to get there. During that time I learned about various things to look for in a text and I picked up a repertoire in conceptual tropes and moves to use in commenting about those ‘things’ I’d learned to see. Once my repertoire of things to see and things to say had grown large enough, and my command over the repertoire had become sure enough, then, and only then, was I ready to venture out on my own, as it were.

I learned the repertoire from my teachers, and from books and articles they assigned or that I found on my own. But how did they learn their repertoires? Well some of them, say Hillis Miller or Earl Wasserman, may have discovered a thing or two to see and a thing or three to say about it. But much of what they saw and said, they learned it from their teachers and from critical texts they’ve read.

Wounds

Photographing Graffiti

Photographs have been with graffiti almost from the beginning. When The New York Times did its article on Taki 183 it ran a photograph of his tag. When Norman Mailer wrote his extended essay, The Faith of Graffiti, he was chasin’ Jon Naar’s superb photos. Without those photos the essay would have been pompous and overblown. With them, it reaches the mark.

Now look closely at Naar’s photos (some of them are here). There’s not a single piece (aka masterpiece), as they’ve come to be called, among them. Here and there you see something that’s on the way to being a piece, but none are there yet.

The thing about pieces is that they provide a natural frame to the image. So the photographer doesn’t have to think about composition. Just ‘hit’ the frame and you’ve got it.

Naar didn’t have that luxury. He wasn’t looking at framed art. He was looking at tags on walls, tags and tags and more tags and somewhat more elaborate letters and some shapes here and there. But no frames. He had to do the framing himself. With his eye, in his mind. That takes skill.

* * * * *

It’s easy to see why pieces arose. Writers wanted to distinguish themselves among their friends and other writers, and, incidentally, to attract the photographers to their work. So they did ever more elaborate work, and, in time, piecing emerged as a distinct form of graffiti, along with tags and throw-ups. By the time Martha Cooper and Henry Chalfant published Subway Art (1984) pieces were ubiquitous.

In fact, Chalfant’s studio became a haven for many writers, as Gastman and Neelon explain in The History of American Graffiti (p. 115):

By 1979, he had amassed a substantial collection of images, and when he met DAZE, KEL 1ST, MARE 149, SHY 147, and CRASH at the 149th Street bench that year, he invited them to see his images. For the artists, seeing Chalfant’s professional photography of their work and that of their peers for the first time was an astonishing experience.

At a show at OK Harris gallery in 1980, Chalfant met Martha Cooper, a photojournalist who had found her way into the graffiti scene through the phenomenally talented East New York writer DONDI. The pair began assembling a book together, but also became friends and allies of graffiti writers at a time when graffiti, however spectacular, had few friends in the adult world. Chalfant’s studio in SoHo became a gathering point for writers: Chalfant would share his images and art books with the writers, and the writers would call Chalfant and Cooper to tell them where they had painted a new train in a certain yard so they would know where to go to get the picture.

Then there’s the fact that graffiti on the subway cars didn’t last. Either it was gone over by other writers, “buffed” by the city, or eroded by the weather. Whatever happened, the work was gone. So writers, some of them, took photos of their work. You paint during the night, then you hang out by the track the next day and snap a photo as the train goes by. The photo became the persisting, if not quite permanent, much less eternal, record of the work.

"The walls are alive . . . "

CamoGraff, No Man's Land, JC

Vandalog has posted notice of Atlanta's Living Walls conference:

Later this month, Atlanta is going to be taken over by street artists from around the world for this year’s edition of the Living Walls conference, Living Walls: the City Speaks. From the 12th-14th of August, there will be film screenings, lectures and artists painting murals around the city. Living Walls have brought together an impressive artist roster from around the world including (but not limited to) Doodles, Swampy, Gaia, Roa, Labrona, OverUnder, Sam3, Freddy Sam, White Cocoa, Nanook, Greg Mike, Paper Twins, Clownsoldier and Gawd. And I can’t complain about the keynote speakers either: Tristan Manco, Gaia, Ricky Lee Gordon and me.

The famous song actually goes (cue Julie Andrews): The hills are alive, with the sound of music . . . Perhaps it needs to be rewritten: The walls are alive, with graffiti talking . . . Who's gonna' sing it?

An Ontological Moment in Human Thought?

Are we looking at an ontological moment in human thought?

On the one hand, we have the rise of Object-Oriented Ontology in the Continental philosophical tradition.

But we also have the fact that “ontology” has become a term of art in the knowledge representation division of cognitive science and AI. An ontology, in this sense, is the list of different kinds of things—animal, vegetable, mineral—one must include in a domain model in order to represent that domain in a computer program. As such, it entails no direct commitment to what’s really out there in the world; rather, it’s just how we think about the work.

Q: But how we think about the world is changing, no?

A: Yes.

Back in 1979 psychologist Frank Keil published Semantic and Conceptual Development, which is about how children develop ontological concepts. How do they distinguish living from non-living, and when do they first do it? Plants from animals? Like all good thinkers, of course, he sets it up with a review of the background. There is, way way long ago, Aristotle’s Categories, which he covers, But it’s the more recent history that interests him, Bertrand Russell and Gilbert Ryle, who “proposed theories that relate predictability to ontological categories” and some work originating in logic from the early 1960s by Fred Sommers that encompasses the two.

The notion of ‘category mistake’ is key. For example, “The cow was an hour long” (from Keil p. 3) simply doesn’t make sense. One cannot measure the length of cows in hours (unless, perhaps, one were to ask how long it would take, say, for a small slow-moving animal to move from one end of the cow to another). It’s a mistake in category to make such an assertion.

In this sense, one of the best-known sentences in modern thought is a wonder of category mistakes, Chomsky’s example: Colorless green ideas sleep furiously. Chomsky’s point was that that sentence is perfectly grammatical, but semantically hopeless. Hence, grammar is independent of semantics. He was wrong on that, but that’s another argument.

An Open Letter to Ralph Nader: Please, Please, Please!

Resilience in No-Man’s Land: Float Like a Butterfly

Been thinkin’ about you, Ralph. You gotta’ run, you really do. For the frogs, yes, and for the kids.

Let me tell you about some kids. I’ve only met them once, only talked to one of them. But I know they’re resilient because I’ve seen what they’ve built. Though they’re probably not old enough to vote for anyone, and they know the world’s stacked against them, I figure they’d vote for someone like you because they know you’ve done something to change the country, to make it safer—though they can be a bit reckless, these kids.

So, anyhow, they like to skateboard (they spell it sk8, fewer characters, you know?) and to ride BMX bikes. But there’s no place for them to do it. The city’s too busy handing out construction contracts to friends and friends of friends so they can build high-rise apartment complexes for wannabe bankers and gofers to bankers, because, YOU know Ralph, that those bankers are swimming in so much cash that even the gofers and wannabes can afford to live in luxury.

Sting Like a Bee

Three Animating Women: Sylvia Moberly-Holland, Bianca Majolte, Ethel Kulsar

These three women were responsible for much of the storyboarding of the "Nutcracker Suite" episode of Disney's Fantasia. And that is one of the most gorgeous pieces of film ever made. Without qualification. It takes my breath away just to think about it. The conception is brilliant, to be small enough that ordinary flowers, grasses, and weeds are large objects in your world: BRILLIANT.