JOLLY DAYS, an artist's journal

Charlie Rose repeated a March 2011 interview with David Brooks last night. Brooks was promoting his book, The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement. The book, as Brooks described it, is an allegory. Two fictional characters illustrate ideas. The ideas are drawn from psychological and sociological academic studies.

Some reviews indicate Brooks did not inhabit the characters, did not bring them to life, and the science might not be fully explored either. However, you don’t read such books for depth, but to get a feel for the landscape: a bright man trying to open a curtain so you can see what is being thought about in the realm of human behavior.

Brooks’ sensibility is quite appealing. He is someone who is “nice” without seeming weak. Brooks gives nice a good name. Brooks has underlying beliefs but sees no reason why arguments have to ensue. This is somewhat quixotic, as many people just want to argue, which often seems more the point for them, and so ideas are put aside no matter what someone like Brooks might wish. But to a remarkable degree, in the adversarial left-wing environment of the NYT, as it is now constituted, Brooks appears to be accepted and liked by the partisan community. Brooks has been damned as the conservative that liberals like. It isn’t really a condemnation at all, but rather a tribute to the man that he can force focus on ideas in the roiling emotional pit of public life.

I have to admit, and this is a bit unfair to Brooks as I have not read his book, but the ideas he discussed on Rose sound very like a New Age Benjamin Franklin redux. Work hard, care, come from or find a good environment, and you too can make it. Making it, prestige seeking, is one of the most off putting things about the NYT actually. The NYT and MSM in general have a conformist, career centered focus — rather than a values based or true achievement focus. Too often achievement is measured by salary (even, weird as it seems, inherited wealth), truly slimed by fame or popularity metrics, or simply defined as rising in the chosen bureaucracy — without questioning the cohort’s nature. I often have the same doubts about Brooks — a conventional, unquestioned deference to honorifics you could call it.

Brooks draws a larger circle than most commentators, seeing that the mysteries surrounding us can’t be easily formularized. Things are complicated, which is obvious, but in a meme loving, consensus culture, it is salutary to hear that things might not be so easy to understand or fix. Lopping off the ambiguities to fit the purity of idea doesn’t work in art, in life, or in serious thinking. At least Brooks gives complexity a try.

NYT book editor Tanenhaus has a brief, interesting conversation with the impressive Harold Bloom. Bloom’s stated idea in the interview is that writers who came after the classics were in a state of internal disarray (“Anxiety of Influence”), feeling in essence that everything had been said.

So Bloom places Whitman between Emerson and the King James Bible. This is a critics’s trope, where influence explains or places artists. It is a false approach I feel, because the process of influence is, as Matisse said, a kind of wrestling. Taking out of what you admire something you need for yourself; wrestling, again and again, until self emerges. But no doubt much more than two encounters were required for Whitman to become the great poet he was, and much circumspection was necessary for the poet’s voice to coalesce.

This formulation, that influence is struggle rather than adjusting to predecessors, does agree with Bloom’s formulation in one way: artists like Joyce or Kafka, as Bloom says, are part of an ongoing tradition and not “modernists”. Anymore than the human spirit is more modern now than it was 400 years ago. Art can’t be created in awe of anything or anyone other than life and experience.

Bloom’s impressive memory is in evidence at the beginning of the interview as he recites a magical Crane poem — Bloom called it incantatory. He felt that committing great works to memory meant a lot in his life. Helen Vendler, the great critic of poetry as well felt that her early memorization was crucial to her love of poetry. This is in contrast to the idea that memorization is a mind numbing and useless activity. But Vendler and Bloom are robust corrections to that idea.

Bloom also mentions his discomfort with the identity politics cohort trying to impose on great literature; he justly feels that the outward descriptions of creators have nothing to do with what they have mined in their work. It is actually a racist and prissy, reductive pronouncement — saying an artist is their sexual orientation, skin color or gender. Schools of critical thinking have become schools of indoctrination.

Tanenhaus was a student of Bloom’s at Yale. His review of his teacher’s work is fairly convoluted — it never really clarified for me. Bloom, in the quotations provided, is himself at times obscure. Tanenhaus does however have embedded in the noise a good number of subtle insights.

Bill Keller of the Kingdom of the NYT makes a point that he knows will be labeled as Luddite, but he persists admirably. Keller despairs of new media and its illusion: virtual connection.

Keller says,

My mistrust of social media is intensified by the ephemeral nature of these communications. They are the epitome of in-one-ear-and-out-the-other, which was my mother’s trope for a failure to connect…

The shortcomings of social media would not bother me awfully if I did not suspect that Facebook friendship and Twitter chatter are displacing real rapport and real conversation, just as Gutenberg’s device displaced remembering. The things we may be unlearning, tweet by tweet — complexity, acuity, patience, wisdom, intimacy — are things that matter.

The subtleties of human connection, all our sense data aggregating to patterns of connection, will unlikely be communicated with a digital filter in the near future, if ever.

Just finished listening to the audiobook of Lawrence Krauss’ biography of Richard Feyman, Quantum Man. The book is read by Krauss, who is a distinguished physicist himself — the insider knowledge helps,  as the quantum world is not intuitive. Krauss knew Feynman and admired him enormously. Feynman is such an interesting character, both in the scope and depth of his mind and richness of his personality.

Although the science is obscure in its details, the fundamental nature of the subject expands quickly — much of the subject matter spins off into philosophy. No surprise that after Newton determinism became a dominant influence in the mental framework of the West; Spinoza and Kant among many others. The idea of causation in the West spiked after Newton.

Bill Gates has put online Feynman’s “Messenger” lectures at Cornell (You will need Silverlight). This is a legendary series of seven lectures that inspired many physicists. Feynman worked hard on these lectures; the agreement was that he would only give these lectures once.

In addition, there are a number of clips from various biographical documentaries on youtube — so this also filled out the charismatic (overused but accurate word in this case) man for me.

Some random notes / thoughts:

I had not realized the crucial part the young Freeman Dyson had played in Feynman’s recognition. Dyson is an unusually modest man; he seems immune to the sci-careerism in his field. When asked about his being passed over for honors due, Krauss reports that Dyson simply expressed gratitude to have had such an excellent life, in such wonderful surroundings, and to be able to do the work he cares about. Dyson is at the Institute for Advanced Studies, if I remember correctly.

(Changing gears for a moment, I ran across this fascinating paper by Dyson, “TIME WITHOUT END: PHYSICS AND BIOLOGY IN AN OPEN UNIVERSE,” a speculation about the heat death of the universe. The first part is philosophical and for the general public.)

Feynman’s intuitive way of working, not building up from formalisms, as did Dirac, had a particularly energetic, American character. Feynman’s impatience, unpretentious grounding, and exploratory nature are noteworthy — you can see how those traits combined with a focused mind might yield great results.

The second lecture was particularly exciting: Feynman, a brilliant mathematician, describes the relation of physics and mathematics. The mysterious connection between mathematics and the physical world has long been noted. No second hand knowledge in Feynman’s lecture, but rather he explains the process of thinking a scientific genius uses to understand Nature with the tools of math. Feynman elucidated three principal ways of explaining the actions of the real world in numbers: Newton’s mathematics, action at a distance, and a minimal model for a mathematical explanation of the world. Feynman explains how Newton’s math, useful in the quotidian domain, is not of much use in the quantum realm; also, he explained that he felt the other two models will someday have to be united as a tool to explain the world.

Feynman notes — and this is truly a lifting of the curtain — the mysteries he perceives. He notes such things as the oddity that there are so many ways to describe the same actions in nature. That every instance in Nature is always that, unique, and never a general case. That it is impossible to extrapolate action from the micro world of the quanta to the macro world of physical reality. Feynman explains that physics uses not axioms, but modes of thinking; for example, Riemannian geometry might be exactly the tool needed by Einstein, even though it was formulated 75 years before Einstein worked on his theories. Mathematics is the generality and physics the specific, and so axioms don’t work in physics. Feynman explained that Einstein and Dirac made guesses as to how the physical world worked, and then used tools available (these mathematical models) that seemed most likely to help in the explanation.

I should add that I checked out Feynman’s paintings and drawings. They are competent but never got to expressing a true voice. He was a talented amateur. It was interesting to note that early on he was dismissive of the arts, but clearly, as time went on, began to realize there was something there. In one lecture he was dismissive of CP Snow’s Two Cultures, but in his trying to learn to draw and paint reflected a counter tendency — deeper and wiser — that there was something in art that is parallel to the complexity and beauty of the physical world, but which exists in the individual human soul and in the imagination. He would recoil hearing that, but I feel eventually he would admit it, if he had had the time to evolve that side of himself.

Feynman’s love for and gratitude to his father were beautifully expressed in a youtube video. He explained the way his father helped him understand in a deeper sense. People may know the name of a bird, and there are many names in different cultures of course, but that tells you nothing about the bird, said Feynman’s father. The difference between a name and knowledge.

His father was distrustful of the honorifics and uniforms of status. His father pointed out that the costumes of life are just that, and underneath, we all share a common humanity. People bowing before others, because of their uniform, or societal status, repelled Feynman and his father. A useful skepticism implanted early on. Following on this, Feynman did not even trust established laws of science, but derived them himself. This is parallel to the development of many artists, who, with their own individual emphasis, recapitulate in their work the history of art.

Feynman spent a long time trying to return to the bestower an honor many in science would lust for: membership in the National Academy of Sciences. Feynman even considered refusing the Nobel Prize, but felt that people would think he felt too good for such an honor, when really, he simply saw it a decision amongst people and of no real importance. The important thing was the knowledge he had gained of Nature. He remembered seeing scientists in one field trying to keep honors from chemists because they  did not want to sully their grandiose clique with mere chemists. He mentioned Arista, an honorary society of his early schooling, where all they talked about was who they would let in. He laughed at the idea of IQ scores. A truly egalitarian American spirit was Richard Feynman — all from the seed of his father’s character and evolved in his son Richard.

To be continued…

In a recent post I refer to the discussion between Carlo Strenger and Robert Wright about feelings of insignificance in contemporary society. I focused on one aspect of Strenger’s point but put aside his emphasis on the rankings to which everyone is subject. These rankings are everywhere on the internet Strenger noted.

As a sidenote: Whether through marks in school, or criticism face to face, or comments on the net, people say what is wrong but often not what is best. Also, often, this frame of mind says what is best by using a conformist’s formula masquerading as an idea — a comparison that the judge thinks will keep him or her safe from judgment themselves.

Yet another tactic: I’ve often read reviews of, for example, a novelist’s book of poems where the critic says, “Her poems are better than her novels.” That is, no praise for either, just one is better than the other. A passive aggressive ranking.

Extending on Strenger’s idea, this article discusses the effect of ranking.

Journalist Jonah Lehrer thinks,

“Numbers make intangibles tangible…They give the illusion of control.”

I don’t agree with that idea, but think Lehrer is correct, with some modification, in saying, ““We want to quantify everything, to ground a decision in fact, instead of asking whether that variable matters.” People don’t want control in ranking something, they want to affirm the pre-approved — what is safely “the best”. This sort of ranking is a form of laziness and cowardice. That “fact” to which Lehrer points — a number, which has the aura of science — is really an instantiation of the elevation of science as being ominiscient and irrefutable. Few scientists would make such a claim, but scientism, as John Horgan calls it, is used in this way.

What are we ranking?

I was a big fan of Michele Rhee who tried to improve her school district and lost her job. She tried to get rid of teachers whose students did not do well in tests; these tests would rank them and determine their future. She felt the teachers should be graded too; they should be fired if they did not bring their students up to the standards of those tests.

I felt she was trying to clear the way for her students. But I had my doubts as well. I never bought into the idea that tests indicate true competence, intelligence or ability. The things that matter in a person are wrapped in that individual’s character and can’t be separated out.

Ranking can be a death to true potential. A person who did not quite do well in math, like say, Einstein, still might be able to do something worthwhile. The math skill, which might be said to be a predicate for physics itself, might not be as important as the person’s imagination, insight and persistence. But how do you measure that?

In this article a writer was quoted about her obsession with the ranking of her work,

“I go to a place where everything has a number. How many advance copies, how many reviews, how many sales.”

A professor adds,

The obsession with numbers…means we don’t trust or even look for the intangibles that can’t be measured, like wisdom, judgment and expertise.

And what matters finally are the intangibles.

Online, an English scientist discussed his discovery as to how children learn new words. Parents seem to know instinctively when teaching a new word, to point to the object and say, “Look at the, um, dog”.

That is, the parent pronounces the word as “thee” rather than “thuh”, and follows it with what the scientist called a disfluency — the um and ers of hesitant speech. This combination, of the pronunciation as thee, a pause, and a disfluency, triggers the child to understand it is being taught a new word; children look with more frequency at the referent when the word is presented this way.

I remember reading about how those who often have to deliver bad news are taught to present. They are told that if the news is serious but not fatal to say, “Your uncle was in an accident but he is all right”. A straight through presentation of the facts.

However, if the news is catastrophic, they are taught to say, “I have some bad news. [Here, a pause] Your uncle has died”. They are taught that after the pause, they are to leave no doubt as to the outcome. The pause is a signal for the receiver of the bad news to prepare him or her self.

In both cases, a baby learning, and the delivery of bad news, the pause seems to be a genetic, primal signal, universally recognized as a reason to take a breath and apply full focus.

Sailing by the muted TV last night I was snagged by the head of the interviewee. Familiar, but could not recall who it was. It was this guy’s head, not his face, that was striking. A sculptural head rather than substantive presence — perfect for TV. It did not hurt that his stillness gave him a Zen priest’s calm. True charisma of the modern kind.

It was the sculptor Richard Serra on Charlie Rose; Serra is being given a show of his drawings at the Met. In the photos flashed before the interview, to establish status markers, there is a shot of the Met with a big banner saying Richard Serra Drawings. The banners the Met hangs to advertise shows is a surrender to Nascar culture rather than a useful addition. It is jarring seeing those banners plastered on a putative house of culture. It doesn’t fit with the architecture and is not suggestive of the reflective nature of art.

The dignity of High Culture (often an affectation itself) has been trumped by the affectations of the Football Hall of Fame and Academy Awards. They can do grandiosity and not be called snobby because they are clearly not high culture — an unwitting irony there.

Serra’s astringent work was a necessary antidote to the excesses of the art of the 60s. An over estimate would have it that Serra was one of those who tried to swing the pendulum from the Dionysian to the Apollonian. The problem is that Serra’s work does not have the poetry of purity which is what minimalist geometric iconography is all about. Ellsworth Kelly is a better candidate if that is your taste.

Serra’s work is outlier work taken into the main tent. It depends on the negation of what came before. It does however well instantiate an aspect of the art world. That could be expressed, as one critic did at the time, by saying, “Art is not important until I talk about it.” The shameless egomania of post modernism made manifest in critic and artist.

Serra’s art is designed to make you talk about it, to provide obscure grist for the mill — a subservient role for art. It won’t contradict anything you say, because it is content free. Although Serra describes his work as experiential — the viewer weaving his way through plates of steel — the work is seeking meaning ascribed by not offering it. It flatters the audience and at the same time challenges: say you don’t respond, don’t accept the invitation to display-speculate, and you say you are not cool.

Serra’s work does have an elegant assertiveness that fits in well with corporate America however — more noteworthy in its sociological way than the images themselves. No surprise corporate America has embraced such work. Nothing to be concerned about: with subject or personal feelings, a world view or an emotional state, which might trouble a corporate boardroom. They are simply objects of ego and sensibility, now, in the 21st Century, seeming more artifacts of interior decoration than of art.

The recent show given the director Tim Burton at MoMA is more institutionally honest in its subservience to celebrity culture. Burton is actually a very talented fellow. But the large crowds drawn to MoMA by Burton’s show, and the show itself, are products of media culture, not of any desire by a cultural institution to provide its audience with a deeper, meditative experience.

This story has received a surprising amount of attention. The subject is somewhat arcane, but it fascinates.

Scientists have discovered that there are three definable ecosystems of microbes in the human gut. Any one of three distinct forests may inhabit our inner realm, crossing all the divisions human beings make among ourselves.

The scientists,

…found no link between what they called enterotypes and the ethnic background of the European, American and Japanese subjects they studied.

Any group of humans, anywhere, will have one of the three.

The potentials cascade:

The discovery of the blood types A, B, AB and O had a major effect on how doctors practice medicine. They could limit the chances that a patient’s body would reject a blood transfusion by making sure the donated blood was of a matching type. The discovery of enterotypes could someday lead to medical applications of its own, but they would be far down the road.

“Some things are pretty obvious already,” Dr. Bork said. Doctors might be able to tailor diets or drug prescriptions to suit people’s enterotypes, for example

Yet another affirmation, as if one were needed, that we are all of the same DNA soup made.

This fascinating dialog between a psychologist, Carlo Strenger, and Robert Wright, has a stimulating and familiar ring. It is a discussion, like many, both intelligent and ultimately unsatisfying. Maybe all discourse threatens to fall off the cliff as logical discussion can easily become display behavior… but they deserve credit for giving it an honorable try.

Strenger wrote a book called The Fear of Insignificance. He feels the prevalence of ranking and the worldwide media, which he calls the “global entertainment system,” make us acutely aware of our smallness in the scheme of things. We don’t have status and it is shoved in our face. He points out that popularity is valued over achievement. That being known is a value in itself. Not achievement, but simply awareness of self by others.

He expands this to the tribal groups that make up the world, from nations to religious affinity groups, and feels this applies here as well. He feels ultimately it is a fear of death that drives all this. Something of a let down in analysis begins with that obvious predicate of all philosophy.

He feels, and this is where the falloff occurs abruptly, that the answer is a global sense of tribe and a universalist philosophy.

I hope all that is fair to Strenger’s well meaning ideas. But they simply don’t resonate. We will always be tribal creatures, are so genetically predisposed, and the issue is really not individual universalist affinity, but rather that each tribe be open and compassionate to other tribes. You really would not want to live in a world that had a mumbling generalist culture. The heritage of people matters. But that does not have to be exclusive. So this issue is not in individual transformation, but in group self-concept — allowing for an inquisitive inclusiveness rather than defensive isolation. So the focus should be on education of the insulated tribes— many societies just don’t tell the truth to their people.

Wright has an Israel problem that always obtrudes. He identifies with “demands” made by the enemies of Israel, thinking it is logic driving their behavior. And Wright thinks there is some logical solution: do what they want. He feels their arguments are the sole arguments to be acted upon. This is reminiscent of celebrities lolling in Beverly Hills proffering advice to the unwashed; the privileged of course don’t have to deal with the consequences of their advice — they are well away from jeopardy or daily contact with the issues.

The Huffington Post is being sued by bloggers,

bloggers have essentially been turned into modern-day slaves on Arianna Huffington’s plantation…

The dramatic rhetoric aside, this is an interesting issue. Like Juan Williams who learned what liberal now means as taught him by NPR: join the Borg collective or be expelled from the collective with malice.

These bloggers have learned that the egalitarian affectations of folks like Huffington is really a cover story: Huffington is simply an oligarch. She sees others as useful, as a narcissist sees others as tools to their purpose. Those like her want to tell the unwashed, clinging to their guns and religion, what is right and then impose it through shame (you are a bigot if you do not agree) or ostracism via cackling snarkiness.

So Huffington, who did not deign to pay for content as she raked in money, and did not share the $315 million profit (except with her business partners) when she sold to AOL, who exploited celebrity dim wittedness to her benefit, is now making it clear to 9000 bloggers that she disdains her own work gang — as she always had. Privately she thought, “I wouldn’t work for nothing.”

There are so few moderates, so few independents it seems; maybe they just aren’t focused on by the media because there is less heat to attract an audience, and the media knows, you make more money with heat than light.

After a battle with WordPress and obstinate plugins — which resulted in Jolly Days loading as a blank page; and a battle with a cell phone company about its online payment implementation, and not being able to run today —  I’m feeling pecked to death by ducks. Until you realize the context — the greater tribulations of the world — the Arab world in turmoil with uncertain outcome; the devastation in Japan; our president who seems one step behind too often and the Republicans in disarray, the ominous future for the economy if something is not done — it doesn’t make you feel perky.

I’ve been working hard to publish more books at the iBookstore; not satisfying creative work, but rather meticulous, mind numbing work. I’m very proud of the result though:

iPad Sketchbook 3
Ira Altschiller: Works on Paper
Ira Altschiller: A Retrospective

and two more to come: picturebooks is what Apple calls them, which are fixed layout books for a better presentation of books which have an emphasis on images.

I did want to mention a funny link provided at Jason Kottke’s site

Someone at Yahoo Answers uploaded a page of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest as his own and asked for comments.

Rated as the best answer / criticism:

You know your story needs more work, so you don’t need anyone to tell you what you already know.

Comment sections are always pretty funny. Some people don’t like the snarkiness, and I’m not a big fan of that aspect, but often there are interesting ideas and commentary as well. It is the mosh pit after all. A financial journalist at bloggingheads said that she always felt that people weren’t asking questions or engaging ideas  in comments sections of weblogs, they were trying to appear smart.

The idea of sending great literature as if written by sender to an established publisher has been done over the years. Rejection letters for masterpieces like War and Peace leaves one agape — like the audience watching The Frankie singing Puttin’ on the Ritz in Mel Brooks’ Young Frankenstein. Saul Bellow stopped sending his stories to the New Yorker after a full of himself young editor told him how he should correct his piece. Bellow had recently won the Nobel Prize.