Why Combray?

Proust and I aren't getting along. Is this supposed to be funny? charming? acute?

And so I no longer used to go into the little sitting-room (now kept shut) of my uncle Adolphe; instead, after hanging about on the outskirts of the back-kitchen until Françoise appeared on its threshold and announced: “I am going to let the kitchen-maid serve the coffee and take up the hot water; it is time I went off to Mme. Octave,” I would then decide to go indoors, and would go straight upstairs to my room to read. The kitchen-maid was an abstract personality, a permanent institution to which an invariable set of attributes assured a sort of fixity and continuity and identity throughout the long series of transitory human shapes in which that personality was incarnate; for we never found the same girl there two years running. In the year in which we ate such quantities of asparagus, the kitchen-maid whose duty it was to dress them was a poor sickly creature, some way ’gone’ in pregnancy when we arrived at Combray for Easter, and it was indeed surprising that Françoise allowed her to run so many errands in the town and to do so much work in the house, for she was beginning to find a difficulty in bearing before her the mysterious casket, fuller and larger every day, whose splendid outline could be detected through the folds of her ample smocks. These last recalled the cloaks in which Giotto shrouds some of the allegorical figures in his paintings, of which M. Swann had given me photographs. He it was who pointed out the resemblance, and when he inquired after the kitchen-maid he would say: “Well, how goes it with Giotto’s Charity?”

Palm beach brings out the best in writers

Money is cheap on the Gold Coast, and there is a lot of it floating around. A thirteen-year-old boy recently found a million dollars' worth of big, finely cut diamonds in a brown bag on the railroad tracks near Hollywood. His aunt made him turn in the loot, but nobody claimed it, and his neighbors called him a fool. Which was true. There is no place for Horatio Algers down her on the Gold Coast; hard work and clean living will get you a bag of potato chips and a weekend job scraping scum off the hull of your neighbor's new Cigarette boat.

Hunter s. Thompson

"The drama of diamonds! Yes, diamonds are a girl's best friend... This exquisite necklace! A unison of noble gems. Yours for a mere - $250,000."
This was the seasonal Gucci party, given at the Gucci arcade and fronted by Gucci himself (or, rather, by 'Doctor Aldo Gucci' himself. 'Doctor': don't you love it?) Gucci himself is a resplendently handsome maniac with operatic manners and impossible English. 'Let us give thanks that God has forgiven this evening' and so on. Swanky girls and jinking pretty-boys modeled the Doc's latest creations. Gucci then repaired to the minstrel's gallery and, with a tambourine in one hand and a microphone in the other, actually mimed to the songs being played be the sedative pop group behind him.

Martin Amis

Six Feet Under loses its realism

During the first season of Six Feet Under a few of the characters sit down to watch TV. There's a 1980's sitcom on (Family Ties, The Cosby Show?) and it was a jarring moment. There wasn't much of the old show on but it brought back to memory how nothing happened on thoses shows- they were endlessly repeating interactions between set characters.
I'm nearly through with the fourth season and the show has grown weaker. The editors have never wanted a scene longer than a minute which not only makes me feel babied but decreases the impact of major scenes. There was an episode where everything was building towards a dinner of conflicts. Schedules were being made, people were taking themselves on and off the list, there was planning and worrying. People sat down, I imagined the ways it could blow up and ... it was over.
The characters' motivations are no longer clear which make them hard to identify with. After his wife's death Nate becomes depressed, hostile, irresponsible and crazed and then, after burying his wife, a smiling saint. If I had heard these events would happen to him I would have predicted neither of these transformations.

People I saw today

I saw a new bakery, Babycakes, in the neighborhood and decided to go in. As I entered a small boy who was positioned adjacent to the door, made a move to go under me. I raised my leg to block him before remembering that this was not a cat or a dog- that he would not immediately dart into traffic or run away.

In midtown there was a person driving a bicycle rickshaw wearing a Chucky mask. It had the static look of masks but was tight on his face making the effect a bit stronger.

Chopping up our online selves

I have a photo website which isn't linked with this and computer one which is. I've thought about linking them up so that the 2 readers of this site can find the other one and the three readers there can... There might also be unforseen ways in which the two interact.
The problem is that the more that I combine unrelated things the only thing that links them is the person. If there is a site of only photos, it is more straightforward to view them without thinking about who took them than if there is a book review below them.
The websites that I like, even if they are only by one person, do not feature that person. This reminds me that nearly every song I listen to is by a band not a musician. If it is by a single person then they tend to have renamed themselves (ie Mountain Goats).
If reading a more personal one in the first few sentences not only are you trying to answer what it's about but whether it is of value to you. One of the reasons that having a site be about something specific is that there is a known value.
The idea of the site also makes writer's focus clear. If he is evaluating a painting the first sentence may show the thesis. This is takes more work when the entry is about someones travels in Bangladesh.

Congrats

Two of my friends just got some major press
Christian's Seattle Monorail project on boinboing
Susan Margolis made it into my hometown paper

Cleaning

In between the pages of my new copy of Home Comforts: The Art and Science of Keeping House are two pistachio shells which I'm using as bookmarks while I look up what a "backsplash" is on the web. From the context, I'm fairly sure that it is not the type of thing that happens while swimming toward the edge of a pool. It is some type of furniture.
Last night I was variously described as an "animal", a "dog", and a "monkey" due to some other events involving pistachio shells and whatnot. So the natural reasoning might be that I'm reading this because the book was thrown at me.
Instead I ordered it, after reading about it on Cool Tools. My hopes were that after understanding the science of keeping house, I might be more willing to do it. At the least it is always interesting to be introduced to a new world.

This is probably a subject for another time...
The subtitle of the book irks me because besides being a cliche the phrase "art and science" is based on a poor conception of science. It suggets that science is rigid list of steps that needs to be tempered with art.
Nearly every area of science is declared more "art than science". "Up until now visualizing gene transcripts has been more art than science,(link)" "Scientists might add one foreign gene to an organism to produce a drug like insulin. The technique is more art than science given the brute trial-and-error...(link)." But this is what practicing science is, it has to grapple with uncertainty.

http://www.nature.com/news/2005/050829/pf/nbt0905-1037_pf.html

Revere- counterlife

Finishing Philip Roth's The Counterlife there's a feeling of exhuastion. Jew, Jew, Jew. For an atheist Jew there's so much talk about being Jewish. It almost forces a review to look at the book as a Jewish text.
If this can be avoided, it's clear that the book fails on first principles. It's only talk. There's monologues and dialogues and monologues about dialogues. There are letters sent to cover what was missed in the dialogues and replies to those letters. Each needing their own p.s. 's and p.s.s.'s in order to contextualize what's been said.
It takes the pleasure out of reading when there's is nothing to imagine. And it doesn't leave room for what we look for in literature.

The Frick

The Frick is a relaxing museum. The floor is carpeted, the walls are warmly colored. There was a comfy couch in a long room where I sat looking at paintings by Rembrandt, Van Dyck, Velazquez, Goya and others.
Derived from a coal magnate's (Frick) collection, the curation is based on his own feelings of harmony rather than similarities in era or style. These contrasts create directions for thought- what makes the paintings go together, what makes paintings more effective.
His home, designed by Thomas Hastings, is worth seeing for the architecture. In a high, skylit middle room is a long pool with a fountain. Its walls are windowed so you can look into some of the rooms.

MOMA vs. Met

My first visit to the MOMA was a seminal experience and I would still recommend it for people that are going to be in NYC only once but as time goes by I find that when I have to choose I pick the Met. 
The ideal viewing experience for art is at a rich person's home sitting on a long sofa with some food. The room nicely heated, the wall coverings and lighting pleasurable and the art's dimensions in proportion to the room.
In the Met at times you are in a rich person's room (transplanted from some 16th century villa) with wood floors, a carved ceiling, antique chairs and the art in its original context. This is calming and natural, it feels less like inspecting art and more like tourism. There are other varieties of rooms. The Japanese garden with its soft light, trees, weathered rocks and running water. The American sculpture garden where you can eat while looking at sculptures, a bank facade, fountains, and the entrance to the Tiffany home. Also the long Egyptian room with the pyramid, medieval room with the gigantic gate, etc and even on a weekend you can often have these spaces to yourself.
The MOMA, like McDonald's, is designed to be uncomfortable in order to increase turnover. With a $100 million renovation the MOMA can't use plastic seats but it puts them in a fraction of the rooms near comparatively minor works. It's a sort of anti-curation where the works are overwhelmed by the white lights and huge walls. They are either reflexively grouped or have no relation (the sculpture garden). There also seems to a curious prominence given to works such as all black paintings, paintings of stripes, and exploded cartoons which causes many people to laugh the art off, move on quickly, and take other works less seriously. To my mind, even if taken seriously these works are hard to get lost in.
There are other touches. The rooms are excessively cold and vents seem to be positioned over the existing seating. The art on display at the cafeteria is minor *. The guards have a special aggressiveness (perhaps abetted by management.) I have back problems and sometimes use a folding seat but they prevented me (this was not a problem at the Met.).
You can see the way these things affect people at the MOMA people are noisier, ruder take more pictures, and move more quickly. At the Met you will see people quietly clustered around the introductory text of the show and the people who skip it carefully avoiding getting into the line of sight.

*I haven't seen the new cafeteria.
Notes:
Here's more definitive, better written criticism of the curatrion.

Hipster

"Hipster" originally referred to poor, black, jazz performers. It later grew to encompass blacks and whites who were dedicated to jazz and beat poetry.* They thrust themselves out of the main culture, lived in fallen-down neighborhoods and were working with new art forms.
The current use is the opposite of the former meanings. There are now "trust fund hipsters" who are making neighborhoods too expensive. If they lack money they use what is derisively called "hipster PDA's" (note pads). Most importantly it means uncool- "[someone] who derives his identity largely through his association with a subculture which has been deemed hip". The following of counter-culture music has become another example of trying to fit in.
It now reflects only on the speaker, meaning "there are people who either dress better or attend cooler events than me, and I'm better than them because that is all they care about. And that makes them uncool." The speakers also seem to be wanting recognition of their use of a "cool" word. The unremarkable "hipster PDA" is frequently mentioned in magazines and websites (22,000 Google hits). Is there anything so special about using a notepad to record events?

*Even historically "hipster's" picture is somewhat confused. A hipster "wore a beret, dressed completely in black, smoked mentholated Kool cigarettes, wore sunglasses even after sundown". This is not a good description for many of the famous ones- Lenny Bruce, Miles Davis, Ginsberg, and Kerouac.

Before night falls

Before Night Falls is frustrating because there is a feeling of a greater book that could have been made from these experiences. The ones listed are so plentiful and devastating that it seems that they weren't able to get the attention they deserve.
Any paragraph has as much action and more consequences than a typical New Yorker short story. Here is a picking of the best paragraph from a random page:

And then one day a big scandal erupted at the Library. Two well-known women employees had been caught in the ladies' room making love. The women were brought before Maria Teresa who pardoned them, saying that this was none of her business and concerned only their husbands, and there was nothing for her to do. Precisely for being so generous Maria Teresa could not avoid having more and more "enemies" infiltrate the library: resentful people who could not forgive her for the fact that they owed their jobs to her. One of them was Maria Luisa Gil, who hated Maria Teresa with a passion simply because she wanted the job of director for herself. She was a Stalinist Spaniard, married to an old stalwart of the communist party. She was filled with bitterness which she covered up with apparent sweetness. Little by little those enemies started to make headway, saying Maria Teresa was a lesbian, an aristocrat, and a counterrevolutionary, and they finally managed to get her replaced. Lisandro Otero was the one to tell Maria Teresa that she had been ousted. Like a good partisan custodian and enemy of culture, he took great pleasure in firing the person who created the institution. The new director was the none other than the captain of Fidel Castro's police, Captain Sidroc Romos. Maria Teresa left the library in tears.

This could be a movie pitch. Instead it is one of a stunning series of events including avoiding gun fire, hiding in trees, beatings, robberies, prison killings, disfigurements and above all sex in proportions best described with forecasts or statistics. The number of partners certainly exceeds the book's pages but what about its commas?
This may be the only way the book could have been written- as a defiant record in the gaps between fleeing the police, avoiding informers, and another lost manuscript.
None of this is to say that this isn't a great book- it changes one's perspective. Making us aware that this was a person nearly dying* to be sexually, politically and artistically free.

*In my rereading I was surprised to see that there was a time people were dying to get to Gauntanamo.

My Google answers links

when is a brita filter done
Trading - what are the odds of making enough money to be worth it
occassional extra keyboard happenings
dell inspiron 4150 will not wake up from suspend
Places for people who love culture to live.
Connection refused for only some urls
Is it possible for muscles to go on the wrong side of bone through movement?
Getting established as a choreographer
dell inspiron 4150 will not wake up from suspend

Picking a place to live

I plan to stay in New York for some time yet but there are times when the expense, danger, lack of space...

NYC is the third worst overall for air. Also scoring near the top for lead in the air and water pollution. This is not only bad news for current asthma sufferers like myself, NYC is now at the point where one in eight children have asthma and one in four in certain parts as opposed to six percent for the general population.
Diesel fumes are responsible for 4000 deaths per year in New York State. This might have to do with the 30,000 trucks entering Manhattan each day.

Whether I will stay in the U.S. is uncertain so I've sought out information on other cities. I wasn't able to find isolated pollution reports but did find some Total Quality of Life stats which use pollution as a factor. New York makes it to 39th on the list of the world's best cities and nationally the US only makes it to thirteenth.

Note:
At one point I asked a related question using Google Answers.

An idea, perhaps wrong

Any translation of a work differs only in the degree of butchery. The work of an author is not ideas but sentences. The main exception to this seems to be names and currencies (rupees, dinars, etc.). What could be gained if these were translated as well? Naturalness, increased flow, oral and vocal consistency.
It is difficult to remember names that aren't familiar. The choice then is either to ignore it or thumb frantically backwards through the pages. The former result clearly reduces comprehension; the latter breaks the flow and reduces pleasure.
The use of names from the original language creates an illusion that translation is a straightforward process. If one word in a sentence remains in the original langauge then it may seem that it is the only one that can't be translated. Everything else was changing "bibliotechque" to "library".
Written words are a representation of their oral counterpart so in our heads do we anglicize the pronunciation of a French name (e.g. ADÃLAÏDE ) or make it the only word in the sentence with a French pronunciation. To anglicize it is clearly wrong, it is neither how the name is pronounced or a translation. Along with this is the question of what to do with the various pronunciation squiggles.
In short this suggests that Miguel, Maximillian, and Michel become Michael.

What happens to a work that concerns itself with the pronunciation of a word (e.g. Lolita)? Again this assumes that translation is more straightforward than it is. "Lolita" which seems like a natural part of the language in English will stick out badly in (I'm guessing) Swedish or Hindi. Lolita depends not just on the phonetics but the mental associations of the sound.

The case for currencies is much less strong. The narrative flow can continue with only a general understanding of the amount. Also determing a specific sum is difficult due to the fluctuating nature of currencies as well as the price variations on different types of goods due to era or region .

Cropping

This morning and last night I've been doing some painful rereading of previous posts. There were the expected grammar errors- missing words, unnecessary voice changes, and many poor connections.
More time consuming and more frustrating was the poor thinking. Paragraphs speeding up and braking instead of falling in line. Typing instead of thinking ("in the middle of the crux"). A level of pretentiousness much higher than expected.
The fix for much of the pretension was easy. Many sentences could be cut out with no loss of meaning. It reminded me a little of photography, some cropping is for effect but the "no-brainers" are the removal of flood lights and photographer feet.
The most common content changes were substituting "I" for "you" and the removal of "I"s. The "You"s caused too many voice changes and seemed too aggressive. A post about viewing art in galleries has enough problems without me telling you what you must feel when you are viewing it. Also "You"s being generic are easier to change over to "I" or eliminate.

This was a removal of the real knee-bangers. Someday I hope to learn the finer points of which is "which", which is "that".

2-inch pictures

My exposure to major works until my mid 20's wasn't unusual- 2-inch pictures with their caption stating the real size, dorm-room Dali posters, and perhaps a few slide shows. There are many reasons why seeing the piece on the wall of a museum is better which are obvious and enumerated elsewhere. But the textbook pictures have a side benefit- helping reduce pieces to ideas.
Seeing a piece in a museum imprints extra information. For me the Picasso picture with the boy and the horse is not frameless but framed by blank wall, then a passage way and a corner on the sides, it's perpendicular to the Mademoiselles D'Avignon, off to the left on the second floor of the MOMA. At its size (5 foot?) pedestrian traffic is a medium problem, making it difficult to view from far away. It has the typical 1/2 inch of wrapped canvas along the side; it hangs at a certain height. It's a picture on a wall.
Munch's Scream I have seen only reproductions of- hundreds of times in different sizes and styles (flat, blow-up doll, office toy) but they don't fix. Mentally it comes through more clearly, leaving only the wavy figure, the dark sky, and the bridge.

Tags: Painting Perception Barroom theorising

The rules

For the modern reader it may seem like there are no rules left, and things might be better off with some rules. Everything is allowed- incomplete and run-on sentences, new words, optional grammar. This isn't new, rather the rules are from a brief interim. A few hundred years ago none of rules were codified. But we aren't back where we started, we've come to the point where the writer chooses. Everything is destroyed and now each builds individually.
Kingsley Amis said not to start two paragraphs in a row with the same word which at first seems capricious but then appealing. It is a shift from a rule of communication to a truer goal, aesthetics.

So what choices are writers making?

Bernard Malamud's The Tenants begins

Lesser catching sight of himself in his lonely glass wakes to finish his book. He smelled the living earth in the dead of winter. In the distance mournful blasts of a vessel departing the harbor. Ah, if I could go where it's going. He wrestles to sleep again but can't, unease like a horse dragging him by both bound legs out of bed. I've got to get up to write, otherwise there's no peace in me. In this regard I have no choice. “My God, the years.” He flings aside the blanket and standing unsteadily by the loose-legged chair that hold his clothes slowly draws on his cold pants. Today's another day.

It's easy not to focus on the “living earth” sentence. The purple prose initially pushed me off so it wasn't until now that I remembered there are no earth smells in a New York City tenement. There is rotten food, frying bacon, the many scents of air freshener, body odor, smoking reefer, and hair chemicals. Melted cheese, cigarettes, and one-note perfume.
I also admit to distrusting the horse analogy, which I imagine would cause heart-stopping fright rather than unease. The “lonely glass” was also confusing but I blamed it on myself. I assumed that a lonely glass was some other piece of home design that I was unfamiliar with like a sideboard or a bedstead. Or a poetic phrase for a mirror. The other idea is that it is a glass which is lonely, perhaps because it smells the living earth. But based on my glass looking experience I don't think you can see yourself in a glass from more than a few inches away.
The other thing about the paragraph is the voice changes. He and I are one. It's potentially confusing but there is opportunity here- the creation of two simultaneous streams: an intelligent outside 3rd person and the primitive id of the first. It's “he” who spots the "loose-legged chair" and “I” who has "no choice". The quotes in the third sentence from the end provide the final level, a 0th person. This is not how the character is feeling or what he does but a "literal" thought.
Despite my apprehension this goes down easily enough.

Tags: Books Stream of concious

Ragtime

Reflection happens in the time between actions and Ragtime is a steady march of action. This is a history book with personality, which is what it's meant to be. After a while I compensated by reading quickly through it.

They went into the streets and were somehow absorbed in the tenements. They were despised by New Yorkers. They were filthy and illiterate. They stank of fish and garlic. They had running stores. They had no honor and worked for next to nothing. They stole. They drank. They raped their own daughters. They ...

They may come away with a few more ideas about history. They won't remember the characters.

Tags: Books

Ethically Aware

While creating my latest posts I went to Flickr to retrieve the photos. There I found the tremendous awareness of ethical issues in the blogosphere that I'd always suspected. Although the majority of my posts about bad art

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politics

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or literature

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received little attention. The images from ethically aware company American Apparrel did quite well.


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