All hail Peter Schjeldahl, writing here on James Turrell:
As with Irwin, you register the unreliability of your vision, only with a bonus of beauty, replete with associations to music, savor, and scent. (No texture, though. Your meditative state is out-of-body, touchless.) Again, succumbing is optional. I have often resisted and even resented the blandishments of Light and Space art, whose oh-wow effects come with an intimation that the viewer has been cast as a laboratory animal. In this, I'm a New Yorker. In public places here, we are normally averse to letting our egos dissolve like sugar cubes in hot tea. In amniotic L.A., everybody goes around half-deliquesced already, as a matter of course. ... If, as a visitor there, you don't smoothly adapt, you may be as noisily wretched as Woody Allen in "Annie Hall." Practice the proper adjustment with works of California minimalism.
Peter Schjeldahl, " Way Out West." The New Yorker, 25 Jan 2010 (subscription required for online access, alas).
In usual fashion, every sentence adds a new layer of awesome.
I've felt the same way about some of Turrell's pieces—like a lab rat—but one of his blue rooms that was installed at the Henry Art Gallery in Seattle in 2002 was for me a blissfully transporting experience. I had the sense of standing, with others, behind an ethereal waterfall, like in a movie's dreamy interlude, maybe representing a temporary afterlife. It was the kind of installation that made strangers blink and smile at one another.
In this connection, I want to note the Anish Kapoor piece at the Guggenheim right now. Approaching it from one side, you see what appears to be an enormous rusty steel egg that consumes a whole gallery, wall to wall. It's an interesting gesture in its own right, because of the rusty texture, the monumental weight, and the urgency of this thing apparently pressing at the edges of the gallery, as if wanting to grow out of it. But from the other side you find it has a rectangular opening onto another hermetic white gallery room: an opening on which, like one of Turrell's sky spaces, you can't see the edges, and hence the depth behind it appears in line with the surface. So it appears to be a black rectangle painted on the wall, and yet you sense it is hollow, it echoes sound, and you strain to see in the incredible blackness the inside of the urgent steel egg.
Robert Hass wrote this down, in 1989:
In the BahamasThe doctor looked at her stitches thoughtfully. A tall lean white man with an English manner. "Have you ever watched your mum sew?" he asked. "The fellow who did this hadn't. I like to take a tuck on the last stitch. That way the skin doesn't bunch up on the ends. Of course, you can't see the difference, but you can feel it." Later she asked him about all the one-armed and one-legged black men she kept seeing in the street. "Diabetic gangrene, mostly. There really isn't more of it here than in your country, but there's less prosthesis. It's expensive, of course. And stumps are rather less of a shock when you come right down to it. Well, as we say, there's nothing colorful about the Caribbean." He tapped each black thread into a silver basin as he plucked it out. "Have you ever been to Haiti? Now there is a truly appalling place."
(from Human Wishes)
I would love to see the Temple Grandin movie on HBO this weekend. Anyone want to tape it for me? On, like, the VCR?
It is thus a mistake, the justice said, to applaud the regulation of corporate speech as “some sort of beatific action.”
Justice Thomas said the First Amendment’s protections applied regardless of how people chose to assemble to participate in the political process.
“If 10 of you got together and decided to speak, just as a group, you’d say you have First Amendment rights to speak and the First Amendment right of association,” he said. “If you all then formed a partnership to speak, you’d say we still have that First Amendment right to speak and of association.”
“But what if you put yourself in a corporate form?” Justice Thomas asked, suggesting that the answer must be the same.
"Justice Thomas Defends Campaign Finance Ruling" The New York Times, 3 Feb, 2010.
But corporations are self-aware, not just assemblies of people! They live in perpetuity and their agents can be held responsible for not properly feeding the beast with profit. Surely that changes the dynamic somewhat?
I'd not heard its sobriquet, "Wreck the Hoose Juice." Nearly as charming as the tipple itself.
As noted by the paper of record in my present home, "35 percent of the [litter] items identified were Buckfast bottles."
The very inspiring thread of Tyler Cowen's Create Your Own Economy is muddied by a surprising presentation of autism as primarily a set of intellectual gifts. To hear Cowen sing, you'd think autism was strictly an attribute of heroes—heroes who are sadly abused by the prejudice of mainstream neurotypicals. He argues that we should all emulate autistics by memorizing and ordering information—and that we are already doing so, through social networks and personal technology. He takes umbrage at the notion of autism as a "disorder" and calls those who see it that way bigots. He spends chapter after chapter extolling the virtue and importance of autistics' legendary "ordering" abilities, and the relevance of information-ordering to a modern information economy.
I was perplexed—isn't there some downside to autism? Other sources say so. Wikipedia, citing medical journals, describes it as a developmental disorder, and gives figures showing that autistic adults have a very poor success rate (circa 12%) at living independently from day to day.
Cowen paints far too rosy a picture of autism, it seems. And while he does good to call out its strengths, and rail against prejudice, I'm not sure his book contributes to a good understanding of the condition.
Autistic people, like any others, have the right to be treated with dignity and with all the respect they earn. Cowen is right to point out that, as "autism" becomes a commonplace label for a broad class of people, it becomes easier to write them off: to give them less credit than they deserve, and deprive them of dignity.
But if autism is a cognitive inability to participate in the communication protocols that allow us all to coordinate as a society, then it is a disorder.
And, doesn't Cowen elevate the importance of "information ordering" too far? Studying and organizing information can be useful; but I've seen plenty of such obsessions that are, truly, useless—or at least not paying off. The people who memorize train timetables or baseball stats seem to me to be wasting their time. Lots of people know facts but interpret them too rigidly: they can't apply fuzzier knowledge—established associations and probable linkages—or flex what is known into a fuller understanding. Information should be carried by paper and hard drives, not by human memories. Our minds should be left free to perceive, to compute, and to enjoy.
Here's an alternative heroism: the real heroes of today are those with a holistic, integrative and flexible picture of our information-dense world. These are the torch-bearers of the liberal arts 2.0, the intellectual politics of Barack Obama.
