Archives for April 2008
From Small Beer Press: Hugo and Locus Award-winning author Maureen F. McHugh’s “Mothers and Other Monsters” free under Creative Commons licence.
Things Magazine comments on the “genuine strangeness” of Mormon architecture. Like a plastic toy castles waiting to be painted. The temple near Washington, DC is especially peculiar. And Jezebel compares FLDS dresses to current runway looks. Those puffed sleeves aren’t half-bad
Science Fiction is for the Renaissance Men
Deliver science fiction from any necessity to have purpose and value. Science fiction is far above the utilitarian yardsticks of the technical minds, the agency minds, the teaching minds. Science fiction is not for Squares. It’s for the modern Renaissance Man… vigorous, versatile, zestful… full of romantic curiosity and impractical speculation.
-Alfred Bester, Redemolished, “Science Fiction and the Renaissance Man” (quoted from here)
Crisis happens when we fail to look at the large picture, but who is standing far enough away to see?
Not much can be said that hasn’t already been said about the economy. But debts and bad loans aren’t just the fault of poor forecasting, it’s also due to acute specialization. Listen only to realty trade publications, driven by deadlines, ad revenue, and PR releases, and you might be convinced home prices are on the rebound. Healthy skepticism comes from a wide media diet.
Perhaps we are to capacity with lawyers, politicians, lobbyists, realtors, and economists — and what we really need are Renaissance (wo)men. But to be a Renaissance man in today’s workforce almost guarantees nothing better than a temp position in data entry at $13.50 an hour. And that’s the worst possible place for a highly active brain to be. A new report out from the Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences explains how boring jobs turn our minds to autopilot no matter how hard we fight it, guaranteeing an increase in “careless” errors. Researchers are now designing headgear to train the brain not to make boredom-induced mistakes (a muzzle for one’s mind?)
Artist Fritz Haeg thinks we should follow Buckminster Fuller’s advice. “Basically, his theory is that the powers that be want us to be specialists,” he tells this month’s Art Review, “Because they don’t want us to see the big picture, because the more you see the big picture, the more you are apt to question things. He’s saying that decades ago, but I think its even more true today.”
Fuller was bankrupt and suicidal at the age of 32, before his life turned around. He began to wonder “what a single individual can contribute to changing the world and benefiting all humanity,” and that question turned his life around. “Everyone is born a genius, but the process of living de-geniuses them,” he said.
Maybe what we need are more efficient ways of remembering what we learn. There is a profile of Piotr Wozniak, creator of SuperMemo, in this month’s Wired. The article explains how he is really the first to make use of the “spacing effect” method of learning, known by psychiatrists since the 1880s:
The spacing effect is “one of the most remarkable phenomena to emerge from laboratory research on learning,” the psychologist Frank Dempster wrote in 1988, at the beginning of a typically sad encomium published in American Psychologist under the title “The Spacing Effect: A Case Study in the Failure to Apply the Results of Psychological Research.” The sorrrowful tone is not hard to understand. How would computer scientists feel if people continued to use slide rules for engineering calculations? What if, centuries after the invention of spectacles, people still dealt with nearsightedness by holding things closer to their eyes? Psychologists who studied the spacing effect thought they possessed a solution to a problem that had frustrated humankind since before written language: how to remember what’s been learned. But instead, the spacing effect became a reminder of the impotence of laboratory psychology.
SuperMemo helps users retain what they have read by offering it up in small bits spaced at optimal intervals of time:
We are used to the idea that normal humans can perform challenging feats of athleticism. We all know someone who has run a marathon or ridden a bike cross-country. But getting significantly smarter — that seems to be different. We associate intelligence with pure talent, and academic learning with educational experiences dating far back in life. To master a difficult language, to become expert in a technical field, to make a scientific contribution in a new area — these seem like rare things. And so they are, but perhaps not for the reason we assume.
The failure of SuperMemo to transform learning uncannily repeats the earlier failures of cognitive psychology to influence teachers and students. Our capacity to learn is amazingly large. But optimal learning demands a kind of rational control over ourselves that does not come easily. Even the basic demand for regularity can be daunting. If you skip a few days, the spacing effect, with its steady march of sealing knowledge in memory, begins to lose its force. Progress limps. When it comes to increasing intelligence, our brain is up to the task and our technology is up to the task. The problem lies in our temperament.
Public Service Announcements have always provided hackneyed obvious information (”Give a hoot, don’t pollute.”) We should have Public Education Announcements: 30 seconds of Spanish phrases, Newton’s Laws, or basic geometry theorems. Everyone would be able to explain the second law of thermodynamics as quickly as we can say “Shoulda Hada V8.”
There is one place a Renaissance man can succeed in life, according to Alfred Bester, and that is writing science fiction. Everything you can think of can be a futuristic thought experiment. Bester was the consumate dilletante, and like Fuller, experienced a lifetime of failures before making his name. “The Stars My Destination” isn’t even one of my favorite books (I need a much more sympathetic protagonist,) but it’s impossible not to appreciate his sweeping intellect. From the SFW review:
In Bester’s view, any halfway intelligent craftsman can master the technical tricks of storytelling. But it’s only force of authorial personality and its mysterious translation to the printed page that makes any tale unique. In this day and age of cookie-cutter SF, such ideals are too easily forgotten. As William Gibson later echoed, much SF feels as if it’s written by careerists who might as well be practicing dentistry.
Being able to identify patterns and potential intersections, and creatively exaggerate current situations; these are all the gifts of a wide-ranging intellect. That’s what this weblog celebrates.
Related links:
Did Urban Outfitters steal your Etsy crafts? “You thought we wouldn’t notice” is “a site dedicated to pointing out those thing’s that give you that feeling of ‘haven’t l seen that somewhere before?’” There’s no place for writers to point out possible lifting of ideas, but there is Angry Journalist.
Kay Linaker, writer of The Blob, died this week at the age of 94. Rare still is a woman making horror films. Here is a list of female horror directors. Ax Wound Zine heads up the community
This message is brought to you by Panexa. Ask your doctor for a reason to take Panexa (via)
Why Read at All?
Recently, I toured a building full of studios awarded rent-free to artists. It was four floors and three blocks long, maybe 300 studios total, but I didn’t see more than several artists I felt contributed anything memorable, let alone worthy of state-assisted housing. I suspect these residents are excellent essayists and know how to sell themselves in grant applications, because never in history have we had a shortage of starving artists.
Mikita Brottman, literature professor at Maryland Institute College of Art explains why it is some artists succeed, even if their actual visual work is underwhelming. “I have art students who grasp pretty complex ideas but can’t put them into words. If someone is a great video-game designer or great artist or a great musician, when if comes to speaking about it, if they aren’t articulate, they’re seen as freaks,” she tells the Boston Phoenix.
Brottman’s new book The Solitary Vice: Against Reading, sounds much more antagonizing than it actually is. She is arguing against literacy as the only way to measure true intelligence, and that novels are a less relevant way to communicate language now that we deal with words all day online and in text messages.
When I first read about this book, I thought it was an actual treatise against reading and was reminded of the character in Whit Stillman’s “Metropolitan” who never reads novels only literary criticisms, “You don’t have to read a book to have an opinion.”. But, Brottman isn’t validating the blowhard bluffers who have opinions on titles they’ve only encountered, she’s investigating the striving desire to board the frigate at the expense of other things.
“I read all the time, [but] there were some things that reading did for me that were not positive … It alienated me from my family, and my country. It gave me an idealized picture of romance and what the world was like. And it made me socially dysfunctional…I would be a better, more well-rounded individual if I had not spent so much time locked in my room reading when I was a child,” she explains in another interview.
Why do I read anyway? Books that are “impossible to put down” are very hard to come by, especially when there is so much more in life to get done –or enjoy. It’s a holiday and lovely out and I might be picnicking with friends rather than whittling away at the three shopping bags full of books I just purchased at MIT Press’s annual loading dock sale. Reading is a self-imprisoning vice, when it isn’t paired with social or physical experiences. Take Jessa Crispin’s advice to a reader asking why he or she has “suddenly come to hate books”:
My guess is that maybe you’ve been neglecting the right half of your brain. It needs love, too, and reading is a seriously left brain activity. The right brain might be sabotaging you until you entertain it for a while. It loves flirting, and Bourne movies, and the Art Institute. Try baking a cheesecake, or sit on your floor with a box of crayons for a day. Then try again, but maybe something a little less intense than Herodotus. When I’m sick I always regress back to Christopher Pike books, so get back to that level. After a week or two of zombie teachers and man-eating cheerleaders (in a literal sense, not, you know) you’ll be back to Graham Greene.
I think you learn a lot more about a person based on what they won’t read than what they haven’t yet. Life is too short for Jonathan Safran Foer or any other thirty-something Brooklyn novelist. While, I generally like anyone who enjoys JG Ballard books, I also tend to like people who think they would like JG Ballard, but haven’t gotten around to reading his books yet. I haven’t read any Will Self, but I imagine I’d like him, from what I’ve read about him.
But when I do read Will Self, why will I? Why else but for that blissful experience of thinking new things and what Emerson says of regaining discarded thoughts — a passage, which upon a second reading seems to reinforce Brottman’s thesis:
A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his. In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty. Great works of art have no more affecting lesson for us than this. They teach us to abide by our spontaneous impression with good-humored inflexibility then most when the whole cry of voices is on the other side. Else, to-morrow a stranger will say with masterly good sense precisely what we have thought and felt all the time, and we shall be forced to take with shame our own opinion from another.
Those eureka moments are somewhere between chocolate and sex in terms of pleasure, but what besides those three things guarantee joy in this world?
Related links
- Mikita Brottman’s “On Reading” for HuffPost
- Sven Birkerts’s The Gutenberg Elegies
- The Future of the Book blog on Against Reading
- Nerve interviews Brottman
- The Nonist’s Hot Library Smut.
It’s an increasingly nonreligious world, but churches aren’t always razed when they are too expensive for the parish. Residential and commercial realtors just have them rezoned for uses as homes, pubs, and even bookshops.
Peter Saville’s illustration of PSR B1919+21 for Unknown Pleasures is dissolving into a design cliche, like deer or birds on a wire. Previously spotted on pink and turquoise Urban Outfitters t-shirts, the soles of New Balance sneakers, now there’s now a Zune player to celebrate the DVD release of Control.
How “yu” became “me”: “Name servers for .me were delegated by IANA to the Government of Montenegro, with a two-year transition period for existing .yu names to be transferred to .me… One of the first steps taken in deploying .me online was to create .its.me as a domain space for personal sites.”
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