The abysmal deeps of Personality

Username:	Password:
Forgot your password?	Remember Me

"Tithing," Tesla said, "giving back to the day."
...And the greatness of that comes out of nowhere (but obviously has a bearing on the title). Hard not to be picturing David Bowie.

Anyhow, I realized (listening to some old Abbott and Costello and also some contemporaneous radio adaptations of Hitchcock movies) that what makes Pynchon's dialogue so great (has this been noticed before) is how much it's like the radio he grew up with. The smooth and fluid, transitionless abruptness with which narration turns into a snipet of dialogue and then becomes narration again, and vice versa. The great and glorious alertness his characters have -- always ready to speak, to say the thing that will give the situation maximal color and vividness, however briefly; and the corresponding willingness to wait in alert silence.

No wonder, I guess, that he must have relished playing himself (and rewriting the script) for The Simpsons.

Current Music: Dance of Electricity

Social Security numbers, primes and chromosomes
So reading an article about how many ss#s are online, I googled mine. It's there, but not as my ss#. Rather it appears as:

-a document locator number in some company

-a prime number (Using Gauss's formula, I calculate the odds against this at about 20-1. I rock!), and

-a sequence on the 10th chromosome which is more complex than its analogue among rhesus monkeys, or at least has an interpolated sequence of base-pairs.

What do you find if you google yours? (Enter it as a single 9-digit number.) This is my version of Quizilla, I suppose.

Cape Cod
Icy cold, dazzlingly bright Monday...

Coast Guard Beach -- I like the way the waves seem to travel in a school

Fort Hill

More dyspeptic sputtering
Another letter in tomorrow's Times, by yours truly, complaining about David Brooks's truly stupid piece of Steven Pinker- and E.O. Wilson-inspired resonant pessimism last Sunday.

Judith W. Rogers is my hero of the day.

Two deaths
Two of my fathers' clients died in the last couple of weeks. They were both extremely notable painters in the sixties. Jules Olitski was Clement Greenberg's choice as greatest painter alive, a judgment he never recanted.

"Comprehensive Dream"

Greenberg was also a client of my father's (my father is a CPA), and apparently never paid. He may have recommended my father to his artist clients, including, Larry Poons, Susan Crile, Kennth Noland (who turned my father on), and... Viva! Greenberg was as nasty a piece of work, my father says, as he is always made out to be. I never met him but I did meet Olitski many times, and he featured a lot in my parents' shop talk at dinner. I knew his daughter too and we went water-skiing together a couple of times in Bellagio.

I thought his spray-paintings were stupid and empty at the time. Now I think they're magical, and also of another era. I did like the way some of the contrasting colors produced illusions of intense vibrancy in the fog of paint. My father had a "painted word" theory of painting, which I thought was stupid. Now I see the paintings as paintings, not as painted words -- more like Greenberg. They're nearly pure abstraction, and it's beautiful. At the time I was amazed at how much Olitski's paintings sold for. He never paid, apparently, and refused to give my father any paintings as payment in kind, which is what my father really wanted. In his obituary I read that he wanted his paintings to look like they were eerie and unearthly colors hanging in thin air. That's certainly how they hang in my memory.

Dan Christensen also died. He did give my parents a painting as p.i.k. Next time I go home I'll photograph it. In the meantime this is more or less in the same style.

"Lisa's Red" (1971)

My mother says our painting (their painting, but I grew up with it) is "fun." It brightens up the room. I like that she feels that way about it -- I'd never heard her describe it till I mentioned seeing his obituary to her. His painting partly helps me to see how great Olitski really is. There's more than one way to color a field. Olitski colors it the way nature might. Christensen is fun.

Thinking back on my sage and sober and contemptuous ten-year-old or thirteen-year-old self, I realize I was the accountant's kid. There I thought I was the center of the world. I didn't like their paintings (though I liked them), and I thought that mattered. I was the real literary-aesthetic center of things. In my world, anyhow. So their deaths bring back that old version of myself, from the outside. As though now I lived in the world of their paintings, and from that perspective, ranked with the paintings, a member of their train or community, I look back at that obnoxious kid that I was. It's odd.

But I like remembering their paintings, Olitski's especially.

I hate myself, but...
Using some googlefu and the wayback machine I finally found archived copies of the notorious article which contains this rarity, a photo of Jackson (in 1998, aged 7) and his father (then 61):

Rather than risk teaching a lie, why teach anything?
I generally think people can read their Josh Marshall on their own, but this story is pretty amazing.

Term of art
Ren run.

Adorno and Mundane Studies

This is I believe a new section at wonderful McIntyre and Moore's, in Davis Square. The titles of the books on the bookshelf area:

Dumbstruck: A Cultural History of Ventriloquism

So Proudly We Hail: The History of the United States Flag

The Hall of Fame Hall of Fame (This slim and barely visible volume was the catalogue for an exhibition on halls of fame in the late nineties at the Yerba Buena Gardens in the Mission)

The Guiness Book of World Records, 1997 (Guinesses is good for you!)

The Art & Science of Manicuring

The Cheese Book

Read my Lips: A Cultural History of Lipstick

Barnaby Conrad's Encyclopedia of Bullfighting

Purified By Fire: A History of Cremation in America

Christmas: A Social History

Tupperware

Tried and Trousseau: The Bridal Guide

It turns out that the bullfighting book is of use to me. I learned that the veroníca de perfil, the classic presentation of the bullfighter's body in profile to the bull as he makes a two-handed pass of the cape, is a modern innovation, from the late twenties. This is the move that Leiris is so interested in. And, get this, all these flashy moves belong to the category called the adorno. (There's a bullfighting glossary here.)

"You don't even know what a machine is"
Surprisingly good quote from an interview with John Searle in the Boston Globe this week:

"People think I'm saying the computer is too much of a machine to be capable of consciousness. That's exactly wrong. I'm saying it's not enough of a machine."

And some the work admire and some the architect
Save

pandemonium_bks. Go here and buy a T-shirt or three. It's not important, but it's important. Yes,

db_c00per, you.

U
U is a crony. You might think cronyism or being a crony is a relation to others. Simmel might think that being a crony is a sociological facet of human existence. But U is like the sound of one hand clapping. He's a crony even when alone. He shows that cronyism is a Platonic and not just an Aristotlean characteristic. Somewhere there exists the form of the crony pure and simple, and U instantiates it. I like him.

This grim little nugget...
...is buried in the Times's already grim article on the report issued by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

The panel said there was no solid scientific understanding of how rapidly the vast stores of ice in polar regions will melt, so their estimates on new sea levels were based mainly on how much the warmed oceans will expand, and not on contributions from the melting of ice now on land.

Other scientists have recently reported evidence that the glaciers and ice sheets in the Arctic and Antarctic could flow seaward far more quickly than estimated in the past, and they have proposed that the risks to coastal areas could be much more imminent. But the I.P.C.C. is proscribed by its charter from entering into speculation, and so could not include such possible instabilities in its assessment.

But there's another side to things! Because the Times also reports that the IPCC report is being criticized as too optimistic. Too optimistic because it leaves out the melting of Greenland and Antarctica (as in the paragraphs quoted above). And the result of leaving these "specualtions" out? Know who the egregious S. Fred Singer is?

One prominent critic of mainstream climate science, S. Fred Singer, a retired physicist, is already seizing on the report as evidence that people like former Vice President Al Gore who argue that human activity is changing the earth’s climate are now the contrarians.

Pan's Labyrinth
Liked it. Didn't love it. Maybe if the theater had been full of anxious, intense, focussed people I would have. Audiences do so much. But still.

Its strong precursor, its very strong precursor, is Spirit of the Beehive.

( And here's what I don't get about the ending )

Tuché
I kind of like the fact that at least four times, I think (Orleans, Somerville, New York, Northampton), I've been within hailing distance of

bluerosesgirl, most recently last weekend in Northampton, and we've never managed to meet, or managed never to meet.

Men's room

Basement, Smith College Art Museum

The women's room is supposed to be cool too.

Allegory

Greenhouse within greenhouse within greenhouse (Smith College)

A bit on Javier Marías
Hey,

agoraphiliac, do you remember whether Deza's sister is ever named in Your Face Tomorrow?

In the amazing non-fictional book Dark Back of Time (a memory of the "dark backwards and abysm of time" in The Tempest) Marías has some unutterably moving things to say about a brother of his who died as a child before he was born. I have been trying to think about the relation of this dead brother (the kind of person Abraham and Torok sometimes describe) to fiction (a connection Marías makes but doesn't particularly focus on). My uncle, after whom I'm named, died in the Second World War, leaving my father to grow up the younger, resented, surviving son. He loved his older brother, and sometimes tells me about him, though not often. My grandmother told me a lot more about her older son, whose death was (of course) the great tragedy of her life. And I find these stories -- from both of them -- of interest.

My grandfather also had an illegitimate daughter, who died at eleven, before my father was born (I believe).

So there are these two dead siblings -- not mine, but close enough. And I can't say that I find their lives particularly moving. I mean they're of interest, but they also belong to a past completely established, its lineaments utterly determined, pure back story, by the time I was born. They were history. I am curious but not absorbed absorbed in their lives. There doesn't seem the possible other case that we go over again and again when we know the dead -- the way they might not have died; or the way life was before they died.

So I wonder whether Marías had and has that relation to his eldest brother Julianín: thinking of him as someone always already dead. Certainly this is not the way he comes out in the book: as I say there is nothing more moving than Marías's account of his dead brother. But I am wondering to what extent this is an effect of the story being written, existing for an audience (including perhaps the author himself) to whom this is all new. The dead child -- like no one so much, perhaps, as Father Time in Jude the Obscure, or Mammilius in The Winter's Tale -- did Marías somehow manage to turn him into the equivalent of fiction, and then mourn for him, as I do?

Can I do that with the dead of my house, from before my birth? Should I? (The deaths of some of them in the camps are very interesting to me as well, and make for good stories, but still don't move me.) Does it matter to Marías how sad the little life and little death of Julianín makes me? Would I be as sad if his narrating voice didn't sound so sad? Does it matter to me, that is to say, how sad the little life and little death of Julianín makes him? Is the sadness for him real? Fictional? Or just notional?