The Overweening Generalist is largely about people who like to read fat, weighty "difficult" books - or thin, profound ones - and how I/They/We stand in relation to the hyper-acceleration of digital social-media-tized culture. It is not a neo-Luddite attack on digital media; it is an attempt to negotiate with it, and to subtly make claims for the role of generalist intellectual types in the scheme of things.
So hey yea! kiddies! Its time to open up the Ol' Mail Bag. Let's see what my phantom friends/fiends/detractors/slavish admirers have for the OG...(NB: a few of my correspondents seem to have zero clues about properly formatting their email Qs for me; the problem lies with them, not your humble OG.)
1.)
Dear Overweening Generalist dude,
A friend turned me on to your blog, saying you were all into Robert Anton Wilson and conspiracy
theories and the Deep State and stuff like 'at. But you hardly write about that stuff at all. Oh, there are
a few pieces here and there. Are you holding out on us? What gives?
(Signed) Disgruntled
Dear Dis: first of all, get your gruntle back; you'll never know when that shit will come in handy, and besides, I'm not worth the loss of it. (BTW: what's with your fucked-up formatting?) While I'm truly fascinated in all that stuff you're fascinated in, and I have a lot to say, I'm not sure this blog is the place for all that, and besides, when I last looked, there were precisely 789 million other sources online for conspiracy theories and paranoia, really meaty stuff about the Deep State. The more I've delved into that whole schmeer the more model-agnostic I've become about most conspiracy theories. And then again the NSA came to my door and used vaguely threatening language about me even "thinking about" (one of the three guys's exact words) writing about what I know. But thanks for reading!
2.)
Hey man: What's it like where you are? Here it's cold and sorta clammy, which is a drag because I'm allergic to shellfish. (LOL!)
(no signature given)
Dear No Sig-
Hey man back atcha: I love jokes like that, and I thank you for sharing with me and not being...wait for it...shellfish! (HAHAHAHAHA! ROTFLMFingAO! Don't you love this Intrawebs thingy?)
Stay cool, man. (Or, you could be a woman, in which case: you lucked out, eh?)
3.) Hi. I really liked your piece on bumperstickers and how people feel the need to express themselves
"safely," as you wrote. I agree that the sorts of sentiments found regionally can tell us something
about the local semantic unconsciousness. - Publius
OG: Uhhh...I haven't written that piece yet. How did you read it? This email baffles me. I have
sketched notes for that piece, but it's nowhere in my computer yet. This really freaks me out,
because I would have written about what you say you've already read from me. Are you
mistaking me for someone else?
Publius: No, I read the piece in Overweening Generalist from, gosh, I don't have my computer nearby...sometime in mid-December of 2012?
OG: Wha?...How are you writing to me if you don't have your computer nearby?
Publius: Brain implants, muthafuckuh! They rock! I think a thought and my iNeuron writes it as sentences? Duh! Of course, it still requires effort on my part to think, "Message to Overweening Generalist blog." So they have a lot of kinks to work out.
OG: What? Are you putting me on?
Publius: Oh, no: I'm sorry! I forgot: you are writing before the time machines came in. I'm from 2027. I should've said that earlier. Sorry!
OG: Okay, I'll bite: if you're from 2027 and you've read a piece I haven't written yet, then how are we exchanging email right now, in my blog?
Publius: I'm not sure if I follow?
OG: You're not sure...? This makes no sense! You're freaking me out, "Publius."
Publius: Oh wow. Sorry dude. I was only trying to express how I like some of your pieces. Some of your other ones? Not so much...But hey: I'm no great shakespeare as a writer myself!
OG: Ummm...okay, I'll grant you're from the future. Ray Kurzweil's most fervent admirers were right. But I still don't understand how we're conducting an email correspondence in "my time," right now, right where I'm sitting. Just answer that and I think I'll be okay.
Publius: They said we're not allowed to divulge that info, dude. But I swear, man: it's not a big dealio. Things will be okay, and btw: don't worry when they find something bad after your physical.
OG: All right: that's it! I'm tired of you fucking with me! I would like to politely request that you do not write me anything from 2027, as I'd rather just pretend the future can't be known. Humor me. Unknowableness gives me comfort.
Publius: Jeez-a-Louise! I'm sorry, asswipe! I contact you to say I like your piece and you jump all over my shit with a 15 year separation. Fuck you!
OG: Allright: I got carried away. I apologize. But can't you see that using a time machine can really freak out people from the past? By the way: how did they do it? I was sure Einstein's theory of relativity and all the other quantum gravity stuff and wormholes just were hopelessly unworkable.
Publius: Einstein's for schmucks! Do you know about n-dimensional tensile matrices and Gilhooley's theory of antimatter aggregates?
OG: Nevermind. Have a great day, whenever you are.
I noticed that, unlike bloggers who actually make money from their blog (and I'm aware of your
rather unfortunate history with some clueless Puritan assclown d-bag from Google who scuttled
your affiliate-derived income), you not only write far too much to hold the Average Reader, but you
eschew the time-honored "5 Reasons Why You Should Do This and That To Make Your Life
Better" list-formula. Why? No offense intended.
(Signed) - SEO in Oshkosh
Good question. I don't do the listing thing for a number of reasons:
I just think it's trite, and I'm a contrarian, maybe congenitally. Others would say I'm an a-hole, or worse: a hypocrite. One thing I'm not is a cheap Ironist, I'll tell you that!
The List Approach seems so horribly formulaic I simply can't bring myself to stoop that low, and besides: it seems to appeal to that aspect of the quick I want it now I have the attention span of a poodle on meth thing in our culture. I detest what's happened to us. Did you read my post on long sentences? It's HERE.
Furthermore, the List device violates my personal aesthetics derived from Nietzsche, Rorty, and (Groucho) Marx.
THIS SPACE LEFT INTENTIONALLY BLANK AND REDACTED FOR NATIONAL SECURITY PURPOSES
I'm frankly afraid - and I hate to admit this - that the listing technique, approach, gadget, whatever: it might become addicting. And I'm okay with all sorts of addictions, but this is one I will not do. Sorry to disappoint you!
In order to leverage user-friendly interest graphs to maximize social media feeds, I can show you how to synergize cutting-edge podcasting techniques in order to harvest the inverted output of crowdsourced, integrated models and reinvent a bottom up mashup to generate buzz and attract the most talent to your blog endeavor. (not signed)
Dear Robot,
Please watch the below video. It sums up my stance on your schtick really well:
My own thinking about art theorizing, and later anti-theorizing, may have started as a young teenager on a beach towel in the sand, during the summer, at Huntington Beach, or Newport Beach. The visual tableaux of "straight line" horizon of sea/sky, the relaxing auditory soundtrack of Pacific Ocean waves crashing in their marvelous periodicity, the caress of sun on my melanin-deficient skin (yearly checkups now for melanomas, OY!), the primal people-watching of others there, barely clothed, the smell of sea-brine and cocoa-butter suntan lotion, and often, with friends, mind-altering chemicals, like beer or cannabis. On my back, the sun overhead and reflecting off the proto-glass sand surrounding, Sol beating down on my closed eyelids, entoptic imagery. I hope all of you reading this have had the experience of seeing geometric squiggle-waves, or waves radiating out orange or blue waves in roughly 360 degrees from a point, or little bacterium-like shapes floating around in your field of vision. Some people call them "floaters," and sometimes they encounter them while being ill, or faint. I saw them on the beach, always. I could always count on them. I could also banish them by thinking of more worldly things. But eventually, after looking at plenty of cave paintings from places like Lascaux, or Islamic Art, or modernist Abstract Expressionism and 1960s psychedelic art...I wondered: is my beach experience related to the history of art in some way?
entoptic imagery, consciously elaborated
The OG Is Anti-Art Theory
I have no problem with anyone's art theory (with exceptions: Ayn Rand's, the Nazis, 1930s Soviet ideas, and a few others), and I will continue to read anything that seems new. I find value in many aesthetic theories. I get a kick out of Ruskin. E.H. Gombrich's book Art And Illusion was thrilling, and will thrill me again when I return to it. I love looking at Kandinsky's paintings, and his mystical-intellectual ideas about juxtapositions of forms and colors I find baffling yet still interesting. Etc.
I object to the idea of "the best" theory of art. If your favorite theory of art doesn't show up in the blogspew, I could not possibly care less...just continue to enjoy your Art.
Alan Watts, in his The Culture of Counter-Culture, wrote that it's good that we don't have a precise theory of art, or more widely, a precise aesthetic theory, one that, if applied correctly, would churn out great art and artists. Because that would be very boring. I read that over 15 years ago and still agree. Moreover, my developing epistemology increasingly provides evermore doubt we'll ever arrive at a precise aesthetic theory. There was a time - perhaps 1880? - in which this idea would've been thought pessimistic; I see it as an unalloyed joyous thing.
As a young man, Oscar Wilde was furiously reading esthetes and theorists, trying to find his own way. He read the great aesthetic theorist Walter Pater and fell under his influence. Eventually, as Richard Ellmann writes in Four Dubliners, "[...] but he never fell into the error of arresting his intellectual development by any formal acceptance of creed or system, or of mistaking for a house in which to live, an inn that is but suitable for the sojourn of the night in which there are no stars and the moon is in travail [...] no theory of life seemed to him to be of any importance compared with life itself." (p.23)
This seems quite isomorphic to Alfred Korzybski's "The map is not the territory."
basic entoptic imagery
Oliver Sacks
He's just produced another book, Hallucinations. My local library bought five copies, they're all checked out, and there are 42 holds. The Berkeley intellectuals (most of the population?) are fascinated by hallucinations, for multivarious reasons. It also doesn't hurt that Sacks is one of the few scientist-intellectuals who writes so well for the general public that his books still qualify as non-fiction juggernauts in publishing. I will devour his latest book as soon as I can get my hands on it, as I have all of his previous books. From reading reviews of Hallucinations, I find it laudable he's making a very nuanced argument in an effort to de-stigmatize hallucinations, because we're all hallucinating far more often than we'd think.
The paideuma - our collective semantic unconscious - assumes hallucinations are for the seriously ill. It seems part of our long historical baggage of overly-rationalized systems of thought that are now built into the fabric of almost every aspect of our lives, and owes largely to the incredibly influential and persuasive rhetorics of Pythagoras, Plato, Aristotle, Euclid, St. Augustine, Descartes, and Newton.
Around 2008 Sacks published a book on Migraines. His latest book seems to elaborate on some of what was in his headache book, but I'll have to see for myself. In Migraines - which he has had since early childhood - (he also has prosopagnosia, or "face blindness") he describes the imagery that accompanied a migraine headache: tiny branching images, like twigs, geometrical structures that covered his entire visual field, lattice and checkerboards (typical OG digression: this reminded me of Werner Heisenberg, trying to come to grips with quantum phenomena, and in order to escape his hay fever, retired to an island, where he could hike and think and play mental games of chess with his friends, finally arriving at a mathematical solution to the quantum by using a bizarre matrix algebra that no one would have ever thought would be put to practical use), and sometimes more elaborate patterns like Islamic carpet patterns and complex mosaics, spirals and scrolls and filigree, eddies and swirls. At other times he saw three-dimensional shapes like pine cones and sea urchins.
Heinrich Kluver
Now, this is not new territory. Sacks, as a neuroscientist, read Heinrich Kluver's books Mescal and Mechanisms of Hallucination. Kluver experimented with mescal himself and saw infinitely small and transparent oriental rugs and malleable filigreed biological-like objects, often spherical, like radiolaria. Kluver hypothesized that these were "form constants" that were geometrical and ornamental but were innate, which reminds me of Mandelbrot's sets and their descriptions and fantastical arrays in our natural world.
Reading Sacks and then Kluver, this resonated with me because one of my favorite things to do, late at night, cannabis or no: page through marvelous books of prints by Kandinsky, Alex Grey's staggering book Transfigurations, and Ernst Haeckel's Art Forms In Nature, among many others.
When I consciously do this, it is because of the reliability of pleasure, and a concomitant entrance into a finite province of meaning, outside the primary, ordinary, taken-for-granted "reality" of our (in this case my own) daily lives.
Hubel and Wiesel
Basic Idea of Where These Forms Come From
Kluver was fascinated because these visual images seemed to not have anything to do with memory, personal experience, imaginative force, or the desire to see them. They appear to be archetypal. Furthermore, people the world over express these forms in their artworks, whether in Africa, ancient Mexico, or southern Europe during the Paleolithic. But why? What explains it?
The visual cortex, located in the occipital lobe near the "back" of our brains, was described by Torsten Wiesel and David Hubel, and they deserved more than one Nobel Prize, their work was so fantastically groundbreaking. It turns out the part of our brains that is involved in seeing has very many layers and they're quite specialized. One sheet of neurons only knows a dot, others know little lines, other colors, etc. It's incredibly complex and totally amazing they were able to crack this code, via painstaking work.
So, via migraines, or sensory deprivation or hallucinogenic drugs, or fever, or flickering lights, or just-waking/just-falling asleep states: the cytoarchitecture of these basic sheets of neurons - each neuron only "knows" how to do ONE THING! - gets activated. Our primary visual cortex, in these altered states shows us, makes available to us for contemplation, the dynamics of a part of our visual cortex: lines and shapes, from Euclidean forms to non-Euclidean forms, up to - if we're really "out there," Mandelbrot-like forms: animals, landscapes, people, other Beings.
Oliver Sacks thinks the elementary forms of our worldwide human Art can use, as explanatory schema, non-ordinary states available to all of us in one mode or another, and the workings of the neurophysiological workings of the primary visual cortex.
Now, this may seem reductive. And I think it is. But it's my current Number One as far as the basic mental elements of Where Art Comes From. And it seems to go a long way in explaining what caused those shapes playing for me, unbidden, on the backs of my eyelids, in the Theater of the Entoptic, while sunning on the beach. Am I married to this theory? No. But I will be astonished if a richer one comes along.
A Parthian Shot: because I think it's basically correct - that various non-ordinary states in the human archetypal landscape have given rise to Art - I see the so-called War On Drugs (which I often extensionalize to a War On Certain People Who Use Drugs The State Arbitrarily Outlaws) - as a War on Human Nature, and I got this idea from David Jay Brown, in an essay he published in Rebels and Devils: The Psychology of Liberation.
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Oliver Sacks on hallucinogens and hallucinations. We need more and more of these hyper-articulate intellectuals talking about their own phenomenological experiences on psychoactive drugs. This is less than 5 minutes, and get a load of what Sacks says about amphetamines!:
Sometime in 1996, physicist Richard Taylor decided he'd also pursue a degree in Art History, so he's my kind of guy, obviously. He was on sabbatical and checking out Jackson Pollock's drip-art (1943-52). In 1949 Life magazine featured Pollock as the Hot New Guy Painter and then received tons of letters protesting this abstract expressionist's work, a common argument being something like, "My kid could paint that!" 50 years later, a major exhibit of Pollock at New York's MOMA had lines around the block, and a Pollock has sold for $40million. You explain it. I've got some fractal fish to fry.
A detail-section from Jackson Pollock's 1949 work Number 8
Taylor got the idea that Pollock, in his use of particular paints, his manipulations of the paints' viscosities, his bodily motions, his attacking the canvas by walking around it from every angle, using his famous drip technique, had produced fractals. Either Taylor intuited that Pollock had intuited the basic minute algorithmic structure of Nature, or Taylor thought it might be really interesting to pursue the idea and see where it took him, I don't know. But he began an interesting controversy that rattles and drips down to today.
Taylor pursued his hypothesis. As a physicist he was already familiar (an understatement) with Benoit Mandelbrot's book The Fractal Geometry of Nature. In order to test whether Pollock's paintings between 1943-52 contained fractals - whether they contained complex geometric patterns that could be detected at very small scales, medium scales, and larger scales, a hidden occult order that corresponded to well-defined parameters in fractal geometry - he scanned pictures of the drip paintings and put them in his computer. Then he divided the images into very small boxes that added up to five million drip patterns that were, when looked at by the naked eye, anywhere from four yards wide to less than 1/10 of an inch.
Sabinoso canyons of New Mexico, aerial view
If there were fractal patterns in Pollock, it didn't matter what the original size was that was placed into a tiny box in a computer image: fractals are "as above, so below": fractals at the tiniest levels are reflected in the largest levels. If we look at a tree, a twig fractally mimics the whole tree. Mandelbrot - whose work was sneered at when it first appeared (by the most eminent mathematicians of the day!), argued that he had discovered yet another non-Euclidean geometry, one that could be applied to the "roughness" of Nature. Previously, Euclid and other inventors of non-Euclidean geometry assumed smooth shapes basically governed "reality."
[Mandelbrot has won, and for further information - even though I assume nine of 10 readers of Overweening Generalist already know quite a lot about fractals - I've linked to a pretty good 50 minute Nova TV program, which includes Mandelbrot, Richard Taylor, Keith Devlin, Ralph Abraham and many others. If you're bored with my spew here and want to know more about fractals and Mandelbrot, skip to the end of this post. - OG]
a computer-generated fractal image
Anyway, Taylor (1999 paper) found that Pollock's paintings were indeed filled with fractals. As Jennifer Ouellette wrote in Discoverin their November 2001 issue about Taylor and Pollock, "Pollock was apparently testing the limits of what the human eye would find aesthetically pleasing." Let's be clear about why this might be so: if we contain fractal structures in our bodies, and Nature - say, a rain forest, mountains, trees, and clouds - are fractal, then we intuitively "understand" these very complex-looking images, because we evolved with them and they are in us. Studies have shown that people's stress levels can lower by as much as 50% by looking at fractal imagery.
This seems to be true at many levels. Imagine the sound of a baby pounding his fists on the keyboard of a piano. Then think of listening to someone playing major scales in every key on a piano with a metronome. Then imagine Beethoven playing variations on a simple theme.
Some evolutionary psychologists have surmised that, deep in our evolutionary ancestry, we became attuned to deviations in the visual environment that disrupted fractal patterns, and this aided in survival, thus making the argument that we are oddly soothed by looking at fractal patterns because they were primarily about survival, and predated aesthetic concerns. (Another Just-So story?)
What's weird is that Pollock did his drip paintings before Mandelbrot published his work on fractals. If we think Richard Taylor was basically correct and Pollock's drip paintings contain fractals, how did Pollock "know"? Almost every writer who's covered this story uses the words "intuition" and "instinct." Some link this to the fractal nature of our selves, but even if this wonderful idea is true, I still marvel at...how? My best guess, as of this date, is that Pollock somehow got himself into harmony with the way of Nature, what the ancient Chinese called Tao.
"I can control the flow of paint. There is no accident." - Jackson Pollock
Taylor found, using the parameters of fractal geometry and his computer, that, as Pollock's drip technique evolved, the later, more complex paintings had even higher levels of fractal dimensionality.
The next step for Taylor was to build his "Pollockizer," which was a device that used fractal algorithms that allowed a machine to splatter or drip paint in ways that created paintings that were either fractally based, or, when he tweaked the numbers, produce just random, non-fractalized paintings. Then, to test his theory on the public, he displayed his machine-produced fractal paintings along with his non-fractal/ordinary "chaos" paintings. Of 120 people surveyed, 113 chose the fractal paintings as most pleasing.
There's much more to Taylor's arguments about fractals in Pollock, but what he wanted to argue was that he had developed a way to quantitatively analyze the style of an abstract artist. As wild as Pollock's abstract paintings appear, Taylor said his method was objective and that he may have stumbled onto a way to authenticate and legitimate actual Pollocks, to detect the "fingerprints" of his style, and separate them from the (probably) hundreds of fakes out there. Conservators came running to Taylor, eager for him to apply his method.
The Method Gets Tested: Let the Drama Heat Up!
In 2003, Taylor analyzed 24 putative Pollocks and said they did not possess the fractal signature of Pollock.
In 2006, Alex Matter, the son of friends of Pollock, said he'd found 30 Pollocks that the famous painter had given to his parents. They were found in a storage bin in Long Island, New York. Taylor used his method and determined the paintings were not Pollocks.
Enter two physicists, Kate Jones-Smith and Harsh Mathur of Case Western Reserve University in Ohio. They argued that Taylor's methodology was flawed and that it should not be relied upon to authenticate paintings. In the journal Nature they said, "Several problems must be addressed before fractal analysis can be used to authenticate paintings." And one was the small-box counting technique Taylor used. Jones-Smith took her own simple childlike line drawing, Untitled 5:
...and subjected it to Taylor's method. She and her colleagues used the box-counting technique and found them to have the fractal dimensions of a Pollock! (?) Furthermore, Jones-Smith said Pollock's paintings lacked the range of scales needed to be considered as fractal, because the smallest speck of paint analyzed by Taylor was only 1000 times smaller than the entire canvas. Taylor responded in Nature that invoking this power law "would dismiss half the published investigations of fractals." Additionally, Jones-Smith found that, when she and colleagues analyzed Pollocks using Taylor's published methods, they found that two out of three Pollocks failed to satisfy Taylor's criteria. They charged that Taylor had kept some of his methodology unpublished. Also, Jones-Smith said Taylor only analyzed 17 of the drip paintings (other sources I've read give it as 20), which makes the sample size too small, as there were at least 180 drip paintings. This means that Matter's works may have really been Pollocks and that Taylor's idea about Pollock's stylistic fingerprints should not be used in authentication.
Taylor responded that Jones-Smith's Untitled 5 does not show fractal patterns. By late November, 2007, the idea of authentication by fractal signature seemed wildly unsettled.
Here's an interesting point for the OG: by the time physicists with the advanced ninja Mandelbrotian juju apply their numbers, I obviously lack the math chops to stick with the argument. It seems that when a story goes off in this direction - specialists clashing in a language I'm not conversant in - I retreat to the sidelines to watch the melee and see how it all plays out. And sometimes it takes years! Which is fine with me. I actually enjoy the drama of it all.
Enter: Four New Nerds
In early 2008 a paper appeared, "Multifractal Analysis and Authentication of Jackson Pollock Paintings," by Coddington of NY MOMA, Elton of Pegasus Imaging Corp, Rockmore of Dartmouth mathematics, and Wang of Michigan State mathematics. They looked at Taylor's methodology and how he'd determined that the 30 Alex Matter "Pollocks" were bogus. They extended Taylor's methods, adding the "entropy dimension," which they described as a quality related to the fractal dimension, and I'll just have to take their word for it. The four seem excited that geeks like themselves are making inroads into "Stylometry," and early in the paper cite its nascent use in literature, and this reminded me of a totally fascinating book I'd read a few years ago by Don Foster, Author Unknown. Foster called what he did "literary forensics" (other times "forensic linguistics") and he used his computer and algorithms he'd developed about word choice, length of sentences, certain tendencies towards tropes, etc, to try to determine who some unknown author was. He was involved in the Unabomber case, he figured out who wrote Primary Colors, and showed that an incredibly literate and witty letter-writer to a Northern California newspaper, who signed as "Wanda Tinasky," was not Thomas Pynchon, as many suspected. It's a great read, but I've digressed. Again.
So yea, the four geeks. Stylometry would use advanced statistical analysis and improved digital representations to quantify works of art. They thought Taylor's box-counting method was legitimate. Hell, what do I know when they haul out their "entropy plots" and "slope statistics"? What did they conclude about Taylor's methods?
They thought Taylor was right: based on their entropy plotting, the Matter paintings were fakes. When they compared a known Pollock with one of Matter's "Pollock"s, they saw a "dramatic distinction between a secure Pollock and this drip painting found by Alex Matter."
Score one for Taylor.
2009: Jones-Smith and Mathur Team Up with Big-time Physicst Lawrence Krauss
They have done their best to debunk Richard Taylor. HERE is a short writeup on their doings.
2011: Fluid Dynamics Leaks In Check out this article by Lisa Grossman from Wired. When I read the title I thought, okay, more of the math-physics-art geek wars and Richard Taylor, but noooo. What we get here is two geeks from Boston College and a Harvard mathematician claiming the first quantitative analysis of Jackson Pollock. The nerve! Grossman doesn't mention Taylor, but links to his 1999 correspondence to Nature about fractals in Pollock, co-written with Micolich and Jonas. There's no mention of Coddington, Elton, Rockmore and Wang. Why? Because they're not at Harvard or Boston College? What? If you're at Dartmouth it's a denigration?
Herczynski and Cernuschi of BC and Mahadevan of Harvard "believe they've done the first quantitative analysis of drip painting." Yea, hoo-kay.
Well, these fluid dynamics guys had just published an equation about how Pollock spread paint on a canvas, in Physics Today. So...why are they "the first?" Well, they're drawing on novel findings in the area of physics called fluid dynamics. How honey coils when you pour it onto a conveyor belt, the behavior of a dripping faucet, the movement of nanofibers and rope. Some whole other thing that ain't fractals. No, they've done a "quantitative analysis" of "inertial, gravitational, and viscous coiling regimes." Alright, but I think Taylor, Micolich and Jonas did a quantitative analysis in 1999, and the four nerds in 2008 did so also.
I will chalk all this up to the dimension of scientist's lives perhaps best shown in Carl Djerassi's books of what he calls "science-in-fiction," in which an anonymous author's short bio of Djerassi, we read, "illustrates, in the guise of realistic fiction, the human side of scientists and the personal conflicts faced by scientists in their quest for scientific knowledge, personal recognition, and financial rewards."
But just as Taylor thought Pollock was doing fractals before anyone knew about them - even himself - the fluid dynamics dudes say Pollock was doing experiments in fluid dynamics before any physicists had known about the way certain fluids of certain viscosities moved. (This all reminds me of a stunningly imaginative speculative work by a real Leonardo-level Generalist: Leonard Shlain's Art and Physics: Parallel Visions In Space, Time and Light. Here's a thick book on how, throughout history, artists seem to stumble upon "knowledge" about Nature before the physicists, astronomers, chemists, and biologists "discover" the same thing, and then quantify it. Shlain was a surgeon. Yet another digression. Sorry!)
Pollock was obsessive about finding new paints and pigments, and loved to alter their consistencies. Maybe the fluid dynamics guys have something here.
Meanwhile, Benoit Mandelbrot (who died in 2010) thought Taylor was right: Pollock drip paintings were fractal. He supported Taylor in a 2007 Science News article.
Harsh Mathur, Kate Jones-Smith's colleague and Richard Taylor's nemesis, is impressed by the fluid dynamics guys' work. But I find Mathur a tad glib when he says, "Either Taylor is wrong or Kate's drawings are worth $40 million. We'd be happy either way." Why? I'd still like to figure out whether Jones-Smith and Mathur had an ulterior motive for taking on Taylor.
As of 2011, Richard Taylor says that fractals are "just one key to authentication, and should be used with other methods. It's not a red-light green-light method." He's gone on to investigate neurobiology and fractals, using MRIs, EEGs, and skin conductance to measure stress levels of people looking at fractal imagery.
Tangentially, Frances Stonor Saunders, in The Cultural Cold War showed how the CIA covertly backed Western abstract expressionists like Pollock in order to win the war with the Soviets. The idea was that we were way ahead, because, well...just look how "advanced" someone like this Pollock character is! This is what a "free society" looks like! A wonderful work of "hidden history" that almost reads like a byzantine spy novel, yet it's true. What a weird, weird world some of the CIA guys live(d) in.
Late in my investigation, I discovered Sarah Everts's article in Central Science. It serves as a recapitulation and extends my little ditty here. I like how she points out that fractals soothe, the debate rouses, the math and physics sooth, presumably due to their elegance.
"Technique is just a means of arriving at a statement." - Jackson Pollock
Here's a good overview documentary of fractals and their history, Mandelbrot, etc:
Jillian Steinhauer's "Ayn Rand's Theory of Art," which Hyperallergic ran a couple months ago surprised me, because I would have guessed Rand's ideas about art would be dull, but I had no idea how utterly impoverished they would seem.
A 539 page book that Steinhauer admits she didn't buy and only read in chapter summaries and excerpted bits, I might someday see if I can get my hands on a library copy to see if it's as thoroughly ridiculous as it seems, after reading what Steinhauer gleaned from it.
Kandinsky's Unbroken Line (1923), which is NOT art, according to Ayn Rand, because it's not representational. Interestingly, the Nazis had a similar esthetic.
Presented as a "groundbreaking alternative view" of Art, contra the Art Establishment, it seems that Rand only thought representational art in painting, sculpture and drawing was legitimate. Apparently there were other ideas about poetry and novels. But let's learn about what IS NOT art from Rand:
any and all abstract art (remember: it must be representational!)
photography (fuck you, Ansel Adams!)
any sort of crafts from indigenous peoples (why? I'd like to know)
John Cage and Merce Cunningham (big surprise)
James Joyce and Samuel Beckett (it seems likely that Robert Anton Wilson was going around calling himself an Objectivist - before he was finally summoned into Rand's presence and was thoroughly underwhelmed by her, mid-1950s - while he was a budding Joyce scholar. He probably had no idea at the time what Rand thought about Joyce, or her ideas of What Constitutes Real Art in general. That's my guess.)
inscrutable "postmodernist" poetry, like John Ashberry (gosh, I'm shocked)
anything "postmodern" or - seemingly - too cute for Rand: Warhol and Lichtenstein, Cindy Sherman and Chuck Close, Robert Rauschenberg (one of my faves)...you get the point: none of this is true Art, according to our delightful Objectivist
any "art" that comes with a prefix: "visual" or "video" art IS NOT art; "pop" or "performance" or "installation" or "conceptual" art IS NOT art. These are all terms the decadent, socialist, weak moocher Art Establishment has been trying to pawn off as "real" Art to all you saps. Don't fall for it!
finally (yea, I know, you're enjoying this and don't want it to end; sorta like an installment of "Fox and Friends"): anything described by cretinous non-heroic artfolk as "challenging"or "explorational" or "confrontational" or "quirky." See these terms and run, ladies and germs. Get with the Objectivist Program and learn from the amphetamine-addled Aristotelian Ayn herself.
Reykjavik's Wild Street Art
Check it out HERE.
I have the feeling Ayn would not approve.
More Street Art: Slinkachu's Tiny Worlds in the Street
Check it out HERE.
One strongly surmises Ayn would want to spit.
Shelly Miller's Temporary Sugar Mural, About Sugar: "Cargo"
Appearing as a ceramic, but it's not. It was placed on the side of a building in Montreal, and was made from sugar, something so playful and saccharine Ayn would no doubt want to puke. See it HERE. (Sugar murals, not Ayn Rand's puke.)
Speaking of Street Art: Jon Rafman's Google Street View Images
Found at 9Eyes. I use Google Street View but apparently not often enough! (Ayn is spinning in her grave: just think: images captured...ewwww...photography!) Why do I suspect the tiger in the parking lot is some sorta put-on? Still: pretty cool anyway. And who knows what the story is in the first image?
May K's Protein Strand-Art How wonderful is this? Vote for her if you like what she's seeing/doing. Getting even smaller, you can get your personal DNA map enlarged and printed out and looking like...something Ayn Rand would not cotton to.
Top 20 from 2011's Nikon Small World Contest HERE. I find all of these completely wonderful and when I got to the 5th place finisher, the microchip surface, I thought I had my favorite. But then number 20, "Agatized dinosaur bone cells, unpolished," from around 150 million years ago, was my favorite. Oops! It's photography, so for Ayn Rand it's not Art.
Finally: A Nod to the 2012 Election: Marriage Equality Art... Made from seeds!
I first found out about more than half of the above collections of artwerks via BoingBoing.
I suspect the world I perceive is far far far more open than the more-famous Ayn Rand's was, but then I admit my bias.
A Generalist trying to study and write about the human brain seems bound to tax attention: there's simply so much there to get all worked up over, especially since the 1990s "Decade of the Brain" and the resultant supernovae of imaging machines, knowledge of genes and epigenetics, experimental psychologies, and an ungainly amount of scientific data. No PhD in Neuroscience can keep up with all of it; one must specialize. We now have Neuroeconomics. Finally!
But the Generalist is at free play in the dense, massive fields.
I had wanted to do an entire blogspew on the materiality of the human brain, simply because I find descriptions of it so trippy. Full Disclosure: I have never held a human brain in my hands. But I've read and seen enough from people who have, or surgeons who have performed brain surgery, to palpably - in my imagination - "feel" the majesty of it all. But first: the human brain from another level: how we perceive or make "reality," and how tenuous it all seems.
Two Quotes From Disparate Recent Readings
We've learned a lot about how memory works in the last 20 years, but there's a lot left to learn. Just about any textbook minted in the last ten years will discuss how different declarative memory ("knowing that") works versus procedural memory ("knowing how"...like navigating a stairwell, riding a bike, or tying your shoes).
Discussing recent findings using imaging machines, Amiri, Lannon and Lewis write, "While explicit memory (basically: declarative- OG) is swift and capacious, a fallacious sense of accuracy attends its frequently erroneous returns. New scanning technologies show that perception activates the same brain area as imagination. Perhaps for this reason, the brain cannot reliably distinguish between recorded experience and internal fantasy." - A General Theory of Love, p.104
Before you go thinking about you and your friends and everyone you love here - not to mention how this might impact "personal responsibility" and the Law! - dig this quote from Douglas Rushkoff's Program Or Be Programmed: Ten Commands For The Digital Age:
"But the latest research into virtual worlds might suggests the lines between the two (digital models of reality and our own being-in-the-world models - OG) may be blurring. A Stanford scientist testing kids' memories of virtual reality experiences found that at least half the children cannot distinguish between what they really did and what they did in the computer simulation. Two weeks after donning headsets and swimming with virtual whales, half of the participants interviewed believed they had actually had the real world experience. Likewise, Philip Rosedale - the quite sane founder of the virtual reality community Second Life - told me he believes that by 2020, his online world will be indistinguishable from real life." - p.69
[Note: This all may dovetail mindblowingly with Nick Bostrom's ideas about humans being a computer simulation, which I touched on HERE, and this recent article, "Physicists May Have Evidence Universe Is A Computer Simulation". Caution: If you you're not familiar with these ideas yet and have wanted to do a psychedelic drug such as psilocybin mushrooms but can't find any, these ideas may prove an adequate substitute.]
Three Pound Universe: Dissection Witness
I liked Zoe Williams's brief article on her experience in the room with a neuropathologist and his "special chopping board and really sharp knife." I'll watch anything on the science channels on TV that are about the materiality of the brain, and I can't get enough of reading about the sacred object you're using now to decode what I'm trying to say. For us, it seems plausible that the brain is the most complex object in the universe. And when Williams describes it as "jaundiced pallor and pronounced bulge, like pickled eggs," it activates those circuits in my own brain that have to do with...surrealism.
Maybe that's just me.
Dr. Gentleman, who seems to love his job of slicing and dicing recently deceased brains, works for a UK brain bank devoted to researching Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, and Multiple Sclerosis, roughly in that order. He can use the naked eye to read the sorts of suffering the human underwent. It's always interesting to hear about something like, for example, strokes.
"'It's pot luck with strokes,' he explains at one point - you can have a stroke and not notice. Or you can have a stroke that leaves you with a cystic cavity, or what a layperson might call, a big hole in your head."
Gentleman cuts away in front of the journalist, pointing out, "that's the main event; personality, executive function, reason." I find the high number of errors interesting: people while living had been diagnosed with some brain disease - they and their loved ones were at least given a name for their malady - and far more often than I would've thought, it was wrong, judging by the visual evidence of the physical insults of the person's actual brain. Clearly, we have a long road to hoe here.
All this stuff not only puts me in the mood of surrealism, but concomitant to this, in encountering the actual material brain, a combination of dreamlike wonder juxtaposed with ghastly existential terror, back to dreamlike wonder. And quite often a dark humor suffuses the scene.
If you're still interested in this stuff, HERE's another: cutting through the deeply-buried pineal gland. You can thank me later.
Richard Brautigan
Richard Brautigan's Brains, "Literally"
You can make this stuff up, but you must have an eldritch, poetic mind. But this story is true: poet J.J. Phillips wanted to do research on the counterculture novelist/poet Richard Brautigan (have you read Trout Fishing in America?). Stephen Gerz tells the story in his edifying book blog Booktryst in a post "Novelist Richard Brautigan's Brains At Bancroft Library: A Grand Guignol Adventure," which you must read; I can't do it justice.
Maybe I should've posted this on Halloween.
I take some odd and demented delight in knowing most of the action here took place in my neighborhood. The owner of Serendipity Books, Peter Howard? His legend grows by the year. Did he know for sure that's why some of Brautigan's papers were so messy? Phillips had to call in a coroner to confirm. And what of the librarians at the UC Berkeley Bancroft Library? Phillips thought they were acting "squirrelly and obfuscatory." And I think Phillips has a point: what if Brautigan had had Mad Cow disease?
Being a fan of Codrescu, I can only imagine his reaction upon hearing the story. Wow.
Another Poet
I'd like to leave you with a link to "Brain," by C.K. Williams. Here the brain is traversed by the poet, a cavern, a maze of corridors...and where is a comforting soul?
Who knows what's real? All "I" - this is my brain speaking here - know is, I'm hungry and it's time for dinner, so I bid this spew adieu.
This case, in which the three-judge U.S. Court of Appeals, DC Circuit, began hearing oral arguments 15 days ago, as I write this. The decision is not expected for "months." Many of you are all over this stuff, but the basic deal is this: Unistat's federal government "schedules" all drugs. A Schedule One drug has "no currently accepted medical use," has a supposedly "high potential for abuse," has "no currently accepted medical use in treatment" in Unistat, and some Authorities at some point decided a Schedule One drug fails to meet accepted safety guidelines for people while under medical supervision.
These are the Banished of the Banned drugs. You have to go through extraordinary measures to try to get permission to study these drugs, even if you have the PhD or MD degree.
Ecstasy is Schedule One (in my learned opinion, it should not be, not even close).
Heroin is Schedule One (this is maybe the only drug on Schedule One that I think someone could make a somewhat plausible argument that it fits all the criteria above, although I find the idea of Schedule One drugs - which means the government, with very, very rare exceptions - will not allow any scientists to do research with the drug, which I find contrary to the spirit of scientific inquiry in general).
LSD is Schedule One (although, increasingly, since around 1995, scientists have gotten permission to do studies and have found some profoundly human uses for the drug, particularly with the terminally ill; LSD should be studied much more, in my opinion).
Cannabis is Schedule One also. Yes, that's right: the Federal Unistat government has classified marijuana as on par with heroin and LSD. "No currently accepted medical use."
Americans for Safe Access (ASA) thinks it has a welter of new scientific data to present to the court. The history of sane people trying to get the government to reschedule the drug to Two, Three, or Four, is long and evermore maddening the more you read it. Since 1972 people on the side of Sanity (I admit my blatant bias here) have tried to get pot rescheduled under the Controlled Substances Act, only to be kept waiting for decades (I'm not exaggerating here), only to be summarily dismissed by the DEA.
IF...if the Court says the DEA dismissed the arguments from previous petitioners for frivolous reasons, the Court could find that Cannabis be rescheduled to something like...well, how about Schedule Three? Among the drugs on that level: Marinol, which has as its active ingredient THC, perhaps the main molecule that gets you high in Cannabis! Why is Marinol Schedule Three while Cannabis is Schedule One? Welcome to the Profound Idiocy and All-Out Fascist Meanness of the DEA!
Anyway, a rescheduling by the Feds would relax the Gestapo-like tactics, which have gone on at least since the time of Nixon, but really stepped up and never really let down, from Ronald Reagan to Obama. The States that voted to allow medical pot would probably not be subjected to the Inhuman tactics by the Cop/Prison Industrial Complex.
I'll link to a bunch of articles that discuss this potentially liberating moment for our future; I confess I see people like DEA head Michele Leonhart and the DEA's lawyer arguing against its rescheduling, Lena Watkins, as on the side of Neverending Human Misery in Many Forms. Anyone else working to lessen Prohibition of these magical flowers is, to me, on the Side of the Angels. More classic proponents of Neverending Human Misery in Many Forms are named in this article, in which DEA folk and Drug Czars warn that, if cannabis decriminalization bills are passed by voters in a number os states, the purveyors of Neverending Human Misery in Many Forms will crack down hard.
Because I do not consider Unistat much of a Free Society anymore, I have grown hardened soul-skin; I cannot get my hopes up that the Appeals Court will do the sane thing. But I do confess that, like a prisoner unjustly locked up who thinks someone outside will find evidence that they did not commit the crime and they can finally go free: I catch myself hoping.
For an enlightening microcosm of this whole story, listen to a 21 minute clip from Ira Flatow's NPR Talk of the Nation's "Science Friday" show, in which, just a week or so before the hearings got underway, two experts - Dr. Bertha Madras (For Neverending Human Misery) and Dr. Donald Abrams (Side of the Angels), debate the topic: HERE.
I hope you all have (or had) a sexy, cell-gladdening Halloween!
The other day I was watching Jeopardy! (I know, I know, I'm some sorta geezer and this disclosure no doubt damages my Cool Cred, but WTF).(<---a bit of ironic foreshadowing!)
Anyway, HERE's the board I was looking at. Look at the category, "Send Me A Text." From the context, I got the first three, but didn't get the $800 or the $1000 ones. (Did you? I have sent precisely three texts in my entire life, and zero in the past two years. Kids 12-15 send 193 text messages per week, with girls sending more than boys.)
Which sent me, later that evening, to online dictionaries of Text-Speak.
Quite the cornucopia of knowledge I'll probably never use, but still: interesting: HERE.
William Faulkner, Nobel Prize for Literature, hear his acceptance speech HERE.
Robert Anton Wilson, when talking about his style, often pointed out Joyce and Pound as influences. When he mentioned Faulkner, it was usually in the context of Faulkner's long, hypnotic sentences, sentences that start out telling you about a idea or person or something in the environment, then meandered around corners, banking off of the qualities of light and what that made a character think of, and that time when the town was faced with a crisis, and how they handled it, people around Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha having seen quite a bit in their time, or at least thinking they did. Wilson wanted his own long sentences to "swing" just so.
And I've long marveled at long sentences and what they can do to my consciousness. Those of you who enjoy the sentence of clauses upon clauses: do you feel like we're a dying breed?
McLuhan might've said - maybe he did write - that with the ubiquity of SMSs (short messaging systems), it might eventually place long, literary sentences into relief: because of loudmouths on talk radio and their short sentences, with shouting pundit-heads on TV "news," all of this in the context of here and now robotic short declarative "news" bites, sound-bites, texts, tweets, etc: we might suddenly notice the long sentence as the marvelous thing it represents.
What does it represent?
Pico Iyer. I became hooked with Video Night In Kathmandu, then read The Global Soul, then The Lady and the Monk. See his books HERE.
One of the most literary and cosmopolitan writers we have, Pico Iyer - my favorite travel writer, ever - not long ago penned a short essay on why he writes long sentences. He does it as "a small protest" against "the bombardment of the moment."
He says we have a surfeit of information, but "what we crave is something that will free us from the overcrowded moment and allow us to see it in the larger light." All well and good, but what does the long, Faulkneresque sentence do?
For Pico Iyer, "The long sentence is how we begin to free ourselves from the machine-like world of bullet-points and the inhumanity of ballot-box yeas and nays." Now we're getting somewhere...
The extended sentence, swoop-swerving on the page, signifies the complexities of our minds in a world in which, as Pico says, for shouting heads on TV, "Qualification or subtlety is an assault on their integrity." It seems like some sort of weapon of defense, this expansive sentence.
He also asserts - and I agree - that the long sentence, when we hang with it intently, as it seemingly tries to throw us with its subclauses acting on prior clauses, abrupt shifts or languid turns...we are allowed access to the depth and mysteries of our own minds. Long sentences have invasive qualities. They seem a close cousin to the instrumental solo, especially in jazz. They demand a relatively brief period of zen-like attention, and maybe that's enough to accomplish their ability to change our state of consciousness to something more in-tuned? Aye, I will say something that Pico did not say: the long sentence is a brief escape into a micro but finite province of meaning: it's mind-altering, it's like having passionate sex on your coffee break. Instead of coffee. It's like getting stoned. Sorta.
The long sentence militates against everything fast and easy and short in our world; it wants to save us from what we're in peril of losing: the subtle self-questioning of the live mind. The long sentence is a chance for passionate engagement with the world, and integrity's "greatest adornment."
Pico cites Rushdie and DeLillo, Proust and Pamuk, Philip Roth and Sir Thomas Browne, Annie Dillard and Alan Hollinghurst. And someone I've been reading lately, Thomas Pynchon:
"I cherish Thomas Pynchon's prose (in Mason & Dixon, say), not just because it's beautiful, but because his long, impeccable sentences take me, with each clause, further from the normal and predictable, and deeper into dimensions I hadn't dared to contemplate."
I'm re-reading Pynchon's Inherent Vice right now. It's a novel filled with Los Angeles detective tropes, paranoia, drugs, music, crazy characters, and humor. The book is set in LA, very early 1970. And on page 13 Pynchon delivers a long sentence, a genius of image-projection upon the reader's mind (what Ezra Pound called phanopoeia), which, well, just read for yourself. The private detective in the novel - named "Doc" - has an office next to a Dr. Buddy Tubeside, whose practice consists almost entirely of giving people shots of "Vitamin B12," which was a euphemism for methamphetamine. (B12 is a real vitamin - it prevents anemia - but it always helps to have a euphemism for a populace paranoid of the Drug User.) This is a historical fact: doctors in the 1950s through about the mid-1970s, would see middle-class patients - often housewives - who felt uninspired in their dreary housework, they had little nagging pains, they felt "blah." Doctors could give a shot and do the trick every time! How meth has changed over the years, eh?
Anyway, here's Pynchon:
"Today, early as it was, Doc still had to edge his way past a line of 'B12' -deficient customers which already stretched back to the parking lot, beachtown housewives of a certain melancholy index, actors with casting calls to show up at, deeply tanned geezers looking ahead to an active day of schmoozing in the sun, stewardii just in off some high-stress red-eye, even a few legit cases of pernicious anemia or vegetarian pregnancy, all shuffling along half-asleep, chain-smoking, talking to themselves, sliding one-by-one into the lobby of the little cinder-block building through a turnstile, next to which, holding a clipboard and checking them in, stood Petunia Leeway, a stunner in a starched cap and micro-length medical outfit, not so much an actual nurse uniform as a lascivious commentary on one, which Dr. Tubeside claimed to've bought a truckload of from Frederick's of Hollywood, in variety of fashion pastels, today's being aqua, at close to wholesale."
Do you not only get a picture here, but a snapshot of a historical moment, with ideas about how we negotiate drugs and permissibility, how we frame addiction, how things change, how sex can go with drugs, people will always just want to feel good, etc? I do. And "beachtown housewives of a certain melancholy index" just kills me. O! To write a phrase like that! What about "stewardii"? And "lascivious commentary" on the nurse uniform.
It's Things like this that keep me reading, ladies and germs. It's sentences like that that give me a contact high.
One of the only photos of the extremely enigmatic Pynchon, born in 1937. When he's been labeled "reclusive" he shoots back with something like "You mean I'm not media-friendly?"
