Word Tempering

In his blog, in a response ( titled Oxologies, tautymoroa, and other (hi)stories ), to my post of yesterday, Audience vs Participant, Felix Grant starts by saying that he is, “deeply reluctant to take issue” with me.

Why oh why is Felix “reluctant to take issue” with me? That’s just mean. I love to be disagreed with. I crave disagreement. Please, please “take issue” with me. My brain needs tempering ( and feel free to go all semantic with that word ).

So, though I only have a minute right now, I just want to respond briefly to his post of this morning — because I am totally delighted to be disagreed with, even if it is being done so very apologetically.

Felix says that “History is always  multiple and provisional.” I believe that the use of history in the phrase “alternate history”, is — because of the presence of “alternate” — meant to be only  history as in our own particular history ( regardless of what you feel “history” contains or consists of ).

That’s why “alternate” is there.

What else could ”alternate” mean ? If one speaks of an “alternate route” does not that require a known, fixed route already in mind? If one speaks of an alternate plan, doesn’t that require that there already be, in existence, a particular, specific, one-of-a-kind plan ? Else how does that other become “alternate” ?

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

A Certain Resignation

The two quotes, below, are taken from a review of two Lee Freidlander shows. The article, from The Threepenny Review,  is titled, The Shadowed Image   and it’s by Kathryn Crim.

… I’m looking now at the suite of television screens in empty hotel rooms, and the framed picture of the Kennedys in a store window, and the one of a young Mickey Rooney. These are from a world that’s still being colonized by images. They seem to me to have acquired a faintly vintage charm. I don’t just mean that they are full of objects from the past, but that Friedlander’s need to ironize what Susan Sontag called our “image-choked world” ages a little over the years. (Not that our cities and highways and private homes aren’t still sticky under a great cobweb of iconography; not that we don’t go on setting up rooms for human life and filling them with screens as companions.) As the years pass, I sense Friedlander growing at once more adventurous and also a little somber. The frustrated documenter, the tourist, the voyeur, the family man— always the boy fooling around with his equipment—uproots our assignations of beauty and sentimentalism, exposes our tendency to divide up a life and put it on display. I wonder if this is one of the reasons Friedlander must let himself into the image, to prove that the camera can also enlarge us.

Near the end:

The whole is only ever behind us. These photographs intimate a certain resignation, an acceptance that at some moment in the course of our lives we settle into a certain seat— not that we can’t go on examining our perspective, but we can’t entirely change where and what we are.

It’s a really good review. Highly recommended. [ link ]

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

Singular Art and Inflated Intolerance

… The idea that art has to possess certain characteristics which ‘raise’ it above the rest of the social world, thereby freeing it from all obligations to justify itself, has become so deeply entrenched over the course of 300 years by the pens of entire armies of writers about art, that it will take considerable effort to take another road across this terrain.

The above, and all that follows are from an essay by Christian Demand at Sign and Sight called Inflated phrases. ( The bolding within the piece is his ).

… It is a clear-cut hierarchical model which relies on the basic assumption of an absolute moral-intellectual divide: there is such a thing as art in the singular, an amount of artefacts whose particular characteristics make them art, no matter whether we personally think they merit the definition or not. The leading authorities generally entrusted with awarding this distinction tend to be art history and the museum – these also tend to exist in the singular, interestingly enough. Secondly, there are, unbridgeable topographical differences between art (and its friends) on the one hand, and the audience, another strangely singular being, on the other. The audience lives in the profane world of aims and needs; art on the other hand forms a special kingdom beyond the profane. At its borders end the rights of the audience to make demands or more precisely: the rights are transferred directly to art, which itself makes demands on the audience.

Since the audience is not used to having to meet expectations, it is simply no longer prepared or able to do this. It has been so thoroughly pervaded by the everyday indolence that comes from dealing with the profane, that it comes as no surprise that it should have the most peculiar ideas about what art should look like. Since the critic, by contrast, is on a par with art, he always stands on the right side of the expertise gap. His task is essentially to educate the people: from the lofty heights of expertise he informs the audience about what art is and how to behave towards it. Shocking amounts of writing about art follow this view to a greater or lesser extent. Against this current, there is something I want to cling to: “Art” is – and always was – a value judgement, in other words a term whose application reflects the likes and dislikes of the person using it. Art is therefore anything we call art, because for whatever reasons we find it interesting, exciting, enriching or delightful. Since however experience tells us that people find very different things interesting, exciting, enriching or delightful, it follows that the popular pedagogic declaration “That is art!” is trivial (in that it simply denotes that the object in question is, let’s say, being exhibited in a museum) or presumptuous (in that it assumes that something which I find interesting, automatically has to be interesting to others).

There is no real way to prove the validity of likes and dislikes, they have very little to do with understanding and knowledge, and really only reflect our convictions about what makes a successful life. This is an ethical question and in ethical questions no one has an expert edge. Every voice carries equal weight.

This is not to say that there is no possibility for a sensible discussion about aesthetic judgement. Because even if our likes and dislikes have no universal authority, they are anything but unmotivated. Indeed our passions are our most compelling motivations, nothing interests us more, there is nothing we can talk about more. Why don’t we do just that? And why do we try to do it with such inflated intolerance, instead of just promoting them honestly.

There is quite a bit more in the full essay. [ link ]

I’m not sure I agree that likes and dislikes are necessarily “ethical questions” especially when talking about art, but I think the essay is interesting just the same.

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com

It

Today’s best photographers discover more and more within what would seem less and less. Who would have thought that a picture, a mystery, and a joke might be coaxed from subject matter as profoundly banal as that represented in Joel Meyerowitz’s picture? [ shown ]

For better or worse, the nature of the content of such photographs seems progressively less susceptible to translation into words. Possibly the point can be demonstrated by suggesting in capsule form a number of critical approaches that would clearly be irrelevant:

That quote is taken from John Szarkowski’s well-known book, Looking at Photographs. His “irrelevant” approaches are then numerically listed; Cultural, Sociological, Formalist and Symbolist; along with a satirical analytical application of each approach to the shown photo.

Two pages later, in the same book, when talking about a photo of a nearly featureless landscape ( shown ) by Henry Wessel, Szarkowski is reduced to saying:

It would be only half true to say that anyone could have made Henry Wessel’s picture, even aside from the fact that Wessel was probably the only one present when he made it. The basic point is that one would have had first to determine precisely what one meant by it  ( since the picture did not exist as a guide ), and then consider it worth making. Granting these two conditions, almost anyone could have made Henry Wessel’s picture.

Admitting, more or less, that you can’t talk about photographs at the end of a 215 page book that talks about photographs is a little bit like Plato  ( channeling Socrates ) saying that writing is bad — in writing.

Just because photographs are “less susceptible to translation into words” doesn’t mean we can’t or won’t keep trying, or that it’s not worth doing. What if Plato had listened to Socrates … ?

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

More Henny Penny

More Henny Penny  hysteria about the internet. This time it’s Hyperpolitics ( American Style )  by Mark Pesce, again, via The Edge. Here’s a sample:

It is as though we have all been shoved into the same room, a post-modern Panopticon, where everyone watches everyone else, can speak with everyone else, can work with everyone else. We can send out a call to “find the others,” for any cause, and watch in wonder as millions raise their hands. Any fringe (noble or diabolical) multiplied across three and a half billion adds up to substantial numbers. Amplified by the Human Network, the bonds of affinity have delivered us over to a new kind of mob rule.

and more:

Fasten your seatbelts and prepare for a rapid descent into the Bellum omnia contra omnes, Thomas Hobbes’ “war of all against all.” A hyperconnected polity—whether composed of a hundred individuals or a hundred thousand—has resources at its disposal which exponentially amplify its capabilities. Hyperconnectivity begets hypermimesis begets hyperempowerment. After the arms race comes the war.

Sheesh. The dinosaurs are alive!

On the bright side, blogger Ta-Nehisi Coates offers a good defense of blogging called Again with the underwear jokes? Why print should drop the blogger-hate.  Here’s a snippet:

… taking the top 5 percent of print journalism–a mature form that’s had a chance to iron out its wrinkles–and comparing it to the worst of a very new form. It’s true that “anyone can sit at home pontificating in their PJs,” but not everyone does it well, which is why some bloggers attract an audience, and some don’t. Moreover, the idea that blogging consists of simply spouting off is moronic and reductionist. The first thing I discovered–and this has been repeatedly rammed home to me–is just how much reading I have to do in order to be credible.

Note the addendum at the bottom of that post, “UPDATE: Commenter Greed really makes an excellent point”:

This also goes to a larger failing of “conventional” media which is that it fetishizes new information above all else. In reality, new information is not necessarily better or more important that what is already known to the world, though it is often treated that way (see Drudge).

A valuable service that blogs provide is spending more time sorting through and analyzing known information. This function allows a more full processing of information that is already out there, and provides perspective on what information and stories are really important (rather than just what is most recent).

In Andrew Sullivan’s blog, The Daily Dish  ( from which I found the Coates post ) he notes:

I read 8 to 12 hours a day and blog the best of what I find, less than 1% of the total. Google reader tracks how many blog posts I’ve read: as of this writing 21,779 posts in the last 30 days. And that doesn’t count the times I go directly to blogs or news websites, something I do frequently throughout the day. Reporting is important but I fully agree with Coates that reading is a key part of blogging. Blogging isn’t just writing; it’s editing.

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

The Unborn Photographer

The future of this beautiful, universally practiced, little-known art will be determined by young and unborn photographers, who will decide how best to build on their rich and ambiguous tradition.

– the above quote is the next to last sentence from the Introduction to Looking at Photographs  by John Szarkowski

 

When I put the camera to my eye, I un-birth my self

and, then,

find myself in an un-real Nature.

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

The Munch and Cookie Show

 

 

 

 

 

 

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

Blue

 

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

Audience vs Participant

The phrase “alternate history” is an oxymoron. ( Or must it be oxymoronic if it’s more than one word? )

History, by definition strives to be linear and fixed. That historians never succeed in this does not change the nature of the endeavor.

An alternate history is always about somebody else — not about the same people following a different ( alternate ) path.

Have I lost you already ? Play along for a little longer … this is incoherent because I don’t have enough time to piece it together properly, but you are clever enough to work it through by yourself …  if you wish.

Hold the history thoughts for a minute and shift to this idea. Imagine a sporting event or a movie. Audience is here. Players are there. Clear division. Now imagine yourself taking photos of your family. It’s blurring a bit. You recording, they performing but the boundary is fuzzier. Now think about making a self-portrait. You observe and you perform. The boundary is thin as a placental membrane — but just as tough. You are never quite both at the same time.

When does that membrane ever dissolve? When you go into an alternate reality — not an alternate history. Yes, that word shift does matter because you have specifically not including history in the mix. Reading a really good book, watching a really good show — one can merge from audience into participant – go into another reality. The fact that one does not stay  there is because  of history. History is what denies “alternate.”

Consider this quote from a recent multi-book review, How the Mind Works: Revelations   by Israel Rosenfield and Edward Ziff about how the brain works ( don’t bother with the link; I’ve given you the best quote … ):

In general, every recollection refers not only to the remembered event or person or object but to the person who is remembering. The very essence of memory is subjective, not mechanical, reproduction; and essential to that subjective psychology is that every remembered image of a person, place, idea, or object inevitably contains, whether explicitly or implicitly, a basic reference to the person who is remembering.

The “person who is remembering” is remembering … history. To get yourself into an alternate reality, you have to stop remembering. Forget history. Deny history. Give up the whole concept of  history.

=====================

This is a response to some good stuff posted by Felix Grant  which was, in turn a response to more good stuff posted by Ray Girvan, on the subject of Alternate Histories.

This seems to be my week for terrorizing poor Felix ( and, to a lesser degree, Ray Girvan ). Sorry about that ! ( I have a feeling that “poor” Felix is fully capable of inflicting terror in return if sufficiently provoked. )

I read stuff and it sends out tentacles and weaves webs ( mind weeds … ) resulting in these mutated fur-balls being barfed up in this blog. (  *cough* Oh, almost forgot, on the bottled water thing, there was this connection  in this weeks Economist.  *cough* )

Luckily, I am almost out of time, and I have two more posts I want to do this morning.

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

Official Language of the Internet

Turns out that Anguish Languish may not be just for fun. On the Language Log site, they call it or them “egg corns.” The origin of the term  is from a cited case where a woman wrote ‘egg corns’ when she meant acorns.

It’s not a folk etymology, because this is the usage of one person rather than an entire speech community.

It’s not a malapropism, because “egg corn” and “acorn” are really homonyms (at least in casual pronunciation), while pairs like “allegory” for “alligator,” “oracular” for “vernacular” and “fortuitous” for “fortunate” are merely similar in sound (and may also share some aspects of spelling and morphemic content).

It’s not a mondegreen because the mis-construal is not part of a song or poem or similar performance.

 In a later discussion of how to use their newly minted term, Mark Liberman at Language Lab notes, ”… as Geoff Pullum has pointed out, eggcorns are tiny little poems, a symptom of human intelligence and creativity:

It would be so easy to dismiss eggcorns as signs of illiteracy and stupidity, but they are nothing of the sort. They are imaginative attempts at relating something heard to lexical material already known. One could say that people should look things up in dictionaries, but what should they look up? If you look up eggcorn you’ll find it isn’t there. Now what? And you can’t look up everything; sometimes you think you know what you just heard and you don’t need to look it up.”

Two samples from a long post, Still on the Eggcorn Beet:

c) power mower, as in:

“Meanwhile, Richard Parker Bowles, brother of Camilla’s ex-husband, Andrew, said that from the beginning Camilla approved of Charles marrying Diana while she remained his power mower. [Richmond, VA Times-Dispatch, Jan. 1995]

d) pre-Madonna, as in:

“[boxer Leila] Ali actually feels that [fellow boxer Christy] Martin is showing signs of fear. Ali describes Martin as a real pre-Madonna. According to Ali, Martin hired her own media people…”

[from a review of a San Francisco production of the musical "Chicago"] “Bianca Marroquin, a real pre-Madonna, boasts an almost innocent tawdriness and brings a refreshing gamine quality to Roxie Hart’s need for fame.”

It took me a minute to figure out “power mower”. See if you can get it. [ *find answer below ]

Non eggcorn posts of interest at the Language Lab:

Butt-crack of Dawn

Stir-Fried Wikipedia, with Pimientos or Salamander

Snowclones 

Flagrant Mistranslation  ( includes photos of unintentional use of the f*** word )

* power mower is paramour

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/