“In NYC you can find lots of great engineers, visual designers, and great publishers and contributors to social media. But in CA I seem to find far more people with multiple skills – engineers who blog and dabble in design, designers who can do great UI but also great UX, etc. These multidisciplinary people are the ones who hack together brilliant new stuff, can innovate across the board, see various avenues of attack, and are indispensable at startups.” – Caterina Fake (previously: Science Fiction is for the Renaissance Men.)
The Economist reviews Lennard J. Davis’s Obsession: A History starting with the anecdote on the curious habits of 19th century polymath Francis Galton, who would “estimated boredom levels by counting fidgets; in Africa he used a sextant and tape-measure to calculate the proportions of the buttocks of a “Hottentot” woman from afar. Galton also created a “beauty-map” marking every woman who passed as, “attractive, indifferent or repellent.” Davis’ book also discusses obsession as a creative tool, “And so to the present, when obsession is both a common mental illness and a cultural ideal. The two are connected, thinks Mr Davis: twin results of a single process, and perhaps the inevitable consequence of modernity.”
Next time you tell yourself you’ll work on that novel tomorrow, think of Chris Adrian. At 37, he graduated from University of Iowa’s Writers Workshop, med school, and now works as a pediatrician in Boston, while also attending Harvard Divinity School. The Children’s Hospital, although flawed, was one of my favorite books in 2006 (and by far one of my favorite book covers of all time.) It’s unbelievably ambitious — a retelling of Noah’s Ark over 600 epic pages (and Adrian says 400 pages were eventually cut.) Adrian tells Bookslut he’s now working on a novel “retelling of A Midsummer Night’s Dream set in Buena Vista Park in San Francisco.”
Thomas M Disch died Friday of an apparent suicide. This really breaks my heart. He never found the audience he deserved. I buy up Camp Concentration when I find it in used bookstores and pass it along to my friends. He is one of my top ten favorite authors, and I’d spent most of this weekend excitedly rereading his books preparing for a possible interview with him. Of his dozens of books, I haven’t encountered one that wasn’t richly imagined and beautifully written. More from Matt Staggs and Ellen Datlow.
Caterina Fake has fantastic taste in literature: Arthur Schnitzler, Elfriede Jelinek, Stefan Zweig. I found her blog googling a book and enjoyed her concise reviews, (All The Pretty Horses — “Reading it was akin to seeing your cult band sell out, putting out Top 40 when previously they’d written only complex hieroglyphics whose meaning could be teased out only by those willing to climb the mountain and take the vows,” Alfred Jarry –”Turgid, overwritten and solipsistic.”) It wasn’t until a few years later I realized (what was once) her day job. Glad she’ll have more time now for the “hugely ambitious novel.”
Brion Gyson, who invented and later taught William Burroughs the cut-up technique, also gave Alice B. Toklas the recipe for her now famous brownies.
Everything Thomas M Disch writes is amazing, especially Camp Concentration. Tom Moody points out he also made a video game in the 80s (and scripted The Brave Little Toaster.) I haven’t read the MD, but Moody explains it as “From childhood the evil protagonist spends his spare time building a personal world of torture and murder that grows increasingly baroque as he ages.” He’s got a new book coming out called The World of God, and is taking questions (as god) on his blog.
Paul Chan’s 1st Light is one of my favorites things from the ICA. Watch the Youtube video to get an idea. He makes animated shadow projections and a lot more than that. See the website for his current New Museum exhibition. He’s smart, funny, and political, (working with the Teamsters, Indymedia, and Voices in the Wilderness.) Last fall, the New Yorker wrote about the performance of Waiting for Godot he staged in the Lower Ninth Ward, now he’s the subject of a 6-page profile by Calvin Tompkins.
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.
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