Composition with RNZAF 3 squadron Exercise Blackbird for three-channel video installation from Alex Monteith on Vimeo.
Lewis, Carter explained, was famously Christian, a fact I'd somehow managed to miss. I was shocked, almost nauseated. I'd been tricked, cheated, betrayed. I went over the rest of the Chronicles, and in almost every one found some element that lined up with this unwelcome and, to me, ulterior meaning. I felt like a character in one of those surreal, existential 1960s TV dramas, like The Prisoner or The Twilight Zone, a captive who pulled off a daring escape from his cell only to find himself inside another, another cell identical to the first.
In this essay, I propose to try an experiment. Literary criticism is traditionally employed in judging books. Any judgement it implies about men's reading of books is a corollary from its judgement on the books themselves. Bad taste is, as it were by definition, a taste for bad books. I want to find out what sort of picture we shall get by reversing the process. Let us make our distinction between readers or types of reading the basis, and our distinction between books the corollary. Let us try to discover how far it might be plausible to define a good book as a book which is read in one way, and a bad book as a book which is read in another.
Those of us who have been true readers all our lives seldom fully realise the enormous extension or our being that we owe to authors. We realise it best when we talk to an unliterary friend. He may be full of goodness and good sense but he inhabits a tiny world. In it, we should be suffocated. The man who is contented to be only himself, and therefore less a self, is in prison. My own eyes are not enough for me, I will see through those of others. Reality, even seen through the eyes of many, is not enough. I will see what others have invented. Even the eyes of all humanity are not enough. I regret that the brutes cannot write books. Very gladly I would learn what face things present to a mouse or a bee; more gladly still would I perceive the olfactory world charged with the information and emotion it carries for a dog.
Shane Cotton, The Hanging Sky, 2007. Acrylic on canvas, 265cm x 265 cm. Image from the Anna Schwartz Gallery website.
We must not let loose our own subjectivity upon the pictures and make them its vehicles. We must begin by laying aside as completely as we can all our preconceptions, interests and associations. ... We must use our eyes. We must look, and go on looking till we have certainly seen exactly what is there. We sit down before the picture in order to have something done to us, not that we may do things with it. The first demand that any work makes of us is surrender. Look. Listen. Receive. Get yourself out of the way. (There is no good asking first whether the work before you deserves such a surrender, for until you have surrendered you cannot possibly find out).
Dead parents are so much a part of middle-grade and teen fiction at this point, it's not even the "in" thing. It's not "au courant" or "en vogue." It's just an accepted fact: kids in books are parentless.
But I don't accept it, because you know what? It is not believable that so many kids are missing one, if not both parents. Slews of them! Hundreds! To quote Oscar Wilde, sort of: "To lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose a parent in nearly every children's book looks like lazy writing." (I assume that is what Wilde meant.)
Of course, dead or removed or simply not-very-involved parents are almost the necessary ingredient in a good adventure or fantasy story (the Swiss Family Robinson aside). Sales's article did make me do a quick mental review of some of my old and current favourites:
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (C.S. Lewis) - absent parents, guardian figure who subtly encourages adventure
The Sword in the Stone (T.H. White) - obscured parental situation results in effective orphan status, one bumbling guardian figure, one guardian figure who subtly encourages adventure
I Capture the Castle (Dodie Smith) - dead mother, obdurate (possibly mad) father, one of the best step-mothers in fiction. The Mortmains remain my favourite fictional family.
Ballet Shoes (Noel Streatfield)- three orphans, collected by an absent eccentric, given two female guardian figures and a handy mechanic.
When You Reach Me (Rebecca Stead) - absent father, father stand-in, mother. Less mad-cap than the Mortmains, but a beautifully drawn group of relationships.
Summerlands (Michael Chabon) - dead mother, grieving father (who needs to be rescued)
A Wrinkle in Time (Madeleine L'Engle) - absent father (who needs to be rescued), preoccupied mother
Fairburn is generally taught now as a poet, and he wrote quite a bit of that. But he wasn't the best of our poets, and, for me, it's his argument that's the key to him. His cranky, rambling 1944 essay, 'We New Zealanders', certainly has its flaws: most notably a section in which he hails the theories of Social Credit as the answer to New Zealand's economic problems. But it's also possessed of a raging, huge, unmissable voice.
... Fairburn had another key attribute of a good blogger: he didn't need much editing. "One of the remarkable things" about Fairburn's letters, declared James and Helen McNeish in their biography, Walking on My Feet, "is how meticulous Fairburn's English was even in his careless moments."
Suddenly I was cast into an alternate reality, where Peter Tomory, Hamish Keith, Gordon Brown, Wystan Curnow, Nelson Kenny and Imi Porsolt were running the 1960s EyeContact. And I thought: wow. That would be one hell of a read.
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Another favourite of mine, Scott Westerfeld, whose ear for invented language is usually sound, grated on me a bit with Leviathan, a steampunk alternate history of events leading into the first world war. "Clart" is a good coinage for "shit" – it sounds appropriately dirty – but "bum-rag" just gets overused by the heroine-posing-as-hero in her attempts to swagger convincingly, and "Barking spiders!" is frankly rubbish. There are loads of better authentic early 20th century swear-words. Even "damn" would do nicely for a bit of variation.
THE 17-year-old girl at the center of the revolution is a great character without being exactly likable. Katniss is bossy, moody, bratty, demanding, prickly. She treats the world with an explosive aggression that is a little out of the ordinary, to say the least. ... In short, she belongs to a recent tribe of popular heroines: the small, difficult teenage girl who manifests enormous physical and moral strength. She is both murderer and victim, somehow representing female strength and female vulnerability all mingled and entwined, dangerously, ambiguously, into one. She is Pippi Longstocking. She is the girl with the dragon tattoo. She is mesmerizing in her way of defying authority, antisocial, courageous, angry, self-involved and yet somehow sweepingly sympathetic.
Those subscriptions were sold at a deep, deep discount (61 percent less than usual). And because the Joffrey had to split its take with Groupon, the loss in revenue was even greater. This terrifies many cultural groups. But if those seats were going empty anyway, what the heck?
The smarter arts organizations are realizing that you have to give people a deal. No one wants to pay the sticker price in this economy. Raise the ticket prices and you see fewer people. Give folks a break, and they'll maybe pay more next time and buy a profitable drink at intermission. At the Playhouse Square Center in Cleveland, they just completed a big study on why certain orchestra seats were always empty during the first couple of nights of Broadway tours. They decided to fill them at any cost — thus you can now subscribe to seven Broadway shows in Cleveland for less than $100. Those empty seats are now occupied by warm bodies.
Bodies that talk to friends. Bodies that send passionate e-mails.
It is now more 20 years since Whiteread made Ghost, her seminal plastercast of the interior space of a Victorian front room. When it was finally shown, the sculpture looked inevitable: so simple, so direct, so unfussy, never mind the complications of making, removing and assembling the sections of the cast.
'Success is a topic I'll be trying to tackle in a panel discussion about social media at the National Digital Forum in Wellington in October - earlybird registration has just been extended until this Friday. I'll be joined on the panel by Renae Mason from the Powerhouse Museum: you can read their account of taking part in Ask a Curator day on their Fresh and Newer blog, and their reasons for hacking the event and using Facebook instead of Twitter.In my preface to An Anthropologist on Mars, I quoted G.K. Chesterton’s attack on science as a cold, impersonal, Sherlock Holmesian business, whereas his fictional detective, Father Brown, proceeds by a sort of uncanny empathy. I think as a writer, one needs to bring out the passion and the purity of science, the excitement, the beauty, and the fact that science may provide the only way of observing and understanding immense phenomena that lie beyond the unaided senses — the causes of things, things which are below the surface, like atoms.I hesitate to use the word purity when there have been so many uncomfortable frauds in science. One can feel ideally that science shouldn’t need policing, because there’s much more pleasure in a genuine result than in making anything up. Nothing that one could make up will be as deep and interesting as the reality. Freeman Dyson says something like, “Nature’s imagination is much richer than ours.”
II
My second thoughtful piece comes from a few months back: Atul Gawande, in the New Yorker, on dying.
I vastly admire Gawande's ability to draw out the strength and vulnerability of both patients and medical practitioners, to move from a single person's situation to a macro-economic one and back again. His essays are always insightful and affecting: this one should be published as a stand-alone edition, a modern manifesto on dying well.
III
It's a sad but logical segue from my second choice to my third, Aida Edemariam's interview with Terry Pratchett in the Guardian. I rediscovered Pratchett in the past year, after a gap of a decade and a half - the Tiffany Aching series has become a firm new favourite.
Pratchett is living with Alzheimers, and is a vocal advocate of assisted suicide:
He doesn't say it in so many words, but that [grief over losing his parents in recent years] must also be combined with grief for the loss of his ability to write longhand, or type with anything other than one finger at a time (although, weirdly, he is still perfectly able to sign his name — "the bit that knows how to sign my name is an entirely different bit of the brain"); the grief of knowing that while he may have years yet, most of his other mental faculties will go the same way. But probably not suddenly.
"Every day must be a tiny, incrementally . . . incremental . . . incremental . . . – he stumbled over a word; you must write that one down," Pratchett says with a dark, almost-laugh. (Having been a journalist himself, before becoming a PR in the nuclear industry and thence a novelist, he rarely passes up a chance to remind you that he knows how journalists work) ". . . incremental . . . change on the day before. So what is normal? Normal was yesterday. If you lose a leg, one day you're hopping around on one leg, so you know the difference.
Not so long ago, directors were proud to say museums were "cathedrals of culture," collecting, displaying and preserving the best art. Today, that's regarded by some as elitism, and it's not enough. Reacting to demographic and social trends, they are bending the art-museum concept to reach new audiences and remain relevant.
Ms. Feldman [head of the Minneapolis Institute of Art] is part of a new generation of women and men in their 40s that is taking the reins at America's top art museums. It includes Christoph Heinrich at the Denver Art Museum, Thom Collins at the Miami Art Museum and James Steward at the Princeton Art Museum, to name a few. Shaped by their times, which differ markedly from the formative years of the directors they are replacing, many have different views of what a museum should be.
As you may guessed, I have my doubts about the town square metaphor. Great art requires contemplation; it reveals itself slowly, over time, not in one glance. I don't question the motives of the new directors, or their goals, just their methods.
They [the new gen museum directors] believe that future museum-goers won't be satisfied by simply looking at art, but rather prefer to participate in it or interact with it. "The Artist Is Present" show by Marina Abramovic at the Museum of Modern Art—silent, one-on-one encounters between volunteers and the artist, which viewers hung around to watch—is a recent, popular example.
For our first Flickr Project, I’ve created a list of 10 items to photograph. Shoot as many as you can and post them in our group pool, and then check out our “Discussions” pages to talk about your work. I’ll post some of my favorite images on the Walker Art Center Visual Arts blog. On October 1st I’ll pick my favorite treasure hunter and send them a signed copy of the From Here to There catalogue.
