Best of 3

Unexpected

2012-01-31T07:30:00.000+13:00

Drifting around on the wonderful Brainpickings site, I stumbled upon this description of Roald Dahl's Matilda, which knocked me for six:

Originally published in 1988 and illustrated by Quentin Blake, Roald Dahl's Matilda is often seen as a formative foundation for the millennial generation. With its story of an extraordinary child whose ordinary and disagreeable parents dismiss their daughter’s prodigious talent, its central theme echoes millennials’ self-perceived status as a misunderstood social actors with underappreciated talent. More importantly, however, the theme of violence and the abuse of authority — a recurring theme is Dahl’s novels — is a particularly timely one in the sociocultural context of today’s political unrest around the world, from the Middle Eastern revolutions to civic protests across Europe.

While I'm accustomed to reading about adults' levels of discomfort over the violence and evilness of most non-kid characters in Dahl's work, I've never considered Matilda in this light. (It's also interesting to note that Matilda was published in 1988, and that the notion of Gen Y / the Millenial Generation was coined in 1993.) As a not-quite-Millenial myself, I read Matilda round about the end of primary school / my early teens, and took from it three messages: that reading is important and can help you fashion your life; that even though they made you, your parents won't necessarily get you; and that school is the first place in which you create yourself.

So I'm not sure I buy this assessment. The nasty characters in Dahl's books are caricatures, and I think that kids get that (even if not all adults do). Dahl's child characters overcome through wit, cunning and resilience, not rebellion. Still, it's piqued my interest enough to feel the need for a re-read.

Jo, Meg or Amy?

2012-01-28T21:46:00.000+13:00

It was never a question for me - I would only ever want to be tempestuous, ambitious, boyish Jo March (and I still haven't forgiven her for turning Laurie down and going off with boring old Mr Bhaer).

It's the 50th anniversary this year of Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time, and Pamela Paul opens an article in the NYTimes about the wonderful Meg Murray by noting that:

Bookish girls tend to mark phases of their lives by periods of intense literary character identification. Schoolgirls of the ’70s had their Deenie and Sally J. Freedman and Margaret moments, muddling through adolescence in the guise of one Judy Blume heroine or another. And for almost a century and a half, girls have fluctuated between seasons of Amy and Meg and Jo March, imagining themselves alternately with blond corkscrew curls, eldest sister wisdom or writerly ambitions.

Paul investigates how A Wrinkle in Time gave girls an unusual role model: a science fiction heroine, a girl who combined mathematical abilities with fierce family loyalty. Although I enjoyed the book, A Wrinkle in Time never captured by heart: however, one of my favourite books of recent years, Rebecca Stead's When You Reach Me, is a kind of love letter to L'Engle's work, taking her themes of time travel, loss and love and weaving a new story set in 1970s New York, and with Miranda as a Meg for the contemporary reader.

Peter Ackroyd's 'The death of King Arthur'

2012-01-26T16:13:00.003+13:00

From the occasional book reviews file: Peter Ackroyd's The Death of King Arthur.

>>>>>>

I wanted so much to enjoy this book. I hesitate to say 'love this book', because I'm not an Ackroyd fan, but the subject matter here - I am a die-hard Arthur groupie - should have made this an easy win.

However. I found Ackroyd's retelling flatfooted, emotionless, and barren. Stripped-back prose I might have admired, but here we get stripped back storytelling.

The King Arthur story has been a massive part of my imaginative life since I was little. My first introduction, I think, was Roger Lancelyn Green's 'King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table'. I still have a copy of the book, and have dipped into it frequently. [Green added the story of Sir Gawaine and the Loathsome Lady to the Arthurian repertoire, and it's one of my favourite fables of all time; that and Kipling's 'White Seal'.]

Green keeps the archaic language (hithers and thithers and thees and thous) which I found incredibly romantic as a kid. He gives a sense of the destiny that drives the Arthurian story - Arthur is a flawed man in a flawed world, trying to do the right thing, fated to fail. It's also a story of adventure and magic, quests and chivalrous acts.

From Green I moved on to T.H. White - first 'The Sword in the Stone' as a little'un, and then 'The Once and Future King' when I was in my teens. Whatever moral compass I have, I owe mostly to White. Some may find him verbose and cheesy: I find 'The Sword in the Stone' to be one of the most fine, most pure, most gently lovely things ever written. It also introduced me - through Merlin's backwards-through-time life - to irony and and a kind of proto-postmodern humour; grown-up humour.

'The Once and Future King' takes us from a funny, thoughtful, educational story to a full-blown tragedy. The triangle between Lancelot, Guinevere and Arthur drives the story, and what I have always loved about this version is that White tries to turn the three into real people, not ciphers. You sympathise with all three, and every time I draw near the end of their story, the tears come rolling down.

In my first year of university, I decided it was time to buy a copy of the daddy of them all, Malory's Morte d'Arthur. I've never even attempted to read it cover to cover - I dip into and out of it, visiting the stories I picked up through Green and White. And I love the lushness of the language. I don't bother to try to follow the narrative, I just soak in the words. It is a Romance, consistent with all that that means - a meditation on courtly love, chivalry, kingship, nobility, a set of lessons for listeners couched as entertainment.

So what does that leave Ackroyd? The problem is, when you strip away Malory's language but don't add any - for the lack of a better word - psychology, you don't have romance and you don't have any reason for the actions. You don't love anyone, and you don't fear for them. You don't have that sadness of history - that sense of experiencing a long-ago loss - that Adam Gopnik recently identified as a key aspect of chidren's love of fantasy:

What substitutes for psychology in Tolkien and his followers, and keeps the stories from seeming barrenly external, is what preceded psychology in epic literature: an overwhelming sense of history and, with it, a sense of loss. The constant evocation of lost or fading glory—Númenor has fallen, the elves are leaving Middle-earth—does the emotional work that mixed-up minds do in realist fiction. We know that Westernesse is lost even before we know what the hell Westernesse was, and our feeling for its loss lends dimension to those who have lost it.

Instead, Ackroyd left me dissatisfied, with a one-dimensional set of stories and no sympathy.

How to explain? Let's try this. Arthur is the son of Igraine, wife of the Earl of Cornwall, and Uther Pendragon, King of England. Uther fell for Igraine when she and her husband Gorlois visited his court, but when he tried to force himself upon her they fled for their castle. Uther, maddened for her, marched on Cornwall with an great army; Gorlois hid Igraine away in Castle Tintagel, and went himself to Caste Terribel, where Uther besieged him. Though many skirmishes were fought and many man killed, Uther came no closer to Igraine, and, as Malory puts it, 'for pure anger and great love of fair Igraine the King Uther fell sick'. One of Uther's knights went forth to seek Merlin to save the king, and in return for securing Uther's agreement that he would receive any one thing he asked for, Merlin agreed to get him into Igraine's bed.

Merlin conjured Uther into the likeness of Gorlois, and himself and one of Uther's knights into the guise of Gorlois's closest companions. When Gorlois rode forth to attack Uther's armies, Merlin smuggled the king into Igraine's bed, where Arthur was conceived. Uther left Igraine, and hours later she learned her husband had been killed in battle - bewildered and grieved, she kept her puzzlement over his seeming visit to herself. Within thirteen days Uther had secured the agreement of the nobles of England that Gorlois's widow should become his wife.

How then, to reconcile Arthur's seeming bastard birth with the legend? Here's how the four writers manage it.

Green elides the topic somewhat (fittingly, I guess, for someone writing for children in the 1950s):

...Uther fell in love with Gorlois's wife, the lovely Igrayne, and there was a battle between them, until Gorlois fell, and Uther married his widow.

He visited her first in the haunted castle of Tintagel, the dark castle by the Cornish sea, and Merlin the enchanter watched over their love. One child was born to Uther and Igrayne - but what became of that baby boy only the wise Arthur could have told, for he carried it away by a secret path down the cliff side in the dead of night, and no word was spoken of its fate.

Malory tidies the ends up so that Igraine becomes a heroine, and not an exploited and betrayed woman:

The Queen Igraine waxed daily greater and greater, so it befell after within half a year, as King Uther lay by his queen, he asked her, by the faith she owed to him, whose was the child within her body; then she was sore abashed to give the answer. Dismay you not, said the king, but tell me the truth, and I shall love you the better, by the faith of my body. Sir, said she, I shall tell you the truth. The same night that my lord was dead, the hour of his death, as his knights record, there came to my castle of Tintagil a man like my lord in speech and in countenance, and two knights with him in likeness to his two knights Brastias and Jordans, and so I went unto bed with him as I ought to do with my lord, and the same night, as I shall answer unto God, this child was begotten upon me. That is the truth, said the king, as ye say; for it was I myself that came in the likeness, and therefore dismay you not, for I am the father of the child; and there he told her all the cause, how it was by Merlin's counsel. Then the queen made great joy when she knew who was the father of her child.

Here's Ackroyd:

Day by day Igraine grew greater with child. Uther lay with her one night and asked her, on the faith she owed to him, whose offspring it was. She was too ashamed to answer. 'Do not be dismayed,' he told her. 'Tell me the truth, I shall love you all the more for your honesty.'

'I will speak the truth to you, my lord. On the night that my husband died a stranger came to Tintagel in his shape; he had the same speech, and the same countenance,as the duke. There were two companions with him, who I thought to be Sir Brastias and Sir Jordans. So I was deceived. I did my duty, and lay beside him in our bed. I swear to God that, on that same night, this child was conceived.'

'I know, sweet wife, that you are speaking the truth. It was I who came to the castle. I entered your bed. I am the father of this child.' Then he told her of the magic of Merlin, and she marvelled at it. But she was overjoyed, too, that Uther Pendragon was the sire of her offspring.

God, I hate that use of 'offspring'. The two passages are nearly the same, but I find Ackroyd's so charmless.

'The Sword in the Stone' doesn't explain Arthur's origins at all. The task of explaining this falls to four small boys - the brothers who would become Arthur's knights Gawaine, Gaheris and Gareth, and the traitorous Agravaine - huddled together in a draughty tower, telling each other a well-worn family story.

"So when our Grandfather and Granny were winning the sieges, and it looked as if King Uther would be utterly defeated, there came along a wicked magician called Merlyn --"

"A nigromancer," said Gareth.

"And this nigromancer, would you believe it, by means of his infernal arts, succeeded in putting the treacherous Uther Pendragon inside our Granny's Castle. Granda immediately made a sortie out of Terrabil, but he was slain in the battle --"

"Treacherously."

"And the poor Countess of Cornwall --"

"The chaste and beautiful Igraine --"

"Our Granny --"

"-- was captured prisoner by the blackhearted, southron, faithless King of the Dragon and then, in spite of it that she had three beautiful daughters already whatever --"

"The lovely Cornwall Sisters."

"Aunt Elaine."

"Aunt Morgan.'

"And Mammy."

"And if she had these lovely daughters, she was forced into marrying the King of England - the man who had slain her husband!"

They considered the enormous English wickedness in silence, overwhelmed by its denouement. It was their mother's favourite story, on the rare occasions when she troubled to tell them one, and they had learned it by heart.

One of the things that fascinated me, reading back over the different versions of this chapter, was that White's retelling takes Malory's words and inserts into the children's story verbatim:

"The chaste and beautiful Countess of Cornwall," resumed Gawaine, "spurned the advances of King Uther Pendragon, and she told our Grandfather about it. She said: 'I suppose we were sent for you that I should be dishonoured. Wherefore, husband, I counsel you that we depart from hence suddenly, that we may ride all night to our own castle."

Call me a romantic, but for me, White will always best convey the heart of Malory's tale. Sure, he brings a Tolkienesque dying-of-the-days to it, a note that Ackroyd strips out. But Ackroyd also takes all the emotional heft out of the story, and doesn't replace it with anything. I wish it was otherwise - I'm sure others will react differently to me - but, well, THWHITE4EVA.

[I drafted this review in my email. When I got to Goodreads, this was the final sentence of the very short description of the book: "This title presents readable accounts of the knights of the Round Table." I could have saved some typing ...]

Young folks these days

2012-01-21T07:30:00.000+13:00

Two points. One, I am still vaguely resentful that I'm neither fully-fledged Gen X nor Gen Y. Two, I want to claim GLAMAZONS (galleries, libraries, archives, museums, aquariums and zoos) as my own invention, before pointing you to a post that mentions ZAMs (zoos, aquariums, museums).

Colleen Dilenschneider's 8 Top Tips for Museums and Non-Profits to Engage Millenials in 2012, based on Tina Well's Top 10 Gen Y Trends for 2012:

Sell admission by emphasising the good that your institution does
Tell people what's special and immediate about the experience you're offering
I refuse to type in this made-up term; you're going to have to click through for that one
Blah blah technology blah blah (I'm a bit dubious that point 2 and point 4 work together, unless you make technology the point, and that's shortsighted)
"Curators are no longer the celebrity rockstars of the museum world… the visitors now hold that title." Awww, bless. I hope someone told the curators about their rockstar status in 2011, when they could still enjoy it.
Take people behind the scenes - non-generationally specific good advice
Get your stuff online - help people use it (this I can wholeheartedly agree with)
Engage at a personal level to get donations, and make it easy to donate online

Overall, I'm not taken by either of these posts. But I often find it's the stuff that annoys me that I need to pay more attention to.

Didactic

2012-01-18T07:30:00.000+13:00

One of the things I do every summer is edit my Feedreader subscriptions (I know - wild, right?). This summer I stripped out a bunch of save-the-world web designy type subscriptions and replaced them with a new folder called Economics.

I've made a small selection of well-known blogs, from across the political spectrum. Since doing this about two weeks ago, I've been intrigued by how strong my reactions have been to the posts. many of them go straight over my head. But most days there's something in there that teaches me something, or forces me to think about casually-held assumptions (like this post about work hours limits, which are enforced for low status roles [e.g. manual labourers] but not high status roles [e.g. lawyers]).

Here's what I've signed up to:

Overcoming Bias by Robin Hanson, an associate professor at George Mason University

The Conscience of a Liberal by Paul Krugman, a professor at Princeton University (although I wish the NYT would push out the full posts via RSS, not just the headings)

Greg Mankiw's Blog by (believe it or not) Greg Mankiw, a professor at Harvard University

Marginal Revolutions by Tyler Cowen, a professor at George Mason University

Do you have any recommendations?

I found it in the archives

2012-01-16T07:30:00.000+13:00

I missed this story last year - the US National Archives ran 'I found it in the Archives', a contest where people entered their favourite items found at the Archives between June and September, and then winners were chosen by public vote.

The winner was this World War Two hand-drawn map, entered by John Lawlor. The objects were interesting, but it was people's (often lengthy) stories about how they found the item and why it was meaningful that really strike a chord.

I like this idea. When I was working at the National Library, it was often the stories from the people doing their own research into collections that drew me in more than the curators' stories. Researchers find the damnedest things. I like the idea of capturing and sharing these stories, and I'd be even happier if there was a physical manifestation of this project - not a book or an exhibition, but something low-fi; a wall where people pinned up colour printouts and a handwritten note would be just fine by me.

Time out

2012-01-13T07:30:00.000+13:00

One of Chuck Klosterman's predictions for 2012 in a Grantland round-up was this:

7. A popular trend story in the mainstream media becomes coverage of "Gen Y Luddites" — teenagers who consciously disdain social networking and technology.

After reading that, I kept a bit of an eye out over the summer break for stories along these lines. I hav the feeling that over 2012 we're going to see a lot of stories about slow information (like slow food, but for the creation and consumption of web content) and people vowing to lay off the internet (internet-free resorts, internet-free days, any app that monitors your internet use). These are, of course, going to go hand in hand with a deluge of quantified and programmable self stories (articles about how my collecting data on every aspect of your life - how much you eat, sleep, exercise, interact with people, your emotional state throughout the day - and using that to help you meet self-improvement or health goals) which would seem contradictory to the first theme, but when has this ever been a logical game?

Anyway - here are a view examples of what I mean:

New York Times technology blogger Nick Bilton has resolved to spend 30 minutes a day without his iPhone.

Katie Roiphe writes on Slate about the popular Freedom app, which cuts you off from the internet for a period of time you specify.

'The Joy of Silence' by Pico Iyer in the New York Times, which starts off as a normal article about the backlash against our ever-connected lives and then devolves into such gorge-raising paragraphs as

In my own case, I turn to eccentric and often extreme measures to try to keep my sanity and ensure that I have time to do nothing at all (which is the only time when I can see what I should be doing the rest of the time). I’ve yet to use a cellphone and I’ve never Tweeted or entered Facebook. I try not to go online till my day’s writing is finished, and I moved from Manhattan to rural Japan in part so I could more easily survive for long stretches entirely on foot, and every trip to the movies would be an event.

David Tate on creating things as a way of breaking free from being a consumer of things.

The links above are not so much about teenage Luddites, but about that generalised anxiety that our always-on, always-connected lives are somehow ruining us. (Mind you, during one of my always-on, always-connected activities prior to the Christmas break, I found an article that said crosswords were going to the the doom of modern society, so this is in all likelihood just that same oh-no-things-are-changing, really-nothing-ever-changes, freakout that every decade burps up.)

I spend 8-10 hours in front of a screen - let's say 70% working, 30% not working and in that grey area where work is just part of your life. I check my iphone incessantly if I'm stuck somewhere with nothing better to do. I also read (paper!) books for at least an hour and a half on weekdays, closer to four hours on weekends. I get through a New Yorker or two most weeks. I no longer read print newspapers, rarely watch tv news, hardly ever visit NZ news websites, and get my daily news from RadioNZ: I trust my friends on twitter to alert me if anything needing my attention has happened. I do not worry about any of these things.

However, a little bit of stillness and switching off wouldn't go amiss in most of our lives. It could, for example, offer a welcome relief from circles of inanity like this StackExchange forum on productivity. (A hint to all posters: you'll be more productive if you stop frequenting this forum, quit reading Lifehacker posts, and generally stop wasting your time trying to optimise every moment of your existence. Trust me.)

Change of direction

2012-01-11T07:30:00.000+13:00

A year-long feasibility study, commissioned by the City of Helsinki and done by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, has concluded that yes, building a Guggenheim Museum in Finland would aid Helsinki in its efforts to become a cultural capital.

Which makes me think - why Te Papa North? Why not Guggenheim South?

Let me through, I'm a curator

2012-01-10T21:19:00.000+13:00

George Clooney has announced that his next movie 'will be the World War II story “The Monuments Men,” a look at the art historians who landed at Normandy to rescue art looted by Adolf Hitler.' Clooney will both star and direct.

There's plenty of material to work with, with 11 civilians drafted to rescue Europe's artistic treasures, two deaths and a love story involving a woman who was part of the French resistance. One can only hope this will all result in an art-themed Ryan Gosling tumblr.

Another reading update

2012-01-04T19:17:00.001+13:00

I forgot to say I abandoned Testament of Youth (Vera Brittain's memoir of growing up before, through and after World War One) even though I felt like both a traitor to the sisterhood and a real jerk doing so.

I ground it out all the way to the end of Mary Gabriel's Love and Capital: Karl and Jenny Marx and the Birth of a Revolution, not because I liked it (or them) but because I was learning a lot about a subject I turned out to know woefully little about.

I flew through Madeline Miller's debut novel The Song of Achilles, a retelling of the Iliad that focuses on the love story between Achilles and Patroclus (which I loved, until it realised it had Twilight overtones - though at least A and P have it off frequently - at which point I was overcome with doubts).

And I also ripped through the first book in George R. R. Martin's Game of Thrones series, which was pretty much exactly what I expected, with less sex, and didn't really need me to add my opinions to the overflowing seas of opinion and intrigue which surrounds it.

Now on the go: Stephen Greenblatt's 'The Swerve' (taking the place of the essay collections I originally twigged, because the library delivered it up faster than expected). And made happy by the news that there's a new Michael Chabon coming out this year, I think I'm going to re-read 'The Yiddish Policemen's Union', which is, I think, my favourite of his books (after 'Summerlands').

A reading update

2011-12-31T18:45:00.001+13:00

Because you never know, you may be interested:

Patrick Ness, A Monster Calls (impulsive insert) four stars[would have been three, but for the brilliant illustrations and the sheer production values]

Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad (on the original list) just as good as everyone says it is

Maggie Stiefvater, The Scorpio Races (impulsive insert) four stars

Vera Brittain, Testament of Youth (on the original list) abandoned, one star

Mal Peet, Life: An Exploded Diagram (on the original list) five stars

I'm still grinding my way through Mary Gabriel's biography of Jenn and Karl Marx, finding Karl Marx thoroughly exasperating but learning too much to put it down, and am about to embark on another impulse addition, Madeline Miller's The Song of Achilles.

Christmas reading

2011-12-24T07:30:00.000+13:00

Here's my list:

Fiction

George R. R. Martin, A Game of Thrones
Mal Peet, Life: An Exploded Diagram
Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad

Essays

John Jeremiah Sullivan, Pulphead
Best American Science Writing 2011

Memoir

Vera Brittain, Testament of Youth [in progress, perilously close to being ditched]

Non-fiction

Pippin Barr, How to play a video game
Stephen Greenblatt, The Swerve: How the Renaissance Began
Mary Gabriel, Love and Capital: Karl and Jenny Marx and the birth of a revolution

Posting will probably be infrequent as I make my way through this pile - see you in 2012!

Bob Semple, heart throb

2011-12-23T07:30:00.000+13:00

Diving around the National Library's collections the other day, I stumbled across Robert Semple.

I knew about the Semple tank, of course, but I had no idea Semple (coal miner, trade unionist, mine inspector, Labour MP, Minister for Public Works and Transport) was such a hottie.

Obviously a bit of a show man, then. I wanted to add Mr Semple to My Daguerrotype Boyfriend, but their T&Cs scared me off. So I've put these here for you instead.

Images, from top

Gaze, Henry Edward 1874-1953. Portrait of Robert Semple. Gaze, Henry Edward :Negatives. Ref: 1/2-174828-G. Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand. http://beta.natlib.govt.nz/records/23140679
Creator unknown :Photograph of Robert Semple. Ref: PAColl-7985-79. Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand. http://beta.natlib.govt.nz/records/22549597
Pratt, J, fl 1974. Pratt, J, fl 1974 :Photograph of tank designed by Robert Semple. Ref: 1/2-050790-F. Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand. http://beta.natlib.govt.nz/records/23112325
Robert Semple. Ref: 1/2-044054-F. Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand. http://beta.natlib.govt.nz/records/23129598
Robert Semple, former Minister of Public Works, at the controls of an earth-moving machine, Berhampore. Dominion post (Newspaper) :Photographic negatives and prints of the Evening Post and Dominion newspapers. Ref: EP-NZ Obits-Se to Sh-01. Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand. http://beta.natlib.govt.nz/records/22787201

Hey, good looking

2011-12-22T20:00:00.000+13:00

Some people have cigarette breaks. Me - when I need a break from wireframing or proposals or carefully wording emails, I go for a sift through the National Library's online collections. Which is where I found these gorgeous things this week:

Those flies are so fly. Also, shades of Rick Killeen.

I like to think someone saw the poster and said 'Oh, shit, guys, sorry - I forgot to tell you we were changing it from Moral Army to Moral Re-Armament. No, there's not time to start over. Just paste the extra letters on at the ends.'

Images:
New Zealand. Department of Health. [New Zealand. Department of Health?] :Where flies fly in, health flies out. Cleanliness means no flies and good health. Carelessness breeds flies and sickness [1960s?]. Ref: Eph-D-HEALTH-1960s-01. Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand. http://beta.natlib.govt.nz/records/22308807
Moral Re-Armament (Organisation)Harry H Tombs Ltd. Moral Re-Armament (Organisation) :MRA; Moral Re-Armament. H H Tombs, poster printers - 23195. [1950?]. Ref: Eph-D-RELIGION-1950-01. Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand. http://beta.natlib.govt.nz/records/22458756

Meg Rosoff - There is No Dog

2011-12-21T07:30:00.000+13:00

From the occasional book reviews column - Meg Rosoff's funny, filthy, thought-provoking There is No Dog.

>>>>>>>>>>>>>

What kind of God would make a world like this? It's the question we ask when we start testing our theological chop in our teenage years: a world of wars and rape and environmental disaster, of pimples erupting just before the school dance and turning up to the ball and seeing your arch-enemy in the same dress as you (but a size smaller).

Meg Rosoff's answer? A negligent, floppy-haired teenage boy god - irritable, distractable, sex-mad and short-tempered, yet also rather luscious and prone to the odd moment of utter brilliance. In short, Bob.

Bob got the job of God of Earth after his mother won it in an intergalactic poker hand. 'There is no Dog' starts off like Douglas Adams: Bob takes up the job with some enthusiasm, bashing out the world in six days, with - as his factotum and middle-managementy sidekick Mr B likes to reflect - no long term plan or strategy, no consultation, no common sense:

In the beginning the earth was without form and void and the darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, 'Let there be light,' and there was light.

Only it wasn't very good light. Bob created fireworks, sparklers and neon tubes that circled the globe like weird tangled rainbows. He dabbled with bugs that blinked and abstract creatures whose heads lit up and cast long overlapping shadows. There were mile-high candles and mountains of fairy lights. For an hour or so, Earth was lit by enormous crystal chandeliers.

Bob thought his creations were very cool.

They were cool, but they didn't work.

So Bob tried for an ambient glow (which proved toxic) and a blinding light in the centre of the planet, which gave off too much heat and fried the place black. And finally, when he curled up in the corner of nothingness, tired as a child by the harebrainedness of his efforts, Mr B took the opportunity to sort things out - with an external star, gravity, roughly half a cycle in darkness and half in light so there was a Day and a Night. And that was that. The evening and the morning were the first day. Not fancy, but it worked.

Mr B's job is to clean up after Bob: he filters and files the prayer, and fixes things in small ways, where he can (where doing so doesn't fuck everything up beyond all belief accidentally). He spends a lot of time worrying about the whales, his own personal creation. But millennia on, Mr B has had enough of Bob - his ingratitude, his laziness, his romantic and sexual conquests. Mr B is submitting his resignation.

Meanwhile, Bob has fallen cataclysmically in love. The world will end (perhaps literally) if he doesn't get into the pants being worn by Lucy, a virginal and exquisite 21-year-old zookeeper. As Bob pursues Lucy, the weather goes nuts - snow in summer, floods, tornadoes. Bob is not a god of small considerations. Like any boy guided largely by his sexual organ, he is singleminded and one-eyed in this endeavour.

In another side story, Bob's mother Mona - a voluptuous, voluptuary goddess with more than a taste for gin - has lost Bob's pet Eck (a strange cross between a penguin and a lemur with an anteater's nose) in yet another poker game. In six weeks Eck will be eaten by Emoto Hed, a dangerous and powerful god. Bob's too busy wooing Lucy to worry his head overly much about Eck's fate right now (aside from moaning at Mona for messing with his life yet again), but Eck is undergoing an existential crisis:

So the answer to the question about whether he would have to die, Eck gathered, was yes. Yes, he would have to die; yes, he would be forgotten and the world would go on forever without him. With no mitigating circumstances to make the horror easier to swallow.

It strained his relationship with Bob. Why did you bother creating me, he wanted to ask. Why bother giving me a brain and a realisation of how miserable existence can be? Why did you invent creatures who die, and worse, who know they are going to die? What is the point of so unkind an act of creation?

Rosoff floats between Douglas Adams' giddiness, Douglas Coupland's work-place malaise, Michael Chabon's humid descriptions of teenage sexual obsession, and some P.G. Wodehouse sit-com humour. And through it all she maintains her own inimitable style, mixing musing on mortality with wanking.

The thing that's stayed with me from this book? Rosoff's evocation of teenage boys: self-centred, short-tempered, sex-mad and occasionally insanely amazing:

Mr B marvels that the same God who leaves his dirty clothes in a mouldering heap by the side of his bed could have created golden eagles and elephants and butterflies. Such moments of transcendent inspiration! Other creatures fill him with admiration as well - heavy loping striped tigers and graceful long-necked swans, creaking as they fly. Ludicrous pincushion porcupines. It's not that the boy is altogether devoid of talent, but he is devoid of discipline, compassion and emotional depth. Foresight.

And the last thing that I love? This isn't typical YA. By the end of the book, Bob's not a better person. Most of the adults have learned something and are moving on, but not Bob. Bob's still Bob - eternally teenaged, god bless him.

My year in reading

2011-12-20T07:30:00.000+13:00

Inspired by my friend Emma, I've been reviewing my year in reading. I collect (almost) all the books, and (almost) everything I think about them on Goodreads.

I can't quite be arsed recording everything here again, so here are some screenshots:

Overall, the differences between 2010 and 2011 seem to be:

more poetry
more YA
less science
more World War One memoirs
less contemporary fiction

I'm not sure what the 2012 focus will be. In the meantime, here are the books I gave 5 stars this year:

Meg Rosoff, There is No Dog
Muriel Spark, The Driver's Seat
Margaret Mahy, Memory
Nicholson Baker, The Anthologist
Robert Graves, Goodbye to all that
Colette, Cheri and The Last of Cheri
W.H. Auden, Another Time
Judith Schalansky, Atlas of Remote Islands
Lauren Redniss, Radioactive: Marie and Pierre Curie
Sarah Bakewell, How to Live: A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Answers
Rebecca Skloot, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
Nick Lane, Life Ascending: The Ten Great Inventions of Evolution (December 29 2010, but hey ...)

A rich man's world

2011-12-19T07:30:00.000+13:00

Blake Gopnik might be a very good art critic (I freely admit that I don't read enough of his work to know for myself). But he evidently hates art fairs; however, he perked up when he took some Monopoly money along to Art Basel and picked himself up ten million dollars worth of goodies (you can see what he 'bought' here).

In a follow-up article, Gopnik attempts to explain 'why art is so damned expensive'. The tl;dr - art pricing is entirely unreasonable, in that there's no logic to it. I have an extremely intelligent friend who, every so often, asks me to explain how people decide how much an artwork is 'worth'. He can't wrap his head around it because there's no pattern, no rules, no reasoning - it's utterly opaque unless you're all the way on the inside, and even then, if you look at the subject in the right light, all the sense rushes out the door again.

Of course, that's the top of the market. I love buying art. I love thinking about how a piece will fit in with what is already at home. I like to think of the money going back to the artist who made the piece. I have a ceiling (which, as the years go by, slowly goes upwards) which means that each piece is carefully considered, but often also bought with a sense of joyful recklessness. I don't understand how people who love art can't want to come home to it every night. It might be senseless over all, but on the personal level, it makes a lot of sense to me.

Six lamps a-glowing

2011-12-17T07:30:00.000+13:00

The National Library's twitter folks (@NLNZ) are doing a Twelve Days of Christmas count down.

Trying to outsmart them, I found this for 'six' (proto-Bill Culbert, no?)

But was aesthetically trumped by @shiftermike with this beauty

Black and white photos, huh? There's nothing like them.

Images

Six freestanding lamps. K E Niven and Co :Commercial negatives. Ref: 1/2-209830-F. Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand. http://beta.natlib.govt.nz/records/23210052

Six different tyre treads. K E Niven and Co :Commercial negatives. Ref: 1/2-227689-F. Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand. http://beta.natlib.govt.nz/records/22721587

YA musings

2011-12-16T07:30:00.000+13:00

This article by Andrew Karre on Hunger Mountain is one of the smartest pieces I've read on the topic of YA.

He begins by noting that articles about YA have become internet crack, racing to the tops of 'most emailed' lists and filling Twitter with hashtags. These articles come largely in two flavours:

Strand one can be called the “YA is too dark” strand, or, as I prefer to call it, the “Think of the children!” strand. Strand two is the navel-gazing strand, or, if you prefer, the “YA is/is not a genre!” strand. I have established positions on both (for the record, barely dark enough and it’s a genre for me), but I think the fact of these coexistent debates is evidence of something much more interesting and important than either debate.

But why do we (well, some of we) care so much? Because, Karre argues - persuasively and readably - that YA publishing has become disruptive, in the same sense that Apple's i-Products are disruptive. YA titles - Twilight, Harry Potter, Hunger Games - have become culturally ubiquitous. Writing from the inside of the debate, Karre concludes:

Arguing about whether YA is too dark is the literary equivalent of arguing about whether consumers will ever want a cell phone without a physical keyboard. Worrying about whether YA is a genre is the equivalent of agonizing over whether an iPad is a computer or merely a media consumption device (the answer, conveniently, is the same in both cases: It doesn’t matter; it’s whichever you need it to be). The only meaningful outcome of these debates is this: What we’re doing matters.

Arguing from the outside is Adam Gopnik in his recent piece in the New Yorker, a fascinating analysis of what it is about long, complex fantasy series that enthrall kids and teens (and adults). Many are ponderous, over or underwritten:

What is it, then, that makes the books enter kids’ consciousness?

First, kids experience them as mythologies more than as stories—the narrative sweep is, curiously, the least significant part of their appeal. When kids talk about movies, it’s usually the cool parts that get highlighted. (“So there’s this, like, cool part where the guy—the blue guy?—has to tame, like, a flying dinosaur and they’re all on a cliff and he says, like, ‘How do I know which one is mine?’ And, so, the blue girl is, like, ‘He will try to kill you!’ ”) Readers of the Eragon books don’t relate cool incidents; they relate awesome elements. You hear about the Elders, the dragon riders, the magical fire-sword Brisingr; what drags readers in is not the story but the symbols and their slow unfolding. The sheer invocation of a mythology casts a deeper spell than putting the mythology on its feet and making it dance. If you talk to an Eragon reader, you will see why the introductory seven-page synopsis of the mythology is necessary. The synopsis is the story.

And the truth is that most actual mythologies and epics and sacred books are dull. Nothing is more wearying, for readers whose tastes have been formed by the realist novel, than the Elder Edda. Yet the spell such works cast on their audience wasn’t diminished by what we find tedious. The incantation of names is, on its own, a powerful literary style. The enchantment the Eragon series projects is not that of a story well told but that of an alternative world fully entered. You sense that when you hear a twelve-year-old describe the books. The gratification comes from the kid’s ability to master the symbols and myths of the saga, as with those eighty-level video games, rather than from the simple absorption of narrative.

It's such an interesting point. Kids love mastering complexity. This makes me wonder - how could that love be better harnessed in the classroom?

My year in perfume

2011-12-15T07:30:00.000+13:00

I spent the weekend in a nostalgic haze of the Body Shop's 'White Musk'. I'd sniffed it on someone this week, and got one of those immediate scent memories that dragged me all the way back to 6th form English, where every second girl in the class (including me) was drenched in the stuff.

Today, it smells strangely old-lady for such a classic starter perfume (there were, of course, no 'by Taylor Swifts' or 'by Beyonces' or 'by Britney Spears' back in my day). It's got a big white flower, and then a big musk (the clean laundry variety, not the dirty sheets) and underneath it all a powdery sweet cosmeticy note. It's as sweet as all get out, and kind of soothing.

Wondering around snuffing at my wrists (I spend rather a lot of time doing this) I got to thinking about my year in perfume. It's a vain pleasure, sure, but one that pleases me deeply.

Summer was spent drenched in Guerlain's Vetiver - sharply, freshly green, a cold spice smell (if you can imagine that: not cardamom or star anise - green, yet with that same intensity), that makes me think of the very innermost leaves of a blade of plucked grass, cast in crystal.

When I felt like a change I'd swop to Guerlain's Mitsouko, which I find pleasingly sharp, almost aggressive - the angular cousin of Jicky (see the next paragraph), beautiful in its own way but far less eager to please.

Winter was spent alternating between Guerlain's men's cologne Habit Rouge (I can't top Luca Turin's description of it smelling like 'sweet dust') and their classic women's fragrance Jicky - apparently the oldest perfume in continuous production.

I love the progression of Jicky - a big hit of lavender, then a very weird moment where it smells like curdled milk, then a deep purple oily cloud where the lavender is balanced with vanilla, with an underpinning of dried herbs - a salty lick under all the sweetness.

On a visit to Melbourne (and more specifically, the magical Klein's Perfumery) I added to my collection with Frapin's Terre de Sarment - a rich blend of woodsmoke and vanilla freshened by dollops of citrus, with an underlying note of booziness, more whiskey or bourbon than berried wine. It smells like the night after the pub, in the best possible way.

I also gave in to L'Artisan Parfumeur's 'Dzing', which smells like vanilla-drenched manila folders with a strange musk underpinning. It's a very odd smell, curiously flat (not lacking fizz, but flat like a huge roll of butcher's paper - a single, uninflected surface) but I find it compelling.

During the year, I also experimented with a bunch of samples of leather perfumes, drawn from Turin's top 10 list: Estee Lauder's 'Azuree' (work glove and citrus), Chanel's Cuir de Russie (amazing, impossible to find here) and S Perfumes S-eX (does what it says on the bottle). I couldn't find one that I could wear (as opposed to it wearing me) so I'm saving that up for when I'm an irascible old lady with a lip full of snuff and no qualms about being thought odd.

But the perfume that blew me away, that lingers, that delights every day, is L'Artisan Parfumeur's Timbuktu. Turin describes it as woody smoky - I get less of either of these than an incredibly clear, bright shaft of pink peppercorns - but it's taught me what he means by 'radiance', a smell that sings out like a cleanly plucked note. I can't wear it myself (not yet, anyway) but luckily someone else in the house can.

What's next? There are some Chanels I'm still very keen to lay nose on: Bois de Iles, Sycomore. I've been ummming and aahing about a bottle of Eau Sauvage all year; that or maybe Guerlain's Eau de Cologne for an alternate summer scent (yes, Guerlain is a bit of a theme here, but in terms of readily accessible, high quality perfumes, they're our best option). I might put more effort into exploring Serge Lutens. Overall, I'll continue to feed my healthy little obsession.

Not remembering Don Driver

2011-12-14T18:29:00.000+13:00

Today I talked on the radio about Don Driver and his work.

I wish I could have thought of a better short title than 'Remembering Don Driver'. It's the traditional wording, but it implies that you're dragging stuff up from the depths of your memory, which is wrong on two counts for me. First, I never (to my great regret) met Driver, so I'm not recalling personal memories. And second, there is nothing at all past tense about how I feel about Driver's work: it is vital and fresh, and I strongly believe only continue to become more eye-smacking as time passes.

Anyway - here's the audio, should you want to have a listen.

There's also a gallery of images on the RadioNZ website.

Judging a book

2011-12-14T07:30:00.000+13:00

Two takes on the resurgence of beautifully designed and printed print books: The Guardian takes the high road, the New York Times goes straight for the commercial jugular.

Both note that the print market is having to differentiate itself from the e-market in order to survive (and make money). A year on from first having a whirl with a Kindle, I'm still a resolute print-book reader and buyer.

I still read print books because the public library can supply (almost all) my needs. It's still cheaper for me to reserve a book I want through the library than to download it from Amazon, and because my reading backlist is so long, I don't feel like I'm missing out by not having it now.

My print buying has tailed off mostly to YA fiction (cheaper than 'adult' books), new releases by my favourite authors (completist urges) and essay collections (no real reason, there's just something I like about them). I buy very few books that I haven't already read. In fact, I buy books largely in order to loan them - there's something irreplaceable, for me, about the physical act of handing over a book for someone else to love. I haven't (more shame me) bought an art book all year.

Some people have photo albums. I have bookshelves: even without cracking them open, my books remind me of people and places and moments in my life; where and when I read them, who I was at that time, who I shared them with. Plus, yeah - they do smell good.

Fritsch in Chch

2011-12-12T07:30:00.000+13:00

The National has a simply glorious looking show of Karl Fritsch's work on at the moment. Not only do the pieces look terrific, but his characteristically rough-edged yet elegant displays look just as good. Go visit and shop, if you can.

Some chewy weekend reading

2011-12-10T07:30:00.000+13:00

James Bridle's WebDirections keynote on 'The New Aesthetic' (video and transcript - the transcript is awesomely annotated with links to images and articles).

A nice bookend to the above - Russell Davies on the post-digital.

Relevant to PBRF funding in universities: Mark Bauerlein asks in The Chronicle of Higher Education whether all the publishing in the field of literary studies is actually benefiting anyone.

Michelle Nijhuis in 'The Last Word on Nothing' (an awesome science blog) on the the different narrative styles of environmental reporting (Quest, Rebirth, Tragedy, Rags to Riches).

Aimee Levitt on Laura Ingalls Wilder and American economic downturns.

Don Driver

2011-12-08T18:44:00.001+13:00

Jim Barr and Mary Barr have written beautifully on Don Driver, who died today.

I never met Don Driver. It makes me sad. Over the last few years I've become a fervent admirer, seeking out as many shows and opportunities to see the work as possible (and opportunities to mention him here and when on the radio).

Driver's work holds the room. It squawks and it growls and it sings (and occasionally it's quite trippy) but it's impossible to look past. It grabs your eyeballs and it makes you think.

I owe five people real credit for my love of Driver's work: Jim and Mary, William McAloon, Julian Dashper and Hamish McKay. It's a delight to see curators my age (or thereabouts) taking up his work as well - Aaron Kreisler in Dunedin (a NP kid himself), Aaron Lister in his sculpture show at City Gallery next year. People have been saying today that Driver is sadly overlooked. Me, I think he was loved and admired where it mattered.

(Having said that - a dirty great survey show would not go amiss.)

UPDATE: That first 'Aaron' should have been Kreisler - sorry, both. And Sarah Farrar has written a nice short piece about Driver and her own discovery of his work (another one of those young curators) on the Te Papa blog. And Roger Taberner has written a lengthy and insightful piece on the Auckland Art Gallery blog.

Pretty ... smart

2011-12-08T07:30:00.000+13:00

I've been oohing and aahing over Australian jewellery gallery Pieces of Eight's recently-launched online store Edition X, which stocks limited edition pieces of jewellery, textiles, books, objects and more.

In addition to the seductiveness of the objects, I've been seduced by the little design touches on the website; feminine, not too girly, and a strong sense of the Pieces of Eight personality.

Now eg.etal, another of my favourite Melbourne haunts, as also launched an online store.

Although eg.etal's stock doesn't quite delight me as Pieces of Eight does, the site also has some really lovely, simple touches - like how the thumbnails on the homepage react as you scroll over them.

Now all I need is for Gallery Funaki to make my life complete.

City Gallery Wellington's Future - The Survey

2011-12-07T09:36:00.001+13:00

When I saw the announcement of Paula Savage's retirement from City Gallery in their enewsletter, and an invitation to take a survey on the future of the Gallery, I was quite excited. Would they give us a multi-choice list of potential directors to choose from? Could I ask for a larger number of smaller, shorter-run exhibitions throughout the year? Could I tell them about the public programme events I want to attend?

Nope. But you can tell them what you think about the idea of a $10 entry fee for anyone who can't prove Wellington residency to visit City Gallery Wellington and the Museum of City and Sea.

Some sample questions:

After all these days

2011-12-07T07:30:00.000+13:00

It's been a couple of weeks now, and I'm still loving NPR's Infinite Player (original post here).

Usually, the glow of new internet toys wears off pretty quickly (or I bookmark things and never return). But I've just kept the Infinite Player alive in a browser window, switching it on whenever I want a little bit of background chatter (like right now). It's less commitment than a podcast, but more varied and controllable than normal radio. Joy.

Sport and cancer

2011-12-06T07:30:00.000+13:00

Yeah, I think it's a weird pairing too. Never mind.

First, a fantastic profile of Siddartha Mukherjee, oncologist and author of The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, one of the best on-fiction books I read this year (even if the second half does drag somewhat).

One of its most arresting observations was inspired by a conversation between Mukherjee and a friend many years earlier "about the nature of interior and exterior", which returned to him as he was working on the book. "Every era," it suddenly struck him, "casts cancer in its own image." The US in the 70s was haunted by cold war fears of the enemy within – and so the "big bomb" was replaced by "the big C". HIV overshadowed the following decade, and then the search for cancer-causing viruses became oncology's new obsession. Now that we're obsessed with genetics, the focus of research has moved on to hereditary causes. "When a disease insinuates itself so potently into the imagination of an era," he writes, "it is often because it impinges on an anxiety latent within that imagination."

I got all riled up on behalf of (American) football fans when I read this WSJ article about how the NFL will not release the 'All 22' footage - the angles that show what all the players on the field are up to during the game - to fans.

By distributing this footage only to NFL teams, and rationing it out carefully to its TV partners and on its web site, the NFL has created a paradox. The most-watched sport in the U.S. is also arguably the least understood. "I don't think you can get a full understanding without watching the entirety of the game," says former head coach Bill Parcells. The zoomed-in footage on TV broadcasts, he says, only shows a "fragment" of what happens on the field.

And a rather good list of the top sports books of 2011 from Dan Shanoff on Quickish, interesting also for this final observation, his prediction for sports publishing in 2012:

Shorter-form (and quick-turnaround) e-books from "indie" publishers like Byliner and Atavist; from sportswriters publishing on their own; from mainstream publishing houses (including Amazon, foreshadowed by Emma Span and Ben Cohen); and -- most interestingly -- directly from mainstream sports media companies (taking a cue from what The Atlantic did with Taylor Branch's cover story this fall and Politico's e-book strategy, which made its first surge this week) will explode.

Sparkly

2011-12-02T17:04:00.001+13:00

I'm quite taken by the Walker Art Center's new homepage.

Some people will find it way too busy. Me, I like how they seem to have expanded their remit - not just a homepage for their gallery, but a homepage for the visual and performing arts. I like, for example, how articles from other sites are getting pulled through to the page.

I also like all the small touches - little features where you can flick through three panes, the three views for opening hours, this little feature on the far left that highlights different content by theme.

It's a bit super-user, but I enjoy how it rewards exploration. The more you adventure through it, the more it reveals to you - a nice metaphor for art itself, no?

The day after

2011-12-01T11:31:00.001+13:00

I hope to write something more reflective about the NDF conference in the next few weeks. Overall, I couldn't be happier with how it all turned out: fantastic speakers, a highly engaged audience, and - miracle of miracles - sunshine.

I slipped out just before lunch on the second day of the conference to do my regular spot on Nine to Noon, and covered some of the projects featured at the conference. The way Kathryn was immediately sucked in by some of the sites we talked about reinforced for me some of the messages we heard at the conference about helping people sense the texture and colour of our collections.

Here are links to the sites I touched on:

Old Weather, National Maritime Museum, London http://www.oldweather.org/
A citizen-science project where volunteers are helping transcribe the logbooks of Royal Navy ships from around the time of World War One.

What's on the menu, New York Public Library http://menus.nypl.org/
Learning what people were eating a century ago in New York by transcribing NYPL's special collection of historical menus.

Australian Dress Register http://www.australiandressregister.org/
Collecting examples and information about clothing in New South Wales before 1945, from public and private collections.

History Pin - http://www.historypin.com/
A global map for sharing pieces of people's personal histories to create a global resource

Remix and Mash up competitions:
[New Zealand] Mix and Mash winners http://www.mixandmash.org.nz/2011-winners/
[Australia] LibraryHack winners http://libraryhack.org/2011/06/25/the-winners/

A Grand Mother from Candy Elsmore on Vimeo.

Opening remarks for National Digital Forum 2011

2011-11-30T07:36:00.001+13:00

[I didn't give references for the quotes I used yesterday when kicking off the NDF2011 proceedings, so I thought I'd pop the text up here in case anyone wanted to follow them up.]

Before I introduce our first speaker for the conference, I wanted to share a few thoughts. They’re not really thoughts of mine - they’re the thoughts of other people, thoughts that have stuck in my head all year, buzzing away quietly in the background and rising to the top whenever I’ve contemplated this moment of standing here in front of you all.

The 20th century has released us into history through technology

This idea comes from broadcaster and author Melvyn Bragg - I found it in one of his In Our Time e-newsletters at the start of the year.

Bragg was talking about a series of radio interviews he’d been doing at radio stations across the England, asking people to contribute photos, videos, diary entries and other memories to be mixed with archival material to create the TV series “The Reel History of Britain”.Bragge said he was:

attempting to encourage people to send in their memoirs, photographs, whatever, to build up this series, so that it widely and fully and properly represents all of us who were part of all of the history of this country over the last 120 years.

Releasing people into history through technology - this is what we’ve been doing for the past ten years.We call what we do harvesting or cataloguing, digitising or preserving, data visualising or crowd-sourcing, community management or customer service, or whatever the latest round of restructuring has deemed our job to involve.But what we’re really doing is working with people to create and share back our collective and collaborative history.

A book is a machine to think with

This line comes from IA Richards’ introduction to his 1924 book Principles of Literary Criticism. I haven't actually read the book myself - I've just spotted the reference a lot lately.

The line is often cited in debates about the future of the book - contrasted against the idea of a book as ‘tree flakes encased in dead cows’. The full quote goes like this:

A book is a machine to think with. What kind of a machine? Not a bellows or a locomotive but more like a loom on which to re-weave some ravelled parts of our civilisation.

When you think about books like this they become social items, items which pass through a network of people. In the case of a book, the network includes the writer, the editor, the publisher, the reviewer, the reader: each extracting and absorbing and reusing what they have touched, consciously or otherwise.

The same can be said of all the items we work with: physical, digital, physical made digital, digital made physical.All this stuff, these records of human life and thinking and experience that we are busy collecting, preserving and making available. They are all crucial items in the unending cycle of creation and creativity, and we’re there in the middle of it, helping the wheel turn around. It’s a position of responsibility and privilege and opportunity.

Data needs spokespeople

I first saw this phrase in a blog post by the urban designer Adam Greenfield, citing a presentation about people-powered data by Elizabeth Goodman, who was in turn citing Bruno Latour, at which point I gave up any hope of understanding the original thought, and decided to take out of it just what I wanted to.

What I wanted was this:

We are swimming in data. Digital New Zealand now has more than 25 million records* in its search API. It can’t print posters advertising this miraculous figure, because it grows faster than their printing budget can keep up with.

Over the past ten years we have mastered the tasks of data: of collecting and preserving and making available. More recently, we’ve been getting so much better at the arts of data: of sharing nicely, of recruiting supporters, of welcoming contributions.The hurdle at which we continue to stumble, however, is letting go.

And I know, I know - I’ve banged my heads against the walls of copyright and donor restrictions with the best of you.But if we are going to continue to play an important role in the cycle of creation and creativity, we are going to have to do even more to not just promote our data for what it is, but to promote it for what people can make of it.

Giving a shit

This line comes from an article by Alexis Madrigal published in The Atlantic in June this year. He was talking about the tenacity, the bullheadedness, the inspiration and the desire that’s needed for people like us to keep pushing our institutions forward in order to serve the people we are here to serve.

The article is titled ‘What Big Media can learn from the New York Public Library’. Here’s the full quote:

First, I'm convinced the NYPL is succeeding online because of desire. The library's employees give a shit about the digital aspects of their institution, and they are supported in that shit giving. I mean this in the most fundamental way possible and as a damning critique for media companies. Second, the library sees its users as collaborators in improving the collections the library already has. While serving them online costs the library some money, they are creating value, too, by opening up conduits into the library for superusers.

You don’t work for your line manager, or your director, or your CE. Really, you work for your customers. How much say do they have in what you do? How many decisions are made in their best interests? If you were to ask ‘what is the single best thing we could do to add value to our customers’ lives’, what would it be?

I hope that, as ever, this year’s conference is a chance for you to confirm just what it is that you give a shit about.

*27 million records, as of yesterday

Reading lists

2011-11-30T07:30:00.000+13:00

Ah, I love the Books of the Year outpouring on the internet. Here are a few goodies:

New York Times 100 Notable Books

The Guardian's Books of the Year

The New Statesman's Books of the Year

Bus stops

2011-11-28T07:30:00.000+13:00

In the vein of abandoned, polar-bear infested workers' barracks, I now bring you Soviet bustops, including this beauty

which reminds me strongly of the Ratana temple at Ratana Pa

and Rua Kenana's meeting house and church at Maungapohatu

Images:
Photograph of a Soviet bus stop by Christopher Herwig from How to be a Retronaut
Ratana temple. Godber, Albert Percy, 1875-1949 :Collection of albums, prints and negatives. Ref: 1/2-018648-G. Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand. http://beta.natlib.govt.nz/records/23113205
Bourne, George, 1875-1924. Rua Kenana Hepetipa's wooden circular courthouse and meeting house at Maungapohatu. Godber, Albert Percy, 1875-1949 :Collection of albums, prints and negatives. Ref: APG-1679-1/2-G. Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand. http://beta.natlib.govt.nz/records/23131313

What Middletown Reads

2011-11-24T07:30:00.000+13:00

I am curious about the hands that books have travelled through. I am sad we no longer have due dates stamped into library books. I liked knowing that the book I had selected had been a popular as a pretty debutante for the first year after it arrived in the library, but had since then sat for twenty forlorn years in its place on the shelf, waiting for me to claim it.

At primary school, I could trace books back through their issue slips - when you're nine, the kids who had moved on to high school become like mythic beings. Taking out a book that they had once read was like a connection to adulthood, a promise that I too would soon don a navy blue uniform and stay on the bus into town after the little kids got off.

Today, I believe most libraries discard borrowers records, as a privacy matter. But one collection of small town American borrowers records - from turn-of-the-19th-century Muncie, Indiana, have been digitised and made available online.

In a terrific article on Slate, John Plotz covers what researchers are digging up from the ledgers:

For example, they discovered that fewer than 38 percent of Muncie patrons were blue-collar, though more than 60 percent of Muncie’s families were blue-collar. They also discovered that blue-collar families were significantly more likely to have multiple library cards than white-collar families. With little spare cash to buy books—and with few forms of affordable daily entertainment—the single book permitted out on each card frequently was not enough for a blue-collar family with several avid readers. Blue-collar borrowers were also more likely to borrow classics, or older books, while white-collar readers gravitated to the latest fashionable books: Felsenstein and Connolly speculate this may reflect the availability of older books in the houses of wealthier patrons.

Plotz's essay is more than just your typical data crunching+insight. It's also the story of how he tries to re-live the reading life of Muncie teenager Louis Bloom, and his searching out of Bloom's descendants. It's a lovely and fascinating article, and perfect for a weekend read.

NPR's Infinite Player

2011-11-22T18:00:00.000+13:00

You know how every so often something comes along, and you're like, YES! That is exactly what I've been looking for?

Today I am LOVING NPR's experimental web app Infinite Player. There's a great explanation of the app on the Nieman Labs site. Basically, it presents a random mix of NPR pieces, designed bring that serendipity of just switching on the radio & listening to what it gives you to the web. It's a contrast to seeking out and listening to podcasts ('intentional listening'): every piece I've heard so far has been under five minutes long, so there's no annoyance if you zone out for a moment, or tune in a bit late; you're not overly invested, so you can move on.

At the moment, all you can do on the app is play, pause, refresh and igive an item a thumbs up or thumbs down to indicate your interest and teach the app about your tastes. It's brilliantly simple, and it was chucked out there in a sprint and a half.

One of the first stories Infinite Player threw up for me was about a guy who used 'Moneyball' style data analysis to win at Jeopardy. In half an hour I've heard about electric cars, cheese making, shortages in ADHD medication, something doomy about Obama and the economy, and criticisms of the latest Honda Civic. It's been joyous.

Of course, I've gone straight into feature bloat. I want other stations and other podcasts in there. I want a link so I can tweet and email stories to people. But wow - three weeks for this level of delight. That's all kinds of awesome.

Crowdsourcing an Yvonne Todd catalogue

2011-11-21T18:55:00.001+13:00

Go on, you know you want to ...

What the ...

2011-11-21T07:30:00.000+13:00

This weekend I finished Claire Tomalin's Charles Dickens: A Life. I've written something of a review over at Goodreads, but my single favourite finding in 416 pages was discovering that no-one seems sure what colour Dickens' eyes were:

they were reported variously as dark brown, dark glittering black, clear blue, 'not blue', distinct clear hazel, 'large effeminate eyes', clear grey, green-grey, dark slaty blue - with a little orange line surrounding the pupil - and even, by a cautious observer, as 'nondescript'.

Admirable

2011-11-18T07:30:00.000+13:00

Adam Gopnik is probably my favourite New Yorker writer, and his Angels and Ages: A Short Book About Darwin, Lincoln, and Modern Life was one of my favourite books in recent years. I'm not going gangbusters over reading his new book (The Table Comes First: Family, France, and the Meaning of Food) but boy, does the guy give good interview on the promotional trail. This interview with ZYZZYVA is the best so far, and includes gems like:

To me a great piece is a sequence of memorable sentences. And I know that’s a sort of limiting thing. Maybe that’s why I can’t write effective narratives! But for me a wonderful epigrammatic sentence, an effective aphorism, that for me is like seeing a pregnant woman, it’s the perfectly shaped thing, pregnant sentences.

And then paragraph structure fascinates me, too. One of the things that drives me nuts when I’m reading even good academic writing is that nobody seems to have ever heard that sentence variation is a vital part of writing. These are people who are perfectly competent in every other ways, but every sentence is the same shape.

In the end though, you either can produce surprising, beautiful sentences or you can’t. Without that, all the erudition and intelligence in the world is not going to make any difference. For me, yes, a piece works when I can say that there are six good sentences in it. And a piece that does not have any good sentence is not worth reading. Now, having said that, of course I struggle over weeks and pull my hair to work on the structure, to make it logical, and move paragraphs around so that the sequence flows. All that stuff matters, too. But if I am answering honestly, yes, it’s the sentence that matters.

Recommendations, please

2011-11-17T07:30:00.000+13:00

Life has eased back a bit, and as a result I've started thinking ahead to Christmas and, as ever, my Christmas reading list.

I've got a growing stack of fiction (ranging from my first stab at George R. R. Martin through to Muriel Spark) but my non-fiction is looking very thin. So I thought I'd throw it open here: what should I read over summer?

To provide some guidance, here are some books I've particularly enjoyed over the past two years:

Michael Lewis's Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game - how the Oakland Athletics used hard numbers to build winning baseball team

Robert Graves's Goodbye to all that - his searing memoir of childhood and World War I

Rebecca Skloot's The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks - the story of the woman from whom the HeLa cells were drawn

Sarah Bakewell's How to Live: A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer - a marvellously constructed study of the first essayist.

Lisa Jardine's Going Dutch: How England Plundered Holland's Glory - how ideas, politics, people, power and money flowed between England and Holland in the 17th century

Siddartha Mukkerjee's The Emperor of All Maladies - a history of cancer

Adam Gopnik's Angels and Ages: A Short Book About Darwin, Lincoln, and Modern Life - takes a coincidence (the two men were born on the same day) and turns it into a thoughtful take on two exhaustively documented lives

H.G. Bissinger's Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team and a Dream - a heartbreaking look at Texan high school football

Nick Lane's Life Ascending: The Ten Great Inventions of Evolution - a witty and occasionally mindblowing book, and thankfully not The Greatest Show on Earth

Richard Holmes's The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science - a vastly enjoyable study of the point before art and science began to divide.

Judith Schalansky's Atlas of Remote Islands - a thing of intelligent beauty

Lauren Redniss's Radioactive: Marie and Pierre Curie - a thing of beautiful intelligence

Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw's Why Does E=mc^2?: And Why Should We Care? - a kindly written introduction to the theory of general relativity, which had me for absolute minutes on end feeling like I actually understood it.

So, what should I read this summer?

Goodbye, Seb

2011-11-15T20:36:00.001+13:00

Seb Chan has posted the news that he's leaving the Powerhouse Museum for the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum.

Seb has been a massive influence on me, personally and professionally. His work, and more importantly, his outreach at the Powerhouse brought the international digital cultural sector's attention to this part of the world, and New Zealand and Australia's cultural institutions have flourished in that time.

You can't pin all the changes down to one person, of course, but you also can't deny that Seb's combination of energy, data-driven innovation and sheer generosity of spirit has made it all that bit easier to push our own organisations forward in the digital world. Thanks Seb, travel safely, and I hope we see you down here again soon.

p.s. you probably all follow Seb's writing at Fresh and New(er), where he's going to keep posting; you might not know though about Small Stories, his delightful blog about books he's reading to his kids. Highly recommended.

The Big Irony

2011-11-14T07:30:00.000+13:00

From the occasional reviews series: Lev Grossman's The Magicians.

..........

Laura Miller described Erin Morgensten's (rather sickly sounding) The Night Circus as 'the first Etsy novel'. That might make Lev Grossman's The Magicians and The Magician King into Narnia for Boing Boing readers.

The Magician King is a quest story, written for an audience that's not just familiar with every Harry Potter meme, but with knowyourmeme.com as well. I think of Grossman's tone as 21st century hardboiled; it's every bit as quotable, but also every bit as relentless, as Raymond Chandler. Here's a representative sample:

She always righted herself in the end, with the help of the dandy new shrink, a woman this time, and her dandy 450 milligrams of Wellbutrin and 30 milligrams of Lexapro daily, and her dandy new online support group for the depressed.

Actually, the support group really was pretty dandy. It was something special. It was founded by a woman who'd worked successively at Apple, and then Microsoft, and then Google. She blazed a glittering arc in the firmament at each firm for about four or five years, piling up tranches of stock options, before she rolled neurochemical snake eyes and a bout of clinical depression knocked her out of the sky. By the time Google was done with her she was forty-four and had her fuck-you money in the bank. So she retired early and started Free Trader Beowulf instead.

Free Trader Beowulf - you had to be at least forty and a recovering pen-and-paper role-playing-gamer to get the reference, but it was apt. Google it. FTB was an online support group for depressed people. But not your common run of depressed people. Oh, no.

To get in the door you first had to show them your prescriptions. They wanted credentials, solid ones. A bunch of nerds like this, they didn't want to hear your whining, and they didn't want to read your poems - sorry, Jack - or look at your doomy watercolours. This crowd wasn't soft-core. If you were depressed, they wanted to see the hard stuff, a diagnosis from an actual psychiatrist and hard-core chemical-on-neuron action. And if you were rocking double-neurochemical-penetration, like Julia was, all the better.

As much as I enjoyed The Magicians - felt like I was reading a palimpsest of every bit of lovable and scary fantasy I've ever read, supplemented by every bit Grossman has read - now the magic's starting to fade a little. The writing's still crisp, but the story is less compelling, the allusions less amusing, the inventiveness not quite as sparkling.

The book ends with a set-up to turn this duo into a trilogy. I kind of hope Grossman bucks this and does something totally different next.

Beyond access

2011-11-10T22:04:00.000+13:00

My term on the National Digital Forum board is drawing to a close (I finish up after the NDF conference later this month).

It's a bit of an end of an era for me - I see it as part of the six year journey I've been on since I started work at the National Library in January 2006. Although I left in the middle of last year, working at the Library had a huge impact on me. For the past six years, I've spent a great deal of time thinking about cultural institutions and their collections.

I think about what these institutions stand for, and why they exist. I think about who they serve (or what they serve - I have this fuzzy, not particularly well articulated theory that collecting is part of creating history, whether or not anyone ever puts what is collected into a history). I think about how people interact and engage with the institutions and their collections. With our collections, when you really think about it.

Working on things like the National Library's Flickr Commons account and the @NLNZ twitter account reinforced for me not only that, thanks to the web, collections have moved beyond the physical places they're stored into the unlimited world, but that the role of researching and sorting and presenting these collections have moved beyond curators and historians and into the hands of anyone with a search box and a link to share around.

We've come a long way in the decade or so since cultural institutions started digitising their collection items and putting them online. But we haven't gone quite far enough. I still want more. I want more freedom to play with collections. In particular, I want more freedom to play with items that are out of copyright and ready to move back into the creative melting pot.

I was prompted to think about this again tonight when I read about the launch of Mixel, an iPad app that lets people grab images from around the web, remix them into collages and share them around. As one of the founders, Khoi Vinh, writes:

... we chose collage for a very important reason: it makes art easy. Photos, the component pieces of every collage, are among the most social and viral content on the Web, and allowing people to combine them into new, highly specific expressions of who they are and what they’re interested in is powerful. Collage also has a wonderfully accessible quality; few people are comfortable with a brush or a drawing implement, but almost everyone is comfortable cutting up images and recombining them in new, expressive, surprising or hilarious ways. We all used to do this as kids

When I see things like this

and this

all I want to do is share them. And I can, thanks to the new statement on the National Library's Beta website:

You can copy this item for personal use, share it, and post it on a blog or website. It cannot be used commercially without permission, please ask us for advice. If reproducing this item, please maintain the integrity of the image (i.e. don't crop, recolour or overprint it), and ensure the following credit accompanies it

What I want now is the next bit. I want to start playing. I want to give them another life, like Mixel is doing:

Mixel keeps track of every piece of every collage, regardless of who uses it or how it’s been cropped. That means, in a sense, that the image pieces within Mixel have a social life of their own. Anyone can borrow or re-use any other piece; you’re free to peruse all the collages (we call them “mixels”) and pick up literally any piece and use it in your own mixel. If you don’t like the crop, the full, unedited original is stored on the server, so you can open it back up in an instant and cut out just the parts you like. Mixel can even show you everywhere else a particular image has been used, so you can follow it throughout the network to see how other people have cropped it and combined it with other elements.

I know we need to respect copyright, attribution, donors' original intentions, and the makers of these works themselves. But I honestly think it's what we need to make happen if we want to move from being providers of things that people enjoy and look at, and become providers of things people love and use.

<p>&amp;amp;amp;lt;p&amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;br&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;br&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;br&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;br&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;I kn&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;br&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;lt;/p&amp;amp;amp;gt;</p>
Introducing Mixel for iPad from Mixel App on Vimeo.

Images, from top
Total eclipse of the sun. Ref: 1/2-051134-F. Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand. http://beta.natlib.govt.nz/records/22516232
Young boy on a rocking horse. Harding, William James, 1826-1899 :Negatives of Wanganui district. Ref: 1/4-008595-G. Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand. http://beta.natlib.govt.nz/records/22853575
Taieri Pet at Middlemarch. Whites Aviation Ltd :Photographs. Ref: WA-28295-F. Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand. http://beta.natlib.govt.nz/records/23232388

Full disclosure - although I no longer work at the Library, the company I work for has a long relationship with the Library and we've worked together on the Beta site. Also, I realise the Whites Aviation photo is most likely not out of copyright - I just like it.

Picks

2011-11-09T07:30:00.000+13:00

Today on the radio I'm going to be previewing the visual arts line-up at next year's NZ International Festival of Arts. I was struck in 2010 by how much more Wellington's public galleries seem to be aligning their programming to the Festival than in previous years*, and that seems to be true of 2011 as well.

Te Papa is timing a refresh of 'Collecting Contemporary' for the start of the Festival, which will feature works by Karl Fritsch, Francis Upritchard and Martino Gamper from Gesamtkunsthandwerk, currently my 2011 show of the year.

City Gallery is unveiling 'The Obstinate Object: Contemporary NZ Sculpture', featuring new, recent and older work, including the single piece I am already most excited about seeing, Don Driver's Ritual**, which I've never seen in the flesh.

The Adam is showing series by four photographers: Kohei Yoshiyuki, Fiona Amundsen, John Lake and Simon Starling. I saw Starling's Autoxylopyrocycloboros (the work that will be at the Adam) at the Power Plant in Toronto in 2008, and was struck by how much Starling's practice reminds me of Michael Stevenson.

And the Dowse is showing Mexican artist Theresa Margolles' In the Air from 2003 alongside a new work commissioned for her visit to New Zealand. Margolles is my pick for the Festival. In the Air is very simple, on first glance (and glancing contact) - bubbles blown out into a gallery space that pop as they hit hard surfaces or land on wandering visitors.

The charge comes when you discover that the bubbles are blown using water that was previously used to wash down bodies - victims of violent crimes, drug overdoses, traffic accidents - in the Mexico City morgue. Even though the water has been sterilised, it still carries that taint of death and decay, turning the innocent bubbles into a somewhat grisly memento mori - a role they've played in Western painting for centuries.

It's the combination of the simplicity and the big reveal that I think will captivate people about this work. [My one concern is that there won't be enough bubbles to make the room seem fairytale like - please let there be enough bubbles.] Like Janet Cardiff's Forty-Part Motet - in my opinion the hit of the 2010 visual arts line-up - it's not a work you have to work hard to get. It's easily explained, but also easily experienced. I might sound like I'm being dismissive, but I'm actually being admiring; this kind of succinctness, of distillation, of directness, is relatively rare in contemporary art, but magical (or at the very least reaction-provoking) for the viewer, whatever their level of gallery-going experience.

*It's just as well I've never been an Angry Young Person, because that sentence makes me feel about forty.
** Yeah - I'm most excited about the oldest work in the show. I was truly never an Angry Young Person.

Sports round-up

2011-11-07T07:30:00.000+13:00

Some good reading I've come across lately ...

Dennis O'Toole's 'The Procreant Urge' (The Morning News), looking at John Updike's 1960 classic 'Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu' and quitting while you're ahead.

Karl Taro Greenfeld's 'The Green Bay Packers Have the Best Owners in Football' (Bloomberg Business Week) - like Moneyball, a examination of doing things differently.

Michael Tomasky's 'The Racist Redskins' (New York Review of Books), a review of Showdown: JFK and the Integration of the Washington Redskins:

The nickname had been the brainchild of George Preston Marshall, a laundry magnate and flamboyant showman who had bought the Boston Braves football team in 1932. As his second head coach, Marshall hired William “Lone Star” Dietz, a journeyman coach at the collegiate level whose mother was most likely a Sioux. It was in “honor” of Dietz, who coached the team for just two seasons and who at Marshall’s urging willingly put on war paint and Indian feathers before home games, that Marshall changed the team’s name to the Redskins. When Marshall, frustrated by Boston fans’ lack of support, moved the franchise to the nation’s capital in 1937, the coach was gone, but the team name stayed.

That combination of 'urging' and 'willing' is odd. For more where this all came from, try out grantland.com.

Take me out

2011-11-04T21:43:00.004+13:00

From the occasional reviews series - Michael Lewis's Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game.

.............

There's something about American sportswriting that I just love. Or perhaps there's simply enough distance that what sounds banal and often ridiculous when it's written here in New Zealand (witness the outpouring of adjective, cliche and nation-building around the Rugby World Cup) sounds mythical and meaningful when it comes from offshore. Perhaps I'm just buying in to the romanticism that this book seeks to unravel. But I don't care - I love it, I loved this book, and you should read it.

As there's a movie just about to come out starring Brad Pitt based on 'Moneyball', I probably don't need to go deep into exposition. To keep it as short as possible: Lewis spent a year bedded into the Oakland Athletics, studying how general manager (and ex pro player) Billy Beane and a small number of his colleagues sought to ignore the folk wisdom that has traditionally governed how a baseball team is put together and instead assembled an assortment of unlikely, unfavoured and unheroic players on the basis of a bunch of carefully crunched statistics, and came out on top.

I might be one of the few people who expected more data and less sport from 'Moneyball'. Even though I know barely anything about baseball (a couple of seasons of softball as a kid is the sum total of my knowledge) I was able to skate past the unintelligible passages, and soak in the sections that made sense.

And soak in them you certainly can. Lewis has a hardbitten, salty, yet occasionally love-struck way of writing that makes this book the unexpected delight it is (my single favourite sentence: 'When it suited his purposes Billy Beane could throw the best pity party this side of the Last Supper.' The chapters dedicated to analysing single players - a batter with the best record of laying off the first pitch in the league, a pitcher with an amazing way of keeping runs down, but who looks all wrong - are beautiful character studies. And the overall story of Billy Beane, the guy who seemed to have it all going for him but couldn't make it, and who came back to rewrite the way teams were put together so guys like him were no longer the guys you wanted, is told with clear-eyed affection. Even if you have no interest in baseball, this is a remarkable book about the tenacity required to do something dramatically different.

I share my reviews on Goodreads (fair warning, I'm prepping to review a book about New Zealand YA writing, so there's going to be a lot in that vein coming up, starting with Elizabeth Knox's Dreamhunter and Dreamquake.

You have this week ...

2011-10-24T18:09:00.002+13:00

Earlybird registration for the National Digital Forum conference has been extended until 28 October.

If you haven't already checked out the programme, you should. As co-convenor, I'm obviously completely biased, but I couldn't be prouder of this year's line-up - or more grateful to all the people who are putting time and energy into presenting at the conference.

If you want an objective sense of how high the quality is, consider this. One of my heroes, Seb Chan, blogged this week about presenting at Web Directions South about digital cultural initiatives. Nearly every one of the projects he name checks will be represented at NDF: Tim Sheratt’s work with the digitised newspaper collections in Trove; New York Public Library’s historical menus project; the Australian Dress Register; the Old Weather project with the Citizen Science Alliance using old ship logs from the National Maritime Museum to gather geolocated climate data form the past. That's just four of the 50+ speakers we'll be presenting. Hurry up - you don't want to miss out.

Preggers

2011-10-19T07:30:00.000+13:00

An interesting write-up of Portland Art Museum's new brand. (It works, you know. The first person I showed it to said 'That's a big friendly P', and that's about what they were aiming for.)

Oceania goes free for a day

2011-10-17T19:24:00.003+13:00

The simple things

2011-10-17T07:30:00.000+13:00

It fascinates me that exhibitions that take six months of research and soul-searching can be indistinguishable in their final effect from a selection of works made within a single day. I guess the lesson is that if you have a rich vein of work to tap, and know how to make stuff look good on a wall, a fast show can also be a good show.

Hamish McKay's current show of four Don Driver works exemplifies this approach. Quickly assembled, it's nonetheless a visually satisfying experience - complete unto itself. As a die-hard Driver fan, I have no pretensions to objectivity here; I just think you should get along to the exhibition.

Line them up

2011-10-14T07:30:00.000+13:00

Friday nerdy fun: the kerning game (not just addictive - pretty, too).

Lessons

2011-10-12T09:00:00.000+13:00

As the Clyfford Still Museum in Denver nears its opening day, the press is gathering (and covering more than the sale of four works from the collection to create an endowment).

I feel like a bit of a dummy - I didn't realise that Still released so little of his work to the market; I think of him alongside Rothko and Pollock, not as someone who needs to be hoisted higher in the firmament (maybe I can thank my lecturers for that). Dean Sobel, the museum's director, makes this explicit in a Wall Street Journal interview:

"We are going head to head with Rothko, Pollock, de Kooning and Newman," he says. "The goal for us is to put Still back in, to show the greatness of him and that he was the great innovator of the movement. He creates Abstract Expressionism before all the others."

The WSJ makes an interesting point about the challenges of opening a single-artist museum:

Creating a constituency for a one-artist museum can be tricky even when, like Georgia O'Keeffe or Andy Warhol, that artist is widely known (and loved) and has a local base (Santa Fe, N.M., and Pittsburgh, respectively). Still, a loner who was born in North Dakota in 1904 and died in Maryland in 1980, with several stops in between, had decreed that his life's work should go to any city that would erect a museum solely for his works—and nothing else, ever. Denver just happened to win the competition.

Fast Company's Design blog makes the same point from an architectural angle:

Museums for single artists are tricky. They’re monuments to figures who loom larger than life and, as a result, they can skew all-too-easily toward cliche or, worse, outright cartoon. But architect Brad Cloepfil, of Portland-based Allied Works Architecture, was the right man for the job here. His best designs, like the low-slung Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis and the forthcoming National Music Centre in Calgary, are tough on the outside, sweet on the inside, with big, bold gestures and thoughtful floorplans. Plus, he’s some kind of genius with light, feeding sun indoors through slits and crevices and peepholes in the architecture, like little blasts of heaven.

These are all interesting things to think about in light of the ongoing fundraising for the Len Lye Centre. I can only hope that some rubber pants turn up in the archives.

Bless

2011-10-10T09:00:00.000+13:00

Following on from Ursula Nordstrom - a Guardian interview with the blissfully unrepentant Maurice Sendak. (I challenge you to find a better opening para from last week's news).

Fantasy lives

2011-10-07T09:00:00.000+13:00

I have spent all this week pretending I am Ursula Nordstrom. While I type up proposals and estimates and web copy and bash out emails about wireframes and webforms and whatevers, inside my head I've been Nordstrom, at my desk in New York, banging away on my typewriter sending hilarious, heartfelt, cajoling, placating letters to Ruth Krauss, Maurice Sendak and E.B. White.

This is because I'm reading Dear Genius: The Letters of Ursula Nordstrom, the most gripping book I've read in months. It's not because the letters between the editor for childrens books at Harpers Booksand various writers, illustrators, friends, enemies, librarians, reviewers, teachers and children are full of drama and intrigue. They're more like a wall of words coming at you, in a tone that I'm sure some would find annoying but which I find entrancing. I've just finished her letters to E.B. White about the illustrations for Stuart Little and Charlotte's Web - she auditioned a number of artists, but settled on Garth Williams:

You will see that in the sample drawings for Stuart Little Mr. Williams did one picture in different techniques. We like the more detailed technique, don’t you? He was careful about lots of small but important details. For instance, in the picture of the doctor examining Stuart, Stuart is standing up. Mr. Williams had him lying down in the first sketch but changed it because he was afraid he might look like a little dead mouse if he were lying down. (That is probably a silly detail to pass on to you, but it was somehow encouraging to us.)

The exchange over Charlotte's Web is especially endearing; here she is on a round of changes to the illustrations:

On #1 Garth has changed the position of the door. On #2 he re-did it so that Fern has hair more consistent with the other drawings. On #3 he re-drew it so Mrs. Arable looked less like a young girl, more like herself in other drawings. (On #3, if you agree, Mrs. Arable looks a bit whiskery-y and we can have a couple of the little lines taken out. I may be imagining it through.)

Nordstrom's voice reminds me a little of Tammi Taylor in my great crush 'Friday Night Lights' - an impossibly friendly bulldozer of politeness, enthusiasm and relentless forward motion. It's such a pleasure having her inside my head right now.

(You can read a proper review and more extracts in this Open Letters Monthly article, which is where I first heard of the book.)

How you play the game

2011-10-05T09:00:00.000+13:00

I firmly believe everyone should read everything Atul Gawande writes in the New Yorker. Doing so will make you a wiser, more thoughtful, more expanded person. Intellectually more attractive. Better.

So in case you missed it, here's Gawande's latest piece, Personal Best. In it, Gawande asks why some professions - like sports and singing - have coaches, and others - like his own, surgery - don't. He opens by noting that his own performance as a surgeon has plateaued. He has mastered the physical skills needed, and gained the experience that allows him to deal with exceptions to the norm:

As I went along, I compared my results against national data, and I began beating the averages. My rates of complications moved steadily lower and lower. And then, a couple of years ago, they didn’t. It started to seem that the only direction things could go from here was the wrong one.

Gawande looks at case studies from school teachers to professional violinists, and then takes on a coach of his own, a retired surgeon, who observes him during an operation:

Osteen also asked me to pay more attention to my elbows. At various points during the operation, he observed, my right elbow rose to the level of my shoulder, on occasion higher. “You cannot achieve precision with your elbow in the air,” he said. A surgeon’s elbows should be loose and down by his sides. “When you are tempted to raise your elbow, that means you need to either move your feet”—because you’re standing in the wrong position—“or choose a different instrument.”

He had a whole list of observations like this. His notepad was dense with small print. I operate with magnifying loupes and wasn’t aware how much this restricted my peripheral vision. I never noticed, for example, that at one point the patient had blood-pressure problems, which the anesthesiologist was monitoring. Nor did I realize that, for about half an hour, the operating light drifted out of the wound; I was operating with light from reflected surfaces. Osteen pointed out that the instruments I’d chosen for holding the incision open had got tangled up, wasting time.

That one twenty-minute discussion gave me more to consider and work on than I’d had in the past five years. It had been strange and more than a little awkward having to explain to the surgical team why Osteen was spending the morning with us. “He’s here to coach me,” I’d said. Yet the stranger thing, it occurred to me, was that no senior colleague had come to observe me in the eight years since I’d established my surgical practice. Like most work, medical practice is largely unseen by anyone who might raise one’s sights. I’d had no outside ears and eyes.

Gawande also points out that coaching has become faddish in recent years - from life to Twitter, you can seemingly get coached in anything. In fact, the project management/software development methodology we use at work, Scrum, has regular reviews and coaching as one of its central tenets; it's all about iterative improvements to the way a team works. Bringing in a set of outside eyes to review how a team is working together or a process is moving can be hugely beneficial, but I think it needs a framework in which the coaching isn't intrusive or threatening, but normal and welcomed.

As always, I can't help but compare this back to the days when I worked in museums and art galleries. Reviewing something after it's done - like the success of an exhibition - is pretty much useless. You can say all you like that you'll 'use these learnings in future projects', but let's admit it: we rarely do. But reviewing how things are going every day or every week or every fortnight, and deciding *then* how you're going to make things work better - that's coaching. That's how you get a little bit better all the time.

Paying through the nose

2011-10-03T09:00:00.000+13:00

A few weeks ago on the radio I talked about the Oceania exhibitions at Te Papa and City Gallery (in brief: Te Papa surprisingly good; City Gallery surprisingly dull).

The thing that exercises me most about this show - content and presentation aside - is the entry charge. Now, sure, $10 is not a lot for two shows. But given that there's funding from MCH, and that the City Gallery show is about half made up of Te Papa collection items, and that it's these two institutions' jobs to put on exhibitions, I felt that I'd already paid that $10 a couple of times through taxes and rates.

I can only assume that the entry charge is meant to capitalise on the intended audience for the exhibitions - the people visiting for the Rugby World Cup. Based on the afternoon I spent at the two exhibitions, it's not exactly going to be a money spinner. City Gallery was as deserted as I've ever seen it, and the rest of Te Papa was heaving, but I would have spent that 90 minutes with a handful of other people.

It also interests me that this is the third paid show (including Kusama and Crown Lynn) since City Gallery reopened following renovations in late 2009. In fact, if you total the three runs up (Kusama 27 Sept 2009 - 7 Feb 2010; Crown Lynn 29 Jan - 25 April 2011; Oceania 6 Aug - 6 Nov 2011) that's verging on a year's worth of charged shows.

In this case, $10 doesn't feel like a valid attempt to recover costs, but a hurdle that's keeping visitors out. And that's particularly sad in the case of Te Papa, as this is a show more people should see.

If you want to read something more coherent and insightful about entry charges, you might like to check out these two recent Art Newspaper pieces: To charge or not to charge and New York's great museums could do better.

Anticipation

2011-09-28T09:00:00.000+13:00

I am squeakily excited about Claire Tomalin's forthcoming biography of Dickens - her book on Samuel Pepys is one of my favourite reads of the past two years.

In anticipation, I am reading both my first Dickens since 'A Christmas Carol' as a kid (Great Expectations) and Tomalin's own first biography, of Mary Wollstonecraft. Also in anticipation, the Guardian has gone on a Dickens/Tomalin spree, including:

Rachel Cooke's interview with Tomalin
A piece by Tomalin on Dickens, and specifically one small episode from early in his life
A 'My favourite Dickens' series
A set of sketches of famous characters (although why must everything you can click on these days be termed 'interactive'?)

Expertise

2011-09-26T09:00:00.000+13:00

There is nothing better than having an articulate expert break something down for you. In that vein, here's broadcaster Ira Glass on the genius of the RadioLab podcast.*

Most journalism in our country lacks the sense of joyous discovery one gets in Radiolab. There’s none of the enthusiastic “Yes!” “No!” “Yes!” “You heard me right!” “Get outta here!”

I tend to have big pretentious, tiresome thoughts about how important that is. Real journalism – and by that I mean fact-based reporting – is getting trounced by commentary and opinion in all its forms, from Fox News to the political blogs to Jon Stewart. Everyone knows newspapers are in horrible trouble. TV news continually loses ratings. And one way we broadcast journalists can fight back and hold our audience is to sound like human beings on the air. Not know-it-all stiffs. One way the opinion guys kick our ass and appeal to an audience is that they talk like normal people, not like news robots speaking their stentorian news-speak. So I wish more broadcast journalism had such human narrators at its center. I think that would help fact-based journalism survive. But like I say, I’m kind of a nut on this subject.

I've posted this before, but if you haven't read it yet, and any part of what you do involves trying to tell people a story that they will be moved by and remember, you should: Ira Glass's radio manifesto.

*On the podcast note - can anyone recommend a really good art-specific one?

Full heart

2011-09-21T09:00:00.000+12:00

Because I am fully, deeply, overwhelmingly immersed in Friday Nights Lights* right now, I can find an article like this, which concludes like this, not cheesy but moving, even mythical:

In Muck City, the children have nervously followed their fathers and grandfathers into the mud and the fire and emerged with a fearlessness that most of us cannot understand. Soon we will gather in front of our televisions and watch receivers run over the middle and linebackers dive headfirst at loose footballs. We will tell ourselves we could do this too, if we were paid millions, or if we were famous, or if we took steroids. But we'll forget how the game of football is born out of hunger, and courage, and desperation, and community, and hope. And how sometimes it's played in spite of everything else.

So, yes - the tv series. It is breaking my heart into little sentimental pieces every night, and I don't give a damn who knows it. Then again, I read the book too, and it broke my heart just as effectively, if in a very different way.

Web muster

2011-09-19T09:00:00.000+12:00

Test your colour acuity with this hue-grading exercise (I felt pretty good about my score until the designers at work, unsurprisingly, got perfect results0.

I've been asking for someone to bring Blue Poles over for years - The Art Newspaper on exhibitions of just one work.

Mashable covers mobile technologies at the Powerhouse, Smithsonian and Museum of Jewish Heritage (and Seb Chan posts a couple of Q&As left out of the article) .

The Economist on beautiful functional design, sparked by the shortlist being announced for the British Pylon Design competition (really - how awesome is that? I love power pylons).

Science and poetry

2011-09-15T09:00:00.000+12:00

Inspired by my love for Richard Holmes The Age of Wonder, I'm heading along next Tuesday to Professor Kathryn Wall's inaugural lecture at Victoria University, looking at the mix of emotions with with the arts viewed science in the 18th century:

In the lecture, titled "God said, Let Newton Be": Alexander Pope and the Scientific Revolution Professor Walls will explain that Pope, like his contemporary Jonathan Swift, mercilessly satirised scientists.

"They were part of a reactionary movement—science was seen as a fad, an addiction and as a waste of time. It didn’t seem to be producing any practical benefits."

Professor Walls says it is not surprising that poets were opposed to science. "Poetry plays with words. It delights in paradox and ambiguity. Scientists value precision and clarity—the mentality is utterly different."

However, Professor Walls believes Pope's attitude to science was complex. "Pope attended a series of lectures given by one of Newton's disciples, and the scientific discoveries of the day clearly influenced his thought."

Talking about someone else's generation

2011-09-13T09:00:00.000+12:00

I feel a strange sense of relief when I see the dates for the V&A's upcoming show Postmodernism: Style and Subversion 1970-1990 - like I've been exempted from something. So much of my university education was dedicated to post-this and ism-that, that it's nice to see someone draw a line back when I was still at primary school.

Apparently artists asked to take part in the exhibition have an even more complicated relationship with this particular period-label:

“It is a real issue that so few people identify positively with postmodernism,” said Mr. Adamson [co-curator of the exhibition]. “And a whole list of people do not want to be identified with it.” Among them is the American architect Frank Gehry, although the V&A eventually persuaded him to participate.

Meanwhile, in other preview media pieces, the Independent manages to go from postmodernism to Facebook and 'postwhateverism', the Financial Times asks whether the exhibition can rescue the 'movement's' reputation, Prospect Magazine asks if this exhibition seals postmodernism's tomb, and Jonathan Jones asks if it all started with Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

My favourite stationery

2011-08-31T09:00:00.000+12:00

This (fascinating*) article about the debut of a new range of paperclips (Acco's Klix, pictured above) gives me an excuse to post a picture of my absolute favourite - better than Sharpies, better than new pencils - item of stationery:

Not only are they very good at holding pieces of paper together, the little boxes are like the stationery version of Tiffanys. Love.

For a more in-depth review of the new Acco Klix, see this Office Supply Geek post.

* Honestly - fascinating. The American paperclip industry is protected from Chinese manufacturing by import tariffs. Americans purchase more than 30 paperclips per capita each year. Acco is currently undertaking a major project to ensure they get exactly 100 paperclips into each container (they used to put in 102, to be on the safe side if people counted). Fascinating.

The funniest post I've seen so far on an art gallery blog

2011-08-26T09:00:00.000+12:00

“OMG, I just took a pic w/ Jesus, LOLZ ROTFL”

Private or public?

2011-08-25T09:00:00.000+12:00

Earlier this year (I think) I talked on Radio New Zealand National about the rules and restrictions surrounding photography in art galleries.

Tangentially linked - a film that shows what happened when the London Street Photography Festival sent six photographer out to shoot in public locations in London.

Jealous

2011-08-23T09:00:00.000+12:00

It's a little old now, but when I first saw it, this announcement of start-up grants for web technology projects in the universities, museums, libraries and archives by the National Endowment for the Humanities filled me with envy. Here's a random sampling of some of the successful projects:

Minneapolis Society of Fine Arts -- Minneapolis, MN
HD 51490, Enhancing the Humanities Through Innovation: The Extended Collection Project
Katherine Milton, Project Director
Outright: $25,000
To support: Development of a pilot program for training docents in using digital tours and resources.

Museum of the City of New York -- New York, NY
HD 51480, Improving Digital Record Annotation Capabilities with Open sourced Ontologies and Crowd sourced Workers
Lacy Schutz, Project Director
Outright: $50,000
To support: The development of methods and tools to facilitate the description of digitized primary sources by combining "crowdsourcing" tactics with linked open data and semantic Web technologies.

New York Public Library -- New York, NY
HD 51427, MOVER [a Multimodal Open Source Variorum eBook Reader]
Doug Reside, Project Director
Outright: $50,000
To support: The development of a prototype mobile application to allow users to study multimedia variorum editions of musical theater plays.

It's the development of prototypes that particularly intrigues me. At work this year we've been able to first prototype and then 'productionise' (terrible word) a system that will be publicly released shortly, and the ability to quickly add, test, tweak or drop functionality and features was a god-send. Prototypes also dramatically reduce the risk of failure - they give everyone time to figure out where the true value in a product really lies, something that's not always obvious at the beginning of a large web project (you'd like to think that's not the case, but I've found it often is).

Inevitably, my usual final line: I wish there was this kind of support for test projects in New Zealand. But a final, final line - I wonder if there's a condition attached to these grants that the 'learnings' (another terrible word) and code from these products and prototypes has to be released back into the community?

Happy anniversary baby

2011-08-21T09:00:00.002+12:00

Today is the 100th anniversary of the theft of the Mona Lisa from the Louvre - and the 50th anniversary of another heist I'd never heard of, the lifting of Goya's portrait of the Duke of Wellington from the National Gallery in London. The Guardian has a good story about the two snatches.

Disaster preparedness

2011-08-18T08:51:00.002+12:00

First up, the director of the American National Gallery is called Earl “Rusty” Powell III. I want more New Zealand directors to have diminutives - even better, I would like them to have wrestler names, like 'Mad Dog' and 'The Axe'.

Secondly, and more on topic - an interesting article about National Gallery curator Andrew Robison, who is the guardian of seven black, cloth-lined boxes that constitute the gallery's 'in case of World War III' collection of works on paper:

In 1979, with Washington worried about 52 hostages in Tehran and terrorist threats at home, Robison’s boss asked him to create a big container for works of the highest value. If catastrophe hit, the container could be spirited away to an undisclosed location. Today, Robison has seven boxes in two separate storerooms — four for European holdings, three for American. These do not include the museum’s 10,000 photographs, 3,800 paintings and 2,900 sculptures, outside of Robison’s purview and mostly too big for any mad dash out the building. And because his works are so fragile and light-sensitive, they live most of their lives in protective storage, going on the walls for viewing only in short spurts.

The fact I found most interesting:

During Robison’s 38-year tenure, the works-on-paper collection more than doubled, from 50,000 to 106,000, and routinely his team found additions that pushed out other masterworks. In fact, only 27 percent of what Robison first put in the boxes in 1979 is still inside them.

The article is a little sneering about curators ("Robison is neither a rogue nor a prig, the two usual poles of cultural debate") but still an interesting peek behind the scenes. I wonder what's on our disaster boxes?

Pottermore

2011-08-16T12:42:00.003+12:00

The first reviews of Pottermore are coming out, and I feel like I'm glimpsing the future of something. Maybe it's the future of how we consume 'books'; maybe it's the future of a new relationship with authors.*

Even as a non-avid Harry Potter reader (I think I've read most of the books, but I'm not sure**) I can completely see the appeal of this massively immersive experience. Pottermore only features the first book in the series so far, but Rowlings has added reams of backstory, notes, ideas that were ditched, and the kinds of activities fans (and non-avid readers) will likely go nuts for. From Bryan Young's review on Huffington Post

As I went through to choose my wand, I was asked a series of questions, written by Rowling herself, before a wand chose me.

I was assigned a Hawthorne wand with a unicorn core, 10 and 3/4's inches, and of a slightly springy flexibility. It was very cool and seemed very personalized, but you don't realize how personalized until the next screen where you're able to explore what all the different sorts of wand cores and woods mean. There's hundreds of possible combinations, thousands maybe, and somehow when I read about typical personality traits of wizards with my wand it seemed oddly accurate. Magic? Maybe.

It goes deeper from there:

You're sorted into a house at Hogwarts through a series of questions. The questions don't seem to have obvious paths to any specific house but, again, the results seem oddly prescient. As I read the books, I was quite confident I'd be sorted into Ravenclaw and this only confirmed my suspicions.

From there, you're granted access to the common room of your house and the majority of social networking begins. You can link up to Facebook and find friends of your own inside Pottermore, assign them nicknames, comment on their activities, and give them gifts of the loot you've found throughout the book.

But there's even more to do. You can cast spells and duel with fellow (live) students, you can make potions, and keep track of house points in the Great Hall. In fact, there is an active competition for the House Cup and you see the house points for all four houses in the Great Hall.

For every kid - and adult - who wanted to be The Chosen One, swept off into a magical world of spells and portent and symbolism and best friends, this is it. It's some new form of entertainment/social networking/fanfic/alternate reality that I can't put my finger on yet, but that intrigues me.

First review of Pottermore - the Guardian
Background on Pottermore - Wired

*One of my first thoughts was - do I want to be this close to authors? I can see the appeal for Neil Gaiman fans, or George R.R. Martin fans, or Terry Pratchett readers. But do I want BloodMeridianMore? No. No, I don't.
** I recently read the last book. I read the epilogue first. I was Disappointed.

Apocalypse Friday

2011-08-12T09:00:00.000+12:00

My new favourite discovery, courtesy of Chris McDowall on Twitter - Wellingtonian Tim Denee. I'm intrigued by this early test panel for a potential post-apocalyptic comic set in Wellington.

In his description of the idea, Denee references Cormac McCarthy. On the same day that I saw that cartoon I fortuitiously stumbled across a link to this 2007 Rolling Stone article about McCarthy and his involvement with the interdisciplinary science research centre, the Santa Fe Institute.

"When I was a kid, I was very interested in the natural world," he says. "To this day, during casual conversations, little-known facts about the natural world will just crop up." On a dime, McCarthy can slip into a thirtyminute treatise on some arcane biological phenomenon. "Voles leave trails where they go, like markings," he'll say out of the blue. "They're mostly composed of urine, but there are other substances as well. One absorbs ultraviolet light, which is invisible to us. But guess who can see it? The raptors flying overhead can see it. They have ultraviolet vision! That's just very interesting. You think about these birds - they're not looking for voles, they're looking for ultraviolet trails through the weeds."

It's a fascinating profile, and this is my favourite line:

"People ask me, 'Why are you interested in physics?' But why would you not be? To me, the most curious thing of all is incuriosity. I just don't get it."

I've always wanted to have something in common with Cormac McCarthy.

Image
Untitled work by Tim Denee, www.timdenee.com

Crowdsourcing

2011-08-11T09:00:00.001+12:00

Crowdsourcing is going to be one of the themes of this year's NDF conference - asking the public to help you fix or supplement the data and collections from cultural institutions has certainly moved from being brave three or four years ago to being mainstream today.

That's why two recent stories about crowdsourcing caught my eye. Photo agency Magnum has partnered with Tagasauris, a photo-tagging company ,to encourage more specialist tagging of their archive. As reported in the Independent:

Tagasauris already registers some 2,500 taggers working across the Magnum archive. There is, however, one problem with their work: it isn't necessarily specialised. While these taggers might be able to offer general information, for the most part they lack the kind of expert knowledge that could contribute more meaningfully – the nature of the film used for a particular shot, perhaps, or the back story of the photographer.

Social networking and a bit of competitive gaming are, hopefully, going to get the specialists working:

Magnum hopes to recruit would-be gamers with superior expertise through social networking – it currently has more than 300,000 followers on Twitter and 135,000 Facebookers who "like" its page. Every time there is a new image to be inspected, it will be posted on Magnum's Twitter feed. Participants can share the photos, spreading the knowledge base wider.
...

Carter insists there's yet more to be gained by having contributors compete with one another. When The New York Times photojournalism blog posted an article on the Magnum project, several thousand people contacted the agency. "The question is: how much broader would that response have been if the task was gamified? My suspicion is that there are millions of eligible people who would do it," says Carter.

(This blog post from the New York Times has more details about quality control and linking up the metadata, if such things ring your bells.)

The project is currently limited, according to the Independent, to 50 volunteers - you can sign up to be accepted later on . Interestingly, this Wired article, about Tagasauris tagging that found previously uncatalogued photos taken on the set of American Graffiti, notes that rather than 'volunteers' in the sense we might immediately think of, the work is being done through Amazon's Mechanical Turks programme.

My own favourite crowdsourcing projects are focused on the correction of the muddly text produced when documents/manuscripts are digitised and then 'translated' into searchable text using optical character recognition. The translation isn't by any means exact - even crisp tyepwritten documents will render errors, while 19th century newspapers - which are usually digitised from microfilm, vary from 78% to 98% accurate. 98% accurate sounds great, until you realise that it's not that only two words in every hundred that will be mangled - every character has a 2% chance of be mis- or unrecognised, and every word with a muddled character risks being unsearchable.

So I was delighted to see that massive project is being undertaken to digitise and correct the two weekly magazines that Charles Dickens edited, in time for Dickens' bicentenary in 2012. Appealingly, the site has been released in beta, and volunteers can make corrections as the site continues to be developed.

I signed up last night to have a play - while the actual editing interface is a delight to use, and the instructions thorough and easy to follow, I've yet to find an easy way of completing one page and moving on to the next, without having to go to the homepage of the site each time. Ditto, it took me several minutes to find something I could do - unlike the Australian National Library's newspaper correction project, which I've also contributed to, here you 'claim' a journal issue and it is locked so only you can edit it. It would have been useful to see a list of unclaimed journals to choose from.

But I'm being picky. It's a great project, a 24-page issue feels like a manageable and worthwhile piece of work, and I'm looking forward to it.

At the art fair

2011-08-08T09:00:00.000+12:00

This year's Auckland Art Fair felt bigger and lighter (almost scarily so - the sunshine pours into the new Viaduct events centre, often making it hard to get a good look at anything behind glass, and I imagine meaning a lot of the works on paper that dealers took along will be recuperating in a dark room for some time) but also somehow less exciting. Perhaps it was because the 2009 edition was my first art fair; perhaps because in general dealers opted for a tasting platter / stockroom approach and there were few big ticket items (large Robinsons, Parekowhais, Picks or Cottons) in evidence.

Having said that, there were some doozies. Michael Lett, as Over the net noted on the opening night, had another stellar showing. Giving over the whole space to Campbell Patterson, Lett festooned the walls with Patterson's blotchy, scabby, sultana-bran-and-spit spotted towels (you've gotta love something so determinedly hard to preserve being offered up on this occasion). Patterson's new video work - a tight close-up of the artist's head on its side on a concrete floor, mouth jammed with three ever so slowly melting yellow iceblocks - was transfixing.

Robert Heald laid out my favourite stand - a stripped back presentation that both captured his aesthetic and the programme he's putting together in Wellington, and formed the best example of an actual show at the fair. A wall where two new Patrick Lundberg painted 'shoelaces' were punctuated by two small examples of Lundberg's found objects with carefully excised paint layers was restful, thoughtful, and good to look at, while three of John Ward Knox's light and airy canvases held the back wall.

Hamish McKay also went for the curated approach, while still managing to create a joyous jumble, uplifting a decent chunk of work from the recent collaborative project by jeweller Karl Fritsch, furniture maker Martino Gamper and artist Francis Upritchard and laying it out again in Auckland. Fond as I am of these pieces, it's now the third time I've seen them, and as a spoiled art viewer I would have liked to see something new. Then again, the collaboration is so damn appealing you can see why McKay wants to spend as much time with the works as possible - and to get them in front of Auckland eyes.

Of the dealers who took the stockroom approach, Darren Knight Gallery used a monochrome palette to bind together the work of a number of artists, including a covetable watercolour portrait by Ricky Swallow and an interesting new work by Michael Harrison. I also would have liked to have gotten a closer look at the new Fiona Pardington photos at {Suite} Gallery which were suffering a little from the glare issue: big, dark pulpy images of dramatic artificial flowers that seem like the plus-size of the series of small, sexy cigarette-card sized works she made a few years ago (a pair of plush lips, a bruised overblown rose, a sparrow in a fist). Kushana Bush had a nice selection at Brett McDowell's stand (another of the more restrained and more coherent instances at the fair) and I've also given my abstract-loving heart away to Selina Foote, who had two works at Sue Crockford.

But some of the best stuff was back at the dealers' actual galleries. More on that later this week.

Web muster

2011-08-05T14:00:00.000+12:00

From McSweeneys - Young people are reading more than you; maybe its because the YA market is booming:

Between 1995 and 1997, the number of young adult titles published per year fell dramatically, dropping from 5,000 to just over 3,000, according to R.R. Bowker’s Publishers Weekly. In 2009, there were over 30,000.

From the New York Review of Books blog - goodbye Helvetica, hello Optima (only the piece is much more serious and eloquent than I'm making it sound)

Optima is the anti-Helvetica. Zapf designed it in the early 1950s, around the same time that Helvetica was taking shape, but he had a completely different and far more profound sense of what a typeface ought to be. Instead of being mathematically perfect and untethered to a particular time or place, Optima embodies a subtle understanding of history. It is nominally a sans-serif, but its lines swell subtly toward their endpoints, with the result that they suggest classical serifs without actually having them. Zapf based the letterforms on carvings he found on Italian renaissance grave stones, and their overall shape and proportions unmistakably derive from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. But their sleek lines suggest the aerodynamic curves of modern technology, and the whole design could only have been invented in the mid-twentieth century.

And in the Guardian, Martin Creed's piece for the Edinburgh festival - "a work of art so perfectly integrated into the world that you feel a bit of a fool for making a fuss over it." (Does anyone else wish the Guardian put in more pictures?)

NDF2011 first speaker announcement

2011-08-04T15:37:00.003+12:00

Right now, almost all my time and thought that doesn't get absorbed by my paid job is getting absorbed by my not-paid job, co-organising the National Digital Forum conference.*

So it's with great joy that I get to announce the first batch of confirmed speakers:

KEYNOTES

Mitchell Whitelaw, University of Canberra, http://creative.canberra.edu.au/mitchell/
Michael Lascerides, New York Public Library, http://www.nypl.org
Third keynote TBC

PRESENTATIONS

Lucinda Blaser, National Maritime Museum, on improving collection data and encouraging conversations through crowdsourcing and partnering projects http://www.nmm.ac.uk

Melanie Cooper, Auckland Museum: ‘From ship to shore and back: Growing an audience around a Biodiscovery Expedition to the Kermadec Islands’ http://kermadec.aucklandmuseum.com

Susan Corbett, Victoria University of Wellington: ‘Cultural heritage institutions, digitisation, and copyright: are they compatible?’

Ryan Donahue, George Eastman House, Rochester, New York, on the responsibilities, challenges and roles for cultural heritage and technology in digital preservation http://www.eastmanhouse.org

Arapata Hakiwai and Philip Edgar, Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, on Te Papa’s research project to discover, inventory, gather, make accessible and encourage connections with Māori and Moriori taonga held outside New Zealand http://www.tepapa.govt.nz

Tim Jones, Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetu, on a collaboration with volunteers working at home to gather geographical coordinates for locations depicted in works in the Gallery's collection http://christchurchartgallery.org.nz

Chris McDowall, Digital New Zealand, giving a visual exploration of New Zealand’s digital heritage http://digitalnz.org

Andy Neale, Digital New Zealand, on myth-busting the API http://digitalnz.org

Michael Parry, Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI), on the ways cultural organisations are turning to mobile devices to represent various parts of their activities and functions – with mixed success http://www.acmi.net.au

Paddy Plunkett, National Library of New Zealand Te Puna Mātauranga o Aotearoa, on the use of Agile development methods in the heritage sector http://www.natlib.govt.nz

Anna Raunik, State Library of Queensland: ‘What's ours is yours - or is it? How open is our data?’ - the National and State Libraries Australasia Libraryhack project http://libraryhack.org http://www.slq.qld.gov.au

Kate Stone, National Film and Sound Archive of Australia, on the place of websites like australianscreen in the current online environment http://aso.gov.au/

Tim Sherratt, independent: ‘It’s all about the stuff’ http://discontents.com.au

Elycia Wallis, Museum Victoria, on the Biodiversity Heritage Library in Australia, a collaborative effort between libraries in museums, herbaria and collecting institutions including CSIRO, and linking to the Biodiversity Heritage Library globally http://bhl.ala.org.au/

Kate Woodall, Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa: 'Layered Journeys: exploiting digital media to create experiences for people beyond the usual museum visit’ http://www.tepapa.govt.nz

PANEL DISCUSSIONS

On APIs:
Carlos Arroyo and Rebecca Pinchin, Powerhouse Museum, Sydney
Lawrence Chiles, National Maritime Museum, London
Graham Davies, Amgueddfa Cymru - National Museum Wales
Andy Neale, Digital New Zealand

On film and moving image:
Brenda Leeuwenberg, NZ on Screen
Michael Parry, ACMI, Melbourne
Kate Stone, AustralianScreen

On mobile:
Virgina Gow, Auckland Museum
Michael Parry, ACMI, Melbourne
Simon Sherrin, Museum Victoria

On collaboration and community:
Annette Beattie, Hutt City Libraries
Smita Biswas (Tauranga City Libraries) and Walter McGinnis (Katipo/independent)
Jackie Gurden, West Coast Heritage and Libraries

On iwi and Māori initiatives:
Michael Hennessy, Ab Ovo - Io Media
Honiana Love and Claire Hall, Te Reo o Taranaki Charitable Trust

On learnings from digitisation projects:
Sarah McClintock, Archives New Zealand
Vye Perrone, University of Waikato Library
Claire Stent, Statistics New Zealand

LIGHTNING TALKS

Euan Cochrane, Archives New Zealand: ‘Emulation for Fun and Profit: Opening Old Digital Information for Reuse’
Paul Rowe, Vernon Systems: ‘Putting things in their place’
Erika Taylor, Powerhouse Museum, Sydney, on curators and the digital world
Simon Sherrin, Museum Victoria, on the Field Guide of Victorian Animals

Of course, this is a preliminary announcement & subject to change. But it's still pretty damn exciting.

Also worth noting - applications for subsidised registrations close on 8 August. This year we've made the criteria broader than ever before, so do check it out.

*My co-organisers are Brenda Leeuwenberg and Celeste Milnes. They're awesome.

Colony

2011-08-01T09:00:00.000+12:00

Over the weekend I finished E.O. Wilson's Anthill, the octogenarian Pulitzer Prize winning scientists first novel, a roman a clef about growing up in the American South as a bug-obsessed little boy.

The majority of the book reads like a John Grisham with less zap (you can see what I thought here, if you like). But the central section - where Wilson describes the rise and fall of three closely located ant colonies - is some of the best writing I've read this year. The fate of these ants is Homeric, and utterly gripping.

Luckily, the first part of this study was reproduced in the New Yorker last year, and is freely available online.

The Trailhead Queen was dead. At first, there was no overt sign that her long life was ending: no fever, no spasms, no farewells. She simply sat on the floor of the royal chamber and died. As in life, her body was prone and immobile, her legs and antennae relaxed. Her stillness alone failed to give warning to her daughters that a catastrophe had occurred for all of them. She lay there, in fact, as though nothing had happened. She had become a perfect statue of herself. While humans and other vertebrates have an internal skeleton surrounded by soft tissue that quickly rots away, ants are encased in an external skeleton; their soft tissues shrivel into dry threads and lumps, but their exoskeletons remain, a knight’s armor fully intact long after the knight is gone. Hence the workers were at first unaware of their mother’s death. Her quietude said nothing, and the odors of her life, still rising from her, signalled, I remain among you. She smelled alive.

Punishing the wrong behaviour

2011-07-29T09:00:00.000+12:00

I love the idea of the New York Public Library's 'Read Down' programme.

Over the summer break, kids who have racked more than $15 in fines can get them expunged by logging their reading times on the Summer reading site. 15 minutes of reading equals a $1 reduction in fines.

Currently, 143,000 kids - 30% of those with NYPL cards - owe $15 or more in fines. The Library wants to get them back in the doors:

"Kids might be afraid or ashamed because they are delinquent with the library," said NYPL official Jack Martin. "The idea of this program is to bring them back in.

"We are in such hard economic times and children and teens depend on the library," he added.

I can't easily think of an alternative way to encourage people to return books apart from discouraging them for holding on to them with fines (although drop-boxes at schools might help). But stopping kids from borrowing more because they're scared of getting told off or turned away defeats libraries' bigger purpose.

Amnesties like this delight me. Libraries recognise they're unlikely to ever get the money back - but they can get the items, and - more importantly - get the readers back through the doors.

Shiny

2011-07-26T22:26:00.006+12:00

I'm really rather taken with the Steve Carr works in the first show at the new Melbourne gallery, KALIMANRAWLINS.

I've always enjoyed his mixture of humour, high-finish and suspense - even the sculptural and photographic works have a sense of the cinematic.

And I'm also excited to see what KALIMANRAWLINS puts out there - they also represent NZ artists Simon Denny, Seraphine Pick, and Ronnie van Hout.

Images:
Steve Carr, Screen Shots, 2011. HD file transferred to Blu-Ray. Unique edition (3 screens). From the KALIMANRAWLINS website.

Steve Carr, A Shot in the Dark (The Bachelor), 2008. C-type print mounted on dibond. Christchurch Art Gallery collection.

Steve Carr, A Shot in the Dark (Bearskin rug), 2008. Kauri, stain, acrylic paint. Christchurch Art Gallery collection.

Musing

2011-07-26T09:00:00.001+12:00

When I talk on the radio about an exhibition or an art work, I'm mindful that I pick things that I can enthuse about. Partly because that's what I see as my role on National Radio - I'm not going to waste an opportunity to get listeners positively engaged with contemporary art and the art world by behaving like a hatchet-tongued stereotype. But also because I'm aware that going on air and ripping shreds off something that people can't see will simply create a very unenjoyable ten minutes of radio.

So there have plenty of shows in the past year that I've gone to, that I've thought were lame, dull, overcooked, or uninteresting. I've avoided talking about all of them. There have been shows I've gone to that I've found somewhat flawed in a thought-provoking way (the anniversary show at the Dowse, the current show at the Adam Art Gallery) that I have tried to delve into. It's a challenge, trying to explain why you're puzzled or not satisfied by something. When you say a book is not well-written, people know what you are generally aiming at. When you try to explain why you're calling an exhibition badly curated (that is, when you're saying something other that 'the art isn't very good', although god knows there's been a few examples in recent months where that simply is the case), it's far harder to find some common ground to start from.

So I was interested to see Robert Pinsky's three rules of reviewing in Salon this week:

1. The review must tell what the book is about.
2. The review must tell what the book's author says about that thing the book is about.
3. The review must tell what the reviewer thinks about what the book's author says about that thing the book is about.

I wonder if this can be successfully adapted to exhibitions?

1. The review must tell what the exhibition is about
2. The review must tell what the exhibition's organiser says about the thing the exhibition is about
3. The review must tell what the reviewer thinks about what the exhibition's organiser says about the thing the exhibition is about

The complicating factor is, of course, that with an exhibition, there's often another layer. What the curator is saying might be very different from what the artist is saying. Sometimes the tension between these two things is interesting - sometimes it's effortful, sometimes it's just daft. Maybe this is point four, and maybe this is where I need to put more thought in.

Web muster

2011-07-21T18:40:00.002+12:00

A romance writer does some hardcore research to make sure scenes involving crinolines, corsets and heaving body parts are realistic*

Women wore blouses under their corsets—making actual bodice ripping fairly pointless. Corsets fastened in front and laced up the back and couldn't be undone in a single passionate gesture. "You'll see pictures of corsets on bare skin. That's completely historically inaccurate," Ms. Gist told her audience.

Seb Chan blogs about using the My Tours app to create walking tours for the Powerhouse Museum, and interviews Glen Barnes, the guy behind My Tours. Wise words from Glen:

I think this is one area where organisations really have to start working with local tourism boards and businesses. If you are from a smaller area then band together and release one app covering the local heritage trail, museum and gardens. The tourism organisations tend to have more of a budget to promote the area and by working together you can help stand out amongst the sea of apps that are out there. Also make sure that you tell people about it and don’t rely on the app stores. Get links of blogs, the local newspaper and in real life (Welly Walks had a full page article in a major newspaper, two more articles and a spot in KiaOra magazine). Talk to people and make sure the local hotels and others who recommend places-to-go know about what you are doing.

And finally, creating a history of smells:

It seems far-fetched to think we could actually start to smell the past - or somehow preserve a whiff of our daily lives. But increasingly, technology is making it possible, and historians, scientists, and perfumers are now taking the idea of smells as historical artifacts more seriously. They argue that it’s time to delve into our olfactory past, trying harder to understand how people experienced the world with their noses - and even save scents for posterity.

*No, not that kind of hardcore. This is a family show.

King of paintings

2011-07-20T09:00:00.000+12:00

Hamish McKay is currently showing Julian Dashper's masterful Regent (on resale) alongside a little group of smaller velvet paintings selected from private collections.

It is an utterly fantastic painting. Energetic, almost greedy, it latches on to your eyes and propels them around it surface, over clownishly thick lines and sublime golden dribbles and scaley white patches and turquoise lakes.

Dashper famously observed of these works that

they were all made by holding the tube and squeezing it. So I never touched or embraced the painting. I could have made them wearing three piece suits. They were like lies in terms of artistic expression or angst.

As such, they're often taken as conceptual paintings. Dashper disowned the word 'conceptual' as it was applied to him - all art, he argued, was conceptual. And you can't help but feel, as your eye travels over Regent, that there's a joy in colour and texture and gesture, and that while Dashper might have been faking it, he was feeling it too.

I've always loved Dashper's words as much as his works. The show at Hamish McKay's coincides with the publication of Julian Dashper: This is not writing, a collection of essays, interviews, artists statements and other texts. I can't wait to get my hands on a copy.

NB: For those of you who tune in, I'll be talking about Dashper's work, with a focus on Regent, on Radio New Zealand national at about 11.45am today.

Image:
Julian Dashper, Regent, 1986. Oil on velvet 1370 mm x 2140 mm. Image from the Hamish McKay Gallery website

Over here

2011-07-18T11:42:00.002+12:00

About a month ago, I blogged about this Atlantic article by Alexis Madrigal on the New York Public Library, and especially this extract.

I'm going to give you the conclusion to this article here to solve the tl;dr problem. There are two things the library has done to create such cool projects. First, I'm convinced the NYPL is succeeding online because of desire. The library's employees give a shit about the digital aspects of their institution, and they are supported in that shit giving. I mean this in the most fundamental way possible and as a damning critique for media companies. Second, the library sees its users as collaborators in improving the collections the library already has. While serving them online costs the library some money, they are creating value, too, by opening up conduits into the library for superusers.

So you can imagine I'm super-excited to say that Michael Lascerides, Senior Manager for Web Initiatives at NYPL, has just been announced as the second keynote speaker for this year's National Digital Forum conference in Wellington.

Michael joins Mitchell Whitelaw, whose work I've also blogged about. I'm know I'm being partisan as hell right now, but I can't wait for November.

You had me at 'polar bears'

2011-07-15T09:00:00.001+12:00

This image in a Salon slideshow of abandoned towns and buildings made my brain dart straight to Michael Stevenson.

The caption sealed the deal:

At 79 degrees north, Pyramiden was once an ideal Soviet community of 1,000 settlers: self-reliant, with free food and 50,000 books in the library. In 1998, mining was no longer sustainable and the settlers were given a few hours to pack. Melancholic remnants of their hasty departure are everywhere: dried-up plants on windowsills, Tolstoy on dusty shelves. We carry guns; a necessary precaution as Pyramiden now belongs to polar bears and cackling seagulls, nesting in windows and on rusted playground swings.

I have my fingers firmly crossed for a Michael Stevenson Soviet utopia with bonus polar bears.

Then again, perhaps we have a Michael Parekowhai on our hands? According to Wikipedia:

The world's northernmost grand piano is located at Pyramiden; a "Red October" (Красный октябрь)grand piano is located in the auditorium of the cultural centre.

PSA

2011-07-13T09:00:00.000+12:00

The thing I most admire about NZ On Screen - aside from their evident skills in copyright wrangling and content creation - is the way they work hard to group and promote the films on the site.

Recently they've asked Mark Amery to collect together documentaries and films on New Zealand artists, and he's aggregated about a dozen titles, including the full version of the 2009 documentary on Peter McLeavey.

Two lovely things from Lapham's

2011-07-12T09:00:00.000+12:00

I wish I had reading room in my life for a print subscription to Lapham's Quarterly, but I'd knee-deep in unread New Yorkers as it is.

Thankfully, Lapham's are very generous with their online sharing. With each issue they make a mix of the historical and contemporary content available straightaway; so for the latest food-themed edition you can get Deborah Blum's Death and the Pot (2011) alongside a c. 29BC Roman piece.

In a new venture, Lapham's are sharing a bibliography of the books that were used to pull together each issue; so the food-themed issue list includes The Kitchen Notebooks of Leonardo DaVinci, The Expedition of Humphrey Clinker by Tobias Smollett and Garlic and Sapphires by Ruth Reichl.

Alongside that, the blog this week features one of the best job titles I've seen in a while: Culinary Collections Librarian and Electronic Resources Coordinator. It belongs to Rebecca Federman, who holds that august position at the New York Public Library, and she's guest blogged for Lapham's on The Fried Chicken War. The post draw on the NYPL's awesome programme to crowdsource the transcription of their menu collection, What's on the menu?

Attraction/aversion

2011-07-08T09:00:00.001+12:00

On a recent trip to Melbourne I got to catch up with all my favourite jewellery galleries/shops - Studio Ingot, eg etal, Gallery Funaki (a whole damn tray of Karl Fritsch rings) and the wonderful new Pieces of Eight gallery.

I saw some great work, but nothing that hit me as viscerally as these hair necklaces by Kerry Howley that a friend tipped me off to this week

I'm intrigued by what wearing these pieces would feel like. Howley calls the series attraction/aversion, and my first reaction on that basis was not about the taboo nature of hair, a la Vivian Lynn, but the physical sensation. To look at, you'd think they'd feel itchy and scratchy - there's something about those curves that suggests tickly ickiness. But then I recalled that I have long hair, and when it hits my throat and shoulders its almost imperceptible, and any tickle is quite pleasant. So my curiosity moved on to pondering how people would react if you were wearing a work like this - how outspoken they might be in their own attraction or aversion.

Read all about it

2011-07-07T09:00:00.000+12:00

Seb Chan over at the Powerhouse Museum has been blogging up a storm as a bunch of new sites and apps roll off the production line ...

First up, there's the Sydney Design 2011 site, mobile site and app (built by Mob Labs, based on an idea by Toko, and produced by the Powerhouse), which Seb describes as the most decentralised web presence for the event yet; partners use an instance of the Powerhouse's helpdesk tool to submit events for editorial review. At the end of the post Seb observes

Mob Labs did a great job on the mobile site which has some nifty swipe interface action and geo-location in mobile browsers – give it a go on an iPhone, Android or Blackberry and see. And once the native App goes live we’ll be able to see how many iOS users choose the App over the Mobile Web version of the site.

Maybe this year will be the last time we feel we need both a mobile website and an App.

Next, there's Go Play, a site and mobile app that pulls together kids holiday events across multiple agencies. Here the Powerhouse seems to be working as a R&D lab for the NSW government, selected to solve a problem on the basis of their well demonstrated digital acuity. Seb's post outlines the need and audience for the site, as well as the development process.

Then there's the online exhibition catalogue and app for 'Love Lace', a new Powerhouse exhibition. I found Seb's post about this piece of work particularly interesting, as they've found ways to solve previous issues they had with QR codes:

To solve one of the big problems with QR codes – that people just can’t be bothered downloading a QR code reading application (or firing it up if they do have one), our internal developer Carlos Arroyo has built the exhibition iPhone and Android App with the QR code scanner built in! This means anyone who downloads the exhibition App – itself a full catalogue of the exhibition designed for in-gallery supplementary browsing now also has their QR scanner at their finger tips.

If you're not subscribed to Fresh + Newer, you really should be. Seb never posts filler or fluff; it's always useful, usable information, which often makes you think not just 'why didn't I think of that?' but 'what if we couyld do things like that?'.

Take me out to the ball game

2011-07-05T08:57:00.003+12:00

Things are still crazy busy round here. If you've got a spare quarter of an hour though, you could do much worse than to give it over to this blow-by-blow account of an India vs Pakistan match from the 2011 Cricket World Cup by Nate DiMeo and Michael Schur.

Sure, lengthy pieces in which American writers try to unravel the complexities of cricket (really - is it that complex? and that hard to tell the difference between wickets, stumps and bails?) are hardly rare. But this one has a particular charm that doesn't all come down to the fact that one of the writers is high as a kite on Vicodin.

12:42
Tendulkar is out!

No he isn't. He escapes again — this after a line drive is dropped by a fielder. Tendulkar is charmed. He's the Derek Jeter of cricket, right down to the fact that he is 37 and hates A-Rod (we assume). We are currently awaiting crowd-shot confirmation that he also dates the Indian Minka Kelly. Eagerly.

The dropped ball has infuriated the emerging man-crush, Afridi. The commentators are tearing into the fielder for dropping a rocket line drive that he was trying to field, 15 yards away, with his bare hands. Dunno. Seems understandable to us. But we feel for Afridi.

How many chances can they give Tendulkar?

That is not rhetorical. We do not know if there is a limit to how many chances they can give Tendulkar.
2:38
Another wicket for Pakistan (from Ajmal, not Gul), another confounding "Billie Jean" interlude. Riaz is back in, and they show his stat line, which has like 50 categories, only three of which are recognizable. This stat line graphic is crazy. Without rewinding and actually checking, here's what it looked like, in our minds' eyes:

RIAZ
Wickets: 4
Dot balls: 29
Glimmers: 14
Fleemers: 2.21
PaPkk: 100
Posterior? Y/N/V777
Powdermilk: Zap
Snerkles: Portishead
Cricket? Yes.

The conclusion I come to at times like this - there are few things as satisfying as insider language, and one's smugness over understanding said language is best complemented by someone else's utter bamboozlement.

Refreshing

2011-06-28T22:03:00.002+12:00

I was suprised and pleased to see Walker Art Centre director Olga Viso giving an honest and personal take on this year's Venice Biennale

Philippe Parreno’s slight and almost pathetic marquee of lights over the entrance to ILLUMInazioni seems to announce it all: a Biennale in malaise, full of deflated artistic gestures and impotency. The sense of “artistic stultification” — to appropriate language used in the Biennale’s exhibition guide to describe Maurizio Cattelan’s hundreds of taxidermy pigeons that line the ceiling and rafters of the Arsenale — was pervasive.

... On the journey home, I found myself continuing to contemplate the 2011 Biennale with curiosity and intrigue. Was my overall impression a generational one? Did my memory of past biennales that had more impant reflect a sense of nostalgia not relevant to the current moment?

This is part of what I wish 'professionalism' meant in the visual arts: the ability and confidence to share professional opinions openly and thoughtfully with an interested audience. I wish it happened more.

Offline

2011-06-24T09:08:00.005+12:00

A couple of busy weeks means that posting here will be very erratic, if it happens at all.

For replacement reading pleasure, how about checking out Longreads, or newcomer Byliner?

Getting shit done

2011-06-23T09:00:00.000+12:00

I'm utterly smitten with this Atlantic article by Alexis Madrigal on the New York Public Library. Especially this paragraph:

I'm going to give you the conclusion to this article here to solve the tl;dr problem. There are two things the library has done to create such cool projects. First, I'm convinced the NYPL is succeeding online because of desire. The library's employees give a shit about the digital aspects of their institution, and they are supported in that shit giving. I mean this in the most fundamental way possible and as a damning critique for media companies. Second, the library sees its users as collaborators in improving the collections the library already has. While serving them online costs the library some money, they are creating value, too, by opening up conduits into the library for superusers.

Madrigal was obviously pretty smitten to - the Atlantic has put out an open call to librarians, archivists and curators to tell them more about what they're doing:

We here at The Atlantic Technology channel love archival collections that have been digitized. We think they help us situate ourselves in the present by giving us an unvarnished look into the past. We also think that your work doesn't get enough attention from the outside world. Reporting a recent story on the New York Public Library's digitization efforts, we realized that we wanted to create a conduit into our reporting system for you to let us know when you're working on an interesting collection.

So, that's what this form is. A self-service way to quickly ping us about the good work you're doing.

Awesome.

Dance magic dance

2011-06-21T08:49:00.002+12:00

Every so often I like to dip my toe in a different world - well, my reading toe, anyway ...

Dancers and their hair - I never realised it was such a big deal

Miranda Weese, a former principal at both City Ballet and Pacific Northwest Ballet, experimented with different lengths and layers to lighten the bulk of her hair. “I had to learn ways to put it up so that I didn’t pull it so tight, because I was literally balding in the front,” she said.
Ms. Weese eventually added bangs; her reasoning was that she could pull them back more gently after the rest of her hair was up. Once, she recalled, a concerned Rosemary Dunleavy, the company’s balletmistress, approached her backstage and said: “You’re not going to wear the bangs are you? Because I think it would make you look like a little dog.”

Taking Romeo and Juliet to the stadium, big screens, popcorn, early exits and all

“I’m so pleased that it’s so popular,” said Jo Moon, 42, an advertising executive who was standing in the refreshment line during intermission. “I like how people from all walks of life can come here and be themselves, with no airs and graces.”
But her companion Anja Tita, 40, said that while that was well and good, the lack of airs and graces meant that many people seemed to have no compunction about rudely taking their seats even after the dancing had begun. (Even more rudely, there was a rush for the exits even as the last scene was taking place.)

All aflutter over Twitter at the New York City Ballet, who are introducing a social media policy

the policy would require dancers to include a disclaimer specifying that their comments are not employer-sanctioned, according to a copy of a draft reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.
It would also ban them from disclosing another dancer's injury or illness, and from posting photographs of company events, or of "persons engaged in New York City Ballet business without their consent."

Closing soon - NDF2011 call for presenters

2011-06-16T09:00:00.000+12:00

I try not to mix my worlds up too much on this blog, but I want to pimp the National Digital Forum conference that's happening at Te Papa on 29 and 30 November this year.

It's New Zealand's key event for web-inclined people working in, with and near museums, galleries, archives, libraries, and any other organisation or company or endeavour interested in getting New Zealand's culture and heritage online, accessible and re-usable.

As well as invited speakers, each year we run an open call for presenters. This year we welcome proposals on a range of topics including:

connecting our online culture and heritage - through partnerships and through technology
measuring success and failure - how do we know when we’re doing the right thing well?
getting New Zealand’s culture and heritage out into the world: innovative projects, community engagement, education, re-use by consumers and creators
sharing stories of inspirational and creative projects
the challenges and opportunities facing our sector.

We also welcome proposals that don't relate directly to these topics, but that you think will resonate with conference attendees.

I'm co-convening the conference this year with Brenda Leeuwenberg from NZ on Screen. If you would like to discuss an idea before submitting a proposal, you can contact us by email: conference AT ndf.org.nz

The call for papers closes on 20 June, and we hope to have registrations for the conference open at about the same time.

More information about the Call for Presenters and an online submission form are available on the NDF website.

Web muster

2011-06-15T09:00:00.000+12:00

Derek Powazek on How to Turn a Fan into an Enemy in Under 140 Characters (an online interaction with an NPR host that looks set to create a whole new movement)

The Art Gallery of New South Wales snags a show of heavy-hitters from MOMA

I know the character ends when the camera switches off, but try reading this New Yorker profile of Alec Baldwin without seeing Jack Donaghy preening in your mental eye.

And finally. I'm often asked why some artists get shown at City Gallery, or represented by Peter McLeavey, and others hang their work in cafes. Is there, people ask me, an objective distinction that can be made between the art from different art worlds? In this op-ed about the Australian four-year-old whose paintings are selling for tens of thousands of dollars, Noah Horowitz tries to answer that question.

Why so serious?

2011-06-13T07:22:00.000+12:00

[Republished, because I mucked up some HTML]

Back in the day, when I was one of the people running the National Library's twitter account, we used to agonise regularly about whether our linking lines were too smutty, or that the material we were linking to was too off-colour. It's surprisingly difficult to have a sense of humour when you're inside an institution, speaking out.

So I guess it's up to the people on the outside to have the good, smutty fun. Three examples that have come across the transom lately:

Fuck Yeah Victorians: clippings of all things Victorian gleaned from around the web.

Bangable dudes in history: it's not exploitation if there's pie-charts.

And my personal favourite, My daguerreotype boyfriend: because any hot guy looks better in long exposure. Especially, for some reason, criminals.

From the archives

2011-06-10T09:00:00.002+12:00

Found when rooting around in my collection of Instapapered articles:

25 abandoned Yugoslav monuments that look like they're from the future

The artisans who turn ideas into art: who pickled Damien Hirst's shark and painted Ai Weiwei's seeds? (The Independent)

New York Public Library crowdsources transcriptions of old menus (utterly lovely project) (New York Times)

What vaccine refusal really costs: Measles in Arizona (Wired magazine)

The British are coming! (maybe) - Anatomy of an artworld rumour (New York Observer)

The Emperor of All Maladies

2011-06-08T09:00:00.001+12:00

From the occasional book review series - Siddartha Mukherjee's The Emperor of All Maladies.

...............

Siddhartha Mukherjee is a writer/physician in the traditional of Oliver Sacks and Atul Gawande; in 'The Emperor of All Maladies', he binds together stories of the patients he treats as an oncologist in Boston with the history of the understanding and treatment of cancer.

The book opens with Carla, a 34-year-old kindergarten teacher who for the past month had been noticing increasingly concerning and painful symptoms - mysterious bruises, pale gums, exhaustion, a sudden and numbing headache on waking. She goes to her doctor for bloodtests; when her blood is drawn, is isn't red, but a thin, pale serum.

Mukherjee first hears about Carla when a sentence flickers up on his pager: Carla Reed / New patient with leukemia / 14th floor / Please see as soon as you arrive. Carla is whirled immediately into an isolated, sterilised room, and her five-year 'battle' with cancer begins. [I'm just going to be up front here - although I understand the history of the metaphor of cancer as a war, and survivors as ... well, survivors, it's still a metaphor I find distasteful.] We are returned to Carla throughout the book, and its conclusion coincides with her remission.

Between the beginning and end of Carla's story, Mukerjee takes us through 500 pages and 4,500 years of sickness, scientific discovery, political lobbying, fundraising, outsized personalities and bucketloads of factual trivia. Leukemia - the cancer Carla was diagnosed with - is regularly returned to throughout the book; the modern treatment of cancer began in the 1940s with Sidney Farber, a specialist in pediatric pathology (children's diseases), who decided to focus his attention on childhood leukemia: virulent, mysterious, almost inevitably fatal, but - almost magically, from a research point of view - a cancer that could be measured, and the efficacy of treatment revealed with data.

At Boston's Children's Hospital, Farber trialled treating children with leukemia with folic acid (which had recently been shown to restore the normal creation of blood cells in bone marrow in nutrient-deprived treatment). His first experiments went horribly wrong; folic acid accelerated the progression of leukemia in the children. But Farber was fascinated - if folate exacerbated leukemia, might an anti-folate treat it?

And there you have it - in one paragraph. Up until about the 1980s, treating cancer was a practice of ideas (not even what I would term theories) and experiments. From the 1950s, through the partnership of Farber (whose later experiments worked out much better than the first folate trial) and philanthropist Mary Lasker, America's Congress and private patrons funded the war on cancer on a basis Farber and Laskey deliberately compared to the Manhattan Project. But for decades, funding went primarily to trials, and only a snippet to research into prevention and the cellular basis of cancer - the basic research required for coherent, systematic development of targeted drugs.

The first half of Mukherjee's book is fantastic, fascinating and appalling. We move from the Egyptian physician Imhotep in 2,500BC, who categorised tumours, to Galen, to the hubristic surgeon heroes in the first decades of the 1900s. I was particularly struck and distressed by the story of surgeon William Halsted, who invented the radical mastectomy. Halstead worked from the thesis that cancer spread of radially from a central node, and that by excising all flesh that could possibly be infected, a relapse could be prevented. Surgeons cut deeper and deeper, further and further into women - removing breasts, chest and back muscles, lymph nodes, collarbones. Of course Halstead and his followers did not recognise that cancer metastasizes unpredictably; it may not reappear next to its first appearance in the breast, but in the liver, pancreas, brain. This may seem exploitative, but as Mukherjee writes:

When for patients, that manic diligence had become a form of therapy. Women wrote to their surgeons in admiration and awe, begging them not to spare their surgical extirpations, as if surgery were an analogical ritual that would simultaneously rid them of cancer and uplift them into health. Haagensen transformed from surgeon to shaman: "To some extent," he wrote about his patients, "no doubt, they transfer the burden [of their disease] to me." Another surgeon wrote - chillingly - that he sometimes "operated on cancer of the breast solely for its effect on morale."

When a surgeon named Keynes successfully trialled a treatment for breast cancer in the 1920s where the tumour was removed in a lumpectomy and then the patient treated with radiation at relatively low doses, he was laughed off, even though his remission rates were at least equal to extreme surgery. It's these kinds of stories - like that of the history of lobotomies - that chill me to the bone.

The second half of 'The Emperor of All Maladies' drags a bit in comparison. His chapters on the tobacco industry and the link between smoking and cancer are terrific, and filled with grim details. Smoking became so prevalent it was impossible to see it as being related to cancer. In 1870, cigarette consumption in America was under one cigarette per capita per year. In 1900, Americans consumed 3.5 billion cigarettes and 6 billion cigars a year. By 1953, the average adult American smoked ten cigarettes a day, the Englishman 12, a Scotsman nearly 20. In the 1920s, a renowned St Louis surgeon was asked whether tobacco smoking had caused the increased incidence of lung cancer, he replied 'So has the use of nylon stockings.' In an awful irony, at the same time researchers and surgeons were getting to grips with cancer treatment in the 1970s and 1980s, and quadrillions of dollars had been spent on the war on cancer, the incidence and mortality of cancer was increasing, as first the peaks of male and then female smoking came of cancer age. But in general, as the treatment and research into cancer become more detailed, so does Mukherjee's book, and I occasionally got lost or skimmed the odd page.

Mukherjee's writing is clear, even lyrical in admittedly odd places:

To choose a medical specialty is also to choose its cardinal bodily liquid. Hematologists have blood. Hepatologists have bile. Huggins had prostatic fluid: a runny, straw-coloured mixture of sugar and salt meant to lubricate and nourish sperm.

One small criticism relates to what I started calling the adjective trifecta: sentences like this appeared more than seemed necessary:

Impatient, aggressive, and goal-driven, the president, Richard Milhous Nixon, was inherently partial to impatient, aggressive, and goal-driven projects.

While my initial enthusiasm for the book didn't last all the way to the end, my admiration for Mukherjee remains. You can't help but look up to someone who can both practice medicine, and research and write a book like this.

Busting assumptions

2011-06-03T09:00:00.000+12:00

Occasionally an article on a topic you feel pretty familiar with turns up something new. This recent Art Newspaper article on blockbuster exhibitions, for example, made me for the first time think about the curators who assemble 'blockbuster' shows:

In general the criticisms levelled at such events—the wear and tear on artefacts and on curators, who often argue that they are unable to concentrate on their permanent collections because of the demands of temporary displays—are robustly brushed aside by museum directors. Dynamic directors believe that objects are more at risk on permanent display or in storage than they are on their travels, and that the good curator loves to combine care for their collection with exhibition organisation; as Saumarez Smith puts it: “I think there is an element of myth about exhibitions acting as a distraction from the task of interpreting collections. In my experience, able and energetic curators want to do both.”

I guess I almost thought blockbuster shows sprung, fully formed, from the originating institutions without much thought or work. Then I realised suddenly that I made this assumption based on the small number of blockbusters that make it to New Zealand's shores. Blockbusters come out here what, maybe once a year? I wonder what percentage of the international annual blockbuster production that constitutes.

It was also interesting to read that fashions in blockbusters are changing: more contemporary artists, more photography (of course, you could argue that you can market the hell out of almost anything and turn it into a blockbuster through sheer force of will).

At the end of this, you realise that 'blockbuster' is an unfortunate term (and not only in the sense that it originates in massively destructive aerial bombardment). Blockbusters seem to attract coverage, not criticism: the ubiquity of some of the works, the torrents of visitors, the merchandise seem to freeze critical faculties (if not carping). There is a tendency to assume that something can't be big, popular, and sophisticated. The Art Newspaper piece isn't a revelation or a revolution, but it made me think.

Exploring copyright in academia

2011-06-01T16:10:00.003+12:00

Four interesting articles from The Chronicle of Higher Education, looking at copyright issues in relation to researchers from several different angles:

Pushing Back Against Legal Threats by Putting Fair Use Forward

A rarely discussed form of self-censorship happens routinely on college campuses. Professors and graduate students choose not to tackle academic arguments that involve music, movies, or other forms of popular culture. They worry that including relevant clips in their work means the hassle and expense of getting copyright permission for each snippet.

Two professors at American University argue that actually scholars (terrible word, I'm sorry, but it probably means something specific here) can use this material, without asking for permission, and even if they hope to profit from the resulting publications.

A professor's fight over Shostakovich heads to the Supreme Court

Music professor Lawrence Golan has been fighting for 10 years to have a statute that makes it prohibitively expensive for small orchestras to play certain pieces of music overturned.

The dispute that led to Golan v. Holder dates to 1994, when Congress passed a law that moved vast amounts of material from the public domain back behind the firewall of copyright protection. For conductors like Mr. Golan, that step limited access to canonical 20th-century Russian pieces that had been freely played for years.

Out of Fear, Colleges Lock Books and Images Away From Scholars (slightly hysterical header)

Wide online access to university collections is curtailed due to legal uncertainty around 'orphaned works' - items that are in copyright, but for which the copyright owner can not be identified or traced.

[UCLA] is sharing only a fraction of [its collection of Mexican and Mexican American Recordings] with the world because it believes most of the collection is made up of orphans, still covered by copyright. Full access is restricted to computers connected to the campus network. Off-campus users can hear only 50-second snippets. UCLA chose that policy based on its reading of fair-use exceptions to copyright law, which may permit reproductions for teaching and research. Going further would introduce "a level of risk that, given the current status of copyright law, was really challenging," says Sharon E. Farb, associate university librarian for collection management and scholarly communication.

What you don't know about copyright, but should

Profiles Nancy Sims, a copyright-programme librarian at the University of Minnesota Libraries who's 'there to help people on campus and beyond—both users and owners of protected material—understand their rights'. Her job includes advising faculty on their own copyright rights (copyrights? hmmmm).

The only pity with these articles; that there's not one devoted to open research and Creative Commons licencing.

Proust was a Neuroscientist

2011-05-30T18:17:00.003+12:00

From the occasional book reviews series - Jonah Lehrer's Proust was a Neuroscientist

.................

Jonah Lehrer argues through eight case studies (Walt Whitman, George Eliot, Auguste Escoffier, Marcel Proust, Paul Cezanne, Igor Stravinsky, Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf) that 'celebrated artists discovered truths - real, tangible truths - about the mind, anticipating the findings of neuroscience.' From the book's blurb:

We learn how Proust revealed the fallibility of memory, how George Eliot understood the brain's malleable nature, how the French chef Escoffier intuited umami (the fifth taste), how Cezanne worked out the subtleties of vision, and how Virginia Woolf pierced the mysteries of consciousness.

I just didn't buy it. At most, these artists made use of human phenomena - the way taste and smell can trigger memories, the fact that denatured proteins taste delicious, the way that our brains take time to understand how "noise" = "music", the way that our eyes can build a recognisable image from almost abstract elements - in their work, but they don't predict how scientists will test and describe the brain's behaviour.

I will make an exception of Escoffier and Stein. Stein pushed language as far as she could, producing senseless sentences that were still grammatically correct, prefiguring Chomsky's 'Colourless green ideas sleep furiously' and theory that we are born with an inbuilt understanding of grammar. Stein herself had been through medical school and worked in neuroscience; some of her first writing experiments turned her clinical notes into gibberish.

Escoffier to seemed to have almost a scientific method - trying to delight his guest, he refined and codified recipes, and turned established practices upside down. Grand food, for example, had previously been served cold, as its grandness was partly derived from its preposterous presentation, which would have been ruined by heat. Escoffier realised that hot food releases smell, and smell is important to taste. He was also a stock and sauce master, deglazing pans and boiling things down - the practices which denature proteins and creates glutamate, the amino acid our body craves (we produce more than 40 grams of glutamate a day, and so we need our Marmite top-ups). At the same time though, Escoffier was hardly peering around the human tongue looking for the tiny areas that would respond not to salty, sweet, bitter, sour but to rich savoury glutamate.

I guess I don't see the difference between Cezanne and the ancient Egyptian brewers who passed wooden spoons down from generation to generation, believing they had the magical power to start beer (which they did, through the microorganisms that lived in the cracks of the wood). Both are concerned with the end product, not necessarily the phenomena that produces it. Cezanne was interested in how the eye works and how the mind builds up shapes, sure - but really how close was he to the five steps of visual processing?

Lehrer is very sincerely trying to bring the arts and science back together - to repair the right of C.P. Snow's two cultures. I'm not sure this book does it though. The art sections end up feeling like illustrations of the neuroscience; entertaining introductions, but not intellectual equals. Having said that, it's a perfectly enjoyable book, very readable, and packed with snippets and tidbits of information.

Video stars

2011-05-25T12:41:00.006+12:00

A great story this week came out this week about how the designers of L.A. Noire used archival research to underpin the look and feel of their game. A police procedural, the game is set in c. 1947 LA:

The USC Libraries' Regional History Collection offered production designers a sense of how city streets and sidewalks looked at night. USC's Dick Whittington and Los Angeles Examiner photography collections cover the same time period as the video game. The Whittington Collection—preserving the work of the Dick Whittington Studio, from 1924 until 1987 the premier commercial photography concern in Southern California—contains a number of streetscapes captured after dark, including the photo of Vine Street in Hollywood below.

Hollywood night scene, looking south on Vine Street past the Hollywood Plaza Hotel, USC Libraries

In related areas: in my feedreader today I found writer Lev Grossman's post on writers who love video games:

Then there’s a recent game like Portal 2 (I’m just plucking examples out of the ether here). I played through it a few weeks ago. Look at the tightness of the plotting, the economy and discipline and humor and sharpness with which they sketch out the characters. These are things we usually look to novels for. But by those standards Portal 2 is the best novel I’ve read this year.

One of my favourite blogs is Pippin Barr's inininoutoutout, a chronicle of game playing and invention. As a non-gamer, it's taught me to look at games as a feat of design and psychology, and I highly recommend it.