Annabel Lyons - The Golden Mean

From the occasional book reviews department

....

'The Golden Mean' is an intimate book, as salty and as civet-scented as the men who people it. In it, Annabel Lyons reimagines the relationship between the philosopher Aristotle and his teenage pupil, the Macedonian prince Alexander, casting outwards and backwards to Aristotle's domestic life with his wife, children and later his servant-lover; his childhood; his apprenticeship of sorts to his physician father; his early years at Plato's Academy; his tenuous friendship with Philip the King. There is no plot, as such, unless you consider life itself to be a plotline.

Aristotle's philosophy peppers the book. Most obviously, and a little clumsily, it comes through on a lesson for Alexander and his companions that uses a near-dead chameleon to illustrate Plato's theory of Forms. Aristotle then strangles the chameleon and dissects it with the boys, a show-don't-tell moment in which Lyon's introduces Aristotle's own central tenet, of knowing the world through the close study of particular things. At this point in his life, most of Aristotle's heavy-duty theorising lies before him: Lyon's shows us seeds of ideas being planted. He asks the actor Carolus what makes a good tragedy:

"Funny question," he says. "A good death, a good pain, a good tragedy. 'Good' is a funny word."

"I'm writing a book." The response I default to when my subjects start to look at me strangely. And maybe I am, suddenly, maybe I am. A little work to bring me back here when I reread it many years from now, to this rain and this cup of wine and this man I'm prepared to like so much.

The golden mean in Aristotle's philosophy is the desirable midpoint between two equally dangerous extremes, excess and deficiency. Lyon's Aristotle is throughout the book poised between two points, often unhappily. He oscillates between dark melancholy, where he struggles to leave his bed and cries without knowing, and periods of 'golden joy' when thought flows out of his effortlessly. He is between two stints in Athens - he has been bullied by Philip into staying in Pella to tutor Alexander. He is between Alexander - brilliant, charming, terrifying, almost unearthly and his older half-brother, the retarded Arrhidaeus who Aristotle seeks to rehabilitate. Between his refined wife Pythia and the earthy servant Herpyllis, between his Macedonian roots and his Athenian learning, and perhaps most tellingly between thought, which he excels at, and action, on which Alexander challenges him.

Two things in particular struck me about this book. One is the writing - staccato, almost choppy, but not unbeautiful. Often pungent: in a particular favourite passage, Aristotle notes how he is teaching the Athenian Carolus to curse properly in dialect: "His diction is high and elegant and a bit prissy, but he's learning, slowly. "Fuck me" - I taught him that." And

He looks at me like I'm stupid. "Comedy makes you laugh. A couple of slaves buggering each other, I'll have that and thank you very much. How would you say that here?"

I think for a minute. "Ass-fucking," I say in dialect.

He grunts. He likes it.

There's something very human about a normally profane Aristotle. Human is my key word for this book. Human, and 'man' too - this is a book of men. This is the second thing that struck me. Men talking, fighting, fucking, loving, thinking, battling, all with each other. Women are back in their houses, literally and metaphorically - this is a man's world, and sex soaks through it. "It's all sex with you, isn't it" says Aristotle to Carolus lightly, who replies with more seriousness:

"It's in the air, the dirt, the water. It touches everything. ... They celebrate with it, they make people suffer with it, they do their business with it. They run the kingdom with it."

Lyon has done the near impossible, and made personalities so famous and remote they seem abstract into fleshy, faulty, fully fashioned men. Highly recommended.

Judith Schalansky - Atlas of Remote Islands

Envy is not a pretty emotion. It makes you feel empty, and small. Thankfully my delight in Judith Schalansky's 'Atlas of Remote Islands' was great enough to overwhelm the occasional twinge of envy that she, and not I, has made something that I find so utterly covetable. (Made worse, let's be honest, when I just discovered that she's a year younger than me).

Of course, I couldn't have created this book: it grows entirely out of Schalansky's own self. Her discovery of the household atlas ...moreEnvy is not a pretty emotion. It makes you feel empty, and small. Thankfully my delight in Judith Schalansky's 'Atlas of Remote Islands' was great enough to overwhelm the occasional twinge of envy that she, and not I, has made something that I find so utterly covetable. (Made worse, let's be honest, when I just discovered that she's a year younger than me).

Of course, I couldn't have created this book: it grows entirely out of Schalansky's own self. Her discovery of the household atlas as an eight-year-old in East Germany - her incredulity that places out there exist:

I grew up with an atlas. And as a child of the atlas, I had never travelled. The fact that a girl in my class had actually been born in Helsinki felt unimaginable. ... To this day, I am baffled by Germans born, for example, in Nairobi or Los Angeles. Of course I know that Nairobi and Los Angeles exist - they are on the maps. But that someone has actually been there or even been born there still feels incredible to me.

her recognition early in life that maps depict only one of many stories:

Then I looked for my country: the German Democratic Republic. East Germans could not travel, only the Olympic team were allowed beyond our borders. It took a frighteningly long time to find. It was pink and tiny as my fingernail. This was hard to equate: at the Seoul Olympics we had been a force to reckon with, with had won more medals than the United States: how could we suddenly be so infinitesimal?

the sudden expanding of her horizons:

My love for atlases endured when a year later everything else changed: when it suddenly became possible to travel the world, and the country I was born in disappeared from the map. But by then I had already grown used to travelling through the atlas by finger, whispering foreign names to myself as I conquered distant worlds in my parents' sitting room.

Aesthetically, Schalansky's book is one of the most gorgeous things I've handled. This is another part of the uniqueness of her vision - it is all her work: writer, typographer, illustrator. She limits her palette to black, grey, plover-egg blue and brilliant orange, and then she makes magic within her own restrictions. Each double-page spread features on the right a scale drawing of the selected island, carefully etched with place names in fine cursive script; on the left, a catalogue of information, including alternate names, size, number of inhabitants or residents, distance from other land and a brief timeline (I am in love with the slanting lines of these of the distance measurements and timelines).

But the real magic is in the short pieces of text - almost prose poems - that accompany each of the 50 islands. The book is sub-titled 'Fifty Islands I Have Never Set Foot On and Never Will', and the entries lie somewhere between research and hallucination, like the author feel asleep over her papers and dreamed of these faraway places, awoke, and tried to capture that feeling of distance, strangeness, heat, cold, the incessant beat of the waves.

The tales range from Amelia Earhart's disappearance to a band of women stoving in a men's head with a shovel; killer crabs to infanticide; burning penguins to treasure maps. I limited myself to no more than five or six islands a day when reading the book, so I wouldn't become used to Schalansky's style and start skim reading. Instead, I tried to absorb each entry slowly, and to stay in her world. Every entry is in the present tense, whether the story is from the 1800s, the 2000s or an unnamed time - this lends them both an immediacy and a timelessness. My heart thrilled to some mentions - Thule has been part of my imagination since a childhood soaked in Rosemary Sutcliff's Roman Britain, Tristan da Cunha since sighting William Hodgkins' majestic oil paintings, the Scandinavian names feels strangely like home, a combination of poring over Norse myths and Roald Dahl's childhood biography.

I had to resist turning between each entry and a quick trip into Wikipedia to fact check and fill in the gaps. I'm glad now that I did, that rather than trying to turn the book into non-fiction I let it stay in the litterol space it was conceived in. I am happy to have that time inside Schalansky's imagination, and to let mine roam free too.

Oliver Sacks - The Mind's Eye

From the occasional book reviews department

.........

I have this little mental game I play with myself to pass the time - when I'm walking or driving by myself, usually. If it had a name, it would probably be called something lame, like 'Choices'. In it, two or three options for a particular choice are available, and I have to justify to myself why I pick the option I do. It's like debating with myself, I guess, and it goes something like this:

Palmerston North, Wanganui, or Hamilton? (Hamilton)
Taller or thinner? (Taller)
Live to 70 or live to 80? (80)
Live to 80 or live to 90? (80)
Smarter or prettier? (Prettier)
Amputation or paralysis? (Amputation)
Paralysis or head injury? (Depends on the severity)

Oliver Sacks is a neurologist (if you don't know that already - he's up there with Dawkins in the recognisable scientists list, and I don't believe Richard Dawkins has ever been played by Robin Williams). This is Sack's 11th book, most of which are filled with case studies of his patients or correspondents, as he seeks to "show us what is often concealed in health: the complex workings of the brain and its astounding ability to adapt and overcome disability". 'The Mind's Eye', as the title suggests, is focused on brain damage - usually stroke - that leads to visual disorders.

'The Mind's Eye' had me playing a different kind of Choices. Blind or Deaf? (Deaf). Lose your stereoscopic or peripheral vision? (Stereoscopic). Prosopagnosia (inability to recognise faces and/or places) or alexia (inability to read)? (Alexia. Just. Agonisingly.)

It was the case studies of alexia that filled me with horror. I tried to imagine getting up one morning, flipping open the laptop, and not being able to read. Not just not able to piece together the letters of the alphabet, but not even recognising the alphabet. Having those 26 little shapes, so deeply engrained in my brain, appear as unfamiliar as Cyrillic script. Perhaps not only not being able to read, but suddenly, unable to write. Or worse yet, total - global - aphasia: the loss of the ability to process language in anyway, to make sense of words spoken to you, to speak, even, in some cases, to think. Sacks quotes psychologist Scott Moss, who had a stroke at 43 and became aphasic:

When I awoke next morning in the hospital, I was totally (globally) aphasic. I could understand vaguely what others said to me if it was spoken slowly and represented a very concrete form of action ... I had lost completely the ability to talk, to read and write. I even lost for the first two months the ability to use words internally, that is, in my thinking ... I had also lost the ability to dream. So, for a matter of eight to nine weeks, I lived in a total vacuum of self-produced concepts. ... I could deal only with the immediate present. ... The part of myself that was missing was [the] intellectual aspect - the sine qua non of my personality - those essential elements most important to being a unique individual. ... For a long period of time I looked upon myself as only half a man.

'The Mind's Eye' is Sacks' most intimate book yet. Not only does he talk about bis own prosopagnosia (so severe he may not recognise his assistant and friend of 20 years when she's waiting in a cafe for him, or be able to distinguish his face in a window from the face of a man on the other side, or remember how to get to his own house if he deviates from his familar path: qualities that have lead to him being described as everything from pathologically shy to having Aspergers Syndrome). But he devotes a long chapter, 'Persistence of Vision', to excerpts from the journal he kept after a malignant tumour appeared next to his fovea behind his retina in his right eye. The tumour was treated first by inserting a radioactive plaque for several days; then with several lasering sessions; he nonetheless lost his stereoscopic vision (depth perception) and a large chunk of his central vision: after a bleed, his lost his peripheral vision.

It seems a strange thing to say, but sight really matters to Sacks. From childhood (I thoroughly recommend his autobiography of his childhood, 'Uncle Tungsten', my favourite of his books). h has been obsessed with sight in all its manifestations, played out in photography and stereoscopy (he is a member of the New York Stereroscopic Society, a group that gets together to marvel over three-dimensional imaging). 'Persistence of Vision' tracks Sacks' experiences and feelings over several years, from sanguine to panicky to despairing. From the day he first noticed first a fluttering in his vision, and then a scotoma (blind spot), visits an opthamologist and is referred for a later appointment with a surgeon:

Back at my apartment that evening, testing my right eye, I was startled to see that the horizontal bars on the air conditioner all seemed to be warped, converging and collapsing into one another, while the vertical bars diverged. I cannot remember how I spent the rest of the weekend. I was very restless, I went for long walks, and when I was inside, I paced to and fro. The nights were especially bad - I had to knock myself out with sleeping pills.

Inevitably, self-pity seeps through: at Christmas he looks at the NYT list of people who died in 2005, and wonders if he will appear on the 2006 list. It's not really self-pity, though: it's part of the relentless self-examination he places himself under, tracking each change and quirk (his scotoma is the shape of Australia - “complete with a little bulge in the southeast corner — I thought of this as its Tasmania.”; he learns he can fill it in, with patterns from the carpet, the leaves of a tree, the blue of the sky).

Sacks' case studies have fascinated me since I first read them in my third year at uni, when taking a neuropsychology paper. One of the reasons I dropped psych and stuck with art history is the appalling damage psychologists and scientists have done, often inadvertently (but not always) as they seek to understand the human brain. You can't hurt anyone with art history, I reasoned. Sacks' humaneness though continues to shine though. Recommended, even if you just read the bits about himself.

Oh, if only wall labels in exhibitions could be like this animation of a game review

You can also see the original Flash animation by Mick Lauer; be warned, it takes forever to load on New Zealand's home 'broadband'.

Little big web

Little is big on the web, from mechanical turks to microcredit.

Now a Brooklyn start-up is doing micro-patronage of the arts. Kickstarter describes itself as "a funding platform for artists, designers, filmmakers, musicians, journalists, inventors, explorers". Artists submit their projects to Kickstarter, who load them to the site, where people can then chose to support a favoured project by donating a couple of bucks.


Crucially, donors don't just get warm fuzzies in return for their donations: the artists offer insider access to the project, and sometimes physical or tangible exchanges. In return for a $50 donation, audio engineer Earl Scioneaux III offered a gumbo dinner and a chance to listen to his recordings with other financiers; Emily Grenader got both the funding and the participants for her project of mailing out a postcard every day for a year.

The site is run by Perry Chen and Yancey Strickler, who raised $30,000 in seed finance before launching the service. In this New York Times article Chen emphasises that Kickstarter is not "an investment, lending or a charity [but] something else in the middle: a sustainable marketplace where people exchange goods for services or some other benefit and receive some value." Fittingly, the article appears in the NYT's Business section rather than being filed under Arts.

At the moment the site is curated; Strickler and Chen review and select the projects. According to the NYT article, they're considering opening the site up to anyone and charging a small fee for transactions. I wonder if that will be as successful - curation is so often the key to quality and appeal.

Of course, sometimes big is good too. Check out Chris Heathcote's loca london.* The page (yup, you read that right - a 5100px wide page, not a site) grew out of his @localondon feed on Twitter, which sends out reminders of when art exhibitions open and close. In this blog post Heathcote tells how this feed of alerts and reminders has turned into a page giving an overview of current exhibitions, plus reviews of the shows. Heathcote clearly sees the curatorial aspect of the page as important: it's not *everything* that's on, and nor is it regurgitated gallery press releases. Instead it's quality, easy to skim critical responses to shows. From the post:

these two services are trying to be slightly different – super simple, low volume, presented in a neutral voice and delicately curated. It reflects what I want to go and see, not everything that’s on.

Interestingly, Heathcote notes that the one-pager is partly inspired by a part of the Guardian that's only available in the print edition: the G2 grid of culture reviews.

Heathcote also describes why he went for one big page, not a 'normal' site. If you ask me, it's inspired - a really clever, thoughtful, elegant tool that re-uses information intelligently and subtly.

*Thanks to @gnat for the tip-off

Frita

Today's challenge: read Tessa DeCarlo's review in The Brooklyn Rail* of the SFMOMA/Walker Art Center Frida Kahlo exhibition, and replace every instance of 'Kahlo' with 'Angus'. I'm almost willing to wager it'll be the most insightful review of the show that you'll see.

From the review:

The knock on Kahlo is that her fame has less to do with art per se than with the “victim chic” of her biography—polio at six, a gruesome, crippling trolleycar accident at 19, marriage, divorce, and remarriage to Rivera, incessant infidelities, miscarriages, and surgeries—and the fact that, as a half-Jewish, half-mestiza, intermittently lesbian, disabled Mexican woman, she’s a veritable political-correctness punch line. It doesn’t help that she’s also wildly popular with people who are more likely to read People than ArtForum.

Indeed, many of Kahlo’s images are so familiar that encountering them in person is like a celebrity sighting: they’re smaller than you expect, yet denser with significance than anything else in the room. But unlike many celebrities, they look better in real life than on glossy paper.

Besides that, I think this is one of the best short reviews I've read in a while. Lively, informed, thoughtfully hooked into contemporary events, tackling the artist and the work, makes me want to write myself.

* By way of Tim Paul's quite splendid Museum Hours blog - thanks for the tip-off J

The new influencers?

The "bloggers are replacing paid critics" meme is getting another workout in the Observer - is it curtains for critics? asks Jay Rayner, a food critic who had to ask his dining mate (and food blogger) to pull down a review of the restaurant they'd just dined in until his own, dead-tree, review appeared.

The Observer follows up with snippets of comment from print critics, (who, on average, have been reviewing for 39.5 years) musing on the rise of online reviewing.

So, inspired by Cheryl Bernstein's recent findings, this week I'm asking: Where are you reading reviews of art exhibitions these days? What source do you consider to be the best? And who's your favourite reviewer?

Take the survey here - it closes next Monday.