Automatic Modernism

Here's a Wordle of my ready-to-defend dissertation.

I actually find the size of "political" a little disturbing. What about "automatic" and "modernism"?

Messing with my head

Wyndham Lewis' brain, preserved in a jar.  Science's revenge on one of its major early 20th century critics, or self-parodic evidence of a scientific ideological vapidness?  Amazing.

A steal

Via Mitch, a stunning Sotheby's auction for the savvy buyer: James Joyce's war-time passport.  Here are the details:

JOYCE'S WARTIME FAMILY PASSPORT, AS ISSUED BY THE BRITISH CONSUL-GENERAL AT ZURICH, SWITZERLAND TO ALLOW "MR JAMES JOYCE, AND WIFE MRS NORA JOYCE TO PASS FREELY WITHOUT LET OR HINDRANCE...", PASSPORT NO.557, ISSUED AND STAMPED 10 AUGUST 1915

Granted, the estimated price is 50-70,000 GBP, but it's totally worth it.

Visuals Optional

I'm off to the British Association of Modernist Studies conference tomorrow, and since it's been awhile since I put up a Wordle, here's a visual of the paper I'll be giving, which is on D. H. Lawrence and the "flux of human character."

Culture, on a long leash

I tend to consider the equation of modern art and modern weaponry as hyperbolic and hortatory.  But, maybe I shouldn't.

Modern art was CIA 'weapon'

Revealed: how the spy agency used unwitting artists such as Pollock and de Kooning in a cultural Cold War

For decades in art circles it was either a rumour or a joke, but now it is confirmed as a fact. The Central Intelligence Agencyused American modern art - including the works of such artists as Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell, Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko - as a weapon in the Cold War. In the manner of a Renaissance prince - except that it acted secretly - the CIA fostered and promoted American Abstract Expressionist painting around the world for more than 20 years.

The connection is improbable. This was a period, in the 1950s and 1960s, when the great majority of Americans disliked or even despised modern art - President Truman summed up the popular view when he said: "If that's art, then I'm a Hottentot." As for the artists themselves, many were ex- com- munists barely acceptable in the America of the McCarthyite era, and certainly not the sort of people normally likely to receive US government backing.

Why did the CIA support them? Because in the propaganda war with the Soviet Union, this new artistic movement could be held up as proof of the creativity, the intellectual freedom, and the cultural power of the US. Russian art, strapped into the communist ideological straitjacket, could not compete.

Via my lady in the trenches, K. 

Pura Masa

Eventually I'm going to do some posts on bread and bread-baking, specifically a bit about why it's important and how it has changed (us) over time. But not yet.

But I did see an article at Wired today, commemorating the hundred-year anniversary of the first fully automated bread factory in the US, and I thought it was interesting:

1910: Ward Baking Company puts a fully automated bread factory into operation. The mechanized factory in Chicago churns out hundreds of perfect loaves a day, untouched by human hands.

Though the author claims in the lead that automated bread was not "the greatest thing since sliced bread," the article goes on to extol the contribution of industry to the mechanization of craft labor because it eliminated germs. Only the nerds at Wired could possibly look at the automation of bread production in 1910 and think, "Wow. How great." As if scientific management and the destruction of craft labor were good things.

Dissertation research

Clearly if I am to write a second dissertation chapter, I'll need to investigate what the first one was all about. And the easiest way to do that is clearly by looking at the damn thing as a Wordle.

Could've been famous

In 1945, Walt Disney signed Aldous Huxley to write a screenplay for "Alice and the Mysterious Mr. Carroll": a combination live-action and animated incorporation of "Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland" with the biography of Lewis Carroll (Charles Dodgson). Dodgson, a beleaguered Oxford lecturer known as the Dodo, has already written "Alice in Wonderland" under the name Lewis Carroll. He and Alice take refuge in Wonderland from Alice’s cruel governess and Dodgson’s Tory vice-chancellor. These villains, who disapprove of "nonsense books," must never learn that Dodgson and Carroll are the same person, lest Dodgson be barred from a coveted university librarianship. A series of fantastic adventures culminates with the resolution of the Carroll-Dodgson identity through a deus-ex-machina appearance by Queen Victoria. "It was so literary I could understand only every third word," Disney said of Huxley’s script, which he didn’t end up using for his adaptation of "Alice in Wonderland" (1951).

Seven never-produced screenplays by famous intellectuals.

april hates u, makes lilacs, u no can has.

LOLcat meets "The Wasteland." And, as often, I wonder whether to dance or despair. God bless the internet.

A Hole in It

Watching-the-state-of-the-Union links:

• The NYT is all over the news that a woman accidentally knocked a hole in a Picasso at the Met, highlighting that shit like this happens and looks at how art actually gets fixed. Somehow I think it makes this de Chirico look even more awesome after the wrecking ball hit it.
  

• I'm looking for any reason whatsoever to get to New Zealand. Cuddle class? Yes please.

• Now everyone agrees: waterboarding doesn't work (and never has).

ReJoyce

Stephen Joyce should never have gone done this road with a professor at a university with such a good law school.

As Stanford University reported a couple of days ago and Inside Higher Ed noted, the estate of James Joyce, headed up by James Joyce’s grandson, Stephen James Joyce, has lost a lawsuit with English professor Carol Loeb Shloss and must pay her legal fees and costs of nearly a quarter-million dollars.

This finding appears to end the almost two-decade battle with the estate by Shloss, and to represent relief for other Joyce scholars who’ve felt the estate to be unfair and unreasonable in the number of demands and limitations imposed on them. [...]

Shloss, the author of Lucia Joyce: To Dance in the Wake (2003), had been forced to remove supporting research from her revisionist book on James Joyce’s daughter, which led to mixed reviews. [...]

In the intervening years since the original publication of the expurgated biography, Shloss has already won in suit the right to “domestic online publication of the supportive scholarship” and the right to republish the book in the U.S. with the missing material restored. Now she’ll be reimbursed for her expenses too, which will clearly make her lawyers—Howard Rice Nemerovski Canady Falk & Rabkin, Keker & Van Nest, and Doerner, Saunders, Daniel & Anderson, as well as the Stanford Law School Center for Internet and Society's Fair Use Project—yes, rejoice.

I met Schloss a couple of years ago, and I gather that the well-publicized legal aspects of this case only barely gesture at what a jerk Stephen Joyce actually is. Every time someone finds an unknown Joyce letter in an archive somewhere, they have to grovel before this guy just to get permission to publish something nobody living today knew existed.

Thanks to Gerry for the link.

recommendation

So, I've been slowly wading into my year-long reading period for the exams I am taking next April. Thus far I've been focusing on modernist novels to come out of the countries that formerly comprised Austro-Hungary -- Kafka, Sandor Marai, Joseph Roth, Jaroslav Hasek, Karel Capek, etc. Today I finished a book that I though was really exceptional, Bruno Schulz's The Street of Crocodiles. Part Borges, part magical realism, this book is absolutely luminous. It's one of those rare books that makes you see the world anew. Schulz very deliberately sets out to defamiliarize the everyday, and is successful to a degree far surpassing the expectations. I feel that now having read it, I would almost be justified in doing nothing else for the rest of the year but re-reading this one work.

And one more thing: if it makes a difference, Schulz's life is fascinating, not least of all because he was shot in the head by a Gestapo officer in 1942.

Librarium

The Library of Babel, or just modernist governmentality?

From Metafilter.

An obscure 1911 British law requires a copy of every published book, journal, newspaper, patent, sound recording, magazine etc.. to be permanently archived in at least one of five libraries around the country. The British Library has the most complete collection and is currently adding about 12.5km of new shelf space a year of mostly unheard of and unwanted stuff. A new state-of-the-art warehouse is being constructed with 262 linear kilometers of high-density, fully automated storage in a low-oxygen temperature controlled environment. It is not a library, it is a warehouse for "things that no one wants." BLDG Blog ponders on what it all means.