From the blog of a friend living in Cairo and till-recently working in Ghana:
What Storytelling Really Is
… as opposed to what marketing people define it as.
While I understand the importance of narrative and storytelling in the work of marketers and advertises, this is one of the cooptations/adaptations in the industry that really pains me. Like paradigm shifts, storytelling/narrative is a wondrous and powerful idea that is trivialized when it gets thrown about in business. A recent review in The Nation of Salman Rushdie’s Imaginative New ‘Enchantress of Florence’ is a wonderful re-grounding of what narrative and story really means to people. (It also reminds us that book reviewing can itself be an art form.)
The novel, on its fourth page, is finding its subject, and its subject is storytelling itself. The men are driven by hungers and thirsts, and so is the writing. In its greedy piling up of nouns–”hostelries, saloons, food stalls, and hawkers”; “Cloths, utensils, baubles, weapons, rum”–we feel the force of storytelling’s appetite for the world, its sheer sensual relish for the thingness of things. It is no surprise that the great compendiums of stories tend to swell virtually without limit: the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, the Decameron and the Thousand and One Nights, Don Quixote and Gargantua and Pantagruel. This is the same impulse, of course–under stricter regulation in The Enchantress of Florence–that gives Rushdie’s greatest novels their girth.
I love the phrase “greedy piling up of nouns” and the sense of fullness the passage conveys. I’m also fond of how the review picks up on the importance of cities in stories and culture:
for Rushdie, the city is storytelling’s supreme subject. Delhi, Karachi, Cochin, New York, above all Bombay, the city of his childhood (“Back to Bom!” is Saleem’s happiest thought in Midnight’s Children), and London, the city of his maturity (“Ellowen Deeowen,” The Satanic Verses calls it, yoking Semitic and Indo-European divinities in a numinous pun on the spelling of the city’s name). The city, for Rushdie, is the place of variety, mystery, fortuity, possibility, conflict–all the elements that most make for good stories. It is the place where strange people live next door and unimaginable worlds are waiting to be discovered on the next block, a place that invites you, as the title of his latest essay collection urges, to “step across this line.”
City here, is more a gathering of people with broader-than-tribal coincidental affililiations, and therefore a place of discovery. Not to discredit the much- and recently-vaunted small towns (from which I come), but I love the sense of magic that surrounds stories, cities, and even trade in this review.
On the work-related side of this, those who bandy narrative and story about might still benefit from this definition (and the underlying energy) to get beyond the A to B nature of story. Story is too often seen as a distilled beginning, middle, and end with connective tissue. Here, it’s more rollicking, intricate, layered, recursive, and rich in bewildering detail.
I have Kindled Rushdie’s book and plan to get to it as soon as I find out what happens between Mister Darcy and Elizabeth Bennett.
My illiteracy: Shoulda shoulda shoulda
Just came across references to the NEA Big Read Meme in Cocktail Party Physics. The NEA is trying to “designed to restore reading to the center of American culture”, a worthy goal questionably stated. I would think a Trojan horse approach (reading that entertains, books that are fun) would work better than a return to the past and an attempt to displace the web and mp3 players. But that’s non-profits for ya.
The list below, and I haven’t found the original source yet (and see no point in trying to having found the same list three times already), has 100 books that are somehow worthy of people’s attention. It’s a mix of popular and fun (Harry Potter, LOTR) and more traditional classics (Lolita, Pride and Prejudice). The viral activity around it is to see what we have read, intend to read and which ones we love. Great fun to play with, critique, and build your own.
One thing around the categories worth doing is distinguishing between “Read and discarded from thought” which would apply to most of Tess of the D’Urbervilles which was part of AP English, “Read and Internalized”, “Read but should Re-Read”. Not all read-s are equal.
Look at the list and bold those we have read.
Italicize those we intend to read.
Underline the books we LOVE.I’ve also put a footnote anchor by incomplete reads, with notes at the bottom.
1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare [1]
15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch – George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky [2]
28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis
34 Emma – Jane Austen
35 Persuasion – Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne
41 Animal Farm – George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez [3]
44 A Prayer for Owen Meany – John Irving [4]
45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding
50 Atonement – Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel
52 Dune – Frank Herbert [5] (Currently reading this.)
53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
72 Dracula – Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses – James Joyce (No, but I read Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and that was enough for me!!)
76 The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal – Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession – AS Byatt [6]
81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web – EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle [7]
90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
94 Watership Down – Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo
Art & Public Spaces in Our Lives
Doing some work-related research, I came across two quotes about the role of public art and museums in our lives:
The only reason for bringing together works of art in a public place is that … they produce in us a kind of exalted happiness. For a moment there is a clearing in the jungle, we pass on refreshed, with our capacity for life increased and with some memory of the sky. — Kenneth Clark
It is the judicious exercise of the museum’s authority that makes possible that state of pure reverie tha an unencumbered aesthetic experience can inspire.” — Phillipe De Montebello
Internet Attention Deficit Disorder
Really great article in The Atlantic about the internet’s possible impact on our cognitive structures/patterns/modes. The title, “Is Google Making Us Stupid”, sounds like the usual whingeing about the internet — how it hurts our spelling, makes us less polite, decreases our capacity for independent thought, makes us less inclinced to memorize epic poetry, etc. But this article is smarter and more relevant on several fronts.
The thread of the article is that the author has noticed that while he has become quite adept at scanning a staggering amount of information and number of articles on the web, he has become less and less able to finish books or even articles. Friends of his have noticed that as well.
Bruce Friedman, who blogs regularly about the use of computers in medicine, also has described how the Internet has altered his mental habits. “I now have almost totally lost the ability to read and absorb a longish article on the web or in print,” he wrote earlier this year. A pathologist who has long been on the faculty of the University of Michigan Medical School, Friedman elaborated on his comment in a telephone conversation with me. His thinking, he said, has taken on a “staccato” quality, reflecting the way he quickly scans short passages of text from many sources online. “I can’t read War and Peace anymore,” he admitted. “I’ve lost the ability to do that. Even a blog post of more than three or four paragraphs is too much to absorb. I skim it.”
The article, and many of the people cited in it, speak in clear tones of worry that we are losing something, but it avoids being a tedious baby-boomer lament. Instead, it has a nice survey of how we have always lamented new technologies (Socrates worries that texts will undermine memory and deep learning in The Phaedras, Nietszche’s typewriter causes speculation about what his real voice is, people worry that the printing press will make knowledge too cheap).
It goes deeper, though, into how we have always thought about our consciousness and how our consciousness may be shaped, by our technologies. We used to think of our brains as clocks, then machines, now computers . . .
There is a woe to us argument:
The idea that our minds should operate as high-speed data-processing machines is not only built into the workings of the Internet, it is the network’s reigning business model as well. The faster we surf across the Web—the more links we click and pages we view—the more opportunities Google and other companies gain to collect information about us and to feed us advertisements. Most of the proprietors of the commercial Internet have a financial stake in collecting the crumbs of data we leave behind as we flit from link to link—the more crumbs, the better. The last thing these companies want is to encourage leisurely reading or slow, concentrated thought. It’s in their economic interest to drive us to distraction.
This puts me in conflict. My tech side, which abhors tech laments rolls my eyes, but my conspiratorial said “uh-oh.” Then there is a genuinely sad part:
If we lose those quiet spaces, or fill them up with “content,” we will sacrifice something important not only in our selves but in our culture. In a recent essay, the playwright Richard Foreman eloquently described what’s at stake:
I come from a tradition of Western culture, in which the ideal (my ideal) was the complex, dense and “cathedral-like” structure of the highly educated and articulate personality—a man or woman who carried inside themselves a personally constructed and unique version of the entire heritage of the West. [But now] I see within us all (myself included) the replacement of complex inner density with a new kind of self—evolving under the pressure of information overload and the technology of the “instantly available.”
As we are drained of our “inner repertory of dense cultural inheritance,” Foreman concluded, we risk turning into “‘pancake people’—spread wide and thin as we connect with that vast network of information accessed by the mere touch of a button.”
This upset in ways that upset me: I am no longer even a trailing member of the digital vanguard. (And the fact that I found the article through a sample of the magazine on the Kindle — the device that was going to get me reading again — is not a comfort.)
Associative Inspiration at PS 22
Biking past PS 22 in Crown Heights, I saw some cool fence decorations. From a distance, they looked like old guild symbols, and I thought perhaps this was a magnet school around science and technology. On closer inspection, they were much more: twisty lines of metal text suggesting shapes aspiring to be objects that thought they might be something else.
This shape reads: “Look at the short pants acting like binoculars dreaming of a hand drum.” This was my favorite, but there were more and they were interconnected, check them out on my flickrstream.
Advertising Immortality
Not sure how I feel about this . . .
Small Memorials are worth a look . . .
There’s a small park just east of the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens. I’ve played chess at the tables near the entrance literally dozens of times over the thirteen years I’ve lived in Brooklyn. But it was only today, while I was riding my bike along Eastern Parkway, that I looked at the memorial.
The park is named after Dr. Ronald Ervin McNair. I assumed that this was an inter-war physician who had done some service like setting up a clinic or been a benefactor of the community’s arts efforts. It turns out that McNair was, among other things, an astronaut on the ill-fated Challenger mission of 1986. The memorial, sadly neglected (like the park it is in), is pretty cool:
It’s a nice mix of air & space design, interesting sides to a modern personality (the karate kick next to the professorial holding forth confused me and a person standing nearby), and traditional monumental bronze imagery.
Other interesting things about McNair:
- Nichelle Nichols, Lt Uhura of Star Trek, was helping NASA recruit more diverse candidates to the space program in the 70s and McNair was one of those recruits
- He had a black belt in a form of karate and was regional champion several years
- He was an accomplished saxophonist and composed a piece of music with Jean-Michel Jarre before the 1986 mission. (McNair was supposed to record the saxophone part on the mission.)
Things learned from the trip:
- go that extra step — I’ve been in that park many times but never took the extra steps to find out who it was named after
- ride a bike — having a bike meant that I didn’t have to take extra steps to see this
- the internet needs a memorial project to remember people who inspired the dedication of parks, but not quite enough to maintain those parks.
Lo-rez, lo-fps, embrace of artifice == lessons for digital creativity
The most artistic thing about theatrical [and] advantage of the small theatre is that you are looking through a small window. Has not everyone noticed how sweet and startling any landscape looks when seen through an arch? This strong, square, this shutting off of everything else, is not only an assistance to beauty; it is the essential of beauty – GK Chesteron, 1909
My friends Tom and Donna take me to all sorts of lo-rez, lo-tech, junk-tech performances: puppet shows, performance art based on slide-shows (literal slideshows — with carousels, film-strip projectors, unsynched sounds, live music), and toy theater.
Last night, I went to St Anns Warehouse‘s 8th toy theater festival, produced by Great Small Works. It consisted of four shows:
- a traditional Indian story told through one singer and a partner moving toys around various tableaux;
- an Isaac Babel short story performed in a toy theater with Chagall-like backgrounds with accompaniments on clarinet and fiddle;
- a Stalin-era Russian SF novel (in the traditions many of us know through Stanislaw Lem), performed by three voices and a narrator who was also operating an analog synthesizer. (The synthesizer with its weird beeOOOOOOs and staticy sounds was the perfect aural accompaniment to Cold War era, concrete apartment towers, and emerging realities after the bomb. Tom wryly noted that only people from MIT’s Center for Advanced Visual Studies would consider an analog synthesizer to be as lo-tech as stick puppets)
- a story of the devil destroying the world and orgy that precedes it, done with amazing sound and a devil with cool led eyes and the dance moves to rival Terrence and Phillip in Uncle Fuckah
As a digital designer who tracks CG for improved hair and water effects, it’s fun to watch powerful stories emerge from <1 fps, 0-fidelity, 0 apology to artifice media and find them even more engaging than the adventures of Niko and Roman.
One of the cool things with St Anns is that they usually have theater and festival memorabilia on display around the warehouse. So I got a lot of (crappy iPhone) pics of small toy theaters, an art form unto themselves.
Things learned (and confirmed) from Kindle Nownow
Kindle is fast becoming a bigger conversational go-to for me than wikipedia on the iPhone. Last night, while hanging with my friends (and cultural guides) Tom and Donna, I shared my story about being a real “trouper” versus “trooper”. This brought up other phrases, like “the proof of the pudding” (or the proof is in the pudding), which Nownow sorted out thus:
The entire phrase is “the proof of the pudding is in the eating,” meaning that the true value or quality of a thing can only be judged when it is put to use. (“Proof” in this context means “the act of testing,” rather than our more common “conclusive evidence” sense.) “The proof of the pudding is in the eating” dates back to around 1600, and is more often heard in the United Kingdom than the U.S., probably because puddings of various kinds occupy a more prominent place on the dinner table there.
“The proof is in the pudding,” a fairly common mutation of the proverb, does make a certain amount of sense, i.e., that the final product, not the recipe, is what counts. But personally, I can’t shake the feeling that “the proof is in the pudding” would make an excellent last line for a Sherlock Holmes mystery.
Source:
http://www.word-detective.com/081100.html#proofpudding
They also provided confirmation for my personal pet peeve about the misuse of “begging the question”:
In logic, begging the question has traditionally described a type of logical fallacy (also called petitio principii) in which the proposition to be proved is assumed implicitly or explicitly in one of the premises. Begging the question is related to the fallacy known as circular argument, circulus in probando, vicious circle or circular reasoning. The first known definition in the West is by the Greek philosopher Aristotle around 350 B.C., in his book Prior Analytics.
In contemporary usage, “begging the question” often refers to an argument where the premises are as questionable as the conclusion.
In popular usage, “begging the question” is often used to mean that a statement invites another obvious question. This usage is disparaged.
* Suppose Paul is not lying when he speaks.
* Paul is speaking.
* Therefore, Paul is telling the truth.
I love these guys.
Toby, at Pondering Points, seems to get quite agitated by misused phrases as well. Perhaps Nownow would help . . .