Newtonian science was sober-minded; Archimedes' science was not. Archimedes was famous for hoaxes, enigmas, and circuitous routes. These were not some external features of his writings; they characterized his scientific personality. Science is not--mathematics is not--dry and impersonal. It is where one's imagination is allowed to roam freely.
This selection is purely incidental to the subject of the book, but given my recent interest in the letter, this caught my attention. The letter is something you will see me going back to from time to time. I somehow feel we're really losing something in switching from letters to e-mails.
E-mails are short on ritual. There is no walk to the mailbox, no looking at the stamp, no slicing the envelope, no guessing the handwriting. They just pop up unbidden on your computer screen while you are engrossed in your daily business. Some of them, like little electronic terrorists, can blow your mind and change your life.
My review of Something About the Blues should be submitted sometime tonight and published within a couple of days.
I am already well into the next, utterly fascinating, book--The Archimedes Codex: How a Medieval Prayer Book is Revealing the True Genius of Antiquity's Greatest Scientist.
Here's a NOD from its preface (I keep reading, lately, about the crusaders, in The Most Dangerous Animal: Human Nature and the Origins of War; The Great Arab Conquests: How the Spread of Islam Changed the World We Live In; Mobs, Messiahs, and Markets: Surviving the Public Spectacle in Finance and Politics; and now here):
In April 1204, Christian soldiers on a mission to liberate Jerusalem stopped short of their goal and sacked Constantinople, the richest city in Europe. . . . . The looted city had many more books than people. It was the first time Constantinople had fallen in the 874 years since Constantine the Great, Emperor of Rome founded it in AD 330. . . . [T]he city held the literary treasures of the ancient world as its inheritance. Among the treasures were treatises by the greatest mathematician of the ancient world and one of the greatest thinkers who had ever lived. He approximated the value of pi, he developed the theory of centers of gravity, and he made steps toward the development of the calculus 1,800 years before Newton and Leibniz. His name was Archimedes.
From "See, See, Moon."
But when the blues overtakes you,
every little once in while,
bluegummed moon, all explanations fail
it seems, but no, the blues
by any other name would be
just as funky.
Why should it be so difficult
to pin the color of your sorrow?
Here's another taste from Something About the Blues. This particular selection is from a poem entitled "The Blues Don't Change." There is a sense, almost, of the Blues being not only a persistent undercurrent, an elemental force, but indeed a kind of trickster figure.
And I was born with you, wasn't I, Blues?
Wombed with you, wounded, reared and forwarded
from address to address, stamped, stomped
and returned to sender by nobody else but you,
Blue Rider, writing me off at every chance you
got, you mean old grudgefulhearted, table
turning demon, you, you sexy soulsucking gem.
It's difficult to quote only a part of this poem. The whole thing is so powerful, works so well, is so necessary, that plucking a sentence or fragment out of a stanza just seems wrong. But the one stanza above can meaningfully stand there on its own.
There won't be many NODs for Something About the Blues. Maybe a two or three. I do, after all, intend to have my review of this collection of blues poetry up sometime this week. Sooner than later.
Anyway, here's the first. It provides a broad introduction to the blues, and ties it to poetry as well.
Beaded and threaded throughout America's musical mosaic, the blues make you feel and hear. Sometimes you can count them off in measures and beats, but largely they dwell in a feral state; blues truth is wild and menacing.
Like poetry, the blues will always be dramatically unpredictable, sometimes torturous and sometimes pleasurable.
There are so many good nuggets in Mobs, Messiahs, and Markets that it's hard to choose just a few. I will post one more here, and then, within a few days, my review should be published and posted here.
. . . Iraq is full of potential terrorists with grudges. Had the Anglo-Americans bothered to look before they leaped, they would have seen a country that is a mix of tribes, clans, families, and religious groups--all of whom take it as an inherited obligation to avenge any wrong done to any of their own group by any member of any other group going back five generations. We cannot kill terrorists as fast as the State Department can create them, say some. . . . . Still, every great empire--from the Assyrians to the Mongols to the British--has taken Baghdad. America has to do it, too. It is the imperial script and America is right on cue.
On the American Empire.
... by the twenty-first century, the United States had already reached an advanced stage of empire--and an aging empire needs a little more than banal reality. It needs delusion to keep it going. It desperately needs an enemy to justify defense budgets and military meddling. What else can you expect? Americans need to believe that they are confronted by a vast army of terrorists ready to "destroy our civilization."
Is America sliding towards fascism? A look at some disturbing things happening with the media.
Here is an MIT security studies maven, writing in a column in the Outlook section of the Washington Post, that the new U.S. strategy of paying Iraqi journalists to place stories favorable to the U.S. in the media is perfectly kosher. A reporter, says Michael Schrage, should be helping the military along, not just chattering about it.
... 'Securing positive coverage for our troops in Iraq can be as important to their safety as 'up-armoring' vehicles and providing state-of-the-art body armor. The failure to wage war is a failure to command.'
Ah--the media war. Until now we thought the war meant those cluster bombs going off in Baghdad. But we realize we were mistaken. It must be the blood that got us confused! The real war, we now see, is on the front pages. Take cover!
There was a time when respectable marriages were based on more serious concerns--money, property, position, and so forth. . . . But in the Western world, arranged marriages have given way to deranged ones. People are expected to fall in love with each other--that is, they are expected to take leave of their senses, and while in this addled state, they are not only allowed, but encouraged, to sign a contract that is meant to last a lifetime.
On news... lots about the news in this book.
... if you think about it, the word newspaper is itself a conceit. It pretends that the news industry is a clean pane of glass through which we look out at the spectacle of public events. But it is not a pane of glass at all; it is a microscope in which particular events are magnified and distorted. News that neither encourages journalistic prejudices nor inflates the journal's profits is invisible. The press lords must think their typical readers are louts. And, if not before, soon after they begin reading the newspapers, they will be.
What is it about the Near or Middle East that keeps drawing world-improvers and do-gooders, two expressions used a lot in this book, to invade and conquer and reform?
Nor is it the first time that people have tried to do good in the Near East. At the end of the eleventh century, Europeans decided to bring the blessings of Christian governance to the desert tribes. The Crusades of the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries were doomed from the beginning. The Crusaders had the will and the weapons to kick Arab butts; what they lacked was a real reason for doing so, for Christianity was already firmly rooted in the Holy Lands, as it had been for more than 1,000 years, even though Jerusalem had fallen to the caliph Umar Ibn al-Khattab in February of 638.
Interesting, and funny, connection between world improvers and markets... mob mentality.
It is a shame that the world improvers don't set off some signal before they go bad, like a fire alarm that is running out of juice. Maybe some adjustment could be made. Instead, the most successful of them--such as Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler--actually gain market share as they get worse. Their delusions are self-reinforcing, like the delusions of a stock market bubble; the higher prices go, the more people come to believe they make sense.
One of the things so many people are concerned about when they think about living more environmentally-friendly lifestyles is that they will have to live more austere, almost ascetic lives. The following NOD addresses that notion.
One of the motivations for designing the Oxford Ecohouse was to put paid to the notion that pursuing a high quality of life necessarily entailed irreparable damage to the environment. The challenge was to prove that those in richer countries could maintain an acceptably high standard of living without polluting the planet at the cost to those in poorer countries. To help better understand the relationship between individual behaviours and the built environment it is necessary to look beyond the form and construction of a building to the consumption patterns of its inhabitants irrespective of culture, geography, or economy. Environmental accounting methodologies, such as ecological footprinting, can provide a very useful insight into those factors which are most important in minimising environmental impacts.
A prediction:
By the middle of this century we will probably all have to live in zero fossil fuel energy homes. The seeds of the ideas sown in this book by then will have grown into the New Vernacular of housing for the twenty-first century and beyond.
A little on hemp, a very useful product in construction, as almost anywhere else. Concerns not so much its use in construction, which the book does address briefly, but rather its qualities and ill reputation.
Hemp fibre is the strongest natural fibre known to man and is reputedly stronger, weight for weight, than steel. Hemp grows very fast, from nothing to 4m high in four months and is virtually disease resistant. It can be used in rotation with other crops and helps improve the soil. Hemp got a bad name in the 1930s after publicity campaigns by the petrochemical industry linking it to its narcotic derivative, cannabis, got it banned (in order to promote oil-based materials). Nowadays industrial hemp has virtually no narcotic content, but still needs to be grown under license.
This NOD is about harnessing the wind and its relations to solar energy.
The wind has been harnessed since antiquity to power windmills, pump water, generate electricity and cool buildings and people. The wind gains its power ultimately from the sun and wind power is essentially solar energy in another form, as it is the sun which warms air and creates the variations in pressure that drive the wind.
Today's NOD has to do with ecotechnology and, as the chapter title from which it is taken suggests, health and happiness in the home. It also has something to say about the tone and overall intent of the book.
Solar panels and ecokitchens, and the way we eat and the way we live our lives, are all important parts of a larger strategy to reduce our impact on this planet before we destroy it completely. This book, however ordinary the issues and ideas in it are, isn't about bling -- it's about survival.
Here are a three quotes from a chapter entitled "Building-In Soul." What they have in common, aside from that abstract thing the author calls 'soul', is the relation of the house to nature.
Buildings are substantive -- what they are made of is very much part of their character. Wood, earth, brick, concrete, steel, glass or plastic buildings are totally different from each other to see, to live in, to build and in the forms their construction logically and characterfully demands. . . . So, very important in terms of their pollution and environmental costs, are their manufacturing biographies and how they end their life -- do they return to nature or become refuse?
Not coincidentally, wood is a material from life. Iron is from the earth, but by way of intense heat and heavy industrial rolling. Plastic is from oil and coal deep beneath its surface, after so numerous chemical synthesis operations that it is totally removed from life. These materials connect us to the world from whence they came: living and life-cycle bound by nature, or lifeless, dead industrial processes. Whereas plastic needs industrial equipment suited to mass production to form, wood needs only a pocket knife. It is more appealing, accessible and healthy to work with. Indeed, you can put your heart into what you make out of it.
We use thousands of materials in modern building, but a general rule is that the nearer something is to life, the more compatible it is: the healthier to live with, the more recyclable back to earth, thence living matter again. It also needs more care for longevity -- but this care, like the care given to its making, is imprinted into its substance and emanates from it, to nourish those who live next to it.
Here's a NOD from the 3rd Edition of ECOHOUSE: A Design Guide:
Three principles upon which all building should be based are:Imagine if these three simple principles were considered before any building took place, whether of an individual house or a new housing development or subdivision.1. design for a climate
2. design for the physical and social environment
3. design for time, be it day or night, a season or the lifetime of a building and design a building that will adapt over time
I still have no time to write the review... Nuts. Too much upheaval change at work. Should get to the review sometime this weekend.
Anyway, here's another NOD:
Enough has already been said about the religious motivation of the invaders, the power of the idea of martyrdom and paradise as incentives in battle. This was combined with the traditional, pre-Islamic ideals of loyalty to tribe and kin, and admiration of the lone warrior hero. The mixture of the cultural values of the nomad society with the ideology of the new religion was formidable.
Egypt was very different. In the modern world we think of Egypt as an Arab country, in many ways a political and cultural centre of the Arab world. At the beginning of the seventh century, however, this was not the case at all. There seems to have been no substantial Arab settlement, no Arab tribes roamed the deserts and few Arab merchants did business in the towns.
Interesting quote to do with the technology used in the conquest of Damascus...
The Muslims do not seem to have had any siege engines, or any equipment more sophisticated than ropes and ladders, and even the ladders had to be borrowed from a neighbouring monastery. It seems that all the attackers could do against the substantial Roman walls of the city was to mount a blockade and hope that famine, boredom or internal disputes would cause the defenders to give up.
On the beginnings of the Muslim conquests...
Muhammad's military campaigns were, in one sense, the beginning of the Muslim conquests. His example showed that armed force was going to be an acceptable and important first element first in the defence of the new religion and then in its expansion. ... At the same time, diplomacy was certainly more important than military conquest in the spread of Muhammad's influence in the Arabian peninsula. It was the network of contacts he derived from his Quraysh connections rather than the sword which led people from as far away as Yemen and Oman to swear allegiance to him. Military force had ensured the survival of the umma, but in the Prophet's lifetime it was not the primary instrument in its expansion.
Here are two quotes relating to the Arabian desert I found quite interesting.
Much of Arabia is desert, but all deserts are not the same. If the Inuit have a thousand words for different sorts of snow, the nomads of Arabia must have almost that number for different sorts of sand, gravel and stones.
The desert landscapes of Arabia were well known to their inhabitants and, we can almost say, cherished. The poets of ancient Arabia delighted in naming the hills and valleys where their tribes had camped, fought and loved. For them, the desert was a land of opportunity, and a land of danger.
What makes the Arab Muslim conquests so remarkable is the permanence of the effect they had on the language and religion of the conquered lands. Spain and Portugal are the only countries conquered at this time where the spread of Islam has been reversed; by contrast we now think of Egypt as a major centre of Arab culture and of Iran as a stronghold of militant Islam.
I found this very interesting. To be honest, I knew Spain had been under Muslim control for some time, but I did not know Portugal had as well. And why are they not now Muslim countries like the other countries conquered? What, I wonder, was different about them?
This is a big book and I have little energy or reading time after my day job, so please be patient as far as the review is concerned. But I will continue the NOD with this book, sharing little, uh, nuggets to tide you over.
In the year 632, Islam was confined to Arabic-speaking tribesmen living in Arabia and the desert margins of Syria and Iraq. Most of the population of Syria spoke Greek or Aramaic; most of those in Iraq, Persian or Aramaic; in Egypt they spoke Greek or Coptic; in Iran they spoke Pahlavi; in North Africa they spoke Latin, Greek or Berber. None of them were Muslims. . . . The scale and the speed of the transformation are astonishing; within a century of the Prophet's death, all these lands, along with Spain, Portugal, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and southern Pakistan (Sind), were ruled by an Arabic-speaking Muslim elite, and in all of them the local population was beginning to convert to the new religion.
Well, I think this will be the last NOD for Adland before I publish my review of it. I haven't had as much time over the last couple of weeks to read. Anyhow, here is another NOD. This one, to an extent, characterizes the 90s in advertising.
Other advertisers of the 1990s seemed keen to emulate Benetton. Confrontation was the order of the day. Coyness was abandoned, taboos were attacked: sex and swearing came streaking out of the closet.
Here's a quote by Philippe Michel, co-founder of the company that has become today's CLM/BBDO, on the job of advertising. It is something today's advertisers, like it or not, understand and have learned to do very well, namely tying a product in with people's dreams and aspirations: '[t]he job of advertising is not to sell, but to create a cultural link between the desires of the entrepreneur and those of the public.'
In 1969, Design Week had found the following quote by David Abbott, founder of AMV, on the craft of advertising:
'Let's start at the beginning: abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz -- you are looking at the copywriter's toolbox. With these 26 little marks on paper we have to persuade people to buy our client's products, ideas or services. If we jumble them one way, we can sell with a laugh. Mix them up another way and we're provocative. Another, and we're sympathetic. It beats Scrabble. And we get paid for it.'
I take issue with the second last sentence in this rather interesting quote...:>) For me, Scrabble is more academic--its about the sheer joy of language and strategy, not about getting paid.
Campaign, quoted in Adland, wrote about the shift in advertising rules at the end of the 80s.
'Of the many advertising rules set in stone,' the magazine wrote, 'this is the most deeply-etched: "Thou shalt not set trends: thou shalt only follow them." In the 1980s, that stone tablet was split in two... BBH told us what jeans to wear; sent records to the top of the charts; and produced commercials whose launches became media events for a national press suddenly obsessed with advertising and admen.'
The 80s certainly were colourful...
The 1980s are often regarded as the golden age of TV advertising. Cable television was in its infancy, expensive global campaigns were newly fashionable and agencies could afford the best directors, many of whom were honing their craft, creating shimmering images for music videos. Advertising and MTV -- which launched in 1981 -- pushed the products and the lifestyle that seduced a new breed of young, upwardly mobile consumers.
I always find it interesting how some ideas, commonplace and entirely taken for granted now, weren't always so. It took some leap of thought. So with the advertising/packaging link.
It was while redesigning the packaging for Rice Krispies that the agency came up with the idea of using the box itself as an advertising device. Until then, cereal packets had been dominated by block letters identifying the product. The agency created a series of dummy designs that reduced the lettering and used the remaining space for colourful graphics. This was a packaging revolution -- and it won Leo Burnett the Corn Flakes account. Soon afterwards, in 1952, Kellogg's handed the agency all of its advertising across the United States and Canada.
There is something delicious, because both provocative and profound, in the quote advertising renegade Carl Ally is said to have hung on his wall:
'Comfort the afflicted; afflict the comfortable.'
If the history of advertising has one overriding theme, it is this constant tug of war between two schools: the creatives, who believe art inspires consumers to buy; and the pragmatists, who sell based on facts and come armed with reams of research.
I'll put two short but related selections into the first NOD for Adland: a Global History of Advertising.
We only know that, between them, advertising agencies and their clients have an immense impact on our lives. As personal video recorders and the internet challenge the ability of TV to disseminate advertising effectively, brands are forcing their messages onto every blank space, into every crack in the urban landscape.
In a world over-supplied with brands, they can't afford to stop trying to imprint their names on our minds. Worldwide spend on advertising currently stands at over US$400 billion a year and rising (according to media agency ZenithOptimedia).
(from "The Piano")
I remember her wide body & how she flipped
out over the side, & there was nothing we could do,
& how she crashed into the street
with her hundred teeth & voices,
& there was nothing we could do
but run out into it, the street, I mean, keys
splintered like bones.
I have been posting NODs (nugget of the day) while reading books for review. I'm finding it more difficult to do with a book of poetry. How do I choose a nugget out of a poem? If I pull a little piece and show it to you, will its power still transmit?
As much else on this site, if it doesn't work, I hope you will let me know. There may only be a couple of NODs from Teeth anyway, as I intend to write the review and have it posted by Monday at the very latest.
Here we go then:
(from "Ode to the Watermelon")
Men bow their heads, open-mouthed,
to coax the sugar
from beneath your workdress.
Women lift you
to their teeth.
Sandia, dia santo,
yours is a sweetness
to outlast slaughter:
Tongues will lose themselves inside you,
scattering seeds. All over,
the land will hum
with your wild,
raucous blooming.
My review of Virtual Worlds should be submitted today, published on Blogcritics Magazine, then posted here by tomorrow or, at the very latest, Monday. Here's another thought-provoking NOD from Virtual Worlds:
Being connected is what 16-32 years olds (sic) live for, says Sky Dayton, who founded EarthLink in 1994 at the age of 23 and is now CEO of Helio (a joint venture of EarthLink and SK Telecom). "It's not content that's at the core of new media; it's communications..."
And now on to Teeth, by Aracelis Girmay. This will be my first poetry review. I have, of course, written essays on poetry during my university days, but writing reviews for the general public is quite another matter.
There have been many firsts since I began reviewing. There was, not so long ago, my first novel review. I stressed about that one a fair bit. Then there was my first non-fiction book review. I stressed about that one a fair bit as well. And now I am about to embark on my first poetry book.
I hope my first attempt will not be too amateurish and will, at least somewhat, do the work justice. Ultimately it is you, the reader of my reviews, who must judge their effectiveness. While I continue to ask your indulgence as I hone my craft, I do very much appreciate your comments and feedback. Indeed, I solicit feedback.
More on identity in virtual worlds:
On Second Life, while your behavior defines your being, you simultaneously fashion your identity from the outside in - purchasing skins, clothing, accessories, even a personality.
A little quote about identity in virtual worlds:
In a virtual community, you can create a new identity or extend the one you live every day in the traditional world. You can test drive new personalities, changing or even completely discarding them if they don't reflect who you want to be.
My review of An Ocean of Air should be published by tomorrow night. Here is the last NOD to/from it:
Clamped to the sea floor of our ocean of air, I try to picture its uppermost layers. But in spite of everything that I've read, I can scarcely believe that air too thin for me to breathe is yet strong enough to fend off everything that space can throw at us.
Yet it is.
And now I turn to Virtual Worlds. This one's not so much about trying to understand the world around us, the physical world, but rather turns towards an examination of how abstract, virtual worlds created with and within modern technology affect our emotional lives. Look forward to some NODs from it beginning tomorrow.
The review of An Ocean of Air is almost due to be published. In the meantime, here's today's NOD to/from the book, a little section explaining the Coriolis Effect:
think of the shape of Earth: a sphere spinning around an axis that goes through its center. Although every part of the planet rotates precisely once a day, some parts have farther to travel than others. The equator has the hardest task. Being the broadest part of Earth, it has much the farthest distance to cover in its twenty-four hours, and every point on its surface is perpetually hurtling through space at more than one thousand miles per hour. Farther north or south, the planet is narrower, and the speed of travel is much slower; by the time you reach the poles, the surface doesn't move at all.
Air is affected by this because it is in contact with the spinning ground, and yet is free to move relative to it. The Ferrel (Coriolis) effect isn't a force so much as an optical illusion, brought about because we forget that we too, are spinning with the ground beneath our feet.