Close

Chuck Close: Process and Collaboration at the Addison Gallery in Andover, Mass. closes in three days but you would have enjoyed it I'm sure. The show highlights about a dozen of Close's varied prints (etching, silkscreen, paper collage, etc.) but supplements the finished images with each of the progressive proofs or individual cuts or etchings.

So, for example, on one wall you've got this from ceiling to floor:



And on the wall to the left, you've got the finished product, Emma:




Upon seeing this in person, you oscillate between the two walls -- and then between awe and disbelief.

Fort Texas, Madison, get ready. Newport Beach, Boise and Portland, hold tight. Waterville, ME: 2008.

Prosophobia probably doesn't mean what I think it means #001

Doctors stress the woman will not look like her donor, but nor will she look like she did before the attack - instead she will have a "hybrid" face.

Apryl Vink

Fictioneers, get on your knees and thank your gods for the Random Name Generator.

Who wants to live forever?

In the mid-1960s, a neurosurgeon named Robert White began experimenting with "isolated brain preparations": a living brain taken out of one animal, hooked up to another animal's circulatory system.

[...]

Could there come a day when people whose bodies are succumbing to fatal diseases will simply get a new body and add decades to their lives--albeit, to quote White, as a head on a pillow? There could. Not only that, but with progress in repairing spinal nerves, surgeons may one day be able to reattach spinal nerves, meaning these heads could get up off their pillows and begin to move and control their new bodies. There's no reason to think it couldn't happen one day.

And few reasons to think it will. Insurance companies are unlikely to ever cover such an expensive operation, which would put this particular form of life extension out of reach of anyone but the very rich. ...

From Stiff: The Curious Life of Human Cadavers, by Mary Roach

Ministry Fiction Irritant #001

From an unfinished something-or-other:

"In Chicago all the alleyways lead to cathedrals," Gotham said.

It was a perfect Gothamism, which we'd defined years ago as a phrase that sounded like an aphorism but meant nothing and was false in every way.

They'll Go Wild

"Are you going to have someone introduce you?"

"I thought I'd come out and introduce myself and sing."

"Great!" exclaimed Johnston. "Come out and say, 'I'm Johnny Cash!' They'll go wild!"

Made to Fail

I was fortunate enough to get tickets to a talk given in Cambridge tonight by Haruki Murakami. The subject was "Frogs, Earthquakes and the Joys of Short Fiction." I don't know exactly what I was expecting but I was delighted to find Murakami both very funny and very inspirational. (And I was relieved that the advice wasn't limited to: "First train your body. Then, your writing style will follow.") I doubt I can do justice to my epiphanous moment but I'll try. Murakami said that the difference between a novel and a short story is that the story is an experiment. This is an exaggeration, he said, short stories are made to fail. Murakami explained that like Raymond Carver, who would finish the first draft in the evening of whatever story he began that morning, he liked to write his first drafts quickly and rewrite, rewrite, rewrite. And something clicked for me. My favorite films and books are those that are trying so hard that in many ways they end up failing (Orson Welles' The Trial being a perfect example) but I don't really think I push myself that hard in my first drafts. Half the time I don't even finish them. I'm a little self-conscious applying Murakami's talk to my own meager attempts. Inspired today, napping tomorrow is an accidental motto of mine. But I feel that Murakami might have had his own Oblomovism to get over, based solely on the number of slacker twenty-somethings in his novels.

Daniel in the Deniers' Den

British revisionist historian David Irving is being held in Austria under laws against denying the Holocaust.

I think I first heard of David Irving in John Sack's Esquire article, Inside the Bunker (which Sack had apparently titled Daniel in the Deniers' Den). It's an intriguing, compelling and contraversial read. Sack, who I hadn't realized died last year, changed the face of the Vietnam War with his articles for Esquire magazine.

Science Will Figure You Out

The bird behaves as if there were a causal relation between its behavior and the presentation of food, although such a relation is lacking. There are many analogies in human behavior. Rituals for changing one's luck at cards are good examples. A few accidental connections between a ritual and favorable consequences suffice to set up and maintain the behavior in spite of many unreinforced instances. The bowler who has released a ball down the alley but continues to behave as if he were controlling it by twisting and turning his arm and shoulder is another case in point. These behaviors have, of course, no real effect upon one's luck or upon a ball half way down an alley, just as in the present case the food would appear as often if the pigeon did nothing -- or, more strictly speaking, did something else.

...from "Superstition" in the Pigeon by B.F. Skinner.

Imagine two houses that were built from the same blueprint and that were initially identical. But now, years later, we notice that they look different at night. In one, the first floor is bright and the second floor dim; in the other, the opposite is true. This difference could have arisen in two ways. Maybe the houses now feature different lights; the owners of the first house might, for instance, have replaced bulbs on the first floor with brighter ones; the other owners might have done the same thing on the second floor. But maybe—and this is the evo-devo picture—the owners of the first house have switched on most first-floor lights and switched off most second-floor lights; the owners of the second house might have done the reverse. Evo devo tells us that animal species look different not because their structural bits and pieces have changed but because they switch on and off the same old bits and pieces in different combinations. Roughly speaking, then, penguins and people differ for the same reason your pancreas and eye differ: they’re expressing different genes.

...from Turned On by H. Allen Orr.

(Science Will Figure You Out is one of many excellent records by Soltero.)

Reruns

My friend Kugler ran Eternitytimesharing, a highly infrequent and relatively quiet blog, and he encouraged me to post. We edited each other's missives and occasionally deleted entirely things that didn't work. Once we'd hit our rhythm we were going to let everyone know the blog was there. That never quite happened. Because what better way to start this blog than with reruns, here are a couple pieces of mine that didn't get killed:

Preformationism

Summer Blackandwhites

The Last Myrmidon

This won't end well. There are too many ways it can go wrong. Too many images lifted from APD. An unfortunate combination of bragadaccio and self-doubt. Rants about public transportation, a lack of cash, my job. It will be neurotically specific except when it's all irritatingly vague. My HTML ineptitude. A half dozen "updates" within an hour to a post that wasn't particularly interesting to begin with. Long lists of sentence fragments. Weeks or months of silence followed by a slapdash note that goes something like: "Has it been six weeks? Man, things have been hectic!" There will be too many exclamation points, semi-colons and elipses. I will misuse words. The mistakes I catch will be insignificant compared to the ones I don't. My unfortunate attempts at cleverness will barely overshadow my otherwise pedestrian yammering. When no one reads it I will drop hints into emails. And yet...

I've always collected my thoughts by sharing, or talking it out as they say on Wheel of Fortune. Bear with me. Thanks.

EDITED: 9.ii.06