Back To School (Crop) by Michael Paul Young
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Jakuchu 伊藤若冲
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What a Physics Student Can Teach Us About How Visitors Walk Through a Museum

What happens when we walk through a museum? In a class I’m teaching on American art in the age of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, this question came up. As a speculative exercise, we are designing an exhibition that involves trying to lay out a group of varied objects—including some that require close attention, such as architectural drawings—in a pathway that will make sense to visitors of different ages and levels of art experience.

To devise a good layout requires some understanding of what museum visitors do, and there’s surprisingly little literature on this topic. Most of the studies of museum-goers that I’ve seen rely on questionnaires. They ask people what they did, what they learned, and what they liked and didn’t like. No doubt there are virtues to this technique, but it assumes that people are aware of what they’re doing. It doesn’t take into account how much looking depends on parts of the brain that are largely instinctive and intuitive and often not easily accessible to our rational consciousness. Was there another mode of investigation and description that would illuminate what was actually taking place?

One of the students in my class, Andrew Oriani, is a physicist who spends much of his time doing mathematical proofs consisting of six or seven pages of equations. (He also has notable visual gifts: as a child he liked to draw elaborate cross-sections of ocean liners). He immediately grasped that the question we were asking was similar to one that comes up in physics all the time. How can one describe the activity of a group of subatomic particles that are moving unpredictably, seemingly erratically, in space? In physics this has become a subdiscipline known as statistical mechanics, and physicists have devised sophisticated tools, such as heat mapping, to describe how particles move in time and where they collect. In essence, physicists have found ways to describe and analyze events that are not specifically predictable, but that, when they’re repeated over and over again, turn out to obey recognizable principles. What would we find, Andrew asked, if we simply mapped the movements of visitors through a museum? What kinds of patterns would we find if we gathered enough data? Could we discern a recognizable pattern that had a shape? What would these patterns of movement reveal about the act of looking?

The preliminary results of asking these questions are provided by the three diagrams in this post. Perhaps there are studies of this sort that have already been published, but I haven’t come across them. Admittedly, Andrew’s diagrams are not precisely accurate—he worked freehand, without exact measurements—but for that very reason they have a wonderfully expressive quality: I must confess that part of what appeals to me about them is simply their beauty as drawings. Even without knowing what they’re about, we can sense that they contain information and they record something mysterious and interesting. In fact, what they record is not difficult to explain.

by Henry Adams, Smithsonian |  Read more:
Drawings by Andrew Oriani
h/t The Browser

Produced by: Brendan McCabe, Ryan Reed and Brian Wolly. (2:44)
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Orchestra Pit, San Francisco Opera House, 1950s by Fred Lyon
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Tor-Arne Moen
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Reclaiming Fair Use

You might ask, Do I really have to know that much about copyright law, especially if I'm someone who just wants to write a blog, make a video, put together a slideshow, build a class lesson, teach a Sunday school class? Not really. You just need to know the right stuff—most importantly, that you have rights. And then you need to know the real risks you take when you exercise your rights. You then might ask, Shouldn't we really leave legal questions in the hands of lawyers? You can, but that's a big decision. It's a decision that leaves you powerless to make creative decisions on your own, and it is unlike the rest of your life. You don't expect to consult lawyers when you speak in public, even though libel laws exist that incautious remarks might trigger. If you are attacked on a dark street, you don't stop to call a lawyer to see if you have the right to self-defense. There's nothing so difficult about the decisions people have to make about re-using copyrighted material that requires you to keep a lawyer at hand as you work.

And then you might ask, How often, really, do these arcane questions of copyright come up for non-copyright experts anyway? More and more, both at home and at work. That is not only because people have more and more tools with which to make and distribute their own digital work. It's also because over the last century, copyright became both long and strong. Our whole culture is now copyrighted.

The whole world wasn't always copyrighted. But since 1978, in the U.S. all expression that ends up in a fixed medium (and that means everything--your shopping list, the inter-office memo, your kid’s homework) is copyrighted by default. There's virtually no chance that you will make even a home video that is not littered with copyrighted material, including your kindergartner's adorable picture of Mom (yes, that kid does own the copyright).

Copyrights didn't always last forever, either. And they don't now, but for most ordinary purposes they might as well. Copyrights now last generations beyond the life of the author. That keeps almost all current culture--X-Men, “Star Trek,” “Saturday Night Live” routines or Jay-Z or Stevie Wonder's songs—off limits until after not only all the participants but all the people who ever heard of them are dead.

As well, big media companies and their trade associations such as the RIAA and the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) were not always huffing and puffing about copyright infringement. But they are now, and they have been ever since digital technology made it really easy to make copies. They have been watching their business models change without seeing a new one that works for them emerge. Their resort has been both to use copyright ownership in their favor and to scare people into thinking that ownership rights are even more stringent than they are.

Furthermore, scare tactics in one area scare people in another. When the Recording Industry Association of America sues downloaders, people who are repurposing bits of copyrighted culture to comment upon it get frightened. When a company challenges another about trademark claims, people erroneously believe this is a copyright problem. Problems that big media companies have with massive commercial piracy in China are confused with individual acts of copying. People are far more alarmed, in general, than they need to be, and they rarely understand exactly what is worth getting alarmed about or why.

None of that would matter that much if we were not becoming a nation of makers and sharers, not just consumers of other people’s copyrighted material. We are rediscovering the participatory, collaborative cultural practices that many of us forgot during the peak era for mass media. We create birthday slide-shows and scrapbooks, mix CDs and files, mashups and remixes, websites and self- published books. We expect programs such as GarageBand and Windows MovieMaker to come pre- installed on our new computers, and we turn to Flickr and Facebook for other people's memories to fill in when ours comes up short.

For centuries, no one much thought about copyright in daily life. Now, we don’t have a choice. We are both consumers and creators every day, and we need to use our rights to draw on our own culture as well as claiming rights to their own productions. We need to reclaim the conversation about copyright as one that belongs to all of us.

by Patricia Aufderheide and Peter Jaszi, Techdirt |  Read more:

Part II here:

Please Don’t Call It ‘Ping-Pong’

Barney J. Reed, who believes himself to be the only full-time professional table tennis player in America, owns a 1995 Geo Prizm, a California medical marijuana card, and a deep-seated distrust of Ping-Pong's ruling oligarchy. I learned about the latter on the first day of the 2012 North American Olympic trials, when Reed came across a flaw in the surface of his table, a ragged scratch that appeared to have been done over with Wite-Out; as soon as he knew it was there, he was utterly distracted by its presence, and once he was distracted, he could not contain his sense of moral outrage. He stopped play, and for several minutes the proceedings reached a stalemate, with Reed standing up against the injustice being perpetrated upon him and the officials refusing to accede to his demands.

"It's your job!" he said. "Don't walk away! You've got to fix the table! Listen, it's not my fault, and it's not your fault. But we've got a simple solution — change the table."

But they did not change the table, and insisted they would not change the table until after the match, which Reed promptly lost to 20-year-old Canadian Andre Ho. The format of competitive table tennis is best-of-seven, with each game played to 11, and at the time of his discovery Reed trailed three games to one, so it wasn't hard to discern the element of gamesmanship inherent in Reed's filibuster. "At that point, he needed something," admitted his father, who is named Barney Reed as well (middle initial: D) and is his son's coach. But it was also indicative of Reed's ongoing agitation with the sport's American caretakers, who he feels haven't done enough to procure sponsorship and support, nor to elevate a game that is still regarded in this country as a casual pastime practiced in half-finished basements.

"This is the Olympic trials, and they said they were going to give us the most perfect conditions they can give us," Reed told me. "And somebody overlooked the fact that there's a big imperfection in the table."

I tried to ask him if there were rules for an occurrence like this, and whether the officials might simply be abiding by those rules, but to Reed, a 33-year-old with an unkempt sweep of brown hair and the mischievous good looks of Russell Crowe, those questions were almost beside the point. "A stupid rule is a stupid rule," he said.

Such is the interminable struggle of Barney Reed's adult life. A column in the local newspaper that day noted his longtime reputation as the "bad boy of Ping-Pong," and he has regularly been portrayed as a McEnroe-esque scold, which feels a little inaccurate, since Reed is viewed by most of his peers as a stand-up guy when he is not feeling shafted by the system. He is a compelling character in a sport filled with stone faces, and he has spent his entire adult life scratching out a living, taking extended journeys to Europe and the Far East, competing at second-rate tournaments held in dimly lit Dominican venues, and winning stakes matches using his own sandal as a paddle. His father, a Ping-Pong teacher and ex-board member of USA Table Tennis, raised him in the game — at the age of 6, he was playing in tournaments — and Reed long ago made the choice to bypass college in order to play Ping-Pong. Over the years he's had occasional brushes with celebrity, playing on television against Conan O'Brien and in Las Vegas against Tone-Loc and evangelizing to people like me about the day when the sport would finally be able to leverage its grassroots popularity into big-time sponsorship deals. "I mean, the national beer-pong champion makes 50 grand," he says. "But our sport right now has no light at the top."

And so Reed lives from week to week, in an apartment near San Jose, and plays in about 25 events a year. He drives the car he won for playing an exhibition at a dealership 17 years ago, and his share of the rent is $400; he lives with his girlfriend, who qualified for the Olympics as a table tennis player in 2000 and now works in a dental office. When I asked Reed if his girlfriend still plays competitively, he admitted that there wasn't much more to accomplish in Ping-Pong once you'd made the Olympics, which is the one thing he has never done. Every time he comes close, something unfortunate befalls him — twice, he's failed drug tests, once in 2002 for a performance enhancer,1 which briefly made him a late-night punchline and led to a two-year suspension, and once in 2008 for marijuana, though he contends that the medical marijuana card should have exempted him. He said he'd never played on this particular brand of table before, and that his serves, which rely on heavy spin, were "digging" instead of "sliding," and his father told me, "It's like he's being held back."

Before he left the gym, Reed took several pictures of the scratched table with his iPhone, though there didn't appear to be any sort of appeals process, so what he planned to do with this evidence I don't know. I don't think he knew, either, but he couldn't help himself.

"It's kind of ironic," he said, "that this shit always happens to me."

by Michael Weinreb, Grantland |  Read more: 
AP Photo/Gerry Broome

Bankrupt in Seattle

In December 2008, a rare snowstorm dropped a foot of heavy powder on downtown Seattle. The city does not as a rule deal well with snow—people panicked. Abandoned cars lined the freeway. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer suspended publication for the first time in seventy years. (Six months later, under clearer skies, it would stop for good.) Two charter buses carrying students slid through the barrier of an overpass and teetered above Interstate 5—no one was injured, but the hole in the barrier remained. Like most residents, I was unable to get to work. Garbage service stopped; people went sledding on an old couch down Denny Way, the arterial connecting Capitol Hill to downtown. Retail businesses, unable to shut so close to Christmas, counted on their employees to make it in somehow—a housemate of mine snowshoed half an hour each way to his job at the downtown Patagonia. Another housemate, Adam, a financial analyst, was able to stay home with a clear conscience: along with 3,500 other Seattle-based employees of Washington Mutual, he had been laid off the month before. A number of former Starbucks employees were able to stay home as well: the coffee colossus was closing 600 stores nationwide, including five in its home city. Seattle was used to a little weather and the business cycle, but snow and subprime were something else. The city, like Starbucks, had overextended—and now it was hardly working at all.  (...)

Steely gray in winter, dim and dove-like in spring, cloaked in fog in fall—Seattle’s weather is one of its bitter joys. Our famous rain is abstract, diffuse. More cotton ball than sheet, it is a woozy, three-dimensional rain that softens the city’s hard corners. Calling up moss and mushroom and penetrating everywhere with a kind of psychic damp, the climate almost literally grows into you. In summer, though, when the rain dries out and the clouds clear up, the city is a different place altogether. Not for nothing did Perry Como sing, “The bluest skies . . . are in Seattle.”

The weather, being in its way quite romantic, lends itself to introspection, bookishness, and a sort of unaffiliated mysticism. Seattle is considered the most literate city in the country—over half the adult population holds at least a bachelor’s degree. More of us are atheists than anywhere else in the US; quite a few people meditate. Support for same-sex marriage, reproductive rights, and gun control is a given. But beneath city’s tendency to quiet contemplation, progressivism, and art-making is what Greil Marcus calls, in reference to the Aberdeen, WA (two hours south of Seattle) rock band Nirvana, “True grunge: not just some music-business catchphrase, but dirt.” Early in the city’s history, workmen used a chute, or skid road, through what is now Pioneer Square to send freshly cut timber to the sawmill below, and the drunks and derelicts who filled the area gave rise to the meaning of the “skid row.” Kurt Cobain chose it as an early name for his band. Grunge, that disaffected, famous-for-hating-fame ethos, captured something in the city’s spirit: its real romance with self-contempt, sarcasm, and despondence. Depression here sends people to the bar or to the bridge, to the needle or to California. Homeless residents stare at magazines in downtown’s Rem Koolhas-designed public library, where they are allowed to be but not to sleep. Drunks still wander up and down skid row; along University Way, pierced and wayward kids crouch on the sidewalk with their dogs.

Grunge took the country’s youth culture by storm in the early 1990s. Meanwhile, a more insidious nationalization was slouching toward unsuspecting urban areas that were in the process of classing up. In 1971, two teachers and a writer had opened a storefront in Pike Place Market where they sold custom-roasted coffee beans. They named it Starbucks after the first mate on the Pequod—the one who didn’t want to chase the whale. A decade after the store opened, they hired Howard Schultz, then running American operations for the Norwegian plastics giant Hammarplast, as head of marketing and operations. Five years later, Schultz had bought the company from the original owners and started on a headlong drive to expand it all over the world. Starbucks opened stores in Chicago and Vancouver in 1987; the first New York store opened in  1994. That same year, a young hedge fund analyst named Jeff Bezos, noticing the astonishing growth in home internet use, quit his job to move to Seattle and open a business, Amazon.com, out of his garage. For a while it seemed that Seattle could succeed on something other than its rain and grungy, anti-establishment sulk. Early in the last decade, at the height of Seattle optimism, even the local bank got into the spirit of things: Washington Mutual took itself national, aiming to become, as its CEO said at the time, nothing less than “the Wal-Mart of banking.” WaMu launched an ad campaign, which debuted during the Oscars, featuring the rosy (and in retrospect worrisome) new slogan, “The Power of Yes.” Almost any loan, regardless of the income or situation of the borrower, would be approved, and WaMu proceeded to peddle its “flexible lending” with a sense of cheery informality—commercials ridiculed other lenders and their “rules.” Even the bank’s remarkably casual new ATMs were on-message, greeting customers with a “Hi there! May I have your secret code?” Instead of “Yes” or “No,” WaMu offered “Sure” or “No thanks.” It was as though someone had boxed up a bit of Seattle nice: clubby, a little corny, resolutely laidback, and self-consciously inclusive to the point of non-commitment—you needn’t even bank with them to avoid a fee. WaMu wanted to be more like a friend than anything else: “If we’ve done our jobs,” CEO Kerry Killinger said in 2003, “five years from now you’re not going to call us a bank.” This turned out to be true, though not in the way Killinger probably meant.

by Jenny Hendrix, N+1 |  Read more:
Image: Seattle streetcar visualization study. From lmnarchitects.com

Empties (Rurikou-in temple, Kyoto) (by Marser on Flickr)
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The dark arrow on Flickr.

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The Tao of Shutterstock

There are not many occasions when one will find oneself seeking an image of a cat in smart clothes with money and red caviar on a white background. But there may well be one occasion when one will find oneself seeking an image of a cat in smart clothes with money and red caviar on a white background. This being the Internet, actually, there will probably be two or three.

For such occasions, when they arise, your best bet is to turn directly to an image service like Shutterstock. The site, as the documentation for its upcoming IPO makes clear, is a web community in the manner of a Facebook or a Twitter or a Pinterest, with its value relying almost entirely on the enthusiasms of its contributors. But it's a community, of course, with an explicitly commercial purpose: Shutterstock pioneered the subscription approach to stock photo sales, allowing customers to download images in bulk rather than à la carte. Shutterstock is e-commerce with a twist, and its success depends on its contributors' ability to predict, and then provide, products that its subscribers will want to buy. The site is pretty much the Demand Media of imagery -- and its revenues, for both the company and its community, depend on volume.

Shutterstock launched in 2003 and has grown steadily since then, bolstered by the explosion of web publishing. On the Internet, there is always text in need of decoration -- and the site now offers a library of 19 million images to do that decorating. (Per Alexa's somewhat reliable demographic stats, Shutterstock's site visitors are disproportionately women -- women who live in the U.S., who browse the site from work, who don't have children, and who do have Master's degrees. Which is to say, probably, they're members of the media.) As its own kind of inside-out media organization, Shutterstock leverages the same kind of market-prediction strategy that Demand does ... but it does that without Demand's infamous algorithms. Instead, says Scott Braut, Shutterstock's VP of content, it provides its contributors with tools like keyword trends and popular searches so they "can find out what people are looking for and when."

The site also hosts multiple forums intended to guide people through the photo submission process -- and that process, its contributors have told me, is exceptionally user-friendly compared to other microstock photo sites.

It's also, however, fairly exclusive: Shutterstock has a team of reviewers charged with ensuring editorial consistency and quality -- and in 2011, Braut says, only 20 percent of applicants who applied to become Shutterstock contributors were approved. And less than 60 percent of all the images uploaded by those approved contributors were ultimately put up on the site. For each download their photos receive, photographers will get about $0.25 U.S. -- and more if they're oft-downloaded contributors and/or the purchaser has a high-level subscription.

by Megan Garber, The Atlantic |  Read more:
Photo: This. This. This. (Shutterstock/Kruglov_Orda)

Mark Jenkins in Richmond, VA
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Taco USA

Food is a natural conduit of change, evolution, and innovation. Wishing for a foodstuff to remain static, uncorrupted by outside influence—especially in these United States—is as ludicrous an idea as barring new immigrants from entering the country. Yet for more than a century, both sides of the political spectrum have fought to keep Mexican food in a ghetto. From the right has come the canard that the cuisine is unhealthy and alien, a stereotype dating to the days of the Mexican-American War, when urban legend had it that animals wouldn’t eat the corpses of fallen Mexican soldiers due to the high chile content in the decaying flesh. Noah Smithwick, an observer of the aftermath of the Battle of San Jacinto in 1836, claimed “the cattle got to chewing the bones [of Mexican soldiers], which so affected the milk that residents in the vicinity had to dig trenches and bury them.”

Similar knocks against Mexican food can be heard to this day in the lurid tourist tales of “Montezuma’s Revenge” and in the many food-based ethnic slurs still in circulation: beaner, greaser, pepper belly, taco bender, roach coach, and so many more. “Aside from diet,” the acclaimed borderlands scholar Américo Paredes wrote in 1978, “no other aspect of Mexican culture seems to have caught the fancy of the Anglo coiner of derogatory terms for Mexicans.”

Thankfully, the buying public has never paid much attention to those prandial pendejos. Instead, Americans have loved and consumed Mexican food in large quantities almost from the moment it was available—from canned chili and tamales in the early 20th century to fast-food tacos in the 1960s, sit-down eateries in the 1970s, and ultra-pricey hipster mescal bars today. Some staples of the Mexican diet have been thoroughly assimilated into American food culture. No one nowadays thinks of “chili” as Mexican, even though it long passed for Mexican food in this country; meanwhile, every Major League baseball and NFL stadium sells nachos, thanks to the invention of a fast-heated chips and “cheese” combination concocted by an Italian-American who was the cousin of Johnny Cash’s first wife. Only in America!

In the course of this culinary blending, a multibillion-dollar industry arose. And that’s where leftist critics of Mexican food come in. For them, there’s something inherently suspicious about a cuisine responsive to both the market and the mercado. Oh, academics and foodies may love the grub, but they harbor an atavistic view that the only “true” Mexican food is the just-off-the-grill carne asada found in the side lot of your local abuelita (never mind that it was the invading Spaniards who introduced beef to the New World). “Mexico’s European-and-Indian soul,” writes Rick Bayless, the high priest of the “authentic” Mexican food movement, in his creatively titled book, Authentic Mexican, “feels the intuitions of neither bare-bones Victorianism nor Anglo-Saxon productivity”—a line reminiscent of dispatches from the Raj. If it were up to these authentistas, we’d never have kimchi tacos or pastrami burritos. Salsa would not outsell ketchup in the United States. This food of the gods would be locked in Mexican households and barrios of cities, far away from Anglo hands.

That corn-fed Americans love and profit from Mexican food is viewed as an open wound in Chicano intellectual circles, a gastronomic update of America’s imperial taking of the Southwest. Yanqui consumption and enjoyment of quesadillas and margaritas, in this view, somehow signifies a weakness in the Mexican character. “The dialectic between representation and production of Mexican cuisine offers a critical means of gauging Latino cultural power, or, more precisely, the relative lack of such power,” write scholars Victor Valle and Rudy Torres in their 2000 book Latino Metropolis. (Another precious thought from Valle and Torres concerns Mary Sue Milliken and Susan Feniger, two Midwestern girls who came to Los Angeles and learned to love Mexican food during the 1980s, parlaying that fondness into a series of television shows and books under the billing “Two Hot Tamales.” The academics claim the Tamales’ success arose from “neocolonial appropriations of world cuisine by reviving a gendered variant of the Hispanic fantasy discourse.” Um, yeah…)

With due respect to my fellow lefty professors, they’re full of beans. I’m not claiming equal worth for all American interpretations of Mexican food; Taco Bell has always made me retch, and Mexican food in central Kentucky tastes like …well, Mexican food in central Kentucky. But when culinary anthropologists like Bayless and Diana Kennedy make a big show out of protecting “authentic’ Mexican food from the onslaught of commercialized glop, they are being both paternalistic and ahistorical.

That you have a nation (and increasingly a planet—you can find Mexican restaurants from Ulan Bator to Sydney to Prague) lusting after tequila, guacamole, and tres leches cake isn’t an exercise in culinary neocolonialism but something closer to the opposite. By allowing itself to be endlessly adaptable to local tastes, Mexican food has become a primary vehicle for exporting the culture of a long-ridiculed country to the far corners of the globe. Forget Mexico’s imaginary Reconquista of the American Southwest; the real conquest of North America is a peaceful and consensual affair, taking place one tortilla at a time.

by Gustavo Arellano, Reason |  Read more:

Domenico Gnoli at Luxembourg & Dayan

Paintings 1964-1969

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Just Me and My RV

RVers constitute a certain tribe on the road, and I learned that thousands were converging in central Oregon for what was billed as the Greatest RV Rally in the World. On a July afternoon, after receiving instructions in the Cruise America parking lot on how to check the RV’s water levels and empty the waste tank, we headed off on Interstate 80.

Packing for an RV road trip is like preparing for a weekend at a cozy cabin. The luxury of space and the semblance of domestic life inspired me to carry things like candles and paprika, soft cotton sheets and extra pillows. I took sharp knives, folding chairs and musical instruments and put avocados and lemons in a bowl on the kitchenette counter. We hung up our coats in the closet, with hangers. As I drove the rig, Tyson and Angelina put away groceries.

A compact RV drives like a van, but its bulky size soon altered my personality behind the wheel. I paid close attention to the yellow speed advisory signs for a change, and I rarely switched lanes, feeling unusually content to cruise in a patient, linear fashion. (Abrupt turns would cause the drawers and cabinets to fly open, anyway, prompting a scramble for rolling onions.) From a higher perch the landscape appeared wider, more available. Once we joined Interstate 5 in California’s Central Valley I began to feel a closer kinship with the truckers on the road, especially that first evening, after we pulled into a Walmart.

Of all the things Walmart is best known for (low prices, litigation, the demise of mom-and-pop stores), an overnight stopping place for RVers is not among them. But drive any evening into a Walmart lot along a busy highway, and you’ll probably find parked motor homes.

RVers often spend weeks on the road: that road is long, and there are many Walmarts along the way. As the company sees it, RVs arrive with their own bathrooms, and their drivers are well positioned to shop: everybody’s happy. Searching online from my phone I learned there were three Walmarts staggered along 30 miles of Interstate 5 in Northern California.

by Andy Isaacson, NY Times |  Read more:

The Pleasures of Being Read To

Harold Bloom, the literary critic, once expressed doubt about the audiobook. “Deep reading really demands the inner ear as well as the outer ear,” he told the Times. “You need the whole cognitive process, that part of you which is open to wisdom. You need the text in front of you.” While this is perhaps true for serious literary criticism, it’s manifestly not true when it comes to experiencing a book purely for the pleasure of its characters, setting, dialogue, drama, and the Scheherazadean impulse to know what happens next—which, all apologies to Bloom, is why most people pick up a book in the first place. Homer, after all, was an oral storyteller, as were all “literary artists” who came before him, back to when storytelling, around the primal campfire, would have been invented—grounds for the argument that our brains were first (and thus best?) adapted to absorb long, complex fictions by ear, rather than by eye.

That’s an idea I ran past the neuroscientist V. S. Ramachandran (whom I profiled in 2009). Rama answered via e-mail, saying: “Language comprehension and production evolved in connection with HEARING probably 150,000 yrs ago and to some extent is ‘hard wired’; whereas writing is 5000 to 7000 years old—partially going piggyback on the same circuits, but partially involving new brain structures like the left angular gyrus (damage to which disrupts reading writing and arithmetic). So it’s possible LISTENING to speech (including such things as cadence, rhythm and intonation) is more spontaneously comprehensible and linked to emotional brain centers —hence more evocative and natural.” He did add a caveat: “On the other hand reading allows you to pause and reflect and go back to do a second take.” (Though I’d argue that that’s what the rewind button is for.)

I listened to my first audiobook three years ago, when I had to master an interview subject’s massive literary œuvre in a very short time and realized that, to do it, I would have to use every available moment of the day—including those when traditional reading was impossible: walking home after dropping my son at school; jogging; grocery shopping; doing dishes. Since then, I’ve become a habitué of the audiobook section of my local library, renting and illegally ripping “books” to my iPod. I’ve discovered that audiobooks are (among other things) an ideal way to get to know a work that you can’t, for whatever occult reason, bring yourself to read in book form. I’d taken several runs at two late Updike novels, “Seek my Face” and “Terrorist,” and gotten bogged down in both. I have now listened to them as audiobooks and can report that they contain much of Updike’s typical brilliance that I would have missed had I stuck to Bloom’s method of mastering a book.

Inherent in Bloom’s criticism is the idea that one’s “inner ear” (by which I think he means one’s private and instinctual response to a text) is influenced by what is being done to one’s “outer ear,” which receives an interpretation of the book by an intermediary, an actor whose idiosyncratic reading shapes and colors the text. Bloom is correct about this, but I’ve discovered that it’s not necessarily a bad thing. Far from it. There are exquisite pleasures to be derived from hearing how a talented actor brings forth characters and stories—indeed, often in a way that points up one’s own inner-ear tone deafness to certain books. Not long ago, I rented the audiobook of “The Sun Also Rises,” not so much because I felt a burning compulsion to reëxperience Hemingway’s novel (which existed in my memory as a vaguely tiresome meditation on machismo, sexual impotence, and bullfighting) but because I was curious to hear how the actor William Hurt interpreted it.

Hurt, eschewing the kind of caricatured, brawny-man speaking style favored by readers-aloud of Hemingway, went for an eccentric, slightly stilted, halting, almost delicate diction as Jake Barnes—a strange-seeming choice that at first clashed badly with my own inner ear but that now, after repeated, delighted listenings, seems like the only way to render Barnes’s voice, since it best accentuates the deadpan hilarity that is too little commented upon in Hemingway. I’d failed to understand, until I listened to Hurt’s performance, just how funny and touching the book is. (To be fair, there must be examples of audiobooks where a lousy reader is the equivalent of a badly cast actor in the lead role of a book’s movie-version—James Caan as Rabbit Angstrom?—and threatens to ruin that literary work for you forever; but this hasn’t happened to me yet.)

It was the magic of a man named Frank Muller reading “The Great Gatsby” that made me realize that audiobook narration is an art form all its own. As I listened (and re-listened) to Muller’s reading of “Gatsby,” I recognized an almost supernatural quality to the way he inhabited each character, whether he was rendering the watchful, sensible narrator, Nick Carraway, or bullying Tom Buchanan, or even flighty Daisy—often in scenes where rapid-fire dialogue has him shifting back and forth between all three within milliseconds. But perhaps most amazing (for its cagey subtlety) was his enigmatic, chimerical Gatsby—a character Fitzgerald confessed to having had trouble fully seeing (in an inscription of the book to a friend in 1927, he admitted that the character of Gatsby was “thin,” and his editor, Maxwell Perkins, complained of the same thing, while acknowledging that this vagueness was also an important element of the book.)

Muller, reading Gatsby’s dialogue, fleshes him out—just enough, and not too much—by adopting a tone of deceptively subtle casualness not be mistaken for candor; for all the breezy friendliness of his address, there’s something edgy and withholding, something guardedly clipped, about those “old sports”; his tone flickers between sweetly naïve openheartedness (as when extending the palm of friendship to Nick) and something a good deal more sinister, as when he raps out, “That’s my affair,” when Nick asks what business he is in. So uncannily good was Muller—whose name I’d never heard before—that I had to Google him, and discovered that I was far from the first to notice his brilliance. An experienced stage and screen actor, he is also a legend in the audiobook world (a writer at The Los Angeles Times said he was “the best reader I have ever heard;” The New York Times Book Review called him “some kind of genius”). Muller himself gave a glimpse into the challenges of making audiobooks when he told an interviewer, in 2001, “Playing one character is daunting enough, and that is usually all that is asked of an actor, but in a single voice recording you play them all. All the motivations, desires, hopes, and conflicts one character may experience interact constantly with those of the other characters. The development and consistent realization of all those characterizations is quite a challenge.”

by John Colapinto, New Yorker |  Read more:
Illustration by Morgan Elliott

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A 2008 sign endorses same-sex marriage. What’s it like to be a gay Mormon in Utah? Read Jennifer Sinor’s essay Out in the West, published in The American Scholar, Autumn 2011.
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