Hermenautic Circle blog

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Rachel Aviv has won a Rona Jaffe award!

A few folks have been buzzing about the proposal over on Stack Exchange to build a stack overflow-type site for library Q&A stuff. I was wondering about this, since we already have Unshelved Answers. A little Googling and I figured out that the software they’re using won’t be available to them after 4/11 [irony!], so they’re trying to get people together to support a hosted model. Go vote!

Brainiac readers may recall the project by a Google engineer to drive home how large the Deepwater oil spill was, using Google Earth. It let users place a graphical representation of the spill on top of an area they were more familiar with than the Gulf of Mexico, like, say, the Boston region. It turns out that the BBC has a whole collection of Google Earth maps designed along similar lines. Want to get a sense of the range of a Predator drone, a weapon of choice for the United States in the war in Afghanistan? BBC's Dimensions site reveals that a Predator based in Albany, NY, could take out a terrorist strolling near Boston's City Hall.

Dimensions also makes comprehensible the scale of the contested border between Afghanistan and Pakistan--by relocating that border to Europe. Other graphical representations are placed under such rubrics as The War on Terror, Space, Ancient Worlds (example: the Great Wall of China), and Environmental Disasters. Hat tip: Chris Spurgeon.

[Image: Photo by Jim Stephenson].

Architectural photographer Jim Stephenson got in touch the other week with some photos he recently took of an elaborate stage set, constructed by the group dreamthinkspeak, for a new play based on Anton Chekhov's "The Cherry Orchard."

The play was performed in Brighton, England, inside an old department store, the entirety of which had been transformed into a labyrinthine performance space, complete with a Russian supermarket, a simulated department store (within the very frame of the abandoned one), and a cottage surrounded by artificial snow.

[Images: Photos by Jim Stephenson].

There are nurseries and ballrooms, writing desks and dioramas, all stashed away inside a massive performance space through which the audience must walk, as if chasing down scenes.

[Images: Photos by Jim Stephenson].

I'll let Stephenson himself describe the building:

The venue was the old Co-Op building on London Road, Brighton, familiar to most people who live in the city. Opened in 1931, the Co-Op was the largest department store in the city when it closed 3 years ago. It has been neglected since... A large department store, wandering around it was incredible to see how quickly it had fallen into such a bad state. It reminded me of the first few chapters of The World Without Us, where Weisman talks about the processes that would take place around, inside and on our buildings should humans disappear. Indeed, it could be a study of such processes—damp creeps in everywhere, stripping render from the basement walls and warping and tearing the plywood paneling upstairs. Plant life eases through gaps and cracks. Carpet has lifted and the building has a terrific smell of decay. Yet in the stockrooms, still evident, is graffiti from the early 70’s—name checking footballers that have long since retired, bought pubs and passed on. Locally, there has been calls, growing stronger and stronger, for the owners or the council to inhabit the building. This is where dreamthinkspeak stepped in to temporarily transform the former department store into an incredible series of set-pieces, opening up such a familiar building to a public for the first time in three years, curious to see what had happened the their local shop.

The ensuing world of the play included some interesting moments of self-reference; as Stephenson writes: "The basement of the Co-Op used to feature some beautiful leaded windows around the circulation areas and these have been re-used with elaborate models of show apartments and odd and surreal rooms placed behind the glass. Closer inspection shows that these surreal rooms are models of the rooms we’ve already passed through and (we’ll soon learn) rooms to come."

[Image: The "leaded windows... re-used with elaborate models of show apartments and odd and surreal rooms," photographed by Jim Stephenson].

Indeed, one of the most architecturally interesting details of the production was its use of small models that refer to, repeat, or reveal in advance spaces of the play itself. Or, as Stephenson writes, "Repetition of themes continues throughout the show, using increasingly imaginative set-pieces to remind us of where we’ve been." It's as if the play somehow stutters, blurting out smaller versions of itself—like an inhabitable 3D printer that can't help but create images of its own surroundings.

In one of the images below, for instance, Stephenson writes that we see a table "covered in a forest of formerly lit candles"—and within the melted wax, "models of the couple from earlier [in the play] sit drinking tea." It's microcosmic self-repetition—a kind of ontological splintering in architectural form.

This takes on a somewhat mind-bending dimension when we learn that, in the fake department store (within the ruined department store...), attendees are confronted with architectural models "lent to the show by the architects Conran & Partners (so, interestingly, these models are for actual redevelopments that may someday be built)." That is, real buildings, constructed perhaps ten or more years from now, could someday be realistically interpreted as hypertrophied spatial aftereffects of this particular stage set.

[Images: Photos by Jim Stephenson].

In any case, I've included many of Stephenson's photos here, documenting the experience, but there are more on his website (along with a much longer description of the space).

[Image: Photo by Jim Stephenson].

You'll find that I've barely even begun to describe the set's intricacy: there are internal CCTV networks covering the unfolding of the play, multi-lingual actors and actresses wandering through the scenes, and even a secret passageway through a department store cupboard. The final space, like the boss level of some massive new game, "is a huge room, almost an entire floor of the Co-Op," Stephenson explains, "filled with the remains of a former orchard. A deforestation scene, with woodchips all over the floor and tree stumps left."

[Image: Photo by Jim Stephenson].

And, with that, this particular variation on Chekhov's "Cherry Orchard" comes to an end.

(Also check out Jim Stephenson's straight-ahead architectural photography while you are at his site).

Harvard Law's Jack Goldsmith, the Brooking Institution's Benjamin Wittes, and UT-Austin's Robert M. Chesney--security-law heavyweights each of them--have teamed up to create a new blog, Lawfare, subtitled "Hard Security Choices." Here's how they define their mission:

We mean to devote this blog to that nebulous zone in which actions taken or contemplated to protect the nation interact with the nation’s laws and legal institutions.

And here's how they define the neologism Lawfare:

The name Lawfare refers both to the use of law as a weapon of conflict and, perhaps more importantly, to the depressing reality that America remains at war with itself over the law governing its warfare with others.

It's in my RSS reader, and should probably be in yours, too. But here's some early advice to the authors: Provide more links! In the blog's second post, Wittes argues that the law of the land w/r/t detention is presently "a muddle":

The judges who are hearing these cases, we argued, have disagreed about a great many issues that are foundational to the procedural and substantive law of detention. This point is, well, a matter of simple fact; it should not be subject to dispute among serious people. And yet, to our surprise, it has been disputed.

I've downloaded the 113-page D.C. Circuit opinion Wittes links to in the post. Why not provide links, as well, to the posts by these unserious/serious people with whom he is clashing, so readers can better weigh their (worthless?) arguments? The new blog appears to be unrelated to the Lawfare Project, which has a similar mission.

If the numbers are there, I’d like to see them. Otherwise this speculation about the graying of the profession doesn’t really seem to be fact-based.

“ALA is still promoting the idea that we are approaching a librarian shortage and cannot possibly train enough people to continue on the grand tradition of librarianship. This information was suspect a couple years ago, and considering the state if libraries right now–academic, public and special– it’s a damn lie.” [via @librarianmer]

Dead Kennedys’ Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables album was released September 2, 1980. Here’s a slightly earlier live performance of “Kill the Poor.”

Aida Edemariam interviews Terry Pratchett for the Guardian. Here, on the encroachments of Alzheimer's:

He doesn't say it in so many words, but that must also be combined with grief for the loss of his ability to write longhand, or type with anything other than one finger at a time (although, weirdly, he is still perfectly able to sign his name — "the bit that knows how to sign my name is an entirely different bit of the brain"); the grief of knowing that while he may have years yet, most of his other mental faculties will go the same way. But probably not suddenly.

"Every day must be a tiny, incrementally . . . incremental . . . incremental . . . – he stumbled over a word; you must write that one down," Pratchett says with a dark, almost-laugh. (Having been a journalist himself, before becoming a PR in the nuclear industry and thence a novelist, he rarely passes up a chance to remind you that he knows how journalists work) ". . . incremental . . . change on the day before. So what is normal? Normal was yesterday. If you lose a leg, one day you're hopping around on one leg, so you know the difference.

"The last test I did was the first where I wasn't as good as the previous time. I actually forgot David Cameron. I just blanked on him" – this time the laugh contains, what – a kind of ironic approval? "What happens is, I call it the ball bearing. It's there, it just hasn't gone into the slot." He cannot begin to do tests that require him to scribble shapes, but asked to list names of animals, "I industriously say more than you can possibly imagine" – you can just see the pleasure of the earnest nerd in school – "and we go on for a little while until she smiles and says, 'Yes, we know, we know.'

"And then there was the time with dear Claudia with the Germanic accent – which is always good if someone's interrogating you – and she said, 'What would you do with a hammer? And I said, 'If I had a hammer, I'd hammer in the morning. I'd hammer in the evening, all over this land.' And by the end I was dancing around the room, with her laughing. The laugh will be on the other foot, eventually, and I'm aware of that. But it shows how different things can be: I can still handle the language well, I can play tricks with it and all the other stuff – but I have to think twice when I put my pants on in the morning."

1) Stephen O’Connor’s new collection of stories, Here Comes Another Lesson, has just been published by Free Press. He will be giving readings and participating in other events throughout September and October. For details and reviews, click here.

2) Rosecrans Baldwin’s first novel, You Lost Me There, has received raves from NPR, the Daily Beast, and Entertainment Weekly. The book is a NYTBR editor’s pick. He’ll be reading in New York on September 15 at McNally-Jackson Books.

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* For more Author Updates, click here. Don’t forget to check out the Significant Objects Book Shop, titles added regularly!

I loved everything about Paul A. J. Davis's TLS piece on a new scholarly edition of Rochester's poems, but particularly its repeated references to a readership of specialists - it gives me this wonderful vision of an abstruse and tiny yet committed nation of scholars toiling in archives across the land. Anyway, here's a taste, where Davis contemplates the "full-blown eccentricity" of the editors' choice to use as copy-text for "Upon Nothing" "the 'separate' of the poem which Germaine Greer discovered in 1993 in a box of Chancery documents in the Public Records Office and identified as featuring corrections in the hand of Rochester’s mother (the documents relate to disputes about the Dowager Countess’s estates)":

[W]hat most conclusively tells against Fisher’s conjecture [that the Countess might have amended the poem to Rochester's dictation] is comparison of the readings in Lady Rochester’s copy against the lists of variants given by Love (who for some reason did not collate it) and Walker. This reveals that the Countess left uncorrected a number of obvious scribal errors, including a hypermetric line (with Rochester dictating?) whose probable “authorial” forms can be found in other copies. Meanwhile, all but one of her corrected forms are shared with an identifiable subgroup of manuscripts – and not the one which, in Love’s judgement, offers the best guide to what Rochester may originally have written.

The sole exception comes in the highly unstable line “Thou from the virtuous, Nothing, take away”, where (according to Fisher) she corrected the ending to “durst delay”. That is an otherwise unattested and potentially attractive reading – but it is not what Lady Rochester wrote. Other personal writings which have found their way into the same Chancery box (her recipe for face-water” and some scraps of penitential reflection) provide ample evidence of the Countess’s distinctively spiky and discontinuous hand, and particularly of its most salient characteristic: difficulty in joining up the circles of “e”s and “o”s. What she corrected “take away” to was not “durst delay” but “doest delay” – one of the commonest readings in the other witnesses. In all likelihood, then, Rochester’s mother amended her copy of “Upon Nothing” not at the dictation of the poet himself, but from another manuscript. Then again, the fact that she did this is interesting enough in itself.

Now less than ever.

The year I attended Clarion, most of us had rooms on the same hall. As a result, a fair amount of our interaction took place in said hall. We’d sit on the floor, theorizing about the potential undergarment preferences of revered authors, how best to deploy pus, fetuses, and chainsaws in the next stories we submitted, and other topics of note, often until All Hours Of The Night. Every so often, I’d be seized with a sense of responsibility, declare that I Needed To Write! and retreat to my room and my Mac Plus.

(And now you have an idea how long ago I attended.)

But then, after a while, I wouldn’t be able to stand hearing the fragments of conversation and laughter, and out into the hall I’d return.

Dear Internet friends, you are now the metaphorical equivalent of that hall.

So despite the fact that I’ve not yet finished revising the script for Bad Houses*, I’m returning to whatever passes for my regular blogging schedule. I’ve actually been making tiny notes about things to blog about, even: Graphic novel process nerdery. Ancestral artifacts. Various books I wish to extol. More excerpts from my dad’s sf fanzines. Why I like hot yoga. Why I like Scrivener. Inconvenient ideas. The search for the One True Bag. Etc.

For now, I’ll just point you toward a chance to win a signed copy of The Rules for Hearts from the excellent Books on the House. But stay tuned.

And if there’s something you want me to talk about here that’s not included in the above list, by all means, let me know in a comment!

*I’m far enough along that I feel okay about re-emerging. Really.

Hello, friends and readers and interested parties:

Just a quick word to say we’re here, and there will be news of our activities soon. We’re hard at work finalizing the lineup and other details of the Significant Objects book. We’ll have more to say and announce soon. Thank you for your patience!

Oh, and we are still doing the Twitter thing, of course. Follow us @SignificObs if you please.

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Hollis Robbins, a professor of the humanities at the Peabody Institute, part of Johns Hopkins, didn't worry when the man she was dating confessed that his ex-wife had once called his interest in his alma mater, Harvard, "pathological." Sure he wore Harvard ties, went to all the alumni events, and talked about Harvard all the time. And, to be entirely honest, Robbins had met "John" because, as a graduate alumna of Harvard with a daughter about to apply to college, she thought it would be strategically advantageous to become a more active Harvardian herself. But over time, "John's" interest in Harvard did begin to seem a bit over the top. No visit to Cambridge went without a tour of the Mount Auburn Cemetery, the resting place of many a Harvard man. She helped him build a Wikipedia page about one of John's favorite professors, long dead, whose course he had taken decades ago. And while, in theory, John was interested in the life of the mind, his appreciation for Robbins's work and literary interests soon faded--replaced, as ever, by more Harvard chat. Writes Robbins, in the latest issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education (subscribers only):

John's attachment to Harvard seemed a little like what Kurt Vonnegut, in Cat's Cradle, called a "granfalloon," a "seeming team" of people whose connection is tenuous and essentially meaningless, like Hoosiers or people who work at General Electric. There's no substantial basis for the grouping. A "karass," by contrast, is a group whose connections are unpredictable but of cosmic significance, perhaps based on a deeply shared commitment. That I could understand. Still, I am, or was, a good girlfriend, so I kept to myself Vonnegut's wicked rhyme: "If you wish to study a granfalloon, just remove the skin of a toy balloon."

Reader, she dumped him. And her daughter turned out to have no interest in Harvard in any case. She's now at Claremont McKenna.

[Image: "Storm Clouds Over Central Park" by Joseph Bergantine].

Do urban landscapes act as attractors for storms and hurricanes? "New research shows that rough areas of land, including city buildings and naturally jagged land cover like trees and forests, can actually attract passing hurricanes," a study claimed last week.

It works because the whole landscape acts as a kind of vortex or chimney: "Rough cityscapes and forests trap air. This compresses the air and forces it up into the atmosphere, adding energy to the storm and pulling the center of the hurricane toward the rough region. As a result, a city can cause a hurricane to swerve from its predicted path by as much as 20 miles."

"Cities impose greater friction on the swirling flow because of the tall buildings," said Johnny Chan, a professor of meteorology at the [City University of Hong Kong]. "Our results show that tropical cyclones tend to be 'attracted' towards areas of higher friction. So it is possible that cities could cause tropical cyclones to veer towards them."

Defining cities simply as "rough areas of land," comparable to forests or cliffsides, seems actually to underestimate the bewildering porosity, and thus the true storm potential, of urban space—with tens of thousands of rooms and corridors, offering slightly different levels of temperature and air pressure, just sitting there behind closed doors like a storm reservoir. As if every silent room around you right now, in your home, campus, or office park, leads an unacknowledged meteorological double-life: rooms and streets full of air poised just this side of thunderous disequilibrium, on the cusp of becoming a hurricane.

[Image: Hurricane Katrina approaches New Orleans—possibly attracted there, a new study suggests, by the "rough cityscape" of the greater metropolitan region].

I'm reminded of the storm-storage islands described in Greek mythology—for instance, one of my favorite architectural designs of all time, from Virgil's Aeneid, a place called "Aeolia, the weather-breeding isle," where all the winds of the world are stored:

Here in a vast cavern King Aeolus
Rules the contending winds and moaning gales
As warden of their prison. Round the walls
They chafe and bluster underground. The din
Makes a great mountain murmur overhead.
High on a citadel enthroned,
Scepter in hand, he molifies their fury,
Else they might flay the sea and sweep away
Land masses and deep sky through empty air.
In fear of this, Jupiter hid them away
In caverns of black night. He set above them
Granite of high mountains—and a king
Empowered at command to rein them in
Or let them go. (Book 1, 75-89)

Only here, in the 21st-century city, some rogue weather god keeps unparalleled atmospheric disturbances hidden away inside a carefully guarded urban archive of future storms, just waiting for release: proto-hurricanes saved inside sports stadiums, opera houses, suburban homes, and office towers, compressed down into sewers and alleys and discount shoe warehouse storefronts, all bodies of air prepared to become gales if the right links and cross-connections can be made. Vast ductwork cuts in and out of the city, carefully sealed off inside with valves—valves that should only be opened if you want to seed new storm systems, like a multi-county air conditioner gone absurdly out of control.

Or it's the breezy future of street-cleaning. An alternative to fireworks on the 4th of July. A side-effect of urban planning just waiting to be weaponized. An opportunity for urban scale climatological re-engineering brought to you by Trane.

[Image: Hurricane Isabel seen from space].

We saw long ago, for instance, that "many of the skyscrapers in Shanghai could become quite dangerous" due to the high winds they've started to generate. Indeed, "concerns have been raised about the strong and thus damaging winds that are result[ing] from the dense population of skyscrapers so central to the metropolis."

The city, in other words, is generating its own weather. Add this new study—with cities like New Orleans and Miami and New York literally attracting hurricanes to themselves—and the burgeoning field of urban architectural meteorology just got a lot more urgent (and interesting).

(Thanks to Tim Maly for the link!)

"Higher Education? How Colleges Are Wasting Our Money and Failing Our Kids--and What We Can Do About It," by Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus, has gotten a lot of attention recently.* In an interview the Atlantic conducted this summer with Hacker, an emeritus professor of political science at Queens College, in New York, one line in particular stood out. Asked about a half-serious suggestion, in the book, to abandon selective college admissions in favor of a lottery system, Hacker said:

In Holland, which is a sweet little country, everybody was getting convulsed about medical school admissions. In the end, they decided, who cares? They started making the decision by giving each applicant a number and pulling numbers out of a bowl. Apparently, Holland's health care and medical system are as good as they ever were.

Really? Drawing straws to decide who becomes a doctor? I contacted some medical-school officials in that "sweet little country" to check out that assertion. It's not untrue, but there are significant caveats. One fact about med-school admissions in the Netherlands makes random selection sound even more startling, at first: Students enroll in medical school directly from high school. But, for good or ill, Holland's high-schools are more significantly tracked, or stratified, than U.S. schools, and only students from the most academically rigorous institutions are eligible. It is true that, through the 1990s, students who had achieved at least a passing grade in a rigorous high-school curriculum were accepted to medical school by lottery. But the lottery was weighted for grade-point average. So after an initial draw students with high grades were eligible for a second draw, while those with lower grades were not. Even a weighted lottery proved to be politically unpopular, however--viewed as insufficiently meritocratic--and for the last decade medical schools have been allowed to devise additional standards for up to half of their entering classes. (Also, high-school students with the absolute highest grades now automatically enroll in the school of their choice.) Moreover, according to Olle ten Cate, director of the Center for Research and Development of Education, at the University Medical Center, in Utrecht, political pressure is building to abandon the lottery system altogether. This distresses people like him, who believe that once G.P.A. and a solid curriculum are taken into account, a lottery is 1.) fair and 2.) produces excellent doctors. Social science supports his view, he says, that further selective criteria are superfluous, providing no additional useful information. *I add my own two cents to the conversation in Sunday's New York Times Book Review.

Mickey Kaus links to a provocative and worthwhile, if typically grandiose, post by Walter Russell Mead, about higher education. The gist is that universities are not preparing students well for the world as it actually exists. For example, "In an age of outsourcing and technological change, a law degree (even from a 'name' school) is no longer going to be the kind of ticket to affluence that it once was." Among the nuggets of advice: --Schools and college train you to think like a bureaucrat (or at least meritocrat). "You have to fight the tendency of the educational system to turn you into a timeserving baby bureaucrat, following the rules and waiting for the inevitable promotion ... Work or volunteer--not just for money, but to keep your hand in the real world. Live off campus. Start a business. Shake things up." --Channeling Tom Friedman, Mead continues: "Your competition isn’t sitting in the next library carrel. Your competition is in China and India--and your competition isn’t hanging out at frat parties or sitting around watching sitcoms with dorm-mates. It isn’t getting stoned and it isn’t putting its energy into chasing the opposite (or apposite) sex. Your competition isn’t taking courses on gender studies; it isn’t majoring in ethnic studies, or the history of film. Your competition is working hard, damned hard, and is deadly serious about learning." --Skip vocational education. Get a "traditional liberal education," which will equip you for change and fluidity. --Forget about name-brand colleges, but pick the right courses (no "silly courses"--see above--or "guts"). --Learn to write. Companies of all sorts are finding it cost-efficient to fire editors. When that happens, you're toast if you can't produce readable prose on your own. There are some specific things to object to here, such as, for example, the rather '80s-sounding praise of the Asian-student work ethic, which, while admirable in many ways, has also been shown to de-emphasize creativity. It's been Americans, and notably Californians (who are not known for shunning the opposite sex, film courses, or hanging out) who have produced the great start-ups (so far). But the kicker is the piece of advice Mead puts at No. 2 in his list: "Most of your elders know very little about the world into which you are headed." In other words, take pontificating columns like this one with a grain of salt.

The Suburbs’ In Combo album came out September 1, 1980. I had no idea that there had been a promo video for “Cows,” but that’s the glory of YouTube.