Puck

Charlotte Higgins knows an awful lot about really old stuff. When she says “classics,” she’s not talking about rock ‘n’ roll shredders from the 1970s. She’s talking Greek and Latin language writers from before Jesus first spit up on a pile of hay.

It’s All Greek to Me is one of those compendium books that, in a series of snippets and vignettes, tries to give the casual reader (commuting on the train or hanging out in a café trying not to be distracted by everything go on around her) a sense of where she came from.

But that sense will only be even moderately inclusive if our imaginary casual reader is very, very white. There’s no sense in Higgins’ book of there being any foundational culture other than the Greeks. Indeed, there’s no indication here that having the Greeks as the foundation of all that is good, true and beautiful might not be such a good or beautiful thing. There’s no sense here of the horrible xenophobia that is central to the ancient Greek cultures, nor of the racist sense of superiority that infuses much of ancient Greek literature. Even though they lived in a Mediterranean culture themselves, the Greeks figured that pretty much everyone living in the “warm climates” was lazy, uncultivated — and dark-skinned. Read the rest of this entry »

“The dead are the pensioners of remembrance,” João Magueijo writes toward the end of A Brilliant Darkness: The Extraordinary Life and Mysterious Disappearance of Ettore Majorana, the Troubled Genius of the Nuclear Age. With his book, Maguijo has built a home for his pensioner, the probably dead but definitely disappeared physicist Ettore Majorana. It may be sometimes a cathouse (and you thought physicists were all serious and cerebral and stuff), sometimes a house of mirrors, but Majorana does indeed dwell on every page.

Ettore Majorana, we learn, was the wunderkind of the early atomic age. In his native Italy, the Sicilian worked with Enrico Fermi — or worked circles around Fermi and his circle of geniuses, according to Magueijo. Himself a physicist of some repute, Magueijo isn’t a great writer (his sentences sometimes get tangled in their dangling participles), but he’s clearly a passionate one who cares enough about his subjects to have done vast amounts of homework.

The underlying metaphor in A Brilliant Darkness is that the mysteriously disappeared Majorana is the elusive neutrino which passes through ordinary matter unperturbed and is notoriously hard to detect. (In the time it took you to read the foregoing sentence some 100 trillion neutrinos passed through your body.)

It’s not just a conceit: Majorana was hot on the trail of the neutrino, whose existence had been theorized, when he disappeared on March 26, 1938. Majorana’s work was important to Fermi’s project during World War II: developing the atomic bomb. Magueijo wonders, if Majorana had disappeared, whether the younger man might have tempered the venerable Fermi’s decision to join the Manhattan project.

We’ll never know, of course, and Magueijo, a physicist who deals in probabilities but never in certainties, revels in the epistemological uncertainty. In any case, we get a mystery story wrapped up in a biography that unfolds the history of particle physics in a most enjoyable way.

Originally published on Curled Up With A Good Book at www.curledup.com. © Brian Charles Clark, 2010

Henry Pollack is a venerable scientist with a thousand stories to share. He’s been doing ice science for over 40 years. He’s also been explaining what he does, and the implications of what he and his colleagues have learned, for nearly as long. All of that experience makes A World Without Ice a great introduction to climate science.

Pollack doesn’t bother to tackle the climate change deniers head on. At this stage of the game, there’s really no point. Although surveys inform us that Americans remain stubbornly pig-headed about the subject, the rest of us are innovating and positioning ourselves to capitalize on the inevitably growing demand for greener, cleaner technology. For example, roughly thirty percent of greenhouse gas emissions come from the buildings we live and work in. Reducing emissions from buildings (either by building new ones right or by retrofitting existing ones) not only lowers our overall carbon footprint but lowers utility bills, as well. So the deniers can fume all they want; they’ll modify their tune soon enough when their wallets are empty. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s common knowledge by now that the Irish saved civilization. What we didn’t realize, not until Joel Conroy came along to tell us in his award-winning film Waveriders, is that the Irish also gave us surfing.

The Irish invented surfing? Yeah, right, and Jamaicans gave us bobsledding. But wait: the Irish have waves. Big ones. The wall of water known as the North Atlantic slams into the wildly west coast of Ireland and makes waves. Really big ones.

Waveriders argues that Ireland really does have a claim to a central place in the history of surfing. And, based not only the majesty of those west coast waves but the fact that the messiah of the modern surfing revival was Irish as well, we need to take that claim seriously. The messiah’s name was George Freeth, and he was born on the island of Oahu in 1883. He had a part-Hawaiian mother and an Irish father. California clams him as one of their own, but so does the Irish city of Ulster. What there’s no argument about is Freeth’s important role in the popularization of surfing and his modernizing of lifeguarding.

Freeth learned surfing from its true inventors, the Hawaiians. The arguably Irish man brought his talent for surfing to California, surf-crafting the paddleboard and rafting it into service for saving the lives of those imperiled at sea. Freeth died in 1919, a victim of the global flu pandemic. A bronze bust of Freeth was stolen from the Redondo Beach Pier in 2008, probably for its melt value. Read the rest of this entry »

Don DeLillo’s Point Omega is a quiet jewel of a book, a short novel that is really two short stories (the beginning and end of one bookending the second story in the middle) that read like a play. Nothing much happens in Point Omega: the premise of the novel is conversation, our attempts to communicate with the intention of moving another person — the kind of suasion that enrolls a collaborator in an arty film project or another yet disappear into the desert.

As if by touched by fate or brushing up against coincidence, the novel’s bookends (the outer story) communicates only barely with the story in the middle. The inside story is woven by three characters who spend their time talking.

The younger man wants to make a film featuring Richard Elster, the older man, who was an advisor to warmongers. The younger man wants to get him up against a wall and hear what that was like. Ester tells him that they wanted “an individual of his interdisciplinary range, a man of reputation who might freshen the dialogue, broaden the viewpoint.” Someone who could bring new insight to the stumbling war on that adjective, terror, to “the blat and stammer of Iraq.” Someone who could deepen and make rigorous the banality of evil. Read the rest of this entry »

“The music came forth as a no that became a yes, then a no again, then again a yes:” and then the drums kicked in and “nothing is true except our conviction that the world we are asked to accept is false. If nothing is true, everything is possible.” (9)

Welcome to Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century, Greil Marcus’s collage-o-phonic booklike substance that rings with voices in a thousand registers.

“As I tried to follow this story [the one he perceives running through chapters filled with medieval heretics, Dadaists, Situationists, and the Sex Pistols: “I am an anti-christ,” sang Johnny Rotten]–the characters changing into each other’s clothes until I gave up trying to make them hold still–what appealed to me were its gaps. and those moments when the story that has lost its voice somehow recovers it, and what happens then…. [quoting an ad for Potlatch he found in a “slick-paper, Belgian neo-surrealist review” dated 1954:] ” ‘Everywhere, youth (as it calls itself) discovers a few blunted knives, a few defused bombs, under thirty years of dust and debris; shaking in its shoes, youth hurls them upon the consenting rabble, which salutes it with its oily laugh.’ ” (20)

Situationist gnome, 1963: “The moment of real poetry brings all the unsettled debts of history back into play.” (21) That’s getting personal: I’ve resisted reading this book for twenty years. Now that I have, and since you’ve read this far, I recommend you do, too. So much for the niceties of the book review. What follows is engagement with Lipstick Traces. Read the rest of this entry »

Manny Farber wrote like he ran with the Beatniks, smoking, drinking and bopping to jazz rhythms. In Farber on Film, we get the straight, the uncut, the complete writings of Farber on film.

Farber wrote scores of film reviews for The Nation, Time, The New Republic and other publications. But his reviews rarely fit into the “first this, then that, and I liked it because” box that most reviewers cram themselves into. Farber mused on the beauty of images, confronted actors’ choices, challenged directors, and digressed down rarely trod paths in order to introduce pertinent impertinences and relevant social revelations.

Farber was a self-described champion of “termite art”: he loved eccentric virtuosity rather than “white elephants,” conformist monstrosities that “pin the viewer to the wall and slug him with wet towels of artiness and significance.” Termite art, in contrast, is “ornery, wasteful, stubbornly self-involved, doing go-for-broke art and not caring what comes of it.” White elephant art was seamless mass in “pursuit of… continuity” and “harmony,” while termite art participated in the world: it is “an act of observing and being in the world” and

goes always forward eating its own boundaries, and, like as not, leaves nothing in its path other than the signs of eager, industrious, unkempt activity. Read the rest of this entry »

Set in war-torn, German-occupied Poland during World War II, Pornografia is a key text of late modernism — and this is the first edition that is a translation into English from Gombrowicz’s Polish. (The previous edition came into English from a French translation.)

Witold Gombrowicz is a novelist of psychological entanglements, and Pornografia is a novel of erotic entanglement. It is often cruel and sometimes cruelly funny. It is a novel by a man certain that language in some profound way determines ontology, that what we hear and say sculpts the way we are.

Set in a country idyll with the war roaring dully in the background, two refugee intellectuals conspire to contrive a liaison between a pair of kids who have grown up together there in the Polish countryside. Pornografia is an unholy little novel, chillingly dark, at times dripping with cynicism, but at its best beset by bracing, high-brow hilarity and jaded, deeply sublimated hysteria. First published in 1966, it’s only recently that readers have begun to talk about Gombrowicz as a Latin American writer rather than a Polish one. The question of influence is good, if ultimately divisive. Division is precisely Gombrowicz’s strength; you imagine he not only enjoys taking the frog apart with a tiny knife, he begins to split the world apart as if it were empirically just an intimately interbleeding network of heartbeats. Read the rest of this entry »

Gain, Richard Power’s amazing sixth novel (originally published in 1998), takes one of the most difficult issues of our time and humanizes it. The issue is corporate culpability. We all know that “better living through chemistry” has its price and its consequences, but who is to pay?

Not Clare, the transnational corporation whose history is charted across three generations in this saga of a novel. The company makes soap — a cleaning product that offers the homemaker so much to gain. And the company, of course, has gained, prodigiously, over the years: it has profited immensely.

Clare manufacturers its products in Lacewood, Illinois, where Laura Bodey is an estate agent. Laura has ovarian cancer. Her story – of her illness and how, as she disintegrates, her family reunites around her – is intertwined with the story of Clare International.

Long before the novel makes the facts plain, we’ve already drawn connections: our chemistry is killing us. The brilliant Powers draws parallels and cycles in abundance but, to his credit, he never once hits over the head with any moralizing message.

Perennial plants flower and die, and so do people and industries, he implies. It’s the way of the world. We can change things, perhaps and, after reading Gain, we may well join one crusade or another, seeking justice for victims of industries focused on nothing but gain or, contrarily, seeking to eliminate the tort system that is, at this point, the victim’s only source of recompense and punishment for the polluters who make us sick. Either way, or no way, that’ll be what you got out of the novel, not what’s there. Read the rest of this entry »

Leonard Bernstein, early mass media star, gave millions of people a long string of sophisticated lessons in music. Throughout the 1950s and ’60s, Bernstein appeared on all three major television networks many times as brilliant educator and glorious composer, all the while and just off screen he was also a glamorous bon vivant. Bernstein was a man who lived large and looms large still in the musical consciousness of the United States, and the world as well.

From 1958 to 1973, Bernstein delivered four TV music performance/lectures per year, illustrated lavishly with the likes of the New York Philharmonic: the Young People’s Concerts series is still one of the longest-running programs on classical music. Earlier in the 1950s, he delivered for Omnibus a handful of performances that are considered among the finest of the so-called “golden age of television.” Omnibus was a dignified, mid-century monumental series hosted by Alastair Cooke that explored art, science and the humanities. Read the rest of this entry »