State of the Blog Ventures

The recent completion of the Reading List, which for a long time was the leading personal raison d’etre of this here blog, has made me wonder where things stand in the rest of the blog ventures. Here’s a quick look:

The Infinite Art Tournament
32%
Strange though it might seem, it looks as though the eponymous art appreciation exercise of the blog in its modern form is already 1/3 complete. We are still a few months shy of the halfway point of the First Round, mind you, but subsequent rounds rapidly get a lot smaller as artists begin to leave the tournament. Heck, we’ve already lost 76 of the 500 artists who get to play in the big show, and the Play-In Tournament, which is only a few months from finishing up, has ground through more than 60 more.

Element of the Month
45%
Fans of fundamental materialism can relax; there are plenty more silvery-grey metals to go through. The original list, which we have been progressing through in random order, only went as high as Meitnerium, nine shy of the 118 elements that are currently on the books. On the other hand, I doubt I’ll have much to report about Ununtrium, Ununpentium, Ununseptium, and Ununoctium, and may combine those and a few of the other lately-named under an “Extremely Fakey Elements” omnibus post.

Michael5000 vs. Shakespeare
10% Texts
13% Performance
24% Film Adaptation
This is one that has been off-again and on-again. It is certainly way down from the heyday when it had a blog all to itself. The theoretical goal is to post on the/a written text of, a performance of, and a film adaptation of, all of the Shakespeare plays. Realistically, I’d like to read all the texts. Eventually. If I live a long and healthy life.

Michael5000 vs. Dickens
55%
The goal here isn’t so much to post about all of Dickens, but merely to read all of the non-Christmas Dickens that I hadn’t got to already. Right now I’m standing at 8 out of 14.5 novels.

Michael5000 vs. The Beatles
23%
With only 13 canonical albums to plow through, you would think I’d make more progress with this one. But it turns out they are very labor-intensive to write.

The Songs of the 50 States
12%
I’ve skipped a few months here. But, the combination of chronicling my banal travels and stoking my desire to see new places, and new museums, is really too good not to bore you with.  I'm also thinking of tossing in the Provinces as a gesture to my country's vast northern bestie; that would knock me down to 10%.  Also, if this were to continue over the long term, there would likely be some revisitation involved.

Saint of the Month
7%
I’ve only done a couple of dozen saints, nowhere near enough to fill up a full daily calendar. The saints project has a very narrow constituency – consisting of Mrs.5000, pretty much – and I’ve thought about pitching it in on a number of occasions. But then, I always find something new and interesting to read about, and dive in for just one more saint.

The Free Box Tapes
3%
There have been some technical hiccoughs here, including a couple of tape players breaking down and the tape that I am supposed to be listening to currently going missing. I expect to pick up the pace in the fullness of time.

The Jazz Thing
2%
This is a long-term, slow-burn project by design. It’s also logistically clunky, as I’ve found it hard to get my paws on some of the recordings without spending money, which I am naturally loathe to do.

Michael Reads the Bible
50%ish, if memory serves, although you'd have to think the New Testament would go a lot slower.
This project still has its own blog, but it is in mothballs and has not been advanced for nearly two and a half years. I would like to return to it someday.

Blog Projects I Completed
100%

• The Reading List
• The Great Movies
• The More Movies List
• The Forgotten Lands
• Flag Fridays
• 100 Thursday Quizzes
• 90 Monday Quizzes
• 90 Wednesday Quizzes

Of course there have been plenty of boring postcards, droll anecdotes, philatelic ephemera, and such like along the way, and also short-term projects like Classical Wednesdays and the recent map reviews, but I'm only thinking about the extensive lists.


New Blog Projects I Sometimes Think About Launching, Because I’m an Idiot
0%

• Another round of Movies.
• A Tour of the arts holdings in the Castle5000 Collection
• A big tournament-style classical music showdown
• More Quizzes
• Language of the Month

The Infinite Art Tournament, Round 1: Cartier-Bresson v. Bonington!

It's time again for an artist emerging from the brutal jungle of the Play-In Tournament to join the big show, going head to head with an artist from one of the early First Round Ties.  Friends of the Tournament, please welcome to today's First Round Match: Henri Cartier Bresson and Richard Parkes Bonington!

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Henri Cartier-Bresson
1908 - 2004
French

Finished First in Phase 1, Flight 11 of the Play-In Tournament with a voting score of .909.
Finished First in Phase 2, Flight 3 of the Play-In Tournament with a voting score of .600.

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Richard Parkes Bonington
1802 - 1828
English, worked in France

Tied with Pierre Bonnard in his initial Round 1 outing, in March 2012.

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Vote for the artist of your choice in the comments, or any other way that works for you. Commentary and links to additional work are welcome. Polls open for at least one month past posting.

School's Out for Michael5000

I don't know if you noticed, but my review of Kazuo Ishiguro's much-maligned The Unconsoled on Wednesday represented the end of the Reading List Project.  The Reading List was a largely reader-generated list of seventy-some books compiled by vote way back in the Summer of 2007.  Once the list had been compiled, I posted it in an entry called "Back to School with Michael5000," which is a fair representation of what happened.  At six and a half academic years, the Reading List lasted a lot longer than my undergraduate education.  It would be interesting to know which project involved more writing.

I think that's all I'm going to say for the time being.  This will be a day for resting on laurels.

Books Completed 

• Ivo Andric, Bridge on the Drina. Completed April, 2009.
  
• Ball, Bright Earth.  Completed November, 2010.
  
• Beowulf. Completed August, 2008.
  
• Judy Blume, Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret. Completed May, 2010.
  
• Borges, Labyrinths. Completed February, 2014.
• Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre. Completed November, 2009.
  
• Brown, Louis Riel. Completed December, 2009.
  
• Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita. Completed February, 2008.
  
• Byatt, Possession.  Completed July, 2012
• Campbell & Campbell, The China Study. Completed June, 2013.
• Camus, The Stranger.  Completed November, 2010
  
• Cervantes, Don Quixote. Completed June, 2009.
• Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep. Completed November, 2008.
  
• Chaucer, Canterbury Tales.  Completed December, 2010.
• DeWitt, The Last Samurai.  Completed October, 2010.
  
• Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel. Completed April, 2010.
  
• Donaldson, the first Thomas Covenant trilogy.  Completed May, 2012.
• Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov. Completed January, 2008.
  
• Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment.  Completed February, 2011.
  
• The Epic of Gilgamesh. Completed August, 2009.
  
• Graham Greene, The End of the Affair. Completed July, 2009.
• Graham Greene, The Quiet American. Completed February, 2010.
• Hansen, Motoring With Mohammed.  Completed December, 2011.
• Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter. Completed October, 2009.
• Homer, The Iliad. Completed June, 2010.
• Homer, The Odyssey. Completed June, 2010.
• Ishiguro, The Unconsoled. Completed March, 2014.
• Joyce, Ulysses.  Completed August, 2010.
• Kafka, The Trial. Completed January, 2009.
  
• Jasper Fforde, The Eyre Affair. Completed December, 2009.
• Jhumpa Lahiri, Interpreter of Maladies. Completed February, 2010.
• LeGuin, The Earthsea trilogy.  Completed March, 2013.
• L'Engle, A Wrinkle in Time.  Completed November, 2010.
  
• Levin, How the Universe Got its Spots.  Completed September, 2013.
• Lucius Apuleius, The Golden Ass. Completed August, 2009.
• China Mieville, Perdido Street Station. Completed March, 2009.
• Moore/Gibbons, Watchmen.  Completed August, 2013.
• Nabakov, Lolita. Completed March, 2008.
• Nabakov, Pnin.  Completed May, 2011.
• Naipaul, A House for Mr. Biswas.   Completed February, 2014.
• Paton, Cry, the Beloved Country.  Completed November, 2013.
• Ramachandran, Phantoms in the Brain.  Completed November, 2011.
  
• Rawicz, The Long Walk.  Completed April, 2013.
• Robinson, Housekeeping. Completed May, 2008.
• Pamuk, My Name is Red. Completed June, 2008.
• Pullman, His Dark Materials.  Completed August, 2011
  
• J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter books: One, Two (April 2009), Three (February 2010), and Four (April 2011).
• Sapolsky, A Primate's Memoir.  Completed June, 2011.
  
• Scully, Dominion. Completed October, 2008.
• Smiley, A Thousand Acres.  Completed September, 2010.
• Stegner, Angle of Repose. Completed August, 2013.
• Tolstoy, War and Peace.  Completed March, 2013
• Twain, Huckleberry Finn. Completed April, 2008.
• Update, Rabbit, Redux.  Completed March, 2011.
• Voltaire, Candide. Completed April, 2010.
• Woolf, To the Lighthouse.  Completed April, 2011.
  
• Wright, The Moral Animal. Completed January, 2010.

The Infinite Art Tournament, Round 3: Corot v. Dali!

Today's match is a little out of sequence; thanks to ChuckDaddy for alerting me that I needed to get it up and running.  If you don't think you'd have noticed that it was out of sequence -- and indeed, if you've never suspected that there was any intentional pattern to the order of the matches in the first place -- then that's perfectly normal.  ChuckDaddy is a bit of a go-getter when it comes to bracket theory.

By the way, don't procrastinate in casting your vote with this one!  It can only be up for three or four weeks!

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Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot
1796 - 1875
French

Beat 16th Century Italian Correggio in Round 1.
Surprised Gustave Courbet in Round 2.

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Salvador Dali
1904 - 1989
Spanish

Savaged somebody named Charles-François Daubigny in Round 1.
Got away from Lucas Cranach the Elder in Round 2.

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Vote for the artist of your choice in the comments, or any other way that works for you. Commentary and links to additional work are welcome. Polls open for at least one month past posting.

The Reading List: "The Unconsoled."

The Unconsoled
Kazuo Ishiguro, 1995

The Unconsoled was described as a "sprawling, almost indecipherable 500-page work" that "left readers and reviewers baffled". It received strong negative reviews with a few positive ones. Literary critic James Wood said that the novel had "invented its own category of badness."

Well hey, I thought The Unconsoled was fabulous. It was, to be sure, a initially frustrating book, and I spent the first several chapters feeling as though I was listening to a dissonant chord that refused to resolve itself. Later, it occurred to me that "dissonance" is often what we call rich harmony, before we get used to it.

The plot: Ryder, the world’s preeminent concert pianist, arrives in a provincial city with a profound identity crisis. Everyone is hoping that he will reconcile the contrasting impulses towards artistic conservatism and innovation, and in the days leading up to a major concert performance he has a full slate of scheduled appearances with local civic groups and media.  How will he be able to juggle all of these commitments as well as his considerable personal entanglements in the city?

[[Spoilers from here on out. No way around ‘em.]]

The narrative is pretty straightforward for the first two of the novel’s 500+ pages. Ryder checks into his hotel, and enters the elevator with a porter for the trip to the second floor. They enter into conversation – or rather, the porter enters into a monologue, a polite surrealist rant about the history and status of hotel porters in the city. After he has spoken at great length, Ryder eventually realizes that there is a third person in the elevator as well, someone whom he had not noticed earlier, and the conversation now encompasses her as well. As a reader, it eventually becomes impossible for you not to notice that the laws of time and space are being violated; far too much is happening, or at least being said, to fit within a reasonable time frame of an elevator voyage that, we eventually learn, only goes up a single floor.

As things unfold, the logic of time unravels completely, and the logic of space follows close behind. Ryder reports watching or listening to things that are happening in places that he should not be able to see or hear. As he travels through the city, he sometimes must take long journeys to places that should be adjoining, or discovers that places distant from each other are actually two parts of the same building. Crowded urban areas let on to open countryside in impossible configurations.

The social space of Ryder’s experience is pretty messy too. He encounters strangers whom he is surprised to remember are actually people he is intimately connected with. Throughout the town, he randomly encounters friends from childhood and school. People make strange demands, requests, and confidences, and respond to him with unreasonable anger or enthusiasm. Finally, Ryder’s own behavior seems out of his control. He continually resolves to take action, only to be immediately distracted from his decisions, and meets every new request and demand put to him with acquiescence, even when it means abandoning commitments made earlier, even a few seconds earlier. He is continually revaluating his own behavior, typically in a self-serving light, especially when his passivity has made him behave like an ass (which is quite often).

Ryder, in short, is living according to the logic of nightmare. Much is expected of him, he is aware that he is falling short of expectations, yet when he sets out on a course of action it is impossible to follow through. Hell, I had that dream just last night.

So, What Is Ishiguro Up To?

When you begin reading The Unconsoled, you notice that something pretty bizarre is going on, and naturally you start looking for the explanation, the clue, the key that explains why things are so strange in this fictional setting. They never come. There’s the big spoiler: although the narrative will progress, and there will be a sort of cockeyed playing out of cause and effect, the dream logic will persist right up to the final page (which, I might as well tell you, finds our hero riding contentedly on a city streetcar that has a comprehensive breakfast buffet at the back). Naturally, you can’t help but wonder what Ishiguro was up to in writing such a strange story. Here are some of my theories:

I: He wanted to see if he could write an entire long novel set not in a particular place and time, but in an alternative logic. He wanted to see if he could sustain the sense of a dream/nightmare over the course of an entire book.

II: He wanted to weave a large collection of surreal episodes into a long continuous narrative.

III: He wanted to suggest that human experience and nightmare logic aren’t as far apart as we would like them to be. Novels and the stories we construct around our intentions and achievements are all fine and good, but in the actual practice of trying to move forward in the world we are more like Ryder: passive, bewildered, ineffectual, inconsistent, inconstant, and forever in the process of rewriting our own histories to make tolerable sense of the present.

Another writer I happened to be reading at the same time in an unpublished manuscript wrote this about her process:

When I write a story, I write a sentence. The themes and sounds and ideas and shape of that sentence help to shape the next sentence, and so on. So I may start out a paragraph or a chapter, intending for the protagonist to get in their car and drive to the store, but I end up being unable to shape sentences that lead naturally to them doing so. My character can't find their car keys because it somehow becomes dissonant to what I've written for them to do so…. The rogue sentences stay. The story diverges from the plan.

Those intended as minor background characters seize control of the story and don't let it go. Those intended as major characters get involved in something and let the others carry the plot for them. Events I planned to happen won't fit in, and an event I had never considered suddenly emerged as a result of a sentence that was trying merely to marshal the story to a conclusion.

I don’t know if Ishiguro writes this way. But he might be expressing in The Unconsoled the notion that we live this way, the books of our lives unable to reach their planned dénouements as we are battered by the inevitable, relentless rogue chapters, paragraphs, and sentences.

Anyway.

The Unconsoled is told in a formal, emotionally arid first person, with long paragraphs of looping, repetitive dialog spoken by secondary characters. It has comic elements, but it is also rather sad. It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. It is quite long. I feel like I would be going out on a limb to recommend it to anyone, especially knowing as I do that Mrs.5000 found it tedious and unlikeable.

But, after the initial period of disorientation, I thought it was fabulous. I tore through it in a handful of sittings, staying up late because I couldn’t put it down. So, who knows? Maybe you’d like it too.

Incidentally

That concludes my reading list.

The Infinite Art Tournament Second-Round Elimination: Böcklin v. Jan Bruegel!

Two rather famous artists get knocked out of the tournament this week.  Van Dyck was at 1-1-1, before Arnold Böcklin made it past him in his, Böcklin's, second tiebreak match.  Bronzino, meanwhile, had hoped for an influx of voters for over a year, but none have come, and he ends up losing his match with Jan Brueghel that began on January 5, 2013.

If there are no further ties -- always a big "if"! -- then this will be the final Second-Round match on the first of the eight bracket sheets.  The Tournament progresses!

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Arnold Böcklin
1827 - 1901
German; worked in Italy

• Lost to Umberto Boccioni in Round 1.
• Tied with Sir Peter Blake in First Round Elimination.
• Squeaked by Marcel Broodthaers in First Round Elimination Tiebreak by a two-vote swing. YOUR VOTE COUNTS!!!
• Tied again, with Daniel Buren this time, in the Left Bracket Second Round.
• Beat Sir Anthony Van Dyck in Left Bracket Second Round Tiebreak.

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Jan Bruegel (the Elder)
1568 - 1625
Dutch

• Trounced by his father in Round 1.
• Took out Victorian Sir Edward Burne-Jones in a thrilling come-from-behind one-vote victory in First Round Elimination. YOUR VOTE COUNTS!!!
• Knocked out Agnolo Bronzino in theLeft Bracket Second Round.

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Vote for the artist of your choice in the comments, or any other way that works for you. Commentary and links to additional work are welcome. Polls open for at least one month past posting, but likely much longer.

A User's Guide to "Forty Maps that Will Help You Make Sense of the World," Volume VIII

Michael5000 continues his grouchy exegesis of that ubiquitous internet atlas of our times, Forty Maps that Will Help You Make Sense of the World.

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A User's Guide to "Forty Maps that Will Help You Make Sense of the World," Volume VIII

Note: In cutting and pasting the images (at low resolution and for purposes of critique in a non-commercial forum, yo!) I included "Twisted Sifter's" own attribution.  They aren't live links here, so to see the original you would have to go to the original post and click through from there.

36. "Area Codes in Which Ludacris Claims to Have Hoes"

Technical Merit: It is what it is.

Artistic Merit: None ventured, none gained.

Helps One "Make Sense of the World": This visual gag was created by some geography students some years back, when the song in question was popular, and as something to stick on the door of the grad student office it's fairly amusing.  Then the press got hold of it, which was stupid.  Now it's still being flogged at us a decade later, as a delightful little comic surprise on this list of maps that will help us make sense of the world.  Well, whatever.

37. "Where 2% of Australia's Population Lives"

Technical Merit: Adequate but misleading.  By adhering strictly to the boundaries of political divisions, it substantially underestimates the wide open spaces of the Australian countryside.  Especially in the north, a lot of the larger political units will only have a significant population in a single town.

Artistic Merit: None attempted, none gained.

Helps One "Make Sense of the World": Why say it on a map, when you can say it in poetry?

And her five cities, like five teeming sores,
Each drains her: a vast parasite robber-state
Where second hand Europeans pullulate
Timidly on the edge of alien shores.

A. D. Hope, "Australia."

38. "The Longest Straight Line You Can Sail on Earth"

Technical Merit: Unremarkable.

Artistic Merit: Unremarkable.

Helps One "Make Sense of the World": Depends on how you look at it.  In terms of what the map tells us it's telling us -- the longest straight line you can sail on Earth -- it's all fine and good, but who the hell cares?  On the other hand, maybe what we're really supposed to get out of the map is a greater appreciation of the idea of a Great Circle Route, and for that this map might lead to an interesting conversation.  As part of that conversation, however, I'd hope somebody would bring up that "straight line" is not an unproblematic concept.  The line shown here is one defensible concept of a "straight line," but so is the directional bearing that ultimately spirals towards a pole, and so, more than either, is the line that you can not sail, since it immediately begins rising up through the atmosphere, tangential to the spheroid surface of our beautiful blue planet.

39. "Map of Europe Showing Literal Chinese Translations for Country Names"

Technical Merit: A childlike projection with strikingly inept text overlay.

Artistic Merit: None attempted, I hoped.

Helps One "Make Sense of the World": No.  I consulted with Dork Emeritus fingerstothebone, who has a pretty good handle on the Chinese language, on this one, and she confirmed what I expected: these "literal translations" are just rough Chinese homophones for European country names.  You can do it in English, too: "Hungary" means "I want food!"  "Ukraine" means "You major piece of construction equipment!"  "Ireland" means "Angry turf!"  It's all very inane.

40. "Reversed Map with Southern Hemisphere on Top of Map"

Technical Merit: This is a reasonably well-made map.

Artistic Merit: Having wacky, unconventional maps like this hanging on the dormroom or office wall appeals to a certain stripe of folks.

Helps One "Make Sense of the World": If you took an undergraduate geography class, or had a social studies teacher who was into maps at some point in your schooling, you hopefully had the opportunity to meditate on the notion that orienting maps with North at the top is an arbitrary convention.  (If you were reading this daily entertainment back in April 2008, maybe you took this quiz.)

Except, the position of north is not really arbitrary at all.  It really isn't.  North is one of only two geometrically significant points on the Earth's near-sphere; the other is South, and together they mark the points where the imaginary axis of the planet's rotation breaks the surface.  Is North an arbitrary choice among these two points?  In the abstract, sure; but, since most folks live in the Northern Hemisphere (see Map #31) and since there is a bright fixed star, Polaris, that has given folks millennia of guidance on the locational front, North is really something of a slam dunk as the direction that would end up at the top of the page.

Now of course there is a more academic sense in which, in terms of pure theory, "up" could be assigned any which way we wanted.  To make that point, though, it is silly to just flip the world upside down.  If you want to get arbitrary, get truly arbitrary: declare that the southernmost point of the island of Celebes is henceforth "up," and make your map accordingly.  The result would be much more interesting and provocative than the usual pedestrian Australia-on-top business.

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Next Time Out: Oh hey, we're done!
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