But then he tells an audience at a festival that ebook readers are potentially damaging to society because of the impermanence of the words they display on the screen (via CSM):

“That kind of radical contingency is not compatible with a system of justice or responsible self-government.”

He seems to be suggesting that reading words which are not printed on paper somehow makes the experience of reading less real. Furthermore, it seems this unreality is so ephemeral in its nature that society itself will be destabilized as a result.

To conflate the behavior of an electronic device with the future viability of a society seems a little excessive, doesn’t it?

We’ve had the intertubes for better than 20 years now, and in that time we’ve seen (probably) petabytes of information produced on it — much of which is subjectively assessable as noise. That’s easy to prove; how much of the internet do you not spend time paying attention to? Most of it.

(That doesn’t mean that the stuff you ignore is being ignored by everyone else, of course; it just means that your areas of interest don’t intersect with everything that’s available to you. This is no more a problem than the fact that there are probably parts of your local library or bookstore whose shelves you’ve hardly visited, if ever. Time and attention are finite, and interests are subjective, after all.)

The point is that this ephemerality of information has not destabilized society just yet. Are things different today than they were thirty years ago? Of a certainty. Are things worse? Some are. Are things better? Some definitely are.

For instance, it’s now possible for young discontents to hook up with terrorist organizations, and become fully radicalized. That’s a problem. It’s also possible for gay kids to see messages from people who’ve struggled with the same things they’re facing, and gain encouragement from those messages. That’s a good thing.

Almost all of what you can get online is ephemeral, in the same way that a book you load into an e-reader is ephemeral. (Strictly speaking, printed books are ephemeral as well, though much more slowly.) What matters, though, is not the permanence of the medium; what matters is the impression that is made by the message contained in the medium.

Content, in other words, is more important than media.

What you read has much more of an effect on your mind than the thing you’re reading it from, be it e-ink, an OLED, phosphors, or pigment on parchment and its myriad analogues. A quality message will remain with the reader whether it’s been acquired from a Kindle or a sheet of pulp.

Here’s another objection he has:

“A screen always feels like we could delete that, change that, move it around. So for a literature-crazed person like me, it’s just not permanent enough.”

I wonder if people living in medieval times objected to movable type using similar arguments.

That Franzen seems to think media is at least as important as content suggests something, though I can’t tell whether it’s about his fear of his own ephemerality; or his fear that his work would vanish were it not for stacks of printed books with his name on the cover; or fear that he’s really not that great a writer in the first place, so his books are barely worth reading to begin with; or just a total failure to comprehend technology more modern than an Underwood.

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It apparently is true that horned lizards (“horny toads”) will shoot blood out of the sinuses next to their eyes if they feel appropriately threatened, but I gather that it’s usually canines that scare them to that extent. It’s difficult, it seems, for a human to make them do it.

Hey, check this out. It’s another Mimbres design.

I’m not entirely certain what it is, but it looks like a flower — a sunflower? So it seems I was a little off yesterday when I said the Mimbres didn’t depict plants. Flowers, at least, seemed to get their attention.

Beyond that, though, consider the astonishing technical quality here. This pattern was painted on the inside of a bowl — a concave curved surface — and is so precisely executed that none of the “petals” is any wider or thinner than any other one.

There must have been some kind of mechanical help here. Some method of measuring, and an understanding of how to fractionate a circle to any desired specification. And as for the straightness of the lines — inside a bowl — this is simply an impressive work.

Here’s one that I’ve been thinking about more and more lately.

It sure looks like a star to me, and it’s reasonable to presume that it is.

Working from that assumption, I figured it was probably meant to depict Sirius, the brightest nighttime star in the northern hemisphere … but then I got to thinking about something.

The Mimbres were doing their thing from about 1000 to 1150 CE. There was a significant astronomical event that was recorded by Chinese and Muslim astronomers in 1054. It was the supernova that became the Crab Nebula.

1054 is right in the butter zone for Mimbres art. And the supernova would have been visible, day and night, for nearly two years to anyone in the northern hemisphere. Only the moon would have outshone it by night, and it would have been significantly brighter than all other stars.*

If the shape on that bowl is a star, it might be Sirius — or it could be the 1054 supernova, possibly even painted by an eyewitness to the event. Recorded and passed along to us from the depths of a millennium.

When I think about that it makes me shiver just a little. How about you?

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* Except, of course, for the one we’re orbiting.

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(This will have some images below the fold — some of them are fairly large.)

For starters, these people were not primitive, in the cultural or artistic sense. Some of the things they painted are strikingly recognizable, despite the specialized depictions and patterns put on them. Looking at their designs, I see a quail

a Gila monster

what looks for all the world like an alligator snapping turtle

a bluegill

a tomato horn worm

and quite possibly a flounder.

Other images — bats, parrots, monkeys, lizards and so on — are just as recognizable. They also did images of people doing daily things such as fishing.

Despite the superficial simplicity of their designs, though, it would be a mistake to look on them as being somehow primitive or less-advanced works. The Mimbres style is distinctive and appeared, from the beginning, to be quite highly developed, right up until they stopped their art pursuits.

What happened to them? I don’t think anyone knows, and while I’m sure at least some of their images had symbolic or spiritual significance, I think it’s fair to judge that many others were simply designs that looked pretty, and that they liked.

Consider the art fad that began as Deco, went on to Streamline and became Moderne. It lasted, in toto, perhaps 40 to 60 years, and was ubiquitous for a time — to the point that, an archaeologist uncovering that art period 1000 years from now might just decide that it was the defining mode of expression for a culture.

Naturally that’s not the case; I just can’t get over the feeling that the Mimbres art was more or less the Mogollon version of the Deco movement. Consider, for instance, that most Deco images are heavily stylized — much like the Mimbres images — but still recognizable. Archetypes, perhaps, or caricatures of a sort.

It’s impossible (believe me) to generate images that are so thoroughly stylized and not know what you’re doing as an artist. The only way the Mimbres could have come up with such striking — and instantly recognizable — images was for them to study their subjects closely, understand the fundamental shapes that lay behind their forms, and render them in the most elegant way available to their artistic idiom.

Primitive? No, this was an advanced culture. They didn’t have machines, but they had functioning minds — an intelligence at least as keen as anyone’s today — and I am quite sure they knew what they were doing when they made their striking art.*

The second thing I noticed was that the Mimbres depicted animals, bugs, people, the Sun, clouds … but no plants, and no rocks or landscapes. I don’t know if that’s significant or not, but it feels like it ought to be. It seems as though they chose to paint things they believed were alive or animate, and ignored the things that didn’t seem to have consciousness or volition. (When they weren’t painting straight-up patterns, that is.)

For animals and bugs this makes sense. I think it’s instructive, though, that the Mimbres also painted celestial objects, and weather phenomena. This might give us a rather intriguing insight into how they viewed the world around them.

I’m sorry there’s so little known about them today. As I began perusing their images a while back, I fell in love with the style almost immediately — and, by extension, with the people, mysterious as they are.

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* Compare with the ancient Egyptians, who painted objects and people as flattened on walls. I read somewhere once that this was deliberate; they were attempting to show how a three-dimensional object (such as a person) might be mapped onto a two-dimensional surface. That is, they were exploring flatland long before Abbott.

This makes sense. The Egyptians must have had an extremely sophisticated understanding of three-dimensional space. Look at what they built, after all.

It grates me sometimes how easily we’ll judge the advancement level of an ancient culture based on their art alone, as though photorealistic depiction is somehow the hallmark of sophistication. What utter bullshit.

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I’m not sure why I…

So I was toddling off to get shots of our imaging magnets, which aren’t interesting since they resemble, mostly, plastic-wrapped donuts large enough to drive a bike through.

But our campus is sprawled, and I had to cross surface streets to get to my…

I wasn’t sure I was right when I saw them. It seemed … either improbable, or… Here? In this town? Really?

As I walked along and they walked along, here in the middle of our small town, I saw it was true.

They were in their late teens, or early twenties, and they were walking along, and I nodded at them as they passed.

Two boys, holding hands.

I paused for a moment and stared after them, my Nikon D50 in my hand.

You’d have to know the town to know why I was paralyzed.

For a moment, for just a moment, as the lovers passed me, I knew I was not alone.

But … that used to be me. Holding hands with my boyfriend, walking down the street, certain and immortal.

Where did it go? That confrontational, fearless flame?

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Virtually nothing. Reuters tells us, via Boing Boing:

A Saudi court of cassation upheld a ruling to behead and crucify a 22-year-old man convicted of raping five children and leaving one of them to die in the desert, newspapers reported on Tuesday.

Okay, okay, I get it. Even the most religiously overwrought can occasionally get something right.

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He managed to show a little initiative at last, and did it on his own, though he lacked the courage to actually kill himself.

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There’s a lot this administration could be doing better, but only the most hardline Kool-Aid swilling Birthtard would disagree that this single change is, on balance, an improvement.

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Just thought you’d like to know. Thanks for tuning in.

You poor, sad, life-not-having bastards.

Now go somewhere and get laid or something, will you? It’s Friday night. Jesus.

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