Stephen Schenkenberg

"The Germans Dive Deeper"

Sat, 11 Feb 2012 14:55:00 -0600

Peter Watson’s The German Genius: Europe’s Third Renaissance, the Second Scientific Revolution, and the Twentieth Century is an extraordinary 1,000-page book. It is immensely ambitious, rich in ideas and evidence of the German-speaking peoples’ world-changing achievements in music, literature, philosophy, psychoanalysis, biology, geology, bioethics, archeology, art history, and on and on. (On music, to take just one subject: “The standard ‘backbone’ of classical music consists today of Bach, Handel, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, and Brahms — all German.”)

Watson, an intellectual historian and former journalist, is a confident, resourceful, learned guide. He succeeds not just in illustrating how Germany was the leading force in the world of ideas until 1933, but also in helping the reader consider the country since it was ever-changed by the Führer and the Nazi Party (“Hitler still makes history but he also distorts it”). As a writer and historian, Watson is sharp and entertaining, as evidenced by these well-drawn, memorable sketches and assessments of just some of the book’s key figures:

Brahms:

Prickly, oversensitive, cynical, and bad-tempered, he was as much feared and disliked as Hans von Bülow, who was notorious for his tempers and antagonisms. At one party in Vienna, it is said, Brahms left in a huff, grumbling, “If there is anyone here I have not insulted, I apologize.”

Strauss:

Paradoxically, Strauss was himself a solid bourgeois, with a sober — even staid — private life. Alma Mahler was at the rehearsal of Feuersnot in 1901 and confided to her diary: “Strauss thought of nothing but money. The whole time he had a pencil in hand and was calculating the profits to the last penny.” His wife, Pauline, was a grasping woman, once a singer, who would scream at her husband, when he was relaxing at cards, “Richard, go compose!” Their house at Garmisch had three separate doormats, on each of which Pauline insisted that the composer wipe his feet.”

Schoenberg:

Richard Strauss was ambivalent about Arnold Schoenberg. He thought he would be better off “shoveling show” [!] than composing, yet recommended him for a Liszt scholarship.” … A small, wiry man, “easily unimpressed,” who went bald early on, Schoenberg was strikingly inventive — he carved his own chessmen, bound his own books, painted (Wassily Kandinsky was a fan), and built a typewriter for music.

Mann:

When war broke out, Thomas Mann — as we have seen — was as nationalistic as many others. He was not yet one of the giants of European literature but he did have a growing reputation. He volunteered for the Landsturm, or reserve army, but the doctor who examined him was familiar with his work and, reasoning that he would make a greater contribution to the war effort as a writer rather than as a soldier, failed him physically for active service.

Kafka:

Kafka is best known for three works of fiction … But he also kept a diary for fourteen years and wrote copious letters. These reveal him to have been a deeply paradoxical and enigmatic man. He was engaged to the same woman for five years, yet saw her fewer than a dozen times in that period; he wrote ninety letters to one woman in the two months after he met her, including several between twenty and thirty pages, and to another he wrote 130 letters in five months. He wrote a famous forty-five-page typed letter to his father when he was thirty-six, explaining why he was still afraid of him.

Marx:

Along with his fellow German-speaker, Adolf Hitler, Karl Marx probably had a more direct effect on the recently completed twentieth century, and the shape of the contemporary world, than any other single individual. Without him there would have been no Lenin, no Stalin, no Mao Zedong, and few if any of the other dictators who disfigured those times. Without him there would have been no Russian Revolution, and without World War II (or Max Planck and Albert Einstein), would there — could there — have been a Cold War, a divided Germany? Would decolonization have occurred in the way that it did, would there have been an Israel where it is, the Middle East problem that there is? Would there have been a 9/11? Ideas don’t come any more consequential than Marxism.

Freud:

Sigmund Freud’s influence was less catastrophic than Marx’s, but no less consequential…. Alfred Kazin, the American critic, maintained in an essay he published in 1956 to mark the one hundredth anniversary of Freud’s birth that “Freud has influenced even people who have never heard of him.” Kazin thought that, at mid-century in America, “to those who have no belief, Freudianism sometimes serves as a philosophy of life.” He thought that at “every hour of every day now,” people could not forget a name, feel depressed, or end a marriage without wondering what the “Freudian” reason might be. He thought that the novel and painting (Thomas Mann, T. S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Pablo Picasso, Paul Klee, Expressionism, Surrealism, Abstraction) had been reinvigorated by the Freudian knowledge that “personal passion is a stronger force in people’s lives that socially accepted morality” and that the “most beautiful effect” of Freudianism was the increasing awareness of childhood “as the most important single influence on personal development.” He thought the insistence on personal happiness — the goal of psychoanalytic therapy — was the most revolutionary force in modern times, a modern form of self-realization.

Nietzsche:

Nietzsche’s most well-known — some might say notorious — aphorism is “God is dead.” One of his most important achievements, along with Max Weber, was to think through and confront the implications of that sentiment, to work out in what he saw as terrifying detail the consequences of modernity, a world of vast populous cities, mass transport, and mass communications, in which the old certainties had been dissolved, where the comforts and consolations of religion had disappeared for many people, and in which science had acquired an authority that was, in his view, as arid and empty as it was impersonal and impressive. It is in this sense that Martin Heidegger called Nietzsche the “culmination” of modernity — i.e., Nietzsche felt the loss of whatever had gone before more keenly than anyone else, and he described that loss in more vivid hues.

Beuys:

All this was overshadowed by the advent of Joseph Beuys, who stands apart (and, for many people, above) all else in German postwar art. Beuys, born in Krefeld in 1921, never deviated from his conviction that his artistic aim was to find a new visual language that would come to terms with the war and at the same time find a way forward that did not ignore all that had happened.

The work of art, Beuys believed, exists in “eternal time, historical time, and personal time.” Having himself been shot down over Russia as a Luftwaffe pilot in the Second Wold War, he was treated for frostbite by his Russian captors, who used felt and fat, which became the materials Beuys used in (some of) his art, fused with other, less personal substances. He felt the spectator should be aware of what these materials meant to the artist, adding a level of consciousness to the aesthetic experience (as a boy he used a tram stop near an important monument), with the national past, featuring railway lines to remind the viewer what railways were used for in Nazi Germany. But, his lines were slightly curved, to hint at progress, a way forward, and up. In experiencing the present-day beauty of his sculptures, Beuys is saying, we must relive past events — this is his dialogue with time.

Congrats to Watson for completing such a tremendous volume of history. I recommend it highly.

Valid question from Slate: “Does Time Magazine Think...

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 12:09:00 -0600

Valid question from Slate: “Does Time Magazine Think Americans Are Stupid?”

Harper's: "What happened in Vegas"

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 08:46:21 -0600

Harper's: "What happened in Vegas":

An entertaining exchange, which the magazine introduces this way:

From The Lifespan of a Fact, by writer John D’Agata and Jim Fingal, published in February 2012 by W. W. Norton. In 2005, as an intern at The Believer, Fingal began fact-checking D’Agata’s article on the 2002 suicide of Las Vegas teenager Levi Presley. The book is based on emails exchanged by D’Agata and Fingal. The fact-checked article appeared in The Believer in 2010.

NYT: “An Industrial Strength House in Pittsburgh.” I...

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 07:43:00 -0600

NYT: “An Industrial Strength House in Pittsburgh.” I love this place and the story behind it. (Photograph by Tony Cenicola for The New York Times.)

"CCTV police officer 'chased himself' after being mistaken for burglar"

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 08:23:00 -0600

"CCTV police officer 'chased himself' after being mistaken for burglar":

From The Telegraph:

An undercover police officer ‘chased himself round the streets’ for 20 minutes after a CCTV operator mistook him for suspect. As the probationary officer from Sussex Police searched for suspects, the camera operator radioed that he had seen someone ‘acting suspiciously’ in the area. But he failed to realise that it was actually the plain-clothed officer he was watching on the screen, according to details leaked to an industry magazine. The operator directed the officer, who was on foot patrol, as he followed the ‘suspect’ on camera last month, telling his colleague on the ground that he was ‘hot on his heels’.

Sounds like something out of a Gaddis novel. (via The Awl)

A still from “Bill Cunningham New York” — a lovely,...

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 07:22:00 -0600

A still from “Bill Cunningham New York” — a lovely, poignant documentary of a man who relishes his work and guards his independence. (Here are some of his “On the Street” segments for the New York Times.)

This American Life: "Alien Experiment"

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 20:07:31 -0600

This American Life: "Alien Experiment":

Jack Hitt explores Alabama’s immigration bill, HB56. Great segment.

"Moreover, critics have been displaying a reverse-style NIMBY reaction: Nowhere EXCEPT in My..."

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 19:12:36 -0600

““Moreover, critics have been displaying a reverse-style NIMBY reaction: Nowhere EXCEPT in My Backyard! Crystal Bridges represents a form of geographical populism that does not sit well with art world elitists who believe that culture exists, and should be cultivated, in just a few cherished spots, preferably of their own choosing. But why-especially in an age of electronic communications and mass travel-must art be confined to a handful of metropoles? And if the art world has beaten a path to Bilbao or the tiny and remote Marfa, Tex., why not to Bentonville?””

- From “The Meet and Greet Museum,” Steven C. Dubin’s considered take on Crystal Bridges in this month’s Art in America. A museum-going friend who visited last month has given it her thumbs up. Tamara and I will certainly make a trip there this year.

David Carr: "At BuzzFeed, the Significant and the Silly"

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 07:27:51 -0600

David Carr: "At BuzzFeed, the Significant and the Silly":

From this NYT look at the evolving Buzzfeed:

As the consumer Web has matured, readers have become minipublishers, using social media platforms to share information they think will entertain and enlighten their friends. No longer is it just about so-called sticky content that keeps readers around, or even clicky content that causes them to hit a link; it’s also about serving up content that is spreadable.

Hit the right note, and your readers become like bees, stopping by your site to grab links and heading back out on the Web to pollinate other platforms. That behavior has tapped into something visceral, a kind of game in which the person finding something delicious gains social capital for sharing it.

Evgeny Morozov: "The Death of the Cyberflâneur"

Sun, 05 Feb 2012 11:47:00 -0600

Evgeny Morozov: "The Death of the Cyberflâneur":

An interesting piece published in today’s NYT:

As the popular technology blogger Robert Scoble explained in a recent post defending frictionless sharing, “The new world is you just open up Facebook and everything you care about will be streaming down the screen.”

This is the very stance that is killing cyberflânerie: the whole point of the flâneur’s wanderings is that he does not know what he cares about.

Reminded me a bit of the “serendipity” exchanges from 2006.

Speaking of The Bureau of Common Goods: Here’s a spot the...

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 13:38:37 -0600

Speaking of The Bureau of Common Goods: Here’s a spot the company did for Tattly.

Co.Design on Keith Ehrlich's Bureau of Common Goods

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 13:35:41 -0600

Co.Design on Keith Ehrlich's Bureau of Common Goods:

Interesting post about another smart, craft-heavy, personal-project endeavor becoming a sought-after business:

It helps that the Bureau’s current clientele is mostly smaller startups and brands who “can’t afford to talk to a Radical Media, or don’t even know they exist,” Ehrlich says. “What they do know is that whether they’re making baseball bats or iPhone apps, they want to tell a story that engages people. That’s content, not advertising. That’s what Made By Hand was all about, and that’s what the Bureau lets me do by working with these kinds of clients directly. We can get to know each other, become partners, create the film together. It’s not just about executing a brief.”

Dahlia Lithwick: "Colbert v. the Court"

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 07:21:00 -0600

Dahlia Lithwick: "Colbert v. the Court":

A sharp summing up. It’s interesting to learn that Justice Kennedy’s majority opinion stated, presciently, that “fiction and caricature can be a powerful force.”

Building a Mind Created in Words

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 21:43:00 -0600

Two passages, among many, that struck me in William H. Gass’ wonderful new essay collection Life Sentences: Literary Judgements and Accounts:

From “The Literary Miracle”:

Emerson’s essays build the mind that thinks them. It is that mind that is the miracle that interests me. Did he think the thinker who then thinks his thoughts? “The eye is the first circle; the horizon which it forms is the second; and throughout nature this primary figure is repeated without end. It is the highest emblem in the cipher of the world.” I don’t believe he began by having “the eye is the first circle” arrive in his own inward office like a parishioner with a problem, and that, subsequently, he copied this thought down exactly the way it appeared when it knocked, and as he would have been required to had the words come from Allah or from God. He wrote them down so he could think their thought. And when he thought, “the eye is the first circle,” I’ll bet he didn’t know what the second circle was. But writing notions down means building them up; it means to set forth on a word, only to turn back, erasing and replacing, choosing and refusing alternatives, listening to the language, and watching the idea take shape like solidifying fog.”

From “Spit in the Mitt,” about baseball and his father:

We listened to ticker re-creations together—always the Indians, always blowing a lead. You could hear the click of the wireless sometimes as the announcer turned the tape’s dry and sullen information—F8—into a long drive which Earl Averill pulled down against the wall after a mighty run. Later, I would realize that those radio matches were more interesting than games seen on TV or from a poor seat in some vast modern stadium, because they were conveyed in symbols, created in words, and served to the field of the imagination.

Nicholas Carr: "Why publishers should give away ebooks"

Tue, 31 Jan 2012 17:44:04 -0600

Nicholas Carr: "Why publishers should give away ebooks":

Kind of.

Readers today are forced to choose between buying a physical book or an ebook, but a lot of them would really like to have both on hand - so they’d be able, for instance, to curl up with the print edition while at home (and keep it on their shelves) but also be able to load the ebook onto their e-reader when they go on a trip. In fact, bundling a free electronic copy with a physical product would have a much bigger impact in the book business than in the music business. After all, in order to play vinyl you have to buy a turntable, and most people aren’t going to do that. So vinyl may be a bright spot for record companies, but it’s not likely to become an enormous bright spot. The only technology you need to read a print book is the eyes you were born with, and print continues, for the moment, to be the leading format for books. If you start giving away downloads with print copies, you shake things up in a pretty big way.

I’ve daydreamed about this before. Would enjoy seeing it happen. (I had no clue, by the way, that vinyl-record buyers like Carr are indeed scoring free digital copies of the music.)

Franzen on Books, E-Books, and Permanence

Mon, 30 Jan 2012 14:22:00 -0600

Jonathan Franzen, regretting the rise (and, it seems, existence) of e-books:

“Someone worked really hard to make the language just right, just the way they wanted it. They were so sure of it that they printed it in ink, on paper. 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.”

For serious readers, Franzen said, “a sense of permanence has always been part of the experience”. “Everything else in your life is fluid, but here is this text that doesn’t change,” he continued. “Will there still be readers 50 years from now who feel that way? Who have that hunger for something permanent and unalterable? I don’t have a crystal ball. But I do fear that it’s going to be very hard to make the world work if there’s no permanence like that. That kind of radical contingency is not compatible with a system of justice or responsible self-government.”

Luckily for Franzen, not all printed books are as permanent as all that. From the October 2011 article “Jonathan Franzen’s book Freedom suffers UK recall”:

In a highly embarrassing move, publishers HarperCollins were today forced to offer to exchange thousands of copies after Franzen revealed that the UK edition of a novel dubbed “the book of the century” is based on an early draft manuscript, and contains hundreds of mistakes in spelling, grammar and characterisation.

More than 8,000 copies of the faulty first edition have been sold since it was published last week, with 80,000 hardbacks of the book in print. The mistakes were discovered yesterday.

Franzen told the Guardian that the book, the follow-up to 2001’s Pulitzer Prize-nominated The Corrections, contained “a couple of hundred differences at the level of word and sentence and fact” as well as “small but significant changes to the characterisations of Jessica and Lalitha” – the daughter and the assistant of one of the novel’s central characters.

HarperCollins, who say the errors are mainly typographical, have launched a hurried operation to let purchasers exchange their faulty copy via bookshops or pre-paid post. The new version is being rushed through the printers over the weekend and will be available early next week.

Emily Nussbaum on "Downton Abbey"

Sun, 29 Jan 2012 22:09:00 -0600

Emily Nussbaum on "Downton Abbey":

Really liking Nussbaum’s work in her new role as The New Yorker’s TV critic:

Like “Luck,” “Downton Abbey” arrives wrapped in the shiny foil of cachet TV (PBS, WWI, tea and corsets!). But the British series, about the aristocratic Crawley family and their titular home, goes down so easily that it’s a bit like scarfing handfuls of caramel corn while swigging champagne. To let us know that we’re safely in the Masterpiece zone, Laura Linney, clad in a black cocktail dress, introduces each episode with a tense grin, as if welcoming us to a PBS fund-raiser, which I suppose she is.

I could pick at small elements of the show, especially the extraordinary obstacles placed in the way of about fifteen separate couples. (There’s enough unrequited love to make “The Remains of the Day” look like “Caligula.”) A few villains have hearts as black as coal; a few of the decent people could use a good noogie. A threat of blackmail is overheard through a heating duct. And, despite the show’s reasonably nuanced examination of social class, there’s a suspicious ping of nostalgia that one detects over time. But I can’t lie: when I reached the final DVD in my preview package and realized that it was missing the Christmas finale, I let out an animal howl. With its perfectly crafted zingers, waves of pure heartbreak, and a visual thread count so dense it may actually qualify as a controlled substance, “Downton Abbey” is situated precisely on the Venn diagram where “prestige” meets “guilty pleasure”: it’s as much cake as it is bread. And, sue me, I like cake.

"What will our (future) interfaces feel like?"

Sun, 29 Jan 2012 19:47:00 -0600

"What will our (future) interfaces feel like?":

From this Franicisco Inchauste post (prompted by what looks like an unusual new to-do app, Clear):

These days [web design is] about the content. Design starts with the content. Language is the navigation. The interface is words. We’re advised to choose them carefully. Copywriting is now where the interface lives or perishes. We can’t trust those devious icons or that friendly, yet somewhat unclear language from the Web 2.0 days — we need to be clear and say exactly what we mean. The three most important things here are: Clarity, clarity, clarity.

Gerard Craft on Niche's Early Days

Sun, 29 Jan 2012 12:04:00 -0600

Gerard Craft on Niche's Early Days:

From the post:

In 2005, I didn’t know what the midwest was let alone what midwestern cuisine was. Niche opened on the basis and goal to serve simple, quality food in the Benton Park neighborhood in St Louis, Missouri. We had zero connections upon moving to this city: no friends, family, business ties. I was 25 years old, in a new and unfamiliar city. I ended up wandering around and introducing myself to all of the local chefs. It was then that I met one of my closest friends and colleagues, Kevin Nashan, chef of Sidney Street Cafe- a restaurant a block away from Niche’s current location.

We opened up our doors to twelve covers, diners who consisted of neighbors in our building, my parents, and people that I called off of the street offering a free meal. At the time we opened our doors to the “public”, we had less than 10 employees, including myself. We had a half-page wine list, because that is what we were able to afford at that time. We had horrible service due to the fact that there were little to no servers or bartenders in St Louis who knew who we were or were willing to take a chance on us. No one knew our name and no one wanted to work for us. I was warned countless times that I was making the biggest mistake of my life. We kept pushing and cutting away at our path.

During my St. Louis Magazine days, Craft — considered by many the most exciting, most important chef in the city — could often be seen manning sample tables at parties and events himself, rather than just sending someone who worked for him.

Tamara and I have eaten at Niche once — a great special-occasion meal. Craft’s less expensive spot, Brasserie by Niche, is probably our favorite place to eat in St. Louis.

His is a great story of success, earned with a ton of work, good will, and risk.

"Can Pinterest and Svpply Help You Reduce Your Consumption?"

Sat, 28 Jan 2012 17:57:00 -0600

"Can Pinterest and Svpply Help You *Reduce* Your Consumption?":

In The Atlantic, Chris Tackett describes how Svpply has helped him by “fewer, but better, things”:

The more interesting angle to the shopping via bookmark idea is that in some instances bookmarking is even replacing real-world consumption. Just as Megan Garber explained the endorphin hit we can get from adding a great story to our Instapaper queue, I have found that adding items to my Svpply page gives me a similarly pleasant rush of some pleasure-inducing chemicals. When I spot something online that I think has nice design, might be worth-buying later or would make a good gift, I’ll happily click the Buy Later button in my browser to add it to my Svpply page. Once it is there, I am able to revisit the product later and decide if it is really something I want to buy. I have often removed something later that, in an earlier time, I may have actually bought, not realizing I didn’t actually like the design as much as I had thought or simply that I didn’t need it.