by Akim Reinhardt

I'm currently circling the nation in a black and orange ‘98 Honda Accord, my rusted chariot. About 7,500 miles in a little over two months. That's the plan. As far north as North Dakota, as far south as New Mexico, and as far west as California before closing the circuit by returning to Maryland. About 26 states in all.

How? Why?

It's a massive research/conference trip. I'm on sabbatical. A full year at half-pay.

A single semester at full pay is the more common sabbatical leave. For a full year sabbatical, the typical approach is to get a research fellowship that makes up the lost salary and provides academic focus.

But I usually end up doing things my own way. I'm not bragging. It's as much a blend of chaos and neurosis as anything else. But in this case the result is, no research fellowship.

Instead, I've rented out my house during the semester, and this past summer I took on a freelance writing project. I co-authored a coffee table book, which will come out next summer.

Bill moved in to my Baltimore rowhome in August. At the end of the month, I bid him a fond farewell and hit the road. And thus the journey begins.
*
The first stop was The Bronx. It seems only fitting to kick off an epic trek by visiting friends and family in my hometown.

Like the rest of the city, more chains are moving into The Bronx. Not at the same rate that sees Manhattan turning into a bland, congested, overpriced version of the rest of America, but it's happening nonetheless. Very depressing. Dunkin' Donuts. Target. Bla bla bla.

The day I see a real New Yorker, not some Midwestern transplant, order Domino's, is the day I turn my back on the city completely. When that day comes, New York's pointlessness will be profound beyond words.

For now, the pizza's still worth it. For now.

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by Leanne Ogasawara

Fitzcarraldo: “As true as I am standing here, one day I shall bring grand opera to Iquitos.”

The incredible Sisyphean story of a man who wants to build an opera house in the middle of the Amazon rainforest in the late 19th century is only to be outdone by the crazy outlandishness of the man who decides to re-create the event a hundred years later in film.

Like a set of nested Russian dolls–each more mind-bogglingly conceived– the story's central metaphor continuously revolves around the theme of “man against nature.” This is a world where it is dreams that truly matter. And people move mountains in order to pursue their obsessions. So, to build his opera house, the hero, Fitcarraldo, has to employ hundreds of Indians to help pull a 320-ton ship over a muddy hill. But perhaps what is the most incredible part of the story is that Werner Herzog, in the making of his film about the historic ship-pulling, insists on physically re-creating the original challenges by struggling to capture on film the impossible task of having the local Indians pulling a real 320-ton ship over a mountain. His hell-bent will to veracity has made Herzog's film the stuff of legend.

And this is all very unexpected since film has never been an art much concerned with literal truth, being taken up solely by images. Not to mention that if all that matters is the “burden of his dream,” why doesn't Herzog employ the usual Hollywood devices of stage set and miniatures to evoke his story more poetically? Why does he seek to do the impossible and film actual people pulling a real 320-ton ship over a steep and very slippery hill in the most remote part of the Amazon –given the useless burden of doing so?

Why, indeed?

Alongside Herzog's wonderful memoir concerning the making of the film, Conquest of the Useless, I am reading a fascinating book about 17th century science, by Ofer Gal and Raz Chen-Morris. Exploring the intellectual compromises in epistemology that were generated by the rise of the “new science,” Baroque Science tells the story of Western philosophy's estrangement from the senses. In particular, it focuses on the inevitable denigrating of human vision and the disappearing observer in natural philosophy.

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By Eric Byrd

Journey to the Abyss: The Diaries of Count Harry Kessler, 1880-1918

The Belle Époque cosmopolitan, after bidding Rodin adieu at the Gare du Nord the day of the Austrian ultimatum, returned to Germany and donned the feldgrau tunic, to battle for the fortunes of the Reich. The 1914-18 entries of this famous diary can be hard going for those of us unfamiliar with the Eastern Front campaigns or the intrigues of the German High Command – but occasionally Kessler unfolds a comprehensive collage of prewar Modernism – with which he was so intimate – as it continued and changed behind the national parapet. On the day he heard of Rodin's death, after a visit to Grosz's studio, Kessler set down this astonishing vista:

Berlin. November 18, 1917. Sunday. I think Grosz has something demonic in him. This new Berlin art in general, Grosz, Becher, Benn, Wieland Herzfelde, is most curious. Big city art, with a tense density of impressions that appears simultaneous, brutally realistic, and at the same time fairy-tale-like, just like the big city itself, illuminating things harshly and distortedly as with searchlights and then disappearing in the glow. A highly nervous, cerebral, illusionist art, and in this respect reminiscent of the music hall and also of film, or at least of a possible, still unrealized film. An art of flashing lights with a perfume of sin and perversity like every nocturnal street in the big city. The precursors are E.T.A. Hoffmann, Breughel, Mallarmé, Seurat, Lautrec, the futurists: but in the density and organization of the overwhelming abundance of sensation, the brutal reality, the Berliners seem new to me. Perhaps one could also include Stravinsky here (Petrushka). Piled-up ornamentation each of which expresses a trivial reality but which, in their sum and through their relations to each other, has a thoroughly un-trivial impact.

All round the world war rages and in the center is this nervous city in which so much presses and shoves, so many people and streets and lights and colors and interests: politics and music hall, business and yet also art, field gray, privy counselors, chansonettes, and right and left, and up and down, somewhere, very far away, the trenches, regiments storming over to attack, the dying, submarines, zeppelins, airplane squadrons, columns marching on muddy streets, Hindenburg and Ludendorff, victories; Riga, Constantinople, the Isonzo, Flanders, the Russian Revolution, America, the Anzacs and the poilus, the pacifists and the wild newspaper people. And all ending up in the half-darkened Friedrichstrasse, filled with people at night, unconquerable, never to be reached by Cossacks, Gurkhas, Chasseurs d'Afrique, Bersaglieris, and cowboys, still not yet dishonored, despite the prostitutes who pass by. If a revolution were to break out here, a powerful upheaval in this chaos, barricades on the Friedrichstrasse, or the collapse of the distant parapets, what a spark, how the mighty, inextricably complicated organism would crack, how like the Last Judgment! And yet we have experienced, have caused precisely this to happen in Liège, Brussels, Warsaw, Bucharest, even almost in Paris. That's the world war, all right.

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by Josh Yarden

The new year, Rosh HaShana, according to the Hebrew Calendar, arrives this week with the coming of the new moon. As we also reach the end of the annual cycle of Torah readings, I revisited the final words words of Moshe (or Moses*.) The prophet has a curious way of describing his exit from the scene. When he is preparing the people for his own passing and for the transition of leadership (Deuteronomy 31) He tells the Hebrews: “A hundred and twenty years old am I today” and, depending upon which translation you read, he might be saying, “I can no longer… be active” (JPS) “…sally forth and come in,” (Robert Alter) “… go out and come in” (Everett Fox) “I am no longer able to lead you” (King James Version.) In any case, the fact that he is about to die is not exactly at the heart of the sentence.

That which Moses will no longer be able to do is somehow bound up in leadership and particularly in the process of transition. He relocated and transformed his state of mind several times throughout the Exodus narrative. Within the first few verses, he comes into the world, gets put into a basket, placed in the river, drawn into the hands of Pharaoh's daughter, put back into the hands of his mother, and then taken into the palace. When we next meet him as a young adult, he gets into an argument, goes into a murderous rage, into exile in the desert, into Median and into the family of the local high priest. He then enters a marriage, fatherhood, a trance and eventually, he's on his way back into Egypt.

The rest is history. (… or maybe it isn't, but that's not even slightly important to the theme of the narrative.) He eventually goes back into the desert for 40 years, and now, we learn that this next stage of his life will be his last transition. If he is about to die, and if “going out and coming in” is actually what he will no longer be able to do, then the process of personal transformation is the essential meaning of life.

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by Bill Benzon

In The Only Game in Town: Digital Criticism Comes of Age I argued that digital criticism was the most important development in contemporary literary studies because it is the only line of investigation that presents us with new objects of thought. I’m continuing that argument in this post, where I consider some of the new conceptual objects in Matthew Jockers, Macroanalysis: Digital Methods & Literary History (2013).

Jockers undertakes a variety of inquiries into a corpus of 3346 19th Century Novels from America, Britain, Ireland, and Scotland, examining style, theme, and influence. Though he considers the possibility that literary culture evolves in a manner similar to that of life forms, he rejects the idea (pp. 171-172). Not only do I think Jockers is mistaken on that point, but I think that his analytic and descriptive work provides strong evidence not only for conceptualizing literary history as an evolutionary process, but that that process is directional (at least for the corpus Jockers examines). The purpose of this essay is to sketch out that case by reinterpreting some of Jockers’ results.

Note however that I do not intend to provide the required evolutionary model, though I do have some thoughts on how to do so (see the suggested readings at the end). I’ve only explained why I believe such an account is necessary.

Caveat: This is an unusually long post, so you might want have coffee or wine, your pleasure, readily at hand. Also, the argument is basically mathematical, though informally expressed, and mostly through diagrams, which are central to digital criticsm.

Does Culture Evolve?

Let me set the stage by quoting a passage from Tim Lewens’ excellent review of cultural evolution in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2014):

The prima-facie case for cultural evolutionary theories is irresistible. Members of our own species are able to survive and reproduce in part because of habits, know-how and technology that are not only maintained by learning from others, they are initially generated as part of a cumulative project that builds on discoveries made by others. And our own species also contains sub-groups with different habits, know-how and technologies, which are once again generated and maintained through social learning. The question is not so much whether cultural evolution is important, but how theories of cultural evolution should be fashioned, and how they should be related to more traditional understandings of organic evolution.

The alternative, Lewens suggests later on, is that “cultural change, and the influence of cultural change on other aspects of the human species, are best understood through a series of individual narratives.” Lewens rejects that notion, and so do I – and I’ll address that specific alternative, individual narratives, a bit later.

Before going on, however, I want to dispose of the most common objection to the idea of cultural evolution:

The explanatory point of evolutionary dynamics is that it gives us design without a designer, without intention. But isn’t culture consciously and deliberately designed and created?

Cultural artifacts (whether physical things, such as books or drawings, or events, such as rituals or musical performances) are deliberately designed and created by human agents and thus are not the result of a blind evolutionary process. That is true. But whether or not any of those artifacts are retained in a group’s repertoire is a matter beyond the will and design of individual creators. The process of cultural selection is independent from that of artifact creation.

Those many 19th Century novels that are now forgotten were created with as much deliberation and intentional design as those few that we still read and used as the basis for other cultural products, such as movies and, e.g. zombified parodies (Pride and Prejudice and Zombies). Whatever it is that distinguishes the novels with lasting cultural salience from the more ephemeral ones, it isn’t the mere fact of deliberation and design.

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by Matt McKenna

I didn't see the first Dolphin Tale movie starring Harry Connick Jr., Morgan Freeman, and a couple kids who look as if were custom built at the Disney Channel Research Lab, but allow me to synopsize the synopsis from Wikipedia: a wild bottlenose dolphin faces death when she loses her tail in a nasty crab trap accident. Fortunately, the hapless creature is rescued by a few plucky humans, christened “Winter,” and given a prosthetic tail that enables her to swim around in her pool and so forth. In a sense, the original movie sounds a bit like a damp, G-rated Robocop with less murder and more playful splashing. Regardless, the synopsis provides the necessary background to understand Dolphin Tale 2, a film about what happens after you strap a plastic flipper to a proud animal and roll credits. Now, it wouldn't be accurate to say Dolphin Tale 2 is a dark film in the way the Christopher Nolan's second Batman film is dark or even how Irvin Kershner's second Star Wars film is dark, but it is certainly not to be taken lightly. I mean, sure, there's a goofy, hardcase pelican who falls in love with a sea turtle, but that doesn't mean the movie doesn't hit upon some weighty subjects. If the viewer can get past the half of the movie that consists mainly of adolescents giggling as they watch animals goof around, they'll experience a film that lays bare the emerging issue of technological innovation begetting technological dependence.

The conflict in Dolphin Tale 2 revolves around finding an aquarium-mate for Winter when her previous geriatric dolphin buddy, Panama, passes away after having lived a long, rewarding life of confined bliss that in no way resembles Blackfish. Adding urgency to the quest to find Winter a dolphin bestie is pressure arriving on two fronts: 1) the USDA will snatch Winter from her Clearwater Marine Aquarium (CMA) residence and deliver her to some hell hole in Texas if a regulation-mandated pal isn't found and 2) the investment firm that put money into the CMA is annoyed that a lonely, depressed Winter can't be shown to the throngs of thong-sandaled families that paid good money to experience the miracle of a disabled dolphin making do.

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