Rooms of the Past

The theme of a trip to New York the past two days became Rooms of the Past. Each says something about the lives they contained and their relationships to the larger world of the times. At the Jewish Museum, there is a virtual 3D recreation of a 1938 Berlin apartment. It speaks of a comfortable family life in a small space, by present standards, just before that life disappeared. Hitler lurks off stage.

Also at the Jewish Museum, there is a virtual video re-creation of the Cone sisters' apartment in Baltimore, similar to the videos museums sometimes offer of ancient cultures. The sisters were early collectors of Picasso and Matisse, among other artists. Their rooms speak of refined wealthy luxury and modern artistic taste, supported by their brothers' textile interests in North Carolina, where the industry moved to escape Northern union organization. The southern textile workers lurk offstage.

At the Morgan library, J.P. Morgan's pristinely preserved study consciously copies the power of Renaissance palaces in architecture and art patronage. Like the Medicis, he controlled the financial world of his time, acting as a central banker in the 1907 financial crisis from that study, while the best Renaissance portraits looked on from the walls. The rest of the country at the time looms, not lurks, offstage.

At the Players Club on Grammercy Park, Edwin Booth's living room and bedroom are preserved in  poor condition within the now elegant club founded by his infamous brother John Wilkes Booth, who lurks offstage.

We stayed next door at the National Arts Club, home of Samuel J. Tilden, a wealthy railroad lawyer who became a reformist governor of New York and the 1876 Democratic presidential candidate, losing  by one vote in the electoral college.  The vote reflected the post Civil War Reconstruction turmoil because three Southern states sent duplicate delegations to the college, one black and one white. The house displays the Victorian-era opulance of a wealthy man. The still-persistent issues of race and politcal corruption lurk offstage.

Grammercy Park itself - then and now a locked, gated garden - offers an outdoor room that was a sanctuary from the hoi polloi of the city, who lurked on the other side of the tall iron fence. As residents of the Arts Club, we strolled the paths.

Around the corner from the Arts club and down Irving Street, we ate at Pete's Tavern, where O'Henry drank and scribbled in the same era. The tenement dwellers of his stories lurk offstage.

What stories do our rooms tell? Who lurks or looms offstage?

More than we can possibly know

I was intrigued yesterday by an article about philosophy courses available free on line. The article cited openculture.com (the title a subject in itself perhaps). The site is rife with ads for things you can buy, but there is a plethora of courses that can be played through iTunes (downloads available free at iTunes.com) an hour's lecture at a time. Under each category (free language lessons, free textbooks, free movies, etc.), you have to scroll down beyond the paid ads and find free options. I examined a Yale finance course , a French movie and an introduction to electrical engineering. Anybody with a computer can theoretically acquire a college education.

I am not likely to pursue electrical engineering or, to tell the truth, heavy philosophy courses. I may listen to some of the finance lectures, given that my economics education is dated while the financial world continues to churn.  I am drawn as well to some history, art, literature and language courses.

Most of all, I am impressed with the range of possibilities. Ah, but there is no free lunch, as economists are fond of saying. Without the structure of an institution, do we have the discipline to concentrate and absorb all these possibilities?

Further, how much do we need to know? Want to know? In a world of more food than we can possibly eat, how do we plan our meals?

Are we what we read?

Recently, I have encountered three commentaries that  expressed views on how our reading, particularly fiction, becomes part of us and changes us. Michael Dirda, writing in his blog in The Washington Post, says he doesn't feel he's actually read a book until he writes about it. "Composing a review or an essay seems the final stage of reading, a way or summarizing my experience of the novel, biography or work of history." His reading leads to creative writing. He muses that others may join book clubs for this reason.

Second, an article that reached me via Zite.com, an aggregating site that creates a cyber magazine based on the user's expressed and revealed tastes, described a study by Keith Oakley and Raymond Mar at the University of Toronto. The study demonstrated personality changes from reading a Chekhov story. Mar describes their central assumption, "When people are reading literary fiction, they're creating in their mind a simulation of experience...." They applied a personality tests to students before and after they read either a Chekhov story or a summary of basic plot points. Reading the story had a small effect on personality (after all, it was only one story), and the plot points did not. However, the changes varied among individuals. The question is how much effect does habitual reading of literature have on our personalities?

Finally, at Chautaugua Institution in July, I attended a lecture in the literary program in which a novelist asserted that fiction builds the capacity for empathy by immersing the reader in others' experiences. Fiction is valuable because it does this he feels. I agree and would add that history is also valuable for this reason.

Dirda worries that reading groups could also become pressure groups, not a worry I share. But recently I decided not to read Daniel Silva's thrillers anymore because the most recent one contained excessive gratuitous violence in my opinion. Could habitual reading of violent fiction have a negative personality effect?

Should we begin to think of changes in ourselves as part of the experience of reading?

Odes to Boredom: Because it's August?

This past week, both The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal ran articles extolling the virtues of boredom. In the Times, Scott Adams, the creator of the Dilbert cartoon, revisits a lifetime of boredom, including interminable corporate meetings, before Dilbert. Adams lauds his good fortune to have been bored so often, "I've noticed that my best ideas bubble up when the outside world fails in its primary job of freightening, wounding or entertaining me."

He fears for contemporary society because  iPads, iPods and iPhones mean that we can always avoid boredom. Lack of innovation and creativity will follow with dire consequences for society and the economy.

In the Journal, Peter Toohey, a professor of Greek and Roman studies and the author of "Boredom: A Lively History," explains that boredom has a long history. He cites a third century Roman plaque erected by citizens who honored a consul of Campania because he had saved them from "endless boredom." Better not to dwell too much on how he entertained them. (iDevices may have their uses.) For us, Toohey finds boredom useful as a warning that life is not being properly lived and thus needs to be changed before the dire consequences, possibly violence or illness, ensue. As such, he also finds boredom to be a spur to creativity.

Ah, so be thankful for suffocating weather, vacationing friends,  August suspension of meetings, interminable repeats of the same story on TV news and  panels of experts repeating that same news.  If all else fails, watch the grass turn brown until your creative juices stir. But beware of  iDevices!

The writer and the reader seek escape in suspense, character and plot

Joanna Kavenna wrote a long article about John Banville in the  New Yorker a few weeks ago.  Banville is a serious novelist, winner of the Booker Prize for The Sea, who also writes mysteries. He is quoted as saying that one day he sat down and wrote 1500 words of a mystery in place of his usual 200 words for his literary novels.  And he has continued to write mysteries. Kavenna describes his literary novels as prose poetry, without too much concern for character and plot. I bogged down in Banville's latest such novel, The Untouchable, and turned to his latest mystery, A Death in Summer. He wrote it under the name Benjamin Black.

So, readers, what does it mean if both writer and reader feel the need to escape serious literature?

Politics don't change

At an Arts Club dinner recently, a fellow diner recommented Lynne Olson's book, Troublesome Young Men, about Winston Churchill (a not-so-young man at the time) and other Conservatives who opposed the appeasement policies of  Neville Chamberlain, their own prime minister, before World War II. I have found the book enlightening for many reasons, but one is that it reminds me that politics don't change with time and place. Right after the Munich meeting Chamberlain was exceptionally popular for keeping the peace. Convinced he had saved the nation, he was so enraged by the anti-appeasers that he employed tactics  the author likened to Richard Nixon and his operatives' Watergate tactics. In addition to spies who reported conversations, pressure placed on local Conservative groups  to bar anti-appeasers from the ballot and stories placed in newspapers, Chamberlain's operatives tapped the phones of Churchill, other anti-appeasers, government staffers and journalists considered anti-Chamberlain. Chamberlain exulted in writing to his sister that he had "complete knowledge of their doings & sayings."

The "Cloud" is a bank of machines

There is much discussion lately of the advantages of "cloud" computing, meaning that your files are saved where your phone, tablet, computer, etc. can access the latest versions automatically, even if, for example, the file was last changed by your computer but accessed by your phone.  In conversations, I find that people have difficulty in conceiving where the files are physically located, or that they have a physical form. Logically they have to be on stored on discs of a computer being used as a server. This morning, the Washington Post published a photo of Steve Jobs in front of a blowup of the actual storage units for the iCloud. I offer this picture as a reminder that whatever one of us puts in a "cloud" is located on a machine owned, in this case, by Jobs' company, Apple. This raises some questions: Who can access these files? What kind of backup is available in case of mechanical failure or natural disaster? What if Apple changes its mind or is acquired by some other entity in the future. Is this a good idea?

Modern antiques

This week I went to an exhibit called Vienna 1900 at the Neue Galerie in New York city. It was the era of Freud and the exhibit included a reproduction of his patients' couch. This was an ordinary chaise lounge with an Oriental carpet draped over it. What struck me most were the streamlined pieces of furniture that could easily be displayed as contemporary in a furniture store over 100 years later. In particular, an armoire by an architect named Otto Wagner looks exactly like those found in very modern hotels. It has no decoration, simply flat, functional surfaces. Another piece that would be classified as contemporary in 2011 was a grandfather clock all of whose sides were glass.

Some questions arise: why have these designs lasted for so long in some quarters, but why are they also avoided in favor of copies of early American, Victorian, Louis XIV, etc. in other quarters? 

A Visit to a Paleolithic Cave

Note: It must be the beginning of summer that turns my fancy to blogging. I notice that my last post was about this time last year. Also, a few of you loyal readers kept asking me when I would write. So the blog returns.

A few weeks ago, I saw a documentary showing the Chauvet Cave in southern France. Discovered in 1994, the cave contains paleolithic era wall paintings estimated to be 30,000 years old. Avoiding the disaster of the Lascaux cave paintings, which have been damaged by tourism and closed, the French strictly limit access to archaologists and scientists.

One film crew has been admitted and produced a 3D documentary film so the experience is available to the rest of us. Current high tech brings us prehistoric low tech. I have thought of 3D as a gimmick, but not in this instance. The value of technology is in the application perhaps.

The impressive thing about the paintings is not only their age but their beauty. The painters produced sensuously curved lines and employed shading to create a sense of form.

The painting might have been a religious ritual or other ceremony. Paleolithic people necessarily would have devoted most of their time and energy to survival.  Yet they still devoted some of that scarce time and energy to spiritual and aesthetic pursuits. Does this tell us something about being human?