More maintenance

I didn't love Interstellar, but it did strike a chord with me.

The film's long set-up describes a world where no chances can be taken because society can no longer afford them. Being part of a generation that was too late for the babyboomers' party and always knew it would be in charge of the clean up, I saw something painfully familiar in the story where characters were encouraged to go into farming and discouraged from breaking new ground through exploration.

Maybe that's what has me following all this stuff on maintenance and repair (which I've tagged this and other recent posts with). If you Google images of 'maintenance' you get hundreds of faceless drones like those below> they generally hold hand tools, but some of them have wrenches and computer keyboards, implying that a wrench is used to keep a computer up. Clearly, the world is screwed.

What you find when you look for 'maintenance' online...

Either way, I had the same sort of grim recognition when I read Laura Bliss' essay in the Atlantic's 'Citylab' ("How 'Maintainers,' not 'Innovators,' Make the World Turn", April 16, 2016). So I wanted to add it to this list...

At some point we'll get to how all this fits together. For now...there's a clean up on aisle three...

Translators | Traitors

I am starting to worry about this class I will teach next semester in translation. So I was excited to see a couple of reflections on the problem of translation by Daniel Mendelsohn and Dana Stevens in The New York Time Sunday Book Review.

Mendelsohn has a few interesting and not immediately apparent examples that stress the importance of accuracy, but he really wanted to emphasize tone.

Tone is everything. A novel in which characters say “I daresay” is galaxies apart from one in which characters say “I kinda think.” Aeschylus’ “Agamemnon” is notorious for its elaborate diction and inscrutable syntax — a murky Greek that nicely suggests the moral and political murkiness that is the play’s subject. When David R. Slavitt chose to pepper his 1997 translation of this titanic masterpiece with phrases like “learning curve,” “stress-related” and “Watch what you say, mister,” he was not only cheapening the diction but hamstringing the play’s larger meanings. Clytemnestra is not Joan Crawford.

Interesting point, but I am tempted to agree with Stevens, who says that translation is how, "succeeding generations and cultures to reinterpret and reshape [stories] as their own." This is the classic confrontation: for whom is the translation written? For the author, or for the reader? Certainly authors have a stake in how their works are represented when they are carried over from one tongue to another (and that's where I find myself in sympathy with Mendelsohn's criteria of accuracy), but the skillful translator knows the language and idioms of the target language and how to carry the sense of the text across in such a way that readers can access it. 

While translation has been a powerful metaphor around which I organize my own work, I fear it risks being a gimmick when you're dealing with artists who are not all that sure of what they are saying and not all that fluent in any one specific means of expression (I simply cannot use the phrase 'visual language,' which I grow to despise more every day). I wonder if thinking about translation is missing the point - possibly we should be thinking about bilingualism, or about processes of editing and publication. 

But still something inheres to the idea of translation that makes it seem like a good way to understand the process of making something. It makes intuitive sense to some people to see an idea as 'translated' between head and hand. 

Four films on Remix Culture by Kirby Ferguson...

This is reposted from Open Culture. I'm thinking about it because of an essay by Tracy Thompson in Salon on the way the causes of the Civil War still inspire revision and debate. For more on this, see the collection Remixing the Civil War: Meditations at the Sesquicentennial.

Class prep

...thought I would show a video of Marshall McLuhan to my Visual Studies class today (after all, the medium is the...well, you know the rest...)

This one didn't make the cut, but it sure is good...

Suggested readings

It's been very busy - too busy to keep up with this blog's housekeeping. I wanted to point to two things that interested me.

One was in the February 24 Washington Post Classical Beat blog. Anne Midgette makes a plea for critics to connect to others idea when publishing on line. This is a great idea - and its value to all of us comes into focus when she writes about how

A new work, in particular, is in the position of the blind men and the elephant: everyone who was there can give his or her own piece of the experience, and readers, seeing them all together, can try to amalgamate them into a larger, and more accurate, picture.

Critics' varying descriptions and assessments can offer readers a multi-dimensional view of a work. And I need that when I read...as I can't get away to see anything these days.

The other thing I wanted to link to is The Guardian UK Theatre Blog, which had an exhortation for artists to write more about their work. Not more self promotional bloggiy crap, but

a messier kind of writing, more vulnerable and yet more declamatory. Writing that is the product of a desire to speak as well as an obligation to communicate. A more restless kind of writing, devoid of neatness, riddled with ambiguities and rhetorical flourishes. Writing that expresses the same wants and preoccupations as that artist's other creative output, without needing to comment on that work. Writing suffused with generosity and fragility. The page as a canvas or a stage, as well as space for programme notes.

I have been teaching writing in art schools for a while, and I welcome this idea wholeheartedly. Writing is not something one does merely to promote oneself - it's something that can explain one's self to one's self. It is the mind at work... and that's a pretty exciting thing to read (whereas boring, jargon-laced, self-promoting 'artists' statements' are not...)

More soon. Really. I want to write about this book club I'm in and the book How Learning Works: Seven Research Based Principles for Smart Teaching. It's been interesting to think about learning instead of teaching...