Quotes #1: Levi and Goethe

Primo Levi on writing:

"Paper is too tolerant a material. You can write any old absurdity on it and it never complains."

"One of the writer's great privileges is the possibility of remaining imprecise and vague."

Goethe on criticism, polemic and negativity:

"It is much easier to recognize error than to find truth: the former lies on the surface, this is quite manageable; the latter resides in depth, and this is not everyone's business."

"Error is continually repeated in action, and that is why we must not tire of repeating in words what is true."

"If I'm to listen to someone else's opinion, it must be put in a positive way; I have enough problematic speculations in my own head."

Book Review: The German Genius, Peter Watson (2010)

Why do we read and write, you and I? Partly it's because we want to better ourselves. This is what people do - or what the kind of people you and I want to know do, anyway - we learn new instruments and languages, we travel, we try new things. (Or we like to think we do.)

But why do we do this? The answer may seem self-evident: who doesn't want to be "better", whatever that means? Who doesn't want to be more like the people they admire, and more liked by them? Or maybe you feel you have an inner drive: if you didn't try all these new things, you'd go crazy.

But have you ever stopped to think about the context for this behaviour? Whether people everywhere do it, and always have?

That is the concern of the first half of Peter Watson's The German Genius - or, as I like to think of it: After God, "Aargh, Modernity!". Or, even more facetiously: Why We Blog.

Watson tells us that the drive for self-improvement originated largely in pre-unified Germany, born out of the speculative philosophy of such titans as Kant and Hegel that arose to fill the growing hole left by declining Christianity and its message of "Do this, because I say so".

Why in Germany? Religion in Germany had been more inward anyway, as a result of Luther's protestantism returning religion to the people from the control of the church (see the novel Q, ostensibly but not really written by a former AC Milan footballer named Luther Blissett). Plus, it was the German Wilhelm von Humboldt who essentially invented the modern university, with the idea that scholars should conduct original research, and, owing to the support of Friedrich Wilhelm III, there were far more universities, and much more literacy, in Germany than places like France or Great Britain.

Kant, Hegel et al posited that in the absence of an afterlife or divinity, the purpose of life must be to better oneself, a concept that came to be known as bildung. Also, by bettering oneself, one also bettered those around oneself in one's community.

Thus, the next 100 years or so gave rise to such cultural colossi as Haydn, Beethoven, Mozart, Schubert and Wagner, whose music differed from that of Handel and Bach in expressing inner concepts related to the life of man, rather than religious ones, plus Goethe, creator of the Bildungsroman, in which improvement (in the eyes of God or of man) comes only through effort on the part of the individual.

Thanks, Germany!

But then come modernity and alienation, and the second half of Watson's book, which addresses the question of whether German idealism had to lead to authoritarianism.

As Watson makes clear (borrowing on the work of others, as he's quick to point out the whole book heavily does), the idea of evolution did not originate with Darwin. Bildung is itself evolution applied to one's own character, for example. But Darwin accounted for evolution scientifically, realising it comes from overpopulation and struggle to survive and reproduce. Thus (broadly) was born the age of science.

Over the next generation or so, we have the dawn of organic chemistry and the age of cellular and molecular biology, so many of the discoveries coming from German universities and institutes. We mechanise and urbanise. We have mass-production.

Then comes the Franco-Prussian war and German unification.

Scientification continues. Education becomes less humanistic. Alongside this we have Nietzsche, telling us nothing matters anymore.

Then World War I, partly a war of now-struggling German kultur vs British mercantilism and mere civility. We have mechanised, indiscriminate killing on a scale never seen before. Germany and kultur are dealt a terrible blow, although nobody really wins.

Then Weimar and the rise of low-brow culture, followed by Einstein's relativity, Pauli's uncertainty, Godel's revelation that there are things that can never be known, atonalism in music, expressionism in art, cultural pessimism and economic plight.

Then National Socialists, with their incoherent but powerful message that everything had gone wrong and a return to classical culture was needed, and their racism, their belief that others were responsible for the way things were and that these were people who could never be truly cultured, as only true Germans could.

And what came next, which you already know.

And then the aftermath: a slow coming to terms, Heidegger and reassessment, Habermas and what now in the age of ongoing alienation and environmental profligacy.

I haven't done justice to The German Genius there, obviously. It's 365,000 words, and an awful lot of concepts that were entirely new to me. It's a lot to get your head around.

At times it reads like an encyclopaedia, and could perhaps have done with being a bit trimmer. But part of its point is that there is so much more to Germany that the Nazis, despite what British TV schedulers might think, hence there's a lot of chronicling of German achievement even when it's not essential to the narrative.

TGG is monumental in every sense, and probably the most informative and enlightening book I've ever read. I'd read it again, if only it wasn't so big. Bloody overachieving Germans, nicking all the sun-loungers...

Alien Resurrection swimming scene: fluid motion

Watching the BBC David Attenborough documentary Natural World episode 3 Galapagos Islands: Islands of Change, I thought the swimming of these Marine Iguanas, the world's only sea-going lizards (watch from 1.10)...

Was familiar. And a quick Google search confirmed my thinking. Turns out, their motion was used as the inspiration for that of the aliens in the underwater scene in Alien Resurrection, as confirmed here (watch from 3.00):

Cool eh?

Pastel highlights

Some highlights from the Mall Galleries' 2015 Pastel Society Annual Exhibition:

Tom Walker's Still Life With Exploding Glass, which manages to take a collection of familiar still-life objects and transform them into both a spectral terrestrial landscape and a drifting celestial goody bag.

Simon Page's The Black Dog, which combines warm yellows and cosiness with unsettling aquamarine and red, strange angles and an unusual perspective to create a scene of ambiguous tension.

And finally Felicity House's Two Rooms, whose playful lines, bright sunlight and grandiose setting call to mind something like Jacques Tati's film The Illusionist, and which I badly wanted to buy.

The exhibition runs until 7 March. Take a spare few grand and a van with you.

Iraqi Art of the Everyday

The Iraqi pavilion at the 2013 Venice Biennale was housed in a building on the bank of the Grand Canal that is usually a rentable home base for wealthier tourists: the Ca' Dandolo luxury apartment.

The spot was chosen by Tamara Chalabi, chair of the Ruya Foundation for Contemporary Culture in Iraq, who also commissioned the curator for the event. She picked Jonathan Watkins, Director of the Ikon Gallery in Birmingham, who had previously curated several large international exhibitions.

On 26 February Watkins gave a talk about his curation of the pavilion for the annual Mallowan Lecture (don't know) for the British Institute for the Study of Iraq at the British Academy in London.

Watkins decided to showcase artists still resident in Iraq, he told BISI, and whose art deals with issues of everyday life, rather than directly with conflict or politics. Everyone would know about that already, he figured.

He chose to leave much of Ca' Dandolo's furniture in place, partly so that people would feel comfortable hanging out there for hours at a time, and partly to show the everyday art in an everyday setting. He even went so far as to have a baker making and serving Iraqi tea and biscuits in the apartment kitchen for the duration of the event.

Two of the artists Watkins mentioned in his talk stood out.

First the cartoonist Abdul Raheem Yassir (whose work, now that I think about it, doesn't seem to fit with Watkins' description of being apolitical)

And second Akeel Khreef, who repurposes found detritus into useful and beautiful objects, like this table made from old bicycle parts (the tabletop is made from weaved old tires, the legs are forks and the feet are gears. I think the arches are mudguards):

The artists all visited the pavilion in Venice during the event... Not all of them returned to Iraq afterwards.

You can hear Watkins talking about his work on the pavilion here, and here you can read interviews with him and Chalabi.

Books: the power of a redesign

I recently bought a copy of David Bellos's Is That a Fish in Your Ear? I didn't set out to buy this book specifically: the Foyles in Charing Cross Road was displaying copies on one of its stair-side shelves, and it caught my eye.

The edition I bought looks like this:

Tasteful, no?

I didn't immediately decide to buy it: I looked at it, put it back down, wandered around the store some more, decided it had lodged a hook in me that wasn't going to be displaced, and then went back and tucked it beneath my arm.

I've since read the book; I thought it was quite good but would have benefited from being more concise. Of more relevance, it was only when I recorded my having read the book in Goodreads that I realised I'd seen it before (it was first published in 2011), looking like this:

Much as I like the use of an ear as a question mark, this design is not my idea of tasteful. To me, the design of the 2014 edition I bought is a like a nice check sweater, whereas the 2011 edition I didn't buy is more like a mid-90s T-shirt.

What's my point, besides that when it comes to reading material I conform sickeningly to my white middle class status and embody a shameless disregard for the old contents-by-covers adage?

Well, I'm sure its not just me who judges books by their covers. I haven't worked in the book trade, but I would think that part of the reason why book covers receive redesigns, other than because they're being put out by a new publisher and simply to keep up with current fashions, is to better target different groups of consumers?

In this age of online buying and loyalty cards, I wonder whether it's yet possible for publishers, retailers or both to keep track of the types of people buying an edition of a book, based on other purchases - Ottolenghi vs Oliver, say - and then redesign the cover for a later edition to target a different group of people? And would strongly targeting different buyers at different times be more effective than targeting all buyers simultaneously through a design that aims to appeal to all?

Furthermore, with the rise of online bookselling, would it be possible to use a browser's browsing history to show them the version of several simultaneously published editions that they would be most likely to buy?

Maybe this already happens? Google, if you're reading this, do point me in the direction of a relevant book design blog, old chap...

Kafka in a nutshell

This passage from a London Review of Books review by Rikva Galchen of Reiner Stach's three-part biography of Franz Kafka gives some insight into the origins of the writer's particular concerns (she's detailing documented occurrences in Kafka's life):

"Here he is reading a letter from the tax office asking about capital contributions to the First Prague Asbestos Works, here he is writing back explaining that the factory had ceased to exist five years earlier, and here he is receiving another letter asking what his reply meant as no record could be found of the referenced original letter, and then here he is a few months later receiving a third letter threatening him with charges and a fine if he persists in not accounting for the capital accumulation on the First Prague Asbestos Works."