John Gall’s cover art for the paperback edition of 1Q84
An Elegant and Original Idea →
By PETER COATES
Reviewed:
On Growth and Form by D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson
Cambridge University Press, 345 pp., $31.00
Completed in 1915 and first published in 1917, On Growth and Form had already been in print for 50 years when I found it, but it was revelatory: like opening the curtains and finding not the backyard but the Himalayas. Fourteen is an impressionable age, but any number of more mature readers have reacted in the same way, for Thompson’s book is not just about a theory of biology — it presents a way of seeing the natural world through ideas rendered as literature.
Too often, we’re introduced to the natural sciences by a route that seems designed to repel anyone with a degree of sensitivity to beauty: hacking away at brain-dead frogs, calculating the trajectory of imaginary cannon balls, and coaxing minuscule electric currents from vegetables. The scientific content of On Growth and Form has the opposite effect; it is about how a few simple mathematical principles dictate the structure of living things. Animals and plants are presented as the living embodiment of equations of scale across domains of linear measure, mass, temperature, speed; each plant and animal as a cloud of mathematical, almost Platonic, truths. Scientific principles are also revealed in the context of their connection to philosophy, history, and the elegant use of language and learning; a profound revelation of both the spaciousness and the interconnectedness of ideas. It is difficult to convey the impact this combination of ideas and writing delivers to a young mind at the right moment.
Peter Medawar famously called On Growth and Form “beyond comparison the finest work of literature in all the annals of science that have been recorded in the English tongue,” but it is not merely a literary expression of established knowledge; it’s one of the most peculiar and original works of modern science, advancing an idiosyncratic view of how organisms develop, a view that was deeply at odds with the intellectual climate of Thompson’s time. An elegant expression of an original idea that is still, possibly even increasingly, influential in biology, it’s a work of literature that can be read for pleasure by scientists and nonscientists, and a textbook on how to think in any field.
Stylistically, it has profoundly influenced generations of scientist-authors: Benoit Mandelbrot’s seminal The Fractal Geometry of Nature (1982) emulates both Thompson’s literary approach and his audacity in presenting a mathematical view of nature contrary to the prevailing view. Mandelbrot’s somewhat imperious style excites more admiration than affection. Oliver Sacks’ Migraine, which for many years was the most comprehensive overview of the field, though mostly nonmathematical, has more of Thompson’s grace and modesty. In this, Sacks may be Thompson’s truest heir. One of the lasting pleasures of On Growth and Form is in finding echoes of it in so many places, from the essays of Isaac Asimov, to Douglas Hofstadter’s Gödel , Escher, Bach, to Edward Tufte’s influential (and gorgeous) The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. One work contemporary with Thompson’s is also worth mentioning. The Curves of Life (1914) by Theodore Andrea Cook covers some of the same mathematical territory, particularly as related to natural spirals, but with a heavy emphasis on their occurrence in architecture and art.
*****
Chapter two, my favorite, deals with simple mathematical principles that dictate how the form of an animal must change with size: why elephants cannot be shaped like deer; the nonintuitive relationship between leg size and walking speed (if mice moved at speeds proportional to their size, you wouldn’t need cats — you could just pick them up like box turtles); why birds can be only so large, and mammals only so small; why eyes vary in size so much less than animals do. Although Thompson died before computers were invented, this chapter made the analysis of algorithms — the study of how computational processes behave as problems increase in size — seem completely natural to me when I began to study computer science almost 70 years after the chapter was written.
While it’s not easy reading by any means, there are few ideas in the book that require mathematics beyond the level of advanced high school or the first year of college. (I was an undistinguished scholar in high school, to say the least, and got through it.) Given high school algebra and geometry, most of the concepts are developed from scratch, and are not difficult. If some of the technicalities do not get through, the strength of the writing usually bridges the gap, and getting every detail is not critical — they build to a fascinating and subtle argument that depends less on mastering the formulas themselves than understanding the general importance of their very existence.
There are 17 chapters, covering an enormous range of issues, and not all have worn equally well scientifically, nor will all be of equal interest to the casual reader. But you can hardly crack the book without finding something fascinating: how the geometry that controls soap bubbles also determines a wide range of living forms; the geometrical order underlying the growth of shells, leaves, and horns; the engineering principles of skeletons. The most famous chapter is probably the last, which contains the best-known of the many illustrations in the book. The subject is the underlying unity of animal design — how a few basic designs can be systematically distorted to represent almost any animal by a process that we would now call morphing. The process is described by Thompson as simple manipulations of the grid on which they are drawn (in mathematical terms, replacing the regular X and Y coordinate values on the grid with smooth mathematical functions of these values). Less abstractly, it’s as if images that cannot be erased from or added to are drawn on a rubber sheet that can be stretched and compressed, but not cut. In this way, he warps a human infant’s skull into that of an ape, and turns one canonical fish into a multiplicity of species, showing how these simple warping functions unify huge families of species.
Unseen Le Petit Prince pages land for auction →
By ALISON FLOOD l The Guardian May 4, 2012
Rare unpublished pages from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Le Petit Prince, which shed new light on the beloved story, have been discovered and are set to be auctioned later this month.
The pages were part of a collection of Saint-Exupéry’s writing passed to French auction house Artcurial by a private collector earlier this year. Reading through the material, experts were astonished to discover that it included two unpublished pages from The Little Prince, one of which features entirely original material and could give a political perspective to the story of the prince from a tiny planet who journeys through the universe before arriving on Earth.
“His writing is terrible, but we managed to interpret it and realised that two of the pages, among all these pages, were unpublished material from The Little Prince,” said Benoît Puttemans from Artcurial’s books department. “It was a big shock.” The Little Prince has sold millions of copies around the world. Saint-Exupéry died in action in 1944, the year after it was published.
The first page reveals an early version of the moment when the hero arrives on Earth, the seventh planet he visits. In the unpublished version, Saint-Exupéry wrote: “If we gathered together all the inhabitants of this planet, all next to each other, tightly, as they do for some big public assembly, the whites, the yellows, the blacks, the children, the old people, the women, and the men without forgetting a single one, all of humanity would fit on Long Island.” This compares to the final text, which reads: “If the two billion inhabitants who people its surface were all to stand upright and somewhat crowded together, as they do for some big public assembly, they could easily be put into one public square 20 miles long and 20 miles wide”.
“These are interesting variants,” said Puttemans. “In this draft, Saint-Exupéry is much more precise. He talked of Long Island, which would be a detail for American readers, not others. In the definitive text, he changed this and made things much more universal – but it’s interesting to see what was in his head as he was writing.”
The second page introduces an entirely new character to the storyline – a crossword enthusiast, the first human the Little Prince meets when he arrives on Earth. “‘Where are the men?’ said the little prince to himself as he was travelling,” writes Saint-Exupéry in the draft. “He met the first of them on a road. ‘Ah!’ he said to himself, ‘I am going to find out what they think about life on this planet,’ he said. ‘That may be an ambassador of the human spirit …’”
The man tells the Little Prince he is very busy.“‘Of course he is very busy,’ said the little prince to himself, ‘he takes care of such a large planet. There is so much to do.’ And he scarcely dared disturb him. ‘Perhaps I can help you,’ he nevertheless said aloud: The little prince enjoyed being helpful. ‘Perhaps,’ said the man […]. ‘I have been working for three days without success. I am looking for a six-letter word that starts with G that means ‘gargling’.”
The page then ends. “We don’t know the solution, it’s not on the page, and that’s part of the beauty of it – it makes many readings possible because we don’t know what Saint-Exupéry was thinking,” said Puttemans. “But he wrote it in 1941, in New York, when he was very engaged with the war. So I think one meaning for the six letter word could be ‘guerre’ [war]. Which changes our interpretation of the text a little bit.”
Usually, Puttemans said, The Little Prince is seen as a universal text, but if the solution to the crossword clue is “guerre”, then the book could be seen as having an anti-war perspective.
“In French, ‘to gargle something’ can also mean ‘to be proud of oneself, or of something’. This pride can be compared to a nationalism which, in 1939-1940, unleashed the conflicts in Europe which we know of,” he said. “Obviously this is only a guess: the text does not give us an answer, and maybe it’s better that way.”
How to Teach Art in 89 Simple Lessons
By DWIGHT GARNER l New York Times March 29, 2012
When the American painter, sculptor and installation artist Paul Thek (1933-88) taught art classes at Cooper Union in the late 1970s, he wrote and then gave to his students a long, provocative and now famous list of questions and marching orders he titled “Teaching Notes.”
Thek’s sometimes intimate questions included “On what do you sleep?” and “Have you ever been seriously ill?” Among his tantalizing assignments for students were “Add a station to the cross,” “Redesign the human genitals so that they might be more equitable” and “Design an abstract monument to Uncle Tom.” I’d walk a long way to see Richard Serra or Cindy Sherman attempt any of these, especially the middle one.
“Teaching Notes” closed with this statement, which professors (and critics) everywhere should etch onto the bottom rims of their reading glasses, facing outward: “Remember, I’m going to mark you, it’s my great pleasure to reward real effort, it’s my great pleasure to punish stupidity, laziness and insincerity.”
Thek’s list has been passed around by serious art teachers for decades. It is now reprinted in — and its spirit lingers over — a mischievous and nourishing new book called “Draw It With Your Eyes Closed: The Art of the Art Assignment,” compiled by the editors of the art magazine Paper Monument, a sibling publication of the literary magazine n + 1.
Here’s what Paper Monument’s editors, in this slim book, have had the wit to do: They’ve asked dozens of artists and teachers, some well known and some not, to speak about the best art assignments they’ve given or received or even heard of.
The results are aimed at M.F.A.-level teachers, but these 89 entries are accessible to anyone, many even to children. Like the conversation in the final hour of a boozy art opening, these small anecdotal essays mix gossip, profundity, bogosity and lecherousness in equal parts. The book is buzzy and wild, like real talk.
Some of the assignments printed here read like haiku. “Take an 18 x 24 inch piece of paper and make a drawing using nothing but your car”; “Defenestrate objects. Photo them in mid-air”; “Go into your studio. Using all the clothes you are wearing, make a work of art. Leave the studio naked.”
Others sound like party games, albeit the kind that will have the neighbors ringing the police at midnight. There are stories here of pianos being demolished and then reassembled; of male nude models developing stubborn erections; of art made from nearly every bodily emission; about an entire class unwittingly eating pot muffins at 8 a.m. on a Tuesday because a student has brought them along.
Kevin Zucker, an artist who teaches at the Rhode Island School of Design, relates the pot muffin story. His essay includes this observation: “Later that afternoon you will have to endure a lengthy meeting with someone from the college’s ‘risk management’ office. The official’s job description, enthusiasm for discharging his duties, and Men’s Wearhouse suit will all combine to make you bottomlessly sad.”
About another assignment, Mr. Zucker writes: “Nobody will admit to pinning the skidmarked undies to the wall.” Luckily this work vanishes before students must critique it.
Some of these small essays are autobiographical, others confessional. More than a few are dyspeptic. There’s a lot of (legitimate) pushback to the notion that art can be taught, or that assignments do anything except promote subservience and callow grade grubbing. A contributor named Justin Lieberman speaks for many when he says he often tells his students: “I am not your father! Do what you want!”
The editors note that “many of the anti-assignments collected in this book use the slippery logic of ‘I command you to disobey me’ and other infamous tricks of the oracle.”
Most of the contributors, however, respond in the spirit of the undertaking. Their essays are a pleasure, in that they show us serious thinkers returning to bedrock principles. They remind us that every artist was an apprentice once.
This is the book to read on the subway while on your way to the Whitney Biennial. It allows you to consider the long and improbable leap from novitiate art to the real and electric thing.
One surprise is that a book like this one doesn’t already exist. The editors began work on it, they write in an afterword, because they were surprised to find, in art literature, “how little attention was paid to the nuts and bolts of art teaching.” They point out that art assignments have largely been an oral tradition, “adapted, shared, and reworked.” This book thus comprises a mini-canon.
Paper Monument is adept at this kind of small, unpretentious volume. In 2009 it published a demonic little pamphlet titled “I Like Your Work: Art and Etiquette.” It was packed with sardonic advice about how to behave at openings and elsewhere. It addressed burning issues like when to act like a jerk, and how to dress if you happen to be obese.
A fair amount of flatulent academic writing clouds the air in “Draw It With Your Eyes Closed.” (“All art should kind of assault the domestic interior”; “begin by revising your previous notions of space.”) But if you follow art and can’t stomach a certain level of pretentiousness, you’ll forever be stuck in the shallow end of the pool.
“Draw It With Your Eyes Closed” is an upbeat and idiosyncratic book that also happens to speak some uncomfortable truths about the art world. One of them is this: “It’s quite difficult to get a foothold if somebody older than you doesn’t take an active interest.” Perhaps more pertinently, there is this advice to any teacher who lords it over his or her students: “Don’t forget how easy it is for them to find images of your own work on the Internet.”
The pocket in question is a small pocket of resistance. A pocket is formed when two or more people come together in agreement. The resistance is against the inhumanity of the New World Economic Order. The people coming together are the reader, me, and those the essays are about–Rembrandt, Paleolithic cave painters, a Romanian peasant, ancient Egyptians, an expert in the loneliness of a certain hotel bedroom, dogs at dusk, a man in a radio station. And unexpectedly, our exchanges strengthen each of us in our conviction that what is happening in the world today is wrong, and that what is often said about it is a lie. I’ve never written a book with a greater sense of urgency.
Your Brain on Fiction →
By ANNIE MURPHY PAUL l NYTimes Sunday Review March 17, 2012
Amid the squawks and pings of our digital devices, the old-fashioned virtues of reading novels can seem faded, even futile. But new support for the value of fiction is arriving from an unexpected quarter: neuroscience.
Brain scans are revealing what happens in our heads when we read a detailed description, an evocative metaphor or an emotional exchange between characters. Stories, this research is showing, stimulate the brain and even change how we act in life.
Researchers have long known that the “classical” language regions, like Broca’s area and Wernicke’s area, are involved in how the brain interprets written words. What scientists have come to realize in the last few years is that narratives activate many other parts of our brains as well, suggesting why the experience of reading can feel so alive. Words like “lavender,” “cinnamon” and “soap,” for example, elicit a response not only from the language-processing areas of our brains, but also those devoted to dealing with smells.
In a 2006 study published in the journal NeuroImage, researchers in Spain asked participants to read words with strong odor associations, along with neutral words, while their brains were being scanned by a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine. When subjects looked at the Spanish words for “perfume” and “coffee,” their primary olfactory cortex lit up; when they saw the words that mean “chair” and “key,” this region remained dark. The way the brain handles metaphors has also received extensive study; some scientists have contended that figures of speech like “a rough day” are so familiar that they are treated simply as words and no more. Last month, however, a team of researchers from Emory University reported in Brain & Language that when subjects in their laboratory read a metaphor involving texture, the sensory cortex, responsible for perceiving texture through touch, became active. Metaphors like “The singer had a velvet voice” and “He had leathery hands” roused the sensory cortex, while phrases matched for meaning, like “The singer had a pleasing voice” and “He had strong hands,” did not.
Researchers have discovered that words describing motion also stimulate regions of the brain distinct from language-processing areas. In a study led by the cognitive scientist Véronique Boulenger, of the Laboratory of Language Dynamics in France, the brains of participants were scanned as they read sentences like “John grasped the object” and “Pablo kicked the ball.” The scans revealed activity in the motor cortex, which coordinates the body’s movements. What’s more, this activity was concentrated in one part of the motor cortex when the movement described was arm-related and in another part when the movement concerned the leg.
The brain, it seems, does not make much of a distinction between reading about an experience and encountering it in real life; in each case, the same neurological regions are stimulated. Keith Oatley, an emeritus professor of cognitive psychology at the University of Toronto (and a published novelist), has proposed that reading produces a vivid simulation of reality, one that “runs on minds of readers just as computer simulations run on computers.” Fiction — with its redolent details, imaginative metaphors and attentive descriptions of people and their actions — offers an especially rich replica. Indeed, in one respect novels go beyond simulating reality to give readers an experience unavailable off the page: the opportunity to enter fully into other people’s thoughts and feelings.
The novel, of course, is an unequaled medium for the exploration of human social and emotional life. And there is evidence that just as the brain responds to depictions of smells and textures and movements as if they were the real thing, so it treats the interactions among fictional characters as something like real-life social encounters.
Raymond Mar, a psychologist at York University in Canada, performed an analysis of 86 fMRI studies, published last year in the Annual Review of Psychology, and concluded that there was substantial overlap in the brain networks used to understand stories and the networks used to navigate interactions with other individuals — in particular, interactions in which we’re trying to figure out the thoughts and feelings of others. Scientists call this capacity of the brain to construct a map of other people’s intentions “theory of mind.” Narratives offer a unique opportunity to engage this capacity, as we identify with characters’ longings and frustrations, guess at their hidden motives and track their encounters with friends and enemies, neighbors and lovers.
It is an exercise that hones our real-life social skills, another body of research suggests. Dr. Oatley and Dr. Mar, in collaboration with several other scientists, reported in two studies, published in 2006 and 2009, that individuals who frequently read fiction seem to be better able to understand other people, empathize with them and see the world from their perspective. This relationship persisted even after the researchers accounted for the possibility that more empathetic individuals might prefer reading novels. A 2010 study by Dr. Mar found a similar result in preschool-age children: the more stories they had read to them, the keener their theory of mind — an effect that was also produced by watching movies but, curiously, not by watching television. (Dr. Mar has conjectured that because children often watch TV alone, but go to the movies with their parents, they may experience more “parent-children conversations about mental states” when it comes to films.)
Fiction, Dr. Oatley notes, “is a particularly useful simulation because negotiating the social world effectively is extremely tricky, requiring us to weigh up myriad interacting instances of cause and effect. Just as computer simulations can help us get to grips with complex problems such as flying a plane or forecasting the weather, so novels, stories and dramas can help us understand the complexities of social life.”
These findings will affirm the experience of readers who have felt illuminated and instructed by a novel, who have found themselves comparing a plucky young woman to Elizabeth Bennet or a tiresome pedant to Edward Casaubon. Reading great literature, it has long been averred, enlarges and improves us as human beings. Brain science shows this claim is truer than we imagined.
Among the problems Nabokov’s Lolita poses for the book designer, probably the thorniest is the popular misconception of the title character. She’s chronically miscast as a teenage sexpot—just witness the dozens of soft-core covers over the years.
I was interested to see what well-known designers might come up with when freed from editors, publishers and art directors and the constraints implicit in the marketing and selling of books. The result, I think, is a sort of meditation on what it means to create a cover for a complicated book, but it’s also about how a cover can add to or change the book’s meaning.They don’t shy away from frank sexuality, but they add layers of darkness and complication. And like Jamie Keenan’s cover—a claustrophobic room that morphs into a girl in her underwear—they provoke without asking readers to abdicate their responsibility.
