We won’t exchange our book gifts until later this evening, but these are my companions until then. It delights me that how I have spent Christmas Eve for more than thirty years has a name: jólabókaflóð.
Author Archives: Nerdishly
Lincoln Park Conservatory
The Lincoln Park Conservatory, which is adjacent to the Lincoln Park Zoo, is one of my favorite spots in all of the greatest city in the world. To enter this building is to enter the otherworld.
On each of our last five or so visits, the most recent of which was yesterday, a character of a caretaker has held court with any visitor who will stop and listen. He is intent on letting each of us know that staff has been reduced, volunteers are none too plentiful, and the building is falling apart. The latter is apparent. The former? Not so much. The plants seem abundant and well cared for. The floors and bathrooms are clean. For all of its decrepitude, the building is beautiful. Isn’t this just “the way things are” in 2015? Many people, businesses, cities, countries have fewer resources to meet their needs, let alone their wish-list of hopes, dreams, and wants. We must do what we can with what we have. It seems that the time to rail about what was has passed — especially if one, after all, still has his job.
Surreal
I captured these images as I wandered through the Museum of Contemporary Art exhibit “Surrealism: The Conjured Life” yesterday.
Detail from
■ Tom Czarnopys’ “Untitled” (1984)
■ Joseph Seigenthaler’s “The Couple” (1993)
■ June Leaf’s “But Alas, He was an artist”
■ Jimmie Durham’s “In a Cabin in the Woods” (2010)
■ Jean Dubuffet’s “La Verrue sous le nez (Wart Under the Nose)” (1951)
■ Lee Bontecou’s “Untitled” (1990-2000)
At the Lincoln Park Zoo
Early this year, I accompanied my daughter on a visit to the Milwaukee County Zoo for a series of primate behavior observations. While she made copious notes and narrated what she was seeing and how it dovetailed what she was learning in her anthropology course, I took image after image, many of which she used as references for illustrations she made to complement her field notes. Since that rather magical day, I look at primates much, much differently. I think I have begun to see them.
The above images were taken on December 11 at the Lincoln Park Zoo.
A Greek chorus
Perhaps it was a product of seeing the two plays on the same day, but the relationship between the barking journalists who offer up sensational headlines in the wake of Bobby Franks’ murder in Never the Sinner at Victory Gardens and the Greek chorus who bring the audience up to speed on the house of horrors that is Atreus in the contemporary translation of Aeschylus’ Agamemnon at the Court is rather uncanny. The similarity struck me during the panel discussion that followed Never the Sinner. The press, the chorus. Of course! It’s all narrative, I thought, and someone mediates it, reinterprets it, annotates it, comments on it, tells the story.
Reviews of Never can be found here and here; Agamemnon, here and here. I enthusiastically recommend both plays.
At the Milwaukee County Zoo
Project FeederWatch
Helping birds is easy.
1. Put up a feeder.
2. Count the birds that visit.
3. Send the data to scientists.
The 2015-2016 season of Project FeederWatch begins November 14, so it’s not too late to register for this wonderful program.
From the Project FeederWatch website:
Project FeederWatch is a winter-long survey of birds that visit feeders at backyards, nature centers, community areas, and other locales in North America. FeederWatchers periodically count the birds they see at their feeders from November through early April and send their counts to Project FeederWatch. FeederWatch data help scientists track broadscale movements of winter bird populations and long-term trends in bird distribution and abundance.
Anyone interested in birds can participate. FeederWatch is conducted by people of all skill levels and backgrounds, including children, families, individuals, classrooms, retired persons, youth groups, nature centers, and bird clubs. Participants watch their feeders as much or as little as they want over two consecutive days as often as every week (less often is fine). They count birds that appear in their count site because of something that they provided (plantings, food, or water).
If you plan to participate, set up your feeders now and commit to keeping them filled throughout the season. Use a variety of feeders and seed to attract a greater variety of visitors. For more information, check out this site.
“Genius by any definition is rare.”
The May 1960 edition of Horizon: A Magazine of the Arts featured an article by Harold G. McCurdy, author of The Personality of Shakespeare: A Venture in Psychological Method (1953) and then professor of psychology at the University of North Carolina. “The Childhood Pattern of Genius,” based on a (presumably longer and more scholarly) paper first published in the Journal of the Elisha Mitchell Scientific Society and later in a report of the Smithsonian Institution, has enjoyed a bit of fame more than five decades after its publication because its concluding paragraph serves as a sort of “So there!” response to queries — both implied and expressed — about the methods and motives of home educators.
Not content to discuss a potentially truncated and/or inaccurate transcript of the quote, I tracked down a copy of the magazine, a hard-bound gem of a publication that includes such delights as an image of the Bed of Ware (so famous, apparently, that it merited mention in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night) in a piece about civilization’s best beds; “An Eastern Art Goes Western,” James A. Michener’s exploration of traditional Japanese wood block complemented by numerous (and gorgeous) full-color images; and mention of Burnham’s “White City” of 1893 in an article about the 1964 Fair.
McCurdy writes:
In summary, the present survey of biographical information on a sample of twenty men of genius suggests that the typical developmental pattern includes as important aspects: (1) a high degree of attention focused upon the child by parents and other adults, expressed in intensive educational measures and, usually, abundant love; (2) isolation from other children, especially outside the family; and (3) a rich efflorescence of fantasy as a reaction to the preceding conditions. It might be remarked that the mass education of our public school system is, in its way, a vast experiment on the effect of reducing all three factors to a minimum; accordingly, it should tend to suppress the occurrence of genius.
McCurdy’s “twenty men of genius” included such notables as John Stuart Mill, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Blaise Pascal, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Voltaire, John Quincy Adams, and William Pit, and the writer maintains that his “brief sketches” of their lives
confirm the rule that children of genius are exposed to significantly great amounts of intellectual stimulation by adults and experience very restricted contacts with other children of their own age. Nor should we overlook the fact that books themselves, to which these children were so much attached, are representatives of the adult world. […] Books extend the boundaries of the adult empire.
My first thought after reading the article was, Were there no women of genius? And my second? What a dubious business this is, appropriating a fifty-five-year-old study about genius as a validation of home education. Certainly, McCurdy notes that mass education “is, in its way, a vast experiment on the effect of reducing” the important aspects of the childhood pattern of genius, but he also contends that “Genius by any definition is rare.”
Indeed, it is.
“I think walking is a little more primal than art-making.”
Two images I took at the now closed Charles Ray: Sculpture, 1997–2014 continue to attract my attention, even now, five months after taking them. Ray’s “Sleeping Woman” (2012) is a startling achievement, at once awe-inspiring and intimate.
The exposed waistband of her briefs. That detail that slays me.
The title of today’s post comes from a passage in Will Self’s 2013 interview with Ray.
A minority of one
While there is much to recommend about the Steppenwolf’s production of 1984, including the haunting set and the emphasis on the individual’s experience of this madly prescient world, Lance Baker’s creepily perfect O’Neill is the best reason to see the play, which runs through November 20. Reviews here and here.
Nerdishly 