MITPressLog

A Skull-astic Read

Happy Halloween! To kick off the spooky festivities, here’s a passage from The Gothic, edited by Gilda Williams, in which Gianni Jetzer traces the symbolic development of one of the most popular Halloween icons: the skull.

 

Freakish Beauty
The once unambiguous symbolism of the anatomical skull has clearly given way to the ambiguity of countless graphic variations within the framework of a completely new aesthetics. An early illustration of this new development in modern times is the flag flown by pirate ships – the Jolly Roger. Its most popular subject – the skull and crossbones – was a common memento mori on tombstones in Britain in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. For the first time, a symbol of death was transferred from a religious to a profane context in a singular act of piracy. Divorced from the ‘comforts’ of the Church and extreme unction, it morphed into a fearsome sign, the embodiment of a terrifying code of lawlessness and ungodliness. Pirates were ‘outlaws,’ dropouts from Christian society and its system of values and beliefs. Having since been appropriated by Hollywood and Disneyland, the sign has sacrificed much of its subversive appeal.[1]

Folkert de Jong’s installation It All Began in the Sea, shown at the Centre for European Art in Xiamen, China (2003) can be seen as both a pirate monument and a memento mori. The skull and crossbones are depicted next to amphorae, starfish and finger-like steles, recalling the treasure islands of pirate-story renown. Despite the frightening symbolism, there is something genuinely romantic about the ‘monument’…Displaying an ambivalent form of beauty in the midst of bony skulls needs no explanation; death suddenly acquires an easy-going nonchalance.

Folkert de Jong rises above the level of the straightforward memento mori. He uses skulls to tell stories (of life); he turns them into freakish pop characters who seem to live life dangerously on the presumption of their immortality. They have transcended us and our dreams of eternal youth, for they have reached another stage of consciousness, a kind of stable condition while we, the living, have to deal day after day with the inexorable decay of our own bodies…

Rebel Yell and Halloween
Even so, the skull still owes its popularity more to tattooing than to the fine arts. Tattoos spoke a secret language long before primitivism became trendy, before every small town boasted a high-street tattoo parlour and every indie-rocker and office worker willingly submitted to the needle. They were the domain of a special society, the underworld of criminals and inmates. The skull has always been a popular motif in tattooing…Today tattoos are no longer signs of affiliation with the underworld, but purely a lifestyle accessory…The skull continues to enjoy great popularity, except that it now has precious little to do with vanitas symbolism or the memento mori. It merely serve to embellish the body, to demonstrate defiance in the face of death or simply to make a show of rebellion. The skull has become an ambivalent rhetorical figure in contemporary society, possibly through the influence of other cultures. In Mexico, the ‘Day of the Dead’ is celebrated with thousands of little skeletons. Death is seen as the ultimate liberation from all earthly burdens. No wonder then that skeletons and skulls play such a central role during this festival where, rather than symbolizing death, they are viewed as symbols of life and regeneration. In order to confront death and make light of it, people eat marzipan, sugar or chocolate skulls and stage scenes populated with skeletons. And in North America, where black suits printed with white skeletons enjoy great popularity, it looks as if Halloween will soon outshine Christmas.

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[1] See David Cordingly, Under Black Flag, the Romance and the Reality of Life Amongst Pirates (Harvest Books, 1995).

 

Bill Gates on Vaclav Smil

Bill Gates - yes, that Bill Gates - reviews Vacla Smil's history of diesel engines and gas turbines, Prime Movers of Globalization, in his newsletter Gates Notes. A sample:

There are a lot of fascinating historical points and statistics in Smil’s book that make it an interesting read, but what most fascinated me was learning about the incredible impact these two innovations have had on so many aspects of our lives.

RTWT here.

The Font Fight: Helvetica’s Battle to Gain Control of NYC Subway Signs

 

In celebration of the 107^th anniversary of New York City’s first official subway system, let’s take a look at seven facts about how its iconic signs came about from Paul Shaw’s Helvetica and the New York City Subway System:

1) The first “signs” in the New York City subway system were created by Heins & La Farge, the architects of the Interborough Rapid Transit (IRT), when the IRT, the Brooklyn-Manhattan Transit (BMT), and the Independent (IND) lines merged in 1904. They are the same mosaic tablets seen today in both serif and sans serif roman capitals. Although created in the same architect’s studio, none of the signs have a uniform lettering style.

 2) George Salomon, frustrated by the labyrinth of distinctions among the IRT, BMT, and IND lines, suggested creating five color-coded lines identified by a letter and eleven branch lines a derivative letter/number combination. Only the color-coded route map was adopted by the Transit Authority, and Salomon’s subway map was published in 1958. 

3) Many subway sign systems around the world experienced many issues with consistency of style, except for London. Calligrapher Edward Johnston created the Johnston Railway Sans font for Frank Pick, the publicity manager for London Transport in 1916. In the 1960s, the font Airport, first used in The Oceanic Building (now Terminal 3) at Heathrow Airport.

4) The font Helvetica, created in Switzerland, didn’t catch on so quickly in the United States until Mergenthaler Linotype in Brooklyn aligned its original German Linotype mats with American ones.

5) MIT was one of the earliest three places to incorporate Helvetica into award-winning designs and advertising.

6) Helvetica became the official typeface for the New York City subway system signage in December 1989. Forms of Helvetica Medium were used for the Metro-North, Long Island Railroad, and New York City Transit Authority (NYCTA).

7) Desktop publishing software helped prompt the complete switch from the font Standard to Helvetica. It was the only font available in the equipment and systems listed the 1989 MTA Sign Manual.

 

How to lose the Euro battle

"Imagine an army going to war. It has overwhelming firepower. The generals, however, announce that they actually hate the whole thing and that they will limit the shooting as much as possible. Some of the generals are so upset by the prospect of going to war that they resign from the army. The remaining generals then tell the enemy that the shooting will only be temporary, and that the army will go home as soon as possible. What is the likely outcome of this war? You guessed it. Utter defeat by the enemy."

That's from a recent paper on the European Central Bank by Paul De Grauwe, faculty member at the University of Leuven, former member of the Belgian parliament, and editor of four of our books. The paper takes the Bank to task for the timidity of its bond-buying program, intended to stabilize the European economy. De Grauwe thinks that the ECB's open lack of commitment means that the program will have the opposite of its intended effect, with continued skepticism on the part of investors. The result? "You guessed it. Defeat by the financial markets."

Parts of the paper are somewhat obscure to those who haven't closely followed the Euro's fortunes over the last few months. But I found the last paragraph interesting for what it says about the role of academics vs. politicians in economic forecasting:

Academics have the reputation of living in an ivory tower far away from the realities of the world. My impression is that instead of the academics, it is the European leaders who have been living in an ivory tower. Disconnected from the economic and financial realities, they have created an institution that does not work and will never do so properly. Now they are creating a financial gimmick that, in their fantasies, they expect to solve the funding problems of major Eurozone countries. It is time for the European leaders to step back into the real world.

Read the whole thing here. Paul Krugman of the New York Times comments on De Grauwe's paper here.

Mens et Mania Recording Series: Week Three

Last week, Samuel Jay Keyser discussed the “adolescent science of linguistics.” This week, Jay reads from Chapter 7 of Mens et Mania and answers a few questions about it below.

 

 

 

 

From Ch. 7. Pornography&Free Speech

What were your thoughts about this controversy at the time it was unraveling?

 

I don’t think it was an accident that pornography became an issue at a time when the number of women on campus was doubling.  I think there was an element of sending women a message about their place in the scheme of things lurking behind the defense of a principle. One still hears women confronted with the view that they made it into MIT because of their gender and not their innate abilities.  In any event what troubled me most was the inability of one segment of the campus to be able to empathize with how pornography made another segment feel.

Have your opinions about this matter changed at all in retrospect?

No.

What do you think the importance of this incident was, in terms of what the students got out of it compared to the faculty?

For one thing the student-run Lecture Series Committee (LSC) no longer shows a pornographic movie on Registration Day.  That is a great step forward in civilizing our community. I have no doubt that pornography is still shown/viewed in more private settings.  But at least it is no longer a part of the “welcoming” ritual of MIT freshmen.

As for the faculty, I doubt many of them were very much aware of the turmoil that the issue had created on campus.  They were, as they so often are, focused on their research and teaching to the exclusion of issues of community culture.  I wouldn’t be surprised if much of the faculty had no idea that a pornographic movie was part of the Registration Day ritual at MIT.

Do you think that over the course of years, matters like these are necessary for the progress of both institutions and student populations? 

I think that confronting bad behavior is always a good thing to do.  I am not in favor of “doing” anything to students who behave badly, but I am in favor of holding up a mirror to what they are doing.  The same goes, of course, for the faculty.

 

John McCarthy, 1927-2011

We note the death on Monday of John McCarthy at the age of 84. McCarthy was a pioneer in the computerized simulation of human thinking - what we now call artificial intelligence. McCarthy came to MIT in 1958 and cofounded the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory with Marvin Minsky.

His experience there led him to create the LISP programming language, which became standard for AI research. And while programming languages have flourished in recent decades, we think it significant that LISP is still in use. Proof? The LISP 1.5 Programmer's Manual, which McCarthy wrote and we published in 1962, is still in print. Still sells, too.

He was an influential early thinker on what would become electronic commerce as well. One of his students at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory was Whit Diffie, who would go on to develop the foundational ideas of public-key cryptography, now the basic security mechanism underlying e-commerce.

In an obituary published by Stanford, McCarthy's colleague Edward Feigenbaum said that his colleage "could be blunt, but John was always kind and generous with his time, especially with students, and he was sharp until the end. He was always focused on the future. Always inventing, inventing, inventing. That was John."

He wil be missed.

Art Around the World

On October 25th, International Artists Day, in conjunction with Picasso’s birthday, celebrates the beauty and influence of art around the world. From cave paintings to modernism, art tells the story of people and culture. International Artists Day is a rapidly growing grassroots movement to pay tribute to any and all artists. Check out these MIT Press books featuring art and artists from around the world and be sure to visit your local art gallery or museum today.

 

Africa

Exiles, Diasporas & Strangers
By Kobena Mercer 

Migration, whether freely chosen or forcibly imposed, has been a defining feature of twentieth-century modernity...Whether manifested in the striking architectural innovations of Nigerian modernism in the 1920s or postmodern works by Jean-Michel Basquiat and black British filmmakers in the 1980s, the multidirectional appropriation and borrowing described in these essays give us new perspectives on twentieth-century art and modernity.

 

Asia

Contemporary Art in Asia
Melissa Chiu and Benjamin Genocchio, eds.

This book is the first anthology of critical writings to map the shift in both the nature and the reception of Asian art over the past twenty years. Offering texts by leading figures in the field (mostly Asian), and including more than fifty illustrations in color and black and white, it covers developments in East Asia (including China, Korea, and Japan), South Asia (including India and Pakistan), and Southeast Asia (including Vietnam, Indonesia, and Thailand). 

 

Wenda Gu
Mark H. C. Bessire, ed.

Wenda Gu is one of the leading contemporary Chinese artists of his generation. Known by some as "the hair artist" and remembered by others as the artist whose monumental installation was violently destroyed by a Russian artist at the infamous "Interpol" exhibition (Stockholm, 1996).

 

Eastern Europe

Imagine No Possessions
By Christina Kiaer

Kiaer analyzes this Constructivist counterproposal to capitalism's commodity fetish by examining objects produced by Constructivist artists between 1923 and 1925.

 

Art Power
By Boris Groys

Art has its own power in the world, and is as much a force in the power play of global politics today as it once was in the arena of cold war politics…In Art Power, Groys examines modern and contemporary art according to its ideological function.

 

Latin America

Mexican Modernity
By Rubén Gallo

In Mexican Modernity, Ruben Gallo tells the story of a second Mexican Revolution, a battle fought on the front of cultural representation. The new revolutionaries were not rebels or outlaws but artists and writers; their weapons were cameras, typewriters, radios, and other technological artifacts, and their goal was not to topple a dictator but to dethrone nineteenth-century aesthetics. 

 

North America

Move. Choreographing You
By Stephanie Rosenthal

Move. Choreographing You explores the interaction between visual art and dance since the 1960s. This beautifully illustrated book, published in connection with a major exhibition, focuses on visual artists and choreographers who create sculptures and installations that direct the movements of audiences--making them dancers and active participants.

 

And in celebration of Picasso's birthday and his contribution to the art world...

Myth and Metamorphosis
By Lisa Florman

[T]his book offers a radically different view of Picasso and the "classical"—a view that aligns his work much more closely with Surrealist, and specifically Bataillean, revisions of antiquity.

 

 

Undercover Surrealism
By Dawn Ades and Simon Baker

Undercover Surrealism, taking the visual richness of [George Bataille’s] DOCUMENTS as its starting point, recovers the explosive and vital intellectual context of works by Picasso, Dalí, Miró, Giacometti, and others in 1920s Paris.

 

Food for Thought

Today marks the celebration of the first National Food Day! Along with promoting better eating habits and healthier food options for the future, National Food Day reminds us that it is important to recognize the history that shaped our food culture today. In Chapter 3 of Food Justice, Robert Gottlieb and Anupama Joshi give an overview of various factors that contributed to the downsizing of cooking and food preparation through the years:

Even before the rise of fast food restaurants in the 1960s and 1970s and their influence on how we consume our food, changes were already taking place with respect to food preparation and the food products that shaped daily cuisine and diets. The loss of farmland and the demographic migration from rural areas to urban and then suburban locations picked up pace in the early twentieth century. By the 1920s the majority of the U.S. population lived in urban areas, and by the 1950s suburban areas had become the fastest-growing population centers. As the population moved, knowledge about growing and preparing food for the family meal faded. The early school garden movement in the first decade of the twentieth century emphasized the need for a new generation of children growing up in cities to regain that knowledge. The separation from home-grown and home-prepared food was accelerated by the advent of the school lunch program in the early twentieth century, which offered a consumable alternative to home-fixed meals carried in school lunch boxes…

Some cookbook authors would proclaim during the 1950s that processed foods for the home, such as frozen foods, had become “almost a necessity.” “Frozen vegetables are God’s own gift to the busy housewife,” declared Blanche Firman in her 1951 treatise on “recipes and entertainment ideas for young wives.”  A 1952 Business Week article celebrating the “revolution in eating habits” and the triumphant march of the food industry into the kitchen envisioned a not-so-distant future “when housewives will pick up an entire pre-cooked frozen meal”…

During the 1960s and 1970s a more complete makeover of food preparation occurred with the availability of new appliances such as the microwave, more instant foods on the market, and the continuing reach of television in influencing what food was purchased and how it was prepared. The key to food preparation became speed and convenience…Food preparation itself became linked to a culture of eating characterized by speed and convenience. By 1989, a Gallup survey about what food was eaten at home found that “almost half [of respondents] were sitting down to frozen, packaged, or take out meals.” And when food preparation and cleanup were combined, according to a 2007 government study, less than half an hour a day during the week was spent on that entire process and only a little more than half an hour on weekend days. In comparison, nearly two and a half hours a day were spend watching TV during the week and more than three hours a day on weekends.

 

Mens et Mania Recording Series: Week Two

 Last week, Samuel Jay Keyser told us about how he watched a wrecking ball destroy his old MIT office and shared his reactions to that experience. In this week's recording, Jay reads an excerpt from Chapter 2 of Mens et Mania. Like last week, there's also a brief Q&A with Jay about this recording below.

 

 

Ch.2.The Steps of Widener

 

You say, “No matter. The book will rise again.” What have you learned from your past years in the sciences that makes you think this?

My comment was meant to convey my faith that science will ultimately arrive at the truth, at least insofar as the human mind is capable of coming to grips with the truth. 

Do you believe that we will develop a better way of “seeing” the abstract in the near future?

I hope so. I think that there are a lot of frontiers where we need a better way of seeing. Why, for example, is the universe expanding at a faster rate? You would think gravity would be slowing it down.  Is it because of the dark matter? Perhaps dark matter is just a figment of our ignorance. Or take the brain. How is the most commonplace notion, say, of a coffee cup actually encoded in the neuronal structure of the cerebrum? I think these, and many other problems, are going to require a new way of seeing things abstractly.

What do you think the “adolescent science” of linguistics is competing with?

I don’t think it is competing with anything other than itself. My reference to linguistics as an adolescent science was meant to indicate that there is still so much we don’t know—for example, how linguistic knowledge is represented in the wetware of the brain—that the science itself is unable to offer us very little guidance in knowing what the right next step is. This is in sharp contrast to physics where the foundations are so secure that it is virtually impossible for physicists to publish nonsense. The agreed upon fundamentals of the field won’t let them. I am hopeful that once we understand how the brain encodes linguistic knowledge, many of the fundamental questions will be decided once and for all. Then the field will grow up.

 

Failed Farms to Fall Foliage

Fall is upon us, bringing with it gorgeous landscapes that mesmerize tourists and native New Englanders alike. Yet, fall foliage was not always something that people flocked from both near and far to appreciate; in fact, Kent C. Ryden writes in A Landscape History of New England (edited by Blake Harrison and Richard Judd), “New England’s fall colors seemed to be a secret…[people] paid little heed to fall foliage because it served no aesthetic or imaginative purpose for them, so it remained simply a part of the backdrop to their everyday lives.” How did New England’s vibrant fall colors transition from ignored to revered? The following excerpt from A Landscape History of New England explains.

From earliest European settlement until well into the nineteenth century, the primary story of the New England landscape was the conversion of wooded space into agricultural space. Given the economic calculus of the times and the set of understandings guiding the minds and hands of New Englanders, “forest” meant “potential farm,” which meant that trees existed to be cleared for fields and fuel, with some left standing as woodlots to provide farms and villages with continued timber resources. In a remarkably short time, as much of the New England landscape as was practicable was converted to farms, with the line of agricultural settlement reaching north into Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont by the 1790s. By the middle of the nineteenth century, according to some estimates, three-quarters of New England had been deforested, primarily for agricultural use.

Today, however, those same estimates gauge the region as three-quarters forested. What had been a massive landscape conversion over the course of three centuries has reverted even more rapidly to some semblance of its former self in only half the time. It is not a matter of the original ground cover reasserting itself; indeed, the ecological composition of New England forests today is largely a result of human action. To summarize a long and complex story: once the American Northeast was connected to the agricultural lands of the Midwest by first the Erie Canal (finished in 1825) and then by railroads (completed in the 1840s), New England agriculture became a more difficult economic concern. It is not that New England farms failed absolutely; rather, given their comparatively thin soils, their shorter growing seasons compared to other states, and the impracticability of new farm machinery on many smaller holdings, they were at an economic disadvantage in competition with the influx of cheaper foodstuffs arriving daily from other parts of the country. Some farmers—particularly those in the more hardscrabble hill farms of northern New England—abandoned their lands…much of the New England landscape was allowed to revert to forest…

Far from being heartened by the return of trees on the played-out farms, many early commentators looked at the New England landscape according to the old calculus of productivity. From their perspective, New England was a failed region…

By the early twentieth century, however, we also begin to see a change in how that landscape is perceived, a change that reflects a larger regional and national evolution in the cultural meanings of natural places. Just as changing nature-culture relations have molded the physical landscape of New England, so have changing cultural ideologies regarding nature altered the perceived significance of the landscape. Basically, this change amounted to thinking of forests not as “failed farms” but as “foliage,” an altogether different category of landscape. A new one, too: the popularity of, and regional pride in, colorful leafy hillsides is very much a twentieth-century development…[allowing fall foliage to become] not only a New England regional symbol but the main focus of many an autumnal bus trip along the region’s back roads.