Guest Blogger Chris Rossi on Paul Bowles’ Mosaic Method

Long before Eno’s oblique strategies, Paul Bowles described his own method for excising the ego by introducing randomness to the artistic process, in this case narrative story-telling. In his brief but illuminating introduction to the short story collection A Hundred Camels in the Courtyard, Bowles says, “In 1960 I began to experiment with the idea of constructing stories whose subject matter would consist of disparate elements and unrelated characters taken directly from life and fitted together as in a mosaic. The problem was to create a story-line which would make each arbitrarily chosen episode compatible with the others, to make one lead to the next with a semblance of naturalness.”

Bowles’ solution was to create a literal mosaic, generating a list of characters, “incidents and situations that I had witnessed or heard about that year,” then combine them. Once Bowles had his list (“A held a grudge against B, when B was made a police man,” “C acquired an old pair of shoes from D,” etc.) he needed something to bind the storylines together. Choosing as his subject the community of Kif-smokers in Morocco, he realized: “By providing Kif-directed motivations, I was able to use cannabis as both a solvent and solder in the construction.”

Inspired by Bowles, I used this method while writing “Lives of the Saints,” a film I’m shooting later this year. I drew my list from people I know, barely knew, or heard about. My list partially reads: “A is an alcoholic acting teacher trying to reconnect with her daughter, B is a young drifter who left his family following the death of his sister, and C is a middle-aged professor from the Midwest, journeying to the city to search for his runaway daughter.” My “solvent” in this case, was the characters’ aching desire to reconnect with their families after a traumatic event.

Just as Eno intended his OS cards to break a deadlocked artistic situation, so Bowles’ method can be useful for smashing through writer’s block. It also takes the focus off plotting, allowing a narrative to unfold, unforced and organically from character, via the collision of those characters’ trajectories. The dizzying result can be the disappearance of the writer’s hand, and the birth of a world that feels authentic and random.

Much like this one, on a good day.

What do Caroline Herschel, Ada Lovelace, Mary Somerville, Mary Anning, Lise Meitner, Emmy Noether, Jocelyn Bell, Rosalind Franklin, Vera Rubin, and Hedy Lamarr (among others) have in common? They each made extraordinary scientific discoveries that went unrecognized because they were women, many of them having to endure male colleagues taking credit for their work, then winning Nobel prizes for it. Even Marie Curie — sadly the only woman scientist anyone can ever think of — was dismissed as little more than her husband’s assistant, her Nobel prizes contested by fellow scientists. On December 10, 1911, Marie Curie won her second Nobel, the only person ever to win two Nobels in two different sciences, yet a hundred years later, in 2011, no women were among the nine Nobel winners in the sciences, and women remain severely underrepresented in the STEM professions — science, technology, engineering, and math.

A 2010 report by the American Association of University Women, based on decades of research, concluded that bias and stereotypes still impede the female pursuit of scientific subjects from grade school through academia. Vivian Gornick’s book of interviews with scientists, Women in Science: Then and Now, provides detailed accounts of the discrimination experienced regularly by professionals. Glaring proof of such prejudice was infamously provided by Lawrence Summers, president of Harvard University at the time, who in a creepy, eugenics-ish statement asserted at a 2005 conference on Diversifying the Science & Engineering Workforce that women had “issues of intrinsic aptitude.”

Summers’s views echo Victorian British claims that female brain size was too small to grasp scientific subjects. Richard Holmes, author of The Age of Wonder, has been spending much time in that revered scientific institution The Royal Society of London researching his forthcoming book, The Lost Women of Victorian Science. The society’s archives, as reported in a recent issue of the Guardian, have revealed that despite their presumed encephalic limitations, “women played a far more important role in the development and dissemination of science than had previously been thought.”

Another Victorian, Alfred Lord Tennyson, famously declared, “The woman’s cause is man’s; they rise or fall together.” While Julie Des Jardine’s book The Madame Curie Complex: The Hidden History of Women in Science exposes male scientists’ bad behavior toward their female counterparts, she also notes that women scientists wouldn’t have gained the recognition that they did without the help of notable male allies.

Hedy Lamarr has found a notable male ally in Pulitzer-prize winning science writer Richard Rhodes. His delightful, explosive book entitled Hedy’s Folly: The Life and Breakthrough Inventions of Hedy Lamarr, The Most Beautiful Woman in the World has brought significant, well-deserved recognition to this woman’s remarkable scientific achievements.

As some people do puzzles or watch birds, Hedy invented. As a child from a secular Jewish family in Austria in the 1920s, she absorbed her banker father’s love of knowing how things worked. At sixteen she dropped out of school to pursue a career in acting. Her success was immediate with a groundbreaking film called Ekstase. Rhodes maintains it was a strikingly modern exploration of female sexuality and a reversal of Victorian paternalism. “Had the film been released in the 1960s instead of the 1930s,” Rhodes speculates, “it might have been hailed as feminist.”
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Compiled by Guest blogger Peggy Nelson

I have some early memories of what I’ll call my ontological anxiety. I drew one dot and then another next to it and in a flash realized that by simply deciding I could see those dots as two eyes. Add another quick slash and I not only had a mouth but an expression, a smile, frown, goofy smirk. That moment where the abstract becomes familiar, the geometric turns narrative, when nothing is suddenly something, has never ceased to delight and frighten me in equal measure. As a child, I also diligently practiced meditation and experienced the opposite movement where thoughts and images and identities dissolve into nothingness.

In subtle and overt ways, this ontological anxiety runs through much of my written and visual work, taking different shapes as my inquiry and practice move through novel articulations. Childhood through young adulthood I mostly drew and made small sculptures, and I liked portraits in particular when I was young, copied from books of obscure 19th Century Polish painters my mother brought home from the research library where she worked. Drawing those portraits too there was the exquisite moment when two small marks or a minor erasure suddenly brought the face to life. I made one self-portrait around the age of twelve mostly from a photo, though I remember checking in the mirror to get the spark of presence just right. I did a series as a young man of stylized self-portraits, all angles and windows and curling cigarette smoke, inspired by the German Expressionists.

And there I stopped. For many years I dedicated myself solely to writing, wrestling with the same slippery Self in poems, stories, scripts. I resumed my study and practice of meditation, mostly Buddhist and Tantric, two rigorous contemplative traditions with a great deal to say about the nature of the Self. One fine day, I took my old camera (with film!) out for a walk and started a series of self-portraits. In the city, you’re always part of a larger play of light, and through the day, you catch yourself tens if not hundreds of times, not always consciously, sometimes in peripheral flickers, and all those mirrored impressions create a holographic image, an identity held in the mind. As a meditative practice and a minor compulsion (the line is thin sometimes) I paid attention to my reflected and refracted selves, projected or ghostly, present and absent simultaneously. I collected reflections like a bird watcher.

The gesture is the simplest, regressive and infantile in its immediate pleasure, the recognition of oneself in a particular time and place. But look long enough or enough times and location gives way to the more grown-up experience of dissolution into greater relationship. In that flash of recognition I’m relieved of ontological anxiety. The Self forms as it vanishes, evaporates as it condenses, and that’s the fun part, the invitation to play, make a story, a poem, a mood. And where my head appears in each image is experienced by me at that very instant as an open expanse containing everything else in the picture.

***

Vijay Balakrishnan was born in Ootacamund, South India, and immigrated with his family to Chicago at the age of nine. He’s co-written the feature screenplays Karma Local and Toussaint, published fiction in Miranda Literary Magazine, and his prose and photographs have appeared in The Paris Review. Recently, he published his first novel, Peace INC., which was profiled in HiLobrow.

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One day in the White Paper city, early morning people wake up and begin to live their lives.
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Lavazza a modo mio from dadomani on Vimeo.

This first appeared in Stuck in Customs.

I was recently in Chicago for several days and fell in love with the city. It’s sophisticated and grown-up and seems to combine the best of San Francisco and New York. This photo by Trey Ratcliff captures a view from one of the tallest buildings in Chicago.

This first appeared in Stuck in Customs.

Max Benavidez on Delgado-Qualtrough’s The Cosmological Lotería

We love games of chance. Whether it’s throwing dice, playing a card game or having our fortune told by a tarot card reader, we enjoy the luck of the draw. These games can be serious as well as entertaining. One of the best known is the Mexican Lotería, a deck of 54 cards with kitschy images or pictograms. The names and images on the cards represent various messages and also riddles that carry certain interpretations.

For example, the image of the Rooster (El Gallo) is about betrayal in various forms. The Rooster hails back to the Bible and Peter betraying Jesus, who had predicted: “Before the rooster crows, you will disown me three times.” The Mermaid (La Sirena) is another card. She stands for the power of unbridled emotion. It goes back to the Greek story about Ulysses, who made a pact with his soldiers while they were at sea and were approaching the Sirens. He wanted to hear the Sirens’ mesmerizing song, but he also knew that if he did that he would then be incapable of rational thought. So he put wax in his soldiers’ ears so that they could not hear, and had them tie him to the mast so that he could not jump into the sea. He did go temporarily insane and tried to break free so he could join the Sirens, which would have meant his death.

These are not light subjects. And now we have a new creative interpretation of the lotería deck to consider: artist Luis Delgado-Qualtrough’s The Cosmological Lotería. Currently on view at The Beverly Project in Los Angeles in an exhibition called Lotería and Metaphors, Delgado-Qualtrough’s The Cosmological Lotería brings the deck into the 21st century by depicting our ongoing struggles with each other, with nature and with the intractable structures of society.

Rather than the classic cheesy images of the Mexican deck, Delgado-Qualtrough has created exquisite gelatin silver photographs of existential experiences. Picture the Mexican lotería as imagined by Albert Camus and photographed and printed by Ansel Adams and you have an idea of the lustrous and ironic feel and tone of Delgado-Qualtrough’s work in the show.

A stand out in the show is “Los Deseos” (The Desires) which features a set of black-and-white images of Marilyn Monroe set atop of a series of old-style urinals. The juxtaposition works. By combining Monroe, the enduring symbol of glamorous sexuality, with everyday porcelain urinals, Delgado-Qualtrough captures the dual nature of desire. It can be both alluring and grimy, filled with flights of illusion but grounded in the hard truths of attraction and consummation. His other cards include “The Doubts,” “Torment,” “Temptation,” and “The Obstacles.” There is something in this deck for almost every human mood and condition.
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Guest blogger Joshua Glenn on Bees

It’s an unusually warm day in mid-May, and Ken Leavitt is using his hive tool, a crowbar-cum-scraper suited for burglary or home renovation, to pry the lid off of one of his “deeps,” a capacious wooden box hung with 10 wood-and-beeswax frames seething with thousands of honey bees. The bees, along with the others in his five purple-and-white hives perched on a hillside overlooking the greenhouses of Allandale Farm on the Jamaica Plain-Brookline border, the last working farm in the area, are, as they say, busy.

A voluptuous odor, somewhere between a bakery and a brewery, rises to our nostrils. Leavitt plucks out one of the brood frames barehanded and scans the comb closely. To Leavitt, the frame he’s scrutinizing is both an X-ray and an interactive aerial map of a miniature civilization. He’s searching not only for evidence of diseases and pests like foulbrood and mites but for social disorder: sprawl, a dysfunctional ruler, overpopulation, demoralized workers.

“Nice pattern,” Leavitt says quietly, as much to the bees as to me. Worker bees move purposefully about, secreting and kneading wax to make more comb, readying brood cells for the queen’s eggs, tending to the hive’s young, and receiving nectar from forager bees before laboriously processing it into thick, spring-sweet honey. For every communal pound of honey they’ll produce over the course of the season, Leavitt’s bees will tirelessly crisscross more than 8,000 acres, pollinating flowers and kitchen gardens in Jamaica Plain, Brookline, Roslindale, West Roxbury, and Newton along the way.

This arrangement suits Leavitt, a tall, muscular man of 57 whose ponytail and beaded necklace mark him as a pregentrification denizen of Jamaica Plain. Long before he started keeping bees, he says, he believed in the honey bee’s ethos of “working hard and feeding the community,” as he puts it. In the 1970s and ’80s, he helped open and run restaurants that became Five Seasons (a pioneering vegetarian eatery on Centre Street), Blackbird Kitchen, and Centre Street Cafe. “I liked making cheap, nourishing food for my friends and neighbors,” Leavitt says.

It’s impossible, it seems, not to look into the hive and see a more diligent, community-minded, and orderly version of our own society. From the “Georgics” of Virgil, which praised honey bees because “they alone hold children in common: own the roofs/of their city as one: and pass their life under the might of the law” to the 1609 English beekeeping treatise The Feminine Monarchie to female-centric idylls like Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God and Sue Monk Kidd’s 2002 bestseller The Secret Life of Bees, writers have sung the praises of these insects. And beekeeping itself has given us lasting metaphors: To eke out a living, for example, is to add another eke, or extra straw coil to a skep, as a domed straw beehive was known in medieval England.

Indeed, as a recent bumper crop of new books about honey bees makes clear, despite centuries of demystification of hive life by scientists, we may never tire of finding human-sized meaning inside bee-sized hives.
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Pincel de Zorro (English) from Hug Codinach on Vimeo.

Personal project to promote the book Pincel de Zorro, now in its second edition, published by Ediciones Ondina. An illustrated tale from the Spanish author Sergio A. Sierra, Pincel de Zorro is a whimsical story set in Japan, full of tenderness, magic and sadness. The story is complemented by unique illustrations, all of which are hand drawn by Meritxell Ribas using a complex technique called grattage, in which paint is scraped off the canvas with a pointed tool.

Pincel de Zorro tells the tale of Shiori, a little girl whose life changes the same night her father brings home a dead fox from a hunting trip. Mysteriously when her parents decide to sell the precious skin of the animal, they receive a visit from a magical woman.

This project has been an amazing collaboration between my friends, Sergio and Meritxell, authors of the book, Albert Alay, the music composer, and me, taking the role of creative director. This has been a passion project of ours, done with no budget, and we hope that someday we can bring these wonderful characters to life in a feature film.

For more information visit pinceldezorro.es

Direction, Design and Animation: Hug Codinach
Illustrations: Meritxell Ribas
Text: Sergio Sierra
Music: Albert Alay

Special thanks to RIck Gledhill at King & Country and Gabriela Effron.

PASSION SHOW from TAKAHIRO KIMURA on Vimeo.