saturday, january 05, 2008
Peruvian art and some tentacles
A few days ago, my friend and I were wandering around the American Museum of Natural History when I spied a reproduction of the tomb of the Lord of Sipán, the place where archaeologists dug up the pre-Columbian earspool I call the “jeweled platypus”:
I learned and wrote a lot about the jeweled platypus last June, so this exhibit was cool to see. Some of the other nice things I saw at the museum:
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tuesday, january 01, 2008
Books are permanent, or at least durable
Note: I have some related bookmarks if you find this post TL;DR.
On Twitter a month or so ago, Vaguery asked “What is a book, besides a conceit?” so I responded, “a couple weeks from now, i could send you my Book Manifesto, the final assignment for this class: [Texts in/and/of Transition: Theories of the Book]”. He said “¶#1 had me interested. ¶#2 had me wondering if we were thinking about the same things in a translatable way.” My assignment turned into a way to answer him; this is a version of what I turned in.
Vaguery (William Tozier) sometimes talks about about scanning out-of-copyright books, which I’m guessing he does to preserve them and make them easier to access, transforming piles of old paper into sets of images and text files that anyone can download and read and appropriate and alter. By removing the folds of a book, laying it flat to copy it into loose-bound digital files, he gives that book a longer intellectual life — a more permanent existence.
My online friends and my friends in literature classes talk with different jargon, but they share a certain amount of anxiety about books. I think they’re seeing the dominant intellectual media shift from paper to screens, which shows up on social websites when we argue about the Kindle and in class when we discuss the nostalgic smell of paper. We worry because books are the most durable way we have to store language, and there are no books inside a computer. I think Vaguery might be wondering what happens to a book when he turns it from paper to bits. Is it still a book? What is a book, anyway?
After asking his question, Vaguery also said, “A book is not words. A book is not pages. A book is typography, and weight, and flow.” In “The Book: A Spiritual Instrument” (1895), Stéphane Mallarmé says a book is the foldings of its pages and “their thickness when they are piled together; for then they form a tomb in miniature for our souls”. But a book needs no typography, no weight, no flow, no folds, no thickness. It is not a tomb. Those are all ways of saying that a book is permanent. A book can be a group of JPG scans of unintelligible handwriting, like the Voynich manuscript viewed thousands of times as a Flickr set. The heavy folded-paper version is rare and expensive; its online incarnation is free of cost and alive with comments yet still gives pretty much the same information to a reader.
The important part of “bookness” is language stored permanently. Language and permanence take different forms, but it always comes back to that.
In San Francisco on summer mornings, I bought books at sidewalk yard sales for dollars or quarters. Once I walked by one of those sidewalk spots later that day and saw several of those books laid out by themselves on the sidewalk in the dark. I picked up another one and took it home. I think the sellers threw away the similarly neglected old shoes, magazines, and half-broken electronics, but they held some respect for those unwanted books as little piles of information that might be useful to somebody even if their covers sat on the rough sidewalk for a while. People tend not to throw books away lightly.
Books without covers (or some other kind of binding) are unprotected books in danger of disintegrating. I’ve read a lot of mass-market paperbacks that say on the copyright page, “If you purchased this book without a cover, you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as ‘unsold or destroyed’ to the publisher, and neither the author nor the published has received payment for this ‘stripped book.’” Destroyed! Stripped! Those books declare that they are no longer really books if their protective bindings have been removed, and they’re right. Disintegrated books are piles of paper that get scattered and forgotten.
In high school I once left a fraying yellow paperback on a lunch table while I went to go talk to somebody, and when I came back, the book was in pieces on the ground. The people sitting there saw my face and apologized — they were just playing with it — and we picked up the pieces and I organized them back together. I never finished reading it; I had to put rubber bands around it to throw it in my backpack, and it sort of fell apart when I tried to open it anyway.
A different example: a few months ago, the New York Times said “ancient books, hidden for centuries in houses along Timbuktu’s dusty streets and in leather trunks in nomad camps, [are] raising hopes that Timbuktu — a city whose name has become a staccato synonym for nowhere — may once again claim a place at the intellectual heart of Africa.”
But the permanence of a book does not just come from the longevity of its binding and paper. It also comes from lots of copies: sometimes in the form of scribes, sometimes printing presses, sometimes publishers who put out tenth and eleventh editions, and sometimes peer-to-peer filesharing networks. Librarians call this Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe. It’s a networked, rhizomatic form of permanence, and it’s one way in which Vaguery is maintaining the bookness of his books. He, like the converters of the Voynich manuscript, lets people obtain a new copy of those old illustrations every time they refresh those pages in their web browsers, making unlimited copies limited by new restraints and challenges to permanence (digital rights management and “other laws of cyberspace”) but not hierarchical paper bindings anymore.
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monday, june 04, 2007
Pre-Columbian earrings and the Jeweled Platypus
When I was about 11 years old, I saw this image in an issue of National Geographic Magazine, cut it out, and saved it. I called it a jeweled platypus, since that’s what I thought it looked like. I later pasted it on the inside pocket of my binder, which I lost when I was 15. Luckily, I’d scanned the parts of my binder that I liked, and I uploaded the platypus image as an easter egg in an early version of this website. A year or two later, I converted the website into a blog, put the image on the template, and bought the domain name. This platypus has stuck with me from the moment I saw it.
Well, I knew the whole time that the little bird wasn’t a platypus, but I had no idea what it was. I’d lost any clue to its origins in the moment of possessing it, so I trusted my aesthetic sensibility and the silly name I’d thought up a long time ago (exhibit B: my username on most websites is “dreamyshade”), and I gave somebody else’s image my own meaning and story.
That’s how it was until today, when I consulted Ask Metafilter (the community oracle of earnest and educated web people), and fifteen minutes after I posted my question, a kind linguist answered, “It’s from Sipan, on the north coast of Peru. I think it’s an ear plug, and the image is a muscovy duck.” I laughed. Sipan? An ear plug? A muscovy duck? What are those things? More importantly, what am I going to rename my blog? I clicked his link to this picture:
Yes, that’s the duck, made of turquoise, gold, and wood, and apparently owned by a museum in Peru. It’s part of a set of earspools (that’s the term in scholarly documents; they’re orejeras in Spanish and earplugs or earrings in informal writing, but they all mean “large round ornaments that attach to ears with pegs”) found with an elaborate mummy — a warrior-priest called the Lord of Sipán — in 1987, the year I was born. He was part of the pre-Columbian Moche/Mochica civilization, which existed from about 100 A.D. to 800 A.D. There was an article about him in National Geographic in October 1988, with pictures by Bill Ballenberg, which might have been the one I read. My picture turns out to be by Martha Cooper, though:
It’s strange to see the platypus laid out like that, bright and high-resolution and watermarked. I think my copy of the image is prettier, with a low resolution that hides some of the flaws of the newly-unearthed artifact and a dark background that sets it off, like the black of the magazine page that I remember. This image also reminds me that my copy doesn’t look quite like the shiny one that Ask Metafilter linked to (above). Even considering extensive restoration work, the bird’s shape is different. A few hours later, I realized that there must be two of these ornaments, one for each ear, and I found an image with both of them:
I’m not sure which one is represented in mine. It should be the one on the left, unless people are horizontally flipping pictures, which means that the eye is in the wrong place. The one on the right has a better-placed eye, but the feet look different.
There’s another odd aspect: the caption of the picture by Martha Cooper says the earspool represents a Muscovy duck, but it takes some imagination to connect it with how they look in real life (they’re ugly). But the Muscovy duck was domesticated in South America at the right time — and they were the only ducks around — so it makes sense.
The exhibit of artifacts including the duck (“Royal Tombs of Sipán”) was at UCLA in 1993, when I was six years old and living across the city. That exhibit was organized by Christopher B. Donnan, who researches “archaeology, culture change, invention and technology” and is the world’s Moche expert. Confusingly, there’s a current Canadian exhibit about the art of the Sicán people, who were different from the Sipán although near them in time and space — and had similar art. For example, Sicán art has prominent warrior imagery that looks like the Sipán earspool that I vaguely remember was on the magazine page next to my platypus:
There are even pictures of that earspool being dug up, and other earspools in the archaelogical site, which is pretty cool. Archaeologists have found many other Moche earspools, and they’re all beautiful: iguanas that Escher might have liked, a running deer, more deer, lapis lazuli warriors, and more warriors. There are a bunch of warrior earspools because along with making jewelry and ceramics and textiles, the Moche killed people a lot:
Moche worship featured a figure called the Decapitator…shown with one arm holding a knife and another holding a severed head by the hair…This human sacrifice also included the consumption of human blood by the Lord of Sipán, who was a Moche spiritual, military and civil leader…Burials in plazas near Moche pyramids have found groups of people sacrificed together and skeletons of young men deliberately excarnated, perhaps for temple displays. The sacrifices are believed to have been to ensure the coming of the yearly rains.
Then some catastrophic flooding and drought disrupted their civilization, and it disintegrated.
As you might be able to tell, I spent the rest of the day googling and ogling everything related to this duck. I think the Moche and other pre-Columbian Peruvians have the greatest sense of style, especially this falcon cup, this guy on a burial bottle, and this arms-outstretched guy. I love my little duck earspool. It’s the right combination of unusual and beautiful, its mysteriousness allowed me to make it my own, and now it has introduced me to a whole civilization of awesomeness (with Ask Metafilter’s help).
Edited on June 9 to correct and clarify some paragraphs and add more:
I found a couple of useful books in the UCSB library: Moche Art and Iconography (1976) and Moche Art of Peru: Pre-Columbian Symbolic Communication (1978), both by Christopher B. Donnan and which seem to contain the same material, with extra color photos in the second one. They include a compendium of beasts containing a Muscovy duck and explain, “Muscovy ducks have their bills turned 90° so that they are shown in top view while the rest of the figure, including the head, is shown in profile.” That perspective is part of why my platypus looks odd, but doesn’t explain why it has a squarish lump in place of a left leg and foot. The books were published ten years before the tomb of Sipán was excavated, though, so it’s good that they help explain the platypus at all.
I also liked this stirrup spout bottle:
I’m using part of that neat fineline drawing, which represents the Moche burial theme (4 mb PDF), as the banner underneath the platypus in the blog header. It looks much better than the old doodle of mine that I had there.
One last thing for this epic post: in “A Man and a Feline in Mochica Art”, an article in “Studies in Pre-Columbian Art and Archaeology”, number 14 (1974), Elizabeth P. Benson summarizes Moche art beautifully:
The problem, of course, lies not in the physical description of this piece, but in its meaning or meanings. The Mochica have left, on painted and modeled pots, more vivid pictures of their world than any other Pre-Columbian people, perhaps more various and telling pictures than any other ancient people. There are representations of their flora and fauna and portraits of their chieftains and warriors, their diseased and disfigured. These are often rendered with such extraordinary realism that one knows exactly what sort of bird or squash or deer or disease is represented. Equally often, however, the motifs are blended in what is to us fantasy: beans have human faces and legs, weapons are anthropomorphized, and warriors have wings and hawk beaks. In the attempt to sort out the realities and relationships of the Mochica world, one can neither take the literal for granted, nor dismiss as fantasy the extraordinary combinations of motifs, for the Mochica view of reality was not that of modern man, and, because they were preliterate people, a high degree of symbolism was involved in their representations.
It reminds me that I still don’t know what that little Muscovy duck symbolized to the Moche, and that nobody might know. I’m thinking about emailing Christopher Donnan to see if he has some ideas.
Edited on June 21 to link to the accompanying analysis; both parts made up my creative exercise for a class.
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friday, june 01, 2007
The significance of roly-poly fish heads
This is a sculpture by Colette Hosmer, made from a mold of fresh food sold in Chinese markets (project statement). She has many other neat sculptures: minnows as water, food made of sand and dirt, creepy still-lifes, and more.
But when I saw that picture while going through an art magazine, I tore it out and saved it because it made a certain song pop in my head:
Fish heads, fish heads, roly poly fish heads!
Fish heads, fish heads, eat them up, yum!
In the morning, laughing happy fish heads,
in the evening, floating in the soup!
Ask a fish head anything you want to.
They won’t answer; they can’t talk!
I took a fish head out to see a movie,
didn’t have to pay to get it in!
They can’t play baseball, they don’t wear sweaters,
they’re not good dancers, they don’t play drums!
Roly poly fish heads are never seen drinking cappucino in Italian restaurants with Oriental women…yeah!
Fish heads, fish heads, roly poly fish heads!
Fish heads, fish heads, eat them up, yum!
The guy who taught me how to fish had us sing that with him while we gutted the poor things and as a way of promoting the fishing activity to other campers. Even though I never killed animals after that, I like the song and inflict it on my friends whenever possible. This is the video and you must watch it.
For the squeamish, Cement Mixer, Putty Putty is another of my favorite silly songs.
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sunday, may 27, 2007
Another eccentricity
The following is my new desktop picture from Wikipedia, where its contributor described it as “The typical car wash view from the inside of a car. The ride can sometime compare to a theme park joyride.” The main car wash article is detailed but leaves out that second part.
Yesterday Doug’s truck went through an exciting car wash at a gas station, where the arch of power zoomed back and forth over us inside of it, spraying water and soap and hot air on the ceiling and windows, noisy and enthusiastic and perfectly automatic with little signs flashing the name of the wash stage, like a dishwasher or washing machine. The arch looked like this, but inside a small structure instead of nothingness:
On the right, the little green sign says markvii.net, and there’s a relevant product page with excellent bits such as “It’s not about the carwash, it’s about the carwash business”, turbo nozzles, and the AquaJet GT showcase video. I love the informativeness of this website, hinting that a smallish dorky business owned by a German conglomerate hides untold corporate horror behind another convenient component of life.
Too bad it didn’t make the truck very clean.
