Ntuple Indemnity

I read too much and write too little. This has made it difficult to keep this space current and engaging, something that I sought to remedy with a weekly book review until other commitments started getting in the way. The book feature will return as soon as I can manage it and for as long as I can help it; but until then and going forward, I will content myself with regularly sharing some links to pieces that may fascinate the sort of people who come here in the first place, as they certainly fascinated me.

Up to this point I have typically refrained from aggregating news and commentary from elsewhere without any reply of my own, but I would rather pass on insightful reading material free of comment than never have it reach you at all. At the very least I hope to introduce some of you to the many excellent blogs and journals I follow.

Some recent highlights:

• Jonathan Crowe of The Map Room has continuing coverage of how geographers have responded to the devastating earthquake in Haiti.

• Brendan Wolfe wrote a comprehensive Wikipedia article about early jazz cornetist Bix Beiderbecke and ran afoul of quality-control standards gone awry. (via Jacket Copy)

• My good friend Melissa Priestley, who recently penned a book about Canadian wine, doesn’t like her bottles corked.

• Jazz drummer Tim Shia to Toronto City Councillors and media: shut up during the performance and learn how to tip. (via Jazzblog.ca)

• Steven Shapin reflects on the Darwin bicentennial celebrations of 2009 in an article eerily reminiscent of a seminar I was in last term.

• At On the Human, Michael Allen Gillespie makes the case for science as an intentional conscious activity like the arts.

• Melanie Bayley, who presented her research at a symposium I attended in October, published a delightful article in New Scientist on mathematical debates in Alice in Wonderland.

• Edmonton Symphony Orchestra director Bill Eddins explains his statement, “In order to understand Beethoven you have to play the piano. And in order to play the piano you have to understand Beethoven.”

There is a lot of rubbish being written about Avatar, and I freely admit to letting my own contribution stew in my draft box while I correct its pungent odour with the appropriate spice. But for the time being, I want to draw attention to one particular response to the film. Jonah Lehrer writes about the neuroscientific basis for cinematic immersion, and concludes:

What these experiments reveal is the essential mental process of movie-watching. (Other research has also emphasized the ability of stories to blur the difference between fiction and reality.) This doesn’t mean that every movie needs to be an action packed spectacle, just as Greenberg was wrong to suggest that every painting should imitate Pollock. But I think it helps reveal why Avatar is such a success. At its core, movies are about dissolution: we forget about ourselves and become one with the giant projected characters on the screen. In other words, they become our temporary avatars, so that we’re inseparable from their story. (This is one of the reasons why the Avatar plot is so effective: it’s really a metaphor for the act of movie-watching.)

When I think of films that act as “a metaphor for the act of movie-watching”, the director that instantly comes to mind is Alfred Hitchcock. And it so happens that the Hitchcock film most commonly read in this way also has a protagonist laid up in a wheelchair.

Psychoanalytic criticism has long thrived as a route into Hitchcock’s oeuvre, not least because he was familiar with psychoanalysis and popularized it in his 1945 film Spellbound, but also because his characters were marked with disorders, obsessions, and pathological instabilities of personal identity. You can see it in his choice of literary adaptations, chiefly Rebecca, where the second Mrs de Winter (Joan Fontaine) is consumed by the lingering household presence of the first; and in later films like Vertigo, where Madeleine (Kim Novak) “becomes” her suicidal great-grandmother through gazing at a painting in the museum (or so it would seem). It is Rear Window, however, that openly sets up its hero, L.B. Jeffries (James Stewart) as a passive voyeur behind a fourth wall that encloses an exterior apartment complex, where he sees fragments of his own life and relationship reflected back at him.

None of these interpretations are terribly hard to arrive at by yourself, but if you really want to get fancy, step back one level further and look for films where people watch Hitchcock. (We’re all familiar with the typical shot of a character sitting in a cinema, backlit by the beams of the projector, but pay attention to their faces and how they react to the film embedded en abyme.) The most recent example off the top of my head is Ang Lee’s Lust, Caution, where Wong Chia Chi (Tang Wei) gazes at Joan Fontaine in Suspicion as if looking into a mirror.

Of more interest from a sci-fi perspective—which will hopefully lead us back to Avatar—is how Terry Gilliam cues the final act of Twelve Monkeys with a scene from Vertigo, right when Madeleine Stowe takes after Kim Novak in turning her character blonde. A decade and a half after its release, Twelve Monkeys holds up today as one of the finest original pieces of sci-fi cinema (with all respect to its inspiration, La jetée), and it seems oddly prescient today in the face of James Cameron’s more conventional showpiece about a guy dumped into a tank to infiltrate and warn a society in which he is ultimately subsumed.

How, then, does Avatar differ from all these films? If the dissolution of identity is so key to its appeal, as Lehrer suggests, then why is it such an anomalous mainstream success?

The easy answer is that the kind of cortical stimulation Lehrer talks about comes equally from the overwhelming visuals of Cameron’s film, especially if you experience it in 3D. But that dodges the very questions of story and theme that Lehrer wants to raise. The thematic answer, as I see it, is that Avatar plays it safe: completely unlike the films of Hitchcock, Lee, and Gilliam, it never dares to convey the madness of a dissolved identity or bother its audience to consider the schizophrenia of immersing itself in film. On Pandora, a world where USB ponytails plug into any living thing, bodily escape is free of risk. The film doesn’t spit us out and force us to look at ourselves; it does the opposite instead, encouraging us to enjoy what Lehrer calls “a pretty nice cognitive vacation.”

Continued »

I returned to Cambridge yesterday and it looked like this:

Today, it looked like this:

The Times covered the day as it unfolded, and the Telegraph reports we should expect at least six more days of snow. Here in East Anglia the weather has struck me as tame and, to be honest, rather pleasant; the snow is fluffy and there isn’t much wind. If this is what passes for a meteorological calamity on a national scale, I shudder to think how Britons would take the conditions I saw in Alberta only a week ago. The difference is in preparedness, I suppose.

In recent years, I have developed a reputation in the family as someone notoriously difficult to shop for whenever Christmas comes around. This may seem odd at first, because the only material possessions I truly crave are the same things I have always craved: books, old films, and LEGO pirate ships. The difficulty is that with spare exception, the people who shower me with gifts are typically not in a position to introduce me to books and films, nor are they aware of what already resides in my library or what I am likely to appreciate. (Asking for jazz records would be a disaster waiting to happen.) They know this, and I know this. It has come to the point where I have seriously considered drafting a registry of books that are on my list of titles to read or collect, a practice normally reserved for weddings and baby showers but no less appropriate here.

It would only be one step removed from what I currently do, which is request nothing but Chapters/Indigo gift cards so I may dump more funds in my online account for special orders to come. If I am lucky in a given year, I would receive at least one of these cards amidst the piles of genuinely thoughtful gifts that are nevertheless most definitely not made of plastic bricks and do not, try as I may, snap together with the satisfying clicks of childhood workmanship. Thus far I have resisted establishing a full-fledged registry for the conventional reason: an aversion to mechanizing away the possibility of an exceptional present—the kind that is creative, surprising, and perfect in ways I wouldn’t have come upon myself. Let it be known that I do appreciate most of the loot I receive; I only worry that I let a frightful lot of it sit around unloved. One need not be the buyer to succumb to the trappings of a Charles Foster Kane, buried in worldly treasures with nary a Rosebud in sight.

My spoiled little crisis of material saturation is not without an upshot, however, for it has made giving, not receiving, into the seasonal pleasure it was always touted to be. I may put the burden off to the last minute every time, but being the family book supplier sure has its perks. Matching people to books is an involving game in itself, and one that invites improvement year to year. It isn’t enough to select something you think the recipient ought to read: it has to be something they are likely to take off the shelf and open. And there’s always some measure of risk, especially when you give books that you have not read yourself and do not know firsthand to be any good, but which you estimate to be a good fit based on your prior experience with the author and your assessment of the recipient’s tastes. To introduce someone to a book they may never have discovered themselves is to lead them outside their comfort zone of known knowns, which may not include a regular habit of reading anything at all.

This, as I see it, is the best way to test how well you understand someone: find something they haven’t read, which you think they ought to read, and which they are likely to try and enjoy. Voracious readers are a challenge because of the first condition; people who don’t read enough are a challenge because of the third. The second condition, which may sound like a paternalistic outlier, serves more than an educative purpose. A gift that contravenes the giver’s values is a gift in bad faith. There are some authors who are frankly never getting a dime of my money, and to present their works to somebody else who may well enjoy them would be no selfless charity, but would leave me with a lingering guilt of having done harm.

Don’t think too hard about the transactional cycle in play, where I receive gift cards one Christmas and expend them on gifts the next. The aim is not to biblioptimize, and I do not keep score. Happy Christmas, one and all.

I’ve had a thing for gourmet potato chips since I was very young. Over the years I’ve become so accustomed to expensive high-quality snack foods—fortuitously, the ones that are often promoted as healthy options that won’t kill you quite as swiftly as that tennis-ball tin from the Pringles factory—that I find it very difficult to go back to chips of the ordinary sort. Root vegetable snacks that retain the flavour of the vegetables are a whole order of magnitude more delicious than your average powdery munchies laden with artificial flavours and a surfeit of cheap salt.

I don’t think my potato chip snobbery is a consequence of marketing; I liked these snacks before the organic foods craze ever came to fruition, and I savoured them for flavour and texture alone. But there’s no denying that the companies behind specialty chips pay careful attention to packaging their foods to evoke nostalgia for an imagined pre-industrial authenticity. They appeal to images of the harvest and of kettle-cooking by hand. You certainly see this embodied in high-end brands like the king of root vegetable snacks, Terra Chips (who substantiate their boasts in every way with an astonishing assortment of vegetables and spices), but midrange brands that can be found in supermarkets and convenience stores like Miss Vickie’s (which, by the way, has really gone downhill since it was acquired by Frito-Lay and switched from peanut to vegetable oil) also call upon a rustic ideal where their products, in their words, “remind people of a less-hurried time, when people cooked with care and patience.” We know, of course, that a high-volume national product like Miss Vickie’s isn’t exactly a pastoral manufacture, but that’s how they distinguish themselves from the competition all the same.

I’ve sampled a few of the potato chip brands here in Britain, where they are known as crisps. So far, I’ve been unimpressed, and the potatoes are clearly to blame. I know this from having tried the control group of the global Kettle brand, which is here a cut above your typical crisp, yet oddly stale and inert in comparison to the North American equivalent. Most well-travelled individuals have likely experienced this sort of brand-name dissonance with respect to breakfast cereals; it’s a shock to many a Canadian when travelling abroad that the formula for Kellogg’s Special K everywhere else doesn’t taste anything like Rice Krispies like they do at home.

Then I discovered Phileas Fogg.

Phileas Fogg potato crisps are nothing special, although their Indian Red Chilli mini-poppadoms are one of those unique and delightful pleasures of the British imperial legacy that I haven’t seen before. What caught my attention about these snacks, though, was the branding. The copywriting is magnificent. Far from the usual blurb about the innocence of cottage life, the inscription on every bag aims for a loftier romance:

Embodying the pioneering spirit of the legendary PHILEAS FOGG, our snacks have been created using carefully selected authentic ingredients from around the world to satisfy the most discerning culinary explorer.

It gets better. Here’s the description of their Sea Salt and Indonesian Black Peppercorn crisps:

Indonesia; the breathtaking land of volcanoes, emerald green pastures and the home of our black peppercorns. Here they are known as the king of all the spices and are treated almost as royalty. The pepper farmers are fiercely protective of their crops and watch over them as they dry in the sun. We think it’s worth all the trouble. They give our crisps a satisfyingly balanced flavour—fruity and fresh, with a hint of fiery heat.

And those mini-poppadoms I mentioned earlier:

India. Land of mogul palaces, mystical cities, vibrant colours and delicately spiced poppadoms. Ours are carefully flavoured with hot and fiery red chillies from the Guntur region. Then they are sent to Chennai in the sweltering south to be used in the creation of the perfect poppadom. For an evocative flavour they are sun dried and then cooked to split-second perfection. This gives a crisp, bubbly texture that melts in your mouth, leaving a gentle, aromatic and authentic taste.

If they were really taking this seriously they would have called the city Madras instead of Chennai, but that’s a minor quibble in the grand scheme of things. What astounds me is how the brand has co-opted the name of Jules Verne’s quintessential globetrotter, Phileas Fogg, as a great symbol of imperial adventure who brings knowledge and goods from faraway lands to home soil. Their television advertisement speaks of Fogg as a real historical figure! Nowadays, popular fiction in all media is so tied up in licensing and property rights that we see contemporaneous promotional products like C3PO’s and Bertie Bott’s Every Flavour Beans, but one can only wonder what cultural or literary sources snack foods will draw on a hundred years from now, not to promote the original text but to deploy it as an emblem of a more flavourful time and place.