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The New Yorker 2014-04-28
“Pixel Perfect” / Margaret Talbot
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/04/28/pixel-perfect-2
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/04/28/the-poets-hand
__ The annotator, it’s plain, found in the Alvearie not a set of fixed definitions but a pulsing network of meaning-by-association. He races back and forth among words, dowsing for connections. The dictionary is a compendium of possible allusions, from language to language and word to word. What is lost in lucidity is gained in the strange poetic power of association that is Shakespeare’s most striking poetic feature. His mind leaps sideways—and, by implication, in cross-referenced, associative, language-leaping allusiveness—as often as it bulls forward toward a goal. It is the very opposite of what Orwell and the like supposed to be the special virtue of English: plain-pudding simplicity and clarity. Our top Bard looked at language as, precisely, a beehive, where words went out and then came back to make honey from the nectar of their exotic engagements.
__ That arch-rationalist Bertrand Russell once said that the mystery of Shakespeare lies in understanding why lines that are all allusion and enchantment—like “Come unto these yellow sands” or “A great while ago the world began” or “Still through the hawthorn blows the cold wind”—have what he called “mental content”; that is, they assert actual propositions, states of affairs that we can entertain and appraise. They sound like music and read like law. Magic that makes sense to mind: that seems to be as good a definition, or encirclement, of Shakespeare’s art as we are likely to get.
"Imitation of Life" / Louis Menand
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/04/28/imitation-of-life
__ As Buchloh says, “You could not have a conversation with Polke without his continuously destabilizing your sense of self, without his suggesting that it rested on some type of oblivion or disavowal.”... I felt awash in a sea of exotic erudition and ungraspable logic, listening to Polke as, with absorption and course-correcting irony, he listened to himself. My profit was an inkling of how he made art, monitoring an internal crossfire—or a chorus—of ideas.
Emiy Nussbaum: Personality is itself a form of acting, as well as a side effect of trauma or love.
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/04/28/pixel-perfect-2
- Ira’s lashes weren’t quite thick enough, he said, and the caruncle—the bit of pink flesh in the inner corner of an eye—didn’t glisten convincingly.
- Human skin was devilishly hard to simulate: “It’s this crazy landscape of fuzz and squish.”
- To re-create a face digitally, you needed to know all about that face’s reflectance properties: not just how light bounced off the surface of the skin, which is called specular shine, but also what it did after penetrating skin, which is called subsurface scattering. The translucency of skin is part of what make us look alive, not plastic.
- Whereas others might talk about Tom Cruise’s ineffable star quality, Debevec puts it this way: “He’s got that iconic nose and really deep-set eyes, so that the distance from nose to eyeball is farther than anything I’ve ever seen. His beak is significant. He just has this really anatomically notable face.”
- Peach fuzz would be particularly helpful, they agreed, with children’s faces, since there’s so little texture to work with otherwise.
- Debevec explained, “The 3-D shapes of many actors—in every expression they could possibly make—are contained in the frames of the movies themselves. There’s a scene at the end of Bruce Lee’s ‘Enter the Dragon’ where Lee walks through a hall of mirrors, and there are frames where you see his face from several viewpoints simultaneously. By comparing the points in the different views, you can triangulate his facial geometry.
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/04/28/the-poets-hand
__ The annotator, it’s plain, found in the Alvearie not a set of fixed definitions but a pulsing network of meaning-by-association. He races back and forth among words, dowsing for connections. The dictionary is a compendium of possible allusions, from language to language and word to word. What is lost in lucidity is gained in the strange poetic power of association that is Shakespeare’s most striking poetic feature. His mind leaps sideways—and, by implication, in cross-referenced, associative, language-leaping allusiveness—as often as it bulls forward toward a goal. It is the very opposite of what Orwell and the like supposed to be the special virtue of English: plain-pudding simplicity and clarity. Our top Bard looked at language as, precisely, a beehive, where words went out and then came back to make honey from the nectar of their exotic engagements.
__ That arch-rationalist Bertrand Russell once said that the mystery of Shakespeare lies in understanding why lines that are all allusion and enchantment—like “Come unto these yellow sands” or “A great while ago the world began” or “Still through the hawthorn blows the cold wind”—have what he called “mental content”; that is, they assert actual propositions, states of affairs that we can entertain and appraise. They sound like music and read like law. Magic that makes sense to mind: that seems to be as good a definition, or encirclement, of Shakespeare’s art as we are likely to get.
"Imitation of Life" / Louis Menand
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/04/28/imitation-of-life
- Updike was miserable, but he felt that he had finally introduced some uncertainty into what had been a freakishly serene adulthood—“I had at last ventured into harm’s way,” as he put it in his memoir,
- “Ulysses” begins with a mock celebration of the Eucharist—and so, in fact, does “In Search of Lost Time,” a cookie dipped in a cup of tea. The idea is that literary representation is an act of transubstantiation. Literature pulls the real up out of the realm of temporality and insignificance and remakes it into a form that will never decay and never die. There is nothing doctrinally religious about this conception of the literary act. It is at the heart of modernism. “It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance,” Henry James wrote to H. G. Wells. That’s what Updike believed.
__ As Buchloh says, “You could not have a conversation with Polke without his continuously destabilizing your sense of self, without his suggesting that it rested on some type of oblivion or disavowal.”... I felt awash in a sea of exotic erudition and ungraspable logic, listening to Polke as, with absorption and course-correcting irony, he listened to himself. My profit was an inkling of how he made art, monitoring an internal crossfire—or a chorus—of ideas.
Emiy Nussbaum: Personality is itself a form of acting, as well as a side effect of trauma or love.