Project

My project for Miami was going well, then school (three studio classes, two coordinatorships, five school committees, seven graduate tutorials, four advancement-to-candidacy committees, etc) forced me to abandon it for two solid months. Today is the first day I have had some time to resume work on the project. However, I have now had a technical setback-- a laser-cutting problem-- for which I am currently seeking a solution. I hope I can get this figured out soon, and get on with this project.

Fiction, continued

Back to a subject from an older post: the popular theory that all artwork is the logical extension of its maker's personal biography. In that post I described how Salman Rushdie expressed his annoyance at the prevalence of this theory. While reading about the recent death of David Foster Wallace, I came upon a review of his in which he expressed indignation at another writer's crude attempt to "explain" all of Jorge Luis Borges' short stories through the lense of his biography. Wallace found these explanations trite, forced and ridiculous, and asserted that "the stories so completely transcend their motive cause that the biographical facts become, in the deepest and most literal way, irrelevant."

The truth, briefly stated, is that Borges is arguably the great bridge between modernism and post-modernism in world literature. He is modernist in that his fiction shows a first-rate human mind stripped of all foundations in religious or ideological certainty -- a mind turned thus wholly in on itself.‡‡‡ His stories are inbent and hermetic, with the oblique terror of a game whose rules are unknown and its stakes everything.
And the mind of those stories is nearly always a mind that lives in and through books. This is because Borges the writer is, fundamentally, a reader. The dense, obscure allusiveness of his fiction is not a tic, or even really a style; and it is no accident that his best stories are often fake essays, or reviews of fictitious books, or have texts at their plots' centers, or have as protagonists Homer or Dante or Averroes. Whether for seminal artistic reasons or neurotic personal ones or both, Borges collapses reader and writer into a new kind of aesthetic agent, one who makes stories out of stories, one for whom reading is essentially -- consciously -- a creative act. This is not, however, because Borges is a metafictionist or a cleverly disguised critic. It is because he knows that there's finally no difference -- that murderer and victim, detective and fugitive, performer and audience are the same.

For the full article, see this link.

No More Model Train Stuff

I have never really comprehended the meaning of the word "hobby". The very concept of a hobby always sounded so noncommittal, and connected to the baffling concept of "killing time."

I met up with my T.A. down in Salinas and we spent at least ten minutes watching guys play with trains in their cool clubhouse. I guess they had put most of their energy into "train stuff" that I (in my search for impressive feats of geological simulation in miniature) could not discern. Most of the "scenery" in this setup appeared to be assembled from store-bought parts, and offered me no special insight into diorama-fabrication processes. Afterwards, at lunch, we decided to eliminate the planned class field trip to the Model Train Expo later this month, in case it should prove to be, umm, totally lame. I'll go on my own, to possibly purchase some materials for the class.

At any rate, I actually enjoyed the drive down to Salinas and back. I hardly ever drive anymore since I moved back to San Jose (two blocks from where I work) over a year ago-- so driving offers an opportunity to briefly clear my brain of school-related bureaucracy, and so forth.

Back to the subject of the artist, Michael Ashkin (from a prior post). I remember discussions of his work back in the 90's, in which the implication was that he had taken the genre of model train landscapes, and "elevated" it into something less mundane, perhaps less "hobby-like." Years ago, my friend Chris Ware (whom I rarely see anymore since moving to California) was hailed by literary and art critics as having singlehandedly "elevated the genre" of comic books into something more. Chris always vehemently objected to this intended praise, insisting that the comic-book genre needed no elevation, by him or anyone else-- it was already a genre with an illustrious past. This ostensible elevation was accompanied by a new title for the genre-- graphic novels. Chris always maintained that he made comic books, not graphic novels.

More Model Train Stuff

So, I've learnt that an important "figure" in the model train world lived in Monterey, and nowadays there's a posse of model train folks working in Salinas. They are occupying the "Railway Express Building" in exchange for restoring it. From what I can glean from the website, they are building a giant model of the Monterey and Salinas Valley Railroad in this building. They have an open house with workshops now and then. One is this Saturday, so my Installation Art TA and I are gonna go check it out, and talk to these train folks. Here's a picture of the in-progress model, from the MSVRR website.

Congratulations, Jonathan

Check out Jonathan Brilliant's show in Williamsburg, NY: http://www.jonathanbrilliant.com/dsg.

Crate, continued

Update: my crate made it home. I removed the plastic I had wrapped it with to protect it from further rain, and now the poor mildewy crate is baking in the sun in the back of my truck. My socket set is on its way home in a separate box (travelling by UPS,) so I can't open the crate until that shows up!
New update: got the crate open and emptied out. The fence parts did fine (I guess if it survived a year in snow and other weather, this was no big deal.) The crate is a mildewy nightmare, and has gained so much water weight that even empty we can't get it out of my truck yet. Now I see why the shipping cost went up $150 beyond what was originally projected.
At least the fence saga is over.

East Coast Trip Part 2

So, when we were driving back to Connecticut after our highly technical tour of the bike factory, I noticed a few place names that sounded familiar. One of these was New Lebanon, NY. I knew there had been a Shaker settlement there in the 1800s. There was no time for us to stop and look for it, but it turned out we had an extra day at the end of the trip, so we could afford to go back up there after all. A bit of research showed that an even bigger Shaker village was nearby in Hancock, Massachusetts. I knew this place well from my many books on Shaker furniture and architecture. In fact, I show slides every semester and drone at at length on in my Woodworking class and my 3D Design Concepts classes, about this very place. Needless to say, I was very excited to have happened upon all this, completely unplanned. I knew my Spring 08 Woodworking class would approve of my going there.

When we got to Hancock, Massachusetts, the rain let up for a few hours, so we got to explore most of the buildings. A demonstration had just started of the water-powered wood shop, right when we arrived! This was more than I could have asked for. I frequently tell my students that a Shaker woman invented the table saw-- now I know it was the table saw blade that she invented. The rest, I don't know. I always thought the Shakers had worked in some crazy reckless freehand manner on their table saws, but in fact they had a pretty logical parallel fence system, and a precursor of the sliding feed tables popular today. The docents did a lathe demo and a bandsaw demo, with all the machines powered by overhead leather belts running from a water turbine under the floor. I had a brief conversation with one of the woodworker docents after the demo, and he said, "Here, come on in!" and let me into the wood shop. I didn't really know what I was supposed to do in there, so I just kept taking pictures of stuff.

Lathe demo and belt-powered shop.

A jointer very similar to the one in SJSU's wood shop.

Luckily, SJSU's table saw is not too much like this one.

Taking more pictures from inside the shop...

I got to look down into the water-powered turbine zone.


Next we moved on to the other buildings, including the round barn shown below, and the Shaker Dwelling House-- a place I've been in awe of for years based on my books of photographs of it.

Inside the round barn.

The shop where bentwood boxes are made. We missed the demo, but we got a verbal explanation. They make these a little differently than I thought. I will pass the information on to my students.

The Dwelling House has the most spectacular built-in cabinets and iconic, minimal furniture. It was amazing to finally see all of this firsthand, but I also had a nagging feeling of disillusionment. In art school one is incessantly lectured to about the importance of experiencing authentic works of art directly, as opposed to viewing them in photographic reproductions. The original, physical object apparently has an "aura" that will spill onto us if we come within a few feet of the thing itself. I have always preferred the pictures in books, and that is why I spend a lot of my money on art books. The "real thing" is often a bit shabby, beat up, and plastered with educational plaques and explanations. In the case of the Shaker Dwelling House, the real thing required us to wear fluffy blue shoe protectors-- quite reasonable, but a rather unromantic distraction from the elegant building. One became more conscious of oneself as tourist/ intruder, and of all the other tourists/ intruders.

There was a second source of disillusionment as well. Although I knew better, I had developed an image of the Shakers as a posse of precocious minimalist designers and efficiency experts. I had lost sight of the fact that, like their celibacy, their ostracism of ornament was part of a relentless quest for a limited number of available spots in the afterlife. Well, whatever the motivation, their aesthetic helped pave the way for a lot of Modernist furniture. And I now have my own images, free of copyright issues, of their beautiful furniture and Spartan interiors. Good enough.

Built-in cabinets.

Communal dining room.

"Adult cradles". The Shakers took in homeless and sick people, some of whom eventually became Shaker converts.