Fri, 23 Jul 2010 23:02:26 +0000

For Japanese-Americans who were forced into relocation camps during World War II, everything from peach pits to bottle caps became the stuff of art. They found animal traps in the brush and melted them down to make knives. A length of sewer pipe, etched with plum blossoms and small birds, became a vase. Shells from [...](image)

Wed, 21 Jul 2010 14:18:40 +0000

The other day, I asked the Muscle how the Battle of the Crater got its name. Ever since he took the Open Yale Course on the Civil War,* he’s been reading every book on the syllabus, so I figured he would know. His answer: A bunch of Union soldiers dug a tunnel under a fort [...](image)

Thu, 15 Jul 2010 22:26:09 +0000

Back in the 1870s, Eadweard Muybridge set the stage for cinema by shooting photos of moving targets, such as horses, gymnasts, and nudes serving tea. This was quite a feat, given the cumbersome process of photography in those days. (Think glass negatives and chemical baths.) Muybridge had to trick out cameras that could take a [...](image)

Wed, 30 Sep 2009 17:53:36 +0000

The Artist in American Society, the Formative Years: 1790-1960 by Neil Harris. (Goerge Braziller, 1966) The colonial painter wasn’t so much an artist as an artisan. He painted signs, crockery, fire buckets, and anything else he could to make a living. If he were particularly ambitious, he might farm himself out to small towns like [...](image)

Fri, 18 Sep 2009 03:58:51 +0000

The “lady traveler” was something of a Victorian phenomenon.  She shooed hippopotami with her parasol and bicycled across India in bloomers. A painter, collector, or just a wanderer, she cherished her tea after a camel ride. (Isabella Bird drank it from a beef tin with a one-eyed outlaw named Mountain Jim.) Back home, if she [...](image)

Tue, 08 Sep 2009 00:30:30 +0000

#3. The problem of violence and responsibility. To regain their kingdom, the Pandava brothers go to war. At the close of the 18-day battle, the dead include their sons, cousins, guru, and a brother they never knew they had. Some didn’t even die a clean death. They were distracted by imitations of their son’s voices, [...](image)

Mon, 07 Sep 2009 21:06:59 +0000

4. Caste counts. Caste has a long, complex, and politically fraught history in India. This post merely outlines a few basics that are relevant to a reading of the Mahabharata. Humans in the epic are born into a caste that determines their status and lifestyle. Caste resembles but is not quite the same as a [...](image)

Wed, 02 Sep 2009 04:21:58 +0000

Novelist Kazuo Ishiguro captures the self-deception of men who grapple with personal responsibility amidst forces beyond their control. The perfect English butler in The Remains of the Day learns that his lord sympathizes with the Nazis. A Japanese propaganda painter fears that his wartime sympathies have damaging consequences in An Artist of the Floating World. [...](image)

Tue, 01 Sep 2009 15:48:07 +0000

Solaris is, on the one hand, quite strange. On the other, it’s not strange enough. The 1972 Soviet film by Andrei Tarkovsky follows a psychologist named Kris Kelvin to the planet of Solaris, which is covered by a vast, intelligent ocean. It’s this intelligence that responded when scientists blasted it with radioactive waves some years [...](image)

Fri, 21 Aug 2009 01:14:15 +0000

I’m experimenting with quick, mid-reading posts. Alexis de Tocqueville was just 26 when he and a coworker visited America to study its prison system. His quest, as it turns out, was far broader: to understand democracy in America as a case study for what he expected to happen in France and beyond. What surprises me [...](image)