At the time Northrop Frye's never re-edited Anatomy appeared, a new edition of Ingarden's The Literary Work of Art was nearing release: those releases in German in 1961 and 1965 could have been matched by revised editions of Anatomy.
More interesting to me at the moment is the other work of Ingarden available in English: "The Cognition of the Literary Work of Art". It is now possible to imagine the construction of a collaborative digital edition of the first work with the variations, emendations, clarifications, alterations of the second work.
One might also imagine the worrisome prospects, recalling the censorship of the re-release of Copernicus' on Revolutions or a more effective means of banning books than had been available when the works of Descartes were placed on the index of prohibited reading. To some extent the prospects for web censors are limited by the widespread teaching of English and the availability of English translations - but this may be a transitory and very limited perspective. Stop to consider Estonians neglecting Russian in favor of English and German as second languages and then imagine any situation such as that of the Fox News reports on Georgia in that recent war - or the reliance on digital "sources" in contrast to the reporting on the Nigerian civil war of the late 60's in pre-CNN news. We very often require real documents: paid receipts for the coffins delivered to a morgue; payroll records for grave diggers.
But historians and records of interest to historians are perhaps a different case from literature. There may still be worries. Consider the great writers.
In a careful reading of Iris Murdoch's "The Sea, The Sea" some very telling flaws are evident - they seem to reflect the philosopher-novelist having drawn too much on her own life experiences. In a careful reading of Simone de Beauvoir's "L'Invitée", an entire phrase reveals her limitations as a novelist in what was either a private joke with J-P Sartre or a very naive notion of how philosophical theses might find expression in a novel. Place these two novels in a Digital Library for the Internet University and I can immediately imagine how to better ensure the stature of the two great thinker-writers with only the very slightest editorial improvements - which they surely would have made themselves in a re-edition with our hermeneutical advantages.
Digital Editions could, of course, be an aid: my digital views of "The Sea, The Sea" and "L'Invitée" could have each of the passages in question high-lighted as links to my marginalia.
It is said that marginalia in copies of Copernicus "Revolutions" would require an editor of Koestler's "The Sleepwalkers" or "The Watershed" to make corrections. But "Darkness at Noon"? Would we alter the closing lines? Yes, in a translation we might suggest an alternative: translation by "A" is largely to be praised but the closing lines were rendered so much finer in translation by "B". At this point the philosopher of literature is likely to point to the manuscript.
Enter the philosophical papers of Husserl. During the war, the Husserl papers were scattered for safety and an unintended result was that his correspondence was lost to an Allied bombing raid. Already his work must be considered in part the result of collaboration and his efforts to respond to criticism from students and followers: so I imagine a digital re-edition of Ideen I with the transcendental idealism corrected and a re-edition of the Log.U.'en with a full recognition of co-constitution and genesis. These would constitute new works in a way in which the routine restoration of great paintings or the rebuilding of the tower in which Kopernik worked are recognized as that same work versus "a copy made from mostly the materials of the original." This is not like sand-blasting the grime of a grey Paris or a grey Edinburgh leaving the cities somehow seeming unfamiliar to writers who returned years later.
The simple answer might seem to be this: maintain digital images of carefully archived volumes with an option to have a robotic "amanuensis" place the original under a web cam and leaf to a page in question such that a comparison be made on a split-screen or across displays or otherwise matched. But his too is somewhat naive as often with each new printing (before photostatic reprints became common) one new error was introduced for every two or three errors corrected. Some works by major poets since 1805 have no single standard edition - they changed continually from the first printing to the last.
In the case of the digital novel, the use of images, video and alternate passages, chapters and endings may make my list seem very naive in its turn.
In the case of papers delivered at conferences, they - rather like sermons, speeches, readings - will soon permit the comparison of the text with the audio and/or video record.
I have before me the famous text of Richard Hughes: at least one phrase cries out to be removed lest it be cited on internet blogs and calls made for the book not to be reprinted unless re-edited and in the process, abridged.
Some lengthy works which were poorly edited before first printing merit being abridged and their authors' case is improved in the process - the collation of blog posts need not be imagined in that regard ... I am thinking of Lev Shestov versus Susanne Langer. Abridging the former would disguise his monomania, while abridging the latter can increase her accessibility and relevance for the non-philosopher or the philosopher with no interest in the local history of her subject. But then we come to the digital Nietszche or worse - the digital Kierkegaard.
My own tiny digital contribution is to extract prose poetry from a novel - in my case, the Thames River from "The Heart of Darkness". This seems harmless enough. The digital advantage is that the extracted text can be "re-imposed" on the original and my additions and emendations exposed or elided.
Were it today, the 1960's students of Frye, like the students of Husserl in '39, readily could have released an emended digital version of the Anatomy to address the alternate standpoint of Ingarden on many points.
In the next decade, enterprising students of anglo philosophy made be moved to release digital versions of work such as Wollheim's Art and Its Objects with suitable high-lighting to indicate those places where critical analysis and conceptual analysis and linguistic analysis can not be clearly distinguished from phenomenological analyses and reflection on variations - and to provide digital links to correlated analyses in the originals and in translations. Others may embrace the digital extraction of "the argument" into a logical space, a polemical space and a rhetorical space exposing propositions, entailments, exaggerations, ad hominem, non sequitur and clever comic bits of wit - not to mention assigning Bayesian values to hypotheses earlier and then later in an opus and in the opera.
Showing posts with label digital library. Show all posts
Showing posts with label digital library. Show all posts
Friday, March 12, 2010
Sunday, March 7, 2010
Roger Scruton on architecture: a few notes
Something in Roger Scruton's "The Aesthetics of Architecture" (1979) recalls George Steiner's 1978 "On Difficulty".
But first the imagination. Scruton pg79 confidently asserts that in the selfless experience of the dog, all that we find is perception but not imagination. Scruton simply may not have met very many intelligent dogs, such as those who know how to play "find the toy". But perhaps in 1977-1978 it was still possible to imagine that animals have perception without the self: this we now think is not true of some dolphins, elephants and most primates. A cat momentarily startled by her reflection in a large familiar mirrored wall should be enough to give us pause. More decisive should be the crow which solves the problem before it in a single try. Perhaps Scruton would have us believe that the crow simple "sees" the solution.
Scruton's views in A of A are entirely parasitic upon his earlier "Art and Imagination" (1974.) For the moment, let's consider this quote from A of A:
Scruton neglects to mention that appreciation of a great many buildings has changed since one hundred years or more of soot and grime has been removed or the role of colour on the surfaces of much of the buildings of antiquity. He ignores the effect of the first concertos to begin with a chord on the solo instrument rather than a gracious introduction by the orchestra or music not the less aesthetically successful in all regards despite being music for a single occasion.
But what is even more obvious is the lack of consideration of the ugly in the architecture that matters so mcuh to so many: public housing. Both "grotesque" and "ugly" are missing from the index.
Scruton devotes time to psychoanalysis (1979 ? ) leaving you to wonder who he is addressing, and where he has been. Kleinian thought?
What is missing is literature. he is not alone: when Hugo Friedrich opens on poetics, he mentions all of the arts except dance and architecture. But the problematic structure of the novel is what comes closest to the problematic of architecture - and even the problem of the mere "facade". The analog to architecture is the setting of narrative and the presence and development of characters - he is right to think that sculpture has little to teach in the aesthetics of architecture.
Music that interests you little can be allowed to continue on the edge of awareness. But try to keep an interest in dance, a play or a novel which does not appeal to you. Only a poem of no interest is more difficult.
There is a prospect to put Scruton to the test with the internet and 3-D virtual worlds: we will soon be able to experiment on which virtual buildings in which arrangements most appeal to intelligent participants in elaborate and clever pursuits. One thing of which I am certain will be the importance of colour and texture and reflectivity.
My favourite building here in Minneapolis is the new Federal Reserve building at the foot of the Hennepin Bridge and near the Federal Post Office. The Reserve has its counter-part some blocks away in the new Federal Courthouse (a less successful building but on a more restricted site) and no doubt one or the other is missed by some visitors (link: the old reserve building abandoned due to asbestos issues.)
To appreciate the Reserve building it is important to be on foot and to return to see it in the evening (electric architectural lighting.) In the case of the Courthouse, the landscape architecture is essential (utterly neglected by Scruton.)
No doubt when Charles* becomes King we will see Scruton knighted for his service to the educated sensibility and to good taste, but until then we can continue to enjoy building and hope for better.
In the case of architecture, failures are very important, as they are in science. The World Trade Center's architect did the new building so of my alma mater - one result was thick winter dust in the air of the enclosed passageway in front of the entrance to the library: he did not understand the challenges of the Saskatchewan winter and the use of sand on icy walkways. The buildings leaked hopelessly, the fountains all cracked and the library was missing a mezzanine for an error in calculating the weigh of books. I could go on. Seem from across the man-made lake, the library was a lovely site at night. To work in, it was less a failure than the appallingly ugly cement MacLennan Library of McGill University (with its appalling lighting and worse - recycled city air) or the monstrosity that is the Robarts Library of U of Toronto (they thought the stacks would be closed.) Yet a simple red brick library can be a great success and a pleasure to most any visitor if certain features are attended to in the design - features ignored by Scruton but emphasized by those he denigrates.
Buildings which succeed find their success in aspects far more diverse than Scruton imagines - and those that fail do so for reasons far more obvious in some cases, and for causes and reasons often rather obscure and difficult in others. The aesthetics of the ugly, mindless, stupid and grotesque are essential if we are to understand the sheer folly of committee selections and their total misreading of the models and presentations upon which they have -in part - formed their judgments.
Had Scruton given slightly more attention to the challenges facing the phenomenology of the literary work of art, he might have been less hasty in his assessment of what can be learned from careful relfection upon our experience, its context, horizon, expectations and preconditions regardless of his highly personal biases.
[note: I have become acquainted with a pair of Scotch terriers, Oscar and Duke - the one white, the other black - the former barks readily and the latter is extremely shy - but barks at cartoon animals on television and persons imitating animals in his presence (the other is unperturbed by these.)
If we one day establish that animals using signs have invented a novel combination for an unfamiliar experience, perhaps this division of image and percept can be extended to animals or dropped as inadequate.]
[note: I have become acquainted with a poodle-bichon mix named Clarence who puts his toys "to bed" somewhere at night - even in a strange house - but will whine inconsolably if he misplaces one particular one of those toys - or sometimes - but only sometimes - if he finds it lying in plain view during the day. He sits at the top of the stairs staring at the door when his master has left him too long at our home - but I am sure he does not imagine her coming through that door - although the arrival of any car in the drive does seem to stir some belief in something on his part - and his many disappointments are surely imagined by us alone.]
* The key to the book may be Phyllis Lambert and her institute: a Seagram archive photo is on the dust jacket and the Seagram building finds a place in one of the photo plates #85, pg 226
There is a mention of Roman Ingarden in a note, pg 276, dismissive of the notion that there might be something like a phenomenological method - surprising in 1979 years after Spiegelberg's two volumes.
Mikel Dufrenne's book is disparged but said to be "clear" but Scruton does not say what it is clear about.
The influence of perceptions of Japan on home and villa design in North America and elsewhere finds no mention.
But first the imagination. Scruton pg79 confidently asserts that in the selfless experience of the dog, all that we find is perception but not imagination. Scruton simply may not have met very many intelligent dogs, such as those who know how to play "find the toy". But perhaps in 1977-1978 it was still possible to imagine that animals have perception without the self: this we now think is not true of some dolphins, elephants and most primates. A cat momentarily startled by her reflection in a large familiar mirrored wall should be enough to give us pause. More decisive should be the crow which solves the problem before it in a single try. Perhaps Scruton would have us believe that the crow simple "sees" the solution.
Scruton's views in A of A are entirely parasitic upon his earlier "Art and Imagination" (1974.) For the moment, let's consider this quote from A of A:
Aesthetic pleasure is not immediate in the manner of the pleasures of the senses, but is dependent upon, and affected by, processes of thought.You might think that Scruton is making a philosophical point, but in truth his point is rhetorical: it follows immediately upon his one brief consideration of Frank Lloyd Wright and the sensuous surfaces of one building. If you consider that buildings with wood, metal and glass surfaces of distinctive texture, colour and reflective properties were visible in architecture prior to 1979 ( arguably the most impressive are more recent ) you can detect the attack on the modern and its desacration of public spaces in London. There is no mention of the notable success of Wright's Tokyo Hotel surviving the great earthquake.
Scruton neglects to mention that appreciation of a great many buildings has changed since one hundred years or more of soot and grime has been removed or the role of colour on the surfaces of much of the buildings of antiquity. He ignores the effect of the first concertos to begin with a chord on the solo instrument rather than a gracious introduction by the orchestra or music not the less aesthetically successful in all regards despite being music for a single occasion.
But what is even more obvious is the lack of consideration of the ugly in the architecture that matters so mcuh to so many: public housing. Both "grotesque" and "ugly" are missing from the index.
Scruton devotes time to psychoanalysis (1979 ? ) leaving you to wonder who he is addressing, and where he has been. Kleinian thought?
What is missing is literature. he is not alone: when Hugo Friedrich opens on poetics, he mentions all of the arts except dance and architecture. But the problematic structure of the novel is what comes closest to the problematic of architecture - and even the problem of the mere "facade". The analog to architecture is the setting of narrative and the presence and development of characters - he is right to think that sculpture has little to teach in the aesthetics of architecture.
Music that interests you little can be allowed to continue on the edge of awareness. But try to keep an interest in dance, a play or a novel which does not appeal to you. Only a poem of no interest is more difficult.
There is a prospect to put Scruton to the test with the internet and 3-D virtual worlds: we will soon be able to experiment on which virtual buildings in which arrangements most appeal to intelligent participants in elaborate and clever pursuits. One thing of which I am certain will be the importance of colour and texture and reflectivity.
My favourite building here in Minneapolis is the new Federal Reserve building at the foot of the Hennepin Bridge and near the Federal Post Office. The Reserve has its counter-part some blocks away in the new Federal Courthouse (a less successful building but on a more restricted site) and no doubt one or the other is missed by some visitors (link: the old reserve building abandoned due to asbestos issues.)
To appreciate the Reserve building it is important to be on foot and to return to see it in the evening (electric architectural lighting.) In the case of the Courthouse, the landscape architecture is essential (utterly neglected by Scruton.)
No doubt when Charles* becomes King we will see Scruton knighted for his service to the educated sensibility and to good taste, but until then we can continue to enjoy building and hope for better.
In the case of architecture, failures are very important, as they are in science. The World Trade Center's architect did the new building so of my alma mater - one result was thick winter dust in the air of the enclosed passageway in front of the entrance to the library: he did not understand the challenges of the Saskatchewan winter and the use of sand on icy walkways. The buildings leaked hopelessly, the fountains all cracked and the library was missing a mezzanine for an error in calculating the weigh of books. I could go on. Seem from across the man-made lake, the library was a lovely site at night. To work in, it was less a failure than the appallingly ugly cement MacLennan Library of McGill University (with its appalling lighting and worse - recycled city air) or the monstrosity that is the Robarts Library of U of Toronto (they thought the stacks would be closed.) Yet a simple red brick library can be a great success and a pleasure to most any visitor if certain features are attended to in the design - features ignored by Scruton but emphasized by those he denigrates.
Buildings which succeed find their success in aspects far more diverse than Scruton imagines - and those that fail do so for reasons far more obvious in some cases, and for causes and reasons often rather obscure and difficult in others. The aesthetics of the ugly, mindless, stupid and grotesque are essential if we are to understand the sheer folly of committee selections and their total misreading of the models and presentations upon which they have -in part - formed their judgments.
Had Scruton given slightly more attention to the challenges facing the phenomenology of the literary work of art, he might have been less hasty in his assessment of what can be learned from careful relfection upon our experience, its context, horizon, expectations and preconditions regardless of his highly personal biases.
[note: I have become acquainted with a pair of Scotch terriers, Oscar and Duke - the one white, the other black - the former barks readily and the latter is extremely shy - but barks at cartoon animals on television and persons imitating animals in his presence (the other is unperturbed by these.)
If we one day establish that animals using signs have invented a novel combination for an unfamiliar experience, perhaps this division of image and percept can be extended to animals or dropped as inadequate.]
[note: I have become acquainted with a poodle-bichon mix named Clarence who puts his toys "to bed" somewhere at night - even in a strange house - but will whine inconsolably if he misplaces one particular one of those toys - or sometimes - but only sometimes - if he finds it lying in plain view during the day. He sits at the top of the stairs staring at the door when his master has left him too long at our home - but I am sure he does not imagine her coming through that door - although the arrival of any car in the drive does seem to stir some belief in something on his part - and his many disappointments are surely imagined by us alone.]
* The key to the book may be Phyllis Lambert and her institute: a Seagram archive photo is on the dust jacket and the Seagram building finds a place in one of the photo plates #85, pg 226
There is a mention of Roman Ingarden in a note, pg 276, dismissive of the notion that there might be something like a phenomenological method - surprising in 1979 years after Spiegelberg's two volumes.
Mikel Dufrenne's book is disparged but said to be "clear" but Scruton does not say what it is clear about.
The influence of perceptions of Japan on home and villa design in North America and elsewhere finds no mention.
Thursday, March 4, 2010
Bombing of Civilians
One of the problems of the internet is disinformation. Routinely information from sources such as wikipedia appears with no credit and remains uncorrected after the original article has seen alterations.
Some days ago I was "informed" at an internet site that the Luftwaffe bombing of civilians in England only began after the Germans had suffered civilian losses when the British had bombed over Germany. Given that the actions of Bomber Command - Dresden and Wuerzberg, for example - are so troubling - the suggestion that the British kicked off the practice was one I felt I needed to look into.
The utter absurdity of the claim becomes apparent when you see the photographic evidence: Britain entered the war with the German attack on Poland. The first documented indiscriminate bombing of civilians in WW II is the German bombing in Poland at the very onset of the war.
The sinister suggestion that the British kicked off this round of aerial bombardment of civilians is chilling given what we know about Bletchley Park, Enigma machines and popular claims that the British had known in advance that Coventry was to receive a major attack in late 1940 (said to have motivated a revenge firestorm in 1945 in the historic core of Dresden.) A similar suggestion is debated concerning American intelligence bearing on the attack on Pearl Harbor.
Even if I wished to track this issue of misinformation even as relates to divergences in reported facts across wikipedia articles written in western European languages, the blog format appears inadequate. Even filecards most days seem more useful - especially if encoded in a McBee style (edge-notched.)
Without an effective research "browser", even pursuing a relatively recent topic such as information and misinformation concerning the effectiveness of high-tech ordinance in the bombing near or in Hanoi late in the Vietnam War (1972) becomes a challenge. At the moment the best tool available to me remains Microsoft One-Note 2007.
One symptom: today Google Documents rejected my recent Chrome bookmarks as too large a file (the format is HTML.) Browser bookmarks themselves prove to be of such limited usefulness unlike simple file cards and margin notes in an actual bound paper text.
For research cutting across languages (in my case several, including Polish and Russian) a number of otherwise useful tools prove unable to handle UNICODE even as UTF-8 (in this regard, Microsoft Notepad proves a useful scratchpad once a document is saved as UTF-8 due to its prefixing with BOM.)
As I am also looking a Curl-based multi-text browser/viewer for literary notes across translations, I am hopeful to make some progress on a useful tool for adding notes by topic without the serial post limitations of the blog format. It is not simply that the blog does not have adequate full-text indexing or contents trees, but chiefly that its edit format is "single post" within a given browser session. A multi-applet Curl research browser seems to me to be an appealing alternative (UNICODE-ready versions of ObjectIcon and Rebol3 are also appealing as are the possibilities open to Seaside-enabled Smalltalk app's.)
Note: the en.wikipedia.org article on the February 1945 firebombing of Dresden fails to note that the bombing of the core of the city of Würzburg even occurred - let alone on March 16, 1945 - the Churchill memo discussed in the article is shown as dated March 28, the second April 1 (according to that article.) Furthermore that article is not tagged with "aerial area bombing" or "aerial incendiary bombing": even using the best linux Gnome browser, only 2 tags would be available for a "bookmark" of that article and no place to annotate the limitation or flag a TODO in the browser. Supposing that I were not intent on updating the article but only comparing with German and Russian versions, the existing browsers, so far as I am aware, are inadequate to these simple browse-and-note tasks. In my view they are not yet true browsers: they remain simple page viewers. A variety of FireFox 3 plugins have proven so problematic - even those with remote store which should facilitate working across machines (such as my XP PC and my linux netbook) - that I have returned to using Google Chrome and occasionally linux Epiphany.
Some days ago I was "informed" at an internet site that the Luftwaffe bombing of civilians in England only began after the Germans had suffered civilian losses when the British had bombed over Germany. Given that the actions of Bomber Command - Dresden and Wuerzberg, for example - are so troubling - the suggestion that the British kicked off the practice was one I felt I needed to look into.
The utter absurdity of the claim becomes apparent when you see the photographic evidence: Britain entered the war with the German attack on Poland. The first documented indiscriminate bombing of civilians in WW II is the German bombing in Poland at the very onset of the war.
The sinister suggestion that the British kicked off this round of aerial bombardment of civilians is chilling given what we know about Bletchley Park, Enigma machines and popular claims that the British had known in advance that Coventry was to receive a major attack in late 1940 (said to have motivated a revenge firestorm in 1945 in the historic core of Dresden.) A similar suggestion is debated concerning American intelligence bearing on the attack on Pearl Harbor.
Even if I wished to track this issue of misinformation even as relates to divergences in reported facts across wikipedia articles written in western European languages, the blog format appears inadequate. Even filecards most days seem more useful - especially if encoded in a McBee style (edge-notched.)
Without an effective research "browser", even pursuing a relatively recent topic such as information and misinformation concerning the effectiveness of high-tech ordinance in the bombing near or in Hanoi late in the Vietnam War (1972) becomes a challenge. At the moment the best tool available to me remains Microsoft One-Note 2007.
One symptom: today Google Documents rejected my recent Chrome bookmarks as too large a file (the format is HTML.) Browser bookmarks themselves prove to be of such limited usefulness unlike simple file cards and margin notes in an actual bound paper text.
For research cutting across languages (in my case several, including Polish and Russian) a number of otherwise useful tools prove unable to handle UNICODE even as UTF-8 (in this regard, Microsoft Notepad proves a useful scratchpad once a document is saved as UTF-8 due to its prefixing with BOM.)
As I am also looking a Curl-based multi-text browser/viewer for literary notes across translations, I am hopeful to make some progress on a useful tool for adding notes by topic without the serial post limitations of the blog format. It is not simply that the blog does not have adequate full-text indexing or contents trees, but chiefly that its edit format is "single post" within a given browser session. A multi-applet Curl research browser seems to me to be an appealing alternative (UNICODE-ready versions of ObjectIcon and Rebol3 are also appealing as are the possibilities open to Seaside-enabled Smalltalk app's.)
Note: the en.wikipedia.org article on the February 1945 firebombing of Dresden fails to note that the bombing of the core of the city of Würzburg even occurred - let alone on March 16, 1945 - the Churchill memo discussed in the article is shown as dated March 28, the second April 1 (according to that article.) Furthermore that article is not tagged with "aerial area bombing" or "aerial incendiary bombing": even using the best linux Gnome browser, only 2 tags would be available for a "bookmark" of that article and no place to annotate the limitation or flag a TODO in the browser. Supposing that I were not intent on updating the article but only comparing with German and Russian versions, the existing browsers, so far as I am aware, are inadequate to these simple browse-and-note tasks. In my view they are not yet true browsers: they remain simple page viewers. A variety of FireFox 3 plugins have proven so problematic - even those with remote store which should facilitate working across machines (such as my XP PC and my linux netbook) - that I have returned to using Google Chrome and occasionally linux Epiphany.
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