jameswharris

A Study in Fame–Bob Dylan

Our world is awash with famous people but how many are really worth the notice? If you live long enough you’ll watch the famous coming and going, maybe not as fast as every fifteen minutes, but its amazing how many once famous faces I can no longer match a name in memory, or tell you if they are dead or alive. Think about it, how many people can you name that have stayed famous your whole lifetime? One of the strangest of the famous that’s haunted me my whole life is Bob Dylan.

Dylan was born in 1941, and I was born in 1951, and he started recording in 1961, so he was in the generation just ahead of mine, who made an impression us boomers as we became aware of the world around us as teens. Fifty years on, my demographic cohorts are in their sixties, and the generation that influenced us are in their seventies. Many of the famous people that inspired my generation are forgotten or dead – or both.

Most folks are famous for a Warhol unit of time because they create only one noteworthy event on the world’s stage. Bob Dylan has written hundreds of songs, an astounding output of artwork, but what makes many of them memorable is how they fit into history at large. And if you didn’t like his singing, there have been hundreds of performers covering his tunes. At one time I had a playlist on Rhapsody with over 100 cover versions of “All Along the Watchtower.” Part of Dylan’s fame is due to influencing so many other people.

Not only is Dylan famous, but he’s legendary, infamous, and mythic. Although most people won’t think of Bob Dylan when they think of the concept of fame, but if you read his biographies, and there are countless bios to read, you’ll see he’s a perfect example of someone suffering the fates of fame.

Plus Bob Dylan has toured the Earth like no other person in history. Dylan played 2,000 concerts between 1988 and 2007, and he continues to tour at the rate of about 100 concerts a year. His constant touring, which has gotten named the Never Ending Tour, will probably end when he dies. Just look at his tour dates and locations. Fans now follow Dylan from city to city like hippies used to follow The Grateful Dead. Dylan tours like Sisyphus rolls rocks.

Has there been anyone in the history of the world that has traveled to more places than Bob Dylan? Dylan has his own artistic empire of fame.

Yet, to the average person, how many people can name a Bob Dylan song? He’s not that famous, not enough that all 7 billion people on Earth know of him. Currently Dylan is only #65 on one of The Most Famous People of All Time lists. But such lists are bogus, because there’s no real way to measure fame, other than maybe counting daily Google searches.

Of people who listen to rock and roll, Dylan is famous, to people that don’t, I can’t imagine his name coming up very often.

Fame is an odd concept. Fame is both ephemeral and lasting. If you look at the 2013 Time 100 list of most influential people of the moment, you won’t see Dylan, and you will see many names you’ve probably haven’t heard of before either. How many people know of Elon Musk? You’re famous if the media takes notice of you, whether its because you’re heroic, criminal, mad, inventive, creative, stupid, or whatever catches the public’s fancy at the moment.

Some people consider Bob Dylan a rock star, others a songwriter, and others a poet. Fame for a poet really means how often are any of your carefully crafted lines quoted or memorized? Fame for a songwriter is measured by how often do people sing and record your songs. Fame for a rock star is measured by how many people swoon at your image holding an electric guitar. Poetry is a dying art form, but poetry was never popularly consumed to begin with, but some poems have lasted a very long time. A century from now, how many rock stars will actually be remembered? How many figures from popular culture can you remember from 1913? That’s after Mark Twain and before Charlie Chaplin.

The Independent gave “70 reasons why Bob Dylan is the most important figure in pop-culture history” on his 70th birthday. Will any of those reasons be valid in 2113?

Go to this list of Dylan songs at his website, and see how many titles you know. Then click on the song name and read the lyrics. You’ll have to decide for yourself if the words will survive like the words of the great poets of the past. Dylan has lead a legendary life. I’m sure there will be novels and movies based on his adventures in the future. Some have already come out. But his real fame will come from his songs, and the seeds they plant in minds yet born. Byron and Keats never imagined all the thoughts thought about their lines of poetry, and we can’t imagine what will happen to Dylan’s words in the future. But my guess is they will be put to uses in ways we could never fathom even if time travelers came back and told us.

I just finished reading The Ballad of Bob Dylan by Daniel Mark Epstein. It was a compelling read that kept me constantly wanting to find more time to read. Among the many biographies of Dylan I’ve read, it’s among the best, although my favorites are still Positively 4th Street by David Hajdu and No Direction Home by Robert Shelton, now in a new edition. Reading about Bob Dylan is like trying to study cosmology, it’s a subject of endless depth.

JWH – 7/14/13

A Feminine View of an Apocalypse

I hope I’m not being too sexist here, when I review Life as We Knew It by Susan Beth Pfeffer. The books seems to be a feminine take on the end of the world. But I have read many end of the world stories, and I think they’ve always have been written by males. Books about the collapse of civilization are a special favorite of mine since I was a little kid, and now they are becoming very popular with young adult readers. It’s rather fascinating to read a woman’s take on the genre.

First off, this isn’t going to be a regular review, because it’s going to contain spoilers to all the essential events in the story. Let’s just say that I found Life as We Knew It to be extremely readable and likeable, but I want to dissect it because it was such a different view on the end of the world as I know it. It was a rather nice and civilized view, and I’m essentially asking if that’s because the author was female. Of course, this is a YA novel, so maybe it was pulling its punches, but then I’m not sure if YA readers want to be handled with care. Kids loved The Hunger Games, which made them sort of like Romans at the Coliseum.

Surviving a brutal world at the collapse of civilization is the core appeal of reading end of the world stories. Like I said, I really liked Life as We Knew It, and felt it was a compelling read. I’d recommend it to any adult or kid who loves to read YA novels, but I’m now going to pick it apart for psychological reasons. If you haven’t read it, don’t read beyond the cover photo.

When civilization collapses all rules disappear. Survival is the number one driving force. And in most post-apocalyptic novels of this type, the key conflict is kill or be killed. Susan Beth Pfeffer completely side steps this issue. An asteroid hits the moon and brings about catastrophic changes to life on Earth. The story takes place from May to March, beginning slowly, but ending with a brutal “nuclear winter” like winter. The story is told by Miranda, a sixteen-year-old girl in diary form, and is about how her single mother Laura keeps Miranda, and brothers Matt and Jon alive when civilization falls apart.

One reason I love these after-the-collapse stories is they present a perfect fantasy puzzle of “What would you do?” in the same situation. If you were sitting in your suburban home watching the news and knew that civilization was about to come to an end, what would you do? Laura withdraws a lot of cash out of her bank and pulls her kids out of school. She also gets an old lady neighbor and they all go on a frantic shopping spree for food and necessities. Now this is practical, but Pfeffer presents this chaotic moment as too civilized. Sure it’s a madhouse at the grocery story, but not crazier than Walmart at 4am on Black Friday. And it’s a bargain, all shopping baskets can be stuffed with as much stuff as possible for just $100, so each person gets several loads. That’s just unbelievable.

And here’s the thing, that one shopping spree lasts the family eleven months. Even though they live near a pond, there is no mention of fishing. Even though they live in the outskirts of town with lots of trees to cut down for firewood, there’s no mention of hunting squirrel, rabbits, raccoons, possums, groundhogs, frogs, turtles, dogs, cats, birds or anything else. Everyone begins to starve, but they take dead bodies to the hospital. If these people are that hungry and think they won’t make it through the winter, why aren’t they eating the dead? I’ve been a vegetarian since 16, but hey, every real life story I’ve ever read about starving finally comes down to cannibalism. By the time Mrs. Nesbitt died, Miranda and family should have been hungry enough to eat her.

Pfeffer evidently doesn’t believe in killing animals for food even though the family eats a lot of canned meats. It’s strange that the boys chop wood seven days a week to get ready for winter, but never go hunting and fishing. Nor do they go scavenging. In Pfeffer’s world, the rule is people leave each other alone, and only plunder each other’s houses if the family dies or moves south. But Matt, Jon and Miranda never routine scavenge homes on their own. That’s way too civilized. And dare I say too girly? Life as We Knew It is way too civilized view of no civilization. America is full of gun owners, but we don’t see guns in this story except for a couple tiny mentions.

Liberals often ask NRA members why do they need assault rifles. Well, they are for the end of the world. When civilization goes down the toilet, it’s a dog eat dog wild west world. In Susan Beth Pfeffer’s apocalypse it’s a please-and-thank-you end of the world scenario. Only nature kills, not people.

Like I said, Life as We Knew It is a gripping, well told story, even though it doesn’t fit the standard after-the-collapse model. Is that because Pfeffer is a woman and expects the end of the world to be different? Or does she believe young adult readers shouldn’t imagine such a brutal existence, even though they’ve been assigned Lord of the Flies for decades? Or is her novel just a cozy story of how she thinks things should be if civilization should collapse? Sort of a politically correct Mad Max?

Even the ending was too nice. Miranda has decided to leave home to die in hopes of leaving more food for her younger brother who everyone thinks should be the ultimate survivor. But at the last minute she finds a flyer from a newly set up government office that’s giving away food. They are saved. Civilization hasn’t completely collapse and its making a comeback. Survival has merely been one of waiting, hoarding food, and rationing. No one in this story fights to survive. They struggle, they endure, they work hard, but they don’t fight.

The thing I’ve always loved about after the collapse stories is the pioneering spirit of starting over. Of reinventing old ways of doing things to replace modern technology. There is no invention in this story, no learning to make bows and arrows, no Gilligan’s Island professor inventing new tools out of old parts, no reading old books to figure out how to make animal traps and cure hides. Most of all, these people don’t scavenge, steal or kill. Nor are they preyed upon by armed hoards of starving survivalists. Every family holes up in their own house and waits. Ultimately, waits for the government to help them.

Hey, I’m about as liberal as they come, but I know better than wait on the government after civilization goes down the drain. I don’t know if the collapse of civilization would be as brutal as The Road by Cormac McCarthy, but it should be as brutal as Survivors (BBC 1975-1977), a favorite TV show of mine. My all-time favorite after the collapse story is Earth Abides by George R. Stewart. That’s because it’s about the intellectual rebuilding of society. Stewart shows that once civilization collapses it will be very hard to rebuild. I’m afraid Susan Beth Pfeffer doesn’t really understand what a collapse of modern society means, or she didn’t want her story to be all about realistic brutality. I have to give Suzanne Collins a lot of credit for having her sixteen-year-old Katniss facing realistic brutality in a honestly violent way.

Even if Pfeffer didn’t want Miranda and her family shooting guns at other people, she should have at least included a local militia protecting the neighborhoods and setting up the power behind the rule that you don’t loot your neighbor’s house unless they are dead or moved. Pfeffer makes no suggestion that strangers would organize or work together. Family is the only bond. That’s odd, don’t you think? After every natural disaster I see endless news stories about strangers helping each other.

Also I was disappointed that Miranda and her family totally depended on the phone, radio, TV and the Internet for their news, and once those systems died, they just did without. Why didn’t they communicate more with other people? Why wasn’t their some kind of gossip grapevine, or bulleting board news system? Pfeffer’s characters aren’t inventors, but I think necessity really is the mother of invention, and they faced a whole lot of necessity.

I believe we all write end-of-the-world stories that reflect our own psychological make-up. And this could be a little like taking your clothes off in public.

I’m calling Life as We Knew It a feminine apocalypse because her nonviolent view of the end of the world is so very different from all similar books I’ve read which have always been written by males. Is that sexist or political incorrect of me? Who says end of the world stories have to play by masculine rules? But why didn’t Miranda try to catch fish at the pond, or the boys try to kill squirrels when they were chopping wood?

Now don’t get me wrong, I do believe most women would be fighters in real life, and probably if they wrote fictional accounts of surviving, their characters would be fighters too. I’m just wondering why Pfeffer wrote such a polite story about a brutal time? Is this her naked honesty of how she thinks people would behave?

In this story food only comes from the grocery store, and help only comes from the government, and desperate people never resort to using guns. Where’s the 4th of July spirit? I grew up watching westerns, so I guess I might be indoctrinated differently.

Maybe I shouldn’t write such a story as this, because my naked views might be loathsome. But now that I’m old, and in declining health, it would be much different from one I would have written at 25. I should write an after-the-collapse story about a gimpy old fart trying to survive the end of the world. It would have a hilarious scene of a life long vegetarian killing and eating a squirrel.

JWH – 7/4/13

What Are The Best Sites For Reading Science Book Reviews?

Generally, when I discover a great science book, it’s through accident, rather than intent, and usually it’s a couple years after it originally appeared. Popular science books seldom become beach reads that everyone talks about. Maybe I should say never, because I can’t name one. Even though our culture is massively tech driven, science isn’t popular like football or superhero movies. It’s a darn shame that science books don’t get the press that Kim Kardashian does! What I’d like is a handful of science book review sites to read weekly, and when a book gets praised on many of them, I’d know what to read right away.

Quite often I’ll visit one of my two favorite bookstores and check out the science book section and see many new science books that look appealing, but I’m afraid to buy them without knowing more. Over the years I’ve bought several science or science history books that I later discovered were not very well received. What I need to do is read reviews before I go shopping, so I’ll know something about the new science books.

Since Google is our best friend, I started with a search on: science book reviews.

At the top of the search results is book reviews at Science Magazine. Ah, an obvious choice! But before I could get too excited, I was quickly reminded that Science is rather parsimonious with its words. You have to be a subscriber to read the full text reviews. However, they do give yearly listings of book reviews with links to Amazon, where I can read the customer reviews. Here’s the list for 2013. Overall, I’d stay it’s not worth the visit though, especially since many of the book are expensive academic books I’d never buy, like The World in the Model by Mary S. Morgan, which does sounds great though. Although I did spot a couple books I’m going to keep my eye out to find.

What Did The Romans Know? An Inquiry into Science and Worldmaking by Daryn Lehoux.

Faking It – Manipulated Photography Before Photoshop by Mia Fineman

Second in the Google returns is The Guardian: Science Book Reviews. Now these popular science books are more my speed. Right off the bat it reviews two books I want to read. However, it’s not exactly what I’m looking for either. The Guardian provides a rather hodgepodge look at science books. What I’d really like is a site that covers each week’s new published science/math books, pretty much like Entertainment Weekly does for movies, television, music and books. Here’s one book reviewed at The Guardian I’ll buy when it comes out in America 8/1/13.

Farewell To Reality: How Modern Physics Has Betrayed the Search for Scientific Truth by Jim Baggot.

Over at American Scientist, they have a Book Review Links page that attempts to do what I’m doing here, find science book review sites. There I found Download The Universe: The Science Ebook Review. This is a very cool site about science ebooks, both free and priced. I liked this site so much that I subscribed to their RSS feed in Outlook.

Another great site is Edge.org, and their Library page. It’s not really a book review site. Title links go to Amazon, but author links go to pages about the writers, and since Edge.org focuses on interviews, this often leads to book discussions.

I did stumble upon ForeWord Reviews Science Section. One book it reviewed that intrigued me was Software and Mind: The Mechanistic Myth and Its Consequences. But it’s priced out of my reach, and is probably outside my intellectual grasp. But it sure does sound fascinating. I bought The God Problem: How A Godless Cosmos Creates by Howard Bloom because of their review. I’ve always wondered why a universe ruled by the 2nd law of thermodynamics could create such complex systems.

A book I spotted at my favorite bookstore, Before Galileo: The Birth of Modern Science In Medieval Europe by John Freely was very enticing, but I went home empty-handed to read the reviews first. The reviews at Amazon were overall positive, but one made me worry. It claimed the narrative was more like an annotated bibliography. The review at Physics Today was a lot more encouraging. However Nicole Archambeau, the reviewer, claimed she wouldn’t assign it as a textbook, but preferred The History of Science: From Augustine to Galileo. But at Amazon, one of the two reviewers called that book mediocre. But over at the the Wall Street Journal, Laura J. Synder didn’t fuss over Before Galileo much, but did mention a few subjects it covered that made it appealing again. I always find books that make a case that the dark ages weren’t completely dark to be a reason to get on my To-Be-Read pile. But if you follow my links and read the reviews, Before Galilio is a good example of why you don’t just grab an interesting title off the shelf and buy it. I think I’ll wait to see how the Kindle edition will be priced.

Science News has a Bookshelf section on their web with reviews of many books I saw at the bookstore yesterday. They are short reviews, and not good enough to effect a buying decision, but they do list a lot of books worthy of researching to see if they are worth buying. You’d think just looking at Amazon’s New & Notable > Science and Math section would list all the good science and math books that are coming out, but often I see books at the bookstore that aren’t listed there. And, Amazon annoyingly lists books I don’t think belong in the science and math section. However, the Amazon list is one of the most inclusive of all the sources I’ve cited. It makes me wish I could read and digest a science/math book a day, because they offer at least 365 of my-interest-worthy science and math books a year, out of the 1,031,471 that Amazon claim to have for sale.

On average I read about 52 books a year, or one a week. At best, I read one science/math book a month. So you see my problem? If I’ve only got time for 12 books a year, I want to make sure they are the best ones to read. Which brings me back to why I wrote this blog. How do you find the best books on any topic published each year? Normally, you have to wait until next year when all the reviewers pick their favorites. But if you don’t want to wait, then you’ve got to find sites like I mentioned here to figure things out on your own. I always get a kick out of picking books when they come out and then later discovered that many reviewers considered them the best of the year.

JWH – 7/3/13

Is The Daily Newspaper Dying?

I often find myself lamenting the passing of institutions I assumed would always be permanent fixtures in my life.

My parents, who grew up during the heyday of radio, long before television, lived in a world of two daily newspapers, The Miami Herald in the morning, and The Miami News in the evening. I was even a paperboy for the News back in 1965, but it died a long time ago. During my life I saw many cities close their afternoon papers. Now, all over the country, morning papers are hurting, and some are even disappearing. I’m wondering if morning papers are going the way of the buggy whip.

My wife and I quit getting the newspaper years ago. We kept subscribing for years because it was a lifelong habit, but seldom read it. But we finally realized that most often our daily issues went directly to the recycle bin, and so we stopped taking The Commercial Appeal. I see fewer people bringing the paper to work, and I assume there are college kids at the university where I worked that never got into the habit of reading the paper with breakfast.

This is sad. Months ago I bought an issue of The New York Times to read the old fashion way, but I couldn’t. I love reading The New York Times online, but I no longer had the patience to read a printed paper, which involves a lot of flipping, folding, jumping from section to section, and getting ink on my fingers. My old eyes find it painful to read the paper’s small print. Susan and I aren’t alone in giving up on our hometown paper, there’s even a web site, Newspaper Death Watch, devoted to the passing of this very old tradition. Should we all go back to subscribing to save this fading technology? Are there things newspaper publishers could do to revitalize their product?

I read books and listen to music on electronic devices, so why don’t I read my local paper on my iPad? On the new miniseries Under the Dome, a newspaper reporter talks to an older woman who tells her she doesn’t take the paper, but gets her news from the Internet like everyone else. Ouch.

We have to think about why people were so devoted to newspapers in the past. For many pre-Internet citizens, reading the paper was the only form of reading they did. The paper offered news, gossip, social media, advertisements, job want ads, for sale listings, sports scores, stock and bond quotes, cartoons, horoscopes, movies times, recipes, letters to the editor, wedding announcements, photos, etc. Newspapers packed a lot of entertainment value. And from this list we can see the answer to why papers are losing subscribers. The Internet provides the same content, but faster, better, cheaper, and it’s highly customized. In fact, smartphones, pulling content from the Internet, provides people exactly what they got from newspapers and more, but in a much handier delivery and reading system. Progress marches on. It’s cruel, but so it goes.

Newspapers were a delivery system for communication and content – pretty much a printed internet. I feel sad that all those reporters, editors, linotype operators, pressmen, truckers, delivery people have lost their jobs, but I hope they got jobs at new Internet businesses. I’d hate to think that local people lost their jobs to out-of-town companies.

Long before the Internet, many reporters had moved to TV, and we have far more TV stations with news programs than we ever had papers. So what I’m lamenting isn’t a lack of reporting, but the system in which the news was reported. If you’re interested, you might find the Newspaper Death Watch interesting to read, it’s subtitle is “Chronicling the Decline of Newspapers and the Rebirth of Journalism.”

To be honest, I’ve never been happy with television journalism, so I wonder if there isn’t something potentially better than the printed newspaper and local TV news show? More and more papers are working with paywalls to create online newspapers, that include print, photos, sound and video. The New York Times is excellent, except for their pricing, but if everyone subscribed to it, where would we get local, state and regional news? Can local news sites make a go of providing news that can compete with TV and national web sites? Is it possible to make hometown news site?

Anyone can collect their favorite links to a bunch of sites and recreate much of the content people used to get from their local newspaper. Can a newspaper publisher, with their editors, reporters, and staff create a central site that essentially recreates the old features of a newspaper? How many people would give up their favorite news, weather, TV listing, movie listing, Craigslist apps to use a centralized service? Has the App-ization of the world killed off a general purpose tool like the newspaper? Probably.

I shouldn’t mourn the victims of progress, but I do, even though my buying habits are killing what I miss. I recently bought my local paper for nostalgia’s sake. I didn’t like it. I was like that baby on the YouTube video trying to use a magazine after playing with an iPad. It just didn’t feel right. I guess I’m dumb. I keep buying vinyl records, even though they’re a pain in-the-ass to play. And I still buy books even though my eyes love my Kindle. And I keep writing crying-in-my-beer blog posts about the old ways disappearing. When will I learn?

JWH – 6/30/13

This is Colossal

Colossal: Art & Visual Ingenuity is a web site that visually amazes. And although it has 275,000 likes on Facebook, I’ve only recently discovered http://thisiscolossal.com. I wish I had a talent to be artistic. I think of artists are people whose profession is to create beauty, and I love to look at beauty.

I thought I’d show some of the artwork that amazed me recently at Colossal. My tastes resonate with about one out of ten posts, so visit the site to see more variety of artwork. Especially since my tastes are so narrow. One easy way to keep up with Colossal is to subscribe to their weekly email newsletter. If I was rich I’d travel the world just to look at all this art in person.

Harold Ross developed a technique of lighting night scenes with a LED flashlight. Read about the details at his blog.

One of the things I love about Colossal is they provide videos about how artists work. Here is one about Amy Casey.

Some art doesn’t even look like what people think about as art, as in this video Hyperdrive.

Some art, like this installation by tomás saraceno, allows for people to become part of the canvas.

This photograph, of a single image, by Bela Borosdi requires a video to really appreciate. Who would imagine creating such a work?

I love super-realistic artists like omar ortiz. What kind of skill, power of concentration, and patience does it take to create such works?

Some art moves, so other than being there, we need video to show it off. In Cloud Light by Anthony Howe.

Elizabeth Patterson produces paintings that distort my sense of reality.

Lisa Park’s work is science fictional.

Sometimes art isn’t created but caught in life with a photograph, as Rakesh JV does at this face painting festival.

Sometimes art is being at the right place at the right time. This video is by Mike Olbinski.

Some artists work on a very big scale, such as JT Singh, who calls himself an urban graphic explorer.

Here JT Singh is giving a TED talk.

Here Singh captures Vietnam.

Here Brusspup uses science to create art.

Some artists like Jon Smith can find beauty in making something and then breaking it.

Gil Bruvel makes metal blow in the wind.

This is just a very small taste of what’s at Colossal. If you love art, if you love to indulge our eyes in beautiful visuals, if you love creativity, if you love to be amazed at the infinite powers of human invention, then look at this site daily.

If I had the time I’d save these images and videos and make a slide show for my big screen TV. I already save images I like to a folder that my computer uses for wallpaper backgrounds.

JWH – 6/29/13