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Phoenix, Arizona, 4.33 pm

On The Sanity Of Artists

Maria Popova digs up a nonfiction gem from Henry Miller, To Paint Is to Love Again, in which he addresses the question:

Certainly the surest way to kill an artist is to supply him with everything he needs. Materially he needs but little. What he never gets enough of is appreciation, encouragement, understanding. I have seen painters give away their most cherished work on the impulse of the moment, sometimes in return for a good meal, sometimes for a bit of love, sometimes for no reason at all — simply because it pleased them to do so. And I have seen these same men refuse to sell a cherished painting no matter what the sum offered. I believe that a true artist always prefers to give his work away rather than sell it. A good artist must also have a streak of insanity in him, if by insanity is meant an exaggerated inability to adapt. The individual who can adapt to this mad world of to-day is either a nobody or a sage. In the one case he is immune to art and in the other he is beyond it.

Mental Health Break

It’s hard to believe all this was 17 years ago:

Papa’s Masculinity

Tyler Malone interviews Adam Long, the director of the Hemingway-Pfeiffer House in Arkansas, where Hemingway once lived, about the subject:

Hemingway is sort of the prototypical machismo American writer, but that uber-masculinity aspect of his persona often gets played up. He seems to me a much more complicated man than the mythical bull-fight-loving tough guy allows. Do you agree? And if so, in what ways do you see a different side of Hemingway? And how can highlighting those alternate aspects of his personality help to open up his novels in different ways?

I agree that Ernest is more complex than his one-dimensional macho performance. Certainly, Ernest was obsessed with masculinity, as were many men in his time and place. Because of this performance, he seems to have worked to ensure that his public persona was quintessentially macho. This probably becomes more and more true as his celebrity grows.

Beneath this, though, I think there is a much more complex person. Looking at his texts, I think that, at times, you see his narrators regret their own chauvinism. It seems to me that many of his narrators are speaking about past events, like one might in a confessional. I think seeing the difference in age in the first-person narrators and the events they narrate is important in seeing growth (or at least regret) in some of the Hemingway heroes.

Previous Dish on the author here, here, and here.

(Image of Hemingway with Col. Charles T. Lanham in Germany 1944 via Wikimedia Commons)

The Smell Of Rain, Ctd

New high-speed footage, above, captures the phenomenon:

[Researcher Youngsoo] Joung and [Cullen R.] Buie set up a system of high-speed cameras to capture raindrops on impact. The images they produced revealed a mechanism that had not previously been detected: As a raindrop hits a surface, it starts to flatten; simultaneously, tiny bubbles rise up from the surface, and through the droplet, before bursting out into the air. Depending on the speed of the droplet, and the properties of the surface, a cloud of “frenzied aerosols” may be dispersed.

“Frenzied means you can generate hundreds of aerosol droplets in a short time — a few microseconds,” Joung explains. “And we found you can control the speed of aerosol generation with different porous media and impact conditions.”

From their experiments, the team observed that more aerosols were produced in light and moderate rain, while far fewer aerosols were released during heavy rain. Buie says this mechanism may explain petrichor — a phenomenon first characterized by Australian scientists as the smell released after a light rain.

Previous Dish on the subject here.

Picturing The Night Shift

Jeff Sharlet scrolls through #nightshift pictures on Instragram:

There are the warehouse workers who snap themselves letting a wisp of marijuana smoke slip from between their lips, little Instagram rebellions. There are the soldiers and sailors pulling a night shift for no good reason other than orders, photographing themselves and their comrades on the verge of sleep or already under. Cops in noirish black and white, their pictures framed to show a bit of badge. And nurses. A lot of nurses. Close-up, arm’s length, forced smiles, dead eyes. Scroll through #nightshift, and you’ll see some saints among them and some whose hands you hope will be more alive in an emergency than their ashen faces.

The #nightshift hashtag is especially well populated by the armed professions and the healing ones. Sometimes they are almost one and the same, as in the case of @armedmedic3153, a.k.a. Marcelo Aguirre, a paramedic in Newark and suburban New Jersey. He owns an AR-15, a ­9-millimeter­ and a shotgun, but the only thing he shoots on the night shift is his camera. He works nights so he can study days; he wants to be a doctor. Nights are good preparation for that: You get more serious cases. You learn on the job. A 12-hour course each night you’re on. Twenty-four hours if you take a double. After a while, the adrenaline that juices you when you’re new — when you’re still keeping a tally of the lives you’ve saved — disappears. You just do the job. “High speed and low drag,” Aguirre told me when I called. “Please ignore the siren,” he said. “We’re going to a call.” A stroke. Nothing to get excited about. Coffee sustains him. He stays clean. Some guys, he said, use Provigil, but that’s prescribed. “For shift-work disorder,” he said.

“Would You Like To Be Shut Down?”

Lauren Davis highlights HENRi, the very poignant short seen above:

In a bit of role reversal, Keir Dullea, better known as 2001: A Space Odyssey‘s Dr. David Bowman, plays an intelligent ship in the short film HENRi, which also stars Superman actress Margot Kidder. After some time adrift in space, the ship’s intelligence decides to build itself a body to feel more alive. HENRi was written and directed by Eli Sasich, whose short film Atropa we were drooling over just last week. Where Atropa was a proof-of-concept, however, HENRi is a complete story, but, like Atropa, it was inspired by classic science fiction films. …

It’s always nice when crowdfunding allows someone with this much talent to spread their creative wings. We’re definitely keeping an eye out for Sasich’s work in the future. You can also read more about the film and see some of the models that went into its creation at Filmmaker Magazine.

Dear Aunt Ayn, Ctd

A reader grumbles:

The reader responses you posted to Ayn Rand’s letter miss the point. I don’t think anyone is arguing against responsibility, maturity, etc. The point is that Rand is the ultimate stick in the mud. She’s the little girl from Miracle on 34th Street who doesn’t believe in Santa Claus, except she grows up and never got to the end of the movie. The point the commenters are missing is that her niece asked for twenty five dollars, not a fucking lecture about moral responsibility, the plight of man, or any of the other bullshit that Rand used to fill her intolerable books with.

Another sighs:

I guess it’s a hazard of the way we read blogs and links. The comments from your readers who didn’t like the way you presented Ayn Rand’s letter are in fact quite consistent with Mallory Ortberg’s presentation of the letter in her own piece:

This letter so perfectly encapsulates everything I find deeply endearing about this bloviating monster. It is 30% very good advice, 50% unnecessary yelling, and 20% nonsense.

Another notes:

A couple of your readers contextualize Ayn Rand’s apparently stringent conditions for the repayment a loan of $25, but the context widens further still. In old age, when she was already quite rich, Rand accepted both Social Security and Medicare. It cannot be fully excused by saying (as some libertarian apologists have done) that she had paid into them and therefore could feel free to draw benefits as a return on her contribution – like the return, say, of a $25 loan – because she drew much more than she paid in. The Medicare, for example, was for the treatment of lung cancer – and Rand was always a strong proponent of smoking, her heroes did it ceaselessly, and she herself scoffed at reports that it causes lung cancer. Moreover, Rand was one of three female founders of the Cato Institute, and the other two – Rose Wilder Lane and Isabel “Pat” Paterson – both refused to accept Social Security. On principle.

The Mind Of Edgar Allan Poe

Marilynne Robinson praises his idiosyncratic brilliance, claiming the long prose poem about cosmology he wrote in the last year of his life, Eureka, was “so full of intuitive insight that neither his contemporaries nor subsequent generations, at least until the late twentieth century, could make any sense of it”:

Its very brilliance made it an object of ridicule, an instance of affectation and delusion, and so it is regarded to this day among readers and critics who are not at all abreast of contemporary physics. Eureka describes the origins of the universe in a single particle, from which “radiated” the atoms of which all matter is made. Minute dissimilarities of size and distribution among these atoms meant that the effects of gravity caused them to accumulate as matter, forming the physical universe.

This by itself would be a startling anticipation of modern cosmology, if Poe had not also drawn striking conclusions from it, for example that space and “duration” are one thing, that there might be stars that emit no light, that there is a repulsive force that in some degree counteracts the force of gravity, that there could be any number of universes with different laws simultaneous with ours, that our universe might collapse to its original state and another universe erupt from the particle it would have become, that our present universe may be one in a series.

All this is perfectly sound as observation, hypothesis, or speculation by the lights of science in the twenty-first century. And of course Poe had neither evidence nor authority for any of it. It was the product, he said, of a kind of aesthetic reasoning—therefore, he insisted, a poem. He was absolutely sincere about the truth of the account he had made of cosmic origins, and he was ridiculed for his sincerity. Eureka is important because it indicates the scale and the seriousness of Poe’s thinking, and its remarkable integrity. It demonstrates his use of his aesthetic sense as a particularly rigorous method of inquiry.

Previous Dish on Poe’s Eureka here.

(Photo by Flickr user irisb477)

Are Open Borders In Our Future?

Wondering what the world will look like in 2030, Politico asked “asked 15 of the smartest people we know for their most out-there predictions.” Charles Kenny expects that “the social change to come that will have the biggest impact on the global quality of life is a dramatic decline of discrimination by place of birth”:

At a time when the United States can’t pass immigration reform and Europe is seeing the rise of far-right parties, it might seem ridiculous to suggest that legal and social discrimination against those born in other countries could rapidly decline, but there are a bunch of forces working in favor of such an outcome. Economic convergence is reducing the income gap between rich and poor countries, while global values across a range of issues, from the importance of democracy and the environment to women’s rights, are converging as well. The West is rapidly aging as populations begin to decline, which will create considerable demand for imported labor from the rest of the world.

Globalization continues apace, and global problems, from climate change to the emergence of infectious diseases, are making it increasingly clear that we’re all in the same boat. The generation born in the new millennium is already far more global in outlook than those that came before, and the next generation will doubtless see themselves even more as world citizens.

It might be too much to hope that discrimination against place of birth will collapse as rapidly as discrimination against sexual orientation at birth has weakened in the United States, but if the change is only half as rapid, the world will be a far richer, healthier, secure and sustainable place in 30 years. As my Center for Global Development colleague Michael Clemens has amply demonstrated, opening borders is a trillion-dollar opportunity waiting to be grasped—and the next generation could be the one to grasp it.