Of course that’s misleading: The way to not make an anthology is to not make it. This was really a faux-clever way of saying how to make a bad anthology, in specific Stephen Hyde and Geno Zanetti’s Players: Con Men, Hustlers, Gamblers, and Scam Artists (2002).
Here are their techniques:
1. Arbitrary Organization
The book is divided into four numbered but untitled sections. The first is the smallest so at first glance you’d think that would be an introduction and the other three devoted to some theme. On second glance, it’s nothing of the kind; in fact there doesn’t appear to be any reason for the groupings at all. They randomly group topic and approach though perhaps the point is chronological since section two has the older material (Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Baudelaire) but it’s not like they’re showing any progression.
2. Ignore Fact or Fiction Distinctions
It’s tempting to think that a book opening with a Borges story is trying to rub factual against fictional material (y’know, mixing genres and questioning “reality”) but the book reads like slopiness. Not just that the pieces aren’t IDed as one or the other since you can usually figure that out but the intermingling and general lack of purpose makes the book as overblown myth as, say, Guys & Dolls than as any serious investigation into the players’ world(s). It doesn’t help that some of the “facutal” pieces appear to be mostly exaggeration if not near-complete fabrication. The excerpt from Frank Abagnale’s Catch Me If You Can, for instance, is almost assuredly not true (I’ve taken the bar exam and don’t believe that anybody could fake their way through it), made even more suspicious when he stops providing concrete information.
3. Avoid Rudimentary Information
Why bother with simple things like a tiny introduction or even dates? Rufus Jarman’s piece on the Spanish Prisoner mentions how much is lost annually on the scam and you immediately wonder if that includes the Nigerian email that’s so clearly the same thing. But hey, maybe Jarman’s piece is a few years old and predates email; that makes sense. Then you start to suspect that it’s maybe 15 or 20 years old until he mentions American victims sometimes going through Havana and suddenly this whole thing has to be at least half a century out of date, maybe more. The piece isn’t mentioned in the copyrights page so who knows? Clearly the date is crucial to evaluating the information but no date is given, as would be the original publication that printed it since there’s enough vague stories that I wonder how much is real.
4. Poor Selection
Why anything by Robert Anton Wilson would be included anywhere is something of a mystery but even past that his piece here is fuzzy minded and misleading, actually something of a scam itself. Even more mystifying is an excerpt by Rodolfo Scarfalloto that’s about lying and truth but is so completely and obviously not true that it constitutes a lie itself. Such as “The ‘Heart’ (feeling) cannot be fooled, because it already knows the truth, irrespective of the external scenery.” Maybe these are samples of clever schemers who scam readers with books that have the intellectual heft of a Jerry Springer show. But considering some of the other tedious choices I think the anthologists just don’t know what they’re doing.
Tuesday, August 1, 2006
Monday, July 31, 2006
getting it wrong
It's probably some streak of smug superiority but I can't help being attracted by writers who base their ideas on some technical issue that they get totally and provably wrong. Usually if you see a mention of "entropy" or "Heisenberg" you can pretty much be guaranteed it's completely wrong unless coming from an actual science writer. (A personal favorite is when Charles Rutheiser claims in Imagineering Atlanta that fractals are non-Euclidean, showing not even a superficial understanding.)
So critic Mick LaSalle in the San Francisco Chronicle wrote a review of Monster House that blithely dismisses pretty much all animation prior to it, mainly because of some kind of facial abilities in the new technology. Or as he puts it "Moreover, if the actor is thinking or is full of doubt, the technology will be able to render subtle qualities of pensiveness or doubt in the animation." Which actually might be good since most actual live actors can't render these subtle qualities or at least they're in films where such skills are not needed.
Pixar animator Jeffrey Pidgeon wrote a fine rebuttal.
So critic Mick LaSalle in the San Francisco Chronicle wrote a review of Monster House that blithely dismisses pretty much all animation prior to it, mainly because of some kind of facial abilities in the new technology. Or as he puts it "Moreover, if the actor is thinking or is full of doubt, the technology will be able to render subtle qualities of pensiveness or doubt in the animation." Which actually might be good since most actual live actors can't render these subtle qualities or at least they're in films where such skills are not needed.
Pixar animator Jeffrey Pidgeon wrote a fine rebuttal.
Thursday, July 13, 2006
who'd a thunk: linguist humor
http://mercury.ccil.org/%7Ecowan/essential.html
English is essentially a West Germanic language that's trying very hard to look like a Romance one.
Danish is essentially Swedish run backwards at half speed.
French is essentially Latin spoken by a drunken Roman soldier.
[and it just goes on and on....]
English is essentially a West Germanic language that's trying very hard to look like a Romance one.
Danish is essentially Swedish run backwards at half speed.
French is essentially Latin spoken by a drunken Roman soldier.
[and it just goes on and on....]
Wednesday, July 5, 2006
still here....
When I started the blog however long back (three years? four?) I knew it wouldn't be updated every week. Still, this may be the longest it's gone silent. Consider it conceptual art blogging.
Monday, May 1, 2006
Sunday, April 23, 2006
two art books
Two books with similar titles that I both ran across in libraries (one academic, one public) while looking for something else.
Lyle Rexer’s How to Look at Outsider Art (2005) doesn’t sound particularly promising and lives up to such unpromise. After all, doesn’t outsider art more than any other create its own terms? Not that an introduction or overview wouldn’t be useful but the primary value to Rexer’s book is as a sporadic survey. There are a few interesting artists I didn’t know about and unfamiliar bits about others I did but Rexer is far too mired in run-of-the-mill art critical thinking to help much with this art. In other words, timid and watered-down philosophy takes precedence over actually experiencing the art work. Much of his concern is exterior (outside the outsider art) even leading him to propose a taxonomy based on the mental status of the artist, an activity more appropriate to a therapist than a critic. While such information is undeniably of interest, it’s not the major point. You also wonder about most factual information when he tells us about the Borges story “Tlon, Uqbar, and Orbis Tertius” which manages to have two errors in one title (it’s actually “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” and the umlaut couldn’t have posed a problem considering how often Wölfli is mentioned). Elsewhere he tries to mention a Ken Grimes painting that resembles a circuit diagram as an example of outsiders gravitating to science fiction despite the obvious fact that there’s nothing remotely science fictional about this since it’s based on decades-old electrical symbols.
Though Patrick de Rynck’s How to Read a Painting: Lessons from the Old Masters (2004) seemed more promising, it’s actually of almost no value. The basic idea is to explore important elements of pre-modern painting that elude most of us nowadays. The format is two pages per painting (100 paintings in all) which each work getting a full view then enlargments of specific icons, characters or actions with accompanying text. The main problem is that the text is just too blunt and telegraphic to convey much information. On Martini & Memmi’s The Annunciation, de Rynck identifies the four Old Testament prophets but doesn’t explain why those particular four, what they’re doing there, whether that was a common design element of that genre. In short, everything that I picked up the book for (and in fact didn’t get much beyond 60 pages). A much better approach would have been eight pages for each of 25 paintings which would allow a more detailed exploration as well as background for the artist.
Lyle Rexer’s How to Look at Outsider Art (2005) doesn’t sound particularly promising and lives up to such unpromise. After all, doesn’t outsider art more than any other create its own terms? Not that an introduction or overview wouldn’t be useful but the primary value to Rexer’s book is as a sporadic survey. There are a few interesting artists I didn’t know about and unfamiliar bits about others I did but Rexer is far too mired in run-of-the-mill art critical thinking to help much with this art. In other words, timid and watered-down philosophy takes precedence over actually experiencing the art work. Much of his concern is exterior (outside the outsider art) even leading him to propose a taxonomy based on the mental status of the artist, an activity more appropriate to a therapist than a critic. While such information is undeniably of interest, it’s not the major point. You also wonder about most factual information when he tells us about the Borges story “Tlon, Uqbar, and Orbis Tertius” which manages to have two errors in one title (it’s actually “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” and the umlaut couldn’t have posed a problem considering how often Wölfli is mentioned). Elsewhere he tries to mention a Ken Grimes painting that resembles a circuit diagram as an example of outsiders gravitating to science fiction despite the obvious fact that there’s nothing remotely science fictional about this since it’s based on decades-old electrical symbols.
Though Patrick de Rynck’s How to Read a Painting: Lessons from the Old Masters (2004) seemed more promising, it’s actually of almost no value. The basic idea is to explore important elements of pre-modern painting that elude most of us nowadays. The format is two pages per painting (100 paintings in all) which each work getting a full view then enlargments of specific icons, characters or actions with accompanying text. The main problem is that the text is just too blunt and telegraphic to convey much information. On Martini & Memmi’s The Annunciation, de Rynck identifies the four Old Testament prophets but doesn’t explain why those particular four, what they’re doing there, whether that was a common design element of that genre. In short, everything that I picked up the book for (and in fact didn’t get much beyond 60 pages). A much better approach would have been eight pages for each of 25 paintings which would allow a more detailed exploration as well as background for the artist.
101 best screenplays?
http://www.wga.org/subpage_newsevents.aspx?id=1807
A friend sent this list from the Writer's Guild of the 101 Greatest Screenplays and it's an odd statement. The overall impression isn't that screenplays were judged but that the voting members simply chose the greatest films where the screenplay was clearly the foundation. How else would you account for Citizen Kane when it's obvious that the same script filmed by anybody else but Welles wouldn't have resulted in anything remotely like what we have. Or The Wizard of Oz which owes less to the screenwriters than to the songwriters, actors, set designers and Baum. The number one choice was Casablanca, a routine 40s Warner melodrama that's inexplicably come to be considered A Great Film but which again owes whatever strengths it has to something other than the script. (It probably helps that respected nitwit Robert McKee has praised this particular script, or again the resulting film since it's not clear that he or any of the voters actually read the script.) Being the result of industry voting, the list really just shows writers patting each other on the back. That's why there are no silent films and almost nothing from outside Hollywood.
A friend sent this list from the Writer's Guild of the 101 Greatest Screenplays and it's an odd statement. The overall impression isn't that screenplays were judged but that the voting members simply chose the greatest films where the screenplay was clearly the foundation. How else would you account for Citizen Kane when it's obvious that the same script filmed by anybody else but Welles wouldn't have resulted in anything remotely like what we have. Or The Wizard of Oz which owes less to the screenwriters than to the songwriters, actors, set designers and Baum. The number one choice was Casablanca, a routine 40s Warner melodrama that's inexplicably come to be considered A Great Film but which again owes whatever strengths it has to something other than the script. (It probably helps that respected nitwit Robert McKee has praised this particular script, or again the resulting film since it's not clear that he or any of the voters actually read the script.) Being the result of industry voting, the list really just shows writers patting each other on the back. That's why there are no silent films and almost nothing from outside Hollywood.
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