| returning to prior bemusements |
[Oct. 14th, 2007|11:13 am] |
I remain astounded by these Pilgrim and Indian figures from China because they represent a new phase in global marketing.
In the first place, I remain baffled (others would not be so ignorant) by the process of their making. I see less and less evidence that there is any hand manufacture at all, except possibly in the painting of the eyes and lips, which I’m omitting from consideration here.
I am more fascinated by who made the decisions to replicate the signs of American nostalgia, and how. The proportions are almost knowingly wrong, imitating what a folk carver might have done once but, to my knowledge, never did quite so bizarrely.
And on this one, more so than on the others seemingly from the same factory / workshop, the designer has gone overboard on the indicators of age, wear, and clumsiness. This designer has clearly been studying the longtime popularity of pre-aged wooden furniture from Crate and Barrel. It makes perfect sense that a garden center would have these in stock (though not on their website), because the same sensibility that responds to flowers and trees and flowing water tends to respond to age and wear and the objects of an older America. I certainly do, alongside the architecture of Santiago Calatrava and Daniel Libeskind.
So when the newly designed markers of an older America show up fresh off the container ship from China, I take notice.
I have written before, of course, about Umberto Eco’s Travels in Hyperreality, a.k.a. Faith in Fakes, the now-ancient source that helped give us a popular language for this sort of phenomenon, rather than resorting to poststructuralese or Frankfurt School lingo.
And though her perceptions transgress against conventional literary comforts almost intolerably, it was Doris Lessing who once rubbed our faces in the hard lessons of how the world is filled with authentic fakery; sleep sold as desirable newness, or as imitations of the old because some buyers prefer that. The Four-Gated City and such were about environmental apocalypse in a decade when such things were just beginning to be spoken of, and later on Lessing went through … uh, that phase of influence that the newspaper writers conspicuously do not dwell upon, skipping over certain interesting details. Shikasta and The Flight to Lucifer are roughly contemporaneous novels.
I need to re-read Lessing’s lectures titled Prisons We Choose to Live Inside. I have always preferred to go to her sources for such lessons, but some still find Lessing the best intermediary for the information she has made available, truths that are not just inconvenient but downright unpalatable unless mixed with the sweeter ingredients she rarely provides.
As I say, Lessing has gotten almost reflexively crusty in her dismissive treatment of the news of the Nobel Prize (“Oh yes, now there will be speeches and flowers and it will all be very nice” is the sort of world-weary speech one of her characters could have said in her most globally resigned fictions.) And I have grown tired myself of consuming Lessing’s medicaments, good for me or not. But she and Harold Bloom were plainly part of a most conspicuously intriguing moment in world cultural history circa 1979-1982 that I am still trying to figure out. |
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| returning to even more prior bemusements |
[Oct. 14th, 2007|11:22 am] |
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Diane Ackerman's 2004 book An Alchemy of Mind proves to be an eminently readable and apparently reliable summary of the state of research on brain physiology and psychology. It is good to have a book other than Robert Ornstein's The Psychology of Consciousness to recommend to those for whom Mulla Nasrudin stories are a real turn-off. |
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