Meta Critical Miscellany - Literary, Intellectual, Enjoyable, Forgotten, Fragile

 

Actually, Criticism is Literature

Writing about the art of writing is an art unto itself.

Jonathan Russell Clark

Literary Hub

"Every once in a while, a critic will feel it necessary to define what they think of as their role in the larger literary community. Now as a critic I love these essays; many of these writers have brought brilliant insights into what can often be a dismissed vocation. But while I appreciate the efforts of my fellow critics, there is one aspect to nearly all of these defenses that I disagree with, deeply, and that is the implication that criticism is separate from the literature it describes, as if novelists, poets, playwrights, and nonfiction writers were the players in the game and we critics merely the referees. What’s intimated in many defenses of criticism is this gap between observer and observed, between artist and non-artist."

"This is bullshit. Criticism is also literature. The word 'also' there insists on criticism's inclusion as a genre of literature, and not as a subject that stands outside of it. When viewed as a separate entity, criticism becomes this Big Brother-like authority ready to pop up and take down any unsuspecting artist; it turns criticism into a practical evil that published authors must suffer through; and it devalues the work of those who became critics because they love literature and they love to write."

"A critic is an artist; I am an artist. I write because I love language and because I love using language to depict the various complexities of my life. Some people use their family and friends as inspiration, while others mine history for theirs. Still others find muses in the calm of nature, some in the chaos of the city. I’ve found it in books - it is through them that I’m able to express not merely what I think of literature, but what I believe about life."

 

 

 

The Intellectuals are Having a Situation
Reviewing the n+1 review of reviews.

Christian Lorentzen

Gawker

"I am not the most famous book reviewer in America, but I've been reviewing books on and off for 21 years, and it is how I make my living, such as it is. Why do I do this? I enjoy writing criticism, performing literary analysis, and reading and thinking about books. One of my friends once justified our activities by saying you have to help create the literary culture you want to be part of."

"n+1 ran an essay called 'Critical Attrition: What’s the Matter with Book Reviews?' Let's begin with 'the earnest reader.' This reader pays attention to jacket copy on books, uses the website Goodreads, searches Twitter for literary opinions, and doesn't know very much about the literature business. I'll be honest, I have no respect for this fictional character or anyone in real life who resembles him. He's buying books, presumably books that he's going to spend many hours of his life reading. Yet when he has read a book he doesn’t like, he feels misled by its marketing. This reader is simply bad at being a consumer. He doesn’t know how to spend his money on products that will please him. He is not in touch with his own taste and ways of satisfying it."

"A sorry situation, as n+1 paints it. Readers who don’t know how to find the books they like and reviewers writing pieces that are tepid and compromised, secretly driven by their misplaced hopes for minor advancement (n+1 is too sympathetic to their plight to call them grifters, but that's the idea). I think these problems are irrelevant because they constitute the sort of mediocrity endemic to any endeavor." 

"The picture n+1 paints of criticism is a joyless one. If there is a problem with book reviewing the problem is that those of us who are good at it aren’t good enough, there aren’t enough of us, and we aren’t doing a good enough job of expanding the scope of literary discourse, to put it in touch with tradition and open it wide to new writing. We have the duty of helping to create the culture we want to live in, and that world should be full of infinitely various delights. The imperatives are to be stylish, to be thorough, to be funny, to be generous, and occasionally to be cruel."

 Critical Attrition

What's the matter with book reviews?

The Editors

n+1

Like This or Die

The fate of the book review in the age of the algorithm.

Christian Lorentzen

Harper's Magazine

 

 

 

Let People Enjoy This Essay

How the mindset of an irritating web comic infected criticism.

BD McClay

Gawker

"If we were using one of those little pain-measurement scales to log how annoying this comic is, 'shhh' in its original form ranks, at the very worst, two out of ten. It’s a little smug. But it’s basically fine. In a happier world it would have slid down into the great content void and that would be the end of it. Instead, some world-historical monster cropped out the last two panels, which in turn became a standalone reaction image. Let people enjoy things went from one piece of an, again, only mildly annoying comic, to a manifesto for a certain type of fan that gets very, very angry if somebody out there isn't enjoying things."

"'Let people enjoy things' is, partly, just about figuring out when it is and isn’t appropriate to get into a disagreement, which, for conflict-enjoying people, is a lifelong process. There’s a right time and a right place and, maybe most importantly, the right companions for me out there. The problem is this: For a small but vocal number of people online, any opinion they dislike is, essentially, being expressed by somebody in their home. 'Let people enjoy things,' as a way of saying 'learn basic conversational dynamics,' is a banal but true statement. But in practice, 'let people enjoy things' means something else: it is rude or inappropriate to dislike something."

"The 'let people enjoy things' problem is a pathological aversion, on a wide cultural level, to disagreement, discomfort, or being judged by others. I don’t want to move 'let people enjoy things' one tier up so that now we are all fiercely demanding to be allowed to enjoy cultural criticism. Negative criticism can be just as tedious, misguided, and fan-service-driven as positive criticism. But the paradox of a wide-open digital publishing field is that it has tended more and more toward consensus, with its two modes being the rave and the takedown, instead of diversity; even in terms of subject matter, culture verticals focus on the same things, instead of branching out."

"People are as interested in conversation over pieces of art and entertainment they like as they have ever been. But all of these take place within a context where interest and fandom are already established, which is part of why a harsh review can provoke such an angry reaction. A recap isn’t really meant to be evaluative. Much like evangelicals created their own parallel version of everything, from music to magazines, fan culture has its own alternatives. Negative reactions - up to a point - can live comfortably in this world. Negativity is just another brand.  Even so, many kinds of negative criticism, particularly of a vaguely political bent, come down to trope recognition: women in refrigerators, Bechdel tests, who dies first in horror movies."

"But criticism - by which I mean something that demands maintaining distance between the critic and the subject, not a negative or positive viewpoint - is, in a fandom world, an obsolete exercise. The growth area in culture writing is culture coverage - interviews and profiles - not criticism."

 

 

 

 

Have We Forgotten How to Read Critically?
Since the internet has made the entire world a library with no exits or supervisors, many readers treat every published piece of writing as a conversation opener, demanding a bespoke response.

Kate Harding

Dame Magazine

"Not every piece of short nonfiction writing is an opinion piece, crafted to advance a particular argument. This is the first thing we all need to understand. I love the essay form because it’s an opportunity to watch someone - including yourself, if you write them - think deeply, out loud." 

"We used to understand this, I think. But social media has tilted things so that books by contemporary authors - let alone essays - are no longer portable worlds that awaken when a reader enters and slumber when one leaves. Today, the author is not dead until the author is actually dead. In the meantime, every published piece of writing is treated as the beginning of a conversation - or worse, a workshop piece - by some readers, each of whom feels entitled to a bespoke response."

"There is no apparent awareness that, in writing a piece and publishing it, the author has said what they meant to say and turned the project of thinking about it over to the reader. Today’s reader will simply not accept the baton being passed. If something is unclear, the author must expand; if something offends, the author must account and atone. Simple disagreement triggers some cousin of cognitive dissonance, where the reader’s brain scrambles to forcibly reconcile beliefs that don’t actually contradict each other."

"Reading can make you feel close to someone without actually knowing them, a precious gift in a lonely world. But if the pleasure of reading is feeling connected to a distant stranger, then the pain of watching people read badly is its opposite: a severing of shared humanity. A cold, demoralizing reminder that we never can look inside each other’s minds, no matter how we try."

"Books once kept the boundaries between writer and reader distinct. Unless you met an author under the controlled circumstances of a public event, you’d never get a chance to say hello, much less insult their intelligence and demand they go to therapy. Now, you and 300 other furious strangers can tell an author to kill herself before she’s finished her first coffee. Technology is a miracle."

 

 

 

Authorial Fragility and the Limits of Poptimism

It's good when critics dislike things.

Christian Lorentzen

Gawker

"It seems strange to me that people have to invent ulterior motives for critics who don't lavish every new novel, film, television program, or art exhibition with slobbering praise. Disliking most of what you see and hear seems to me the natural way of things. All the more pleasure when you find something that grips your attention. Reading novels and watching films and looking at paintings and sculptures are hedonistic activities. Negative reviews are simply the expression of displeasure. The critics who write them don’t tend to be normal people because if they were their reviews would be boring and either nobody would print them or nobody would read them. In any case evaluation isn’t the ultimate point of criticism, though in the crude slipstream of social media it's usually taken to be."

Everyone's a Critic

Richard Joseph

Los Angeles Review of Books

Your Bubble is Not the Culture

From Hamilton to Harry Potter, critics keep misreading popular culture 

and writing off things that their audiences love. Why?

Yair Rosenberg

The Atlantic Newsletters

Musical Miscellany - Symphonic Planets, Dark Cells, Synthesizing Mushroom, Novel Virus, Volatile Market, Noisy Colors

 

 

 

The Symphonies of the Planets

NASA Voyager Recordings

via The Internet Archive

"Soaring to the depths of our universe, gallant spacecraft roam the cosmos, snapping images of celestial wonders. Some spacecraft have instruments capable of capturing radio emissions. When scientists convert these to sound waves, the results are eerie to hear. The probes picked up the interaction of solar wind on the planets magnetospheres, which releases ionic particles with an audible vibration frequency."

 

 

 

 

The Dark Side of the Cell

Anne Niemetz and Andrew Pelling

the dark side of the cell

"Professor James Gimzewski and Andrew Pelling at UCLA first made the discovery that yeast cells oscillate at the nanoscale in 2002. Amplifying this oscillation results in a sound that lies within the human audible range. The tool with which the cell sounds are extracted - the atomic force microscope - can be regarded as a new type of musical instrument. The AFM 'touches' a cell with its small tip, comparable to a record needle 'feeling' the bumps in a groove on a record. With this interface, the AFM 'feels' oscillations taking place at the membrane of a cell. These electrical signals can then be amplified and distributed by speakers."

 

 

 

Pink Oyster Mushroom Playing Modular Synthesizer

Myco Loco

via YouTube

"Electrical resistance is measure by passing a small current through the mushrooms similar to a lie detector test. The changes in resistance are then converted into control signals which determine the rhythm, pitch, timbre and effects parameters of the modular synthesizer."

 

 

 

Markus J. Buehler · Protein Counterpoint Sonification

 

Protein Counterpoint Sonification

Markus J Beuhler

via MIT News

"The proteins that make up all living things are alive with music. Markus Buehler, musician and MIT professor develops artificial intelligence models to design new proteins, sometimes by translating them into sound. The Covid-19 outbreak was surging in the United States, and Buehler turned his attention to the spike protein of SARS-CoV-2, the appendage that makes the novel coronavirus so contagious. He and his colleagues are trying to unpack its vibrational properties through molecular-based sound spectra, which could hold one key to stopping the virus."

 

 

 

Sounds of a Volatile Market

Jordan Wirfs-Brock

via Medium

"With the craziness of the stock market lately, there have been some nice visualizations flitting around. I set out to sonify the stock market data with the goal of conveying both the recent precipitous drop and the crazy volatility. I focused on two metrics: the daily percent change (conveying volatility) and the daily closing price (conveying overall market movement)."

 
The Colors of Noise

Mark Frauenfelder

via Boing Boing

"White noise is a blend of random frequencies with a flat spectrum - any frequency band has the same amount of power as any other. I find white noise to be sharp and harsh. Most white noise generators don't actually play white noise - they play a 'colored noise' that's more soothing. Colored noises have a blend of random frequencies but some frequencies play at a higher volume than other frequencies. This gives the noise a 'color' or distinctive tone."

 

Miscellany - Songs for Ohio

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"Ohio" by Over the Rhine, Ohio

 

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"Carry Me Ohio" by Sun Kil Moon, Ghosts of the Great Highway

 

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"Ohio" by Modest Mouse, This is a Long Drive for Someone with Nothing to Think About

 

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"Ohio Light and Power" by The Albertans, Dangerous Anything

 

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"Teacup Woozy" by Holopaw, Holopaw

 

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"Ohio" performed by The Dandy Warhols, Come On Feel The Dandy Warhols

 

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Delicious Miscellany - Milk Cocktails, Elusive Salep, Dusty Spirits, Vintage Perfume, Mad Honey, Antique Opium

  

 

The Key to Crystal-Clear Cocktails? Milk

Camper English

Cook's Illustrated 

 

"After a 150-year absence, milk punch is back. The base recipe for milk punch includes citrus juice or another acidic ingredient. Hot milk is added to the mixed cocktail, curdling the milk, and then the punch is strained to remove the curds. The process removes most of the color and cloudiness from the drink, clarifying it, and it preserves the cocktail from spoilage for months or even years if kept cool. 

The concept of clarifying cocktails with milk might seem a bit odd today, but in the milk punch heyday - the 1700s through the mid-180ss - spirits would have been far rougher around the edges, and in addition to clarifying and preserving the drink, the process also softened the harsh flavor of the booze. The resulting drink is unctuous and silky, clear and only subtly milky, with softer, mellow flavors."

 

 

For Many US Turks, Salep is Beloved but Elusive

Amelia Nierenberg

New York Times

 

"In Turkey, winter is the season of salep. Peddlers pushing carts sell the hot, milky drink traditionally made from ground orchid tubers. Students warm their cold fingers around flimsy paper cups filled with steaming salep. Businessmen sip it with one hand and check their email with the other.

But in the United States, the Turkish drink is almost impossible to find or make. Decades of strain from habitat loss, climate change and over-harvesting have taken their toll on orchids, a main ingredient. Export is difficult, as orchids are included in an appendix to an international agreement meant to protect different species from trade.

Still, homesick Turks dream of real salep, which is something like a cross between hot chocolate and rice pudding. The drink is a beloved street food. Many learn to make it only after they immigrate."

 

 

  

Chasing 'Dusties' with America's Top Spirit Hunter

Aaron Goldfarb

Punch

 

"As late as the early 2010s, savvy collectors were able to pull amazing finds by simply going 'dusty hunting.' By now, paeans have been written to those who’ve best pulled off the task, like the so-called 'Bourbon Turtle,' who absolutely cleared northeastern liquor stores of bottles that had been gathering dust since the day they were stocked.

But you’re no longer going to find any Stitzel-Weller Old Fitzgerald by heading to some convenience mart on the other side of the tracks; nor does one have decades to build a collection if demanding restaurateurs want their whiskey bar stocked with the old stuff ASAP. Thus, a new breed of vintage spirits buyer, has emerged - one that’s forced to be more resourceful."

 

 

 

Confessions of a Vintage Perfume Addict

Barbara Herman

Jezebel 

 

"Trying to be discreet in the middle of an open office, I'd pop open a vial of perfume and dab it on my wrist. In a ritual that has become as common as having a meal or reading a book, I'd lift my wrist to my nose, close my eyes, and sniff, like a deranged junky getting her fix. In that work environment, it would have been appropriate for me to wear perfume in a style that has been popular since the 1990s: the office scent. It is institutional and conformist. 

 

As I became bored with office life, my rebellion took an invisible turn. I didn't want to blend in. My perfume tastes began to wander over to the wrong side of the tracks, looking for the rude, the louche, and the difficult. I wanted an anti-office scent. I found myself drawn to vintage perfumes that took me to distant lands and told me stories about fur-clad, misbehaving women who smoked; erotic perfumes that smelled like unwashed bodies; and perfumes that deliberately overturned trite and outdated gender conventions in perfume. 

Take Bandit. Its composer - former model, reputed lesbian, and legendary iconoclast of scent - was the rare female perfumer, celebrated for her daring overdoses of extreme perfume notes. Her masterpiece Bandit, a bitter green leather perfume for women, was said to have been inspired by the scent of female models changing their undergarments backstage during fashions shows."

 

 

 

The Strange History of 'Mad Honey'

Emma Bryce

Modern Farmer

 

"The dark, reddish, 'mad honey,' known as deli bal in Turkey, contains an ingredient from rhododendron nectar called grayanotoxin - a natural neurotoxin that brings on light-headedness and hallucinations. In the 1700s, the Black Sea region traded this potent produce with Europe, where the honey was infused with drinks to give boozers a greater high than alcohol could deliver. 

Rhododendron flowers occur all over the world, and yet mad honey is most common in the region fringing the Black Sea. In Turkey, not only do the poisonous rhododendrons abound, but the humid, mountainous slopes around the Black Sea provide the perfect habitat for these flowers to grow in monocrop-like swaths. When bees make honey in these fields, no other nectars get mixed in - and the result is deli bal, potent and pure.

The honey is taken in small amounts, sometimes boiled in milk, and consumed typically just before breakfast. And yet, finding it still amounts to something of a treasure hunt. The honey’s potency seems to have turned it into a treat reserved for those in the know. The responsible shop keepers know they shouldn’t be selling it to strangers. They are a bit wary of marketing it."

 

 

 

How Collecting Opium Antiques Turned Me into an Opium Addict
Lisa Hix
Collector's Weekly

 

"You really have to work hard to get hooked on smoking opium. The Victorian-era form of the drug is rare, and the people who know how to use it aren’t exactly forthcoming. But leave it to an obsessive antiques collector to figure out how to get to addicted to a 19th-century drug.

He started out collecting innocuous things; at first, it was seashells and stones, then it was currency and Asian antiques like textiles. Eventually he also discovered the beauty of antique opium pipes, bowls, and lamps, as well as opium trays and the hundreds of little implements that went with the ritual. Because opium smoking had been so thoroughly eradicated around the globe in the early 20th century, very little had been written about these objects. After years of intense research, he produced the first opium-smoking antiques guide.

Research wasn’t limited to mining Victorian medical books or hunting down authentic pieces on eBay. As he came across various pipes and tools, he sought out the last of the Laotian opium dens to learn how these accoutrements were used and, yes, to try them himself. Before long, he and a friend had created their own private opium den in rural Southeast Asia, but when another smoking buddy died, possibly from withdrawal symptoms, he had to quit before it was too late for him, too. His latest book details how his obsessive collectors’ bug led to his opium addiction."

 

Intercultural Miscellany - World in Motion, First Contact, Cultural Appropriation, Indian House, Migration Museum

A Picture of Change for a World in Constant Motion
Jason Farago
New York Times

"During Hokusai’s lifetime, Japanese were barred from leaving the country, on pain of death. But the country was not totally closed. Some foreign goods could come in. And some foreign techniques, too. Do you see, here, how the traveler in the back is so much smaller than the woman who’s lost her papers? And how sharply the landscape slopes up? A hallmark of Renaissance image-making. Hokusai was among the first Japanese artists to employ Western perspective, though he used it playfully. Hokusai would have picked up this perspectival technique from Dutch prints circulating in Edo, even as elsewhere, in the same image, Hokusai employs a perspectival technique common in Asian painting, with similarly sized figures positioned along diagonal sightlines. That, too, was imported knowledge, absorbed from Chinese examples into earlier Japanese painting."

"In 1867, the World’s Fair took place in Paris. Japan participated for the first time, and displayed coats of armor, swords, statues - and woodblock prints. The French went wild. A critic at the fair singled out Hokusai. What these young moderns loved were the prints. Hokusai’s example would soon influence the work of Paris’s modern artists. Mary Cassatt, for instance. She learned from Japanese printmakers to create spaces of blocky color, with hard transitions from tone to tone. Or her friend Edgar Degas, whose flat and asymmetrical spaces channel the Japanese model into the opera house and the ballet studio. These Parisians understood the prints they were looking at only in part. They made foolish, patronizing generalizations."

"Like most fantasies, 'Japonisme' said more about the fantasizer than the fantasized. These Parisians, defeated in war and rocketing through industrialization, saw themselves in landscapes that were both ageless and adrift. And Hokusai, who’d already metabolized Western technique into his images of Japan, was the perfect vessel for their dreaming."

First Contact
David Olusoga
BBC

"In the 15th and 16th centuries distant and disparate cultures met, often for the first time. These encounters provoked wonder, awe, bafflement and fear. Art was always on the frontline. Each cultural contact at this time left a mark on both sides: the magnificent Benin bronzes record the meeting of an ancient West African kingdom and Portuguese voyagers in a spirit of mutual respect and exchange. By contrast we think Spain's conquest of Central America in the 16th century as decimating the Aztecs and eviscerating their culture. But even in Mexico rare surviving Aztec artworks recall a more nuanced story."

"The Tokugawa Shogunate, after an initial embrace, became so wary of outside interference that they sought to cut ties with the outside world. But in their art, as in their trade, they could never truly isolate themselves from foreign influences. By contrast the Protestant Dutch Republic was itself an entirely new kind of creature: a market driven nation-state. It was a system that created new freedoms and opportunities. The British in India: at first the British were as open to foreign influence as the Dutch. But by the 1800s they became more aggressive and the era of encounters gave way to the era of muscular empire, that was dismissive of India's arts and cultures."

How to Change Your Conversations about Cultural Appropriation
James Mendez Hodes
Mndz

"A cultural practice or cultural expression is a mode of behavior, communication, or self-assertion with origins or close associations with a certain culture. Either internal factors or external factors may form those associations. Cultural exchange is one culture’s adoption of cultural practices or expressions originating with another culture. We’ll call the former culture the adopters, the latter the originators. Cultural appropriation is an instance of cultural exchange which aggravates, entrenches, trivializes, or mocks a power imbalance between an enfranchised adopter and a systemically oppressed originator. An instance of cultural appropriation may also have positive or benign effects - for the originator, the adopter, or third parties - which exist in parallel to the appropriative dynamic."

"What’s the context? What does it look like without that context? What power dynamics differentiate adopters and originators? What’s the connection between adopter and originator? What’s the tone? Who feels hurt, and why? Where I hope this analytical strategy takes us is the complicated places. Where expressions are simultaneously racist and anti-racist. Where different subaltern groups borrow from each other along intersectional gradients of power that leave each group empowered over the other in a different way. Where there’s contradiction, harm and help given and taken simultaneously, or long histories of borrowed expressions becoming the adopter’s cultural signifiers. The most complex, challenging questions of cultural appropriation concern marginalized groups exchanging culture with one another."

This is an Indian House, According to One Architect
Aatish Taseer
New York Times

"Indian architecture was effortlessly palimpsestic, a place on which layer upon layer of thought and reverie had been inscribed, and yet no succeeding layer had completely hidden or erased what had been written previously. India's oldest stone buildings are stupas and rock-cut caves of Buddhist origin. These were preceded by an older tradition of building in wood. When Buddhism declined in India, and resurgent Hindu faith rose, it was the ghost of Buddhist architecture, visible in both the apsidal shape of certain temples and in the use of stone-latticed windows, that was resurrected in a new tradition of Hindu temple architecture."

"With the coming of Islam, many features of Indian building, such as screens, carved brackets, corbeled arches and deep eaves projecting hard black shadows, became part of Indo-Islamic architecture. Dynasties rose and fell, the religious makeup of India changed, but Indian architecture, like Indian food, music and literature, was able to absorb the new influences."

"The English writer Robert Byron makes an important distinction between what he describes as 'fusion' and 'allusion'. The first is the use of diverse architectural inventions and ornamental themes, whatever their dates or racial origins, simply for their practical value in creating and artistic unity and in giving effect to the values of mass, space, line and coherence in the whole design. The second is the use of these same inventions and themes in a mood of reminiscence regardless of their relevance to mass, space, line and coherence."
  
  

 
A New Type of Museum for an Age of Migration
Jason Farago
New York Times

"A whole new order is proposed, one that does not care about an artwork’s uniqueness, a dress’s elegance, or an artifact’s fine condition. What matters here is movement - how objects and forms circulate through time and across the globe."

"Here’s an example: Two pieces of blue-and-white pottery are on display - a vase ringed with Persian script and a porcelain dish decorated with Chinese characters. They both date from around the late 16th century. But it turns out that the 'Persian' one was made in China, while the 'Chinese' one comes from Iran, and on both of them the characters are nonsense. Their meaning lies not in the gobbledygook written on their surfaces, but on the trade routes they map and the relationships they signify."

Decadent Miscellany - American Mesmerism, Gothic Marxism, Haunted Mansion, Wedding Ruins, Rich Warehouses

When Mesmerism Came to America
Max Nelson
New York Review of Books

"Control is a coveted possession. The mesmerists and skeptics all seem to want it; at any rate, they want to consider themselves rational and self-possessed enough not to fall under anyone else’s. During this brief, strange moment, mesmerizing another person - or seeing someone get mesmerized, or denouncing mesmerists as charlatans - became a way of stockpiling control for one's own use. At whose expense? Unidentified, enslaved West Indian laborers planters tried to mesmerize; female factory workers."

"Mesmerists made gains in America not by denying that they exploited credulous subjects but by advertising that they had found a new technique for doing precisely that. Once calling people 'credulous' emerged as a way to justify singling them out as test subjects, mesmerists could compete over experimenting with, and hoping to control, the credulity of others. They became businesslike experts in the profitable arts of human manipulation. Two of mesmerism’s early adopters were plantation owners and factory managers."

A Thousand Lost Worlds: Notes on Gothic Marxism
Adam Turl
Red Wedge Magazine

"The valorization of the realm of a culture’s ghosts and phantasms as a significant and rich field of social production rather than a mirage to be dispelled. The valorization of a culture’s detritus and trivia as well as its strange and marginal practices."

"A general Gothic dialectic is born of a series of cultural contradictions that echo the structural contradictions of capitalist relations and production. These contradictions find expression in the mediated cultural superstructure. The material convulsions of capital constantly create new spaces for semi-autonomous social and cultural relations - only to tear them asunder. Each of these is a trauma to the social unconscious."

"The initial impetus for the Gothic in art and literature stemmed from the marginalization of medieval forms by bourgeois relations and industrialization. The Gothic castle and the abbey stood in ruins, projecting both a nostalgia and fear of the past - things that were lost but also alien and threatening to modern life. This dynamic is the cultural echo of combined and uneven development. The hard fought autonomy of the small businessman is destroyed as capital is consolidated in larger units. 'Self-made men' are proletarianized - as far fewer proletarians become 'self-made men.' In the process thousands of little gothic worlds are created. In the shells of factories, in the empty union halls, in the empty mansions of declassed small capitalists, in the photographs of failed revolutions and in the broadsheets of all but forgotten sects."

The Heiress to a Gun Empire Built a Mansion Forever Haunted by the Blood Money that Built It
Pamela Haag
Smithsonian

"Sarah Winchester had inherited a vast fortune off of guns. She built her house with shifts of 16 carpenters who were paid three times the going rate and worked 24 hours a day, every day, from 1886 until Sarah’s death in 1922. Winchester wove and unwove eternally. She built, demolished and rebuilt. Winchester hastily sketched designs on napkins or brown paper for carpenters to build additions, towers, cupolas or rooms that made no sense and had no purpose, sometimes only to be plastered over the next day."

"Her building is a ghost story of the American gun. Winchester became terrified that her misfortunes, especially the death of her husband and one-month old daughter, were cosmic retribution from all the spirits killed by Winchester rifles. A medium told her that she would be haunted by the ghosts of Winchester rifle victims unless she built, non-stop - perhaps at ghosts' direction, for their pleasure, or perhaps as a way to elude them. Haunted by conscience over her gun blood fortune and seeking either protection or absolution, Winchester lived in almost complete solitude, in a mansion designed to be haunted."

Wedding Photography Collides with Ruin Porn
Michael T Luogno
New York Times

"About half of all marriages end up in ruins. A few start out that way. For some couples, abandoned buildings - train stations, warehouses and century-old churches, often found in declining or deindustrialized cities - are proving the perfect haunting aesthetic for their weddings."

"Logistically one of the biggest issues is that a lot of these buildings don’t really have addresses anymore. Ruins also change or sometimes disappear altogether."

"This method of gazing at such areas of a city doesn’t always examine the larger social and economic forces taking place in cities. Still, the forlorn sense of isolation sparks curiosity for some couples, along with a desire to bring former functions back to abandoned structures, even temporarily, as a way to honor them."

 
Uber-Warehouses for the Ultra-Rich
The Economist

"The world’s rich are increasingly investing in expensive stuff, and 'freeports' are becoming their repositories of choice. Their attractions are similar to those offered by offshore financial centres: security and confidentiality, not much scrutiny, the ability for owners to hide behind nominees, and an array of tax advantages. Because of the confidentiality, the value of goods stashed in freeports is unknowable. Though much of what lies within is perfectly legitimate, the protection offered from prying eyes ensures that they appeal to kleptocrats and tax-dodgers as well as plutocrats. The goods they stash in the freeports range from paintings, fine wine and precious metals to tapestries and even classic cars."

"The early freeports were drab warehouses. But as the contents have grown glitzier, so have the premises themselves. The idea is to turn freeports into places the end-customer wants to be seen in, the best alternative to owning your own museum. The newest facilities are dotted with private showrooms, where art can be shown to potential buyers. The wealthy are increasingly using freeports as a place where they can rub shoulders and trade fine objects with each other. It is not uncommon for a painting to be swapped for, say, a sculpture and some cases of wine, with all the goods remaining in the freeport after the deal and merely being shifted between the storage rooms of the buyer’s and seller’s handling agents."

Map & Miniature Miscellany - Model Cities, Panoramic Maps, Polymath Maps, Fantasy Buildings, Faraway Lands, Maze City, Papa's Maze

Enormous Scale Models of Cities are Mind-Blowing and Gorgeous
Vincze Miklos
Gizmodo

"Sometimes the only thing more awe-inspiring than a city is a massive model of the city, rendered down to the finest detail. And of course, they're to scale. Which is itself amazing."

Gorgeous Panoramic Maps Drawn Long Before Satellites Even Existed
Kelsey Campbell-Dollaghen
Gizmodo

"There was once a time when we had to imagine what our towns and cities looked like from the sky. There were famous artists who specialized in creating these panoramic views of Earth, though today, it's a lost art. They were called panoramic or aero views, each drawn by hand without help from a plane or satellite."

"The makers of these maps took the accuracy of their creations very seriously. The artist would walk through the streets of his subject, noting every detail available, from the location of trees to how many windows each building had. They would create a kind of proxy map using their notes, and only start drawing once they had a complete survey."
 
 

The Maps of an Ottoman Polymath
Public Domain Review

"The Bosnian-born polymath and all-round genius Matrakçı Nasuh is best known for his exquisite miniatures depicting various landscapes and urban centres of 16th-century Persia."

"The name Matrakci was not, in fact, his name by birth but rather a nickname referring to his invention of a kind of military lawn game called matrak, a word which means 'cudgel' or 'mace', the main weapon at the heart of the game. The name stuck, and later would come to label its very own genre in Ottoman miniature art, the 'Matrakci style', describing works echoing his penchant for detail and precision of execution."

Building Fantasy
Lucas Adams
New York Review of Books

Fantastical Cityscapes of Cardboard and Glue
Roberta Smith
New York Times

"Out of modest ingredients Kingelez creates a whole world, entirely his own. The sprawling, glittering future city is one example of an electrifying alternate civic space, a city made up of glittering skyscrapers that could easily have been crafted from stained glass. In addition to entire imaginary cities, Kingelez’s work offers an assemblage of eye-popping additions to any fantasy skyline. Each piece is riddled with decoration and ornamentation, bright pink foliage, circles and stars, and a color palette that always leans toward the bold and the vivid."

"Peering down at Kingelez’s array of visions like some benevolent Godzilla, it’s an easy leap to imagine the lives of those living and working in a cityspace that instantly feels so exuberant, and so generous. None of Kingelez’s designs feature private residences. What would it be like to live and work in a place that knows abundance and love the way Kingelez depicts it?"

Incredible Dream-Like Models of Faraway Lands
Alice Yoo
My Modern Met

Amazing Bonsai Tree Castles are Miniature Living Worlds
Lori Zimmer
Inhabitat

"All my creation comes from my early experiences of bonsai making and maze illustration. I always got inspired from the question 'if I could be a Lilliput…' Maybe such small objects could be transformed to become a huge scale of buildings, castles, and the world itself."

"I built my career as a maze illustrator in my twenties. I got fully immersed in pushing a strong conceptual maze. From my thirties, I shifted my career from being a maze illustrator to being a concept maker for the catering trade that creates a fusion between food and entertainment. I applied my method of giving surprise and joy to people for which I cultivated in my career as a maze illustrator."

I’ve Been Developing This Maze City For 5 Years While Travelling Around The World
Marval
Bored Panda

"Rabath Jany is an ancient city in Babaria, built across the fiords of both Silvenaos and Yellow seas. It is better known as Maze city due to its complex architectural structure. I developed this painting traveling around the world during five years. The mix of different people, cultures and natural landscapes I met during my trip has deep influenced the development of the maze city. Rabath Jany is the result of such mix of cultures I met during my trips."

"Maze city is a mixture of modern and ancient technologies. Maze city’s inhabitants always used sailing ships. Otherwise, they also have a very sophisticated sky metro infrastructure with hundreds of sky lines running through all the districts."

Dad Spends 7 Years on Incredibly Detailed Maze
Johnny
Spoon & Tamago

"Some people have hobbies. Other people are obsessive. But when the two cross paths, this is what you get. A Japanese twitter user recently unearthed an incredibly detailed maze that her father created almost 30 years ago. When pressed for details, the father explained that he spent 7 years creating the map."

Miniature Miscellany Redux - Fairy Castle, Nutshell Studies, Miniature Offices, Model Trains, Replica Studio, Antique Furniture, Bookcase Nooks, Atalier Dollhouse

Colleen Moore's Fairy Castle
Museum of Science + Industry

"One of the most popular film actresses of her time, Colleen Moore assembled a legion of her industry colleagues to help craft this miniature home of fantastic proportions. She shared it during the Great Depression, touring the country to raise funds for children's charities."

"From the chapel's floor-to-ceiling stained glass to the flickering of the tiniest lights, every inch on display is a study in artistry and craftsmanship. The Fairy Castle is virtually a museum within our Museum, a collection of miniature treasures in every room, from inch-square books signed by the world's greatest authors to statues nearly two thousand years old. Though the Castle's magical residents are never seen, we know for certain they have exquisite taste."

 

Frances Glessner Lee and The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death
Smithsonian American Art Museum

"Frances Glessner Lee crafted her exquisitely detailed miniature crime scenes to train homicide investigators. These dollhouse-sized dioramas of true crimes, created in the first half of the 20th century and still used in forensic training today, helped to revolutionize the emerging field of homicide investigation."

"Lee is considered the mother of forensic science and helped to found the Department of Legal Medicine at Harvard University. At the time, there was very little training for investigators, meaning that they often overlooked or mishandled key evidence, or irrevocably tampered with crime scenes. Lee and her colleagues at Harvard worked to change this. Lee was a talented artist as well as criminologist, and used the craft of miniature-making that she had learned as a young girl to solve this problem. She constructed the Nutshells beginning in the 1940s to teach investigators to properly canvass a crime scene to effectively uncover and understand evidence."

"The equivalent to virtual reality in their time, her masterfully crafted dioramas feature handmade objects to render scenes with exacting accuracy and meticulous detail. Every element of the dioramas - from the angle of miniscule bullet holes, the placement of latches on widows, the patterns of blood splatters, and the discoloration of painstakingly painted miniature corpses - challenges trainees’ powers of observation and deduction."

I Turn Work Frustrations into Mini Magic in My Office
Derrick Lin
Bored Panda

Agency Life Told in Miniature Figures
Derrick Lin
Bored Panda

"Sometimes work can be really hectic and frustrating and as grownups, we are expected to be cool about it and keep the whining to ourselves. I work in advertising and my workday is often very chaotic and unpredictable."

"With my iPhone, a reading lamp, and miniature figures, I recreate the imaginary scenes of my honest thoughts in work situations right on my work desk. Pairing each photo with corresponding caption, I post them on my Instagram and Tumblr feeds as a way to document my eventful career. My tiny people are always there making sure I don’t hide my feelings."

How Model Trains Transformed from Cutting-Edge to Quaint
Ben Marks
Collector's Weekly

"In the 19th century, the railroad was the Internet of its day, connecting people with one another and moving merchandise and raw materials across great distances at unprecedented speeds. As railroad tycoons laid more and more miles of track throughout the growing nation, increasing numbers of citizens were able to witness the spectacle of a steam-engine locomotive roaring through their once-remote towns. In an age when few people traveled farther than 20 miles from their homes in their entire lifetimes, the effect must have been thrilling."

"Naturally, children were eager to play with pint-size versions of this new technology, and 19th-century toymakers obliged, cranking out model trains in wood, cast iron, and tin. By the first half of the 20th century, millions of little boys dreamed of waking up on Christmas morning to find a model train tooting around the tree."

"The problem with model trains in the 21st century: technology. Trains haven’t thrilled us for decades. For most of us, our experience with trains ranges from being packed into a crowded commuter train at rush hour to being stuck behind the wheel of a car at a railroad crossing as miles of groaning gondolas and rattling tanker cars rumble by. For the 21st-century kids stuck in the back seat of that car, trains are noisy, antiquated, and irredeemably boring."

Artist Constructs Intricately Detailed Miniature Replica of 1900s Photo Studio
Kristine Mitchell
My Modern Met

"Ali Alamedy has an eye for detail. The Turkish artist creates delightful miniature dioramas that are filled to the brim with hand-crafted items and absolutely ooze with charm. His newest piece is an adorable recreation of a photo studio from the 1900’s. The tiny photo studio took 9 months to complete, and was built using an assortment of materials such as wood, plastic, copper, and paper. Filled with over 100 tiny, period objects, Alamedy constructed each and every component of the studio from scratch. His time-intensive work manages to stay true to the spirit of vintage photo studios, and overflows with small-scale details that show true appreciation for the craft."

Japanese Artist Crafts Miniature Antique Dollhouse Furniture by Hand
Emma Taggert
My Modern Met

"Japanese artist Kiyomi brings some interior design chic to the world of dollhouses, with a range of handmade miniature antique furniture and accessories. Made from various materials including paper, wire, and perspex, her incredibly detailed, tiny creations include everything you would find in an 18th century world. There’s antique, industrial style cabinets and chairs; haberdashery items, such as spools of thread, sewing scissors, and a vintage sewing machine; as well as little shoes and hats, laid out in a tiny clothes store. There’s even a miniature bakery complete with teeny-tiny pastries."

Book Nook Shelf Inserts are Really Cool, and Everyone Should Know They Exist
Christopher Hudspurth
Buzzfeed

If you haven't seen or heard of a book nook before, it's a little shelf insert that goes between books and looks like a tiny door leading to an incredible place, or depicting unique sights.



My Atelier Dollhouse
Hanabira
YouTube


Notes: My previous miniature miscellany got really positive feedback, and several people suggested additional links to check out. I also realized I'd forgotten my friend Derrick Lin's miniature work. Big thanks to astralbath and bombasticus for their recommendations especially.