Having gotten through Passover, routine is beginning to return. Reading has continued apace and I’ve finished the wonderful Saving Time by Jenny Odell. It’s more a meditation and memoir than standard non-fiction, a category I truly appreciate.

I’m focusing down to just two projects in the coming months moving into the summer, my notes on Jaynes and making images. I’ve made it through Jayne’s discussion of boolean algebra and have a much deeper appreciation of the relationship between logic and the aspiration for rationality in reasoning. While he only alludes to the subject here, I think his caution against “the mind projection fallacy” is very important. In math and logic, “is” has a particular, rather abstract meaning. Not so in common language usage and we like to use “is” to create equivalence between what really “is” and our beliefs, perceptions and mental models. It’s a trap that is easy to fall into.

This was one of those email on sale alert impulse purchases I make for Kindle Books from time to time. It looked like it would fit into my current theme of reading on creativity and craft. It turned out to be a great intuition.

This a 25th anniversary editon of what is called in the blurbs “a classic book”. Picture This is very simply a short, illustrated deconstruction of how some identifiable elements of an image (color, position in the frame, shape, distance from other objects) are interpreted by us emotionally. Since it’s a classic book and I readily agreed with almost all the observations, these truly appear to be universal, wired in aspects of brain function in interpreting the visual world. Often Bang takes exactly the kind of ecological approach I’d use, talking about why something would feel a certain way based on relationship or common experience without resort to theory or some evolutionary design concept. Quite simply, we can’t be sure how we got here, but here we all are. In fact, it would be interesting to know to what extent these observations hold true across cultures.

Right after I finished the book, I pulled up my public gallery in Flickr. It’s been a while since I actively used the app, but it’s a quick way to get an overview of my photographic work.

Looking at my work through the eyes of Bang’s book, it’s amazing how almost all of my images are restful, balanced and lacking tension. I chose this image from a few years ago as a good example. There are two objects in frame, the white paint square to the left and the remnant window sill on the right. There are the background gray and white color blocks. The main characters here are off center vertically, but balanced. They seem friendly as if they might be chatting with each other. Even though nothing is centered vertically, the greater weight of the dark object rests comfortably away from the picture edge and the the white square takes up the other side, getting close to the dark bar in its space.

Will my images change? Actually, I doubt it, given that this is how I see the world. Maybe more a reflection on me than on the art. Or both.

Number seven in the series, Slough House by Mick Herron is another great addition to this spy thriller series. Of course, if you’ve read any of the series or watched the AppleTV+ show, it’s character drama and commentary on post-cold war bureaucracy and politics. This book focuses particularly on the domestic politics of England.

I’ve realized through reading the series that by focusing on this outcast group in the spy world and their often inept efforts that are always successful ultimately, the books have a way of looking upwards into the corridors of power- both political and organizational. Like much good fiction, we get a pointed reflection of our times. This is what life was like.

One of the older posts here that continues to get some hits is a bit of a meditation on the photographer Eliot Porter, who was an influential early color landscape photographer who is now, I fear, largely forgotten, even though he was an important influence on landscape photographers and my own approach to the intimate view.

I had no answer at the time, but after finishing Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr, I felt like maybe I had a bit of insight into why some artists, while influential, are forgotten while others, influential or not, continue to be relevant. Cloud Cuckoo Land is very much a work of contemporary fiction. It is generally somewhat fantastic in its settings, plot and characters- shifting in time and space from ancient Greece to the fall of Constantinople to modern day and a future time, all tied together through the device of the Ancient Greek manuscript, Cloud Cuckoo Land. Most fiction today shifts scene and character point of view. Or makes narrative construction a central part of the experience in one way or another.

For some reason, it brought to mind James Joyce’s Ulysses, which I reread last year, and Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, which I reread a few years ago, both influential books of my youth. But it seems to me that while Joyce is still celebrated and read, Pynchon is becoming another forgotten artist who was influential, but now seeming less interesting to read.

Perhaps one reason why artists like Porter and Pynchon fade is that those they influence, surpass them in the very areas in which they innovated. It’s clear that most landscape images taken by YouTube photographer influencers and now much better images than those Porter took. We have better capture methods, better exposure control and better post-processing tools than Porter had. On the other hand, I don’t think anyone has created the kind of majestic monochrome images that Ansel Adams made, keeping his work relevant for us. Sometimes doing it first means doing it so well that those that follow seem to be imitating. Others are surpassed by those that come after and so are forgotten as they were innovative and influential, but ultimately not of a quality that lasts.

Cloud Cuckoo Land seemed to me to take the tools of modern fiction and use them in a fun, somewhat hopeful way. The basic text is an absurd Greek fantasy of no great merit and the stories told that are spun from it similarly are comedies of no particular great merit. Yet the whole is a nice meditation on literature, stories, comedy and, perhaps best of all, is a compelling fun read.

I won’t judge it for the ages. That will depend on those that follow us.

This photo is one extreme of the casual approach, approaching the almost arbitrary selection of content. I’m showing this just to make a point about what I’m thinking about this year in creating photographs. My instinct is that this is just a bit too far, but with just some structure it would work. It lacks gesture which is enough of a subject for an image.

My contribution to working in public.

Currently Reading

Nonfiction

Intentionally left blank

Fiction:

The Books of Jacob by Olga Tokarczuk, Jennifer Croft (Translator)

The Stand by Stephen King (Audiobook)

The Pursuit of William Abbey by Claire North [On Hold]

Deciding Better:

Probability Theory: The Logic of Science by E.T. Jaynes

Mathematics and Plausible Reasoning: Volume 2: Patterns of Plausible Inference by George Polya

The Invention of Tomorrow: A Natural History of Foresight by Thomas Suddendorf, Jonathan Redshaw, Adam Bulley.

Jewish Studies:

Shaarai Teshuvah (The Gates of Repentance) by Rabenu Yonah

2023 Reads

Fiction:

In The Distance by Hernan Diaz

On Target by Mark Greaney

Babel: Or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators’ Revolution by R.F. Kuang

Trust by Hernan Diaz

The Dark Tower III: The Wastelands by Stephen King (audiobook)

The Gray Man by Mark Greaney

The Dark Tower II: The Drawing of the Three by Stephen King (audiobook)

Sputnik Sweetheart by Haruki Murakami

Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin

The Dark Tower I:The Gunslinger by Stephen King (audiobook)

Jonathan Strange and Mr Norris by Susanna Clarke (audiobook)

Slough House by Mick Herron

Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro

Joe Country by Mick Herron

Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr

Stella Maris by Cormac McCarthy (audiobook)

The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler

London Rules by Mick Herron

Bad Actors by Mick Herron
Children of Time</em> by Adrian Tchaikovsky
Children of Ruin by Adrian Tchaikovsky
Children of Memory by Adrian Tchaikovsky

All of the Dark Tower books by Stephen King on Audio Book
Under the Dome by Stephen King

Nonfiction:

On the Origin of Time: Stephen Hawking’s Final Theory by Thomas Hertog

Mathematics and Plausible Reasoning, Volume 1: Induction and Analogy in Mathematics by George Polya

When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamín Labatut

Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock by Jenny Odell

Novelist as Vocation Haruki Murakami

Picture This: How Pictures Work by Molly Bang

The Entangled Brain: How Perception, Cognition, and Emotion Are Woven Together by Luiz Pessoa. Note that free PDFs of the book chapters are available here.

The Creative Act: A Way of Being Rick Rubin

Wabi-Sabi for Artists, Designers, Poets & Philosophers by Leonard Koren

Indigenous Continent: The Epic Contest for North America by Pekka Hämäläinen

The Marvelous Clouds by John Durham Peters

Nefesh Hachaim by Rav Chaim of Volozhin

Reading Plan

I’ve got three categories of reading running. Fiction, nonfiction general reading, and books related to the On Deciding . . . Better project. The idea is to have variety but focus on finishing a book in each category. Always having a few ready on deck of course.

In fiction now I’m branching out from pure SciFi and SciFi tinged Fantasy into more literary picks with SciFi overtones. I loved reading Sea of Tranquility by Emily St John Mandel last year, so I’m pushing a bit in that direction this year. But probably alternating that with finishing the Slow Horse series and maybe pickup another spy series- for the variety.

The nonfiction category is for general information, filling in gaps in my understanding of the world. I’ve enjoyed reading popular presentations of quantum physics like Carlo Rovelli’s Helgoland, history or art. Right now, after two books of political US history, I’m drawn to asthestics and am really enjoying Rubin’s book.

Next is my project specific reading for this project, On Deciding . . . Better which has been going on 25 years now. Last year, I spent time on the fundementals of statistics and Baysian reasoning. This year it’s catching up with neuroscience to ensure the current accuracy of the ODB manuscript.These books get written and then reviewed for note taking as I described here.

Finally, I spend time every morning on a work of Jewish ethics and philosophy. Having read through some recent commentaries over the last few years, I’m going back to sources like the famous Nefesh Hachaim. Now this doesn’t generally so directly enter my notes here, it is foundational to my thought and personal growth.