Marilynne Robinson's Small, Rich Body of Work

Posted on 16th May 2012 in The monuments of world

By Allen Barra

May 16 2012, 1:47 PM ET Comment

The Pulitzer Prize-winning author has written only seven books over the course of her career, but her slow care is part of what makes her great.

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Since her first novel,1980′s Housekeeping, Marilynne Robinson has written just six books: two novels—Gilead (2004) and Home (2008)—and fourworks of non-fiction, Mother Country (1989), The Death of Adam(1998 ), Absence of Mind (2010), and this year’s When I Was A Child I Read Books.

Can a novelist who produces only three works of fiction in 32 years be considered great? Can an essayist whose primary concerns—the compatibility of Christian dogma with science, the liberal origins of Calvinism—are far outside mainstream American thought be considered great?

Robinson is an American original. In How Fiction Works, James Wood tracks some possible literary antecedents: “There is a familiar American simplicity, which is Puritan and colloquial in origin, ‘a sort of ecstatic fire that takes things down to the essential’,” as Robinson has it in Gilead. We recognize it in the Puritan sermon, in Jonathan Edwards, in Ulysses S. Grant’s memoirs, in Mark Twain, in Willa Cather, in Hemingway.”(Almost as if in reply, Robinson writes in When I Was A Child, “I think anyone can see that my style is considerably more indebted to Cicero than to Hemingway.”)

But though Robinson might share certain sensibilities with other writers, it’s difficult to detect more than a faint association between her work and that of any previous author. As a novelist, her territory, the Western Plains, is also that of Willa Cather. (Robinson grew up in Idaho.) And in Gilead or Home, her pair of novels about two Iowa ministers, she seems to find a kindred spirit in Georges Bernanos of Diary of a Country Priest, but no direct influence.

As a thinker, I suspect Robinson might find the Catholic apologist G.K. Chesterton an agreeable dinner companion. (I’m also guessing she might empathize with Chesterton’s notion of a respect for tradition as “the democracy of the dead.”) And I would love to hear a symposium with Robinson and Garry Wills. (Six years ago the two were featured together in an edition of The American Scholar under the subject of “The Other Christianity.”)

One thing she certainly shared with both Chesterton and Wills is an absolute lack of interest in the fashionable. She has been described as having a cult following, but I think that is misleading. Let’s just say that despite an interest in themes and subjects shared by almost no other American writer, she has gathered a substantial readership—one that, despite a Pulitzer nomination for Housekeeping, a Pulitzer for Gilead,an Orange Prize (the prestigious U.K. award for women writers) for Home, and a lovely film version of Housekeeping by Scottish director Bill Forsythe in 1987—has never threatened to spill over into the realm of mass-market fiction.

Rhetoric is heard, John Stuart Mill said, and poetry is overheard. Robinson, I expect, writes to be overheard. I would say Marilynne Robinson has been overheard by more people than any other current American writer.

THE SUCCESS OF Gilead and Home has sent many readers back to Housekeeping, a novel that, more than three decades after its publication, remains fascinating and elusive.

In When I Was A Child, Robinson writes that for her,fiction is an attempt “to stimulate the integrative work of a mind perceiving and reflecting, drawing upon culture, memory, conscience, belief or assumption, circumstance, fear, and desire—a mind shaping the moment of experience and response and then reshaping them both as narrative, holding one thought against another for the effect of affinity or contrast, evaluating and rationalizing, feeling compassion, taking offense.” (That’s a mouthful, but it’s hard to get a sense of what Robinson is saying without quoting her at length.)

Housekeeping, she writes,”is meant as sort of demonstration of the intellectual culture of my childhood. It was my intention to make only those allusions that would have been available to my narrator, Ruth, if she were me, at her age more or less.”

Housekeeping is set in the early 1950s in the town of Fingerbone, Idaho: “never an impressive town. It was chastened by an outsized landscape and extravagant weather, and chastened again by an awareness that the whole of human history had occurred elsewhere”—except for a spectacular accident a generation before the story takes place in which a train and its passengers slid off a long trestle bridge outside Fingerbone and disappeared forever into a deep mountain lake.

The tragedy haunts the town; the grandfather of two young sisters, Ruthie and Lucille, was on the train and their mother, for reasons the girls can’t fathom, commits suicide by plunging her car into the same lake. To Ruthie, the older of the sisters and the narrator, her mother is a constant presence.”She was a music I no longer heard, that rang in my mind,” Robinson writes.

Housekeeping is a novel about women. There are practically no men in Ruthie’s world. Her grandfather died before she was born, and her long-gone father isn’t even a memory. In a reverie that sounds more like an intrusion of the author than a mediation by Ruthie, Robinson writes of the grandmother, “She could feel that sharp loneliness she had felt every long evening since she was a child. It was the kind of loneliness that made clocks seem slow and loud and made voices sound like voices across water.”

After their grandmother’s death, two great aunts come to take over the household but soon long to escape Fingerbone and return to Seattle. Then, Sylvie, Ruthie’s aunt, returns to the gothic house she grew up in to take care of the girls, who are now teenagers. At first Ruthie and Lucille, who see in Sylvie a sort of return of their mother, are ecstatic. She sings nostalgic songs like “Irene” and “What’ll I Do When You Are Far Away?” and imposes no strictures on them. The girls choose to skip school and take long hikes in the woods.

But Lucille is at first irritated and then alarmed by Sylvie’s growing eccentricity. She washes tin cans and stacks them in the kitchen and collects newspapers for no apparent reason, putting them in stacks in the living and dining rooms. Desperate to escape her family’s shattered history and to join the middleclass, Lucille leaves the house and takes shelter with one of her teachers.

Ruthie, though, is gradually drawn towards Sylvie’s rootlessness. She finds the past a burden: “Memory is the sense of loss, and loss pulls us after it.”When local authorities threaten to take custody of the girls, Ruthie and Sylvie leave town for a life of drifting. Some day, she muses, “When I am feeling presentable, I will go into Fingerbone and make inquiries. I must do it soon for such days are rare now.”

I find myself struggling to put words to what I love about Housekeeping. After rereading it, I realize I’m touched by the way that nothing in Robinson’s world is inconsequential. The sisters, who skip school a lot, enjoy taking long walks at dawn. On one walk, they are joined in the road

By a fat old bitch with a naked black belly and circles of white around her eyes. She was called Crip, because as a puppy she had favored one leg and now that she was an elderly dog she favored three. She tottered after us briskly, a companionable gleam in her better eye. I describe her at length because a mile or so from town she disappeared into the woods as if following a scent and never appeared again. She was a dog of no special consequence, and she passed from the world unlamented. Yet something of the somberness with which Lucille and I remembered this outing had to do with our last glimpse of her fat haunches and her palsied, upright tail as she clamored up the rocks and into the dusky dark of the woods.

Crip passed from the world unlamented except by Marilynne Robinson.

This sense of the importance of things permeates Housekeeping. Inanimate objects that fill their house have significance, “For even things lost in a house abide, like forgotten sorrows and incipient dreams … like the dim coil of thick hair, saved from my grandmother’s girlhood.”

THE FAINT WHIFF of nihilism that exists in Housekeepingmay seem surprising to those who discovered Robinson through Gilead and Home, with their reverence for tradition. Set in Iowa, the two novels center around the families of a Congregationalist minister named John Ames and his lifelong friend, a Presbyterian minister named Robert Boughton. There is no way to make that plot description sound timely, relevant, or contemporary to avid readers of Jonathan Franzen or Zadie Smith; you’ll simply have to trust an avid reader of Franzen and Smith when he tells you how Gilead and Home can draw you in. One might also trust James Wood, who wrote about Gilead (and would, I think, extend the same praise to Home) that it “achieves an almost holy simplicity.”

Events in Home revolve primarily around the Reverend Boughtonand his prodigal son Jack, who has lived the life of a drifter—one wonders if he somewhere on the road his path crossed Sylvie and Ruthie’s. Jack has spent time in jail and fathered a child with a black woman, the latter of which does not appall his family so much as puzzle them. The happiness stirred by his return home is mitigated by the unspoken knowledge that he cannot stay and ultimately cannot find peace in his father’s religion.

Reverend Boughton is almost unique in stories about religious patriarchs in that he has virtually no ego and does not preach to his children. He is also unaware of nearly all social and political changes that have occurred since he was a boy. Like so many otherwise good men, he believes that the way things were when he was a young manare the way the world is supposed to be. The Civil Rights movement, for instance, which intrigues Jack so much, is unfathomable to him.

If Robinson werea lesser novelist, one writing to warm our hearts, she would lead us down a path through which Jack and his father could reconcile. But the final pages of Home linger in the reader’s mind like an open wound of the heart.

The sister left behind to care for their father reflects on Jack and the son she didn’t know he had, “She knew it would have answered a longing of Jack’s if he could even imagine that their spirits had passed through that strange old house. Just the thought of it might bring him back, and the place would seem changed, to him and to her. As if all that saving and keeping their father had done was providence indeed, and new love would transform all the old love and make its relics wonderful.” As a novelist Robinson illuminates the souls of people who live lives of quiet desperation.

I mean souls in exactly the same way Robinson does in When I Was A Child:

Having read any number of times that the human brain is the most complex object known to exist in the universe, and that the mind is not identical with the brain but is more mysterious still, it seems to me that this astonishing nexus of the will, so uniquely elegant and capable, merits a name that would indicate a difference in kind from the ontological run of things, and for my purposes ‘soul’ would do nicely.

AFTER HOUSEKEEPING, Robinson turned to non-fiction, which, If I’m reading her correctly, has served as an outward expression of her primary concerns before they were filtered and reshaped in her fiction.

Mother Country: Britain, the Welfare State, and Nuclear Pollution, published in 1989, is an extraordinary and little-read book—many of Robinson’s fans have never even heard of it. I did not know of it myself until I saw a copy at my local library book sale and was astonished to find that the author of Housekeeping had written a book on nuclear pollution.

I didn’t think anyone was capable of getting me to read a book on this subject, but I was riveted from the first sentence: “The largest producer of plutonium in the world and the largest source, by far, of radioactive contamination of the world’s environment is Great Britain.”Plutonium dumped into the sea from the notorious government-owned Sellafield Plant “has already been found in Ireland, Iceland, Sweden, Denmark and Belgium.” It is “perhaps not irrelevant to note … that Britain leads the world in lung cancer deaths.”

This is scary stuff, written by a writer not given to hyperbole. “My attack,” she says,”will seem ill-tempered and eccentric, a veering toward anarchy, the unsettling emergence as lady novelist as petroleuse.” (I’m sorry to interrupt this eloquent diatribe, but I have to point out the use of the magnificent word “petroleuse,” which, after 30 minutes of frantic research, I discovered is the name for the women of the Paris Commune of 1871 who are accused of burning down a big chunk of Paris.) “I am angry to the depths of my soul that the earth has been so injured while we were all bemused by supposed monuments of self and intellect, vaults of bogus cultural riches … The grief come home to others while I and my kind have been occupied lies on my conscience like a crime.”

With a passion and clarity missing from most political journalists, she strips away myths about British and American histories of social responsibility.Her conviction that the US’s commitment to social justice is considerably greater—considerably greater—than the UK’s is eye-popping. For instance, the relative state of government support for its citizens: “Why do the Land Grant Act, the Homestead Act, and the GI Bill, three distributions of wealth to the public on a scale never contemplated in Britain, have no status among political events when the dreary traffic in pittances institutionalized as the British Welfare State is hailed as the advance of socialism?”

Contrary to the fears of American conservatives that the US is veering towards a British-type socialism, “Almost no one in the West spends as little on health care as the British, despite the fact that they lead the world in death rates from heart disease and lung cancer.”

The bedrock British political assumption, she finds, “is that absolutely nothing belongs to the general public inalienably by the logic of collective interests or by right … public ownership of a bridge, a tunnel, or a river is for them a departure from the natural order of things.” It’s hard for an American to read these words nearly a quarter of a century later without a shudder as we recognize a similar attitude taking hold here. And with it comes an arrogance that rationalizes the right of the powerful to pollute what belongs to all of us: “It is a very comfortable thing,” she concludes, “to think that the greatest threat to the world is a decision still to be made, which may never be made—that is, the decision to engage in nuclear warfare. Sadly, the truth is quite otherwise. The earth has been under attack for almost half a century.” And by now, for nearly three-quarters of a century. It’s impossible to read Mother Country without wishing that Robinson would update the story.

The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought and Absence of Mind, The Dispelling of Inwardness From the Modern Myth of the Self (the paperback edition of which was released this year) are not arguments for the existence of God or the validity of Christianity in the mode of, say, C.S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity or G.K. Chesterton’s Catholic apologia Orthodoxy.She doesn’t go in for turf wars; there are no battles with secular liberals or right-wing evangelicals. She cites popular atheists such as Bertrand Russell and Christopher Hitchens only in passing.

There are two main themes to these books. The first is that the liberal conscience of Christianity traces back to the Old Testament or, as she puts itin The Death of Adam, “The law of Moses puts liberation theology to shame in its passionate loyalty to the poor.” She also believes, fervently, that the origins of modern Protestant liberality, the kind that possessed the mid-19th century abolitionists, are to be found in Calvinism. Both theses came as surprise to me, though I will have to wait until I can find a large chunk of reading time before I can give assent.

Her other and perhaps larger concern is that there is no essential divide between religion and science. “What I wish to question,” she writes in Absence of Mind, “are not the methods of science, but the methods of a kind of argument that claims the authority of science or highly specialized knowledge, that assumes a protective coloration that allows it to pass for science yet does not practice the self-discipline or self-criticism for which science is distinguished.” Science can tell us nothing about the purpose of life, nor can it even tell us about the origins of scientific principles, she says. Rather, she writes, “scientific phenomena often demonstrate, as physics and cosmology tend to do, that the strangeness of reality consistently exceeds the expectations of science, and that the assumptions of science, however tried and rational, are very inclined to encourage false expectations.”

THIS IS PERHAPS a starting point for a dialogue between believers and nonbelievers. Robinson’s sentiments, after all, aren’t greatly different on this matter from those of Albert Camus, who wrote in The Myth of Sisyphus, “You explain this world to me with an image. I realize then that you have been reduced to poetry … So that science that was supposed to teach me everything ends up in a hypothesis.”

Robinson, of course, is not a skeptic like Camus. She merely wishes to suggest, as she does in When I Was A Child, that:

For almost as long as there has been science in the West there has been a significant strain in scientific thought which assumed that the physical and material preclude the spiritual. The assumption persists among us still, rigorous as ever, that if a thing can be ‘explained,’ associated with a physical process, it has been excluded from the category of the spiritual. But the ‘physical’ in this sense is only a disappearingly thin slice of being, selected, for our purposes, out of the totality of being by the fact that we perceive it as solid, substantial.

Robinson regards When I Was A Child as “an archeology of my own thinking,” and the essays it contains are pointed to both secularists and fundamentalists. To the former she notes, “The contempt of a writer such as H.L.Mencken for popular religion is simultaneous and identical with his contempt for women’s rights and his melancholy belief in the futility of efforts to improve the status of black people.” To the latter, “In my Bible, Jesus does not say ‘I was hungry and you fed me, though not in such a way as to interfere with free market principles.’”

I know little about Calvinism or the beauty of Protestant hymns or many other concerns that animate Robinson’s work. Before I sat down to read and reread her entire oeuvre I hadn’t realized how someone whose background and outlook were so different from my own could lead me to see things in a different way—to understand that “We live on a little island of the articulable which we tend to mistake for reality itself.” To read Robinson it to feel both outrage at the abuse of our planet while also caring about a dog of no special consequence.

I ‘m not saying I want to see Marilynne Robinson sitting next to Grover Norquist on Bill Maher’s Real Time, where her voice might sound merely rhetorical. But it’s a voice that I want to hear—or overhear—more often, one that reveals a soul which burns with ahard gem-like flame and needs to be added to our national dialogue.

More at The Atlantic

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How the CCP will transform into Paris Opera House

Posted on 13th May 2012 in The monuments of world

By: Emmie G. Velarde
Philippine Daily Inquirer

May 13, 2012 | 8:46 pm

“Everybody knows the Paris Opera House. At least by reputation. It is with regret that I assure you it hasn’t changed at all: For the sake of the passerby who hasn’t been warned, let me say that it looks like a railway station. But once you’re inside you’ll be more likely to mistake it for a Turkish bath.”—Debussy (1862-1918)

culturalcenter.gov.ph photo

Today, of course, the Paris Opera House is regarded as a masterpiece of architecture and is a staple in all package tours of the French capital. In “Great Architecture of the World,” English historian and travel writer John Julius Norwich raves:

“Garnier (Charles, 1825-1898, the architect) triumphed over a cramped and difficult site, handling the carriage-ramps and approach steps, the foyers and staircases, both in section and plan, with confidence and skill. The style is monumental, classically based and opulently expressed, as the times demanded, in an elaborate language of multi-colored marbles and lavish statuary … Every city needs its occasional monuments and occasions of grandeur.”

The “cramped and difficult site” includes, among other things, a lake underneath.

Neither one of these two impassioned descriptions of a theater arts address applies to the Cultural Center of the Philippines. Three months from now, however, the CCP will start transforming into what the Paris Opera House means for theatergoers around the world—the remarkable setting of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “Phantom of the Opera,” object of the most lavish praises from critics across the continents, and the longest-running show on Broadway.

The CCP run, which starts August 25, features the touring production that is still performing in Johannesburg, whose cast members come from the United Kingdom, the United States, Australia and South Africa.

“Phantom” proved to be such an audience magnet for the 1,870-seat Teatro in the leisure-casino complex Montecasino where it opened on January 31 that the final date was moved from March 25 to April 22. And thank goodness for that. On April 17, a small group of Filipino journalists watched “Phantom” there.

Even before they left Johannesburg, the run was again extended to May 22.

Current online notices read: “Over 200,000 tickets sold. Show must end on June 3.” That’s because, in order to open in Manila by end of August, the production’s packing should start on June 4 and not a day later.

“Tons and tons and tons of stuff,” in the words of Pieter Toerien, South African producer. Details offered by international technical director Richard Martin includes “110 tons of scenery and nearly 50 fly lines (systems of ropes, blocks and counterweights) to hang all that scenery …” At least two out of 40 container vans will be carrying lights alone.

And, not to forget, the chandelier—effectively one of the main characters—that weighs no less than a ton, which will be suspended above the audience for almost the full length of the show. (The CCP Main Theater’s ceiling may have to be reinforced for this.) Plus the false proscenium modeled after a portion of the original in the Paris Opera House. Let alone onstage “stuff,” even special washing machines for the hundreds of costumes are coming to Manila with the cast and crew.

Absolute replica

Toerien relates: “Cameron Mackintosh (one of the original producers) prepared a blueprint and said, ‘You can do my shows in other countries but they have to be absolute replicas of the originals.’”

Mackintosh sent a team to Johannesburg to train the South African company. “When they finished,” Toerien continues, “they left behind a local team empowered to carry on [with] the work.” This is the team that will mount the musical in Manila.

Toerien says it took him two years of planning to bring the show to South Africa, at the end of which 33 people from all over the world came to build the set into Teatro. “That process took a full two weeks. They worked 16 hours a day, six days a week, and there wasn’t a minute to be wasted. When something went wrong, they had to work right through the night; that’s the only way they could catch up.”

Source of pride

The elaborate production design and intricate costumes by the late Maria Björnson are a constant source of pride for any company that stages the musical.

“Phantom,” as a stage production, is 25 years old and the South African company has some of the original costumes, a few of them made of antique material to start with, about 100 years old. Eugene Titus, head of wardrobe, says: “The people who guard over [Björnson’s] work insist that every single detail is as it was when she first designed them. We started pre-production four months before rehearsal; there was a lot of planning and organization involved to bring the wardrobe up to form. It takes 19 people to run the department.”

During the Johannesburg junket, one question asked of the Manila promoter, Concertus, by the Philippine journalists was, where would all these—scenery, props, costumes, lights, etc.—be stored at the CCP? Bambi Verzo, in charge of logistics and promotions, admitted that this aspect would take some figuring out. “But we will find space.”

‘God’s gift’

As for the show, from the spectators’ end, little remains unknown about “Phantom.” The iconic half-mask renders the musical’s title decipherable in any language or script. And what contemporary music lover hasn’t been captivated by “All I Ask of You” or “Music of the Night”?

For the record, these two all-time favorites, both haunting and thrilling, are not the only numbers that a member of the audience is bound to be humming in his head while striding out of the theater.

It is hard to imagine “Phantom” without the songs; harder even to think that it was first presented to an audience in 1925 as a … silent movie!

Further back, in 1911, the book on which it was based, “Le Fantome de Opera,” by Gaston Leroux, was published. Leroux has been quoted as saying that he was inspired after visiting the Paris Opera House to write the story of a disfigured genius masterminding the career of his beautiful protégé. Roaming its lower depths, the writer said, he found a mysterious subterranean lake (where he eventually envisioned the Phantom’s lair to be). He also said he recalled an accident in 1896 when one of the counterweights had crashed on the audience.

Leroux gave a copy of his book to Carl Laemmie, then president of Universal Pictures, who stayed up all night reading it and, by the morning, was determined to turn it into a film. “The Phantom of the Opera,” the movie, starred Lon Chaney, Hollywood’s “man of a thousand faces.”

In May 1984, Andrew Lloyd Webber came across a review about a stage adaptation of the movie and called Mackintosh about the possibility of turning it into a new musical.

Mackintosh’s account: “The original production went into rehearsal in London on Aug. 18, 1986. Hal Prince (director) and Gillian Lynne (choreographer) had assembled a wonderful cast. After several weeks of exhilarating mayhem, ‘Phantom’ opened at Her Majesty’s Theatre on Oct. 9 and proceeded to become one of London’s greatest musical successes.”

The Times UK called it “God’s gift to musical theatre.” In 1988, “Phantom” won seven Tony Awards, including best musical.

Ultimate test

On Dec. 18, 1874, the famous seven-ton (some accounts peg it at six) bronze-and-crystal chandelier in the theater of the Paris Opera House was lit for the first time. The architect Garnier himself had designed it. It aroused much controversy and was criticized for obstructing views of the stage by patrons in the fourth-level boxes. In his 1871 book, “Le Théâtre,” Garnier wrote this defense: “What else could fill the theatre with such joyous life?”

In May 1896, the falling of one of the counterweights resulted in the death of one member of the audience. This was the incident that inspired Leroux’s gothic novel.

As musical theater, one of “Phantom’s” trademarks is the scaled-down (only six tons lighter) replica of that chandelier. Certainly a thrill—and the ultimate test of how engaging the music can be—is sitting right under it and forgetting it is there.

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'Spiderman' strikes again west of Paris

Posted on 10th May 2012 in The monuments of world

PARIS, France – The French skyscraper climber known to some as Spiderman has struck again: This time, on France’s new tallest building.

Alain Robert scaled the recently heightened First tower in La Defense business district west of Paris on Thursday. Hundreds of onlookers peered out of its windows or craned their necks as he went up.

Robert has ascended more than 100 skyscrapers and monuments over his 15-year career of daredevil climbs using no support equipment.

Often his climbs are illegal, but not this time: Thursday’s feat up the 231-meter (758-foot) building got its owner’s go-ahead.

Robert said he doesn’t battle fear on the way up because “I really don’t have time to be afraid, I really have other things to do.”

(Copyright ©2012 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)

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Visit the Pyramids of Giza With This Interactive 3D Site

Posted on 8th May 2012 in The monuments of world

If you’ve ever dreamed of visiting the Great Pyramids of Giza, you can hold off on purchasing the plane ticket. An online experience now brings Giza to you, transporting you across the world — and through time — to the land of the Pharaohs.

Dassault Systèmes created a 3D model of the Giza Necropolis, a free application available to all Internet users, which was unveiled Tuesday at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts.

This digital model is the only way we can see Giza in its ancient splendor, due to looting, erosion, urban sprawl and artifacts being sent across the world.

“You are visiting and discovering through a new kind of interactive story,” says Mehdi Tayoubi, VP of design and experimental strategy at Dassault Systèmes. “Each time, you can take control of the 3D expereince as a time travel tourist.”

Giza 3D, which targets academics, researchers, museums and the general public, shows how technologies can be integral to historical and art preservation.

“We’ve equipped software for a new generation of classroom,” Tayoubi told Mashable. “We have the teacher traveling through time, bringing students inside pyramids, temples and funeral ceremonies.”

There are two ways you can explore Giza 3D. You can take guided tours of certain monuments by Harvard’s Peter Der Manuelian, the Philip J. King Professor of Egyptology or you can wander through the ancient temples, restored tombs, burial chambers and pyramids.

Each site is annotated, so you can read archaeologists field journals and maps, view contemporary and ancient pictures and browse some 30 objects constructed in 3D.

Giza 3D integrates 100 years of research by the Giza Archives Project, and museums and universities from around the world, in an effort lead by Professor Der Manuelian. Only 10% of Giza 3D is completed, currently including four temples and the Pyramids of Khufu and Menhaure.

The Pyramid of Khafre, the middle of the Necropolis’s three pyramids, and the Sphinx aren’t part of the experience yet.

“What is important for us is to create a community around this experience,” Tayoubi says. “You can bring kids to this virtual environment and they will understand, but if you adapt what you say it will work for an entirely different audience.”

Tayoubi sees these 3D experiences extending beyond locations you can visit — possibly into medicine, entertainment, or robotics — though the Dassault team is currently working on recreating the history of Paris as a 3D experience.

“This is how innovation comes: when different people in different fields come together to think differently,” he says.

Is 3D interactive modeling the future of studying history? What other landmarks would you like to see digitized? Let us know in the comments.

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Review: Bio details revolution in approach to food

Posted on 7th May 2012 in The monuments of world

“The Man Who Changed the Way We Eat: Craig Claiborne and the American Food Renaissance” (Free Press), by Thomas McNamee: Many of us can no longer remember what life was like before arugula and balsamic vinegar became part of the larder, celebrity chefs strutted their stuff on TV and the term “foodie” made its way into common parlance.

But that was the state of the culinary scene little more than a half-century ago when the writer who was to become arguably the most influential restaurant critic of our time landed his dream job by being named food editor of The New York Times.

“What Craig Claiborne saw when he looked out across the vast expanse of the United States was a gastronomic landscape blighted by ignorance and apathy, a drearily insular domain of overdone roast beef and canned green beans,” Thomas McNamee writes in “The Man Who Changed the Way We Eat: Craig Claiborne and the American Food Renaissance,” his comprehensive biography of this towering figure whose public success masked a troubled life.

Claiborne reshaped the world of food criticism, taking it from advertiser-friendly puff pieces displayed on what were then known as the newspaper’s women’s page to a respected genre whose work reflected the same rigor and gravity as that of the Times’ drama, music and art critics. He guided a generation of readers from TV dinners, Reddi-wip and Cheez Whiz to classic French cuisine, Szechwan cooking from China and Mexican dishes that went beyond tacos and tortillas.

“Julia Child was beloved, but Craig Claiborne was the authority,” says McNamee.

The author recounts Claiborne’s unhappy childhood in the Mississippi Delta, where he grew up in genteel poverty, was bullied by schoolmates and found refuge in the kitchen of his mother’s boarding house. After studying journalism in college, he joined the Navy during World War II and was introduced to exotic cuisine and gay sex during a stint in Casablanca.

Claiborne joined the Times after training in classic French cuisine and service at a prestigious hotel school in Switzerland and writing for Gourmet magazine. His prodigious output went beyond his newspaper columns and reviews, encompassing a string of best-selling cookbooks, many co-authored by longtime friend Pierre Franey.

Despite his success and many honors, Claiborne’s life appears to have brought only superficial joy. Forced by the strictures of the times to hide his homosexuality, he was often depressed and nagged by self-doubt. His alcohol consumption was mind-boggling, as he routinely downed a half-dozen margaritas or scotches, a bottle or two of wine and a few stingers or cognacs before, during and after dinner. It was a rare morning that didn’t include a hangover.

This first comprehensive account of Claiborne’s life transports readers to renowned restaurants, profiles innovative chefs and traces the revolution in dining that his writings did much to inspire.

The book is replete with anecdotes and memorable incidents, some of them monuments to breathtaking excess. There is the lavish party on the liner SS France to celebrate Claiborne’s 50th birthday, where guests included Salvador Dali and his pet ocelot; the closing of the legendary restaurant Le Pavillon in 1960 after the staff walked out amid a feud with its tyrannical boss, Henri Soule; and, of course, Claiborne’s $4,000 dinner for two in Paris, an outgrowth of a public television auction.

Students of social history and readers with an abiding interest in food will find much to savor in this book. But those whose palates aren’t attuned to the likes of foie gras and truffles may get their fill early on. De gustibus.

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Pompidou plans to go global: focus is Brazil, India, China

Posted on 30th April 2012 in The monuments of world

Museums France

President looks to extend the brand through a network of rotating galleries

By Gareth Harris. News, Issue 235, May 2012
Published online: 30 April 2012

The Centre Pompidou is looking to expand abroad with a chain of galleries that will carry the flagship French institution’s brand. Alain Seban, the president of the Centre Pompidou, says that museums, universities and even shopping malls could host exhibitions of items drawn from the Paris-based institution’s 72,000-strong collection of modern and contemporary art. Seban plans to establish a network of sites, each measuring around 2,000 sq. m to 3,000 sq. m, for periods of between three and five years.

The ambitious move will draw comparisons with the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, which has established a global network of museums in New York, Venice, Bilbao and Berlin, with another outpost due to open in Abu Dhabi’s Saadiyat cultural district in 2017 (see below), and another proposed in Helsinki. “The Guggenheim model of expansion was based on replicating the New York original: flagship architecture, cutting-edge temporary exhibitions, a modest display of the permanent collection and the fantastic appeal of the brand,” Seban says. “We are taking a more modest approach, with temporary projects in existing venues like museums [and] universities, but why not historical monuments, former industrial facilities or shopping malls? We will draw on the scope of our collection, [which is] the best in Europe, and the strength of our own brand.”

He would not be drawn on exact locations abroad but indicates that he is targeting Bric (Brazil, Russia, India, China) countries with growing economies—and art scenes. “This is a strategy for expanding internationally into territories that can aim to create their own contemporary art brands. Countries such as China, India and Brazil, for instance, can develop such brands in the future.” Such ventures abroad would require a “fee” to facilitate funding, Seban says.

This is not the first time the Pompidou has tried to branch out overseas. In 2007, the then president Bruno Racine said he expected a museum carrying the Pompidou’s name to open in Shanghai before 2010. The programming was to be determined by the Pompidou. The location chosen for the new museum was a former fire station in the Luwan district’s Huaihai Park. But the scheme never materialised because of difficult negotiations with the Chinese authorities: the main obstacle was the lack of a legal framework for a non-profit foreign institution to operate in China (The Art Newspaper, October 2007, p15). A joint attempt by the Guggenheim and the Centre Pompidou, in conjunction with the developer Dynamic Star International, to operate the planned cultural facilities in the West Kowloon cultural district in Hong Kong by 2018 was also thwarted.

The Pompidou’s partnership with the King Abdulaziz Centre for World Culture, an arts complex incorporating a museum to be built in the Saudi Arabian city of Dhahran by 2013, also seems to have stalled. “Saudi Aramco [the state-owned oil company behind the project] is reviewing the proposition; this process is currently slowed down by a general budget review,” Seban says. The Centre Pompidou originally agreed to assist in two areas: temporary exhibition programmes and training.

At home, though, the Pompidou’s profile has never been higher. In 2011, the Beaubourg gallery drew a record 3.6 million visitors, an increase of 40% in five years. The Centre Pompidou-Metz, the northern French satellite which opened in May 2010, had 555,000 visitors last year.

Seban is talking to local authorities across France about creating an equivalent chain of Pompidou-branded galleries, which, he says, would be part of “le service publique” and therefore mainly state-funded. He is buoyed by the success of the mobile Centre Pompidou, which began touring the French provinces last year. The travelling exhibition, drawn from the collection, of 15 works by artists including Picasso, Léger and Calder, attracted more than 35,000 visitors over three months during its first stop in Chaumont (Haute-Marne), northern France. The mobile museum moves on to Boulogne-sur-Mer in June with plans to visit Le Havre and Nantes in 2013.

Rolling out the Pompidou brand at home and abroad is key to Seban’s strategy, especially as, he says, there are restrictions on enlarging the Paris mothership. “We cannot build permanent satellites because of the economy and we cannot expand the Centre Pompidou in Paris. Our aim is to focus on the main building, which needs renovation.”

Arguably the real revolution is taking place online, with Seban saying that the Virtual Centre Pompidou, due to go live later this year, will differ from other museum websites in that it adopts “a content-driven approach. Any content produced by the Centre Pompidou, from catalogues to interviews with artists and curators, will be transferred automatically onto our new web platform, which will act as a digital mirror to the Centre Pompidou.”

This strategy also includes re-evaluating how shows of works from the collection dovetail with big temporary exhibitions. “We need to rethink the model of blockbuster shows and focus more on the idea of the permanent collection. We could, for instance, rotate the collection more quickly to create a series of ‘mini-shows’ that will blur the boundaries between temporary exhibitions and the permanent collection,” Seban says. Talk of dividing the collection is also premature, he stresses. “In 2013, we will focus on globalisation on the modern and contemporary art floors of the Centre Pompidou. It would be a huge mistake to split the collection into two now since our collection of non-Western modern art is among the best in the world.” Meanwhile, a Jeff Koons retrospective organised with New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, is due to open at the Centre Pompidou in 2014.

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Auction of Islamic Art Shines a Light on Rare Glories

Posted on 27th April 2012 in The monuments of world
By SOUREN MELIKIAN
Published: April 27, 2012

LONDON — The accelerating surge of interest in history came out spectacularly at the auction scene on Wednesday. It was reflected in the three highest prices at Sotheby’s, where the subject was art from the Islamic world.

The ultimate rarity of the session was a 13th-century bronze basin with a beautiful shape but only remains of its erstwhile silver and gold inlay, which sold for £361,250, about $584,000.

The importance of the Arab vessel lay in the monumental inscription that runs around the sides and two tiny inscriptions engraved on the rim more than 100 years after the piece was made.

The large inscription spells out the titles and name of a sultan of Turkic stock, Abu’l-Harith Qara Arslan ibn Il-Ghazi, descended from the 12th-century Artuq Shah. Qara Arslan, who from 1261 to 1293 ruled a large area around the city of Mardin, now in southeast Turkey, had no mean opinion of his own persona. The titulature, introduced by a set phrase found on 13th- and 14th-century royal objects, glorifies the sultan in traditional bombastic eulogies. Qara Arslan is hailed as “Our Lord, the Sultan, the King, the Pride of the World and Religion, the Master of Kings and Sultans” and lots more of that ilk.

This wording suggests that the basin was commissioned when the ruler mounted the throne, which appears to be confirmed by the exclusive role of the inscription in the decorative scheme, excepting a band of arabesques at the bottom.

No other vessel to the name of Qara Arslan has been recorded. The mastery of the execution tells us that Qara Arslan, “The Black Lion” in Turkish, was prosperous enough to attract great bronze makers and calligraphers. That is useful historical information.

But what makes the basin unique is the addition of two inscriptions engraved on the rim by his descendants.

One names “Amir” Dawud ibn Malik al-Salih (1368-1376). The title “amir” that Dawud gives himself instead of “sultan” proves that his father, al-Malik al-Salih, who died in 1368, was still alive and ruling. Al-Malik al-Salih, possibly aware of his nearing end, passed on to his son Dawud the splendid basin as part of the dynasty’s regal possessions. This provides tangible evidence of the existence of dynastic chattels in the Near East.

Eight years later, Dawud’s successor, Majd Ad-Din ’Isa (1376-1406), ordered an inscription to be engraved on the rim. His titles “The Lord, the King” prove that he had ascended to power.

The verified use of the basin for more than a century explains why so much of the inlay is gone, as on so many other royal bronzes.

The history of Qara Arslan’s basin does not stop there. In 1406, the Mardin-centered Artuqid sultanate was overrun by another Turkic dynasty, the Qara Qoyunlu. It was soon defeated by the Ottoman sultanate of central Anatolia that kept conquering ever larger swaths of territory, and with that begins part two of the history of Qara Arslan’s basin.

Mercury gilding was added inside to cover the loss of inlay in a large rosette on the bottom, erased by wear. The gilding, typical of 16th-century Ottoman fashion, indicates that the basin was still treasured. It got worn, in turn.

Part three of the basin’s history begins in 1845. Michelangelo Lanci, an Italian scholar who collected Arabic texts on monuments and objects, saw the basin in Rome at the hands of the jeweler and antiquarian Alessandro Castellani. Lanci published the inscriptions in Volume 2 of his “Treatise on Arab Symbolical Representations and Various Categories of Islamic Inscriptions Wrought on Different Material Supports.” Written in Italian, it was published in Paris with a subsidy from King Louis Philippe.

Lanci’s reading included minor mistakes and one huge error. The inscriptions naming three sultans were merged into one, as if they concerned a single ruler. The great French Arabist Gaston Wiet recorded the inscriptions in his 1934 general repertory of Arabic inscriptions, amending them as best he could without having seen the actual object.

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Toronto stock market higher after Alcoa reassures on earnings, outlook

Posted on 11th April 2012 in The monuments of world

TORONTO – The Toronto stock market was higher Wednesday as a strong earnings report from aluminum giant Alcoa Inc. raised hopes that the first-quarter earnings season won’t be as bad as expected.

The S&P/TSX composite index ran ahead 82.41 points to 12,017.7 while the TSX Venture Exchange was ahead 9.81 points to 1,440.91.

The Canadian dollar was up 0.27 of a cent to 99.86 cents US.

U.S. markets were sharply higher after the largest U.S. aluminum manufacturer said Tuesday after the market close that it earned 10 cents a share in the first quarter against expectations of a four cent a share loss. Alcoa is considered a barometer for the U.S. economy as it sells its aluminum to a wide range of customers.

Alcoa also reaffirmed its forecast of a seven per cent increase in 2012 global aluminum demand and its shares were ahead 8.05 per cent to US$10.07 in New York.

The Dow Jones industrials rose 99.6 points to 12,815.53.

The Nasdaq composite index gained 36.89 points to 3,028.11 and the S&P 500 index climbed 13.2 points to 1,371.79.

North American markets finished lower for a fifth straight session Tuesday, with investors sidelined amid data from China indicating slower growth in imports and exports while Spain saw its 10-year bond yield hit four-month highs of over 5.9 per cent.

But traders have also been nervous about how the first-quarter earnings season will play out.

Analyst expectations for earnings for companies in the Standard & Poor’s 500 index went from anticipation of an increase of about three per cent early in the quarter to an expected decline of 0.1 per cent, according to FactSet.

Such a dip would follow three straight years of strong double-digit earnings growth.

“For this cycle, I think we have seen peak earnings, peak profitability,” said Paul Vaillancourt , CEO of Canadian Wealth Management in Calgary.

“But companies are not going to start losing money this quarter, it’s just the rate of growth will decelerate. And so you won’t see the same quarter over quarter, year over year growth in earnings but that’s what happens at this stage in the recovery.”

He said what is important is that the U.S. economic recovery has become self-sustaining “and that’s what really matters.”

Tuesday’s losses had erased all gains on the TSX for 2012, leaving the main index about 20 points shy of where it started the year.

The European debt crisis continued to be in focus Wednesday as Italy’s borrowing costs more than doubled in a couple of bond auctions due to renewed market uncertainty about debt and growth prospects among the 17-country eurozone’s weakest members.

The borrowing rates of Italy and other financially shaky countries like Spain had eased in recent months after the European Central Bank gave banks emergency loans and the government of Italian Prime Minister Mario Monti implemented austerity measures.

However, that lending program by the ECB expired at the end of March.

Commodities were mixed after demand concerns sent prices for oil and metals lower on Tuesday.

Copper prices stabilized and were unchanged at US$3.65 a pound. Prices for copper, which is viewed as an economic barometer as it is used in so many businesses, have tumbled about seven per cent in the past week amid soft Chinese economic data. But the base metals sector was ahead 2.2 per cent as Teck Resources (TSX:TCK.B) advanced 91 cents to C$35.71 and HudBay Minerals (TSX:HBM) climbed 22 cents to $10.49.

The industrials sector rose about 1.59 per cent as Canadian National Railways (TSX:CNR) climbed $1.17 to $77.22 while Canadian Pacific Railway (TSX:CP) improved by 89 cents to $74.15.

The May crude contract on the New York Mercantile Exchange gained $1.29 to US$102.31 a barrel and the energy sector climbed 1.42 per cent. Suncor Energy (TSX:SU) rose 51 cents to C$30.19 while Cenovus Energy (TSX:CVE) was up 57 cents to $33.95.

The gold sector was the only decliner, down 0.57 per cent even as gold shed early losses and was unchanged at US$1,660.70 an ounce. Barrick Gold Corp. (TSX:ABX) faded 22 cents to C$41.49 while Kinross Gold Corp. (TSX:K) shed 18 cents to $9.22.

Romania’s environment minister says an application by Gabriel Resources Ltd. (TSX:GBU) for permits to move ahead with a controversial gold mine can’t be speeded up as requested. Opponents say building the open-pit mine would damage ancient monuments and destroy a mountain face. Gabriel shares dipped nine cents to $3.16.

European markets were positive with London’s FTSE 100 index ahead 0.7 per cent, Frankfurt’s DAX up 1.16 per cent and the Paris CAC 40 ahead 0.75 per cent.

Earlier in Asia, Tokyo’s Nikkei 225 fell 0.8 per cent, Hong Kong’s Hang Seng dropped 1.1 per cent and Seoul’s Kospi edged 0.1 per cent lower, while the Shanghai Composite Index edged 0.1 per cent higher.

Markets will be closely watching for first-quarter gross domestic product results, starting with China on Friday. China lowered its GDP growth target last month to 7.5 per cent, sparking concern that the world’s second-largest economy is slowing faster than expected.

In Canadian earnings news, Astral Media Inc. (TSX:ACM.A) had a $38.2-million profit in its second quarter, a 10 per cent increase over the same period a year earlier. Revenue rose to $233.5 million from $232.7 million and its shares added a penny to $48.48.

Dollarama Inc. (TSX:DOL) says its net income soared 51 per cent to $63.6 million or 84 cents per diluted share in its fiscal fourth quarter, up from $42 million or 56 cents per share a year earlier. The discount chain’s sales jumped 14.7 per cent to $468.7 million. Its shares gained $3.80 to $52.16.

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Windows Of The World

Posted on 3rd April 2012 in The monuments of world

What if you can visit about 120 different cultural landmarks and famous monuments from all over the country in one place? How absolutely convenient, amazing and fun that would be right? Well, Windows of the World at Shenzhen offers just that. But wait, there’s a twist. It’s all in miniature version. Miniature as in, a little smaller than the real ones but nevertheless still exudes a sense and feel of elegance and exquisiteness.

It is located in the western part of Shenzhen in the People’s Republic of China at Overseas Chinese Town along the beautiful Shenzhen bay covering an area of 480,000sqm. Window of the World is a tourist attraction or theme park with more than 120 reproductions of some of the world’s most well-known attractions such as the breathtaking Eiffel Tower, the famous Arc De Triomphe monument, the gladiator arena, the Rome Colosseum, the good luck fountain of Trevi Fountain, the picturesque Niagara Falls, the history rich Angkor Wat, the mysterious Pyramids of Egypt and Sphinx of Giza, the exquisite Taj Mahal, the giant Big Ben of London, the mind-boggling Leaning Tower of Pisa, the opera loving Sydney Opera House, and the ever popular figure of Statue of Liberty. There’s even a Jurassic Park theme area!

If you are feeling lackluster before arriving, the moment you step into the Window of the World and explore what it had to offer, one will simply be hype up and begins to feel the energy and life flowing into you. How could one not when surrounded by magnificent sculptures, landmarks and monuments around! Taking pictures will be the first thing that popped into all the excited minds and one does not even need to scratch the head to look for ideal places to take pictures. Almost anywhere, and everywhere can be a perfect post-card picture location. I kid you not! Since most of us (I believe) had never been to that many countries before, having all this popular tourist attractions under one roof, I mean one sky, is simply amazing, albeit at a cost of them being miniature in size.

Apart from discovering all these unique and interesting landmarks from different countries and taking a plethora of pictures to show off back home to envious friends, family members and relatives, the Window of the World also offers a variety of international restaurants serving cuisines ranging from French cuisine to Mexican delights to Italian pizzas right down to Chinese temptations. Whatever your taste buds craved at that particular moment, you can rest assured that one of the many restaurants there will satisfied your grumbling and demanding stomach and keep it satisfied. However, bear in mind that prices varies from top-end to really affordable mouth-watering food. Whatever your decision, always remember to calculate your budget well beforehand.

If you got bored or tired from walking around the theme park, there are entertainment shows available in the evening with shows such as “Fervorous Paris Nights” at “Caesar’s Palace” which feature dancers dancing to popular music. Feeling playful? Then you can even get to dressed in Japanese kimonos, take pictures in a Japanese background setting and visit the park around on a horse!

If you are feeling more adventurous and seek for some thrill and fun activities instead, fear not, there’s always skiing and snow tubing available at the ‘Alps Indoor Skiing’. Skiing in a subtropical city might sound a little far-fetched, but the Indoor Alpine Ski Run in Shenzhen Window of the World offers you four thousand square metres (about 6,200,012 square feet) of indoor piste to ski and it definitely is a one of a kind experience. Other thrillers include navigating the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon, playing with bows and arrows at the Archery Field or simply visit the park via cable car. Due to time constraint, we couldn’t join all the rides and entertainments that were offered.

The admission fee is 120 yuan, roughly around B$25 (or 50 yuan after 7.40pm). Those who are between the ages of 65 and 69 and whose heights are between 1.1 metres and 1.4 metres are charged half-price. Elderly over the age of 70 and those under the height of 1.1 metres gets to enter for free. To reach the Window of the World, one can use the Shenzhen Metro choosing Line 1 at Shijiezhichuang Station, which costs roughly around five yuan. One tip though. Remember to wear comfortable shoes such as sport shoes or sneakers. Definitely not slippers or high heels as the amount of walking you have to do will kill your feet.

After about four to five hours exploring and discovering the sights and sounds of the Window of the World and it should be enough for sightseeing and tonnes of picture taking moments. Unless of course, if you are highly enthusiastic or have time to kill, spending more time around is not that bad either. I mean why not, when and how often can you say, you have seen nearly what the entire world has to offer. Of course, it’s not the real thing but who cares! After visiting the Window of the World, you can’t help but wish the window at your bedroom offered the same kind of view as well.

–Courtesy of Borneo Bulletin

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Earth Hour 2012 Photos: Global Hour Of Darkness For Climate Change In Pictures

Posted on 2nd April 2012 in The monuments of world

Countless landmarks captured in photos around the world went dark on Saturday, March 31, 2012 as a part of the Earth Hour celebration to raise awareness in a global effort for climate change.

Each year, Earth Hour is held on the last Saturday in the month of March where for one hour, lights are switched off. Last year, 135 countries participated and grew to 147 this year, according to the World Wildlife Fund (WWF).

“Earth Hour 2012 is a celebration of people power; the world’s largest mass event in support of the planet,” WWF official Dermot O’Gorman said in a statement.

Earth Hour began online in Sydney, Australia with the dimming of the Harbour Bridge and Opera Hose and since has spread around the world to the Tokyo Tower to the Sky Tower in Auckland in New Zealand. In Paris, France, over 230 monuments and landmarks went dark on Saturday including the Notre Dame Cathedral and the Arc de Triomphe. The Eiffel Tower, however, only went dark for five minutes due to security measures, according to the Mayor’s office. In New York, the Empire State Building went dim as well as the National Cathedral in Washington.

View the slideshow to see photos of Earth Hour 2012.

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