New tuner whith a philosophical bend...Nika Roza Danilova

Nika Roza Danilova/Zola Jesus

Wikipedia ...

Serious reading played an important part in her self-education. "I probably read Dostoevsky and Nietzsche before I should have", she confessed. Danilova, much interested in philosophy, describe herself as an atheist. "If there were physical evidence then maybe I would consider it. But...The Bible and all these books written by people, they are stories, compelling, yes, and they teach you about life and how to take care of people. Taking them for fact, that's really naive. They are great stories to teach moral structure, but they are just stories." When asked of her personal philosophy, she said: "I believe in not avoiding things you’re afraid of. Especially really dark things."

Vessel

by

Zola Jesus

Deceased--Ken Price

Ken Price
February 16th, 1935 to February 24th, 2012

"Ken Price, Sculptor Whose Artworks Helped Elevate Ceramics, Dies at 77"

by

Roberta Smith

February 24, 2012

The New York Times

Ken Price, whose small, worldly, exquisitely finished abstract sculptures in glazed or painted clay exploded the distinction between art and craft and established him as one of the outstanding artists of postwar America, died on Friday at his home in Arroyo Hondo, N.M., outside Taos. He was 77.

His family said that the cause was cancer, which was first diagnosed in 2008.

Mr. Price belonged to a talent-rich generation of artists who emerged across the United States in the late 1950s and ’60s, responding to the innovations of Abstract Expressionism with innovations of their own. Until the last decade of his life, when he started working larger, his compressed, bravura objects rarely measured more than 10 or 20 inches on a side. Their forms oscillated between the biomorphic and the geometric, the geological and the architectural. They reveled in synthetic color, unusual textures and carefully calibrated erotic innuendo. And they fit in at several points across the fertile landscape of American art of the last 50 or more years.

With artists like Billy Al Bengston, Robert Irwin, Ed Ruscha, Larry Bell and Craig Kauffman, Mr. Price was a progenitor of the Finish Fetish school of meticulous object-making that did so much to establish Los Angeles as an art capital. With artists from both coasts, including John Chamberlain, Donald Judd, John McCracken and Dan Flavin, he helped to usher vibrant color irrevocably into modern sculpture, often with the help of automobile lacquer and enamel.

But Mr. Price’s greatest achievement may have been to help foment a revolution in ceramics that was in many ways the true genesis of the Southern California art scene. Allied with the ceramic sculptors Peter Voulkos, who was briefly his teacher, and John Mason, he insisted on ceramics as high art — an argument that Mr. Price, a man of few but well-chosen words, left to his sculptures to articulate.

Mr. Price enjoyed sustained critical success, but his penchant for working small and his allegiance to clay sometimes obscured his originality. It became almost reflexive for critics and curators to write that his art was paradoxically celebrated yet underappreciated.

In 2007, the American critic Dave Hickey called Mr. Price “the Glenn Gould of object-makers,” comparing him to the pianist as someone who was “predisposed to step away from the spotlight, similarly driven by meticulous eccentricities and beguiled, as Gould was, by the full, intimate grandeur of his practice.”

Only one museum survey of his work was held during Mr. Price’s lifetime — organized at the Menil Collection in Houston in 1992. A 50-year retrospective is to open at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in September and travel to the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 2013.

After his first three exhibitions in 1960, 1961 and 1964 at the legendary Ferus Gallery, the epicenter of Los Angeles cool, a succession of unusually loyal art galleries kept his work in sight with frequent shows, especially the James Corcoran Gallery and L.A. Louver in Los Angeles and the Willard, Franklin Parrasch and Matthew Marks galleries in New York.

If small, his works were still bold in every other way: color, internal scale, visceral effect and associative richness. Even their smallness exuded a nervy, David-against-Goliath confidence. Mr. Price liked to quote the artist Joseph Cornell, whose small boxed assemblages he admired: “Tiny is the last refuge of the enormous.”

Mr. Price first became known in the early 1960s for his so-called Eggs, intensely colored ovoids punctuated with small openings from which slimy-looking forms might protrude, suggesting fingers, phalluses, worms or perhaps entrails. At once beautiful and disturbing, abstract and overly specific, these objects were sometimes presented on pedestals that placed them, rather imperiously, at eye level, calling attention to their every shift in color, texture and shape, inside and out.

His subsequent efforts were stylistically diverse, but he rarely strayed far from the tensions he had achieved in his Eggs, between dazzling exteriors and mysterious interiors, foreshadowed by openings that could appear either soft and vaguely sexual or severely geometric, with the implied monumentality of the entrance to a Mayan temple.

As Mr. Price’s work evolved, he managed to synthesize, in series of works, from just about every 20th-century art style and several corners of popular culture, especially Surrealism but also Russian Constructivism, Japanese prints and Mexican tourist wares. The sculptures of Constantin Brancusi were particularly influential. Other inspirations included natural crystals, the jagged forms of the American Southwest and the coastline of Massachusetts, where he lived during the 1980s.

In his most extended series, he created numerous variations on the common tea cup. The earliest had snails for handles; the later ones, glazed with glossy primary colors, suggested abstract Bauhaus architecture. His first solo show in New York, at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1969, consisted entirely of cups.

His svelte yet pneumatic forms could suggest cartoonish hands, abbreviated Loch Ness monsters or salacious tongues. Others conjured up jellyfish or rogue ocean waves, which Mr. Price, a surfer, knew well. He named one such piece “Pacific.” The announcement card for his 1961 show at Ferus featured a photograph of him on a surfboard, his arms extended exultantly skyward.

The critic Lucy R. Lippard identified Mr. Price as “something of a Surrealist, something of a purist, something of an expressionist, something of a naturalist.” Mr. Price himself remarked on the associational richness in his work in a letter to a friend in 1959. Referring to one of his mound-shaped sculptures — which preceded the Eggs and would form his 1960 Ferus debut — he wrote that making it kindled “fond memories of mountain peaks, breasts, eggs, worms, worm trails, the damp undersides of things, intestines, veins and the like.”

Kenneth Martin Price was born on Feb. 16, 1935, in West Hollywood in Los Angeles, the only child of Kenneth Albert Price and the former Joan Agnes Collins and the son and grandson of inventors. A grandfather had invented headlights, among other things, and his father had helped develop the Popsicle and double Popsicle for the Good Humor Ice Cream Company in the 1930s.

“I remember the garage at our house being full of Popsicle molds and all kinds of interesting stuff,” Mr. Price recalled in a 2008 interview.

He grew up near the beach in Santa Monica and Pacific Palisades, where his parents designed and built a house. He surfed almost every day from the age of 15 to 30, briefly studied the trumpet with Chet Baker and thought of himself as an artist from an early age. He recalled that nature and Mexican folk pottery were central, early visual experiences, and once said that his idea of a perfect day was one spent drawing while listening to jazz.

While still in high school he took classes in cartooning and life drawing at the Chouinard Art Institute and later enrolled at Santa Monica City College. He enjoyed his first ceramics course there so much that he began taking classes at colleges and art schools all over Los Angeles.

By the time he earned his bachelor degree in fine arts from the University of Southern California in 1956, he was aware of Voulkos, who was applying the scale and gestural freedom of Abstract Expressionism to large clay forms. Voulkos’s conviction that ceramics was a full-blown art was a galvanizing antidote to what Mr. Price called the “crafts-dogma hell” he had encountered in other schools.

Along with Mr. Mason, he pursued graduate study with Voulkos at the Los Angeles County Institute of Art (now the Otis College of Art and Design) for about a year. But finding Voulkos’s influence oppressive after a while, he attended the New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University in western New York — famous for its traditional studio ceramics program — where he completed a two-year master’s program in one.

Back in Los Angeles, immersing himself in its burgeoning art scene, Mr. Price joined a kind of boys club of artists that included Mr. Bengston, Mr. Ruscha, Mr. Bell, John Altoon and Ed Kienholz and that used the Ferus Gallery as its base. He also drew inspiration from surveys of European modernism that featured the work of Hans Arp and Joan Miro, and from the Pasadena Museum of Art’s 1963 retrospective of the work of Marcel Duchamp, whose smaller sculptures often exerted an ambiguous sexual charge. In 1962, he spent six months traveling in Japan, visiting potteries and master potters, enthralled by a country where, he observed, “everyone uses a handmade teacup if they can afford it.”

In 1968, Mr. Price married Happy Ward, who survives him, along with three children, all of whom work for him in some capacity: two step-daughters, Romy Colonius and Sydney McDonnell; a son, Jackson Price, and nine grandchildren. The family moved to Taos, in 1971, first into a vacation home that he owned with Mr. Bell and eventually into the house and studio in Arroyo Hondo, which he and his wife designed.

Rather than ignore the protocols of craft, as Voulkos tended to, Mr. Price made its intimations of control, patience and obsession implicit in his work. Especially after the mid-1980s, it sometimes seemed that each new series introduced a new way of applying and showcasing color. He began painting his forms with scores of thin layers of bright acrylic paint that he then sanded down in patches, revealing multiple hues. Undulant surfaces treated this way suggested rough-hewn stones or meteors from a Technicolor world. On smoother forms the process could yield tiny pore-like starbursts of contrasting colors, to startlingly skin-like effect.

In his last years Mr. Price turned to making larger but still eminently blobby, loquacious pieces in bronze, continuing the process of layering color and sanding. He also continued to resist explaining his work’s meaning. As he said in a talk delivered at the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Tex., in 2005, “My primary satisfaction comes from making the work, and my idea of success is getting it to look right.”

“I can’t prove my art’s any good,” he added, “or that it means what I say it means. And nothing I say can improve the way it looks.”

Ken Price [Wikipedia]

Deceased--Dmitri Nabokov

Dmitri Nabokov
May 10th, 1934 to February 22nd, 2012

"Dmitri Nabokov dies at 77; only child of acclaimed novelist Vladimir Nabokov"

The younger Nabokov spent much of his life trying to carve a life away from the shadow of his father. But he always returned to protecting his legacy, translating and editing his work while pursuing careers as an opera singer and race car driver.

February 26th, 2012

latimes.com

Dmitri Nabokov, the only child of acclaimed novelist Vladimir Nabokov who helped protect and translate his father's work while pursuing careers as an opera singer and race car driver, has died. He was 77.

The younger Nabokov died Wednesday at a hospital in Vevey, Switzerland, after a long illness, said literary agent Andrew Wylie.

Dmitri spent much of his life trying to carve a life away from the shadow of his father, considered one of the premier writers of the 20th century for such books as "Lolita" and "Pale Fire."

The tall, broad-shouldered son bore a striking resemblance to his father. Harvard-educated Dmitri was a playboy who began to race cars competitively in 1962 and maintained an active professional operatic career as a basso profundo until 1982.

But Dmitri always returned to protecting his father's literary legacy, translating and editing his father's plays, poems, stories, the novella "The Enchanter" and "Selected Letters."

"My father is gradually marching — with his two favorite writers, Pushkin and Joyce — arm in arm into the pantheon to join the greatest of all, Shakespeare, who is waiting for them," Dmitri told the Associated Press in 2009. "I like to think that I did my bit to keep things on track."

After the success of "Lolita," he translated his father's "Invitation to a Beheading" from Russian and wrote the memoir "On Revisiting Father's Room" after his father died in 1977. After his mother died in 1991, he sold the remainder of his father's archive to the New York Public Library and attended conferences dedicated to him.

In 2009, Dmitri decided to publish his father's final, fragmentary novel, "The Origin of Laura," written on index cards during the last years of Vladimir's life. It was a controversial act that his son said went against the wishes of his father, who had asked that "Laura" be burned.

Dmitri Nabokov was born in 1934 in Berlin and as a child lived "a real drifter's life," he later said. He was living in Paris with his father and Jewish mother, Vera, when the family fled the Nazis in 1940 and came to the U.S.

Vladimir borrowed money to send his son to Harvard in 1951. He reported that Dmitri's interests there were "mountaineering, girls, music, track, tennis and his studies, in that order."

After graduating from college, Dmitri served in theU.S. Army, resuming his voice studies after his discharge in 1957.

The elder Nabokov became an American citizen in 1945 but returned to Europe in 1961, settling in Switzerland to be near his son, who was living in Italy.

Dmitri never married but believed he would have made a great father, much like his own was, he told The Times in 1989: "It was a very rich relationship. We were very good friends.... He made my life infinitely richer, more entertaining and equipped me for creative endeavors of my own."

"Dmitri Nabokov, Steward of Father’s Literary Legacy, Dies at 77"

by

Daniel E. Slotnik

February 25th, 2012

The New York Times

Dmitri Nabokov, the son of Vladimir Nabokov, who tended to the legacy of his father with the posthumous publication of a volume of personal letters, an unpublished novella and an unfinished novel that his father had demanded be burned, died on Wednesday in Vevey, Switzerland. He was 77.

Mr. Nabokov was hospitalized for a lung infection in January and never recovered, Andrew Wylie, the agent for the Nabokov estate, said.

In contrast with his father, who was said to focus on literature and lepidoptery to the exclusion of all else, Dmitri Nabokov was a bon vivant, a professional opera singer, a race car driver and a mountain climber.

He was also devoted to the full range of his father’s work, including the early Russian writings like “King, Queen, Knave,” the English-language masterpiece “Lolita” and the unfinished novel “The Original of Laura.” He translated his father’s early Russian works, including the novel “The Gift” and the short story collection “Tyrants Destroyed.”

He also wrote a memoir, “On Revisiting Father’s Room,” which explored their relationship as well as his father’s life and work. Mr. Nabokov also countered the widely held perception of his father as cool and distant, describing a “trusting, gentle nature.”

“If there is a quality overlooked in his writing by some of the more obtuse commentators,” he wrote, “it is that gentleness, coupled with a total honesty on every plane and an utter freedom from anything cruel, cheap or mean.”

In his book, Mr. Nabokov described an unpublished manuscript that he said “would have been Father’s most brilliant novel, the most concentrated distillation of his creativity, but whose release in incomplete form he expressly forbade.” Vladimir Nabokov’s widow and Dmitri’s mother, Véra, never burned the handwritten notecards that made up the novel, and in 2009 the younger Mr. Nabokov published it. The volume included a text of the book, in the order that the younger Mr. Nabokov believed his father had intended, but also facsimiles of the notecards, which could be detached and arranged in whatever order the reader preferred.

In an introduction, he wrote that his “father’s shade” would not “have opposed the release of ‘Laura’ once ‘Laura’ had survived the hum of time this long.”

In “Laura,” Mr. Nabokov “imagines the death of his protagonist, a writer and neurologist named Philip, as a sort of Nietzschean act of will, as an exercise in self-erasure conducted body part by body part, beginning with his toes,” Michiko Kakutani wrote in a review for The New York Times. “It is the ultimate fantasy of a writer who wants to exert complete control over the narrative of his own life.”

Ms. Kakutani said the book did “a disservice to a writer who deeply cherished precision and was practiced in the art of revision,” but she said it would “beckon and beguile Nabokov fans.”

Dmitri Vladimirovich Nabokov, an only child, was born May 10, 1934, in Berlin. In 1937, the family fled Germany for France and by 1940 had made its way to New York.

Mr. Nabokov concentrated on history and literature at Harvard and graduated in 1955. He also began training for the opera at the Longy School of Music in Cambridge, Mass.

In the late 1950s, Mr. Nabokov helped his father translate his novel “Invitation to a Beheading.” In 1959 he traveled to Italy and began training with a singing coach at La Scala in Milan. He later made his operatic debut in “La Bohème” alongside Luciano Pavarotti, then a novice tenor. An imposing presence onstage at well over six feet tall, he continued to sing professionally until 1982.

He also raced cars competitively until 1965.

In 1986, he published his translation of “The Enchanter,” a never-published 1939 novella by his father widely considered a forerunner of “Lolita.”

After his mother died in 1991, Mr. Nabokov moved into her apartment in Montreux, where he oversaw the Nabokov estate and where he lived at his death. He never married and has no immediate survivors.

In his memoir, Mr. Nabokov recalled one of his last exchanges with his father, who died in 1977. They spoke of butterflies, and of a bucolic valley near their home in Switzerland that they had always meant to explore.

“Tears suddenly welled in Father’s eyes,” Mr. Nabokov wrote. “I asked him why. He replied that a certain butterfly was already on the wing; and his eyes told me he no longer hoped that he would live to pursue it again. Nor would he ever visit that enchanted mountain valley on the far side of the lake. But perhaps, in Father’s memory, I shall.”

Dmitri Nabokov [Wikipedia]


Vladimir Nabokov...the lepidopterist

Nabokov's "Pale Fire"

Is Charlie Brown an Existentialist?

"Sartre & Peanuts"

Nathan Radke claims that Charlie Brown is an existentialist.

by

Nathan Radke

January/February 2012

Philosophy Now

Our anti-hero sits, despondent. He is alone, both physically and emotionally. He is alienated from his peers. He is fearfully awaiting a punishment for his actions. In desperation, he looks to God for comfort and hope. Instead, his angst overwhelms him, and manifests itself as physical pain. There is no comfort to be found.

Poor Charlie Brown. He waits outside of the principal’s office, waiting to hear what will become to him. He offers up a little prayer, but all he gets is a stomach ache.

When we are exposed to something every day we can eventually lose sight of its brilliance. Newspaper readers have been exposed to Charles Schulz’s comic strip ‘Peanuts’ for over half a century. Even now, a few years after Schulz died, many newspapers continue to carry reruns of his strips, and bookstores offer Peanuts collections. His characters are featured in countless advertisements, and every December networks dutifully show the Charlie Brown Christmas Special. Is there any philosophical insight that can be gleamed from such a mainstream and common source?

There has been much discussion concerning Peanuts as a voice of conservative Christianity, including several books such as the 1965 work The Gospel According to Peanuts. This is not without reason; even a cursory glance at a Peanuts anthology will reveal enough scripture references to fuel a month’s worth of Sunday school classes. However, to suggest that Schulz’s philosophical insights didn’t make it past the church door would be a mistake. While Schulz had a great interest in the Bible and the teachings of Jesus Christ, he was also highly suspicious of dogmatic pious beliefs. In a 1981 interview, he refused to describe himself as religious, arguing that “I don’t know what religious means”. Charlie Brown was no comic strip missionary, blandly spreading the word of organized religion. Upon reflection, the trials and tribulations of the little round-headed kid provide deep and moving illustrations of existentialism.

This mixture of Biblical teaching and existential thought is not uncommon. The Danish Christian philosopher Søren Kierkegaard was one of the first existentialists, and his religious beliefs impelled his philosophy, rather than limiting it. Kierkegaard was forced to confront his deeply held belief in the existence of God with the tremendous empty silence that returns from the prayers of humans, and the results were his vital and compelling theories of faith and freedom.

It should also be noted that while Schulz did not consider himself religious, neither did he refer to himself as an existentialist. In fact, he was unfamiliar with the term until the mid 1950s, when he stumbled across a few newspaper articles about Jean-Paul Sartre. He was certainly not formally schooled in philosophical works. And yet, his simple line drawings provide illumination into the questions and problems raised by existentialism.

In order to identify examples of Schulz’s philosophy, a bumper-sticker version of existentialism should prove helpful. In his seminal 1946 work L’Existentialisme est un Humanisme, Sartre outlines some of the core aspects of his theories. A key aspect is the idea of abandonment. Kierkegaard felt that there was an unbridgeable gap between God and Man. Sartre goes even further, and argues that even if there is an unknowable and unreachable God, it wouldn’t make any difference to the human condition. Ultimately, we exist in an abandoned and free state. We are responsible for our actions, and since Sartre argues that there is no God to conceive of a human nature, we are responsible for our own creation.

How does this apply to Peanuts? Like the existential human in a world of silent or absent deities, Schulz’s characters exist in a world of silent or absent adult authority. In fact, the way the strip is drawn (with the child characters taking up most of each frame) actually prevents the presence of any adults. Schulz argued that, were adults added to the strip, the narratives would become untenable. While references are sometimes made to full-grown humans (normally school teachers) these characters are always out of frame, and silent. The children of Peanuts are left to their own devices, to try and understand the world they have found themselves thrust into. They have to turn to each other for support – hence, Lucy’s blossoming psychiatric booth (at five cents a session, a very good deal).

An ideal example of abandonment is the relationship between Linus and The Great Pumpkin. Every Halloween, Linus faithfully waits by a pumpkin patch, in the hopes that he will be blessed with the holy experience of a visitation by The Great Pumpkin. Of course, The Great Pumpkin never shows up, and He never answers Linus’ letters. Despite this, Linus remains steadfast, even going door to door to spread the word of his absent deity. Does The Great Pumpkin exist? We can never know. But from an existential point of view, it doesn’t matter if he exists or not. The important thing is that Linus is abandoned and alone in his pumpkin patch.

Sartre did not deny the existence of God triumphantly. Instead, he considered it “... extremely embarrassing that God does not exist, for there disappears all possibility of finding values in an intelligible heaven.”. Without God, everything we do as humans is absurd, and without meaning. Certainly, spending all night in a pumpkin patch would qualify as embarrassing as well. In the absence of any parental edicts, the characters in Peanuts have had to become very philosophically minded in order to establish for themselves what is right and wrong. When Linus gets a sliver in his finger, a conflict erupts between Lucy’s theological determinism (he is being punished for something he did wrong) and Charlie Brown’s philosophical uncertainty (when the sliver falls out, Lucy’s position crumbles). At Christmas time, Linus dictates a letter to Santa, questioning the validity of Santa’s ethical judgments regarding the goodness or badness of the individual child. “What is good? What is bad?” asks Linus. Good questions.

Another key aspect comes from this monstrous freedom that abandonment allows, and this aspect is despair. In a nutshell, we are created by our actions. We are responsible for our actions. Therefore, we are responsible for our creation. What we are is the sum total of what we have done, nothing more and nothing less. But why should this cause despair? To answer this, Sartre examines the characteristics of cowardice and bravery. When Sartre describes the position that opposes his own, we can see how it may be comforting to not be responsible for one’s creation:

If you are born cowards, you can be quite content, you can do nothing about it and you will be cowards all your life whatever you do; and if you are born heroes you can again be quite content; you will be heroes all your life, eating and drinking heroically. Whereas the existentialist says that the coward makes himself cowardly, the hero makes himself heroic; and that there is always the possibility for the coward to give up cowardice and for the hero to stop being a hero.
(Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism and Humanism 1957)

It is this very possibility that causes despair. Why does Charlie Brown tear himself into knots over the little red-haired girl? The very possibility that he could go over and talk to her is far more distressing than its impossibility would be; he must take ownership of his failure. When she is the victim of a bully in the school yard, Charlie Brown’s despair threatens to leap right off the comic page. He isn’t suffering because he can’t help her, but because he could help her, but won’t: “Why can’t I rush over there and save her? Because I’d get slaughtered, that’s why...” When Linus helps her out instead, thereby illustrating his freedom of action, Charlie Brown only becomes more melancholic.

In order to combat despair, Charlie Brown succumbs to bad faith, which is to say, he denies his freedom: “I wonder what would happen if I went over and tried to talk to her! Everybody would probably laugh ... she’d probably be insulted too ...” It is only by falsely denying his freedom that Charlie Brown can overcome his despair. But by hiding behind bad faith, he does himself no favours. Another lunch hour is spent alone on a bench with a peanut butter sandwich.

Existence is problematic and disturbing. In one weekend strip, Schulz succinctly describes the horror of discovering one’s own existence in the world:

Linus: I’m aware of my tongue ... It’s an awful feeling! Every now and then I become aware that I have a tongue inside my mouth, and then it starts to feel lumped up ... I can’t help it ... I can’t put it out of my mind. ... I keep thinking about where my tongue would be if I weren’t thinking about it, and then I can feel it sort of pressing against my teeth ...

Sartre devoted an entire book to this experience – his 1938 novel Nausea in which his character Roquentin is alarmed to discover his own actuality. But Linus sums the point up very well in a few frames.

Existentialism has been accused of being defeatist and depressing (and Sartre didn’t help his cause with terms like ‘abandonment’, ‘despair’, and ‘nausea’). But Peanuts also demonstrates the optimism of the philosophy. Why does Charlie Brown continue to go out to the pitcher’s mound, despite his 50 year losing streak? Why try to kick the football, when Lucy has always pulled it away at the last second? Because there is an infinite gap between the past and the present. Regardless of what has come before, there is always the possibility of change. Monstrous freedom is a double edged sword. We exist, and are responsible. This is both liberating and terrifying.

Schulz should be considered part of the generation of authors who saw active duty during World War II; he is in the company of writers such as Joseph Heller, Kurt Vonnegut, and of course Sartre himself. It is foolish to disregard literature simply because it appears in the funnies section of the daily paper. Schulz’s simple line drawings and blocky letters contain as much information about the human condition as entire shelves full of dry books.

While it is difficult to say what Sartre would have thought of Peanuts, we do know what Schulz thought of Sartre: “I read about him in the New York Times, where he said it was very difficult to be a human being, and the only way to fight against it is to lead an active life – that’s very true.” If any character has shown us the difficulties in existence, it is Charlie Brown

© NATHAN RADKE 2004

Nathan Radke teaches workshops and tutorials in philosophy at Trent University in Peterborough, Canada.

All quotations in this article come from the following books:
• Charles M. Schulz: Conversations edited by M. Thomas Inge, University Press of Mississippi 2000.
• Existentialism and Humanism by Jean-Paul Sartre, Methuen & Co. Ltd. 1957.
• Peanuts Treasury by Charles Schulz, MetroBooks 2000.

Visit Philosophy Now .

Sign outside physics lab

Should have used Heathkit No. 4530949E

There is something to be said about being absolutely sure before a disclosure is announced.

"Faster-than-light neutrinos could be down to bad wiring"

by

Jason Palmer

February 23rd, 2012

BBC News

What might have been the biggest physics story of the past century may instead be down to a faulty connection.

In September 2011, the Opera experiment reported it had seen particles called neutrinos evidently travelling faster than the speed of light.

The team has now found two problems that may have affected their test in opposing ways: one in its timing gear and one in an optical fibre connection.

More tests from May will determine just how they affect measured speeds.

The Opera collaboration (an acronym for Oscillation Project with Emulsion-Racking Apparatus) was initially started to study the tiny particles as they travelled through 730km of rock between a particle accelerator at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (Cern) in Switzerland and the Gran Sasso underground laboratory in Italy.

Its goal was to quantify how often the neutrinos change from one type to another on the journey.

But during the course of the experiments the team found that the neutrinos showed up 60 billionths of a second faster than light would have done over the same distance - a result that runs counter to a century's worth of theoretical and experimental physics.

The team submitted the surprising result to the scientific community in an effort to confirm or refute it, and several other experiments around the world are currently working to replicate the result.

A repeat of the experiment by the Opera team will now address whether the issues they have found affect the ultimate neutrino speed they measure.
Faulty connection?

The two problems the team has identified would have opposing effects on the apparent speed.

On the one hand, the team said there is a problem in the "oscillator" that provides a ticking clock to the experiment in the intervals between the synchronisations of GPS equipment.

This is used to provide start and stop times for the measurement as well as precise distance information.

That problem would increase the measured time of the neutrinos' flight, in turn reducing the surprising faster-than-light effect.

But the team also said they found a problem in the optical fibre connection between the GPS signal and the experiment's main clock - quite simply, a cable not quite fully plugged in.

In contrast, the team said that effect would increase the neutrinos' apparent speed.

The team had carried out their measurements for more than three years, exhaustively scrutinising their methods and analysis before announcing the results last year - so why had they not found these issues before?

"It's sometimes very difficult to tell whether this thing could have been done before - because in a sense the answer is always yes," said Sergio Bertolucci, director of research at Cern.

Prof Bertolucci outlined the complexity both of the experiment and the analysis of the results, stressing that the hunt for just these kinds of problems had been relentless.

"One has to realise that the collaboration has never stopped to try to 'kill' the measurement (proving that it was erroneous)," he told BBC News.

"Their constant search for systematic (errors) has never stopped, for more than a year."

Given that the opposing effects only seem to muddy the waters further on whether neutrinos can exceed the "universal speed limit", only more experiments will put the matter to rest.

For its part, the Opera team said in a statement: "While continuing our investigations, in order to unambiguously quantify the effect on the observed result, the collaboration is looking forward to performing a new measurement of the neutrino velocity as soon as a new bunched beam will be available in 2012."

Facilities also at Gran Sasso called Borexino, LVD and Icarus will also take part, along with Minos, based at Fermilab in the US, and possibly a Japanese facility called T2K.

With so much at stake, Oxford University particle physicist and Minos spokesman Alfons Weber said these international efforts will go ahead no matter what.

"I can say that Minos will quite definitely go ahead," Dr Weber told BBC News. "We've already installed most of the equipment we need to make an accurate measurement.

"Even if Opera now publish that 'Yes, everything is fine', we still want to make sure that we come up with a consistent, independent measurement, and I assume that the other experiments will go forward with this as well."

But Prof Bertolucci at Cern says that there are wider implications of the neutrino story, which is playing out in the public eye.

"All this story has shown to the wider public how science works," he said.

"Of course the people of Opera are not happy; they would have preferred that the neutrinos stayed [faster than light], but the fact that they came out and they put themselves to the scrutiny of the wider collaboration... I think makes a good case for science."

Atheists have rights too

Jessica Ahlquist, top center, sits amid supporters during a school committee meeting at Cranston High School in Cranston, R.I.

"Prayer banner: Atheist teen speaks out, lands $44,000 scholarship"

by

Rene Lynch

February 22nd, 2012

Los Angeles Times

A Rhode Island teen is learning that it pays to deny the existence of God: Prominent atheists plan to present Jessica Ahlquist with a scholarship of at least $44,000 -- and possibly more.

It seems they were impressed with the way Ahlquist, 16, handled herself amid a roiling controversy that began in July 2010, when she complained about a prayer banner hanging in the auditorium at Cranston High School West that referred to "Our Heavenly Father."

School authorities brushed off her complaint, saying the banner was artistic and historic, as it had been hanging there for decades. Ahlquist later joined the American Civil Liberties Union in a suit alleging that the banner made her feel "ostracized and out of place."

After much legal wrangling, a court ruled that the banner needed to be removed -- and an uproar ensued.

The controversy helped Ahlquist, an atheist, collect thousands of friends and followers on Facebook and Twitter.

But it also sparked outrage on behalf of many others who embraced the banner and wanted the school district to stand firm. A state legislator called Ahlquist an "evil little thing." There were death threats. The financially strapped school district spent tens of thousands on legal fees. And recall threats were lodged against the school board.

Those school board jobs are still in jeopardy; the district voted last week to end the appeals process to save money.

Blogger Hemant Mehta who writes the Friendly Atheist started a campaign to raise scholarship money for Ahlquist, and the American Humanist Assn. is also helping to oversee the fund-raising effort, which runs through the end of the month.

"The way she has handled herself throughout this whole ordeal is admirable far beyond anything most people would expect from a high school student," Mehta wrote.

So far, the fund has raised $44,000 for Ahlquist. Mehta and the association say she earned the scholarship by standing up to critics "with class and style."

Related...

"In God We Must"

Why won’t the U.S. accept its atheists?

by

Julian Baggini

February 5th, 2012

Slate

Point, Texas (pop. 792) is not the easiest place for a single lesbian to raise her child. But neither her sexuality nor her unwed parenthood are enough to make Renee Johnson an American conservative’s worst nightmare. As she explained to me when I met her at Rains County Library, “I’d rather have a big ‘L’ or ‘lesbian’ written across my shirt than a big ‘A’ or ‘atheist’, because people are going to handle it better.”

We had met in a private room because Johnson worried that anywhere else in the town, people might overhear us and be offended by her godlessness. No wonder she often feels alone in her non-belief. But Johnson is far from unique. As I found out when I travelled across the US last year, atheists live in isolation and secrecy all over the country. In a nation that celebrates freedom of religion like no other, freedom not to be religious at all can be as hard to exercise as the right to swim the Atlantic.

America is the well-known exception to the rule that the wealthier and better-educated a country is, the less religious its population. As a Pew Research Center report put it, when it comes to religiosity, “the US is closer to considerably less developed nations, such as India, Brazil and Lebanon than to other western nations.” But what is less discussed is what this means for the minority who are not just apathetic about their faith, but have actively rejected it.

The issue is somewhat neglected because it’s not usually perceptible on the coasts and in the larger cities, but the almost complete absence of overt atheism is striking at all levels of US public life, even in cosmopolitan areas.

This week, Barack Obama was invited to speak at the 60th National Prayer Breakfast, an interfaith gathering which every president since Eisenhower has attended. In the history of Congress, on the other hand, there has only been one avowed atheist, Pete Stark, who has represented ultra-liberal Oakland in California since 1973 but only acknowledged he did not believe in a supreme being in 2007. Even he is a member of the non-doctrinal Unitarian Church, prefers to refer to himself as “non-theist” rather than atheist, and refused to be interviewed for this piece. This compares with at least six openly homosexual representatives.

As leading American public atheist Sam Harris sums it up, being a member of the godless club is “basically the worst thing you can be in terms of having a political life, incurring the judgment of strangers”. A Gallup poll last year showed that, while 9 per cent of Americans would not vote for a Jewish presidential candidate, 22 per cent wouldn’t support a Mormon and 32 per cent would not vote for a gay or lesbian candidate, 49 per cent would refuse to back an atheist for president.

Still, I found that even some New Yorkers, Bostonians and Washingtonians didn’t think there was much problem with being an atheist in their country. Until, that is, I told them a few stories. Like that of Harry Purdy, born in Manchester, the son of an American GI father he did not know. A year after the US government opened up its records, the then 46-year-old stepped off the plane at Louisville Airport, Kentucky in May 1991 and became the first of the lost GI babies to be reunited with his father. Purdy eventually took up American citizenship and moved over to live in 1993.

“It was a good thing I met him for the first time,” he told me when we met at a roadside restaurant near his home, “but this is Kentucky, this is the Bible Belt. I’m an atheist.” One by one, members of his new family turned against him because of his lack of belief. Harry doesn’t see any of his American family any more. “The last one I saw was my cousin, Ronnie. Every time he invites me over to dinner, he turns to religion. Last time I saw him, I didn’t back out, I took him full on.

“I’ve been told things like ‘I hope you have an accident, die and go to hell.’ So that’s what I’ve been up against.”

Friends have rejected him. “I used to be a good running friend with somebody who doesn’t live far from here. I mentioned on one occasion that I was an atheist and I’ve never seen him again … I came here knowing this was the Bible Belt, but I didn’t realise it was a more like a totalitarian Christian society: you’re either one of them or you’re not and there’s no in between. So I’ve learnt this lesson, to keep it to myself as much as possible.”

From the outside, keeping your views to yourself may not seem such a problem. But this is only if you think that it’s easy to live hiding who you really are from almost everyone around you, even close family. Take Matt Elder, who lives in Festus, Missouri (pop. 11,602). When I met him in a downtown St Louis diner, he came across as a cheerful, friendly guy, not someone living under a kind of persecution. “They’re not going to cut me off or throw me to the wolves,” he says of his Christian family and in-laws. But if Elder is typical of the trying-to-keep-their-heads-down atheists scattered around the Bible Belt, then his story shows that none of them has it easy.

Elder says with a smile that when he goes out wearing his black T-shirt with its large scarlet A – the symbol of the atheist Out Campaign inspired by Richard Dawkins – “you’ll see mothers bring their children a little closer and step a little quickly away”. Elder is not militant and tries to be as accommodating as he can without being a hypocrite. “I would go to church with my wife about every week, just for community. But now, I don’t go because there’s really weird conflicts.” Weirdest of all is his regular appearance on the weekly prayer list. “There are times when people stand up and say stuff out loud to every­one else, and my wife did that while I was there.” I asked him what she said, and his paraphrase was: “My husband no longer believes in God and I’m scared for him and my family.” No wonder Elder feels that now at the church “there’s a target on my back”.

To dismiss this as no big deal would be to underestimate the role of churches in small-town America. “Life pretty much revolves around the churches,” says Johnson of her experiences in Texas. In her local Rains county (pop. 9,139), there are 31, of which 17 are Baptist. If you don’t belong to one, you aren’t part of the community, and there are few secular alternatives.

. . .

Churches are also the main hubs for volunteer work, which is much more central to life in the welfare-state free America than it is in Europe. As another of America’s leading public atheists, the philosopher Daniel Dennett, put it to me, “The sad truth is that in many parts of the country, if you want to join forces with your neighbours and do something good, and you look around for an organisation that will help you do that, that’s the churches.” Matt Elder, for example, used to go on mission trips to help build houses for poor people in Mexico, and “would go again in a heartbeat”. But now it would just be too difficult. “You don’t quite belong as you did. It’s kind of a lonely feeling.”

Psychotherapist Marlene Winell, who practises in Berkeley, California, specialises in “recovery from harmful religion” and advocates religious trauma syndrome as a psychological diagnosis. “There are so many places in the US that are just saturated with religion. Everything is interwoven – their families, their schools, their business – so that if you were not part of the club, part of the group, you get ostracised and people go through really horrible experiences of not belonging any more.” If that sounds like the experience of leaving a cult, perhaps that’s because, as Winell argues, “in its raw form, fundamentalist Christianity that believes that the Bible is the word of God is basically a giant cult.”

It was certainly the case that when I talked to several atheists together, sessions ended up feeling like self-help groups. In Dallas, five of them took turns to list examples of the constant pressures of living in a religious society. One was a businesswoman in Plano, a city that’s part of the Dallas-Fort Worth metropolis and was ranked as the fifth most conservative in America by the Bay Area Center for Voting Research. She insists that, if she came out, she would lose her business. “I’ve worked for years to get these people to trust me, to want to do business with me.” So she constantly has to bite her tongue when Plano City Council opens its meetings with prayers, which it does in defiance of the constitutional separation of church and state.

That separation reflects the strange historical paradox of American religiosity: why is it that religion is both at the heart of the nation and legally excluded from its centres of power? The answer is that religious freedom was the reason why the puritan Pilgrim Fathers boarded the Mayflower in 1620 in the first place. They were followed by other nonconformists wanting to escape countries whose established churches made it difficult for people of other denominations to thrive. It was precisely because the religious rights of individuals were deemed so important that most were determined to ensure that the United States government should have no role in determining the beliefs of its citizens. The only mention of religion in the 1787 Constitution was the clause “no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.” In 1791, its first Amendment declares “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof”.

The strict separation of church and state has not, however, stopped many seeing America as a Christian nation. Many Christians campaign for both prayer and the teaching of creationism in schools. One of the most famous legal fights over the latter was the 1925 “Scopes Monkey Trial”, in which a Tennessee biology teacher, John Scopes, taught evolution in violation of state law. It wasn’t until 1967 that the Supreme Court deemed such laws unconstitutional because they breached the first amendment. Other legal disputes are still being fought over monuments such as crosses and the Ten Commandments on publicly owned land.

Despite what looks like a clear constitutional ban on religious discrimination, atheists face problems in many areas of public life, including the military. A woman in the Marines, who has to remain anonymous, says that although chapel and prayer were technically optional, “it was frowned upon” to opt out. In Iraq, chaplains would come into the bunkers and say “bow your heads and pray”. Everyone on the base would receive a prayer through a daily email. Her real problems came at the end of her first tour of duty. “We killed a lot of people,” she said. When she got back she had “a really hard time dealing with it” and “got really bad into alcohol”. But when she asked for help, she was sent to the chaplain, even though she said she didn’t believe in God.

The most extraordinary story I heard was from a woman in Tuscaloosa county, Alabama. She grew up in nearby Lamar county, raised in the strict Church of Christ, where there is no music with worship and you can’t dance. She says her family love her and are proud of her, but “I’m not allowed to be an atheist in Lamar County”. What is astonishing is that she can be pretty much anything else. “Being on crack, that was OK. As long as I believed in God, I was OK.” So, for example, “I’m not allowed to babysit. I have all these cousins who need babysitters but they’re afraid I’ll teach them about evolution, and I probably would.” I couldn’t quite believe this. She couldn’t babysit as an atheist, but she could when she was on crack? “Yes.” I laughed, but it is hard to think of anything less funny.

Given all of this, you might think followers of other religions, such as Muslims and Jews, would be just as threatening. But that does not seem to be so. “People might not like the Buddhists and Mormons but at least they feel like they’re people who believe in a higher power and that confirms their beliefs,” says Johnson. “But somebody like an atheist, it just throws their beliefs into their face.”

David Silverman, president of American Atheists, concurs: “We challenge the whole concept that you can’t be good without God. We challenge the idea that religion is important in the first place, and that really makes them uncomfortable.”

. . .

Data backs up anecdote. A now famous University of Minnesota study concluded that Americans ranked atheists lower than Muslims, recent immigrants, gays and lesbians and other minority groups in “sharing their vision of American society”. Nearly 48 per cent said they “would disapprove if my child wanted to marry a member of this group” (many more than the next most unpopular category, Muslims, at 33.5 per cent). No wonder atheist groups talk of modelling their campaigns on the civil rights, gay and women’s liberation movements. It is not that they claim their persecution is on the same level but that they suggest the way forward requires a combination of organising and consciousness-raising. “We want people to realise that some of their best friends are atheists, some of their doctors, and lawyers and fire chiefs and all the rest of them are atheists,” says Dennett.

Not everyone agrees that this is the way to go. The neuroscientist Sam Harris is one of America’s best-known atheists; his 2004 book, The End of Faith, sold over half a million copies. He agrees that the situation for atheists is “analogous to being gay and in the closet for many people”, and it is striking that virtually every atheist I spoke to talked the language of being “out” or “in the closet”. Nevertheless, Harris argues “it’s a losing game to trumpet the cause of atheism and try to rally around this variable politically. I’ve supported that in the past, I support those organisations, I understand why they do that. But, in the end, the victim group identity around atheism is the wrong strategy. It’s like calling yourself a non-astrologer. We simply don’t need the term.”

Whatever the solution, ignorance does appear to be a large part of the problem. Elder knows of no atheists other than those in a group that meets up a 45-minute drive from where he works. Johnson has two kids in the local school and is as active in the community as a non-churchgoer can be, a volunteer for the library and a board member for the Boy Scouts (even though she feels their strong religiosity is presenting problems for her son’s progression through its ranks). Still, she says, “I’ve been here 10 years now, and don’t know anybody in the whole county who’s an atheist.”

A report from the Pew Research Center last November showed that 53 per cent of Americans say it is necessary to believe in God to be moral. That is one reason why many are afraid of coming out, to the extent that both American Atheists and the American Humanist Association (AHA) will, on request, send mailings to members under plain covers. Roy Speckhardt, executive director of the AHA, says that even some of the committed rationalists who work in their Washington offices tell family that they work for a “humanitarian group”.

Could it be that they are too afraid? “Before Breaking the Spell came out,” says Dennett of his new book, “a lot of people advised me that I was going to have to go into hiding, or have bodyguards, unlist my phone number and all this. And I didn’t know that they weren’t right. A few months after the book came out, it was very clear that they were wrong.”

There’s another reason why atheists might be better off out than in. Researching his PhD, the sociologist Chris Garneau of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln found that, although people who self-identify as atheists are more likely to experience stigma than other seculars, such as agnostics and humanists, those who are out are significantly less likely to report psychological distress than those who struggle to keep their dissent silent.

. . .

Things could be starting to get better for atheists in America. Both Speckhardt and Silverman claim that the number of people who don’t believe in God in the US has more or less doubled over the past decade, with even faster growth among the young. Validating that claim is difficult, in part because the word “atheism” is poison. The American Religious Identification Survey 2008 reckoned that about 12 per cent of Americans were atheist or agnostic, though only 0.7 per cent self-identified as atheist and only 2.3 per cent said there was no such thing as God. Surveys do agree, however, that atheism is on the rise, albeit from a very low base.

What’s driving this change? The success of the “new atheists” has certainly had an effect. Books by the ironically-named “Four Horsemen” – Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins and the late Christopher Hitchens – have all been New York Times best-sellers, with sales in the hundreds of thousands. As Speckhardt says, this has “raised the profile quite a bit”. Publicity campaigns – such as the Metroplex Atheists’ “Good without God” bus adverts in Dallas-Fort Worth, the “No God? No Problem!” billboards by the AHA, and the American Atheists’ more pugnacious ones with “You know they’re all scams” printed alongside symbols of the leading religions – have also generated “millions of dollars of free publicity”, according to Speckhardt.

High-profile legal challenges to cases of religious discrimination have also gained a lot of attention. The AHA, for instance, set up the Appignani Humanist Legal Center (AHLC) five years ago, employing a staff attorney and calling on the services of about 30 pro bono attorneys, while the Freedom From Religion Foundation and American Atheists also use court actions to bring attention to cases. For instance, the AHLC won a settlement for a Southwestern Community College teacher who was fired for allegedly telling his class that the story of Adam and Eve should not be taken literally.

When it comes to identifying the main cause of atheism’s recent growth, most people agree. “It’s all about the internet,” says Silverman. “The reason that atheism is on the rise is because there is no way that a person who is an atheist can think they’re alone any more. When I was growing up, I was the only atheist I knew. I had to get on my bike, ride to the public library and take out the one atheist book that they had in the whole library: The Case Against God by George Smith. Now any atheist can go on Facebook or Myspace and find literally millions of friends.”

Johnson can testify to the power of the web. “I found the East Texas atheist website, and through that the Fellowship of Freethought, the Dallas atheists, the Plano atheists and all these different other groups and I’m like, ‘oh, I’m not alone’ … Just knowing that there are 400-plus people at least, maybe thousands, an hour and a half from here that have similar beliefs is enough that I don’t feel isolated.”

There is still, however, a reluctance for many to come out. “Other than [Stark] we know of at least two dozen other atheists in Congress that just aren’t willing to admit it,” says Speckhardt, a number almost identical to that given to me by Silverman. “They feel that it will be political suicide for them, that they wouldn’t get re-elected or they couldn’t get any of their bills passed. We’ve got to work hard to change that feeling out there.”

That may not be an impossible task, but it certainly looks like a very hard one. Meanwhile, the best hope for America’s atheists is that more people come to understand the message that one man posted on a sign outside his Florida home after he came out as an atheist and all his formerly friendly neighbours, apart from a Muslim family, stopped talking to him: “I’ve been an atheist all my life. Last year I was a nice guy.”