My friend Nick Frankel has just brought out a new edition of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray.  It’s creating quite a buzz since Nick’s new edition restores quite a few sexually charged passages that were suppressed by Wilde’s Victorian editors.

Surprising that it’s taken this long to restore this material.  Check out this interview in which Nick, Associate Professor of English at Virginia Commonwealth University, explains why Wilde’s original editors cut out the homoerotic material that he’s now restored, and offers a fascinating discussion of the social and political context that legitimated the persecution of Wilde and other queers in late Victorian Britain.

I’m spending a week in Turin, Italy, teaching a short seminar on “American Disasters” in the M.A. course at the Università di Torino.  Here’s a copy of the syllabus.

During the evenings, I’ve been walking the city.  It’s a truly beautiful place, filled with nineteenth century arches and arcades.  At this time of year, the city is also full of light displays.  Here’s a brief video of the city of lights:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ohxw_r1kTxs]

I’m in Austin, Texas visiting family.  It’s hot as hell here, but so far the forests aren’t burning down as they are in Russia.  Austin is a pretty progressive town, with a very forward thinking municipal energy company that does a pretty good job of encouraging people to switch to renewable energy sources.  My parents actually had to enter a lottery to get the right to buy wind power from the city – shows how popular it is!  And TX has some of the biggest wind farms in the country.

Nonetheless, people live like they’re in outer space here during the summer.  It’s over 100 degrees Fahrenheit every day in August, and everything is air conditioned.

Signs of awareness of the environmental crisis are not hard to find, though.  I recently went to a show at the Austin Museum of Art.  Called “Running the Numbers,” it focused on the work of the photographer Chris Jordan.  He was apparently a corporate lawyer whose work included defending oil companies until he had a kind of conversion experience and became a photographer focusing on the mammoth piles of detritus produced by our culture.  He began by simply photographing junk yards piled high with used automobile tires and similar objects.

His work has, however, evolved in far more interesting directions recent.  In “Running the Numbers,” digital photomontage images reference famous images from art history such as Seurat’s “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte” and Van Gogh’s “Skeleton of a Skull with Burning Cigarette”.  If you click your computer mouse on these images, however, the computer zooms in to reveal that they’re made of hundreds of thousands (and sometimes millions) of smaller objects – aluminum cans in the case of the Seurat image and cigarette boxes in the case of the Van Gogh.  Each image exemplifies a statistic – in the case of the Seurat, 106,000 cans, equal to the number consumed every 30 seconds in the U.S. Very clever – it even comes out better on the computer than in the gallery since one’s eyes simply can’t zoom down to the scale obtainable through the computer.

The museum did a great job of contextualizing the show.  We arrived in the middle of the day and were given a tour by a very knowledgeable young intern who had been present when Jordan came to introduce the show, so we were able to ask critical questions about Jordan’s intentions, references, and impact.  The museum also provided a table filled with books dealing with similar topics, including a new publication by the amazing Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky on the incredibly timely subject of the oil industry.

Burtynsky’s images in this book are, in many ways, far more traditional than Jordan’s work – building as they do on longstanding practices of landscape painting and photography as well as the minimalism of Bernd and Hilda Becher.  But Burtynsky’s work evinces far less of a sense of awe at the physical structures created by industrial modernity and far more of a sense of dread at the horrendous waste streams we produce.  For me, the most powerful images in Burtynsky’s book are the ones at the very end, the ones grouped under the (perhaps wishful) heading “the end of oil.”

Going to a show like this is in many ways quite depressing.  Burtynsky’s overwhelming vistas of waste and Jordan’s even more mind- and soul-numbing aggregations of microscopic objects that illustrate death-dealing habits of mass consumption leave one feeling overwhelmed, desperate, and perhaps even numbed.  But at least there’s some acknowledgment here of the crisis of our times.  Better this than simply sticking our collective heads in the sand.

I just read a very upsetting post on the website of Triple Canopy, a very interesting online mixed-media journal.  On the site I found a link to a talk given by Roger Hodge, a friend from my college days who had a mercurial rise at the tender age of 37 to the editorship of Harper’s Magazine.  I was very happy for him, particularly since I remember a conversation when he was thinking of moving out to Arizona to edit some sports magazine.  Of course, I was also pretty envious.

Roger ascended into what passes for the stratosphere in media circles four years ago.  Watching his presentation at Duke’s Center for Documentary Studies, I learned that he’s recently been given the sack.  I’m terribly sad for him, although I imagine he’ll land on his feet given his eminence as an ex-editor of Harper’s.

In addition, however, Roger’s talk suggested that we should all we worried about the state of journalism.  According to Roger, his recent fate is indicative of and of a piece with the broader decline in journalism.  As he puts it, journalists made the terrible mistake of training their readers to expect writing for free, and now their occupation is disappearing since there are no viable sources of funding.  Roger reels off some hair-raising statistics, including the fact that circulation is down 20% over the last two years at all the magazines that allow auditing, and that’s on top of a 10% decline the previous year.  This terrible collapse began in earnest, Roger argues, in 2006.

It’s not clear what the solution is.  Even someone in such a powerful position as Roger, editor at one of the two or three most significant venues for serious long-form journalism in the U.S., seems to have no answer.  In fact, not only does he have no answer, but he seems incredibly, painfully pessimistic about the future.  Efforts by newspapers and magazines to set up paywalls are doomed, he argues, since people are now habituated to reading journalism for free.  The only way journalists can survive today is by writing books, one of the only forms of writing which people are still willing to buy.

Given this situation, it seems to me that institutions like universities are going to be one of the only sources where support for journalism is going to be found – at least in the U.S.  The goal in the long term should I think be to push for state subvention along the lines of most major European nations, even if this seems like a pipe dream in this haven of neoliberalism.  Without such a step, the danger is that journalists are going to become like poets in the U.S. today, whose vocation is no longer viable economically and who are totally dependent on teaching in academia in order to survive.

Anyway, here’s Roger’s talk:

For a far less pessimistic take, check out this interview with the editor of The Guardian, a paper which is held in a trust and is therefore subsidized.