<p>I thought it was admiration.</p>
<p>On the artificially enhanced vs. immediately understandable argument:</p>
<p>I’m pretty sure it was “artificially enhanced”. The author spoke very clearly about the computer programs that helped illustrate the images of the planets, and the bit of evidence that everyone is claiming solidifies immediately understandable as the correct answer is the line about the maps having been able to be “instantly interpreted”. My feeling is that sure, while they may be instantly interpreted by the reader they are NOT immediately understood. To understand something and to interpret it are two very different things, are they not?</p>
<p>What did those of you put on the art history passage when explaining why the author put “Even though not all artists had a flock of sheep…” (words to the effect); I put it was to downplay instruction…</p>
<p>Guys, find the passages.
I found one:
“He makes a list of all the places he has to go, circling the buildings on his campus map. When he is alone in his room, he types out a written request notifying the registrar’s office of his name change, providing examples of his former and current signatures side by side. He gives these documents to a secretary, along with a copy of the change-of-name form. He tells his freshmen counselor about his name change; he tells the person in charge of processing his student ID and his library card. He corrects the error in stealth, not bothering to explain to Jonathan and Brandon what he’s so busy doing all day, and then suddenly it is over. After so much work, it is no work at all. By the time the upperclassmen arrive and classes begin, he’s paved the way for a whole university to call him Nikhil: students and professors and TAs and girls at parties. Nikhil registers for his first four classes: Intro to the History of Art, Medieval History, a semester of Spanish, Astronomy to fulfill his hard science requirement. At the last minute he registers for a drawing class in the evenings. He doesn’t tell his parents about the drawing class, something they would consider frivolous at this stage of his life, in spite of the fact that his own grandfather was an artist. They are already distressed that he hasn’t settled on a major profession. Like the rest of the Bengali friends, his parents expect him to be, if not engineer, then a doctor, a lawyer, an economist at the very least. These were the fields that brought them to America, his father repeatedly reminds him, the professions that have earned them security and respect.
But now that he’s Nikhil, it’s easier to ignore his parents, to tune out their concerns and pleas. With relief, he types his name at the top of his freshman papers. He reads the telephone messages his suitemates leave for Nikhil on assorted scraps in their rooms. He opens up a checking account, writes his new name into course books. “Me Illamo Nikhil,” he says in his Spanish class. It is as Nikhil, that first semester, that he grows a goatee, starts smoking at parties, and while writing papers and before exams, discovers Brian Eno and Elvis Costello and Charlie Parker. It is as Nikhil that he takes Metro-North into Manhattan one weekend with Jonathan and gets himself a fake ID that allows him to visit the bars.
There is only one complication: he doesn’t feel like Nikhil. Not yet. Part of the problem is that the people who now know him as Nikhil have no idea that he used to be Gogol. They know him only in the present, not at all in the past. But after eighteen years of Gogol, two months of Nikhil feel scant, inconsequential. At times he feels is if he’s cast himself in a play, acting the part of twins, indistinguishable to the naked eye yet fundamentally different. At times, he still feels his old name, painfully and without warning, the way his front tooth had unbearably throbbed in recent weeks after a filling, threatening for an instant to sever from his gums when he drank coffee, or iced water and once when he was riding in an elevator. He fears being discovered, having the whole charade somehow unravel, and in nightmares his files are exposed, his original name printed on the front page of the Yale Daily News. Once, he signs his old name by mistake on a credit card slip at the college bookstore. Occasionally he has to hear Nikhil three times before he answers.
Even more startling is when those who normally call him Gogol refer to him as Nikhil. For example, when his parents call on Saturday mornings, if Brandon or Jonathon happens to pick up the phone, they ask if Nikhil is there. Though he has asked his parents to do precisely this, the fact of it troubles him, making him feel in that instant that he is not related to them, not their child. “Please come to our home with Nikhil one weekend,” Ashima says to his roommates when she and Ashoke visit campus during parents weekend in October, the suite hastily cleared of bottles, ashtrays. The substitution sounds wrong to Gogol, correct but off-key, the way it sounds when his parents speak English to him instead of Bengali. Stranger still is when one of his parents addresses him, in front of his new friends, as Nikhil directly: “Nikhil, show us the buildings where you have your classes,” his father suggests. Later that evening, out to dinner with Jonathan at a restaurant on Chapel Street, Ashima slips, asking, “Gogol, have you decided yet what your major will be?” Though Jonathan, listening to something his father is saying, doesn’t hear, Gogol feels helpless, annoyed yet unable to blame his mother, caught in the mess he’s made.”</p>
<p>On the artifically enhanced v. immediately understandable argument, I personally put immediately understandable since the author stated that through the photos every bit of detail was immediately evident.</p>
<p>i agree with immediately understandable. I believe that the author talked about computer images and chart a few sentences later; for that section he was talking about real photos not computer made images.</p>
<p>nobodys talking about the indian ceremonial passage…i had a tough time with that. what was the question about the final sentence???</p>
<p>i have already posted the quote the passage used about giotto from vasari’ biography
but here it is again
<a href=“http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/basis/vasari/vasari1.htm[/url]”>http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/basis/vasari/vasari1.htm</a>
extra stuff is included to understand context of quote</p>
<p>Now in the year 1276, in the country of Florence, about fourteen miles from the city, in the village of Vespignano, there was born to a simple peasant named Bondone a son, to whom he gave the name of Giotto, and whom he brought up according to his station. And when he had reached the age of ten years, showing in all his ways though still childish an extraordinary vivacity and quickness of mind, which made him beloved not only by his father but by all who knew him, Bondone gave him the care of some sheep. And he leading them for pasture, now to one spot and now to another, was constantly driven by his natural inclination to draw on the stones or the ground some object in nature, or something that came into his mind. One day Cimabue, going on business from Florence to Vespignano, found Giotto, while his sheep were feeding, drawing a sheep from nature upon a smooth and solid rock with a pointed stone, having never learnt from any one but nature. Cimabue, marvelling at him, stopped and asked him if he would go and be with him. And the boy answered that if his father were content he would gladly go. Then Cimabue asked Bondone for him, and he gave him up to him, and was content that he should take him to Florence. There in a little time, by the aid of nature and the teaching of Cimabue, the boy not only equalled his master, but freed himself from the rude manner of the Greeks, and brought back to life the true art of painting, introducing the drawing from nature of living persons, which had not been practised for two hundred years; or at least if some had tried it, they had not succeeded very happily. Giotto painted among others, as may be seen to this day in the chapel of the Podest</p>
<p>lilteapot–that repetition in ceremonial texts is NOT an aid to memory (e)</p>
<p>in the passage about space/mercator, did you guys say that mercator’s stuff was applicable to modern technology or something like that? something with the word modern in it.</p>
<p>Another:
The question “Why have there been no great women artists?” is simply the top
tenth of an iceberg of misinterpretation and misconception; beneath lies a vast dark bulk
of shaky idees recues about the nature of art and its situational concomitants, about the
nature of human abilities in general and of human excellence in particular, and the role
that the social order plays in all of this. While the “woman problem” as such
may be a pseudo-issue, the misconceptions involved in the question “Why have there
been no great women artists?” points to major areas of intellectual obfuscation
beyond the specific political and ideological issues involved in the subjection of women.
Basic to the question are many naive, distorted, uncritical assumptions about the making
of art in general, as well as the making of great art. These assumptions, conscious or
unconscious, link together such unlikely superstars as Michelangelo and van Gogh, Raphael
and Jackson Pollock under the rubric of “Great”-an honorific attested to by the
number of scholarly monographs devoted to the artist in question-and the Great Artist is,
of course, conceived of as one who has “Genius”; Genius, in turn, is thought of
as an atemporal and mysterious power somehow embedded in the person of the Great Artist.’
Such ideas are related to unquestioned, often unconscious, meta-historical premises that
make Hippolyte Taine’s race-milieu-moment formulation of the dimensions of historical
thought seem a model of sophistication. But these assumptions are intrinsic to a great
deal of art-historical writing. It is no accident that the crucial question of the
conditions generally productive of great art has so rarely been investigated, or that
attempts to investigate such general problems have, until fairly recently, been dismissed
as unscholarly, too broad, or the province of some other discipline, like sociology. To
encourage a dispassionate, impersonal, sociological, and institutionally oriented approach
would reveal the entire romantic, elitist, individual-glorifying, and monograph-producing
substructure upon which the profession of art history is based, and which has only
recently been called into question by a group of younger dissidents.</p>
<p>Underlying the question about woman as artist, then, we find the myth of the Great
Artist-subject of a hundred monographs, unique, godlike-bearing within his person since
birth a mysterious essence, rather like the golden nugget in Mrs. Grass’s chicken soup,
called Genius or Talent, which, like murder, must always out, no matter how unlikely or
unpromising the circumstances.</p>
<p>The magical aura surrounding the representational arts and their creators has, of course,
given birth to myths since the earliest times. Interestingly enough, the same magical
abilities attributed by Pliny to the Greek sculptor Lysippos in antiquity–the mysterious
inner call in early youth, the lack of any teacher but Nature herself–is repeated as late
as the nineteenth century by Max Buchon in his biography of Courbet. The supernatural
powers of the artist as imitator, his control of strong, possibly dangerous powers, have
functioned historically to set him off from others as a godlike creator, one who creates
Being out of nothing. The fairy tale of the discovery by an older artist or discerning
patron of the Boy Wonder, usually in the guise of a lowly shepherd boy, has been a
stock-in-trade of artistic mythology ever since Vasari immortalized the young Giotto,
discovered by the great Cimabue while the lad was guarding his flocks, drawing sheep on a
stone; Cimabue, overcome with admiration for the realism of the drawing, immediately
invited the humble youth to be his pupil. Through some mysterious coincidence, later
artists including Beccafumi, Andrea Sansovino, Andrea del Castagno, Mantegna, Zurbardn,
and Goya were all discovered in similar pastoral circumstances. Even when the young Great
Artist was not fortunate enough to come equipped with a flock of sheep, his talent always
seems to have manifested itself very early, and independent of any external encouragement:
Filippo Lippi and Poussin, Courbet and Monet are all reported to have drawn caricatures in
the margins of their schoolbooks instead of studying the required subjects-we never, of
course, hear about the youths who neglected their studies and scribbled in the margins of
their notebooks without ever becoming anything more elevated than department-store clerks
or shoe salesmen. The great Michelangelo himself, according to his biographer and pupil,
Vasari, did more drawing than studying as a child. So pronounced was his talent, reports
Vasari, that when his master, Ghirlandalo, absented himself momentarily from his work in
Santa Maria Novella, and the young art student took the opportunity to draw “the
scaffolding, trestles, pots of paint, brushes and the apprentices at their tasks” in
this brief absence, he did it so skillfully that upon his return the master exclaimed:
“This boy knows more than I do.”</p>
<p>As is so often the case, such stories, which probably have some truth in them, tend both
to reflect and perpetuate the attitudes they subsume. Even when based on fact, these myths
about the early manifestations of genius are misleading. It is no doubt true, for example,
that the young Picasso passed all the examinations for entrance to the Barcelona, and
later to the Madrid, Academy of Art at the age of fifteen in but a single day, a feat of
such difficulty that most candidates required a month of preparation. But one would like
to find out more about similar precocious qualifiers for art academies who then went on to
achieve nothing but mediocrity or failure–in whom, of course, art historians are
uninterested–or to study in greater detail the role played by Picasso’s art-professor
father in the pictorial precocity of his son. What if Picasso had been born a girl? Would
Senor Ruiz have paid as much attention or stimulated as much ambition for achievement in a
little Pablita?</p>
<p>What is stressed in all these stories is the apparently miraculous, nondetermined, and
asocial nature of artistic achievement; this semireligious conception of the artist’s role
is elevated to hagiography in the nineteenth century, when art historians, critics, and,
not least, some of the artists themselves tended to elevate the making of art into a
substitute religion, the last bulwark of higher values in a materialistic world. The
artist, in the nineteenth-century Saints’ Legend, struggles against the most determined
parental and social opposition, suffering the slings and arrows of social opprobrium like
any Christian martyr, and ultimately succeeds against all odds generally, alas, after his
death-because from deep within himself radiates that mysterious, holy effulgence: Genius.
Here we have the mad van Gogh, spinning out sunflowers despite epileptic seizures and
near-starvation; Cezanne, braving paternal rejection and public scorn in order to
revolutionize painting; Gauguin throwing away respectability and financial security with a
single existential gesture to pursue his calling in the tropics; or Toulouse-Lautrec,
dwarfed, crippled, and alcoholic, sacrificing his aristocratic birthright in favor of the
squalid surroundings that provided him with inspiration.</p>
<p>Now no serious contemporary art historian takes such obvious fairy tales at their face
value. Yet it is this sort of mythology about artistic achievement and its concomitants
which forms the unconscious or unquestioned assumptions of scholars, no matter how many
crumbs are thrown to social influences, ideas of the times, economic crises, and so on.
Behind the most sophisticated investigations of great artists-more specifically, the
art-historical monograph, which accepts the notion of the great artist as primary, and the
social and institutional structures within which he lived and worked as mere secondary
“influences” or “background”-lurks the golden-nugget theory of genius
and the free-enterprise conception of individual achievement. On this basis, women’s lack
of major achievement in art may be formulated as a syllogism: If women had the golden
nugget of artistic genius then it would reveal itself. But it has never revealed itself.
O.E.D. Women do not have the golden nugget theory of artistic genius. If Giotto, the
obscure shepherd boy, and van Gogh with his fits could make it, why not women?</p>
<p>Lemonio, neither of those match what was used in the article, though.</p>
<p>oh crap,got that wrong. do you know the answer to the other question on indian memories and crap</p>
<p>uhh guys a vocab question;;;;</p>
<p>there was one that was like
compromised…coaleced
or
sythethized…crystalized <—is that one right?</p>
<p>please answer!</p>
<p>its not the article, its the quotes used…but looks like sky has found the article</p>
<p>i have found the geology article
[url=<a href=“http://www.uapress.arizona.edu/catalogs/dlg_show_excerpt.php?id=1269&title=The+Moon+and+the+Western+Imagination&subtitle=&author=Scott+L.+Montgomery]Excerpt[/url”>http://www.uapress.arizona.edu/catalogs/dlg_show_excerpt.php?id=1269&title=The+Moon+and+the+Western+Imagination&subtitle=&author=Scott+L.+Montgomery]Excerpt[/url</a>]</p>
<p>Habituated by my own geological training and knowledge, I was never quite prepared upon opening this New … Universe to encounter the faces of so many worlds, dangling in the black of space, their features available to the eye of instant interpretation. Within this book, each planet and moon had its accompanying map, composed of a computer-generated image that flattened its subject out on a single rectangular strip-the so-called Mercator projection. This, too, seemed interesting: a technique literally four hundred years old invented at the height of the early colonial era, the Age of Exploration, now being employed to make visible the most advanced geographies in a new age of discovery. Indeed, what might Mercator have thought were it suggested to him that his scheme would one day be used to plot landscapes so far from terrestrial in aspect as to reflect back, in their magnificent alienness, the very idea of an old and exhausted Earth?</p>
<p>this next paragraph supports my point too</p>
<p>Other surprises were yet to come. Staring at these maps, pondering the contour of their features, I became aware that their alien qualities had been reduced in a particular way. They had been made, in a sense, part of Earth itself. The possession came in a simple form: names. Shifting focus to these, I found each world coming into view in an entirely different way. If it is true (as Goethe once said) that every act of naming is a birth, a mapping of culture and history onto the world of things, then here indeed was a revolution in the skies. Here was an end to the Old World of the heavens, titled after the legends of Greece and Rome and the heroes of Occidental astronomy.</p>
<p>Synthesized and crystallized.</p>
<p>Hey. On Today’s SAT. There was a beautiful Passage from Zen Buddhist manual or something talking about living in the present, and people worry too much about houses, cars, money and preparing for the future that they forget about the moment. I Am trying to find that passage online but i can not! Can anyone post a link? It was just a lovely passage.</p>
<p>it was synthesized…crystallized.</p>
<p>are you sure it was crystallized?? does that mean converge? cuz coalesce seemed better</p>
<p>Since you found the geology one, can u find the ZEN one!? Puhleeeez?</p>
<p>Crystallize can mean to take on a definite/permanent form.</p>