The Gila Cliff Dwellings area is very nice –fun to go back and do some hiking. Might be good to stay at the
roberts lake hotel (kitchenette cabins) or spirit lake lodge, something like that. Not any other lodging in the Mimbres Valley. Hike near Lake Roberts called Purgatory Chasm sounds interesting.

Silver City didn’t seem great - reminds me of gallup - high plateau, but arid. There is a nice historic area, not terribly gentrified.

When Alatriste embarks on a commission to rescue a young converso woman from a convent/brothel, he is betrayed and trapped. He escapes, but Inigo is captured and delivered to the Inquisition as a sympathizer with Jews. The story of Alatriste’s struggle to free him touches on the fear-driven life of the Jewish conversos, never able to be Catholic enough for the Inquisition, and the lengths that men in power will go to protect their often spurious claims to purity of blood.

Perez-Reverte is a lyrical writer whose weakness is a grand send-up to an ultimately inconsequential tale, but this story escapes that in its details of the unwanted but unstinting love of a war-beaten man for a brave boy.

The first part of this story focuses on the childhood of a Chilean waif taken in by a childless woman and raised as her daughter. Small mysteries appear and are solved, and interesting characters keep things going, but where it all leads to is a tiresomely long paean to passionate adolescent love, obviously doomed by the incompatability of its victims, the waif Eliza and a smouldering young man. Allende is setting this up as a straw man, but her obvious pleasure in portraying passion undercuts her intentions.

The straw man begins his fall with Eliza’s decision to run away and follow her wandering lover to the California Gold Rush. The pace and interest of the novel picks up as a Chinese doctor shangaied onto a Chilean merchant ship helps Eliza survive the boat crossing and becomes her friend in California. Allende writes well about the Gold Rush and the wildness of this time, and creates a believable friendship between Eliza and the doctor, but the pace of her novel is increasingly clumsy as she tells stories from other protaganists and segues into pamphlateering about injustice and racism. The true story is Eliza’s growth away from adolescent fantasy toward self-reliance and her recognition of real love for her Chinese friend. This kept me going and was rewarding, but I felt a vague mistrust by the time it was told. Allende can’t resist a political lecture, and I began to think that the whole novel was in danger of becoming one.

A charming book that tells the last days of Pompeii through the eyes of a Roman engineer who oversees the aqueduct delivering water to resort towns in the shadow of Vesuvius. When earthquakes shake the hills and the stately aqueduct collapses, he works frantically to repair the damage and to understand what is happening. A famous letter of Pliny the Younger, the only eyewitness account of the eruption of Vesuvius, lays the groundwork for the story, crowned by a convincing and harrowing account of people caught in inescapable disaster. The young engineer and Pliny the Elder (the famed naturalist who died in the eruption) are the core of the story, both well drawn and likable. A minor mystery and details of the immense infrastructure of the aqueducts round out this enjoyable book.

Domesday Book, Connie Willis

A young academic researcher travels back in time to England in the Middle Ages and realizes with dawning horror that a mistake has delivered her to its first outbreak of plague. Her story in the past is a sweeping tale of death — the death of Kali, merciless and unsatiable, strewing bloated corpses across the land until all motion stops in a bloody tableau. But one small figure, protected by modern antibiotics, moves in the frozen landscape and the tableau dissolves into sorrow and despair. Unfortunately, the story in the future is laughable, with Willis showing an inability to understand science, academia, or the kind of world that might create time travel. Still, a book with a strong emotional heart.

Passage, by Connie Willis

Willis seems to be interested in death. In a modern hospital, research into near-death experiences leads to a drug that can simulate an NDE, and a young scientist tries to walk the edge of death with a notebook. The awed tales of tunnels and lost relatives haloed in light begin to reveal a strange undercurrent of fear, but this is not a horror story. Dr. Lander hopes to help the living with knowledge of death, and her story is surprisingly moving. When she finally passes through a light-filled door in her near-death journeys, she finds herself in a majestic and doomed world. In the last hours of a disaster, over and over, people signal desparately for help. When phones don’t work, they try radio. When radio doesn’t work, they try flares. Is that what our minds do when we are dying? Another book with a shoddy view of science and too much confusion in its convictions, but a haunting view of death nevertheless.

Iron Sunrise, by Charles Stross

Accelerando was too twitchy and disjointed for me, but this book has a much smoother narrative. Pluses: a fast-paced adventure story of galactic assassins, mind-controlled religious fanatics and the undercover agents that fight them. Minuses: a child in peril (almost always a cheap trick) and too many mindless lapses of intelligence in the cream of galactic security agents. I shouldn’t be able to read a book about super-agents and say, “You dummies! Even I wouldn’t have done that!”

Contemporary and Digital
Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago
Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles
Beinart collection of Surrealist Art
Museum of Digital Art - some very good.
The Museum of Modern Art, NYC
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

United States
National Gallery of Art - great online exhibits including Cezanne in Provence
Art Institute of Chicago’s Art Explorer
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
The Guggenheim
The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Albright-Knox Art Gallery
The Frick Collection, NYC
Cleveland Museum of Art
Hirschorn Museum, Washington
Detroit Institute of Arts
Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco
The Getty, Los Angeles
Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena
Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh
Cincinnati Art Museum

International
Tate Gallery, London
National Gallery, London
The Royal Collection, England
The Hermitage, St. Petersburg
Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna
Liechtenstein Museum, Vienna
The Louvre
MauritsHaus, Netherlands
National Galleries of Scotland
Prado Museum, Madrid
Staedel Museum, Frankfurt
Finnish National Gallery, Helsinki
German National Museum, Berlin
Glasgow Museums, Scotland
Kawamura Memorial Museum of Art, Japan

** Sites especially worth looking at within their categories

General art sites showing works of artists

World Artist Directory - Works by eclectic group of international artists, good and bad
A list of artist Webrings - Webrings are spotty, but sometimes good
Ask Art - Info about thousands of American Artists
**Art Renewal - Home of Bouguereau enthusiasts and a huge collection of historical realist paintings - most in the best resolution you’ll find on the internet

Painters of interest - still life

Xiao Xie - paints stacks of library books and newspapers. Can be seen at a number of galleries includingMetivier Gallery.
TR Colletta at camptongallery.com - Stylized still lives of old machinery, scientific equipment, toys.
Daniel Adel - paintings of cloth in motion
Michael Chapman - odd still lives of sorts with a 30s feel
Michael Grimaldi - occasional still lives of antique equipment mixed in with some nice portraiture
Steven Skollar - still lives of antique toys
Daniel Sprick - manages to give a new feel to traditional table-top still life — no small feat

Painters of interest - landscape/cityscape

Francis Livingston - Edward Hopper meets Diebenkorn

Painters of interest - portraiture

Odd Nerdrum - some odd portraits with a lot of character
Victory Wang - he makes skin out of more colors than I believed possible
Helene Knoop - a few unusual portraits are mixed in with a general Bougoureau (?) genre
Ray Caesar - this 3d artist makes macabre Lolitas on LSD. Disturbing, sometimes funny.

Painters of interest - abstract

Gregory Deane - vivid and beautifully textured

Illustration and Cartooning

Illustration and Cartooning blog
Another Illustration blog
Zoological art - an amazing collection of antique posters
Collection of antique Vogue Magazine covers
Flickr - gallery of mid-century illustration
Tales of Future Past - Scans of 30s and 40s sci fi magazine covers

Galleries - mostly figurative since I’ve been doing portraits and looking for help

Mesarts - a large group of artists, including Pat’s friend in Oakland
Wendt Gallery - includes Scott Burdick
Daylight Fine Arts - prints of Jeffrey Larson
Gandy Gallery - classic portrait artists like Sargent
Tirage Art - some figurative work and landscapes
Ann Long Fine Art - realists, scroll down to see images
Eleanor Ettinger - realists
Arcadia Fine Arts - includes Daniel Adel, painter of paper
Florence Academy of Arts - list of links to galleries
Forum Gallery - Modern figurative
Saatchi Gallery - a European physical and online gallery with a wide range of artists

Art Tutorials of interest

** Daniel Smith’s tutorial archives - their catalogs have had well illustrated and professional tutorials for years. Many are gathered here. The first place to look for advice.
**Scott Burdick’s demonstrations - Burdick is a great portrait artist and his website has several demonstrations.
**Vigee Lebrun’s advice on portraiture - The main part of this website is opinionated and full of formulaic ideas about art, but scroll down and you’ll find an excerpt about portrait painting from Vigee Lebrun (17th-18th century portraitist). Very interesting advice from a different time and approach. It had never occurred to me to pay such close attention to foreheads.
Links to art tutorials including Scott Burdick
Vermeer’s Palette
A group of art tutorials including an interesting one about using Scanners and Computers in Art
William Whitaker’s website - an accomplished traditional realist includes some tutorials including one of the few good ones about grisaille
Links to art tutorials and info about a realist atelier
**About.com’s painting info site - with some old master’s info and other eclectic stuff, including a Page of links to portrait sites
Alexei Antonov’s website - an egomaniac realist, but has a lesson on grisaille of a rose. Grisaille info is hard to find.
Nancy Doyle - several art tutorials, some of which are mostly advertising, but a decent one on art materials
**Art Q&A site - a large site with good info under Painting and Paints, emphasis on technical info
Foundations in Grisaille - Colored pencil demo of an intricate grisaille teapot
An artist’s color theory
Oil painting techniques - Portraits and other subjects
**Wet Canvas - huge website of art forums, including Color Theory and Luminous Skin and Limited Pallette and Studio photography lighting techniques
Figure drawing tutorials
History of Painting Techniques - includes old master techniques - shadows, flesh tones.
Indirect painting info
Indirect Painting technique - Example is rocks under water
Art Show - Links to a number of painting, pastel, drawing, digital tutorials including some Daniel Smith
Photographing your artwork
Real Color Wheel - a huge, rambling website including medium yellowing, complementary pigment lists, and a rather obscure main menu

Portait artist websites - these are mainly commercial portrait painters who pose people, and I find their work too stiff or pretty usually, but I linked these for something of interest.

**Masters of Portrait art - the biggies - Kinstler, Greene, Sanden, Knox, Sherr, Silverman
**Portrait commission group in London - of all these sites, this includes the most experimental portrait artists (mixed in with traditional)
**Stroke of Genius - largest collection of American portrait artists I’ve found
Andreeva Gallery portrait artists - New Mexico
John Singer Sargent online
Russell Fecchion - Tucson artist
**Scott Burdick and Susan Lyon - Very fine realist painters, a generous website with tutorials
Ann Kullberg - colored pencil
Daniel Greene - one of the biggie, New York Subway paintings
Simone Bingemer - a stylized super-realist, pastels and drawing. Her drawing is somewhat like mine, though more prettified I think
Steven Mickle - Pastel only, largely children. Photographic style
Robert Hartshorn Not a style I like, but some interesting lighting
Bart Lindstrom - one of the big names
Linda Vise - somewhat stylized. I don’t like her that much, but I like painting white too.
Vincent Chiaramonte - I like the old veteran, the rest are too posed.
Chris Saper - Phoenix artist, writer. Tends to be overheated but facile
Marvin Mattelson - there’s something austere about him that I like sometimes.
Ronald Sherr - see the pencil and pastel heads and very realistic portraits with abstract backgrounds
John Ennis - I only like a few.
Sergei Ostroverhy - very stylized super realist
Tony Ryder - Santa Fe classical realist, teacher
John Howard Sanden - author of portrait book, one of the biggies
Jan DolanStylized, good light
Gwenneth Barth - some good pastels
Morgan Weistling - Bougoureau follower to the max, has some demos
Cristina Troufa - unusual, stark portraits

Works of specific artists, non-portrait

Diego Rivera murals
Banksy - a stencil graffiti artist
Anamorphous street artist
More anamorphous street art

Pencil portrait sites

There are very few good ones I’ve found. Some of the artists above do pencil well.

Pencil Drawing Web Ring - lots of sites, sometimes fun to hunt through, but many bad ones.

Some other favorites, art or not

**Boingboing - a great site for curiosities of all kinds. Almost a new gem a day. Many of my oddest links were found here, including:
**The Museum of Regrettable Food and many other oddities of the 30s through 60s, including a collection of photos. Very funny commentary makes this the mate of the Museum of Bad Art. Go to Home page to see other subjects including The Institute of Official Cheer
**Museum of Bad Art - what can you say? This site might be considered mean-spirited, but it’s pretty funny.
Thrilling Wonder Blogspot - Large collection of interesting photos and graphics
World Best Websites - Links to a lot of good art museum sites as well as pick of the web designs. Lots of quality digital art sites
**The Demotivator Posters - antidote for work madness
Before and after logos - I like a lot of the Befores.The Afters are generally more corporate and polished - not always the best thing.
Proceeding of the Athanasius Kirtcher Society - has to be one of the weirdest sites I’ve found on boingboing, with an emphasis on antique instrumentation and oddities
**The Great Spaghetti Monster - I’m sure I spotted it myself in a tree
A really cool optical illusion
Dozens of panoramas including the Himalayas
Plime arts - always has some good links
**Dictionary.com’s word of the day archive - an indefagitable apologia for fungible but ineffable words. Don’t be a flaneur! Study words!

Art stores online

FramingSupplies.com - best prices on cut mats I’ve found - full line of Crescent mats, acid-free are $1.52 each for 16×20 if bought 4 each with minimum of $100. Frames are Designer Mouldings, a few Nielsen, and Framing Supply brand. I have had some trouble with orders - wrong frame profile or length, but they replaced it quickly. You still can’t beat their prices but be sure to order early and check the order carefully if you have a deadline.
Jerry’s Artarama - now has a Tempe store so you pay tax and shipping. shipping is pretty high, but prices are low.
Dick Blick - Not as cheap as Jerry’s, but has some different things. Now has M. Graham paints, but not as good prices as Art Purveyors
Art Purveyors - Full line of M. Graham (usually 50 percent off) and Silver brushes. Flat rate shipping is reasonable.
Digital Art Supplies - haven’t tried them, but recommended in a news
group.
Inkjetart.com - Great source of inks and papers and a lot of good info. Very prompt shipping.
Red River papers - Looks like average pricing on inks, and some good papers.

James Tiptree Jr. appeared on the science fiction scene in the late 60s with a string of disturbing and inventive short stories largely centered around sexual and reproductive roles. He seemed to come out of nowhere with a mature writing style and startling ideas, bringing psychology into a field given to space battles and robots. His interest in sexual issues and his obvious sympathy for women made him a showpiece in the science fiction community — the man who understands women — and he carried on colorful and intense letter relationships with Ursula le Guin and Joanna Russ among other stars of science fiction.

He was obsessively secretive about his identity, leading to persistent speculation and attempts to find him. Sleuthing by fans finally led to his exposure in 1976 as a seemingly quiet, ordinary, elderly woman living in Virginia. But Alice Sheldon was by no means ordinary. She was fiercely feminist but uneasy with women; highly intelligent; bipolar and hooked on multiple drugs to control (or intensify) her mood swings; sexually complex (it is too simple to say she was probably a lesbian) — and she was from a generation for which none of these were acceptable. She channelled childhood fears, attractions to women and obsessions with death into the explosion of James Tiptree’s stories, infusing them with lifelong interests in psychology, visual perception, military technology, mating cycles, sexual dynamics, journalism … by no means a complete list.

Her biographer, Julie Phillips, explores the many possible currents that came together in James Tiptree’s career, drawing heavily (and skillfully) on Sheldon’s unpublished letters, diaries, and writings. Alice Sheldon was born in 1915, the only daughter of highly accomplished and adoring parents (both traits proving oppressive in some ways to the young girl). Her parents were explorers who took their young daughter on several arduous treks through Africa, introducing her to enforced helplessness (a later source of rage), a child’s-eye view of death and casual killing, and teeming and alien biology. Sheldon’s mother particularly cast a long shadow over the young girl. She was a tough and capable explorer yet a supremely feminine socialite; the recognized writer of “women’s fiction,” adventure stories, and travelogues; a doting but subtly eviscerating mother. As a young woman Alice was looked upon as a promising visual artist, not a writer (unfortunately, very few of her paintings have survived). When she turned to writing, she had difficulty living up to her mother’s image and abandoned a number of projects. She found more success as a WAC in World War I and later as a photoanalyst for the CIA. She describes going into the army with great excitement at finding a world where women had power and competence, a reflection of her growing feminism and anger at the status of women.

Alice Sheldon seems to have been drawn to women throughout her life (describing some of these attractions quite graphically in her writings and expressing a desire to become an active lesbian late in her life in letters to Joanna Russ), but she found no way to live as a gay woman. She developed a pattern of attraction to unattainable and often doomed women (one went into an institution for alcoholics and another died of a septic abortion), perhaps fueling her constitutional inability to write a happy ending to a love story. As a young woman, she seems to have needed to think of herself as a man to some degree to make peace with her sexuality. Our cultural identification of masculinity with power evoked conflicting strains of longing and rage in her — she wished for the physical and social power of a man (and came to have a deep affinity for a male persona), yet she saw male power as oppressive and bitterly resented when it was used against her. She married twice, the first time proving disastrous and violent, the second time growing into an enduring and supportive if asexual marriage that was deeply important to her.

Alice Sheldon appears to have read science fiction since she was a young girl, probably starting with a 1929 issue of Weird Tales. (I wish Phillips had found more information about Sheldon’s thoughts on it, but there is unfortunate silence in this area. I found more in Meet Me at Infinity.) She started writing science fiction in 1966 at the age of 51 as a release from arduous work on her dissertation in psychology. James Tiptree was born on a whim when she looked for a pseudonym and found it in a brand of jam at Giant Foods.

Sheldon’s original reasons to use a pseudonym were understandable — she felt her academic career was too fragile to publish as Dr. Sheldon, and she certainly understood that her work would be taken far more seriously if it came from a man. But it also seems that she had a complex need for a male persona in order to develop as a writer and to acknowledge her darker perceptions. I suspect that all her emotional life was tied up with her ambiguous sexuality, and it felt unsafe to reveal it as a woman. Sheldon’s imagination broke open when she began to write as Tiptree, and he became far more important to her emotional life than any casual pseudonym could be.

While her first stories were light, under the shelter of Tiptree’s persona she turned to dark psychological themes she had considered all her life. She invented alien biologies with symbiotic sexes that hunt and destroy each other (”My Haploid Heart”). She conceived the chilling story of aliens destroying the human race by triggering violence inherent in male sexuality, forcing men to murder the women they have sex with (”The Screwfly Solution”). She wrote of a hideously ugly woman who chooses to live her life suspended in a tank while she animates the artificially grown body of a beautiful celebrity ( “The Girl Who Was Plugged In”). She wrote stories of encounters between humans and aliens with females as the dominant sex, stories of primitive creatures following instinctual mating cycles that are killing off their species, stories of humans drawn sexually to aliens at the cost of their lives. If it is ever fair to draw direct parallels between an artist’s life and art, I would say these stories read like a highly creative psychological autobiography. Tiptree was for a while her perfect psychiatrist, an outside eye to organize her turmoil and reach past her defences.

The persona of the older, sympathetic, masculine Tiptree lasted for ten years and gave Sheldon not only her voice as a writer but an active social life in the science fiction world she loved. One of the great pleasures of this biography is reading excerpts from the voluminous correspondence she carried on with the science fiction community as Tiptree. (It inspired me to buy “Meet Me at Infinity,” which collects some of her wonderful nonfiction writing.) Sheldon’s letter style as Tiptree was self-deprecating, often hilarious, incisive and manically inventive. She gave Tiptree much of her real biography, so was able to talk openly about long-hidden fears and resentments while reinforcing her male identity with real stories of African exploration, hunting, and CIA work (the prejudices of the time working in its favor). She even told the stories of her doomed attractions to women, safer to relate when they became Tiptree’s. She vented her bitterness at women’s status, earning Tiptree his reputation as a male feminist. As Tiptree, Sheldon flirted with her women correspondents (in a whistling-at-skirts style) and engaged in long discussions about male and female writing styles, feminism, and her belief in biological determinism, which was anathema to the growing feminist movement. (Her correspondence with early feminists in science fiction is priceless as both feminist and sci fi history.)

Sheldon came to fear that she could only write with an alternate persona, mainly as Tiptree, but also later as a retired schoolteacher named Raccoona Sheldon — an invention she acknowleged as a desire to begin to express herself openly as a woman, if not yet as herself. She talked about killing off James Tiptree, but couldn’t bring herself to do it, worrying that it was Tiptree who could write, not Alice Sheldon. By this time she had almost bifurcated her abilities, giving Tiptree her creativity and Alice the mundane life of fixing leaking roofs and taking care of her sick mother. When her identity was revealed in 1976, she was never completely successful in finding her writing voice without her protective personas. Though she wrote sporadically for several more years, her demons seem to have finally silenced her. She killed herself and her husband in a suicide pact (though it appears that his was not entirely voluntary — he had agreed in theory to the idea of a suicide pact, but seemed to have not been suicidal in reality, and Sheldon shot him in his sleep before killing herself).

I knew James Tiptree as a woman from the beginning, since I read her after her mask was stripped off. With the assurance of a newborn feminist, I found it obvious that these stories came from a woman and was sad that she didn’t take credit from the beginning. It would have been a huge support to women writers to be able to claim such a voice. But this was still the time before feminism, and these stories would probably never have been written without James Tiptree. When Sheldon first published as a woman (not as herself but as Raccoona), it was a source of rage but no surprise to her that Raccoona’s stories were considered weaker than Tiptree’s, less penetrating. In the face of this, Sheldon’s choice to write as a man seems like a creative adaptation. Her world was not gentle to women.

Reading the story of her decline into depression, I mourned the opportunity lost when Joanna Russ reached out to her and tried to draw her into the gay community late in her life. In an alternate universe, I picture her adored and revered by women in her old age, basking in pleasure even if she never writes another word. But such universes follow the rules of dreams, leaking their stories into each other, and no simple solution would work for Sheldon, so the universe shifts and the women become aliens — bodiless (out of sheer perversity) and forever unattainable. In the world of an artist, stories make universes, not the other way around.

She describes her father from a more adult perspective, viewing him as the iron-willed lawgiver for the family but a law unto himself elsewhere. Why does this lawless man become a police officer and finally leave his family to take up with a very middle class woman and a house full of antiques? There is something wrong with this picture, and a very interesting story might be told to describe what it is. Was the rift ever bridged with his son, law-abiding but just as iron-willed as his father, who leaves home and absents himself from the family? The story of Zippy’s mother, who got up off the couch in a remarkable transformation, is the heart of the book, but we learn little about how she liked her new life as a teacher or dealt with her husband’s betrayel. Perhaps these complaints are unjustified in the face of the viewpoint of a young girl that the story takes, but the book seems to sing most when some adult perspective slips in, and I would have liked more of it and fewer of the sleepover parties and insignificant events. The book seems just slightly self-indulgent, and the material is there for it to be much more.

Smith is a natural writer, but she is not a natural crafter of plots. Her real strength is small tales with sharp character observation, but the plot her tales hang on is little more than a multi-cultural soap opera. She won’t become a first-rank writer, in my opinion, until she can reign in her tendency to use cheap plot devices. In this novel, which centers around a brief affair that throws a family into turmoil, two must be better than one, and the fallen husband does it again just when his marriage is beginning to heal. The second affair serves Smith’s interweaving of two very different families, but seems highly implausible.

The great pleasure of reading Smith is being wrapped in her forgiving nature and affectionate outlook on people. “On Beauty” turns a gentle eye wherever it looks. I can picture the author smiling over her creation, whispering “Everything’s all right,” a soothing and comfortable voice, but one at odds with her subject of race and racism in many forms. Her viewpoint is distinctive and refreshing, but I wonder if she becomes, to her readers, an excuse to not look too deeply, a sort of feel-good dip into Racism Lite. “On Beauty” soothes and points out the good in people, rare in the subject of racism but perhaps too shallow to endure in your heart. I believe that Smith could keep her affectionate outlook, but push deeper and become a far better writer.

This book attempts an ambitious answer by looking at Paleolithic cave art, the astonishing work that appeared in Europe from about 40,000 to 10,000 years ago. It is no surprise to learn that early discovers of cave art were accused of fraud, since scholars refused to believe that primitive people could have produced such amazing art. Where are the scribbles and the stick figures we intuitively think must have predated these masterpieces of observation and fluid draftsmanship?

The photographs in the book show some of the most famous images of cave art from Lascaux, Altamira, and lesser known caves. I look at them in real awe. I can try to break it down and point to beautifully delineated muscles, a masterful grasp of animal motion, fluid and expressive linework, the interaction of images with the rock surface - but my artist’s eye wants to simply say that great artists were at work here. It is no mistake the the Great Hall of Lascaux is called the Sistine Chapel of Paleolithic art.

The author cautions, though, that to appreciate these images with our love and knowledge of art is one thing, but to project our ideas about art into a search for the origin of these images is unwise. To investigate this story we have to unlearn many assumptions, beginning with the words “art” and “artist” and the accompanying belief that these images meant to their creators and viewers anything like what we mean by art. Lewis-Williams turns, with good justification, to the place of art in shamanism, looking in particular at the extensive rock art of the San people of Africa and Southwest American Indian groups to give us a framework for the use of images in mystical practices.

It seems highly likely that magical/spiritual practices were involved with cave art, and many researchers have proposed this approach before. Lewis-Williams wants to do more - his goal is to pull together a theory of the evolution of the modern human brain with a hypothesis of underlying neural structures that led intrinsically to certain mystical experiences, with these experiences finding a natural expression in cave art. He posits, based on the work of cognitive researchers, that the structure of the brain includes certain byproducts (or meaningful products, depending on your outlook) of evolution, among them the universal tendency to experience non-ordinary consciousness in stages from geometric shapes to hallucinatory images and sensations in an autistic state (closed to exernal experience). Certain features of these states are commonly experienced as observing floating two-dimensional images, flying, and going through a hole (or tunnel or entrance depending on your cultural framework). He links these stages to neural activities including dream states and random firings of the optical nerve and other sense apparatuses.

Modern humans have largely relegated mystical experiences to an unreal part of the spectrum of experience, but the author points out that prehistoric people probably had no basis on which to do this, and experienced mystical states as just as real (or perhaps more so) as awake states. He pictures prehistoric people experiencing non-ordinary consciousness, based on the unique structure of their brains, and building early religious and shamanistic practices upon them.

Can we go from this theory to the origin of cave art? Lewis-Williams wants to take us down one of these mystical openings into the chambers of Lascaux and Altamira, with the idea that caves and cave surfaces were the analog of mystical experiences prehistoric people had - first, going down holes or through an entrance into another world, and second, seeing and remembering floating images in space. He does not see any great leap required to begin to make images, but rather believes that prehistoric people were already experiencing neural-based images and giving them great significance; it was a natural step to place them on rock surfaces in the underground realm whose analog they seemed to be experiencing in trances.

These particular ideas of the neural basis of mystical experiences are largely new to me, and I didn’t get a clear view from the book about how controversial they are (probably highly, since they implicitly propose a biological origin for human religion). I find them personally appealing, artistically viable, but highly speculative. (For example, the idea that floating two-dimensional images are one of the elements of non-ordinary consciousness is central to the author’s thesis, but this is based on modern test subjects with extensive experiences of two-dimensional images and movies. Extrapolating from that to prehistory is somewhat problematic.) Lewis-Williams does not strike me as nearly as good at seeing gaps and holes in his own analysis as in others’ - probably another ancient neural trait of humans.

Yet I find his ideas compelling and fruitful for an understanding of art, if only in a poetic sense. I find the best evidence for looking harder at these ideas is the (previously unknown to me) presence of numerous geometric symbols in cave art similar to symbols that neural researchers identify as characteristic of first-stage non-ordinary consciousness. I find the least compelling evidence in his grand but poorly justified statements about the inferiority of the neanderthal brain relative to ours.

How does an artist look at this approach? I still have to ask why many of these images are so masterful even by modern artistic standards, a question Lewis-Williams does not address. Even if they came from mystical experiences, how did people translate them onto rock surfaces as more than crude representations? We could posit the lone genius whose work created a legacy of draftsman(or woman)ship. This romantic idea is undercut by the great distances between different caves with the likelihood that isolation would cause a reversion to more primitive representation. I think that if we propose large changes in brain structure and capacity in the era leading up to Paleolithic art, we should admit the possibility that Paleolithic brains may have actually been better than ours in ways that explain these abilities - perhaps the existence of “photographic” memory in a larger part of the population. There will never be an answer to such a question, but I don’t think it’s possible to ignore the astonishing quality of cave art in any meaningful explanation. The mind in the cave could really paint, a rare thing even in our world overrun with humans.

A mystery frames the story — a part-Ojibwe antique dealer feels a strange connection to an old native American drum and uncharacteristically steals it, then begins a search for its history. Told as a completely separate vignette, the central story of the drum revolves around a lovetorn woman who leaves her husband to live with her lover, taking her young daughter and a newborn baby on a ride on the moonlit night of wolves. The daughter will die, torn to pieces. Has a soul-shaking murder taken place, with the mother throwing her daughter to the wolves to save herself, or has a great soul sacrificed herself for her family? The act will reverberate through centuries on the bitterly drained and beaten Ojibwe reservation, surfacing in the story of a young girl who struggles to save her siblings from cold on another freezing winter night mirrored in time.

Erdrich is a master storyteller with a cool, lyrical delivery. Her stories seem told through an antique glass, perfectly sharp, but distanced by time and art into something beautiful and rare, even when she writes of the present. Suffering and hard endurance are everywhere in these tales of native Americans destroyed by love or by alcohol, bound with the thinnest threads to some hope of salvation in their traditions. But sorrow is burnished and silvered with long handling, and the deep love of a mother for lost and wayward children oversees it all.

There are false steps in this novel. The antique dealer’s story never quite focuses, and her personal search for the drum’s history is totally elided. Anaquot’s forgetting of her daughter’s death does not seem believable in an otherwise sane and canny woman. The three central tales are separated and abrupt; some attempt at binding might have been wise. But these things hardly matter in the face of the dark, bitter, loving, and sometimes even funny tales she tells.

Magical events fill the story, and you could fault this book for a fuzzy Native American mysticism, but that would miss the point that the true magic here is storytelling - weaving the past into the present with meaning and vitality - and the universal lure of a ghost story on an unquiet night. The buried heart of the story - a young girl with transformative powers to help her troubled people - beats true. I have no particular belief in Native American magic, but this book affirms that a storyteller’s magic is an ancient and powerful thing.