Washington Post Book Reviews
For You
Wednesday February 9, 2011
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ALAN LOMAX: The Man Who Recorded the World
John Szwed
Viking
ISBN 978-0670021994
438 pages
$29.95
Reviewed by Mark Berman
Reading about Alan Lomax (1915-2002) can make a person feel very, very lazy. Lomax, who famously scoured the United States and the world collecting folk music, was an archivist, producer, anthropologist, singer, political activist and theorist, to name just a few of his roles. Although he started out collecting folk music in the rural South, he eventually traveled the world finding and classifying song and dance.
John Szwed, a professor of music and jazz studies at Columbia University, knew Lomax personally. His biography of Lomax is rich in detail, thoroughly explaining the methods of music collection as well as Lomax's movement into crafting books, concerts, festivals and radio programs. But Szwed skimps on the kind of personal material that might have humanized his subject.
Consider Lomax's relationship with his father. Himself a folklorist, John Lomax took his son into the field to collect, setting him on the path toward his life's work. This time on the road learning how to become "a messenger for the masses" changed Alan's life. And yet Szwed writes that, at age 23, Alan was "on the verge of becoming the best-known folklorist in America, but self-doubt haunted him."
Did he want to do the work, or was he living out his father's dream? The book barely touches on Lomax's conflicted feelings in this regard. John's death gets only a quick mention, and we don't learn much of anything about his son's reaction. By comparison, when the film director Nicholas Ray dies, Szwed devotes several lines to the ceremony and quotes from Lomax's eulogy for his friend.
Lomax's story is filled with interesting trips and, like the man himself, never seems to stop in one place for very long.
Among the names that pop up as he is out collecting and, later, putting on concerts are the novelist Zora Neale Hurston and singer-songwriters Woody Guthrie, Huddie Ledbetter, Pete Seeger and Bob Dylan. Among many interesting anecdotes is one about Lomax's 1939 performance at the White House. He was there to sing for the president, first lady and the king and queen of England, but "everywhere he went in the White House" the Secret Service jostled him in an attempt to frisk him. It turned out somebody had told the FBI he was a threat, thus beginning the FBI's decades-long interest in Lomax.
Lomax helped reconnect American music with its roots in folk traditions, and his story is an important one for anyone with an interest in cultural history. Szwed admirably captures the efforts of a man who seemed determined to honor what came before him.
Mark Berman can be reached at bermanm(at symbol)washpost.com.
Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
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ALONE TOGETHER: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other
Sherry Turkle
Basic
ISBN 978-0465010219
360 pages
$28.95
Reviewed by Jane Smiley
In "Why the West Rules, For Now," his excellent and amusing survey of the last 70,000 years or so of human history, Ian Morris discusses an event we can look forward to in 2045: the Singularity, "effectively merging carbon-and-silicon based intelligence into a single global consciousness. ... We will transcend biology, evolving into a new, merged being as far ahead of homo sapiens as a contemporary human is of the individual cells that merge to create his or her body." With 35 years to go, we now have Sherry Turkle's "Alone Together" as a progress report from the biotechnological front lines. And it is not amusing.
Turkle is a psychoanalytically trained psychologist at MIT who has specialized for years in studying artificial intelligence and its effect on humans who invent it, use it and enjoy it. Her new book considers robots, Facebook, iPhones and the Internet, and explores questions pertinent to each. Since the 1980s, she has made good use of her access to the foremost thinkers in the AI world, and she has devised experiments for observing how people of all ages -- most instructively children and the elderly -- interact with and relate to machines that in some ways mimic how humans or animals act, think and talk. "Alone Together" is not statistical, it is anecdotal. It is therefore vivid, even lurid, in its depictions of where we are headed, but the reader comes away unsure whether Turkle's anxieties are warranted.
It is clear throughout that a new technology has a cost and a momentum that are never considered when that technology is introduced -- tractors looked easier than plows, iPhones seem more convenient than landlines. Only long after each innovation is introduced do humans bother to ponder things like soil erosion or texting while driving. Decades after the introduction of the Internet and of AI, Turkle is beginning to have second thoughts. She focuses first on robots: humans are determined to relate to them.
No matter how old or young the humans are, no matter how sophisticated in their experience of AI, they begin to have feelings for robots they come in contact with and to feel that their feelings are reciprocated. A mechanical question elicits an answer, large painted eyes elicit compassion, a metallic touch elicits a responding touch, and the emotions that go along with human responses cannot be controlled. Turkle does not include pictures of the robots she mentions, but looking at them on the Internet after reading about them is disorienting -- surely that is not Kismet, the prototype robotic girlfriend that many of Turkle's subjects are attracted to? But it is.
A robot in the room, acting animated and interested, draws us out of ourselves, but social networking tends to push us apart, Turkle says, because humans on the Internet behave (or can behave or are pushed to behave) inhumanely. The Internet gives people the cover to indulge in hate speech, to present phony personas, or simply to avoid relating in real space and time.
Turkle's subject is so vast that she cannot address every facet of it, and of course the missing facet that struck me as a novelist is that every robot and every networking app is a work of art, designed to express the psyche of the artist and to shape the response of the user. We are not entirely unversed in responding to things that don't exist -- Odysseus, Macbeth and the woman portrayed in the Mona Lisa don't exist, either. We could say that when we read "David Copperfield," we agree to a joining of minds that is pleasurable and enlightening, and that as we read and experience many works of art, we clarify the boundaries between each one and between art and ourselves. Turkle's research subjects are at the very beginning of the next phase of the human journey. It may be that we will gain self-knowledge from our experience that we can't yet imagine.
For those who recoil, though, Ian Morris has an alternative -- the collapse of civilization. He makes a good case that mankind has approached climate/energy/population ceilings before and that breakthrough is less likely than self-destruction; in fact, the melding of human and machine intelligence may be our only salvation. Turkle doesn't ponder this issue, but when you read her engrossing study, you will.
Jane Smiley is the author of "Private Life," "The Man Who Invented the Computer" and many other books.
Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
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