The Upside-Down Critic

What to make of Robert Hughes’ Australian roots.

By Mia Fineman

In his recent memoir, Things I Didn’t Know, art critic Robert Hughes pinpoints the moment he decided to leave his native Australia to begin a new life as a permanent expatriate. It was a warm evening in 1962. Hughes and his mentor, popular historian Alan Moorehead, were talking shop as they pounded down Gewürztraminer at Hughes’ apartment in Sydney. “If you stay here another ten years,” Moorehead told him, “Australia will still be a very interesting place. But you will have become a bore, a village explainer.”

Hughes heeded his friend’s advice, staying first at Moorehead’s villa in Tuscany, then moving to London, where he lived on the fringes of hippie counterculture (“all dope, rhetoric, be-ins, and powdered bullshit,” as he recalls) and wrote art reviews for the “quality Sundays”: the Times, the Telegraph, the Observer, the Spectator. In 1970, he got a call from Time (on a neighbor’s phone; his had been disconnected) offering him a job as the magazine’s art critic. His anecdote about this incident is a perfect snapshot of the good old days of cultural journalism: The editor who called him was drunk from his habitual three-martini lunch; Hughes was stoned to the gills on hash and, in his paranoia, assumed he was talking to the CIA. They worked it out; he took the job, moved to New York, and over the course of 30 years churned out hundreds of eloquent, witty, briskly opinionated columns for his target audience of intelligent, nonspecialist readers.

Hughes’ forays into television further broadened his exposure and established him as a celebrity art critic. He honed his amiably pugnacious persona as writer and presenter of The Shock of the New (1980), an eight-part series on modern art for the BBC, and American Visions (1997), his PBS survey of four centuries of American art. The series and their accompanying books are exemplary works of cultural history for a mass audience, masterpieces of education-as-entertainment. Hughes has turned out to be a “village explainer” in the best sense, bringing the insights of a clear-eyed expat to a village that encompasses most of the English-speaking world. At the same time, his memoir reveals just how formative an influence Aussie culture of the ’50s was, in particular its aspirational yet skeptical relationship to European art. It helped produce a critic of rare bluntnesswho also has blinkers of his own.

Hughes is a bravura performer, both on the screen and on the page. He writes with astounding verve, in a voice that slips easily between boisterous vulgarity and polished eloquence. In Things I Didn’t Know, which chronicles his career through 1970, he says the single greatest influence on his approach to criticism was George Orwell. For Hughes, Orwell’s no-nonsense prose style and clear, everyday language offered an astringent antidote to the “airy-fairy, metaphor-ridden kind of pseudo-poetry” that filled the art magazines of the early ’60s. As a result of this early trainingand probably also as a matter of temperamentHughes’ writing is muscular and dazzlingly lucid; he refuses to indulge in sublime metaphysical musings or languid adjectival swooning, opting instead for precise, verbally nimble descriptions of art’s effects. His critical perspective is that of an erudite outsider, which makes him immensely appealing to a mainstream readership: He knows his stuff, but he hasn’t drunk the Kool-Aid.

Hughes’ skepticism served him well during the boom years of the early ’80s, when inflated reputations sprouted like mushrooms in the rich soil of n overheated art market. Bad reviews are always the most fun to read, and for sheer entertainment value nothing beats his poison-pen takedowns of art stars like Julian Schnabel (whose “work is to painting what Stallone’s is to actinga lurching display of oily pectorals”), or Jeff Koons, whom he described as having “the slimy assurance & of a blow-dried Baptist selling swamp acres in Florida.” (Hughes’ pop-culture metaphors are vicious fun, and far from “airy-fairy.”) His “SoHoiad: or, The Masque of Art,” a satire in heroic couplets published in the New York Review of Books in 1984, remains the snarkiest skewering of the contemporary art world that has yet seen the light of day.

Hughes can be just as vivid when writing about the art he loves. He has described the boys in Caravaggio’s paintings, for example, as “overripe bits of rough trade, with yearning mouths and hair like black ice cream,” and evoked Francis Bacon’s famous screaming pope “smearily rising from blackness like carnivorous ectoplasm.” In general, his taste tends toward art with a sensuous, intelligent physicality, a tactile sense of craftedness, and subject matter you can sink your teeth into. Goya is a longstanding favorite (his superb biography of the artist was recently issued in paperback), and he has published persuasive encomiums to contemporaries including Lucian Freud, Philip Guston, Robert Rauschenberg, and Robert Crumb.

But all critics have their blind spots: particular styles or tendencies that they categorically dismiss, unable or unwilling to engage with the work on its own terms. Hughes’ is conceptual art, particularly the ludic, cerebral variety that began with Duchamp and has been carried on by generations of artists, from Joseph Beuys and John Baldessari through Tracy Emin and Maurizio Cattelan. For Hughes, most conceptual art is too intellectualized, too disembodied; it lacks the substance and sensual immediacy that defines truly great art. “Art requires the long look,” he wrote in the introduction to his 1990 collection of essays, Nothing If Not Critical. “It is a physical object, with its own scale and density as a thing in the world.” While this is true of most art up through the 19th century, the new century ushered in a new way of thinking about art as a set of concepts, a mode of interaction, a manner of seeing and apprehending the world that mayor may notbe tied to a discrete physical object. To reject this approach entirely is to cut oneself off from much of what’s interesting and compelling in the art of the last 100 years. And it’s here, in his refusal to engage with this core tenet of contemporary art, that Hughes still exudes a faint whiff of provincialism.

Though he has lived and worked outside Australia for more than 40 yearsmore than half his lifetimeHughes has never renounced his Australian citizenship; in American Visions, he confesses that he has always found “a degree of freedom” in his status as a resident alien. This jealously guarded outsider’s perspective is one of his great strengths as a criticit has enabled him to look at art with fresh eyes and to dissent from the majority opinion, particularly concerning contemporary artbut it’s also the source of his greatest weakness. To Hughes, conceptual art looks like nothing more than an insider’s mind game. And while it’s true that much conceptual art is trivial or banal or needlessly hermetic, the track record of traditional, object-based art is no better. I would love to see Hughes set aside his doubts (at least temporarily), step inside the circle, and grapple with conceptual art on its own terms. But perhaps it’s too much to expect even our greatest village explainer to explain it all.

How did Tchaikovsky die?

On the eve of an ambitious BBC retrospective, Adam Sweeting reports on the controversies that still surround the composer’s death

In summer 2005, the BBC launched a blitz of round-the-clock Beethoven on TV and radio in what was supposedly the biggest retrospective of the works of a single composer in the corporation’s history. Now they’re about to do it again with Tchaikovsky, unveiling a swathe of films and drama-documentaries, followed by a week-long broadcast of the complete works of Tchaikovsky and Stravinsky on Radio 3 in February.

Tragic: Tchaikovsky (played by Ed Stoppard) with his brother Modest (William Mannering) in the forthcoming BBC docu-drama

Conductor Charles Hazlewood features prominently in four of the TV programmes, and is delighted to have had the chance to rectify what he sees as a historical distortion of Tchaikovsky’s music. He deplores the way many post-Second World War conductors converted his work into a glutinous syrup  “especially Herbert von Karajan, who should have been shot for the disservice he performed”  and wants instead to “show that this is music of enormous visceral power and at times coarse brutality, as well as of almost unbearable sweetness”.

Perhaps Hazlewood has been reading the former New York Times critic Harold C Schonberg, who wrote that “for a long time Tchaikovsky, so loved by the public, was discounted by many connoisseurs and musicians as nothing but a weeping machine”. Misunderstood or not, Tchaikovsky’s music remains some of the best-loved and most-performed in the symphonic, ballet and operatic repertoires.

Hazlewood’s drama-documentary re-creates some of the most important episodes in the life of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, but it sidesteps the controversy that still surrounds the composer’s death. Despite decades of debate, no scholar has delivered the final word on whether Tchaikovsky’s death was misfortune or suicide. Hazlewood says: “We’ve deliberately left it quite open-ended. My personal view is that he wasn’t trying to commit suicide. I think he probably snogged the wrong bloke and got cholera  simple as that.”

Death from cholera was the official version endorsed by doctors in St Petersburg after the composer’s demise on November 6, 1893, and repeated by early biographers. Supposedly, Tchaikovsky had drunk a glass of unboiled tap water, which seems a reckless thing to do during an epidemic of a fatal water-borne disease. None the less, his death was imputed to carelessness rather than deliberate self-destruction.

But almost immediately, alternative versions of the story began to circulate, most of them predicated on the idea that the composer had died not from disease, but from arsenic poisoning. Some surmised that he had killed himself in despair at his homosexuality, or fear of its disclosure.

The composer’s drinking and gambling binges suggested another possible motive for self-extinction. While another variant had Tchaikovsky contracting cholera from a male prostitute, many dismissed the cholera story precisely because it was considered a disease of poverty, much too squalid a fate for the famous and solidly bourgeois Tchaikovsky.

Fellow-composer Rimsky-Korsakov was dubious about the cholera diagnosis because quarantine regulations weren’t followed. Tchaikovsky received a steady stream of visitors duing his final days, and his body was not sealed in a zinc coffin as was the normal practice.

Tchaikovsky’s sister-in-law, Olga Tchaikovskaya, claimed that he was poisoned by one of his doctors, Vassily Bertenson, at Tsar Alexander III’s behest. Elsewhere, it was rumoured that the Tsar drove the composer to suicide by commanding that “Tchaikovsky must disappear at once,” after the caretaker at Tchaikovsky’s apartment building reported that the composer had seduced his son.

The most durable of the suicide theories is the one advanced in 1980 by Alexandra Orlova, a Soviet musicologist who had emigrated to the USA. In a story supposedly told to her by an elderly historian, Alexander Voitov, Tchaikovsky had committed a sexual indiscretion too far, becoming involved with the nephew of a certain Duke Stenbock-Fermor. Homosexuality was illegal in Russia, with offenders liable to penalties including deportation to Siberia and being whipped with birch rods.

The apoplectic Duke wrote a letter of complaint to Tsar Alexander III, passing the letter via Nikolai Jakobi, chief prosecutor of the Russian senate. Jakobi had been a classmate of Tchaikovsky’s at the St Petersburg School of Jurisprudence, and conceived the notion of convening a “court of honour” of fellow alumni, who would pass judgment on the tormented symphonist. It was they, according to Mme Orlova, who decreed that Russia’s greatest living composer should commit suicide to avoid besmirching the reputation of the School of Jurisprudence.

This story proved seductive to several eminent scholars, finding its way into biographical entries on Tchaikovsky in The New Oxford Companion to Music and The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (though the latter amended its findings to “not proven” in its second edition). However, marauding posses of rival specialists were soon picking holes in the Orlova thesis, and many considered that Alexander Poznansky last year delivered the coup de grâce with his exhaustively researched volume, Tchaikovsky’s Last Days: A Documentary Study.

Among other apparently lethal blows to the Orlova version, Poznansky revealed that there was no Duke Stenbock-Fermor, but there was a Count of that name. However, he was an equerry to Tsar Alexander, and would not have needed an intermediary to deliver a letter to his own boss.

As for the supposed threat to the reputation of the St Petersburg School of Jurisprudence represented by Tchaikovsky’s gay rampages, Poznansky depicted the school as a hotbed of all-male debauchery which even had its own song hymning the delights of homosexuality. In addition, the author characterised Russian court and artistic life as rife with homosexual affairs, to the extent that Tchaikovsky’s behavior would barely have raised an eyebrow among the champagne-imperialists of fashionable St Petersburg.

advertisementAs the Russian music specialist Prof Richard Taruskin commented, “Homosexuality was regarded, and indulged, as a form of libertinage. Russia was a feudal society until 1861, and ‘gentlemanly games’ were a traditional droit du seigneur.”

This doesn’t entirely account for the neurosis and self-loathing revealed in many of Tchaikovsky’s letters, which suggest the composer felt greater concern about his sexuality than academics writing a century later would have us believe. His marriage to besotted music student Antonina Milyukova in an attempt to eradicate his “pernicious passions” and put on a show of conventional respectability was an act of feverish desperation, ending catastrophically for both partners.

But perhaps the greatest disservice to Tchaikovsky’s work (other than spinning it in a blender of queasy Germanic suariness) would be to represent it as solely the expression of homosexual angst. The 19th-century critic James Huneker thought he could hear a homosexual “pathology”, while latterday “queer theorists” like to analyse his work through a politicised prism of gender and sexuality. Tchaikovsky would probably have preferred his listeners to appreciate him as a master melodist, inspired orchestrator and peerless musical craftsman.

This story proved seductive to several eminent scholars, finding its way into biographical entries on Tchaikovsky in The New Oxford Companion to Music and The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (though the latter amended its findings to “not proven” in its second edition). However, marauding posses of rival specialists were soon picking holes in the Orlova thesis, and many considered that Alexander Poznansky last year delivered the coup de grâce with his exhaustively researched volume, Tchaikovsky’s Last Days: A Documentary Study.

Among other apparently lethal blows to the Orlova version, Poznansky revealed that there was no Duke Stenbock-Fermor, but there was a Count of that name. However, he was an equerry to Tsar Alexander, and would not have needed an intermediary to deliver a letter to his own boss.

As for the supposed threat to the reputation of the St Petersburg School of Jurisprudence represented by Tchaikovsky’s gay rampages, Poznansky depicted the school as a hotbed of all-male debauchery which even had its own song hymning the delights of homosexuality. In addition, the author characterised Russian court and artistic life as rife with homosexual affairs, to the extent that Tchaikovsky’s behavior would barely have raised an eyebrow among the champagne-imperialists of fashionable St Petersburg.

advertisementAs the Russian music specialist Prof Richard Taruskin commented, “Homosexuality was regarded, and indulged, as a form of libertinage. Russia was a feudal society until 1861, and ‘gentlemanly games’ were a traditional droit du seigneur.”

This doesn’t entirely account for the neurosis and self-loathing revealed in many of Tchaikovsky’s letters, which suggest the composer felt greater concern about his sexuality than academics writing a century later would have us believe. His marriage to besotted music student Antonina Milyukova in an attempt to eradicate his “pernicious passions” and put on a show of conventional respectability was an act of feverish desperation, ending catastrophically for both partners.

But perhaps the greatest disservice to Tchaikovsky’s work (other than spinning it in a blender of queasy Germanic sugariness) would be to represent it as solely the expression of homosexual angst. The 19th-century critic James Huneker thought he could hear a homosexual “pathology”, while latterday “queer theorists” like to analyse his work through a politicised prism of gender and sexuality. Tchaikovsky would probably have preferred his listeners to appreciate him as a master melodist, inspired orchestrator and peerless musical craftsman.

BBC2, 9pm: Tchaikovsky: Fortune and Tragedy (part 2 of Charles Hazlewood’s drama-documentary). BBC4, 10pm: Discovering Tchaikovsky: Pathétique (Charles Hazlewood examines the Sixth Symphony)

When mañana is too soon

A psychologist in Calgary thinks he knows why we procrastinate

January 14, 2007
Kurt Kleiner
Special to the Star

No other anguish is quite like that of the procrastinator. He knows that the job has to get done, that putting it off just makes it harder, that the worry is worse than the work. And yet he can’t … quite … get … started.

Procrastination seems built into human nature  the ancient Roman orator Cicero fretted about it, as did the Greek historian Thucydides.

Today, 95 per cent of people say that they sometimes procrastinate.

The real problem, though, is the 20 per cent of us who qualify as chronic procrastinators. These are people who procrastinate so routinely that their work, finances or personal relationships suffer because of it.

At its worst, procrastination is a form of self-destructive behaviour, like drug addiction or chronic gambling. Like them, its origins are mysterious, and its treatment difficult.

Now a new analysis of the psychological literature by a University of Calgary psychologist could help untangle what makes so many of us put off until tomorrow what we really should do today.

Piers Steel has just published a mammoth review of the scientific literature on procrastination in the journal Psychological Bulletin, and his conclusions are at odds with some conventional ideas.

“Some of them are dead wrong,” Steel says.

His research contradicts one major theory, which is that procrastinators suffer from anxiety and so have a harder time facing a difficult task.

Steel looked at the literature and found that statistically there’s very little correlation between anxiety and a tendency to procrastinate.

The same with the flattering idea that procrastinators are also perfectionists, people who care so much about doing it right that they can’t bear to get started. Again, Steel found no correlation.

What he did find is that procrastinators are less confident that they can handle a given task. They’re also more impulsive and less conscientious overall.

“Whether you believe you can or you believe you can’t, you’re right,” Steel says.”Some of these old wives’ tales bear out. People who believe they can are less likely to procrastinate.”

Steel’s paper is unlikely to be the final word on procrastination. But it’s important because it’s the best attempt so far to analyze hundreds of psychological studies that have been conducted over a period of decades.

Part of the problem of procrastination is defining it in the first place. We all have dozens of things we could be doing at any particular moment, and some of them have to be put off.

Prioritizing turns into procrastination when we know the job needs to be done, we know we’ll be worse off if we don’t do it, we intend to do it  and we still don’t do it. It is profoundly irrational behaviour, and its very irrationality makes it tough for procrastinators and psychologists alike to understand.

Samuel Johnson, the prolific 18th-century writer and lexicographer, admitted to procrastinating himself, and described the remorse familiar to any procrastinator: “I could not forbear to reproach myself for having so long neglected what was unavoidably to bedone, and of which every moment’s idleness increased the difficulty.”

But he also puzzled over what made people procrastinate when it was so clearly against their best interests. “The folly of allowing ourselves to delay what we know cannot be finally escaped is one of the general weaknesses,” he concluded.

Steel thinks procrastination is probably an even bigger problem today.

We have more readily available distractions, like the Internet and computer games. (Steel says he’s had problems with computer games himself.) And many jobs are becoming more self-structured, which means it’s increasingly up to us to impose our own work goals and deadlines.

The harm caused by procrastination can be immense. Steel points to a study by the tax-preparation firm H&R Block that says putting off doing their taxes costs U.S. citizens an average of $400 each because of errors due to the last-minute rush.

Even more irrationally, 70 per cent of patients suffering from glaucoma don’t get around to using their eye drops regularly, which could potentially result in blindness.

Fifty per cent of heart attack patients don’t manage to make the lifestyle changes that could save their lives.

“On the one hand, it’s easy to trivialize procrastination. We joke about it,” says Timothy A. Pychyl, a psychologist at Carleton University who studies procrastination.

“But procrastination is self-defeating. It’s a breakdown in volitional action. I have an intention and I’m not following through on it. You’re not able to follow through on what you want to do.”

Over the years, psychologists have come up with a lot of ideas about what makes people procrastinate. In addition to anxiety and perfectionism, some suggested that procrastinators were self-sabotaging, hostile and rebellious, or depressed.

But for Steel, procrastination can be explained by an insight borrowed from behavioural economics called hyperbolic discounting. This is the tendency to value near-term rewards more than long-term ones. For instance, some people will choose a payoff of $50 today over $100 tomorrow.

Steel combined hyperbolic discounting with a theory of motivation called expectancy theory, and came up with something he calls temporal motivational theory (TMT). It boils down to this:

Utility = E x V / Gamma D

Utility is the desirability of getting something done. E is expectancy, or confidence. V is the value of the job, and includes not only its importance but also its unpleasantness. Gamma stands for how prone a person is to delay doing things. And D means delay, or how far away the consequences of doing, or not doing, the task are.

The bigger the top number compared to the bottom, the less likely a task will be put off. So if you expect to do well at a job (E), and it’s a pleasant thing to do (V), and you’re not prone to being delayed by distractions (Gamma), and it has to be done right away (D), you’re not likely to procrastinate.

If you expect to fail at a difficult task and you’re easily distracted and it doesn’t have to be done for quite awhile, you’re going to procrastinate.

“It’s a little bit unsettling that human nature can be reduced to an equation,” Steel says. “But you can show that pretty much every major view of behaviour can be reduced to that.”

Perhaps not surprisingly, other procrastination experts don’t think it’s quite that simple.

“It makes an important contribution by summing it up,” says Pychyl. “It doesn’t mean that he’s captured the whole phenomenon. There are elements we still don’t understand about these self-defeating behaviours.”

Pychyl thinks it’s still too early to rule out anxiety, perfectionism, depression or other causes that have been suggested for procrastination.

William J. Knaus, a psychologist and author of Do It Now!, a procrastination self-help book, says it’s a complex behaviour that’s far from being understood. But he insists procrastinators can change.

“It’s a challenge,” he says, “but it’s doable. We have enough of the tools now so that anyone who is serious about making strides and improvements can do so.”

The lost art of the letter

Critical Point: January 2007

The Internet is affecting not only how scientists communicate, but also how future science historians will have to work, says Robert P Crease

Until quite recently, letters were the most common way  and often the only way  for scientists to communicate informally with each other. It is not surprising therefore that science historians have long relied on letters as invaluable sources of information.

A dramatic illustration concerns the now-famous meeting between Werner Heisenberg and Niels Bohr in Nazi-occupied Denmark in September 1941 during which the two physicists, talking in private, sought to eke out the other’s view on progress towards a nuclear bomb. At first, the principal account of the mysterious visit came from a letter that Heisenberg sent in 1955 to the German science writer Robert Jungk. But among Bohr’s papers were several drafts of letters that Bohr wrote but never sent to Heisenberg after reading the latter’s account of the meeting. In 2002, when the Bohr family made the drafts public, the letters served as a corrective to Heisenberg’s version, showing it to be deceitful and self-serving.

The write stuff

Roles of letters

Now that e-mail has replaced letter writing as the principal means of informal communication, one has to feel sorry for future science historians, who will be unable to use letters and telegrams to establish facts and gauge reactions to events. In addition to the Copenhagen episode, another example of the role of letters is Stillman Drake’s startling conclusion, based on a careful reading of Galileo’s correspondence, that the Leaning Tower event actually happened. And of all the reactions to the discovery of parity violation in 1957, the simplest and most direct expression of shock came from Robert Oppenheimer. After receiving a telegram from Chen Ning Yang with the news, Oppenheimer cabled back: “Walked through door.”

Letters are also useful to historians because the character of scientists can often be revealed more clearly in informal communications than in official documents. Catherine Westfall, who has composed histories of both the Fermilab and Argonne national laboratories, likes to point out that letters often reveal leadership styles in striking ways. “[Former Fermilab director] Robert R Wilson knew he was making history and was ironically self-conscious,” she once told me. “Leon Lederman [another Fermilab director] told jokes, [while former Argonne director] Hermann Grunder wrote letters that were really never-ending to-do lists.”

Historians also use letters to reconstruct thought processes. We could not hope to understand the development of quantum mechanics, fo instance, without studying the vigorous exchanges of letters between the likes of Bohr, Dirac, Heisenberg, Pauli and others as they thrashed out the theory in the 1920s. Indeed, the historian David Cassidy decided to write his biography of Heisenberg only after accompanying the physicist’s widow to her attic and seeing her drag out a trunk of Heisenberg’s personal letters, adding that he could not have completed the biography without them. Cassidy also said that the way to understand Heisenberg’s behaviour during the Third Reich is to study his nearly weekly letters to his mother.

Internet impact

Historians at the American Institute of Physics (AIP), who are working on a project to document the history of physics in industry, have encountered hints of how the Internet and computers are transforming scientific communication.

E-mail is , of course, cheaper and encourages quicker thought, and it introduces a peculiar blend of the personal and professional. The AIP historians have also detected a decline in the use of lab notebooks, finding that data are often stored directly into computer files. Finally, they have noted the influence of PowerPoint, which can stultify scientific discussion and make it less free-wheeling; information also tends to be dumbed down when scientists submit PowerPoint presentations in place of formal reports.

Generally, though, these new communications techniques are good for scientists, encouraging rapid communication and stripping out hierarchies. But for historians, they are a mixed blessing. It is not just that searching through a hard disk or database is less romantic than poring over a dusty box of old letters in an archive. Nor is it that the information in e-mails differs in kind from that in letters. Far more worrying is the question of whether e-mail and other electronic data will be preserved at all.

One can lose letters, of course, a classic case being much of Planck’s correspondence thanks to an Allied bomb in the Second World War. But the challenges of electronic preservation are more extensive and immediate. As AIP historian Spencer Weart notes: “We have paper from 2000 BC, but we can’t read the first e-mail ever sent. We have the data, and the magnetic tape  but the format is lost.” Weart is fond of quoting RAND researcher Jeff Rothenberg’s remark that “it is only slightly facetious to say that digital information lasts forever  or five years, whichever comes first”, meaning that information lasts only if regularly migrated to another format.

This problem has inspired various programmes to foster the preservation of electronic documentation. One is the Persistent Archives Testbed Project  a collaboration between several US institutions to develop a tool to archive electronic data (slac.stanford.edu/history/projects.shtml). Another is the DibnerSloan History of Recent Science and Technology Project (authors.library.caltech.edu/5456) that seeks not only to digitally archive important documents, but also to enlist the scientists involved to put these in a historical context.

The critical point

Technology, from pencils to computers, has transformed not only the nature and cntent of communication, but also the practices that rely on it. Electronic communication is changing not only science, but also science history. Historians of the future will have to rely on other kinds of data than their precursors, and tell the story of science differently.

There is no going back, as is illustrated once again by the BohrHeisenberg episode. Had the Web existed when Bohr wrote his invaluable draft letters to Heisenberg, his correspondence may well have not been preserved. Yet when the Bohr family decided to make the drafts publicly available, where did they put the material? On the Web.

About the author

Robert P Crease is chairman of the Department of Philosophy, State University of New York at Stony Brook and historian at the Brookhaven National Laboratory, e-mail [email protected]

【2007年1月20日狱委讯】大纪元记者辛菲采访报导/浙江著名作家、诗人、剧作家力虹1月12日被当局以涉嫌“煽动颠覆国家政权罪”在宁波中级法院秘密开庭审理。两个小时的审案过程，力虹自始至终拒绝“低头认罪”。 力虹的辩护律师李建强19日夜接受大纪元采访时透露，法庭上没有任何旁听者，李虹家人去了也被拒绝进入法庭旁听。庭上包括辩护律师、公诉人、法官、陪审员、法警在内共10人。当地警察与国保数十人也没有被允许进去。 李律师表示，很可能本月底宣判。 对于力虹被指控的罪名，李律师认为，力虹的文章及其行为都属于言论自由范畴，不应该以刑事手段来追究。 李律师表示，力虹案很特殊，在开庭前收到法院通知称，此案“涉及国家机密”。 李律师分析，这个案子所谓的“涉及国家机密”，主要是因为当局不愿意将力虹文章的内容泄露出去。 当局起诉力虹的根据是他所撰写的62篇文章，内容大部分是有关法轮功学员被活摘器官、声援高智晟律师发起的维权绝食等。 李律师说，“虽然这些内容已为国外各界了解，但是国内百姓并不一定都知道，因此当局不想泄露出去。” 李律师表示，另一方面，力虹被抓是因为有人举报，打电话告诉警察的。这些线索都是警察未来追查的方向，因此当局不愿意泄露这些东西。 李律师强调，力虹案与高律师没有任何关系。各种迹象显示，力虹早在警察的视线中。 对于可能的宣判结果，李律师表示无法预测。他说，“是轻判还是重判，轻判或重判到什么程度，很难估计，不敢有什么预期。” 力虹原名张建红，曾任中国人文思想网站《爱琴海》总编辑。他曾因参与89民运，被当局以“在六·四期间犯有反革命煽动罪”判处劳动教养两年。近年来经常发表针砭时弊、批评中共政权的文章。他于去年9月6日晚被警察从家中带走，9月7日被当局以涉嫌“煽动颠覆国家政权罪”刑事拘留。10月12日，被当局以涉嫌“煽动颠覆国家政权”正式逮捕。 力虹与友人共同创办的《爱琴海》以敢言而著称，向网民传递自由资讯，并开辟网络平台，让网民畅所欲言。去年3月9日，该网站被浙江省新闻办公室和通讯管理局强行关闭。 力虹被抓引起海内外各界人士广泛关注，“六四天网”、海外各媒体都跟踪报导相关消息。 自由作家刘逸明对力虹的良知和勇气给予了高度评价。他指出，“此前，力虹的文学作品虽然多为批判现实，但语言并不算激烈，自从《爱琴海》网站被关闭，他的创作精力几乎都耗费在了写作政论上面，凭借他熟练的写作技巧和对黑暗现实的深切感悟，他一时间成为了海外中文媒体上最引人注目的政论作家，他的政论作品不但具有高超的文学水平，而且具有一般人所无法企及的思想高度，因此，他的文章在网络社会广为流传。” “力虹在去年被捕前，除了为自己的网站被关闭而对当局口诛笔伐之外，更是对被迫害已久的法轮功群体进行了声援。这也许是他被捕的最直接原因，因为法轮功已经成为中共当局眼中最为敏感的组织。” 刘逸明指出，“力虹所做的一切都是源于他的良知，按照中国的法律法规，他并没有违法，宁波当局对他的抓捕是一种彻头彻尾的执法犯法行为，他们的非法行径必然受到舆论的强烈谴责。” “力虹以自己的良知和勇气在其他作家和民主人士面前树立起了一尊不朽的丰碑。真英雄一定经得起考验，力虹对自己所做的一切都无怨无悔，他在当局做贼心虚的闭门审讯下依然坚持自己的立场，这是很多原本被人认为是英雄的人所无法做到的。”

　

【2007年1月20日狱委讯】美国之音记者：高锋2007年1月19日香港报导/因间谍罪被判刑5年的新加坡海峡时报首席特派员程翔获准到广东省服刑。程翔的太太刘敏仪表示，她将继续为程翔争取保外就医。 香港行政长官办公室星期五把中国大陆当局准许程翔转到广东省服刑的消息，通知给程翔的太太刘敏仪。刘敏仪接受中文部记者采访时表示，感谢香港行政长官曾荫权到北京述职的时候代他们转达诉求。 刘敏仪：很感谢特首曾荫权 刘敏仪说：“首先我们很感谢特首曾荫权先生为我们争取，因为我们是委托他转达，一方面申诉判决不公道，第二是争取保外就医，第三是争取到广东服刑。到广东服刑是程翔自己的意愿，我们尊重他，但是我们真正的目标是希望他尽快回家，现在等于是大陆方面已经批准了第一个要求，我们会继续争取他早日保外就医回家。” 程翔的家人表示，暂时不清楚程翔会移送到哪所监狱，也不知道什么时候启程。 香港时事评论员刘锐绍认为，北京批准程翔到广东省服刑是为了回应香港民间的诉求。 王友金：可能影响保外就医申请 中文大学亚太研究所中国法制研究员王友金认为，北京的安排可能影响到程翔的保外就医申请。他说：“如果当局让他留在北京服刑，不满足家属的要求，这反而可以说明，中央可能在数个月内就给他保外就医。现在给他到广东省服刑，说明程翔要在监狱里呆一年半载的时间，中央才会给他保外就医。” 不过，城市大学法律学院副院长梁美芬认为，程翔转送到广东省服刑后，仍然可以继续申请保外就医。梁美芬说：“没有冲突的。过去有些民运人士因为是广东人，服刑的时候也会送回来广东服刑。要移送他到广东省主要是考虑到家人的意愿和他本人对气候的适应。这种移送过去经常发生在香港人、外国人和境外人士身上。当局会考虑到罪犯来自什么地区，另外就是舆论的影响。” 程翔因间谍罪去年8月被判刑5年，现在被关押在北京天河监狱。自从北京市高级人民法院去年11月驳回程翔的上诉后，他的家人和律师一直没有机会到监狱里探望他。