Background
Jamie James was born in Houston, Texas, United States.
The New Yorker, 1 World Trade Center, New York, NY 10007, USA
The New Yorker
880 Main St, Williamstown, MA 01267, USA
Williams College
The New Yorker, 1 World Trade Center, New York, NY 10007, USA
The New Yorker
(For centuries, scientists and philosophers believed that ...)
For centuries, scientists and philosophers believed that the universe was a stately, ordered mechanism, both mathematical and musical. The perceived distances between objects in the sky mirrored (and were mirrored by) the spaces between notes forming chords and scales. The smooth operation of the cosmos created a divine harmony that composers sought to capture and express. Jamie James allows readers to see how this scientific philosophy emerged, how it was shattered by changing views of the universe and the rise of Romanticism, and to what extent it survives today - if at all. From Pythagoras to Newton, Bach to Beethoven, and on to the twentieth century of Einstein, Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Cage and Glass. A spellbinding examination of the interwoven fates of science and music throughout history.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0387944745/?tag=2022091-20
1995
(From 1859 to 1880, Joshua Abraham Norton thought he was E...)
From 1859 to 1880, Joshua Abraham Norton thought he was Emperor of the United States. Ann Atkin keeps 7,500 garden gnomes in her backyard. Brooklyn artist Peter McGough dresses and acts as if it were 1895. These are just a few of the eccentrics discussed by Dr. Weeks, the world's foremost expert on the subject.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0394565657/?tag=2022091-20
1995
(In the fall of 2001, deep in the jungle of Burma, a team ...)
In the fall of 2001, deep in the jungle of Burma, a team of scientists searches for rare snakes. They are led by Dr. Joe Slowinski, at 38 already one of the most brilliant biologists of our time. It is the most ambitious scientific expedition ever mounted into this remote region, brought to a dramatic halt by the bite of the many-banded krait, the deadliest serpent in Asia. Thus begins one of the most remarkable wilderness rescue attempts of modern times. In The Snake Charmer, renowned journalist and author Jamie James captures the life and death of the fascinating and charismatic Joe Slowinski--a man whose career was fast and exciting, and whose tragic final expedition became a pulse-pounding struggle between man and nature.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/140130995X/?tag=2022091-20
2009
(In A Season in Hell, at the age of eighteen, the French p...)
In A Season in Hell, at the age of eighteen, the French poet Arthur Rimbaud predicted the rest of his life: 'My day is done; I'm leaving Europe. The sea air will burn my lungs; lost climes will tan my skin.' Three years later, in 1876, he joined the Royal Army of the Dutch Indies as an infantryman and sailed for Java, where he promptly deserted and fled into the jungle. It was the most enigmatic passage in his life crowded with puzzles and contrarieties. In the first book devoted to Rimbaud's lost voyage to Asia, the novelist and critic Jamie James reviews everything that is known about the episode; from there, he imaginatively spirals into a reconstruction of what the poet must have seen and informed speculation about what he might have done, vividly recreating life in nineteenth-century Java along the way. Rimbaud in Java concludes with an inquiry into what the Orient represented in the poet's imagination, with a scandalous, amusing history of French orientalism. James' surprising book is a richly concentrated blend of biography, criticism and thought-travel, which brings into sharp focus this brief encounter between a great writer and a vanished world.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0091GTW7G/?tag=2022091-20
2012
(According to Paul Bowles, a tourist travels quickly home,...)
According to Paul Bowles, a tourist travels quickly home, while a traveler moves slowly from one destination to the next. In The Glamour of Strangeness, Jamie James describes “a third species, those who roam the world in search of the home they never had in the place that made them.” From the early days of steamship travel, artists stifled by the culture of their homelands fled to islands, jungles, and deserts in search of new creative and emotional frontiers. Their flight inspired a unique body of work that doesn’t fit squarely within the Western canon, yet may be some of the most original statements we have about the range and depth of the artistic imagination. Focusing on six principal subjects, Jamie James locates “a lost national school” of artists who left their homes for the unknown. There is Walter Spies, the devastatingly handsome German painter who remade his life in Bali; Raden Saleh, the Javanese painter who found fame in Europe; Isabelle Eberhardt, a Russian-Swiss writer who roamed the Sahara dressed as an Arab man; the American experimental filmmaker Maya Deren, who went to Haiti and became a committed follower of voodoo. From France, Paul Gauguin set sail for Tahiti; Victor Segalen, a naval doctor, poet, and novelist, immersed himself in classical Chinese civilization in imperial Peking. In The Glamour of Strangeness, James evokes these extraordinary lives in portraits that bring the transcultural artist into sharp relief. Drawing on his own career as a travel writer and years of archival research uncovering previously unpublished letters and journals, James creates a penetrating investigation of the powerful connection between art and the exotic.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0374163359/?tag=2022091-20
2016
Jamie James was born in Houston, Texas, United States.
James graduated from Williams College in Massachusetts, majoring in art history.
James started his career when he moved to New York where he spent 20 years working as a freelance journalist and critic, including a stint as art critic at one of the most respected and prestigious magazines in the world, The New Yorker. In 1999 he left his post and moved to Bali, Indonesia, to concentrate on writing about Asia.
James now lives in Lombok, West Nusa Tenggara and works as a freelance writer.
James has co-authored a book on an anthropological dig in Vietnam that explored the relationship between early man and one of man’s cousins, Gigantopithecus, a ten-foot-tall ape. He has written a history of the connection between music and science centred on the myth of the music of the spheres—an idea that presupposes an orderly universe. James has also co-authored a book on eccentricity, a study of those who have shed the need to conform to most of society’s rules but cannot be classified as mentally ill. His most recent book is Rimbaud in Java.
Jamie James's works are noted both for their firm grounding in the legitimate history of his subjects as well as for their speculative bent.
The recipient of a Guggenheim Foundation grant, James has also contributed to Rolling Stone, The Atlantic Monthly, Condé Nast Traveler, National Geographic, The New York Times and Wall Street Journal, among other major publications.
(In A Season in Hell, at the age of eighteen, the French p...)
2012(For centuries, scientists and philosophers believed that ...)
1995(According to Paul Bowles, a tourist travels quickly home,...)
2016(In the fall of 2001, deep in the jungle of Burma, a team ...)
2009(From 1859 to 1880, Joshua Abraham Norton thought he was E...)
1995James now lives in Lombok, West Nusa Tenggara with his partner Rendy, whom he met in 1995 while he was in Jakarta to profile the novelist Pramoedya Ananta Toer for The New Yorker.
