Zinovy Zinik in Eurozine:

Is the notion of the émigré author a dated phenomenon that has outlived itself in the age of global communications? I don’t think so. I think it is still a useful concept to define a specific type of literature. While the native author deals with moral ambiguities by proxy, using his characters, the personality of the émigré writer is part of his fiction’s plot – he himself has to decide on which side of the border his mind is. What an ordinary human being lives through, the writer tries to describe. What for an ordinary writer is mental exercise, for the émigré author is lived experience. The émigré writer physically lives this metaphor of life in transit. (Elias Canetti, my neighbour in Hampstead, preferred to write sitting in his car, parked in front of his house.) The dilemma of the émigré author is, therefore, linked with his sense of belonging; and since he is a writer, the question arises for whom he writes and where his audience is located. The citizenship of the émigré writer is not necessarily that of the country of his main readership, and his sense of belonging or his religion might differ from his loyalty as a citizen of the country of his residence. That is, the émigré writer is the one who feels he is displaced – geographically or in language, separated from his readers in one way or another.

Vampires, doomed to exist between two worlds forever, provide the ultimate example of the mental state of exile. But they are émigrés of a very specific kind: they don’t cast a shadow. In other words, they have no real identity in this world. The writer’s existence in the outside world is measured by the influence that his creation exerts – by the shadows his words cast. Vampires are like émigré writers, understood neither in the country of their dwelling, nor able to reach across the border to their readers in the motherland.

Daniel Grant in the Chronicle of Higher Education:

Job security is a relatively new concept in the ancient field of teaching art. Historically artists have created, and been judged on, their own credentials — that is, their art. And the master of fine-arts degree, often described as a “terminal degree,” or the endpoint in an artist’s formal education, has long been sufficient for artists seeking to teach at the college level. But significant change may be on the horizon, as increasing numbers of college and university administrators are urging artists to obtain doctoral degrees.

We shouldn’t be surprised; the M.F.A. has been under attack for some time now. The M.F.A. has become a problem for many administrators, who are increasingly uncomfortable with different criteria for different faculty members. They understand the lengthy process required to earn a doctorate — of which the master’s degree is only a small, preliminary part — and see hiring a Ph.D. over an M.F.A. as the difference between buying a fully loaded showroom automobile and a chassis. Administrators like the background Ph.D.’s have in research, publishing, and grant writing (though if their principal concern were the teaching of studio art to undergraduates, they wouldn’t focus so much on the doctorate).

More here.

Theodore Dalrymple in City Journal:

The British parliament’s first avowedly atheist member, Charles Bradlaugh, would stride into public meetings in the 1880s, take out his pocket watch, and challenge God to strike him dead in 60 seconds. God bided his time, but got Bradlaugh in the end. A slightly later atheist, Bertrand Russell, was once asked what he would do if it proved that he was mistaken and if he met his maker in the hereafter. He would demand to know, Russell replied with all the high-pitched fervor of his pedantry, why God had not made the evidence of his existence plainer and more irrefutable. And Jean-Paul Sartre* came up with a memorable line: “God doesn’t exist—the bastard!”

Sartre’s wonderful outburst of disappointed rage suggests that it is not as easy as one might suppose to rid oneself of the notion of God. (Perhaps this is the time to declare that I am not myself a believer.) At the very least, Sartre’s line implies that God’s existence would solve some kind of problem—actually, a profound one: the transcendent purpose of human existence. Few of us, especially as we grow older, are entirely comfortable with the idea that life is full of sound and fury but signi-fies nothing.

More here.

It’s 39 years since Jane Birkin fell in love with Serge Gainsbourg, 27 years since they split up, and 16 years since Gainsbourg died, but you’d never guess. Paris has never let its most iconic couple separate – you can, Birkin says, still not get through a day in this city without hearing the immortal intimacies of ‘Je t’aime… moi non plus’ from somewhere – and anyway Birkin herself, at 60, has chosen to be living proof that love can survive divorce and death. She still spends most nights with Gainsbourg, singing his songs on an endless cabaret tour, breathing life into words he wrote with her, his muse, in mind. Birkin’s apartment, just off the Boulevard St Germain, decked in crimson silk, cast in permanent twilight, crammed with old photographs and a collection of stuffed animals, is made for this perpetual seance. She shares it with a corpulent bulldog, Dora, who lounges on a chaise.

more from The Observer Review here.

It is not hard to understand why John Cowper Powys has never had the recognition he deserves as one of the twentieth century’s most remarkable novelists. Until he was nearly sixty he earned his living as an itinerant lecturer, much of the time in America, where he thrilled his audiences by his seeming ability to transmit, medium-like, the inmost thoughts of the writers he loved. For a time Powys’s electrifying performance as a kind of literary magus attracted a considerable following. His admirers included some of America’s best-known writers – Theodore Dreiser was a notable supporter, for example – but Powys’s method of ‘dithyrambic analysis’ never caught on. An idiosyncratic exercise that he described as ‘hollowing himself out’ so he could become the writer he was interpreting, it was too obviously adapted to the needs of the lecture circuit and the quirks of Powys’s personality to have any lasting influence. Powys removed himself further from any kind of critical acceptance when, in an effort to generate an income that would enable him to give up lecturing, he published a series of self-help manuals. With titles like The Art of Forgetting the Unpleasant and In Defence of Sensuality, these forays into popular psychology were refreshingly unorthodox in their prescriptions for personal happiness; but they reinforced the perception of Powys as an eccentric figure flailing about on the outer margins of literary and academic respectability.

more from Literary Review here.

THE BELIEVER: In your experience of knowing artists, do you think there’s a discrepancy between why artists tell themselves they’re making art, and the actual reason you perceive them to be making art?

DAVE HICKEY: In my experience, you always think you know what you’re doing; you always think you can explain, but you always discover, years later, that you didn’t and you couldn’t. This leads me to suspect that the principal function of human reason is to rationalize what your lizard brain demands of you. That’s my idea. Art and writing come from somewhere down around the lizard brain. It’s a much more peculiar activity than we like to think it is. The problems arise when we try to domesticate the practice, to pretend that it’s a normal human activity and that “everybody’s creative.” They’re not. Honestly, I never sit down to write anything without thinking, This is a weird thing to be doing! Why am I sitting here writing? Why am I looking at the Ellsworth Kelly on my wall? I don’t know. It feels funny to do these things, but it feels funnier not to, so I write and look.

more from The Believer here.

His reticence, it might be said, extended to narrative itself. Beyond brilliantly meshing visual form with theme—empty canvases with empty lives—Antonioni contributed early to cinema’s migration from Victorian narrative modes, as necessary and welcome a move as was that from Great Expectations to Mrs. Dalloway for literature. Beginning with L’avventura, his films are firmly liberated from Hollywood’s obsessive insistence on the conclusive denouement, on tying things up, whether for better (Mildred Pierce; Stagecoach) or worse (Sunset Boulevard). This was not easy or profitable for the director. The sophisticated audience at Cannes in 1960 was no more prepared than the general public to watch a film whose ostensible heroine not only disappears but is forgotten by the other characters. Probably expecting another film noir, where the body would be found and the mystery solved, the Cannes crowd booed vigorously. But, as Antonioni explained, L’avventura was a noir in reverse. Fortunately, the audience’s disapproval was quickly rejected by great cineastes and critics alike.

more from Artforum here.

From Edge:

What is the self? How does the activity of neurons give rise to the sense of being a conscious human being? Even this most ancient of philosophical problems, I believe, will yield to the methods of empirical science. It now seems increasingly likely that the self is not a holistic property of the entire brain; it arises from the activity of specific sets of interlinked brain circuits. But we need to know which circuits are critically involved and what their functions might be. It is the “turning inward” aspect of the self — its recursiveness — that gives it its peculiar paradoxical quality.

In a wide-ranging talk, Vilayanur Ramachandran explores how brain damage can reveal the connection between the internal structures of the brain and the corresponding functions of the mind. He talks about phantom limb pain, synesthesia (when people hear color or smell sounds), and the Capgras delusion, when brain-damaged people believe their closest friends and family have been replaced with imposters.

More here.

From Science:

What makes Maine coons cuddly and Russian shorthairs standoffish? The answer may lie in the first sequence of the cat genome, published today. In all, geneticists have turned up 20,285 genes, the analysis of which could shed light on everything from human diseases to the underpinnings of feline domestication. The latest sequence comes courtesy of a 4-year-old Abyssinian cat named Cinnamon. The analysis is only a first pass and so is not as complete as that done for humans or dogs. Still, evolutionary biologist Stephen O’Brien and bioinformaticist Joan Pontius of the National Cancer Institute in Frederick, Maryland, and their colleagues were able to decipher about 65% of the gene-containing parts of the genome, or more than 20,000 genes. That’s perhaps 95% of the total, based on comparisons with other genomes.

Based on the structure of the chromosomes, the cat genome much more closely resembles that of humans than that of other nonprimate species. Unlike cats and humans, pieces of chromosomes in “the dog, mouse, rat, and others have been reshuffled like a poker deck,” says O’Brien. This conservation suggests that the cat’s genome has more in common with the ancient ancestor of cats, humans, and other mammals than, say, the dog’s does. Other surprises included an excessive amount of mitochondrial DNA stuck into the cat genome, although researchers have yet to figure out the reason or significance.

More here.