Kurt Vonnegut called jokes mousetraps. This metaphor fits into a traditional conception of humor as a form of violence. (Freud theorized that humor is an act of aggression.) Much of the language of comedy is hostile. We say of funny people that they kill us or slay us. A comic will say that a joke killed, which is the opposite of bombed. We say of wit that it is either dull or sharp, and a sharp wit might be called rapier. Dull humor clubs us over the head or even bludgeons us. We describe wit as mordant and sardonic. The root of mordant is the Latin mordere (“to bite”), and the root of sardonic is the Greek sardonios, referring to a plant on the island of Sardinia that (according to legend), when ingested, makes you laugh so hard you die. By comparison, Vonnegut’s mousetrap is fairly innocuous, though illuminating. To be certain, there is an element in joke-telling of entrapment by lure, and there is a sense that the receiver (the victim) walks into the joke, following desires or expectations toward the punch line. As many jokes work by swift and precise reversal (of expectation or logic), you could call the very form of the joke cunning and aggressive. Punch lines—they’re called punch lines—are often short and sharp. They are brutal in form if not content. If the receiver of the joke does not feel punched, he might feel as if he has been blindsided or as if he has suffered a kind of logical whiplash. Vonnegut, though, wasn’t talking explicitly about the violence of joke-telling. He was talking about the craft of joke-telling, the mechanism of the joke. The joker sets the trap—just as there is potential energy stored in a compressed spring, there is tension in the joke’s setup—then springs it. The punch line snaps, harnessing and releasing the joke’s energy.

more from Chris Bachelder at The Believer here.

Laura Marsh reviews Robert Morrison's The English Opium Eater: A Biography of Thomas De Quincey, in TNR:

Robert Morrison’s biography somewhat daringly, then, takes its title from De Quincey’s most famous work, Confessions of an English Opium Eater. While he draws on De Quincey’s reminiscences and self-analysis, Morrison also shows what De Quincey’s life looked like from the outside. In an opening vignette, we meet not the introspective sybarite of the Confessions but a down-at-heel, elderly magazine writer, who has walked eight miles to hand in his copy. Indeed, De Quincey’s tendency to bring hardship upon himself (and others) permeates the rest of the book. Born in 1785 into a wealthy family with aristocratic pretensions (hence the ‘De’), he ran away from Manchester Grammar School at 16, choosing to live alone and penniless in London. He began to dissipate his inheritance long before he was legally entitled to it by living determinedly beyond his means. He was, for most of his life, pursued by creditors, whom he eluded with gusto, although he was imprisoned for debt once and publicly humiliated on several occasions. His long-suffering daughter Florence described leaving the debtors’ sanctuary where they spent seven years as “one of the most lively foretastes of Paradise I have had in my life.”

By tracing De Quincey’s public persona as “The Opium Eater” through to old age, Morrison avoids reducing his subject to The Man Who Wrote The Confessions. Soon after he was identified as the author of the hugely successful (and originally anonymous) memoir, which was one of his first published works, he was able to trade on “the magic prefix ‘by the Opium Eater.’” It was the name under which he published his Gothic novel Klosterheim: or the Masque, the signature on many of his London Magazine articles, and the name used against him in gossip columns.

An excerpt from Michael Chorost's new book, in the NYT:

In Ramez Naam’s book More Than Human I learned of an idea that had been proposed by Rodolfo Llinás, a New York University neuroscientist. It was hair-raising. He suggested that engineers could bundle thousands of slender wires into a cable and insert it into the femoral artery in the groin. They would snake the cable through the bloodstream to the brain, as if doing an angiogram. As the cable entered the brain, the wires would spread out so that each one ended up in a capillary. Once put in place, each wire could detect a single neuron’s firing, and change its firing by pulsing a jolt of electricity to it.

Imagine it: a flower blossoming inside the brain, nanometer stalks splitting away from a micrometer stem. Expanding into every available capillary, touching every cubic millimeter of the brain, collecting terabytes of data in every second. By the same token, it could send in terabytes of data every second. It would be the most intimate interface ever invented. If you connected one person’s wired brain to another person’s, you could literally connect them together; they would have a real corpus callosum joining them (albeit with links of radio waves rather than wires.) And if you connected a number of people to each other via the Internet, then you would have a network in which each node was a human brain. The World Wide Web would become the World Wide Mind.

You wouldn’t think there’s room inside your capillaries to insert any kind of wire, but there is. As the image above shows, each nanowire is less than a micron (a millionth of a meter) across—substantially narrower than a capillary. Llinás’s lab has shown that it can be done in principle. They inserted platinum nanowires into the capillaries of tissue samples and detected the activity of neurons lying next to them. Power tends to dissipate rapidly from extremely thin wires, but researchers are trying, with some success, to create wires that can carry the necessary levels of current.[1]

Larger-scale technologies already exist. Doctors can now thread a tube from the groin into the brain to inject anticancer drugs into tumors. These devices, called microcatheters, are thousands of times wider than nanowires, at half a millimeter to a millimeter in diameter. Nonetheless, they show that it’s possible to go deeply into the brain by threading a wire through the bloodstream. In an article on microcatheters the New York Times quoted a doctor as saying, “Technically, I can go anywhere in your brain.”

Of course, anyone can see problems with using large numbers of nanowires in a living brain. How does one guide thousands of wires through tangled kinks of capillaries? (Brain capillaries are as gnarled and twisted as baobab tree branches.) How does one get each one of them to a specific location? What if the wires get tangled? How do you keep them from shorting each other out? What about blood clotting? What if a wire goes through a capillary wall?

But virtually all of these objections were raised against cochlear implants in the 1970s.

Michelle Goldberg in Tablet:

Breaking the Silence was formed almost by accident in 2004. It started as an exhibition of photographs and video testimonies by soldiers who had served in Hebron and were anguished by their own behavior. The IDF wasn’t happy—military police raided the Tel Aviv gallery where the exhibit was mounted and confiscated one of the videos—but thousands of Israelis attended. Many of them were soldiers who’d never discussed their own shame. Among them was Manekin, who’s still dealing with what he describes as a “great sense of discomfort about my own personal behavior” during his army service. He agreed to give his own testimony, and soon he was part of a nascent movement.

There was no single epiphany that radicalized Manekin, no moment when he realized that much of what he’d taken for granted about Israeli righteousness was wrong. The son of two professors—his mother teaches modern Jewish history, his father medieval Jewish philosophy—he grew up in a home that was religiously Orthodox and decidedly Zionist, if also politically liberal. He had dual Israeli-American citizenship, and he spent a lot of time going back and forth between the two countries. When he was a teenager, Manekin’s family moved to Israel full-time, and he was sent to an Orthodox high school where right-wing politics predominated.

For Manekin, being accepted into the Golani battalion was like getting into a good college. “You want to excel,” he says. He enlisted for four years, one year more than required. He served first in Southern Lebanon and then in the Nablus region in the West Bank. During that time, he did things that he’s ashamed of, though they’re the sorts of things that any soldier controlling a restive, angry population would do, such as shooting stun grenades at Palestinians to intimidate them at checkpoints. Once, when his unit was assigned to protect the route to a settlement, the soldiers commandeered a house in a nearby village to serve as a lookout, and then, suspecting others might be more suitable, they took over those instead. Manekin was troubled by the soldiers’ cavalier attitude toward Palestinian homes. When he voiced his concerns, he was summoned to the battalion general, who asked if he was uncomfortable serving in the territories.

At the time, he was indignant at the suggestion that he wasn’t ready to do everything required by his military position. But in retrospect, he realized the general was right. There is no way to maintain an occupation without cruelty and moral squalor.

From EmersonKent.com:

Anita Hill's Opening Statement of her Testimony, delivered at the Russell Senate Office Building before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Washington D.C. — October 11, 1991.

In my early period there, I had two major projects. First was an article I wrote for Judge Thomas' signature on the education of minority students. The second was the organization of a seminar on high-risk students, which was abandoned, because Judge Thomas transferred to the EEOC, where he became the Chairman of that office. During this period at the Department of Education, my working relationship with Judge Thomas was positive. I had a good deal of responsibility and independence. I thought he respected my work and that he trusted my judgment. After approximately 3 months of working there, he asked me to go out socially with him. What happened next and telling the world about it are the two most difficult things, experiences of my life. It is only after a great deal of agonizing consideration and a number of sleepless nights that I am able to talk of these unpleasant matters to anyone but my close friends. I declined the invitation to go out socially with him, and explained to him that I thought it would jeopardize what at the time I considered to be a very good working relationship. I had a normal social life with other men outside of the office. I believed then, as now, that having a social relationship with a person who was supervising my work would be ill advised. I was very uncomfortable with the idea and told him so. I thought that by saying “no” and explaining my reasons, my employer would abandon his social suggestions. However, to my regret, in the following few weeks he continued to ask me out on several occasions. He pressed me to justify my reasons for saying “no” to him. These incidents took place in his office or mine. They were in the form of private conversations which would not have been overheard by anyone else.

My working relationship became even more strained when Judge Thomas began to use work situations to discuss sex. On these occasions, he would call me into his office for reports on education issues and projects or he might suggest that because of the time pressures of his schedule, we go to lunch to a government cafeteria. After a brief discussion of work, he would turn the conversation to a discussion of sexual matters. His conversations were very vivid. He spoke about acts that he had seen in pornographic films involving such matters as women having sex with animals, and films showing group sex or rape scenes. He talked about pornographic materials depicting individuals with large penises, or large breasts involved in various sex acts. On several occasions Thomas told me graphically of his own sexual prowess. Because I was extremely uncomfortable talking about sex with him at all, and particularly in such a graphic way, I told him that I did not want to talk about these subjects. I would also try to change the subject to education matters or to nonsexual personal matters, such as his background or his beliefs. My efforts to change the subject were rarely successful. Throughout the period of these conversations, he also from time to time asked me for social engagements. My reactions to these conversations was to avoid them by limiting opportunities for us to engage in extended conversations. This was difficult because at the time, I was his only assistant at the Office of Education or Office for Civil Rights.

More here.

From Science:

How many lives would you be willing to sacrifice to remove a murderous dictator like Saddam Hussein? Most of the models that researchers use to study conflicts like the Iraq war assume that civilians and leaders make a rational calculation: If the total cost of the war is less than the cost of the alternatives, they will support war. But according to a new study, those models are wrong. Surveys of people in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and other violent situations suggest that participants consistently ignored quantifiable costs and benefits, relying instead on “sacred values.” The finding could lead to better predictions of when conflicts will escalate to violence.

Models of rational behavior predict many of society's patterns, such as the prevalence of tax evasion and union strikes. But seemingly irrational behaviors like war—in which the measurable costs often far outweigh the measurable benefits—have stumped researchers going back to Charles Darwin. The prospect of crippling economic burdens and huge numbers of deaths doesn't necessarily sway people from their positions on whether going to war is the right or wrong choice. One possible explanation is that people are not weighing the pros and cons at all, but rather using a moral logic of “sacred values”—convictions that trump all other considerations—that cannot be quantified.

More here.

Among the familiar Wayne Thiebaud paintings on display at the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento—the still lifes of gumball machines and voluptuous bakery cakes, the brightly dressed, sober-faced figures, the San Francisco cityscapes with their daredevil inclines—was one mysterious picture, unlike anything else in the exhibition. It was a darkly comic painting of a man in a business suit hanging on for dear life from the limb of a leafless tree, his briefcase tossed on the grass below. A downtown city street loomed beyond the little park where this puzzling drama was playing out. Was the man trying to climb up or down? And why was he there? Thiebaud tries to explain: “Essentially, it’s about urban atmosphere, and the need to escape it.” But Man in Tree illustrates something else. Dated “1978-2010” on the wall label, it’s a testament to Thiebaud’s tireless pursuit of the challenge of painting—in this case, a 32-year run during which he started the picture, stopped and revisited it again and again, delving into its forms and colors, light and shadows, even when he felt as stuck as the man in the tree.

more from Cathleen McGuigan at Smithsonian here.

I can’t for the life of me remember why I was so bad-tempered the first time I saw a show of Gabriel Orozco years ago in New York. Orozco’s mid-career retrospective at Tate Modern (till 25 April) seems so genial and ingenious and above all so modest. It puts together a body of well-made and various work: good photographs, peculiar abstract paintings, found objects (usually modified), small sculptures in terracotta or plasticine, larger ones made from burst tyres or lint from the laundromat, etchings, drawings, and some show-stopping art-world toys: a squeezed Citroën DS, a version of billiards with the red ball hanging from a Foucault pendulum-string (you’re invited to play and it’s fun), an empty shoebox on the floor. Maybe when I saw Orozco in New York in the 1990s I was still partly living in the past. The found objects and useless devices seemed to issue from a dim Dada high ground, and therefore I expected them to hurt, or be biting. But they were friendly. They asked me and the art world to calm down. Art was play. And I see now what the best critics saw then: that this was a welcome, post-adolescent reaction to the Sturm und Drang of the previous decade – all those Nazi/anti-Nazi pictures made from straw and dung – and also, possibly, a way of keeping the Dada flame lightly burning. Well, possibly – that remains the Orozco question.

more from T.J. Clark at the LRB here.

In her Histoire de Ma Vie, the author George Sand describes an encounter with Frédéric Chopin upon returning one night from a trip to Palma. Chopin was playing a melody on the piano, in the grip of a strange delirium. “He saw himself drowned in a lake,” she wrote:

heavy and ice-cold drops of water fell at regular intervals upon his breast, and when I drew his attention to those drops of water which were actually falling at regular intervals upon the roof, he denied having heard them. He was even vexed at what I translated by imitative harmony…. His genius was full of mysterious harmonies of nature, translated by sublime equivalents into his musical thought, and not by a servile repetition of external sounds.

The work that Chopin was playing that night — according to “The hallucinations of Frédéric Chopin,” an article published recently in the journal Medical Humanities — is thought to be the Prelude in D flat major, or Prelude in F sharp minor, or even Prelude in B minor. But for the authors of the article — Manuel Vázquez Caruncho and Franciso Brañas Fernández — the exact piece Chopin was playing, or how it got composed, is less interesting than what might have been happening in Chopin’s mind while he was composing.

more from Stefany Anne Golberg at The Smart Set here.

The Dancer

Mama,
they tell me you were a dancer
they tell me you had long
beautiful legs to carry your graceful body
they tell me you were a dancer

Mama,
they tell me you sang beautiful solos
they tell me you closed your eyes
always when the feeling of the song
was right, and lifted your face up to the sky
they tell me you were an enchanting dancer

Mama,
they tell me you were always so gentle
they talk of a willow tree
swaying lovingly over clear running water
in early Spring when they talk of you
they tell me you were a slow dancer

Read more »

Nate Anderson in Wired:

When Aaron Barr was finalizing a recent computer security presentation for the U.S. Transportation Security Administration, a colleague had a bit of good-natured advice for him: “Scare the shit out of them!”

In retrospect, this may not have been the advice Barr needed. As CEO of the government-focused infosec company HBGary Federal, Barr had to bring in big clients — and quickly — as the startup business hemorrhaged cash. To do so, he had no problem with trying to “scare the sh*t out of them.” When working with a major DC law firm in late 2010 on a potential deal involving social media, for instance, Barr decided that scraping Facebook to stalk a key partner and his family might be a good idea. When he sent his law firm contact a note filled with personal information about the partner, his wife, her family and her photography business, the result was immediate.

“Thanks. I am not sure I will share what you sent last night — he might freak out.”

This rather creepy behavior became common; Barr used it as a sign of his social media prowess. Another target of his investigations went to “a Jewish Church in DC, the Temple Micah.” Someone else “married @ the Inn at Perry Cabin in St. Michaels, MD (non-denominational ceremony).” Barr was even willing to helpfully guesstimate the ages of children in photographs (“they have 2 kids, son and daughter look to be 7 and 4″).

More here.

From Biographyonline.com:

“I'm not the greatest. I'm the double greatest. Not only do I knock 'em out, I pick the round. I'm the boldest, the prettiest, the most superior, most scientific, most skilfullest fighter in the ring today”

Standing at 6'3″ (1.91 m), Ali had a highly unorthodox style for a heavyweight boxer. Rather than the normal boxing style of carrying the hands high to defend the face, he instead relied on his ability to avoid a punch. In Louisville, October 29, 1960, Cassius Clay won his first professional fight. He won a six-round decision over Tunney Hunsaker, who was the police chief of Fayetteville, West Virginia. From 1960 to 1963, the young fighter amassed a record of 19-0, with 15 knockouts. He defeated such boxers as Tony Esperti, Jim Robinson, Donnie Fleeman, Alonzo Johnson, George Logan, Willi Besmanoff, Lamar Clark (who had won his previous 40 bouts by knockout), Doug Jones, and Henry Cooper. Among Clay's victories were versus Sonny Banks (who knocked him down during the bout), Alejandro Lavorante, and the aged Archie Moore (a boxing legend who had fought over 200 previous fights, and who had been Clay's trainer prior to Angelo Dundee).

Muhammad Ali quotes:

“Sonny Liston is nothing. The man can't talk. The man can't fight. The man needs talking lessons. The man needs boxing lessons. And since he's gonna fight me, he needs falling lessons”

“Stay in College, get the knowledge, stay there until you are through. If they can make penicillin out of moldy bread, they can sure make something of you!”

“Clean out my cell and take my tail.On the trail for the jail without bail.Because it's better in jail Watchin' television fed Than in Vietnam somewhere, dead”

“It's hard to be humble when you're as great as I am”

More here.

From PhysOrg:

Most of the banter and gentle humor that usually pepper the popular quiz show was gone as the supercomputer dominated the game by beating his human opponents to the buzzer again and again. Ken Jennings — who holds the “Jeopardy!” record of 74 straight wins — shook his buzzer in silent frustration as the computer's artificial voice answered the first dozen challenges without pause, getting all but one right. “Watson” – named after Thomas Watson, the founder of the US technology giant — receives the clues electronically by text message at the same time as they are revealed to the human contestants. The first player to hit the buzzer gets to answer the question. The others only get a chance if the first player gets the answer wrong.

Watson, which is not connected to the Internet, plays the game by crunching through multiple algorithms at dizzying speed and attaching a percentage score to what it believes is the correct response. It beat Jennings and Brad Rutter — who won a record $3.25 million on the show — to the buzzer on 24 of 30 questions. Five-time “Jeopardy!” champion Jeffrey Spoeri sympathized with Jennings and Rutter, and said the computer's speed to the buzzer seemed like an unfair advantage. “I gotta root for the humans,” said Spoeri, who won 105,000 dollars on the show in November 2006. But he was deeply impressed with the computer's skills. “The actual game play was just amazing, that it would know the answers and discern which one is the correct one,” Spoeri told AFP after viewing the first show.

“It's a terrific experiment.”

More here.

Vijay Prasad in CounterPunch:

The Arab Revolt of 2011 is unabated. Protests continue in such unlikely places as Bahrain. On Valentine’s Day, a protest march in Manama had no love for the al-Khalifah royals. It wanted to deliver its message. “Our demand is a constitution written by the people,” the protestors chanted. Opposition leader Abdul Wahab Hussain told the press, “The number of riot police is huge, but we have shown using violence against us only makes us stronger.” The police fired rubber bullets and dispersed the as yet small crowd. “This is just the beginning,” Hussain said after he had been beaten off the streets.

Such protests appear unlikely only because the wave of struggle that broke out in the late 1950s and peaked in the 1970s was crushed by the early 1980s. Encouraged by the overthrow of the monarch in Egypt by the coup led by Gamal Abdel Nasser, ordinary people across the Arab world wanted their own revolts. Iraq and Lebanon followed. On the peninsula, the people wanted what Fred Halliday called “Arabia without Sultans.” The People’s Front for the Liberation of the Occupied Arab Gulf emerged out of the Dhofar (Oman) struggle. It wished to take its local campaign to the entire peninsula. In Bahrain, its more timid branch was the Popular Front. It did not last long. With Nasserism in decline by the 1970s, the new momentum came to this Arabian republicanism from the Iranian Revolution of 1979. The Islamic Front of the Liberation of Bahrain attempted a coup in 1981. They had the inspiration, but not the organization. This Arab archipelago could not go the way of Yemen, where a revolution allowed a Marxist organization to seize power in 1967.

More here.

In Guernica:

In November 2010, following a public speech she had made on the freedom struggle in Kashmir, a case of sedition was threatened against Roy. Several prominent members of the educated middle class in India spoke up on Roy’s behalf but a sizable section of this liberal set made it clear that their support of Roy was a support for the right to free speech, not for her views. What is it about Roy that so irks the Indian middle-class and elite? Is it the fact that she has no truck with the sober, scholarly, Brahmanical discourse of the respectable middle-of-the-road protectors of the status-quo? Her critics, among whom are some of my friends, are also serious people. But their objections appear hollow to me because they have never courted unpopularity. They air their opinions in op-eds, dine at the corporate table, are fêted on national TV, and collect followers on Twitter. They don’t have to face court orders. Naturally, I wanted to ask Roy whether she feels estranged from the people around her. She does, but also not. Her point is, which people? A bit melodramatically, I asked, “Are you lonely?” Roy’s wonderfully self-confident response: “If I were lonely, I’d be doing something else. But I’m not. I deploy my writing from the heart of the crowd.”

When I sat down for dinner with her I noticed the pile of papers on the far end of the wooden table. These were legal charges filed against Roy because of her statements against Indian state atrocities. Roy said to me, “These are our paper napkins these days.” What toll had these trials taken on her writing? Was her activism a source of a new political imagining or was her political experience one of loneliness and exile in her own land? What would be the shape of any new fiction she would write? These and other questions were on my mind when I began an exchange with Roy by email and then met with her twice at her home in Delhi in mid-January.

Guernica: Before we begin, can you give me an example of a stupid question you are asked at interviews?

Arundhati Roy: It is difficult to answer extremely stupid questions. Very, very, difficult. Stupidity defeats you in some way. Especially when time is at a premium. And sometimes these questions are themselves mischievous.

Guernica: Give me an example.

Arundhati Roy: “The Maoists are blowing up schools and killing children. Do you approve? Is it right to kill children?” Where do you start?

More here.

Garry Kasparov reviews Frank Brady's Endgame: Bobby Fischer’s Remarkable Rise and Fall—from America’s Brightest Prodigy to the Edge of Madness:

It would be impossible for me to write dispassionately about Bobby Fischer even if I were to try. I was born the year he achieved a perfect score at the US Championship in 1963, eleven wins with no losses or draws. He was only twenty at that point but it had been obvious for years that he was destined to become a legendary figure. His book My 60 Memorable Games was one of my earliest and most treasured chess possessions. When Fischer took the world championship crown from my countryman Boris Spassky in 1972 I was already a strong club player following every move as it came in from Reykjavík. The American had crushed two other Soviet grandmasters en route to the title match, but there were many in the USSR who quietly admired his brash individuality along with his amazing talent.

I dreamed of playing Fischer one day, and we eventually did become competitors after a fashion, though in the history books and not across the chessboard. He left competitive chess in 1975, walking away from the title he coveted so dearly his entire life. Ten more years passed before I took the title from Fischer’s successor, Anatoly Karpov, but rarely did an interviewer miss a chance to bring up Fischer’s name to me. “Would you beat Fischer?” “Would you play Fischer if he came back?” “Do you know where Bobby Fischer is?”

Occasionally I felt as though I were playing a one-sided match against a phantasm. Nobody knew where Fischer was, or if he, still the most famous chess player in the world at the time, was out there plotting a comeback. After all, at forty-two in 1985 he was still much younger than two of the players I had just faced in the world championship qualification matches. But thirteen years away from the board is a long time. As for playing him, I suppose I would have liked my chances and I said as much, but how can you play a myth? I had Karpov to worry about, and he was no ghost. Chess had moved on without the great Bobby, even if many in the chess world had not.

David Grossman is the Israeli writer of the hour. Although a celebrated novelist, he is also a distinguished journalist who, over the last 30 years, has written steadily in newspapers and magazines in response to almost every social and political event of any size or significance that has taken place in his country. The difference between the story-telling Grossman and the essayistic Grossman is instructive. In 1987 Grossman wrote The Yellow Wind, a journalistic account of three months spent in the West Bank, where he looked hard at Palestinian life under the Israeli occupation. Until that time, he had lived all of his 33 years in Jerusalem. By his own admission, when he looked at an Arab he saw not a fellow creature; he saw only an Arab. Those three months in the West Bank radicalized him. When, upon its publication, I read the book, it reminded me of books that had been written by white, middle-class American kids who’d gone south in the ’60s to discover for themselves what it really meant to be black in America.

more from Vivian Gornick at Boston Review here.

W.G. Sebald’s long poem Nach der Natur (1988) contributed significantly to the swift recognition of his literary talent among fellow writers and poets, yet it received scant attention by the larger public and literary scholars alike.1 To the English-speaking world it was not even available until 2002, a year after its author’s death, when it appeared in Michael Hamburger’s excellent translation under the title After Nature. Like a triptych, it is divided into three untitled parts, each with a distinct thematic concern involving a specific historical period and a writer or artist: the first focuses on the Renaissance painter Matthias Grünewald, the second on the eighteenth-century naturalist, travel writer, and Arctic explorer Georg Wilhelm Steller, and the last on elements from Sebald’s own biography.2 As opposed to Sebald’s later practice, apart from the landscape photographs that are reproduced on the end sheets of the first edition of Nach der Natur, there are no visuals in the volume, although paintings play a prominent role, especially in the first and final sections of the poem. In what follows, I shall support my reading of Sebald’s poem with reproductions of Grünewald’s paintings. I do so, however, in an attempt to provide a glossary, and I do not want to confuse this with Sebald’s own, later practice of including visuals in his texts.

more from Dorothea von Mücke at Nonsite here.