Amitava Kumar talks to the author in The Paris Review:

Hari Kunzru’s latest novel, Gods Without Men, is being released in the U.S. today. Set in the Mojave Desert, the novel is an echo chamber for stories divided across more than two centuries. The clever symmetries that link the stories reveal the bleached bones of American identity—racial mixing, violence, an unending contest over the politics of meaning and faith. This is Kunzru’s fourth novel; his debut, The Impressionist, appeared in 2003 and was followed by Transmission (2004) and My Revolutions (2007). I conducted this interview by e-mail, but I saw Kunzru only a few weeks ago, in late January, at the Jaipur Literature Festival. He had done a public reading from Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses , a book banned in India since its publication more than two decades ago. Rushdie had been scheduled to appear at the festival but, because of threats to his life, decided to stay away. When I last saw Kunzru, it was close to midnight and he was making calls to lawyers overseas. He had been informed that he was facing arrest. The next day, on legal advice, Kunzru left the country.

The first time I read about you, you were described as having “a nonspecifically exotic appearance” that marked you “as a potential native of about half the world’s nations.” How do you usually explain your origins?

I was born in London. Depending on who I’m talking to, and how I feel, I might describe myself simply as a Londoner, British (that one’s only crept in since I came to live in New York—to anyone in the UK, it’s weirdly meaningless), English, the son of an Indian father and an English mother, Kashmiri Pandit, rootless cosmopolitan …

How did Gods Without Men come about?

I got stuck in Los Angeles on 9/11. I’d been in California for a couple months and was supposed to fly home to England the next day, which was not going to happen. I had a weird experience involving trying to give back a little rented Japanese sportscar with Arizona plates, freeways being closed, getting lost and driving round the perimeter of ghostly, closed LAX on the tensest day in modern American history. Then it involved the LAPD and firearms. Only my English accent stopped the fuckers arresting me. It wouldn’t work so well now with cops and immigration people in the Western U.S.—they’ve got English-accented Pakistanis on their radar. Anyhow, I got away unshot and found West Hollywood full of freaked out hipsters telling each other someone was about to fly planes into the Hollywood sign. People were losing their minds.

From The New Yorker:

At any given moment, Pääbo has at least half a dozen research efforts in progress. When I visited him in May, he had one team analyzing DNA that had been obtained from a forty- or fifty-thousand-year-old finger bone found in Siberia, and another trying to extract DNA from a cache of equally ancient bones from China. A third team was slicing open the brains of mice that had been genetically engineered to produce a human protein. In Pääbo’s mind, at least, these research efforts all hang together. They are attempts to solve a single problem in evolutionary genetics, which might, rather dizzyingly, be posed as: What made us the sort of animal that could create a transgenic mouse?

The question of what defines the human has, of course, been kicking around since Socrates, and probably a lot longer. If it has yet to be satisfactorily resolved, then this, Pääbo suspects, is because it has never been properly framed. “The challenge is to address the questions that are answerable,” he told me. Pääbo’s most ambitious project to date, which he has assembled an international consortium to assist him with, is an attempt to sequence the entire genome of the Neanderthal. The project is about halfway complete and has already yielded some unsettling results, including the news, announced by Pääbo last year, that modern humans, before doing in the Neanderthals, must have interbred with them. Once the Neanderthal genome is complete, scientists will be able to lay it gene by gene—indeed, base by base—against the human, and see where they diverge. At that point, Pääbo believes, an answer to the age-old question will finally be at hand. Neanderthals were very closely related to modern humans—so closely that we shared our prehistoric beds with them—and yet clearly they were not humans. Somewhere among the genetic disparities must lie the mutation or, more probably, mutations that define us. Pääbo already has a team scanning the two genomes, drawing up lists of likely candidates.

More here.

From Orion Magazine:

My name is called, and a doctor I’ve never met performs a scan of my ovaries. I take notes in a blank book I’ve filled with four-leaf clovers found on my river walks: Two follicles? Three? Chance of success 15–18 percent. On the way out, I steal the journal with the monkey on the cover. Back home, under the canopy of oak and hickory trees, I open the car door and sound rushes in, louder after its absence. Cicada song—thousands and thousands of males contracting their internal membranes so that each might find his mate. In Tennessee it gets so bad that a man calls 911 to complain because he thinks it’s someone operating machinery.

A FEW DAYS LATER, I visit the North Carolina Zoo, where Jamani, the pregnant gorilla, seems unaware of the dozens of extra visitors who have come to see her each day since the announcement of her condition. She shares an enclosure with Acacia, a socially dominant but somewhat petite sixteen-year-old female, and Nkosi, a twenty-year-old, 410-pound male. The breeding of captive lowland gorillas is managed by a Species Survival Plan that aims to ensure genetic diversity among captive members of a species. That means adult female gorillas are given birth control pills—the same kind humans take—until genetic testing recommends them for breeding with a male of the same species. Even after clearance, it can take months or years for captive gorillas to conceive. Some never do. Humans have a long history of imposing various forms of birth control and reproductive technologies on animals, breeding some and sterilizing others. In recent years, we’ve even administered advanced fertility treatments to endangered captive animals like giant pandas and lowland gorillas. These measures, both high- and low-tech, have come to feel as routine as the management of our own reproduction. We feel responsible when we spay and neuter our cats and dogs, proud when our local zoos release photos of baby animals born of luck and science.

More here.

Hello,

The voting round of our arts & literature prize (details here) is over. A total of 1,029 votes were cast for the 56 nominees (click here for full list of nominees). Thanks to the nominators and the voters for participating.

Carla Goller has designed a “trophy” logo that our top twenty vote-getters may choose to display on their own blogs. So here they are, in descending order from the most voted-for:

1. Shelf Actualization: Brave New World vs. Nineteen Eighty-Four
2. Occasional Planet: Navigating the waters of our biased culture
3. The Nervous Breakdown: Secret Theatres
4. Tang Dynasty Times: Leonardo in the Gilded Age
5. 3 Quarks Daily: PINA — a 3D Documentary Film by Wim Wenders
6. Need to Know on PBS: Excuse me, I'm having a Macbeth moment
7. 3 Quarks Daily: Adagio in Blues
8. Sanchari Sur: Scheherazade’s One Thousand and One Arabian Night(mare)s
9. The Millions: Sister Carrie
10. 3 Quarks Daily: The Last Novel
11. Pandaemonium: Antigone Across the Ages
12. Eyewear: Harlow on Four Zimbabwean Poets
13. Numéro Cinq: The Formalist Reformation, A Review of Viktor Shklovsky’s Bowstring: On the Dissimilarity of the Similar
14. Big Think: Will Neuroscience Kill the Novel?
15. Salon: Whole Foods Was Around the Corner
16. Kristine Ong Muslim: Bonsai-keeping and the rate of crystal growth
17. More Quasar: Graham Harman and the Queen of the Blues
18. Numéro Cinq: My First Job
19. Rebecca Nemser: Hans Wegner / The Bear Chair
20. The Millions: Irène Némirovsky, Suite Française, and The Mirador

The editors of 3 Quarks Daily will now pick the top six entries from these, and after possibly adding up to three “wildcard” entries, will send that list of finalists to Gish Jen for final judging. We will post the shortlist of finalists here in the next day or two.

Good luck!

Abbas

“I think I’ll write a book today,” the writer Georges Simenon was said to tell his wife at breakfast. “Fine,” she would reply, “but what will you do in the afternoon?” Winston Churchill was similarly prolific, and not just in the field of letters [1]. In his later years, he liked to boast that in 1921 he created the British mandate of Trans-Jordan, the first incarnation of what still is the Kingdom of Jordan, “with the stroke of a pen, one Sunday afternoon in Cairo” [2]. Also like Simenon, Churchill wasn’t averse to the odd tipple, and according to some, that Sunday afternoon in Cairo followed a particularly liquid lunch. As a consequence, the then colonial secretary’s [3] penmanship proved a bit unsteady, allegedly producing a particularly erratic borderline. The result is still visible on today’s maps: the curious zigzag of the border between Jordan and Saudi Arabia.

more from Frank Jacobs at The Opinionater here.

I missed the news of Wisława Szymborska‘s funeral earlier this month, and only just found this youtube clip of the quiet, secular ceremony that nevertheless attracted more than a thousand people in a Polish winter. According to the Associated Press: Freezing temperatures and falling snow at the Rakowicki Cemetery in the southern city of Kraków, where Szymborska lived, did not discourage the mourners, including Prime Minister Donald Tusk, writers and actors, from attending the ceremony. An urn with Szymborska’s ashes was placed in the family tomb, where her parents and sister are buried, to a recording of Ella Fitzgerald, Szymborska’s favorite singer, singing “Black Coffee.” The poet was a heavy smoker and a lover of black coffee. “In her poems, she left us her ability to notice the ordinary, the tiniest particles of beauty and of the joy of the world,” President Bronisław Komorowski said. “She was a Krakowian by choice,” said Kraków mayor Jacek Majchrowski in the clip below. “The climate agreed with her, so did the people.”

more from Cynthia Haven (and a link to a clip of the ceremony) at The Bookhaven here.

In Russia, poetry can make things happen. In February 2011—two months after the handsome young lawyer Alexei Navalny launched his game-changing anti-corruption website, Rospil.info—a writer, an actor and a theatre producer teamed up on a different kind of internet project, which they called Citizen Poet. Every week, Dmitri Bykov weaves a verse pastiche of a well-known poet out of some event in politics, which Mikhail Yefremov—a prodigious mimic with wickedly twinkling eyes—then delivers in fancy dress. Citizen Poet was an immediate cultural sensation. The first clip was about the farcical second show-trial of Putin’s enemy, the former Yukos oil magnate Mikhail Khodorkovsky. The second was a parody of the Romantic poet Mikhail Lermontov, in which “Vova” (Vladimir Putin) talked to “Dima” (Dmitri Medvedev) about the terrifying possibility of an Arab Spring in Moscow: “We are not in Tunis, not in Cairo/ We are in Russia, like mice in cheese/ and the Arab variant is not for Russia.” In August, after Putin was filmed in diving gear, retrieving two 6th-century BC amphorae from the Black Sea bed, Yefremov, reciting a parody of a poem by Osip Mandelstam, pulled a mini amphora out of a fishtank. Was it coincidence that the Kremlin press spokesman conceded soon afterwards that Putin’s archaeological diving feat had been staged? Citizen Poet made it fashionable to laugh at Putin and Medvedev. The Moscow elite paid high prices to watch Bykov and Yefremov perform in theatres and clubs. While notching up millions of online hits as new clips appeared without fail every Monday morning, Citizen Poet toured the cities of Russia.

more from Rachel Polonsky at Prospect Magazine here.

From The Paris Review:

It is perfectly monstrous the way people go about, nowadays, saying things against one behind one’s back that are absolutely and entirely true.

—Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

Several writers have weighed in recently on this age-old human foible that is gossip, with varying levels of success. In The Virtues of Our Vices: A Modest Defense of Gossip, Rudeness, and Other Bad Habits, philosopher Emrys Westacott examines the ethics of several conventionally frowned-upon social transgressions and “moral failings” like rudeness, snobbery, and, of course, gossip. He begins his examination of the subject by posing the big-picture questions: Should we condemn all gossip? If gossip isn’t an “inherently pejorative” act, can it ever be acceptable or even beneficial? Westacott finds compelling ethical justifications for the innocent pleasure so many of us take in slamming our friends and loved ones. Yes, when it’s malicious and untrue, he allows, gossip can ruin reputations and damage lives. But the right kind of gossip—about, say, unwarranted salary discrepancies, or sketchy undisclosed conflicts of interest—can be a force of good. Behind-the-scenes murmurings build relationships, provide emotional catharsis, counteract secrecy, and upend existing power structures, to name just a few benefits. In the end, Westacott concludes, “a willingness to talk about people—which at times will involve gossiping—may be an integral part of the ‘examined life.’”

Another recent book, Joseph Epstein’s Gossip: The Untrivial Pursuit, takes Westacott’s claim that there’s no such thing as “no one else’s business” to new heights—and depths. The extended essay takes as a given that “[o]ther people are the world’s most fascinating subject,” which I for one certainly wouldn’t dispute. From there Epstein veers back and forth between disquisitions on the meaning, importance, and history of gossip to delectable tidbits on everyone from Arthur Miller (who dumped his disabled child in an institution for life!) to Fidel Castro (who did it with Kenneth Tynan’s wife!).

More here.

Jeff Wheelwright in Discover:

The breast-cancer mutation 185delAG entered the gene pool of Jews some 2,500 years ago, around the time they were exiled to Babylon. Random and unbidden, the mutation appeared on the chromosome of a single person, who is known as the founder. In the same sense that Abraham is said to have founded the Jewish people, scientists call the person at the top of a genetic pyramid a founder. This particular founder was born missing the letters A (for adenine) and G (guanine) from the DNA chain at the 185 site on one copy of his or her BRCA1 gene. BRCA1 is a tumor-suppressor gene; the deletion of the two letters disabled its protective function. But the mutation wasn’t immediately harmful to the founder because he or she had another copy of the gene that worked.

Researchers have no idea who the founder was, but they can deduce from historical evidence when he or she lived. When Jews were permitted to return to Jerusalem after their captivity in Babylon, not all the exiles went home. The ones who stayed behind are the ancestors of Iraqi Jews, whose numbers are today much reduced but who for centuries constituted a venerable center of the faith. In addition to the Jews living in Mesopotamia and Jerusalem, satellite immigrant communities sprang up elsewhere in the Middle East. A decentralization of the gene pool had begun, and the distances between groups acted as barriers to the exchange of DNA, barriers that have persisted into the modern day. When scientists in Israel tested BRCA1 carriers from the dispersed Jewish populations, they discovered that all shared the same basic spelling in the genetic region of 185delAG. But some of the matches between Jewish groups were off by a letter or two, which indicated minor changes since the groups had split. Rolling back the demographic clock, the scientists inferred that its founder must have lived before the groups divided—that is, prior to the Babylonian watershed.

More here.

From The New York Times:

The hospital I work at has no 13th floor. The absence can be a bit awkward to explain to people. I mean, here sits a building at the center of the modern evidence-based scientific empire. Yet as soon as we set foot in the elevator, it is clear that we have decided to hedge our bets a little, and play the dark side too. This odd coupling of bullet-train rationality and primal superstition actually is quite common in science. I once worked for an investigator, the most methodical, robotic person I ever have known, who insisted on pointing all of the lab’s workbenches toward the sun for good luck. I myself have been known to avoid checking test results on certain very ill patients until I can sit at a specific computer. (It’s a lucky workstation, honest.) The truth is that despite the endless evidence demonstrating its nonexistence, all doctors believe in luck. We fight it, devoted as we are to upholding the premise of a rational, scientific world that hews only to that which is statistically significant, that wondrous city on the hill where cause and effect are sealed in eternal conjugation. But we are saddled with a few pre-Enlightenment attitudes, too. Not that we care to admit it. Because not only does luck fall far outside the ordered rows of science, but where health is concerned, luck is far too arbitrary, too unfeeling, too senseless an explanation for any of us to accept. We all prefer to believe that we live in a crisp, predictable world where everything that happens has an evident cause.

Lung cancer? Cigarettes. Heart attack? Out of shape. Maintaining the fantasy of this-then-that gives us at least the satisfaction of appearing to control our destiny, when clearly we do not and cannot. Without this small delusion, we’re just floating along like other hapless animals, wishing and hoping that maybe something good will drift our way. The Lotto life.

More here.

“This is not a political war at all. This is not a cultural war.
This is a spiritual war.”
……………… —US Presidential Candidate Rick Santorum

Die Brücke

They must have turned a few stolid German
heads in the years before the war, out to
overturn the dinner table,

bellow in the library and race around
the altar, kids playing savage, their
idea of it anyway, the id

unbridled, hands turned to thrash and
burn with primal tools, gouged wood
releasing unseen spirits, tossing them

off like two minute garage hits pressed onto
paper, burning the inked blocks to heat
their cold Dresden studio leaving

only to take in the tingle-tangle
and meet girls, that timeless rationale
of tortured artists everywhere, a

blitzkrieg bookended by the
Manifesto and Chronik der Brücke,
a short jagged run worn smooth

scoured by war, gouged away by a new
breed of savage in crisp brown shirts, ranks
in lockstep, preaching purity, wielding fire.
.

by Dave Hardin
publisher: Scrum

Manu Joseph in the NYT (image from Wikimedia Commons):

Mr. [Narendra] Modi’s rise is a consequence of two horrific events, which occurred in Gujarat months after he was appointed chief minister of the state.

On Feb. 27, 2002, almost 60 people, most of them Hindu pilgrims, were burned alive in a train compartment near the town of Godhra. Various investigations into the event came up with conflicting conclusions as if to suit every ideology and associated theories.

Secular Indians, whom Mr. Modi sometimes refers to as “pseudo-secularists,” wanted to believe a report that determined that the fire was a tragic accident. Others wanted to believe the reports that said a Muslim mob had planned the attack and set the train on fire, a line that Mr. Modi took in the aftermath of the incident. Last year, a special court convicted several people of murder and sentenced them to death or to life in prison.

In the days that followed the burning of the coach, riots broke out in Gujarat that left hundreds dead, most of them Muslims. As the massacre continued, journalists, activists and several senior police officers in Gujarat who spoke to the news media on the condition of anonymity said that Mr. Modi’s government was complicit in the violence. Mr. Modi, for his part, asserted that the violence was “a spontaneous reaction of the Hindus.”

While reporting from Gujarat on the aftermath of the riots, I stumbled upon the fact that a senior minister in Mr. Modi’s cabinet, Haren Pandya, had testified in a shroud of secrecy before a tribunal that was investigating the cause of the riots. When I approached Mr. Pandya about this, he told me that he had told the tribunal that on the night of Feb. 27, Mr. Modi held a meeting with senior police officers and bureaucrats during which he is alleged to have instructed the police to allow the mobs to vent their anger on Muslims. It is a charge that Mr. Modi has consistently denied.

Hoon Pyo Jeon and Jane Darby Menton in Yale Daily News:

One of Yale’s first female professors, Marcus helped carve a place for women in academia, and her groundbreaking research in the philosophy of language, ethics, metaphysics and epistemology put her at the forefront of her field. To her students and colleagues, Marcus was an academic visionary and an inspirational mentor.

“She had a kind of personal integrity and intellectual integrity that just shone through,” said Don Garrett GRD ’79, chair of New York University’s department of philosophy and one of Marcus’ former students. “People sometimes found her intellectually intimidating, but anyone who knew her knew that she was a very dear person with a very clear mind — the most logical of philosophers and philosophical of logicians.”

Marcus began her revolutionary work in modal logic during the late 1940s when she developed the Barcan formula, which developed the use of quantifiers in the field. Though Marcus initially came under fire for her radical ideas, she continued her research and eventually drew scholarly recognition and acceptance for her work, her colleagues said.

Born in New York City in 1921, Marcus grew up in the Bronx and went on to attend NYU, where she graduated with a bachelor’s degree in mathematics and philosophy in 1941. Five years later, she earned a doctorate in philosophy from Yale. In 1959, Marcus took her first teaching post as a part-time professor of philosophy at Roosevelt University in Illinois, where she worked until becoming head of the philosophy department at the University of Illinois at Chicago in 1964. Marcus returned to Yale in 1973 as a professor of philosophy and taught in the department until her retirement in 1992.

As a professor, Marcus was known for her toughness, but also for her open and supportive attitude.

While former students said they initially found her intimidating, they added that they quickly recognized Marcus’ warm, generous and funny personality. Former students also described Marcus as an excellent mentor — particularly to women entering academia — and many said she inspired them to pursue careers in philosophy.

When Vladimir Nabokov started teaching Russian literature at Wellesley College in 1944, he was frustrated by the lack of an adequate literal translation of Eugene Onegin, which he referred to as “the first and fundamental Russian novel.” He prepared his own extracts for class use and invited Edmund Wilson to work with him on a full translation. Wilson had nurtured Nabokov’s early career in the States, and Nabokov had reciprocated with many generous hours of patient tutorial—often via letter—on the finer points of Russian literature, history, politics, and scansion. The two had grown to be great friends but never collaborated on a full-length work. The 1964 publication of Nabokov’s solo translation of Onegin effectively ended their friendship and sparked one of the best-known intellectual debates of the last century. The project began promisingly enough for Nabokov, though Wilson had misgivings from the get-go. When Nabokov first decided to prepare a prose translation of Onegin, “with notes giving associations and other explanations for every line,” Wilson and Nabokov had been exchanging letters about Russian poetics for a decade, often with barely masked stridency on both sides.

more from Sarah Funke Butler at Paris Review here.

Who is the greatest novelist called Roth? Philip and Henry both have their claims, but the one who will still be read in centuries to come is not an American but a subject of the Austro-Hungarian Empire: Joseph Roth. The name – pronounced ‘rote’ in German – means ‘red’, and that is appropriate, for Roth was a lifelong socialist. But he was also an ardent monarchist, long after the demise of the House of Habsburg. Roth’s life was a losing struggle with authority, money and drink. But he wrote like a recording angel, setting down his recollections of ‘the world of yesterday’, as his friend Stefan Zweig called the Vienna of the haute bourgeoisie: a world that embraced the remotest regions of the realm. For Roth, a native of Galicia, the old emperor was a sacral father-substitute and his empire ‘a kind of relic’. His greatest novel, The Radetzky March, is an elegy to this paradise lost. The facts of Roth’s life are by no means straightforward, for he reinvented himself in later life in order to lend plausibility to his monarchist leanings. In one 1932 letter to the author of a flattering review, for instance, he claims that in the First World War he was commissioned as a lieutenant in a prestigious regiment and was decorated for valour three times. To those on the Left whom he wished to impress, he boasted that he had been taken prisoner by the Russians and escaped, changing sides after the Revolution and fighting for the Red Army.

more from Daniel Johnson at Literary Review here.

One thing in these films, though, is rarely confusing. Despite the gore, the manipulative music, the pre-kill mouth-breathing, the ominous whisper-creep—or, a lot of the time, because of them—these movies are fun to watch. They are also, often, funny. In Susan Sontag’s treatise “Notes on ‘Camp,’” she defines camp as “a certain mode of aestheticism” that acknowledges, in campy objects and artifacts, “a large element of artifice,” exaggeration, or outlandishness. She goes on to make a valuable distinction between “naive and deliberate camp”: the former “rests on innocence” and ventures “a seriousness that fails,” while the latter is “wholly conscious” of itself as camp, can be said to be “camping” or trying on camp, and is usually, according to Sontag, “less satisfying.” A Nightmare on Elm Street is outwardly campy—the campiest of the five. It’s serious, yeah, but it’s also grotesque, in a silly, manic sort of way. Freddy’s a burn-unit case doing stand-up.

more from Adrian Van Young at The Believer here.