All the Dead Boys Look Like Me

Last time, I saw myself die is when police killed Jessie Hernandez

A 17 year old brown queer, who was sleeping in their car

Yesterday, I saw myself die again. Fifty times I died in Orlando. And

I remember reading, Dr. José Esteban Muñoz before he passed

I was studying at NYU, where he was teaching, where he wrote shit

That made me feel like a queer brown survival was possible. But he didn’t

Survive and now, on the dancefloor, in the restroom, on the news, in my chest

There are another fifty bodies, that look like mine, and are

Dead. And I have been marching for Black Lives and talking about the police brutality

Against Native communities too, for years now, but this morning

I feel it, I really feel it again. How can we imagine ourselves // We being black native

Today, Brown people // How can we imagine ourselves

When All the Dead Boys Look Like Us? Once, I asked my nephew where he wanted

To go to College. What career he would like, as if

The whole world was his for the choosing. Once, he answered me without fearing

Tombstones or cages or the hands from a father. The hands of my lover

Yesterday, praised my whole body. Made the angels from my lips, Ave Maria

Full of Grace. He propped me up like the roof of a cathedral, in NYC

Before, we opened the news and read. And read about people who think two brown queers

Cannot build cathedrals, only cemeteries. And each time we kiss

A funeral plot opens. In the bedroom, I accept his kiss, and I lose my reflection.

I am tired of writing this poem, but I want to say one last word about

Yesterday, my father called. I heard him cry for only the second time in my life

He sounded like he loved me. It’s something I am rarely able to hear.

And I hope, if anything, his sound is what my body remembers first.

by Christopher Soto
from Literary Hub, June 2016

Jonathan Ree in The Guardian:

There was a time when every self-respecting egghead had to keep up with the latest developments in philosophy; not any more. Today’s intellectuals, if they do not ignore philosophy entirely, can content themselves with reading one or two books about its past. Hundreds of histories of philosophy are available, and they are all much the same: they tell the same basic story, with the same cast of leading characters. Act one: ancient Greek philosophy, where Socrates postulates an ideal world of which our own reality is but a shadow. Act two: modern European philosophy, which begins in the 17th century when René Descartes tried to cast doubt on everything, thus precipitating a civil war between rationalists who thought that knowledge is based on reason, and empiricists who said that it depends on experience. Act three: professional philosophy, in which Immanuel Kant’s investigations into the logic of philosophical disagreement set it on the path to becoming an introverted technical specialism, increasingly subservient to the natural sciences. The details of the plot may be vague but the message is clear: philosophers are very clever, but very stupid too, promising much and delivering little. Philosophy is history, LOL.

Anthony Gottlieb will have none of this. He is on a mission to show that the great dead philosophers have been misunderstood and that they deserve to be taken seriously. “It is because they still have something to say to us,” he says, “that we can easily get these philosophers wrong.” In 2000 he published The Dream of Reason, a brilliant retelling of the story of ancient Greek philosophy which brought out the lasting relevance of Plato’s idea that truth, happiness and virtue are inseparable, while vindicating Aristotle as a serious thinker about nature, art and society. The Dream of Reason is now joined by this much-anticipated sequel, which picks up the story with Descartes and carries it forward to the beginnings of the French Revolution.

More here.

Junot Diaz in Literary Hub:

I’ve spent past 20 years reading and writing short stories—which, given some careers, ain’t all that much, but it is more than half my adult life. I guess you could say I’m one of those true believers. I teach the form every year without fail, and when I’m asked to give a lecture on a literary form (a rarity), the short story is inevitably my craft subject du jour. Even now that my writing is focused entirely on novels, short fiction is still the genre I feel most protective of. The end-of-the-novel bullshit that erupts with measles-like regularity among a certain strain of literary folks doesn’t exercise me as much as when people tell me they never read short stories. At these moments I find myself proselytizing like a madman and I will go as far as to mail favorite collections to the person in question. (For real, I do this.) I hate the endless shade thrown at the short story — whether from publishers or editors or writers who talk the form down, who don’t think it’s practical or sufficiently remunerative—and I always cheer when a story collection takes a prize or becomes a surprise bestseller (rare and getting rarer). I always have at least one story collection on my desk or near my bed for reading—and there’s never a week when I don’t have a story I just read kicking around inside my head.

I am as much in awe of the form’s surpassing beauty as I am bowled over by its extraordinary mutability and generativity. I love the form’s spooky effects, how in contradistinction to the novel, which gains its majesty from its expansiveness, from its size, the short story’s colossal power extends from its brevity and restraint.

More here.

Virginia Morell at Science:

All great mind reading begins with chocolate. That’s the basis for a classic experiment that tests whether children have something called theory of mind—the ability to attribute desires, intentions, and knowledge to others. When they see someone hide a chocolate bar in a box, then leave the room while a second person sneaks in and hides it elsewhere, they have to guess where the first person will look for the bar. If they guess “in the original box,” they pass the test, and show they understand what’s going on in the first person’s mind—even when it doesn’t match reality.

For years, only humans were thought to have this key cognitive skill of attributing “false belief,” which is believed to underlie deception, empathy, teaching, and perhaps even language. But three species of great apes—chimpanzees, bonobos, and orangutans—also know when someone holds a false belief, according to a new study published today in Science. The groundbreaking study suggests that this skill likely can be traced back to the last common ancestor of great apes and humans, and may be found in other species.

“Testing the idea that nonhuman [animals] can have minds has been the Rubicon that skeptics have again and again said no nonhuman has ever, or will ever, cross,” says Brian Hare, an evolutionary anthropologist at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, who was not involved in the study. “Well, back to the drawing board!”

More here.

W. Tecumseh Fitch in Inference Review:

Noam Chomsky is one of the most influential—and controversial—intellectuals of our time, and his writings have had enormous impact in linguistics, cognitive science, philosophy of mind, and political discourse. If the breadth of these contributions is remarkable, the depth of his insights in each of these fields is formidable and daunting. This scope, combined with the fact that much of his scholarly writing is highly technical, sometimes makes the unity of his thinking difficult to discern. Indeed, until I read this short and accessible volume, I always found it difficult to reconcile Chomsky the linguist/philosopher with Chomsky the political critic—his focus on innate limitations in language and mind seemed at odds with his steadfast political championing of individual freedom against oppressive forces. This recent book, in refreshingly clear if sometimes still challenging prose, provides the answer, and reveals an underlying unity in Chomsky’s perspective and thought on these topics.

In the four essays that make up the chapters of this recent book, What Kind of Creatures Are We?, he clearly leads us through his thinking in the domains of language (“What is Language?”), philosophy of mind (“What Can We Understand?”), and politics and ethics (“What is the Common Good?”), returning in the final essay to the general question of human knowledge and the history of science (“The Mysteries of Nature: How Deeply Hidden?”). Of course, Chomsky is first and foremost a linguist, and it is natural that his own historical trajectory and that of this book start with language—in my opinion the most biologically special and cognitively precious capacity our species possesses. I will thus start this review with some historical context concerning Chomsky’s contributions to linguistics and cognitive science before turning to the contents of individual chapters.

More here.

A touching personal story by a graduate of Yale Law School. Video length: 14:42

Sarah Coolidge at The Quarterly Conversation:

After the suicide of Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes wrote what he considered to be his most important poetic work, Crow: From the Life and Times of the Crow. At the book’s center is Crow, one of folklore’s iconic figures. Hughes uses this feathered symbol of death to take on mythology, Christianity, and conventional poetry.

Crow performs monumental tasks—in one poem, he binds the Heavens to the Earth—but always with the nefarious air of a trickster: when the nail he uses to join the terrestrial and the celestial becomes “gangrenous and stank . . . Crow / Grinned.” In another poem, aptly named “A Childish Prank,” we are given the origin story of the two sexes. Crow is the creator, biting a worm in two and sticking one end partially into man and the other end completely into woman.

This is more or less the same Crow we find in the pages of Max Porter’s debut novel Grief Is the Thing with Feathers. Except that here, in a slim novel barely more than 100 pages, Crow is given the space to grow beyond his folkloric origins. The book’s premise is simple. A father and his two sons are mourning in the wake of the mother’s unexpected death. Dad, as the recent widower is called, was in the middle of writing a book about Hughes’s Crow when his wife died. And the boys, always referred to in the plural, are perplexed by the lack of chaos in the wake of tragedy. All three are unsure of how to proceed with their lives. Then one night Crow arrives on the doorstep of their London flat.

more here.

James Goodman at the New York Times:

“The African-Americans love me,” Donald Trump said back in January. Nine months later, evidence of that love is exceedingly rare. Polls put Trump’s black support in the low single digits, smaller in several samples than the margin of error. In 1964, Barry Goldwater, who had voted against the Civil Rights Act in the summer and won the enthusiastic endorsement of the Klan in the fall, received 6 percent. Ronald Reagan received 12 and then 9 percent. Even John McCain, running against Barack Obama, received 4.

Whether because of those numbers or despite them, the academic study of black Republicans is booming. Last year, Leah Wright Rigueur, a historian at Harvard, published “The Loneliness of the Black Republican,” a spirited study of conservatism, politics and race. Now we have Joshua D. Farrington’s “Black Republicans and the Transformation of the GOP” and Corey D. Fields’s “Black Elephants in the Room.” Other books have been published, and more are on the way. We may soon have more books on black Republicans than actual black Republican voters.

more here.

Joshua Kurlantzick at The Guardian:

Goscha has provided quite simply the finest, most readable single-volume history of Vietnam in English. He takes on some persistent myths about the country. First, that Vietnam has been constantly preyed on. In the pre-colonial period, southeast Asia’s own empires constantly colonised each other. A series of Vietnamese empires conquered parts of modern-day Laos and Cambodia between the 15th and 19th centuries, while alternately fighting and placating China’s rulers, who saw Vietnam as a vassal state.

Second, Goscha shows that Vietnamese dynasties were actively modernising the country before French colonisation began in the mid to late 19th century. The Nguyen dynasty was establishing new tax and irrigation systems, new schools and a modern bureaucracy when France declared its rule over Indochina.

Under the Nguyens, the French and the two governments of South and North Vietnam, the country was hardly monoethnic, though the pictures most Americans saw of Vietnam were of ethnically Viet people. Vietnam, as Goscha argues, has long been influenced not only by the majority ethnic Viet and by Chinese Confucian culture, which spread south over centuries, but also by a far broader range of cultures and peoples.

more here.

Ariel Dorfman in The New York Times:

Indeed, the defining experience of Cervantes’s life was the harrowing five years starting in 1575 that he spent in the dungeons of Algiers as a prisoner of the Barbary pirates. It was there, on the border of Islam and the West, that Cervantes came to appreciate the value of tolerance toward those who are radically different, and it was there he discovered that of all the goods men can aspire to, freedom is by far the greatest. While awaiting a ransom that his family could not pay, confronted with execution each time he attempted to escape, watching his fellow slaves tormented and impaled, he longed for a life without manacles. But once he returned to Spain, a crippled war veteran neglected by those who had sent him into conflict, he came to the conclusion that if we cannot heal the misfortunes that assail our bodies, we can, however, hold sway over how our soul responds to those sorrows. “Don Quixote” was born of that revelation. In the prologue to Part 1 of his novel he tells the “idle reader” that it was “begotten in a prison, where every discomfort has its place and every sad sound makes its home.” Whether that jail was in Seville or in Castro del Río, this recurring experience of incarceration forced him to revisit the Algerian ordeal and put him face to face with a dilemma that he resolved to our joy: Either succumb to the bitterness of despair or let loose the wings of the imagination. The result was a book that pushed the limits of creativity, subverting every tradition and convention. Instead of a rancorous indictment of a decaying Spain that had rejected and censored him, Cervantes invented a tour de force as playful and ironic as it was multifaceted, laying the ground for all the wild experiments the novelistic genre was to undergo.

Cervantes realized that we are all madmen constantly outpaced by history, fragile humans shackled to bodies that are doomed to eat and sleep, make love and die, made ridiculous and also glorious by the ideals we harbor. To put it bluntly, he discovered the vast psychological and social territory of the ambiguous modern condition. Captives of a harsh and unyielding reality, we are also simultaneously graced by the constant ability to surpass its battering blows.

More here.

Dayna Tortirici in n+1:

The investigative journalist Claudio Gatti’s “months-long investigation” into public real estate records in Rome makes the compelling case that Ferrante is, as the stones knew, Anita Raja. Gatti’s previous subjects include JP Morgan Chase and Silvio Berlusconi—targets more deserving of his skills. The article was rolled out in multiple languages simultaneously, like the NSA leak: “in English by NYR Daily, in Italian by Il Sole 24 Ore, in German by the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, and in French on the investigative website, Mediapart,” as the footnote read. Reporting on the reaction to Gatti’s story, the New York Times reached Ferrante’s publisher, Sandra Ozzola Ferri, for comment. “If someone wants to be left alone, leave her alone,” she said. “She’s not a member of the Camorra, or Berlusconi. She’s a writer and isn’t doing anyone any harm.” Ferrante’s readers were quick to denounce Gatti’s revelation. I myself was irritated. Even the stones know that Ferrante is Ferrante, and that’s the way her readers want it. More than Ferrante herself, her readers have benefited from her choice, spared so much extradiegetic noise. We are as invested in her anonymity—and her autonomy—as she is. It is a compact: she won’t tell us, we won’t ask, and she won’t change her mind and tell us anyway. In exchange, she’ll write books and we’ll read them. The feminist defense of Ferrante’s privacy was especially swift. It’s difficult to read a man’s attempt to “out” a writer who has said she would stop writing if she were ever identified as anything but an attempt to make her stop writing.

…“I believe that, today, failing to protect writing by guaranteeing it an autonomous space, far from the demands of the media and the marketplace, is a mistake,” Ferrante told the Financial Times last year. This is an uncontroversial truth. Writers need space to work. One word for this space is room; another is freedom; another is privacy. Each writer finds this space where she can. Woolf pragmatically emphasized the material: “give her a room of her own and five hundred a year, let her speak her mind and leave out half that she now puts in, and she will write a better book one of these days.” (She needed the metaphysical, too: “I need solitude,” Woolf wrote in her diaries. “I need space. I need air. I need the empty fields around me; and my legs pounding along roads; and sleep; and animal existence.”) Kafka found his space at night: “The burning electric light, the silent house, the darkness outside, the last waking moments, they give me the right to write even if it be only the most miserable stuff. And this right I use hurriedly. That’s the person I am.” When she was young, Dorothy West asked her mother for permission to close her door so she could think, and to lock it so she could write. “

ore here.

Alexander Kharazishvili in Inference Review:

Among various philosophical categories, the finite and the infinite are of pivotal importance. The relationship between them is so close, sophisticated, and profound that neither can be perceived and studied without appealing to the other. Both notions are the subject of extensive mathematical research. Modern set theory is entirely devoted to the study of the most general properties of finite and infinite families of objects.

A set of objects is finite if there exists a one-to-one correspondence, or bijection, between the set and some natural number n. It is assumed that nis identified with the set of all strictly smaller natural numbers. It follows that 0 is identical to the empty set ∅, and 1 coincides with the one-element set {∅}, while 2 is equal to {∅,{∅}}, and so on. If a set of objects is not finite, it is infinite. For example, it is a straightforward to demonstrate that the set N of all natural numbers is infinite.

Galileo offered some useful remarks about the paradoxical nature of infinite sets in the seventeenth century.¹ There is a one-to-one correspondence between the natural numbers and their squares. N is equinumerous with a proper part of itself. This is impossible for a finite set of objects.

Bernard Bolzano suggested defining infinite sets as those sets that are equinumerous with their proper subsets.² This is the definition adopted by Richard Dedekind.³ All sets satisfying this definition are now known as infinite in the Dedekind sense: D-infinite sets.⁴

^{More here.}

Jonathan Jones in The Guardian:

Two women are holding a man down on a bed. One presses her fist against his head, so he can’t raise it from the mattress, while her companion pins his torso in place. They are well-built with powerful arms but even so it takes their combined strength to keep their victim immobilised as one of them cuts through his throat with a gleaming sword. Blood spurts from deep red geysers as she saws. She won’t stop until his head is fully severed. Her victim’s eyes are wide open. He knows exactly what is happening to him.

The dying man is Holofernes, an enemy of the Israelites in the Old Testament, and the young woman beheading him is Judith, his divinely appointed assassin. Yet at the same time he is also an Italian painter called Agostino Tassi, while the woman with the sword is Artemisia Gentileschi, who painted this. It is, effectively, a self-portrait.

Two big, blood-drenched paintings of Judith and Holofernes by Gentileschi survive, one in the Capodimonte in Naples, the other in the Uffizi in Florence. They are almost identical except for small details – in Naples Judith’s dress is blue, in Florence yellow – as if this image was a nightmare she kept having, the final act to a tragedy endlessly replaying in her head.

“This is the ring you gave me and these are your promises!” yelled Gentileschi as she was tortured in a Rome courtroom in 1612. Ropes were wrapped around her fingers and pulled tight. The judge had advised moderate use of the sibille, as this torture was called, for she was after all 18. Across the court sat the man who had raped her. No one thought of torturing him. Defiantly, Gentileschi told him her thumbscrews were the wedding ring he’d promised. Again and again, she repeated that her testimony about the rape was reliable: “It is true, it is true, it is true, it is true.”

Gentileschi was the greatest female artist of the baroque age and one of the most brilliant followers of the incendiary artist Caravaggio, whose terrifying painting of Judith and Holofernes influenced hers.

More here.

Cynthia Haven at The Book Haven:

Vladimir Mayakovsky was the celebrated hero poet of the Russian Revolution. His suicide in 1930, at the age of 37, rocked the Soviet world. What had happened? Had he become disillusioned with the new order he had championed? Or was it foul play? The Soviets put forth a different story – romantic disappointment. But the truth, as always, is more complicated.

Enter his biographer Bengt Jangfeldt, perhaps the foremost Mayakovsky expert in the world. I had the good fortune to visit Bengt in Stockholm this summer. He is one of the foremost authors in Sweden, and undoubtedly one of Scandinavia’s most generous spirits. He was not well that day, however, so we had to postpone a whirlwind tour of Stockholm for another visit and chat over coffee at his apartment in the old part of the city.

more here.