Leo Mirani in The Economist:

Jonathan Franzen in The Guardian:

If an essay is something essayed – something hazarded, not definitive, not authoritative; something ventured on the basis of the author’s personal experience and subjectivity – we might seem to be living in an essayistic golden age. Which party you went to on Friday night, how you were treated by a flight attendant, what your take on the political outrage of the day is: the presumption of social media is that even the tiniest subjective micronarrative is worthy not only of private notation, as in a diary, but of sharing with other people. The US president now operates on this presumption. Traditionally hard news reporting, in places like the New York Times, has softened up to allow the I, with its voice and opinions and impressions, to take the front-page spotlight, and book reviewers feel less and less constrained to discuss books with any kind of objectivity. It didn’t use to matter if Raskolnikov and Lily Bart were likable, but the question of “likability,” with its implicit privileging of the reviewer’s personal feelings, is now a key element of critical judgment. Literary fiction itself is looking more and more like essay.

Martin Woessner in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

MAURA AXELROD’S recent documentary film, Maurizio Cattelan: Be Right Back (2016), is a portrait of an elusive and controversial artist, one who has consistently turned manufactured scandals — a miniaturized sculpture of Hitler praying over here, an oversized middle finger in front of a stock exchange over there — into handsome paydays, whether in his native Italy, his adopted New York City, or many other places in between. Cattelan cuts a captivating figure on-screen: he is handsome, sly, seemingly in on the joke that is the global art market. It is easy to see why his works have been popular not just with curators and collectors, but also with museum-goers. Cattelan talks openly about his art, without a whole lot of pretense and without relying on academic jargon, either. How refreshing — he’d be perfect for the Guggenheim!

Only halfway through Axelrod’s film does the unsuspecting viewer begin to have doubts. Doesn’t the talking head on-screen seem a little young to have produced all these works, to have staged all these exhibitions? Don’t his words seem, well, a little rehearsed? The illusion is eventually revealed. It turns out Cattelan has been utilizing a surrogate for years, a stand-in who makes public appearances and sits for interviews in his stead. Naturally, the documentary would be no different. Suddenly, everything about Maurizio Cattelan: Be Right Back seems artificial, constructed. The artist has left the building. Maybe he was never even in it in the first place.

This trick has been pulled before (the 2010 Banksy film Exit Through the Gift Shop is an immediate and recognizable precursor). Still, it says something meaningful not just about our ambivalent relation to contemporary art but also about our complicated relation to truth and reality these days. If everyone agrees that the international art market is a fiction, a confidence game of global proportions, what else can artists do but find new things to fictionalize, including, perhaps most of all, themselves? Similarly, if everyone agrees that politics is, above all else, a performance, why should it come as a surprise that we continue to elect actors — “reality television” actors, no less — to high offices?

There is a growing consensus today about the dangers of living in a post-truth era, about the need for a new realism, which might cut through all of the artifice — all of the nonsense — and set things straight. The philosopher Santiago Zabala will have none of it. In his new book, Why Only Art Can Save Us: Aesthetics and the Absence of Emergency, Zabala rejects this rappel à l’ordre and suggests that now is precisely not the time to banish the poets from the city. It is from the artists, not the philosopher-kings, he thinks, that we have the most to learn.

More here.

Isaac Butler in The Village Voice:

Like a lot of kids, I was hipped to Stanislaw Lem, the Polish master of genre fiction, by a bespectacled, pony-tailed fellow-traveler amongst the self-segregated literary geeks who congregated at one end of my high school’s third floor. By then, I was already heavy into Neuromancer and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep and Dune, but reading Stanislaw Lem for the first time was like discovering a secret treasure chest hoarding everything I loved. Here was where Terry Gilliam got the mixture of laughter and terror that makes Brazil so vital; here was Philip K. Dick’s paranoia stripped of its psychedelic wallpaper and painted over with a droll half-smile. Whether reading about The Cyberiad’s Trurl and Klapaucius, hapless robot inventors traveling the universe solving problems that they usually had caused in the first place, or Eden, in which a Star Trek–like interstellar mission discovers a planet with a domineering and invisible totalitarian government, each successive Lem work felt like it was expanding the idea of the possible.

Lem is probably best known in the United States for his novel Solaris, which inspired films of the same name by directors on the order of Andrei Tarkovsky and Steven Soderbergh. Had he only done that, dayenu, but Lem’s dozens of novels and short stories have proven massively influential — an influence that’s now on full view at “Stanisław Lem on Film,” a series of screen adaptations of the author’s work running through November 11 at Anthology.

Although known first and foremost as a science-fiction writer, Lem dabbled in a variety of modes: horror, detective procedurals, semi-autobiographical realism. But there are certain hallmarks that recur throughout his novels and the films inspired by them.

More here.

George Henson at The Quarterly Conversation:

Having read The Invented Part, it is not surprising that Fresán is often mentioned in the same breath as Bolaño and Cortázar; Bolaño because he is widely considered to be the Chilean’s heir, a folly that I will not elaborate on here, and because Fresán was also a close friend of his; and Cortázar because, as I stated above, The Invented Part is, rightly or wrongly, compared frequently to Cortázar’s magnum opus, Hopscotch; but more importantly because, like Bolaño’s and Cortázar’s translated works, The Invented Part is a welcome addition to the canon of translated Latin American literature.

Unlike Bolaño and Cortázar, however, the appearance of Fresán’s work in English has been belated and sparing. Of this ten books, only two have appeared in English: Kensington Gardens (Faber and Faber 2005), translated by Natasha Wimmer, and The Invented Part, translated skillfully by Will Vanderhyden and released in May of this year. Fortunately, Open Letter is scheduled to publish two other Fresán novels, The Bottom of the Sky (May 2018) and Mantra (TBD), “with plans to complete the Parts trilogy as well,” presumably—hopefully—in Vanderhyden’s translations.

Unfortunately, translators, perhaps out of professional courtesy, or the fear of being labeled the translation police, are hesitant to comment on fellow translators’ work. The task, then, inevitably falls to reviewers who, frankly, are unqualified to do so, and whose critiques inevitably make references to “fluency” and “invisibility” or recur to bromides like, “This translation reads as if it were written in English,” an observation that at best is a backhanded compliment.

more here.

Jessica Hopper at Bookforum:

Sticky Fingers raises an overdue question: Is the era of devoting epic tomes to the exploits of mercurial pricks officially over? If so, Joe Hagan’s skilled filleting of Jann Wenner’s history as the publisher of Rolling Stone magazine is one hell of a coffin nail.

The book was born over lunch at an upstate New York eatery. Wenner, in his egotism, offered Hagan, then a journalist at New York magazine, unfettered access and deep cooperation (he asked to review only details of his sex life, which are nonetheless abundant), without requiring final approval, so sure was he that Hagan’s excavation would evince his greatness. As it turns out, Wenner is furious about Hagan’s final product. After reading a prepublication galley of Sticky Fingers, the New York Post reports, a furious Wenner kicked Hagan off the bill of a panel discussion they were supposed to co-headline. Wenner’s cocksure bargain didn’t go as he’d planned—instead of further enshrining the myth of “Mr. Rolling Stone,” Hagan rightsized his legacy entirely.

Hagan, quite clearly, is without an agenda, and Sticky Fingers is not posited as a takedown of “Mr. Rolling Stone.” Still, the tenor of the accounting of Wenner’s life after 1967, the year he founded the magazine, is inevitably shaped largely by the fact that everyone who has ever loved or liked him seemingly loathed him in equal measure (the holdouts being Tom Wolfe, Wenner’s son Gus, possibly Bette Midler). Many offer remembrances from the seat of betrayal, often one that’s been steeped in acid resentment for decades.

more here.

John Keenan at The Guardian:

Postal workers in Beverly, Massachusetts, no doubt learned by heart the route from their depot to the home of author John Updike, on the area’s north shore. In his biography of the celebrated writer, Adam Begley tells us that Updike’s wife Martha warned that “if he had access to email, he would spend every waking hour responding to messages, so he steered clear, relying on the postal service and FedEx”.

Katie Roiphe wrote in The Violet Hour: Great Writers at the End: “Updike’s correspondence is so charming and lively and wonderful that it evokes the man more powerfully than his published bits of autobiography. It may not be surprising that much of the work of friendship, for Updike, existed on the page.”

But while Updike corresponded with the likes of John Barth, Joyce Carol Oates and Ian McEwan, it was not only authorly names and close friends that received his letters: James Schiff, an associate professor of English at the University of Cincinnati, is working on a volume of Updike’s letters and has unearthed thousands of letters, postcards, and notes the author sent to complete strangers who wrote to him.

more here.

Melvin Rogers in The Boston Review:

Ta-Nehisi Coates’s latest book, We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy, is his clearest expression yet of political fatalism—his “deeply held belief that white supremacy was so foundational to this country that it would not be defeated in my lifetime, my child's lifetime, or perhaps ever.” As in Coates’s Between the World and Me (2015), we again encounter white supremacy not as a political ideology, but as the defining feature of the U.S. polity—its essential nature. The book comprises previously published essays—one for each of the eight years Barack Obama held the presidency—prefaced by moving biographical and personal meditations that give each chapter philosophical weight. Taken together, it is about Obama and the United States—and it is about Coates. It charts the course of Coates’s career from a time when he could not make ends meet to his recent position of speaking for and to Americans about Black America. Obama’s presidency made this possible; it opened the door for a “crop of black writers and journalists who achieved prominence during his two terms.” This is also a book about shattering a great illusion—the idea that Obama’s presidency represented black power. “Obama, his family, and his administration were a walking advertisement for the ease with which black people could be fully integrated into the unthreatening mainstream of American culture, politics, and myth. And that was always the problem.”

For Coates, Obama represented a possibility that had always been denied, the idea that a black American could one day inhabit the highest office of the land. And if a black American could be president, couldn’t the United States be more than the explicit racism of its past and the institutional racism of its present? Coates himself was taken by this seductive idea, something he laments throughout the book. As he explains:

It is not so much that I logically reasoned out that Obama’s election would author a post-racist age. But it now seemed possible that white supremacy, the scourge of American history might well be banished in my lifetime. In those days I imagined racism as a tumor that could be isolated and removed from the body of America, not as a pervasive system both native and essential to that body.

Herein lies the explanation for why a man who curries favor with white supremacists assumed the presidency after Obama. Donald Trump’s ascendancy was a virulent reaction not only to Obama, but to the idea that his presidency signaled the country’s embrace of a multiracial polity.

More here.

Luciano Floridi in Aeon:

Suppose you enter a dark room in an unknown building. You might panic about monsters that could be lurking in the dark. Or you could just turn on the light, to avoid bumping into furniture. The dark room is the future of artificial intelligence (AI). Unfortunately, many people believe that, as we step into the room, we might run into some evil, ultra-intelligent machines. This is an old fear. It dates to the 1960s, when Irving John Good, a British mathematician who worked as a cryptologist at Bletchley Park with Alan Turing, made the following observation:

Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any man however clever. Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an ‘intelligence explosion’, and the intelligence of man would be left far behind. Thus the first ultra-intelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make, provided that the machine is docile enough to tell us how to keep it under control. It is curious that this point is made so seldom outside of science fiction. It is sometimes worthwhile to take science fiction seriously.

Once ultraintelligent machines become a reality, they might not be docile at all but behave like Terminator: enslave humanity as a sub-species, ignore its rights, and pursue their own ends, regardless of the effects on human lives.

If this sounds incredible, you might wish to reconsider.

More here. [Thanks to Dan Dennett.]

Adam Rogers in Wired:

The scientific community has been contending with its own habitual harassers. (Amid the Weinstein scandal, the news section of the journal Science broke the story of field geologists in Antarctica alleging abuse by their boss. As the planetary scientist Carolyn Porco tweeted: Imagine the implications of an abuser and his target confined on a long-duration space mission.)

This isn’t like art. Science’s results and conclusions are nominally objective; failures in the humanity of the humans who found them aren’t supposed to have any bearing. Yet they do.

Nazi “research” turned out to be barely-disguised torture; it was easy to condemn the people who did it and consign to history the crappy outcomes they collected. The racist abuses of the Tuskegee experiments and consent problems with human radiation exposure experiments of the post-World War II era yielded data of questionable use, but led to reform, to rethinking the treatment of human scientific subjects.

But what about, for example, exoplanets? Geoff Marcy, a pre-eminent astronomer at UC Berkeley, pioneered techniques for finding planets outside Earth’s solar system. He also, it seems, sexually harassed students without repercussion for decades.

More here.

Fareed Zakaria in the Washington Post:

This week’s tragic terrorist attack in New York was the kind of isolated incident by one troubled man that should not lead to generalizations. In the 16 years since 9/11, the city has proved astonishingly safe from jihadist groups and individuals. And yet, speaking about it to officials in this major global hub 10,000 miles away, the conclusions they reach are worrying. “The New York attack might be a way to remind us all that while ISIS is being defeated militarily, the ideological threat from radical Islam is spreading,” says Singaporean Home Minister K. Shanmugam. “The trend line is moving in the wrong direction.”

The military battle against Islamist extremist groups in places such as Syria and Afghanistan is a tough struggle, but it has always been one that favored the United States and its allies. After all, the combined military forces of some of the world’s most powerful governments are up against a tiny band of guerrillas. On the other hand, the ideological challenge from the Islamic State has proved far more intractable. The terrorist group and ones like it have been able to spread their ideas, recruit disaffected young men and women, and infiltrate countries across the globe. Western countries remain susceptible to the occasional lone wolf, but the new breeding grounds of radicalism are once-moderate Muslim societies in Central, South and Southeast Asia.

Consider Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim country, long seen as a moderate bulwark.

More here.

Susanna Forrest at Literary Hub:

Mazeppa is one of Lord Byron’s later works, written just a few years before his death and shortly after he had fled England with scandal on his heels and debt dragging at his ankles. His wife had left him, taking their daughter with her. His lovers were numerous and garrulous. Rumor accused him both of homosexual affairs and of an incestuous passion for his half sister. Mazeppa—funnily enough—is about a delirious dash into exile, undertaken reluctantly but transforming its subject into a hero. Within three years of publication, Byron’s publisher John Murray had sold an impressive 7,400 copies.

Byron found his protagonist in Voltaire’s History of Charles XII, King of Sweden. The real historical Ivan Mazepa (Byron added the extra “p”) was a Cossack leader famous for defecting from Russia to Sweden before the 1709 Battle of Poltava. In Ukraine he is still a hero, in Russia, a villain. According to Voltaire, as a young man in the 1660s he served as a page at the court of King John II Casimir in Poland but was caught cuckolding a noble who had him stripped naked, tied to a “wild horse” and thus dispatched all the way back to his Ukrainian homeland. The tall tale of his amorous escapades can be traced back to the memoirs of a courtier called Pasek who held a long-standing grudge against Mazepa. In Pasek’s account, when Mazepa is caught by the irate husband he’s strapped not to the back of a wild horse but his own tame saddle horse, which promptly scarpers back to its home stable via bramble patches. Voltaire upgraded the story. Byron took it further.

more here.

John Gray at Literary Review:

Corresponding with Bertrand Russell in 1922, Joseph Conrad confessed: ‘I have never been able to find in any man’s book or any man’s talk anything … to stand up for a moment against my deep-seated sense of fatality governing this man-inhabited world.’ Conrad was responding to Russell’s book The Problem of China, published in the same year, in which Russell had pinned his hopes for China and the world on ‘international socialism’ – ‘the sort of thing to which I cannot attach any sort of definite meaning’, Conrad observed. International socialism, he continued, was ‘but a system, not very recondite and not very plausible … and I know you wouldn’t expect me to put faith in any system’.

Conrad was a sceptic who believed that the human world was fuelled by illusions. He felt strongly about a number of the political issues of his day, such as the threat posed to Europe by Russian autocracy, and was horrified by the rapacity he witnessed being inflicted on the local population when he travelled through the Belgian Congo in 1890. But nothing could have been further from his way of thinking than high-minded dreams of a world without tyranny or empire. In his view, no change in political systems could eradicate the universal human propensity for savagery. He was suspicious of all large schemes of improvement.

more here.