by Robert P. Baird

In a recent review of The Pale King, David Foster Wallace’s posthumously published “novel,” Garth Risk Hallberg writes:

In the end, Wallace’s body of work amounts to an extended philosophical experiment. Can “morally passionate, passionately moral” fiction help free us from the prisons we make? To judge solely by his suicide, the experiment would seem to have failed.

Of course Hallberg doesn’t end there; he goes on to say that “watching [Wallace] loosed one more time upon the fields of language, we’re apt to feel the way he felt at the end of his celebrated essay on Federer at Wimbledon: called to attention, called out of ourselves.” This is fine stuff, and credible: Hallberg is a serious and intelligent critic, and what he says about the fragments assembled into The Pale King fits the expectations established by Wallace’s earlier writing.

Still, it’s the earlier sentences that interest me more. In identifying a philosophical, even therapeutic aspiration in Wallace’s work, Hallberg is cashing out Wallace’s famous assertion that “fiction’s about what it is to be a fucking human being.” Hallberg draws a line from Wallace’s art through his life to his death, a line we can trace with almost syllogistic precision: if Wallace’s life was the test of his art, and if his suicide marked a failure of his life, then so, too, must his death stand as a capital judgment on his art.

I admire this formula, even as I find myself troubled by it. I admire it because it lays out in especially stark terms a dilemma whose presence has imposed itself, often in unresolved and unsettling ways, on most of the reviews and reminiscences written in the runup to and aftermath of the publication of The Pale King. Hallberg’s great service is to name the question that all of us face in the wake of Wallace’s suicide: namely, how should his death affect the way we read his books?

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by Fred Zackel

Once at twilight I was Zorro. My neighbors called my mom. She called me into the house and explained how a ten year old with a black mask and a Daisy air rifle prowling through backyards at twilight in our neighborhood might be seen as something different in an adult’s eyes.

The astonishing amount of mythological stuff just goes to show the ancients had a ton of time to ruminate on odd, perhaps deviant, human behavior. These peoples are curious and imaginative and undogmatic, even without the precise knowledge of what they were describing, and they dreamed up stories to tell adults when the kids were in the room and listening.

We always lie in front of the kids. To hear some children's animal shows, we tried giving the dodo bird mouth-to-mouth resuscitation … and it didn't work. No. We extincted them. Some for food. And most for fun. Because we like hearing the discharge from our guns as we slaughtered them. Because we felt powerful killing from a distance. But mostly for the fun.

I saw a lovely silly wise-ass joke earlier this week. “Vegetarian is an old Indian word for lousy hunter.”

Remember hearing Aesop’s tale about the Fox and the Grapes? The tale goes over our heads these days, but twenty-six centuries ago, folks who heard it understood the gnawing hunger, despair, and denial of imminent death by starvation. The ancients didn’t have the massive amounts of cheap food that we have now.

Think again of the desperation within Aesop’s Fables. Foxes do not eat grapes unless no other food is available. The hunger of the fox for the grapes is impervious to reason. How loudly is your stomach growling? Sour grapes? Naw, that’s not what it was. In fact, the fox was too weak to jump high enough to reach a cluster of grapes on a trellis. As the fox walks away, regardless of what it says, starvation rules its future.

The fox walks off to die.

Aesop is noir, baby. Noir.

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by George Wilkinson

In the broadest sense, sleep is defined as a period of inactivity and loss of awareness. Most humans sleep 7–8 h per night, and if we are deprived of sleep, our cognitive performance, metabolism and health suffer. Sleep clearly contributes to several important physiological functions. Hypotheses for sleep benefits include overall rest and healing; cellular metabolism or replenishment; and brain-specific functions such as synaptic adjustments important for memory. Specifically, scientists believe our brains require sleep to process what we experienced during the day. However, the specific relationship between sleep hygiene and memory function remains controversial.

In recent years, seminal insights into the control and genetics of sleep have come from studies in flies, fish, and worms. Genetic screens have identified mutations that affect sleep across species, pointing to an evolutionarily conserved regulation of sleep. Moreover, a number of laboratories have identified sleep-dependent changes in gene expression, including in genes involved in learning and memory consolidation. A recent article in the open-access journal PLoS One explores the possible connection between memory and sleep in the regulation of one such gene, brain-type Fatty acid binding protein 7 (Fabp7), in sleep and long-term memory formation in flies.

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By Tolu Ogunlesi

Nigeria's ongoing general elections have placed it in the news in recent weeks – a blend of hopeful and depressing news. Politics is a 'grand' theme, and generally partial to generalisations. Broad strokes are inevitable – Nigeria as a country divided into a “largely Muslim North and a largely Christian South”; Nigeria as a “rich country of poor people” and land ripped apart by “post-election violence.”

It occured to me to present a portrait of an ordinary Nigerian, one of the multitudes of people who have, in an unprecedented demonstration of optimism, been trooping out since the beginning of April to cast their votes in the hope that they will have a say in the shaping of their future.

This woman you're about to meet is not rich. She's a 'struggling' Nigerian (one of tens of millions), and a hardworking one. Most importantly, she is not a “victim” — i.e she will not inspire your pity — despite the seeming toughness of the kind of life she has to live. I met and interviewed her three years ago (April 2008). I have no idea what she's up to today, or if she still sells food at that spot. The only thing I can say for sure is that not much has changed in Nigeria's economic circumstances, between then and now.

The hope is that the politicians being elected at this time will seek to bring genuine transformation to the lives of people like Iya Seun, and make it easier for them to live comfortable lives in the country they call home.

***

Lagos is the Land where the Sun Never Sets on the Hungry Human Stomach. Every vacant spot in every business district cries out (successfully) for occupation by a woman – or band of women – armed with firewood, giant steel pots, and a talent for kidnapping the affections of human stomachs.

Iya Seun (“Seun's mother”) is one of them. She makes a living selling fried yam, fish and bean-cakes (akara) next to a wall at one end of Olosa Street, Victoria Island, Lagos. I imagine that the smoke from her “kitchen” mingles happily with that emerging from the luxurious kitchens of the nearby 5-star Eko Hotels – evidence perhaps of the classlessness that distinguishes smoke from the human existence.

There are two questions on my mind as I speak with Iya Seun. I want to know why she doesn’t have a constructed stall (the standard makeshift affairs that dot the streets of Lagos, most commonly made from corrugated iron sheets, or wooden planks). And then I want to know why she operates a minimalist kitchen, offering “fast-food” instead of the more formidable local staples – Amala, Eba, Fufu – and even rice.

I soon discover that both questions have the same answer.

KAI.

“Kai!” is the Yoruba equivalent of “Don’t!” or “Stop it!” But in this instance it has far more forbidding implications. “KAI” is the abbreviation for the “Kick Against Indiscipline” Squad, the dreaded Lagos anti-vice squad known for harassing street traders and carting off their wares on a journey of no return.

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by Jen Paton

There is a scene in David Mitchell’s novel The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet where a British captain addresses his crew, men from all over the world. The Captain pauses “to let words trickle into other languages.”

The novel follows a Dutch clerk, Jacob De Zoet, at Dejima, the Dutch trading island off the coast of late 18^th and early 19^th Century Nagasaki. Mitchell’s book is full of translation and mistranslation: from Dutch to Japanese, English to Dutch. It is a problem implicit in the historical novel itself, and in history too, to translate the past to the present. It is a long way for meaning to trickle.

In the book’s Reader’s Guide, there is a short essay on historical fiction (don’t be embarrassed to read Reader’s Guides, they are often good), where Mitchell writes of the difficulties of putting words in the mouths of past people: to avoid “smacking of Blackadder” one “must create a sort of dialect – I call it Bygonese – which is inaccurate but plausible.”

One of the hardest things about studying history, and especially the distant past, is trying to understand not just the speech, but also the mindset of the people one reads, and reads about. The people of the past are just as foreign to us in history as in historical fiction. What did it feel like to enter Justinian’s Hagia Sophia? What beliefs, and how true to him, made a man carry a Saint’s bones, or a piece of wood from the ‘True Cross,’ thousands of miles? What made a noblewoman wear a hair shirt underneath her fine gowns? My favorite history book, Peter Brown’s The Rise of Western Christendom, is about these questions. It is satisfying for many reasons, but perhaps most of all because it makes Other the people of the past in a way that, to me, is more honest than is usual.

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James McGirk

A year and decade after the turn of the century, things looked dire in the United States of America, but not that dire: the economy was stagnant after an exuberant but lopsided decade of prosperity, job opportunities for graduates and social climbers had dwindled to a few openings changing bedpans for the large, parasitic over-class of aging boomers, and the gleam of enthusiasm following Barack Obama’s presidency had faded quickly. But the fact that *that* and a few years of hardship was all it took for open revolt among the most highly educated, entitled generation of Americans ever to be born would have been quite unimaginable at the time. That the change they got was not at all what they were expecting is one of the great ironies of our age.

The second clamor for change was born in the creative class; brought to term by the poets, as all good revolutions are, if not precisely not in the usual way. This revolution was born from a coalition with a notorious group of email spammers. Perhaps this requires a little explantation. Let us back up a little.

Since the introduction of fax machines and the Internet into Nigeria and other English-speaking third-world countries, mysterious missives would materialize in the inboxes of the industrialized world. These would purport to be from high-ranking bureaucrats, deposed princelings and other dubious figures, and ask recipients for permission to transmit a few million dollars of embezzled funds into their bank accounts in exchange for a hefty cut. If a mark agreed, he or she would be asked for a moderate advance of funds to cover transaction fees… This was known as a 419 scam, and, given the ludicrous spellings of their messages, these emails weren’t considered much of a threat, and indeed were something of a joke (at first).

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by Hasan Altaf

All throughout That Girl in Yellow Boots, Kalki Koechlin stomps around Bombay in a pair of mustard-yellow Doc Martens until, at the end, devoid of hope, dreams destroyed, illusions shattered, etc., she takes them off and climbs into a rickshaw clutching them to her chest. The Doffing Of The Boots turns out to have a complete lack of resonance: The Docs are practical and fashion-forward but really not much else.

I went into the movie with high expectations – an Anurag Kashyap film, a Kalki Koechlin vehicle, a project that was clearly a labor of love, written by the director and the star – and left disappointed. The meaninglessness of the boots is obviously a minor complaint (sometimes an eggcup really is just an eggcup, although then why would you put your eggcup in the title?), but it seems to me emblematic of many of the weaknesses of the movie: Nothing really resonates, nothing really means anything, nothing really counts. Much like Koechlin’s Ruth, we plod through the movie in our boots until the plot twists a bit at the end, and then we take them off and go home.

I still can’t quite decide what the problem of the movie is, but I’ve narrowed it down to two completely contradictory possibilities: Either there is too much in it, or not enough. The basic plot is theoretically interesting – girl travels to foreign land looking for missing father, discovers deep dark family secret – but the meat isn’t there, and the outlines aren’t enough, on their own. Everything is sketched in so quickly that it becomes almost generic.

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by Ryan Sayre

Sitting in a circle around my computer with Kumagaya and his fellow fishermen at an evacuation center up north, we watched footage taken by him of the tsunami coming in. A good number of clinical terms offer themselves up to help understand Mr. Kumagaya's seemingly untroubled manner when explaning whose boat that was being pulled under now, whose fishing nets washed inland there, whose homes brought out to sea over yonder. Why is the mood closer to good humor than sorrow, nearer to excitement than despair? We can guess what words diagnosis will throw at us; words like 'shock' and 'truama'. But these terms are of limited use. The creases on Kumagaya's sun-beaten cheeks hold his visage to a single benign expression, sorrow having little room in it. It is a face reminicent of Basho's line, fishes weep with tearful eyes. Sorrow would be filtered immediately out of his face by the creases just as the salty tears of basho's fish are devoured by the vastness of the salt-sea the moment they spill from the eye. Where does all the sorrow go without the possibility for outer expression?

A few days ago my dearest informant and quasi-host father, with whom I am staying at present, took me aside to demand a strict outwardly emotional suspension. I was given orders not to offer tears, hugs, or even a listening ear to my host mother when she returned the following day from the funeral services for her father who had died the previous week. I was to use with her a certain one-word greeting generally offered after a long day’s work, a road-trip, or any minor daily task at all. This simple recognition of fatigue was the only one made permissable to me. I forced myself to agree that talk does indeed have something monstrous in it, all its energies being directed to the ear, leaving the rest of the body, and the rest of the enormous event, adrift. My host father was inviting me into a more delicate kind of care, a non-event-based care, an abeyant care. He was offering me in on a relationship honoring silence precisely where to me talk would seem most in order.

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by Meghan Rosen

On the morning of April 8th, the day the government was scheduled to shut down if a budget deal couldn’t be reached by midnight, Arizona’s Junior Senator, Jon Kyl, made a passionate plea on the Senate floor for bipartisanship. He urged congressional leaders to “bridge the differences between the two parties” and reach an agreement.

The House had already passed a bill that made dramatic cuts to government spending, and it was time for the Senate to follow suit. The problem? Senate Democrats refused to vote for a bill that (among other cuts) defunded Planned Parenthood, and President Obama threatened to veto.

Senator Kyl, however, believed the bill was a reasonable measure to keep the government running; in fact, he said, it was necessary. To him, it just didn’t make sense to shut down the government over a program that cost taxpayers 300 million dollars a year. He wanted to put things in perspective.

For the first few minutes of his speech, Kyl sounded like the second-highest ranking Republican in the Senate leadership should sound: bold, confident, and committed to solving tough fiscal problems. In these (fleeting) minutes, it was easy to see why he was unanimously elected by his party in 2008 to serve as the Republican Whip.

And then he clarified his position. It wasn’t that the amount of money going to Planned Parenthood was too insignificant, in the grand scheme of budgets and deficits, to warrant a government shutdown; rather, it was that 300 million was too much. Why hold up the budget debate for such a costly organization? Especially one that peddles abortions. After all, according to Kyl, “If you want an abortion, you go to Planned Parenthood. That’s well over 90 percent of what [they] do.”

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by Dave Maier

He knew very well the dilettantes' manner (which was worse the more intelligent they were) of going to look at the studios of contemporary artists with the sole aim of having the right to say that art has declined and that the more one looks at the new painters, the more one sees how inimitable the great old masters still are. – Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

An interesting phenomenon of contemporary cultural life is that attitudes towards art, while often closely connected with one's political and ethical beliefs, are only with difficulty associated with points on the political spectrum. One finds populists, elitists, traditionalists, philistines, and even revolutionaries on both left and right. In addition, not surprisingly really, one generation's radical bomb-throwers can turn into the hidebound old fuddy-duddies of the next.

Even so, the rhetorical battle lines are fairly predictable. Progressives regard conservatives, whether elitist or populist, as stuck in the mud, while conservatives regard the left as rashly throwing away our cultural heritage in a mad dash for the latest trend, or as indulging in hyperpoliticized provocation instead of Real Art. There have been innumerable books and articles about the radical assault on traditional artistic values, and they all seem to follow the same script, even using the same handful of examples of (and yes, some do use this term, albeit possibly ignorant of its historical resonance) degenerate art: Andres Serrano (Piss Christ!), Robert Mapplethorpe (those icky pictures!), Karen Finley and her unspeakable yams, etc., etc.

Most of this criticism is mere harrumphing, the negative image of art-world puffery, neither of which it is worth our time to discuss. However, some more serious critiques raise important issues, not easily dismissed. Indeed, to the extent that such criticism questions the value of artistic radicalism, it may be congenial even to those who do not identify themselves as conservative. What should artistic progressives say about these things? Can these “conservative” points be adapted to provide a defense of non-radical progressivism? Or are they too alien, forcing us to choose between a) rejecting progressivism entirely in order to acknowledge them, and b) resisting the points themselves even when stated in their strongest form?

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by Jeff Strabone

What happens when a great artist in one medium exhibits work in another? 'Richard Serra Drawing: A Retrospective' at the Metropolitan Museum of Art asks us to consider this question. For forty-some years, Serra has developed a non-representational sculptural practice based chiefly on physical properties of mass, weight, and counterbalance, as opposed to visual agendas of image and representation. In doing so, he has opened up new ways of thinking about art in an era when representation and image-making, no longer the raison d'être of art, are simply two among a smorgasbord of options.

Although the world's attention has gravitated to his sculptures, Serra has been drawing for his entire career. That the Met's exhibition is the first retrospective devoted to his drawings is telling, particularly given his many exhibitions of sculpture and site-specific works around the world. We must ask then, Why has it taken so long, and what do Serra's drawings have to offer us?

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by Alyssa Pelish

For Julia Turner, who, on Slate’s Culture Gabfest of 30 March 2011, declared, “I hate epigraphs!”

You see how cream but naked is;

Nor dances in the eye

Without a strawberry;

—Robert Herrick, “The Lily in a Crystal”

There is a scene in Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin that, I must admit, I was pretty crushed out on in my younger years. In it, the novel’s young heroine, Tatiana, pores over the private library of Onegin, dandified object of her unrequited love. Here, she finds not only the books (heavy on the Byronic heroes) from which he has clearly fashioned himself, but his marginalia: “crosses or a jotted note /…the question mark he wrote.” There it is: his soul laid bare, the primary sources of his character. And the truth is, she’s not sure she likes what she sees; he’s so obviously cloaked in the robes of someone else’s genius – “a Muscovite in Harold’s cloak,” she thinks, noting how ostentatiously Onegin has affected the world-weariness of the first Byronic hero.

What makes the scene doubly great is that Pushkin is all the time inviting us to level a similar charge of appropriation at his entire novel. And it’s true: Eugene Onegin emphatically borrows characters and tropes from the body of Western European literature and culture that once cast a long shadow on Russia’s literary aspirations. As if this weren’t enough, Pushkin inscribes his novel with many, many epigraphs plucked from the Western canon, playing with the idea that his sprightly “novel in verse” is just a hodgepodge of re-heated scraps from the real geniuses over in France, Germany, and England. But of course that emphatic playfulness is what makes Pushkin’s novel: the constant Western references (Onegin eating Strasbourg pie and reading Byron next to his bust of Napoleon, Tatiana captivated by the sentimental heroines of Richardson and Rousseau) and, most visibly, the epigraphs that front every canto. Pushkin is wildly, dazzlingly aware of the role his consumption of Western European culture has played in his literary creation, and he now re-animates the lines he’s learned – in the context of his own verse[1]. The difference between Pushkin and Onegin, you could say, is that Pushkin takes those old lines and makes you see them anew; Onegin, alas for Tatiana, merely takes them.

In fact, the difference between Pushkin and Onegin is really the difference between a well-deployed epigraph and an ill-used one.

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A particle accelerator in the US has shown compelling hints
of a never-before-seen particle, researchers say.
…………………………………………. –BBC 4/7/2011

More Splintered Than Common Sense

Having heard hints
of a never-before-seen particle
my day becomes new;
the blue day is fractured further

What were small thoughts become
more pint-sized then the nonsense
of politicians: smaller even
than the bits of stained tile mosaic
under my feet beneath
a urinal

But I’m disappointed. I’m told
this is not the much-sought-after
Higgs boson that I’ve been chasing
my whole life, looking for it between
the pillows of my couch where I
often find keys and nickels or dimes.
Hope surged when I first heard the news;
but now, again, life seems to be shy
of something elemental, and yet my
tomatoes have just perked green
in several of my potting flats
their petite leaves pulling-in
light

Disappointment aside, scientists say
this hinted-at particle could be a
new force of nature —beyond sex and
maybe greater than greed? Who knows
what new element of nature they’ve
found hinted-at in their accelerator
in unexpected bumps in jets
of colliding particles which they
note while sipping Starbucks
as the white dust of a sugared torus
settles upon the lapels of their lab coats
and the micro-world simultaneously
fragments with the macro
into something even more splintered
than common sense

by Jim Culleny,
© 4/9/2011