Amitava Kumar at CNN:

On October 10, 1953, V.S. Naipaul sent a telegram home to his family in Trinidad. At that time, Naipaul was an indigent student at University College, Oxford; he had arrived in England on a scholarship and had begun writing brief pieces for the BBC’s Caribbean Voices program. Naipaul, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2001, died Saturday in London at the age of 85.

On that day in October 1953, Naipaul was only 21 years old and he had just received the news of his father’s death. His telegram read:

= HE WAS THE BEST MAN I KNEW STOP EVERYTHING I OWE TO HIM BE BRAVE MY LOVES TRUST ME = VIDO

Naipaul didn’t go home; he wouldn’t, in fact, return until several more years had passed. But he paid homage to his father by making him the central character of his fourth novel, “A House for Mr Biswas,” which is regarded by many as one of the greatest novels written in English. Like Mr Biswas in the novel, Naipaul’s father had been born poor. He struggled to discover a vocation and, for a while, succeeded as a journalist.

More here.

Ephrat Livni in Quartz:

Humor me please, and consider the pun. Though some may quibble over the claim, the oft-maligned wordplay is clever and creative, writer James Geary tells Quartz. His upcoming book Wit’s End robustly defends puns and tells the distinguished history of these disrespected witticisms.

“Despite its bad reputation, punning is, in fact, among the highest displays of wit. Indeed, puns point to the essence of all true wit—the ability to hold in the mind two different ideas about the same thing at the same time,” Geary writes. “And the pun’s primacy is demonstrated by its strategic use in the oldest sacred stories, texts, and myths.”

The bible, the Indian epic the Ramayana, and the classic Chinese philosophical text the Tao Te Ching all avail themselves of puns, he notes, though we may not recognize these ancient jokes. The Tao Te Ching begins with a pun, for example. The first line of the text states, “The way (tao) that can be spoken of is not the constant way (Tao).”

Geary explains, “The tao is a physical path, or way, but the Tao is also a spiritual path; the pun brings not only the two sounds and words together but the two ideas, prompting consideration of how to align your physical path (career, life, etc.) with your spiritual path.” It’s thus both a play on ideas and words.

More here.

Zoe Greenberg in the New York Times:

The case seems like a familiar story turned on its head: Avital Ronell, a world-renowned female professor of German and Comparative Literature at New York University, was found responsible for sexually harassing a male former graduate student, Nimrod Reitman.

An 11-month Title IX investigation found Professor Ronell, described by a colleague as “one of the very few philosopher-stars of this world,” responsible for sexual harassment, both physical and verbal, to the extent that her behavior was “sufficiently pervasive to alter the terms and conditions of Mr. Reitman’s learning environment.” The university has suspended Professor Ronell for the coming academic year.

In the Title IX final report, excerpts of which were obtained by The New York Times, Mr. Reitman said that she had sexually harassed him for three years, and shared dozens of emails in which she referred to him as “my most adored one,” “Sweet cuddly Baby,” “cock-er spaniel,” and “my astounding and beautiful Nimrod.”

Coming in the middle of the #MeToo movement’s reckoning over sexual misconduct, it raised a challenge for feminists — how to respond when one of their own behaved badly. And the response has roiled a corner of academia.

More here.

Marie Ostby at Public Books:

Two recent stylistically unconventional novels by Iranian authors in diaspora explore the particular cultural loss of the exile, as distinct from that of the migrant or the refugee. Both Shahriar Mandanipour’s Moon Brow and Négar Djavadi’s Disoriental craft puzzling, labyrinthine reading experiences guided by young, impressionable narrators who are physically and psychologically scarred. At issue are two distinct modes of exile—the post-traumatic alienation of the returned soldier and the anxious flight of the political dissident, respectively—yet the books dwell in a similar mood of perpetual dislocation.

Moon Brow is Mandanipour’s second novel to be written in Persian but explicitly intended for English translation, the author working closely with his gifted and meticulous translator, Sara Khalili, from very early on in the composition process.¹ His highly acclaimed 2009 work of autofiction, Censoring an Iranian Love Story, was the first novel he produced in this way.

more here.

Alex Clark in The Guardian:

Mary-Kay Wilmers has been the editor of the London Review of Books since 1992, and has just celebrated her 80th birthday; almost a decade ago, she published The Eitingons, an account of her mother’s Russian family, including Leonid Eitingon, a general in Stalin’s KGB who features in an essay, My Distant Relative, included in this selection of Wilmers’s writing from 1974 to 2015.

Most of the pieces are book reviews, and all but three were written for the LRB; only occasionally does Wilmers venture into strictly personal territory, most notably in a zinging delve into the menopause. “I have complained a lot about men in my time,” she begins. “In fact, I do it more and more… Here I am, four paragraphs into my musings, or ravings, and beginning to doubt whether I will find anything to say about the menopause that isn’t a way of saying something about men.”

What’s most striking about Human Relations, though, is how much Wilmers has to say about women, and often women of a particular kind: what we’d now call the dysfunctional (the novelist Jean Rhys appears substantively in two pieces here, including a deliciously painful review from 1983 of David Plante’s Difficult Women, whose triad is completed by Sonia Orwell and Germaine Greer), and those whose lives appear to be defined almost entirely by their relation to men.

That “appear” is deliberate; how to properly assess the ambiguous life of Barbara Skelton – wife of Cyril Connolly and then the publisher Lord Weidenfeld – whose memoir Tears Before Bedtime Wilmers reviewed in 1987, is not clear. Though it isn’t hard to alight on a juicy detail when faced with such good material – Skelton, seeing Connolly in a mess, asks what he has all over his face, to which he replies “hate”; at night, he keeps her awake by loudly whispering “poor Cyril” repeatedly, sure that she can hear – Wilmers has a terrific way of marshalling all this to wicked effect. “Instead of a child,” she explains, “they acquire Kupy, a small animal that bites.” But, argues Wilmers, although the couple both indulged in “monstrous behaviour”, Connolly was granted a latitude rarely extended to Skelton. She is similarly even-handed when it comes to Ian Fleming’s widow, Ann, citing a lament on loneliness filled with pathos: “I don’t like an empty house at sunset.”

More here.

Tariq Ali at the LRB:

Naipaul and C.L.R. James were educated at the same colonial school. The high quality of teaching in classics and English literature left its mark on both men. Both of them came to England. There the similarity ends. James moved to Marxism and became a great historian in that tradition. Naipaul put politics on the back-burner, joined the lesser ranks of vassalage (the BBC) and cultivated a cultural conservatism that later became his hallmark both politically and socially. The classical heritage of the European bourgeoisie had completely bewitched him. He saw it as the dominant pillar of Western civilisation and this led him to underplay, ignore and sometimes to justify its barbaric sides both at home and abroad.

In later years, James (in private conversation) would refer to Naipaul as someone who is often needed in an imperialist country trying to create a post-colonial culture so as to say things about native peoples that are no longer acceptable in polite society. Naipaul was never, by any stretch of the imagination, a card-carrying Tory. He lived his life through a circle of friends that he had carefully selected. Most, if not all, were figures on the right.

more here.

Louise Steinman at the LARB:

IN 1970, when artist Robert Smithson first set his gaze on the Great Salt Lake’s Rozel Point Peninsula, he knew that he’d found the right site. Smithson was among a vanguard of artists in the late ’60s moving their work out into the landscape, freeing it from the containment of the gallery. Now he was determined to build an earthwork on a massive scale. Smithson had specific requirements: he wanted the color red — like the salt lakes he’d read about in Bolivia, their surface tinged in carnelian tones by micro-bacteria in the water. He wanted remote and he wanted vast — few to no markers of human artifice — to fuck with the viewer’s sense of scale. He wanted a site that would itself inform what he wanted to build.

Smithson and his wife, artist Nancy Holt, scouted Great Salt Lake’s southern shore; but, as he later wrote in his 1972 essay “The Spiral Jetty,” the water wasn’t red enough. At another site near Syracuse, Utah, on the eastern side of the lake, they were shooed off by angry ranchers.

more here.

Feast Day

There’s a patron saint for everything.
Nearly all the early ones
were martyred. The world has always been
this bloody. St. Justus was nine
when he was reported
as a Christian. Beheaded, he held
his head in his hands. My grandmother
confessed, as doctrine willed it, weekly.
She was so good, and always right.
What could she have confessed? She knew
the name for every kind of fork
and where to place each one
for the dinner party. The Devil
was real perhaps but not to be
spoken of, God a disapproving uncle
you’d do your best not to disappoint.
Which saint could she have prayed to
when her first daughter, days old,
died for no reason? When she woke,
years later, from childbirth, with no womb
to bear more children? Impolite
to speak of the body and its openings
and its failures. At seventy and seventy-five
she spoke still of driving an elderly friend
to the doctor, but by eighty she’d grown tired
of opening the paper each morning
to find the obituaries filled with names she knew.
Each saint is feasted on their dies natalis, the birth
into the next life. It was my birthday
the day my grandmother died, and so now
we share the day with St. Liberata, St. Gwen,
and St. Luke, whose gospel is the only one
to tell the story of the Annunciation. The saints
can’t touch us, or else they’re ineffectual,
or unjust. Confession doesn’t count
if you say it only to yourself. The first daughter’s name
is my name. My grandmother wrote
her own obituary, and when the paper ran it
not one of us knew what the middle initial
of the daughter who preceded her stood for.
There was no one left to ask.

by Nancy Reddy
from Ecotheo Review 4/18

Noson S. Yanofsky in Nautilus:

Was it a chance encounter when you met that special someone or was there some deeper reason for it? What about that strange dream last night—was that just the random ramblings of the synapses of your brain or did it reveal something deep about your unconscious? Perhaps the dream was trying to tell you something about your future. Perhaps not. Did the fact that a close relative developed a virulent form of cancer have profound meaning or was it simply a consequence of a random mutation of his DNA? We live our lives thinking about the patterns of events that happen around us. We ask ourselves whether they are simply random, or if there is some reason for them that is uniquely true and deep. As a mathematician, I often turn to numbers and theorems to gain insight into questions like these. As it happens, I learned something about the search for meaning among patterns in life from one of the deepest theorems in mathematical logic. That theorem, simply put, shows that there is no way to know, even in principle, if an explanation for a pattern is the deepest or most interesting explanation there is. Just as in life, the search for meaning in mathematics knows no bounds.

First, some preliminaries. Consider the following three strings of characters:

1. 100100100100100100100100100100100100100100100100100100100100100100100

2. 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17, 19, 23, 29, 31, 37, 41, 43, 47, 53, 59, 61, 67, 71, 73, 79, 83, 89, 97

3. 38386274868783254735796801834682918987459817087106701409581980418.

How can we describe these strings? We can easily describe them by just writing them down as we just did. However, it is pretty obvious that there are shorter descriptions of the first two strings. The first is simply the pattern “100” over and over. The second pattern is simply a listing of the first few prime numbers. What about the third string? We can describe it by just printing the string. But is there a better, shorter description?

More here.

Colin Marshall in The LA Review of Books:

JE SUIS la jeune fille: though I’ve never formally studied French, I’ve had that phrase stuck deep in my linguistic consciousness since childhood. So, surely, have most Americans of my generation, hearing it as we all did over and over again for years in the same television commercial. Frequently aired and never once updated, it advertised a series of language-instruction cartoons on videotape. Even more memorable than the French words spoken by that young girl were the English ones spoken by the product’s both grandmotherly and severe pitchwoman: “Yes, that’s French they’re speaking, and no, these children aren’t French, they’re American. And they’ve acquired their amazing new French skills from Muzzy.”

In those same years, an early episode of The Simpsons saw Bart sent off to France, an ostensible student exchange meant to punish him for his constant pranks. He spends two months in the French countryside mistreated by a couple of crooked vintners who, in a plot point ripped from the headlines of the era, spike their product with antifreeze. When a shoeless and disheveled Bart finally spots a passing gendarme, he can’t make himself understood in English. Only when he reaches the brink of emotional breakdown does he realize that, unconsciously and effortlessly, he has internalized the French language: “Here, I’ve listened to nothing but French for the past deux mois, et je ne sais pas un mot. Attendez! Mais, je parle Français maintenant! Incroyable!”

All this convinced me, on some subconscious level, that to learn a foreign language meant almost by default to learn French.

More here.