Advice

You think it ugly: drawing lines with a knife
Down the backs of those writers we exist to dislike. But it’s life.

One is disadvantaged by illustrious company
Left somehow undivided. Divide it with animosity.

Don’t be proud –
Viciousness in poetry isn’t frowned on, it’s allowed.

Big fish in a big sea shrink proportionately.
Stake out your territory

With stone walls, steamrollers, venomous spit
From the throat of a luminous nightflower. Gerrymander it.
.

by Sinead Morrissey
from The State of the Prisons
Publisher: Carcanet, Manchester, 2005

Ben Miller in Literary Hub:

One Thursday night in 1980—that interminable presidential election year now melted into the slippery coin of Reagan’s Shangri-La moment—a Clinton, Iowa, public school teacher drove 41 miles south to the larger river city of Davenport to attend a meeting of Writers’ Studio, the local club for aspiring (and expiring) literary practitioners. He knew nobody seated at the folding table that spanned the jump-ball circle in the rented gym of a defunct Catholic school. Technically he was not late: we regular attendees were criminally early. I, spinsterish 16-year-old male in a Hawaiian shirt, quivered along with my peer group of genuine elders. The stranger wore a V-neck sweater, slacks and loafers, a meditative gaze and thin laconic grin. It always startled us to be found.

Most first-timers suffered under the weight of an aesthetic. Either they had been evicted from another group—Wordsmith’s, Pen Women—or swept out of the bungalow of a fed-up aunt. To us these exiles lugged their trilogy concepts, claims to inborn talent, their influences. Rimbaud! Fletcher Knebel! They careened toward a too-little place at the pad-strewn table, exchanging glances with the uncurling tentacles of our trepidation.

Not this one. This writer specimen paused a respectful distance from our tight circle. Upright, no apparent literary leanings, he stated: “I’m Beenk.”

“Blink!?” yelped cigarette-flicking Blanche Redman, hard of hearing. “Gene B-E-E-N-K. I saw the meeting notice in the paper.”

More here. [Thanks to J. M. Tyree.]

Tony Phillips in Signature:

I've been tracking Palestinian filmmaker Hany Abu-Assad since his harrowing film about childhood friends turned suicide bombers, “Paradise Now,” played the 2005 New York Film Festival, then went on to garner an Academy Award nomination for best foreign film and win a Golden Globe for the same. In 2012, his English language debut, “The Courier,” starring Mickey Rourke went direct to video, but he gained his footing again in 2013 scoring his second Oscar nomination with “Omar.”

In 2014, he was invited to join The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and follows up with his most personal film to date, “The Idol.” The film tracks the true story of Mohammed Assaf following a bold escape from Gaza as he scrabbles to the top of the Arab Idol television competition in Cairo as Egypt basks in the Arab Spring. Another English language foray for Abu-Assad awaits: his “Charlie Hunnam out, Idris Elba in” studio adaptation of Charles Martin’s 2010 bestseller, The Mountain Between Us.

When we meet in the lobby of a boutique hotel in Tribeca, his broad, open face welcomes me and I listen to his outspoken views on Israel, thinking, How do I keep this feature balanced? Tell the reader to pick up a fashion magazine with Natalie Portman on the cover as a chaser? But in the end, I decide it’s best to keep the fifty-four-year-old writer, director, and former airplane engineer in his own words, as sparkling as the Pellegrino sitting in front of him.

More here.

C. E. Morgan at The Oxford American:

La belle rivière: the Great, the Sparkling, the White; coursing along the path of the ancient Teays, the child of Pleistocene glaciers and a thousand forgotten creeks run dry, formed in perpetuity by the confluence of two prattling streams, ancient predecessors of the Kentucky and Licking—maternal and paternal themes in the long tale of how the river became dream, conduit, divide, pawn, baptismal font, gate, graveyard, and snake slithering under a shelf of limestone and shale, where just now a boy is held aloft by his beautiful father, who points and says, “Look!” and the boy looks, and what he will remember later is not just the river like a snake but also the city crowding it, and what a city! A queen rising on seven hills over her Tiber, ringed hills forming the circlet of a crown. A jagged cityscape of limestone and brick and glass with a bright nightless burn. The buildings never shut their brilliant eyes to the river where not so long ago, a teeming white mass came floating down to topple trees between the Great and Little Miamis and garrison pike-forts and sling tart, poison arrows at the wegiwas, those brown beehives up in flames. What freedom to rename the named! Losantiville, or Rome, or Cincinnatus after that noble man who would not stay in Rome, but returned home to his plow on the grange. In his stead, they crowned themselves and an American queen was born, one free of Continental dreams, the first to climb off the king’s cock. Visionaries and confidence men alike launched down la belle rivière in droves. Lawyers and stevedores and sawyers and preachers and masons and Methodists, Lutherans, Baptists, and all the rest; the pious came with the venal, the wealthy with aspiring merchants, and the poor came by the thousands as well, passing women lap to lap on flatboats crammed with china, bedsteads, chests, and hogs to the gunnels that dipped and threatened to tip as they rounded broad bends in the river, curving down through the Territory to the Miami Purchase with its terraced bottoms and towering heights. More green than will ever be seen again, and the chance—now forgotten—to peer straight down through the pellucid Ohio, so sunshot and numinous and strange, it was like peering into bright time itself, right into the eyes of an engorged staring catfish not of this age but of millennia before, darting momentarily through a dream no Boston or Philadelphia could offer.

more here.

Andrew Dickson at Literary Hub:

The saga began several years earlier, in 1845, when the volatile Philadelphia-born star Edwin Forrest—the American in question—was on tour to the UK. Stung by a poor reviews in London (the Spectator yawned that his Othello was “affected” and said his “killing of Desdemona was a cold-blooded butchery”), Forrest became paranoid that his great rival, the eminent English actor William Charles Macready, was orchestrating a campaign against him. The following March, Forrest bought a ticket for Macready’sHamlet in Edinburgh; just as the play-within-the-play scene began, Forrest hissed, loudly and publicly. The affair became a scandal, particularly when Forrest sent a letter to the London Times pouring scorn on Macready’s “fancy dance” of a Dane. Back in the US, Forrest—narcissistic even by the standards of most actors—exulted that he had struck a blow against anti-American prejudice.

Macready, an altogether quieter and more uptight character, was shocked, but had little sense how things would escalate. On his own return tour to the US in the fall of 1848, he was astonished to discover that many American reviewers—who had praised him to the rafters on previous visits—had mysteriously turned against him. When he reached Forrest’s hometown of Philadelphia, he was dismayed to find that his enemy had arranged to perform many of the same dates in direct opposition. One night, Macready’sMacbeth was interrupted when the audience began fighting amongst itself. As the curtain came down, Macready protested, only to find when he opened the paper the next day that Forrest had printed a furious take-down of his “narrow, envious” rival. The dispute simmered: in Cincinnati a few months later, half a sheep was thrown at Macready’s feet.

more here.

Peter Schjeldahl at The New Yorker:

A succinct Nicole Eisenman retrospective of twenty-two paintings and three sculptures, at the New Museum, is accidentally well timed to the recent news that the MacArthur Foundation has awarded a “genius” grant to the spectacularly talented, darkly hilarious New York artist. That’s good. Any attention drawn to Eisenman benefits conversation about contemporary art. At fifty-one—tall and stovepipe slim, with a strikingly long face beneath close-cropped black hair—Eisenman has mellowed only slightly from the raucous wunderkind who burst onto the scene in the 1995 Whitney Biennial. Since then, she has led a kind of one-woman insurgency, bidding to reshape the field, with figurative works that collapse the political into the personal and the personal into an erudite devotion to painting. She paints narrative fantasies that look bumptiously jokey at first, but reveal worlds of nuanced thought and feeling. They must be judged in person; in reproduction they lose the masterly touch that is Eisenman’s signature. The MacArthur Foundation cited her for restoring “to the representation of the human form a cultural significance that had waned during the ascendancy of abstraction in the 20th century.” I’d like it to be true. Eisenman’s resourceful Expressionism hints at the power of narrative painting to re-situate the art world in the world at large.

Eisenman is an artist of overlapping sincerities. One of them suggests that of a bohemian community organizer. In “Biergarten at Night” (2007), dozens of characters—some realist, including a self-portrait; others fanciful, such as an androgynous figure passionately kissing a death’s-head—hoist brews in velvety shadow and glimmering light. Each face is painted a bit differently, in a range from filmy to impastoed, and each feels individually known: liked, not liked, loved, perhaps feared. The longer you look the more meaningful the picture becomes. It does indeed recast bohemia in a convincingly up-to-date guise—in Brooklyn, of course, where thousands of the art world’s threadbare strivers reside. Similarly compelling are two big, populous paintings that signal Eisenman’s response to the Great Recession. In “Coping” (2008), poignant citizens of a strange village meander waist-deep in a caramel-colored flood. In “The Triumph of Poverty” (2009), a crowd treks past a beat-up car in a rural scene; one of them is a dishevelled rich man whose dropped pants reveal that he is ass-backward.

more here.

Joe Pinsker in The Atlantic:

There are three things, once one’s basic needs are satisfied, that academic literature points to as the ingredients for happiness: having meaningful social relationships, being good at whatever it is one spends one’s days doing, and having the freedom to make life decisions independently.

But research into happiness has also yielded something a little less obvious: Being better educated, richer, or more accomplished doesn’t do much to predict whether someone will be happy. In fact, it might mean someone is less likely to be satisfied with life.

That second finding is the puzzle that Raj Raghunathan, a professor of marketing at The University of Texas at Austin’s McCombs School of Business, tries to make sense of in his recent book, If You’re So Smart, Why Aren’t You Happy? Raghunathan’s writing does fall under the category of self-help (with all of the pep talks and progress worksheets that that entails), but his commitment to scientific research serves as ballast for the genre’s more glib tendencies.

More here.

Vanishing Point

April morning and out beyond the city,
the hills are strung with vineyards,
church towers and rows of cypress trees.
A patch of olive in thick strokes of silvery green.
No wilderness of laundrettes or builders’ yards
leech from the suburb’s ragged edge.
Just a stone farmhouse nestling beneath
red-scalloped tiles in bold perspective.
It might be a Renaissance painting,
where down in the valley a shoeless
shepherd sits minding his flock,
as a soldier in colourful hose goes riding by.
It’s not difficult to believe it’s 1553
and you’re looking out at the world through
a window; straight down the road
as far as the eye can see, where parallel lines
converge towards a single vanishing point, as if it is the future.

by Sue Hubbard

Gina Kolata in The New York Times:

The idea sounds like fantasy: an invisible film that can be painted on your skin and give it the elasticity of youth. Bags under the eyes vanish in seconds. Wrinkles disappear. Scientists at Harvard and M.I.T. have discovered that it is not fantasy at all. Reporting on Monday in the journal Nature Materials on pilot studies with 170 subjects, the researchers said a “second skin” composed of commonly used chemicals deemed safe by the Food and Drug Administration can accomplish that — and in small studies of it, so far no one has reported irritation or allergic reactions.

Undereye bags are just the start. You can soak the film with sunscreen and protect yourself without worrying about sweat or water washing it away, researchers said. They expect it can be used to treat eczema, psoriasis and other skin conditions by covering dry itchy patches with a film that moistens and soothes. The chemicals are siloxanes — their basic form is one atom of oxygen linked to two atoms of silicon — which form polymers, long chains of repeating units. The researchers made a large collection of them by modifying molecular features such as the chain length to get the ones with the properties they wanted. Then they devised a two-step process. First, a polymer, a clear liquid, is applied. Its chains are not very strong, though, so the next step is applying a product that links them together. By modifying the chemistry of the chains, the researchers can alter the properties of the second skin, depending on how it will be used, making it more or less permeable, for example. A more permeable second skin might be used for undereye bags while a less permeable one might hold a medication in place. It can be removed with a solution that dissolves the polymer.

More here.

Mehr Khan Williams in Youlin Magazine:

The vibrancy, color and cultural diversity of Lahore came to New York for two days over this Spring weekend at the Asia Society, the premier American institution which promotes a deeper cultural understanding and partnership between the United States and Asia. In a burst of dance, music, literary and policy discussions, the Lahore Literary Festival event in New York sought to showcase an image of Pakistan as a complex society with pluralistic values and an ancient and rich literary and intellectual tradition. A tradition that is alive and thriving in Pakistan today. An image which reflects the very real aspirations and lives of Pakistanis but one which is seldom reflected in news coverage in the United States, where Pakistan is often associated with terrorism and Islamic fundamentalism. Amidst all of the stimulating discussions and the joy of listening to great poetry and stirring music, both modern and devotional, there was also a moment of silence to honor the Pakistani human rights activist Khurram Zaki who was killed in Karachi on Sunday, when four men on two motorbikes sprayed Zaki with bullets as he was lunching with a friend at a road side cafe.

…The festival opened with a dance performance by Ammr Vandal against a backdrop of street life on a screen and followed by innovative songs by Zeb Bangash, and her creative band from Brooklyn. The music was Pakistani rendered in many languages and the band played on diverse instruments including the harpsichord. It concluded with the Qav'vali performance by the Saami brothers. Before the start of the sessions on Day 2, Azra Raza accepted the Lifetime Achievement award on behalf of Sara Suleri who could not travel to the conference. One of the most interesting sessions was on “Urdu Literature— Binding South Asia” with Tahira Naqvi, who spoke of the ground-breaking work of Ismat Chughtai, Frances Pritchett who spoke of Ghalib and his poetry and Arfa Sayeda Zehra who spoke in Urdu and reminded the audience of the relevance today of the work of Saadat Hasan Manto. The session was moderated by Dr. Azra Raza, who urged the audience to re-acquaint themselves with some of the best literature in the world produced in Urdu and now also available in English. In this session, Arfa Sayeda Zehra’s contribution received a standing ovation.

More here.

From the Boston Globe:

Sean Carroll, a theoretical physicist at California Institute of Technology, has made a career of making cosmology and physics understandable for those of us who just barely passed high school algebra. Carroll discusses his new book, “The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning and the Universe Itself,” at 7 p.m. Wednesday at Harvard Book Store.

BOOKS: What are you currently reading?

CARROLL: I just finished Helen Wecker’s fantastic “The Golem and the Jinni.” It’s the kind of thing I like reading these days, really good literary fiction with some fantastical element to it. When I was a kid in high school, I read science fiction. When I got to grad school and afterward I discovered the rest of the world and read everything from Jane Austen to Julian Barnes and Thomas Pynchon. I have settled in between with people who are really good writers but who are not purely into realism.

BOOKS: Is that a hard combination to find?

CARROLL: I don’t think it is. Pynchon does that. Barnes too. It’s a gamut from people who get identified as science fiction writers like Ursula K. Le Guin and Kurt Vonnegut to mainstream literary novelists like Michael Chabon. My favorite example is Iain Banks who after publishing his first novel, “The Wasp Factory,” alternated between writing science fiction and literary novels.

More here.

Ikhtisad Ahmed in Scroll.in:

On April 25, Islamists butchered LGBTQ activists Xulhaz Mannan and Tonoy Mahbub in the presence of Xulhaz’s mother at Mannan's home in Dhaka, for being “the pioneers of practicing and promoting homosexuality in Bangladesh (sic)”. Two days before that, extremists hacked to deathRezaul Karim Siddique, a Muslim professor of English at Rajshahi University in northwest Bangladesh. His killers accused him of “calling to atheism”.

At the time of writing this piece, news of the hacking of a Hindu tailoraccused of insulting the prophet has just come in – reportedly the doing of the Islamic State or its local agents. Along with the murder of the bloggerNazimuddin Samad earlier this month, the red hues greeting the Bengali New Year have been painted with blood.

The most recent killings mark the widening range of targets of the unconscionable machete-wielding Islamists in Bangladesh. A total of 35 such fatal attacks have taken place since 2004, and counted Hindus, Christians, moderate Muslim preachers, secular intellectuals and activists, and foreigners as their victims. By turns, Al Qaeda in the Indian subcontinent and the Islamic State laid tenuous claims on these heinous killings – including ones that preceded their appearance in this region.

Attacks on progressive intellectuals in Bangladesh date back to the country’s birth in 1971. They resumed again in the early 2000s, with the attacks on celebrated poets Shamsur Rahman and Humayun Azad. While Rahman survived with minor injuries, Azad died of his injuries months later. Jamaat-e-Islami, the country’s biggest Islamist party, and its proxies played a crucial role in the war crimes of ’71, including listing and rounding up leading intellectuals for revenge killings in the final three days of the war. Ziaur Rahman, the founder of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party and the country’s president from 1977 to 1981, rehabilitated the Jamaat in politics after the assassination of the nation’s founder, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, in 1975.

More here.

Tom Vanderbilt in Nautilus:

Although it scarcely occurred to me at the time, my daughter and I were embarking on a sort of cognitive experiment. We were two novices, attempting to learn a new skill, essentially beginning from the same point but separated by some four decades of life. I had been the expert to that point in her life—in knowing what words meant, or how to ride a bike—but now we were on curiously equal footing. Or so I thought.

I began to regularly play online, do puzzles, and even leafed through books like Bent Larsen’s Best Games. I seemed to be doing better with the game, if only because I was more serious about it. When we played, she would sometimes flag in her concentration, and to keep her spirits up, I would commit disastrous blunders. In the context of the larger chess world, I was a patzer—a hopelessly bumbling novice—but around my house, at least, I felt like a benevolently sage elder statesmen.

And then my daughter began beating me.

More here.

Kurt Chandler at The Atlantic:

Water has become the 21st-century equivalent of oil, and a plan to divert water from the Great Lakes to surrounding areas is raising questions about the possibility of future water grabs from far-flung water-sparse regions.

While plans to divert water from the Great Lakes basin date back to the early 1900s, modern-day attempts have become increasingly extravagant. In 1982, Congress directed the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to study the feasibility of using Great Lakes water to irrigate farmland on the Great Plains. (Not so feasible, said the Corps.) Fifteen years later, a businessman in Canada secured a permit from the Ontario Ministry of the Environment to transport 158 million gallons of water each year from Lake Superior to Asia in tanker ships. (He withdrew his proposal in 1998 under pressure from Canadian officials.) And in 2007, New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson, in his presidential bid, suggested piping Great Lakes water to the arid Southwest. (Richardson’s campaign foundered and his trial balloon burst.)

But it was the proposal put forth by the Canadian businessman that especially rattled citizens and set off alarms among officials in the eight states and two provinces that border the Great Lakes, propelling them to devise once and for all a binding binational system that would manage and regulate the largest source of surface freshwater in the world.

more here.

Alessandro Ludovico at Eurozine:

The subtle relationship between machines and language has evolved over a reasonably long period but is now accelerating. Soon after the first computers were built, various abstract languages were formulated in order to link these machines' inner mechanisms to processes coded by humans. The man-machine relationship has evolved dramatically since then, especially through the languages used both to instruct the machine and to relate to it. These languages now have a double role: meta-knowledge (language used for the functional description of processes) and content (language processed in various forms but in the end reduced to readable text). The digitalization of everything, by both institutions and private companies, is progressively producing impressive “corpuses” which, in their ethereal digital nature, can be goldmines for neural network software. There's still very little awareness though of the sophisticated strategies that online giants are pursuing with a view to building advanced AI and creating new monopolies in strategic services. While Google continuously refines its knowledge corpus through the scanning and indexing of texts from the whole Web and all of the printed realm, Apple enhances the credibility (and the emotionality) of Siri in order to affectively engage users; and Facebook attempts to customize and shape our entertainment environment as no friend has ever done before. All this is based on data, and text and words are among the purest data (basic in structure and extremely rich in meanings) that can be used, once properly contextualized.

There's a small selection of software “literature” in various formats that has almost no perceivable machine “accent” whatsoever. Tweetbots (software that algorithmically composes tweets according to certain strategies) for example, have to be very synthetic. Among the literary ones we find portmanteau_botcreating new portmanteau words every hour, including some quite interesting ones from time to time (a “portmanteau word” is the fusion of different words or parts of words, a term derived from Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass).

more here.

Mikita Brottman at The American Scholar:

I now see Austen as a very dark writer and Mansfield Park as her darkest work, a book full of sexual repression and unconscious conflict, with no forgiveness or redemption for anyone who dares struggle against the social code. The world of taffeta and lace exists only on the surface; underneath it, these well-bred young women are trapped like rats. This fact is made most vivid in the scene where Fanny joins a party of friends and family on their visit to Sotherton Court, the home of her cousin Maria Bertram’s wealthy but deathly boring fiancé, James Rushworth, whose extensive grounds include a bowling green, lawns bounded by high walls, pheasants, a wilderness, a terrace walk, iron palisades, and a small wood.

The layout of the scene and its psychology are closely interlinked. As usual, everyone in the party forgets about frail Fanny, who, exhausted by the summer heat (she should have been grateful it was above zero and not raining), spends most of the afternoon on a garden bench beside a ha-ha—a type of sunken ditch used to separate cultivated garden areas from open parkland. A small bridge crosses the ha-ha, on the far side of which is a locked gate. From her seat on the bench, Fanny waits and watches everyone’s behavior with mounting agitation. At one point, she overhears Maria flirtatiously asking their neighbor, the handsome Henry Crawford, whether he thinks she’s as lively as her sister.

more here.

Jess Denham in The Independent:

The Bard ran the gamut of human experience in his comedies, tragedies and sonnets, musing on life’s joys and sorrows and masterfully crafting words into timeless morsels of wisdom. From laying bare the futility of our existence in Macbeth (“a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing”) and preaching the importance of integrity in Hamlet (“this above all; to thine own self be true”) to warning of speaking without thought in King Lear (“mind your speech a little lest you should mar your fortunes”) and urging us to take control of our dreams in Julius Caesar (“it is not in the stars to hold our destiny but in ourselves”, Shakespeare’s grasp on the English language is arguably still peerless. Romantics and realists alike turn to his words on love for guidance through a realm of that baffles us all; parents drawn upon his cautions when bringing up their children; those in need of a moral compass find one in the pages of his plays; and “neither a borrower nor a lender be” remains the best excuse when your friend requests a bailout.

In need of some words to live by? Here are just a handful of Shakespeare’s most sagacious snippets:

On love

“Love is not love that alters when it alteration finds.”

“The course of true love never did run smooth.”

“Love is a smoke made with the fume of sighs.”

“Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind.”

“They do not love that do not show their love.”

“Love is merely madness.”

On friendship

“Friendship makes us fresh”

“Keep thy friend under thy own life’s key.”

“Friendship is constant in all things, save in the office and affairs of love.”

More here.

Chris Woolston in Nature:

A story about epigenetics in the 2 May issue of The New Yorker has been sharply criticized for inaccurately describing how genes are regulated. The article by Siddhartha Mukherjee — a physician, cancer researcher and award-winning author at Columbia University in New York — examines how environmental factors can change the activity of genes without altering the DNA sequence. Jerry Coyne, an evolutionary ecologist at the University of Chicago in Illinois, posted two widely discussed blog posts calling the piece “superficial and misleading”, largely because it ignored key aspects of gene regulation. Other researchers quoted in the blog posts called the piece “horribly damaging” and “a truly painful read”. Mukherjee responded by publishing a point-by-point rebuttal online. Speaking to Nature, he says he now realizes that he erred by omitting key areas of the science, but that he didn’t mean to mislead. “I sincerely thought that I had done it justice,” he says.

Mukherjee’s article, ‘Same But Different’, takes a personal view of epigenetics — a term whose definition is highly contentious in the field. The story features his mother and aunt, identical twins who have distinct personalities. Mukherjee, who won a Pulitzer Prize in 2011 for his best-selling book The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer (Scribner, 2010), writes that identical twins differ because: “Chance events — injuries, infections, infatuations; the haunting trill of that particular nocturne — impinge on one twin and not on the other. Genes are turned on and off in response to these events, as epigenetic marks are gradually layered above genes, etching the genome with its own scars, calluses, and freckles.” The article is drawn from a book by Mukherjee that is due out later this month, called The Gene: An Intimate History (Scribner, 2016).

More here.