Sunstone—excerpt

Mary, Persephone, Héloise, show me
your face that I may see at last
my true face, that of another,
my face forever the face of us all,
face of the tree and the baker of bread,
face of the driver and the cloud and the sailor,
face of the sun and face of the stream,
face of Peter and Paul, face
of this crowd of hermits, wake me up,
I’ve already been born:
………………………………. life and death
make a pact within you, lady of night,
tower of clarity, queen of dawn,
lunar virgin, mother of mother sea,
body of the world, house of death,
I’ve been falling endlessly since my birth,
I fall in myself without touching bottom,
gather me in your eyes, collect
my scattered dust and reconcile my ashes,
bind these unjointed bones, blow over
my being, bury me deep in your earth,
and let your silence bring peace to thought
that rages against itself:
………………………………… open . . .

by Octavio Paz
from The Collected Poems
Carcanet Press Limited, 1998

Leo Robson at Bookforum:

HOW ROMANTIC IS J. M. COETZEE? At first the question, prompted by his eighteenth novel, The Pole, sounds like a joke. The journalist Rian Malan, who visited Coetzee’s office at the University of Cape Town in the early 1990s, reported that the novelist didn’t smoke, drink, eat meat, or, except on very rare occasions, laugh. “It helps to have a piercing gaze,” Coetzee wrote in one of eight essays on Beckett, and his own author photographs show a man who, with his ironed shirts, unvainly swept-back hair, and eyes that would win any no-blinking competition, resembles a semi-retired notary public, or a mob boss who hasn’t got his hands dirty for decades. In his work, too, he offers little in the way of solace or solicitude, presenting a harsh world in parched prose.

Coetzee is aware of this perception, and though he said Malan “does not know me” and was “not qualified” to talk about his character, he has also acknowledged that his taste for “spareness” is an “unattractive part of my makeup.”

more here.

Kenneth Dillon at The Baffler:

Bella Baxter, the heroine of Poor Things in both the book and the film, often feels like one of those peculiar characters who appear in philosophy. In “Epiphenomenal Qualia,” for example, the Australian analytic philosopher Frank Jackson tells us about Mary, a brilliant scientist who “for whatever reason” has always lived inside a black and white room, learning everything about the world by watching a black and white television. What will happen, Jackson wonders, when we let her out—what knowledge will she gain when she sees the blue sky?

Then there’s the American philosopher Judith Jarvis Thomson’s violinist. One morning you awake in a hospital bed, back to back with a famous violinist. He is ill; the Society of Music Lovers have kidnapped you and brought you here because only your blood can be used to save him.

more here.

Hannah Gal in Quillette:

The sleek Leica gallery in Los Angeles is currently hosting a quintessentially English exhibition—39 arresting stills captured by Sir Roger Deakins, one of the most esteemed cinematographers of our time. Spanning five decades, the monochrome photographs are taken from Deakins’s 2021 book Byways—a title inspired by the time he spent as a young man during the early ’70s “wandering the byways” of north Devon in the southwest of England.

The boy from Torquay would go on to win Oscars, BAFTAS, and numerous other film-industry accolades for his work on some of the most beautifully crafted and iconic films in modern cinema.

More here.

David Grimm in Science:

You’d never mistake a goat for a dog, but on an unseasonably warm afternoon in early September, I almost do. I’m in a red-brick barn in northern Germany, trying to keep my sanity amid some of the most unholy noises I’ve ever heard. Sixty Nigerian dwarf goats are taking turns crashing their horns against wooden stalls while unleashing a cacophony of bleats, groans, and retching wails that make it nearly impossible to hold a conversation. Then, amid the chaos, something remarkable happens. One of the animals raises her head over her enclosure and gazes pensively at me, her widely spaced eyes and odd, rectangular pupils seeking to make contact—and perhaps even connection.

It’s a look we see in other humans, in our pets, and in our primate relatives. But not in animals raised for food. Or maybe we just haven’t been looking hard enough.

That’s the core idea here at the Research Institute for Farm Animal Biology (FBN), one of the world’s leading centers for investigating the minds of goats, pigs, and other livestock.

More here.

Bill Gates in Gates Notes:

For me, this will always be the year I became a grandparent. It will be the year I spent a lot of precious time with loved ones—whether on the pickleball court or over a rousing game of Settlers of Catan. And 2023 marked the first time I used artificial intelligence for work and other serious reasons, not just to mess around and create parody song lyrics for my friends.

This year gave us a glimpse of how AI will shape the future, and as 2023 comes to a close, I’m thinking more than ever about the world today’s young people will inherit. In last year’s letter, I wrote about how the prospect of becoming a grandparent made me reflect on the world my granddaughter will be born into. Now I’m thinking more about the world she will inherit and what it will be like decades from now, when her generation is in charge.

More here.

Poetry

And it was at that age . . . Poetry arrived
in search of me. I don’t know, I don’t know where
it came from, from winter or a river.
I don’t know how or when, no,
they were not voices, they were not
words, not silence,
but from a street I was summoned,
from the branches of night, abruptly
from the others,
among violent fires
or returning alone,
there I was without a face
and it touched me.

I did not know what to say, my mouth
had no way with names,
my eyes were blind,
and something started in my soul,
fever or forgotten wings,
and I made my own way,
deciphering that fire,

and I wrote the first faint line,
faint, without substance, pure
nonsense,
pure wisdom
of someone who knows nothing,
and suddenly I saw
the heavens
unfastened
and open,
planets,
palpitating plantations,
shadow perforated,
riddled with arrows, fire and flowers,
the winding night, the universe.

And I, infinitesimal being,
drunk with the great starry
void, likeness, image of
mystery,
found myself a pure part
of the abyss,
I wheeled with the stars,
my heart broke loose on the wind.

by Pablo Neruda
translation from Spanish: Alastair Reid

Stuart Jeffries in The Guardian:

In a study with chilling modern resonance, the history don contends that the age of reason was betrayed by the greed, corruption and barbarism of Britain’s ruling elite

Britain, thought Thomas Paine, needed to be destroyed. Its monarchy must be toppled, its empire broken up and the mercantile system that propped up this debt-ridden, monstrous pariah state abolished. Only then could a better version – call it Britain 2.0 – arise. But how? In the 1790s, the revolutionary thinker and author of the bestselling Rights of Man was a member of the National Convention in Paris and advised republicans to invade. Later, Paine presented a plan to president Thomas Jefferson to send gunboats to make Britain a republic.

Sadly for egalitarians, anti-imperialists, anti-monarchists and those who regard the rapacious East India Company and the transatlantic slave trade as Britain’s leading contributions to the oxymoron that is western civilisation, neither happened. Had either been successful, Britain’s history might have been very different and such recent exposés of our imperial disgrace as William Dalrymple’s The Anarchy and David Olusoga’s Black and British might not have made such harrowing reading.

More here.

Matthew Hutson in Nature:

Will an artificial intelligence (AI) superintelligence appear suddenly, or will scientists see it coming, and have a chance to warn the world? That’s a question that has received a lot of attention recently, with the rise of large language models, such as ChatGPT, which have achieved vast new abilities as their size has grown. Some findings point to “emergence”, a phenomenon in which AI models gain intelligence in a sharp and unpredictable way. But a recent study calls these cases “mirages” — artefacts arising from how the systems are tested — and suggests that innovative abilities instead build more gradually.

“I think they did a good job of saying ‘nothing magical has happened’,” says Deborah Raji, a computer scientist at the Mozilla Foundation who studies the auditing of artificial intelligence. It’s “a really good, solid, measurement-based critique.” The work was presented last week at the NeurIPS machine-learning conference in New Orleans.

More here.

Peter Lunenfeld in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

In his new book Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon (2023), Michael Lewis has the difficult task of explaining why his subject, wunderkind Sam Bankman-Fried, co-founder of the multibillion-dollar cryptocurrency exchange FTX, who seemed tailor-made for the author’s patented oddball-outsider-disrupts-the-world shtick, was convicted for one of the biggest frauds in financial history. Like so many people both before and after crypto’s last big explosion in 2022, Lewis allows that he doesn’t know all that much about the underlying technologies, specifically blockchain, but is nevertheless compelled by the scene’s anarchic ambition. At one point, he throws up his hands and admits that crypto “often gets explained but somehow never stays explained.”

Regardless of what happens as Bankman-Fried pursues his appeals—a heavy lift, given that even his friends from math camp testified for the prosecution—there is one thing that is guaranteed. The general greed around cryptocurrencies, the nerdish interest in their underlying blockchain technologies, and the desire for something—anything—to fully commodify digital art has not abated.

More here.

Ujjwal Singh in Cantor’s Paradise:

When Einstein talks of someone in the superlative, you know that person would have been beyond special. Indeed, Kurt Gödel was no ordinary man. Perhaps the greatest logician of all time, Gödel’s incompleteness theorems altered the very fabric of the epistemology of mathematical systems.

Sadly, for the man himself, all his magnificent achievements were rather insufficient. Gödel struggled immensely with professional and personal insecurities, leading a very tormented life in his later years. So much so that he had to seek professional psychological help on the insistence of family members.

Presented below are the verbatim notes of Dr. Philip Erlich, Gödel’s psychiatrist, clearly highlighting Gödel’s pathetic mental condition at the time.

More here.

Anne-Marie Slaughter at Project Syndicate:

In 1951, just six years after World War II, Belgium, France, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and West Germany signed the Treaty of Paris, establishing the European Coal and Steel Community.

It was a remarkable achievement, considering that France and Germany had fought three major wars between 1870 and 1945, leading to millions of deaths, the ravaging of lands and cities, and territorial conquest on both sides. Even decades later, my Belgian mother, who fled the German occupation of Brussels as a child with her mother and brother, trembled at the sight of a German customs uniform. Yet these former enemies agreed to pool their coal and steel production in ways that would prevent them from forging weapons to be used against one another ever again.

At a stroke, a handful of visionary statesmen – Robert Schuman and Jean Monnet of France, Konrad Adenauer of West Germany, and Alcide de Gasperi of Italy – laid the foundation for a new European future.

More here.

Jeff VanderMeer at The Paris Review:

Halfway through Sven Holm’s taut unfolding nightmare, Termush, the unnamed narrator encounters “ploughed-up and trampled gardens” where “stone creatures are the sole survivors.” Holm describes these statues as “curious forms, the bodies like great ill-defined blocks, designed more to evoke a sense of weight and mass than to suggest power in the muscles and sinews.” Later, a guest of the gated, walled hotel for the rich from which the novel takes its name relates a dream in which “light streamed out of every object; it shone through robes and skin and the flesh on the bones, the leaves on the trees … to reveal the innermost vulnerable marrow of people and plants.” The same could describe the novel, which accrues its strange effects via both this stricken, continuous revealing and the “curious forms” of a solid, impervious setting, in which the ordinary elements of our world come to seem alien through the lens of nuclear catastrophe.

Long before the sanctuary of Termush becomes visibly unsafe, these tears at the fringes of reality signify the truth of the narrator’s situation. The very texture of the world becomes unknowable, imbued with a potency, vibration, or sheen that alters reality.

more here.

Joseph Hone at Literary Review:

Certain names carry with them the whiff of brimstone. In the world of bibliophiles and booksellers, perhaps no name is more sulphurous than that of Thomas James Wise. Celebrated in his lifetime as the greatest collector in a generation, an accolade made even more impressive by his humble origins, Wise is today notorious as a forger of Victorian first editions. His signature method of reprinting minor works by major literary authors with imprints antedating the acknowledged first editions had, by the time he was exposed in 1934, duped British and American collectors for fifty years. As a young man on the make, he had established a reputation for unearthing previously unknown rarities. When the exposé landed, the mirage was shattered.

The fraud was uncovered by a pair of young booksellers, John Carter and Graham Pollard, who set to the case with all the energy of Holmes on the trail of Moriarty.

more here.

queer ancestor(s)

at most, you are a whisper
that my mother covertly deals
over the kitchen table, eyes shifting
looking out for all vengeful ghosts
both dead and alive

she thumbs through photographs nonchalantly
her index finger stopping briefly
to shine a light, so fast, I almost missed you
but there, my pupil widens
and swallows whole
the proof of your existence

trailed by a story of maybes,
of beliefs,
of secrets,
passing by, burning bright
small shooting star
on the horizon of my life
I want to look back and wish upon you
to ask for your unabashed truth and
yank it down so that I can
thread the glow of your being through mine

by Amanda Gómez Sánchez
from Bodega Magazine

Sarah Bell on BBC: