Linda Kinstler in The Paris Review [h/t: Dana Hammer]:

Brodsky couldn’t remember the first time he met Baryshnikov. “We had a few rather close friends in common in Leningrad,” he said in conversation with Solomon Volkov at his apartment on Morton Street in the late seventies. Baryshnikov was also a close friend of Brodsky’s daughter, a fellow dancer; he even drove her home from a Leningrad hospital after she gave birth. But the two men only met many years later, in New York, after Baryshnikov defected from the USSR in 1974.

For Baryshnikov, the memory of their first meeting is all too clear: one evening in 1974, the composer Mstislav Rostropovich organized a party in New York in honor of the visiting Soviet writer Alexander Galich, and took the recently defected Baryshnikov, then in his midtwenties, along. Brodsky was there. “He was sitting, smoking, very red, very handsome. He looked at me, smiled, and said, Mikhail, take a seat, we have a lot to talk about,” Baryshnikov recalled in a Russian-language interview with a Riga magazine in October. “He gave me a cigarette, my hands were trembling … For me, he was a legend.”

After dinner, the two men went on a long walk through the West Village, found a Greek restaurant open late to continue their conversation. They exchanged numbers. Soon, they were talking nearly every day. Brodsky gave Baryshnikov reading assignments, introduced him to his friends—Czeslaw Milosz, Stephen Spender, Susan Sontag. “He kind of put me on my feet,” Baryshnikov recalled. “That was my university.”

Brodsky dedicated several of his poems to Baryshnikov, who carries his friend’s work with him, and resurrects their dialogue on stage. Hermanis, who began developing the idea for the production fifteen years ago, described it to Latvian public media as a “spiritist séance.” He and Hermanis were both born in Riga, and it wasn’t by accident that they chose that city for the debut run of what Baryshnikov has called “the most private and important work I’ve done in my life.”

More here.

Hal Foster at Artforum:

“PICASSO SCULPTURE” is both amazing and appalling. With 141 objects in eleven galleries, the presentation is lucid, stately, almost grand, and the work is inventive in the extreme. Yet there are times when all this creativity betrays a manic energy—I can’t help myself!—as well as an aggressive defiance: I can trump anyone! What else, you say, is new about Picasso?

The master made circa seven hundred objects, which is a lot, but not when compared with roughly forty-five hundred paintings. As the curators Ann Temkin and Anne Umland demonstrate, his engagement with sculpture was episodic: He worked intensely in the medium, then put it aside, and when he came back to it, he often featured a new set of materials, forms, and structures. For a long time, Picasso was reluctant to show his sculpture, and he liked to keep it close by. Why? Was it especially important to him, somehow intimate, even “talismanic” (as the curators suggest), or was he uncertain about its status (which can be improvisatory), or did he feel both things at once?¹ Throughout the exhibition, it is difficult to distinguish clearly between research and resolution, minor and major (sometimes a tentative experiment in a new material appears later as a confident statement). Picasso, like Matisse, frequently turned to sculpture to address a problem in painting or to elaborate on an idea, a device, or just a whimsy first developed in two dimensions.

Like his first paintings, his first sculptures in bronze are emulative, sub-Rodin and Rosso, and this is also true of the rough figurines in wood he produced after the Gauguin retrospective in Paris in 1906. Picasso acquired a few Iberian sculptures in early 1907, and his fabled encounter with African and Oceanic art in the Musée d’Ethnographie du Trocadéro, which prompted him to revise Les demoiselles d’Avignondramatically, occurred in May or June of that year; this interest in the archaic and the primitive is manifest in his sculpture no less than in his painting.

more here.

Alison Kinney at The Paris Review:

The Sagas of Icelanders chronicle the settlement of Iceland during the ninth to eleventh centuries, known as both the Viking Age and the Saga Age. “They’re not stories,” Jón gently reproved me: “they’re sagas,” a unique medieval prose form that upends the conventions of domestic drama, genealogy, historical fiction, adventure, and myth. They date not from the Viking Age but from the Christian, multilingual literary society that succeeded it. Around 1130, Ari Þorgilsson, the first recognized Icelandic author and historian, wrote Iceland’s origin story in The Book of Icelanders. By the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, editors, translators, and even critics abounded, and celebrity poets, such as Snorri Sturluson, toured the royal courts of Scandinavia and England. That period of passionate inquiry and composition might yet be called a Silver Age, for its writers were troubled by lost cultural heritage, civil war, the relinquishment of Icelandic independence to Norway, and a sense of belatedness. Ari had composed the Íslendingabók with the authority of proximity and living witness, within a generation’s memory of the Saga Age. Two centuries later, the anxious writers committing saga-like oral narratives to parchment cited Ari’s book for credibility.

more here.

Margaret Wertheim at Aeon Magazine:

It might seem surprising to many readers but, for 300 years, scientists and philosophers have been debating whether our minds might not operate more like Bitbol’s thermometer. Though Chalmers’ ‘hard problem’ term is new, the questions underlying it have haunted modern science from its beginnings, for the attribution of consciousness is one of the foremost qualities distinguishing us as something other than a complex set of dials.

As one of the founders of empiricism, Locke believed that knowledge comes primarily from sensory experience, with real knowledge beingfelt by conscious beings. In the 17th century, René Descartes had also insisted on the irreducible centrality of subjective experience, arguing that, in principle, we could not build a machine to emulate human behaviour. For Descartes, a conscious machine was an impossibility, and something extra – a soul – was needed to account for the full spectrum of our mental landscape and actions. Like Chalmers and Bitbol today, Descartes and Locke considered conscious experience as something that couldn’t be wholly explained by the laws of physical nature.

But in the early 18th century an emerging group of mechanists began to suggest that feelings and emotions were merely secondary byproducts of the ‘true reality’ of matter in motion.

more here.

Mali, Mai Lai, San Bernardino, Planned Parenthood, Paris,
Doctors Without Borders, Drone death, NRA, Shock and Awe,
Boko Haram, ISIS/Daesh…
……………………………….. —The News

After you died
I stopped reading history.
I took up Cormack McCarthy
for the rage and murder.
Now I return to Gibbon; secure
in his reasonable civilization,
he exercises detachment
as barbarians skewer Romans.
Then Huns gallop from the sunrise
wearing skulls.

by Donald Hall
from Without – Letter After a Year, excerpt
Mariner Books, 1999

Maria Shehata in theFword:

“Do you think women are funny?” Yawn. I am a female stand-up comedian with 11 years experience, and I get asked this in almost every interview. It’s a topic that has been discussed ad nauseam, with documentaries, news articles and Christopher Hitchens’ masterpiece of controversy, the article ’Why Women Aren’t Funny.’ in a 2007 issue of Vanity Fair. In the USA, it’s no longer the debate it used to be. The list of women who disprove this notion keeps getting longer and longer to the point that it’s silly to even bother listing it anymore. Female comedians in the USA have been around long enough to undo all those cognitive schemas in our heads that it’s a man’s world and there’s no place for a woman in it. Women are funny too, and we will continue to see this over and over and over again.

…Asya Yavitz, a female comedian in Moscow, says on stage she plays the role of dumb girl, even though she’s head of her IT department at work, echoing Phyllis Diller in the 1950s playing herself down so she wouldn’t be a threatening woman in the eyes of her audience. “Unfortunately the majority of our audiences are Russian and not foreigners, so you have to joke as a woman, and not as a man.” When I asked her to elaborate she said, “You can say you’re head of a transnational corporation, but you should admit/joke on HOW you got this job, or that you are a blonde who understands nothing … female stupidness is obligatory, even if you’re head of your IT department.”

More here.

Ian Penman in City Journal:

Why do I keep seeing this one image of Joan Didion so often recently? I’ve seen it crown two out of three recent profiles or reviews, and here it is again, in all its icy monochrome perfection, on the front of Tracy Daugherty’s outsize biography. It was even splashed across one side of a season’s briefly fashionable tote bag (the other side proclaiming MAGICAL THINKER, which seemed to me a most un-Didion-like phrase, even if it did sort of recycle one of her most recent titles). Is there some kind of demand being responded to here? Is there something in the air?

“Jacket photograph copyright 1970 Julian Wasser”—which makes the Didion in the photo 36 and returns us to a moment when the woozily optimistic saturnalia of the sixties was shifting down into a murkier time of serial overdose and retreat: the Exile on Main Street years. This was also high times for the so-called New Journalism—almost midway between Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood (1966) and Tom Wolfe’s clamorous manifesto-compilation of 1973. Didion (and her husband John Gregory Dunne) could be found in the contributors’ rolls of the latter, alongside burly big hitters like Norman Mailer, Michael Herr, and Hunter S. Thompson; but her presence on the page was markedly different from these other stars in the “nonfiction” firmament. She didn’t burst from the platform of her magazine work like some raucous volley of fireworks. Didion’s tone was more reserved, more quietly insinuating, and sometimes slightly disturbing; you might occasionally mistake the authorial “I” of those early pieces for a more astringent and censuring sensibility from an earlier century, navigating our choppy twentieth-century rapids.

More here.

Menachem Feuer in Berfrois:

Franz Kafka loved to stay on the move. He traveled and kept a travel diary. From his travel diaries, we also learn that Kafka went to spas; he liked to exercise and move his body. Like many European Jews in his generation, he wanted to be healthy and happy. But when it came to his life, his faith, and his future, Kafka didn’t feel like he was making any progress.

Kafka felt he was failing to move in the right direction. Sometimes he felt he wasn’t moving at all. In order to understand whether or how he could move, Kafka turned the question of movement into parable. By way of his fiction, he encountered the possibilities of movement. Kafka wondered whether fiction would enable him to move or if it suspended movement? Was Kafka, as he says in one journal entry, “stuck to this spot,” or could fiction, as we see in a few of his parables and fictions, help him to transcend his location and go… elsewhere?

These parable-based meditations on movement brought Kafka face to face with failure and the possibility of madness. They prompted him to reflect and decide on whether or not to make a “bargain,” as he says, with madness. This bargain necessarily affected his movement and prompted Kafka to, as he says in his journals, “cultivate” failure.

More here.

Tardigrades are sponges for foreign genes. Does that explain why they are famously indestructible?

Ed Yong in The Atlantic:

The toughest animals in the world aren't bulky elephants, or cold-tolerant penguins, or even the famously durable cockroach. Instead, the champions of durability are endearing microscopic creatures called tardigrades, or water bears.

They live everywhere, from the tallest mountains to the deepest oceans, and from hot springs to Antarctic ice. They can even tolerate New York. They cope with these inhospitable environments by transforming into a nigh-indestructible state. Their adorable shuffling gaits cease. Their eight legs curl inwards. Their rotund bodies shrivel up, expelling almost all of their water and becoming a dried barrel called a “tun.” Their metabolism dwindles to near-nothingness—they are practically dead. And in skirting the edge of death, they become incredibly hard to kill.

In the tun state, tardigrades don't need food or water. They can shrug off temperatures close to absolute zero and as high as 151 degrees Celsius. They can withstand the intense pressures of the deep ocean, doses of radiation that would kill other animals, and baths of toxic solvents. And they are, to date, the only animals that have been exposed to the naked vacuum of space and lived to tell the tale—or, at least, lay viable eggs. (Their only weakness, as a researcher once told me, is “vulnerability to mechanical damage;” in other words, you can squish ‘em.)

More here.

Adil Najam in The Guardian:

It was December 2009. I remember sitting on a plane on my way to Copenhagen. I wondered if this would be the historic moment when the world came to its senses.

There was hope in the air. Indeed, I was greeted by stickers on the subway that renamed Denmark’s capital “Hopenhagen”. I smiled.

There was widespread anticipation – nurtured frantically by the host nation – that the UN-sponsored climate summit (COP 15) would be “historic”. That the impasse on global climate change would be broken. That major CO₂ emitters – the US, EU, China, India – would agree on a meaningful binding agreement that would (a) limit their emissions, (b) support developing countries in their transition to low-emission futures, and (c) create a mechanism to assist vulnerable countries in coping with the costs of adaptation and climatic disasters that, by then, had already become inevitable.

That, of course, did not happen.

Today I am again on a plane, on my way to Paris for COP 21. This time, I am not holding my breath. Not smiling.

The hype around Paris is not dissimilar to what one remembers before Copenhagen. Except the aspiration is even lower, the proposals less bold. The scientific consensus on the threats posed by climate change even more definitive. And the interests of developing countries even more marginalised.

More here.

Owen Flanagan in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

When I was a wee Catholic lad growing up in the New York City suburbs of the late 1950s and early 1960s, I learned that good people go to heaven after they die. This was consoling. But it made me wonder precisely which part of me would go to heaven: my body, my mind, or my soul. Thanks to dead hamsters and such, I understood that bodies die, decay, and disperse. There was talk in school and at church of the resurrection of the body on Judgment Day, but that event, I reckoned, might not happen for several million years, and surely I’d be well ensconced in heaven by then. My mother tentatively explained that the part of me that loved peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and chocolate ice cream sodas would most likely not go to heaven, or, if it did, would not need or want peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and chocolate ice cream sodas anymore — possibly, I speculated, because, in the heavenly state, I’d be able mentally to conjure those great pleasures without there being actual physical manifestations of me or them. I surmised that those perfectly good human desires would either be gone (because my body would be gone), or somehow be eternally satisfied.

So, which was it, my mind or my soul that would go to heaven? Or both? And how did they differ? I didn’t want to go to heaven without my personality and memories. I wanted to be in heaven with my brothers and sisters, parents and grandparents, if not bodily then at least mentally. But personality and memories were, in my little boy ontology, associated with mind, and there was talk that the part of me that would go to heaven was something more ethereal than my mind. It was my eternal soul. But my soul, unlike my mind, seemed a bit too vague and general to be “me.” I wanted to be in heaven with me as me myself. Such were the vicissitudes of boyhood. I was troubled by three-ism. I was not, and am not, alone.

More here.

D. Graham Burnett at Cabinet Magazine:

It is perhaps not widely understood (outside the specialized domains of risk modeling and property insurance) that the last twenty years have seen the relatively rapid growth of a new kind of financial instrument: the catastrophe bond. I aim in what follows to offer the reader a brief introduction to these innovative money-things, which sit at the precarious nexus of mathematical modeling, environmental instability, and vast sums of capital. Techno-legal creations of considerable complexity (and some genuine elegance), “cat bonds“ circulate in the Olympian air of global high finance, where they afford investors an opportunity to place large bets on the occurrence (and non-occurrence) of various mass disasters: earthquakes, hurricanes, plagues, suitcase nukes. The lengthy, turgid, and highly confidential specifications that make up the prospectuses of these investments might be said to represent a special and entirely overlooked subgenre of science fiction: what we discover, turning the pages of such deals, are fanatically extensive metrical descriptions of countless doomsday scenarios, each story told in lovingly legalistic and scientific detail. Unlike most dystopian fantasizing, however, the worst-case scenarios played out in the appendices of cat bond issues come with very real-world prospective paydays, precisely priced and proper to the consideration of an imaginative portfolio manager looking to diversify her investments. 


Put your paranoia aside (at least temporarily). It is quite possible that cat bonds are basically a good thing, creating mechanisms as they do for hedging against the tremendously disruptive costs of low-probability, high-negative-impact natural and/or social events. It is also possible, of course, that they are simply another sophisticated exercise in plutocratic self-dealing. We will bracket that thorny problem for now, and focus here on conveying (1) a general understanding of how these instruments work, and (2) a specific appreciation of the way that they constitute perhaps the most elaborate and powerful social technology currently available for articulating just what we mean when we say “catastrophe.”


more here.

From KurzweilAI:

Researchers from Princeton University and the New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT) report for the first time that army ants of the species Eciton hamatum that form “living” bridges across breaks and gaps in the forest floor are more sophisticated than scientists knew. The ants exhibit a level of collective intelligence that could provide new insights into animal behavior and even help in the development of intuitive robots that can cooperate as a group, the researchers said. Ants of E. hamatum automatically form living bridges without any oversight from a “lead” ant, the researchers report in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of the Sciences. The action of each individual coalesces into a group unit that can adapt to the terrain and also operates by a clear cost-benefit ratio. The ants will create a path over an open space up to the point when too many workers are being diverted from collecting food and prey.

Collective computation

The researchers suggest that these ants are performing a collective computation. At the level of the entire colony, they’re saying they can afford this many ants locked up in this bridge, but no more than that. There’s no single ant overseeing the decision, they’re making that calculation as a colony. The research could help explain how large groups of animals balance cost and benefit, about which little is known, said co-author Iain Couzin, a Princeton visiting senior research scholar in ecology and evolutionary biology, and director of the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology and chair of biodiversity and collective behavior at the University of Konstanz in Germany. Previous studies have shown that single creatures use “rules of thumb” to weigh cost-and-benefit, said Couzin. This new work shows that in large groups these same individual guidelines can eventually coordinate group-wide — the ants acted as a unit although each ant only knew its immediate circumstances, he said.

More here.

Barry Schwabsky at The Nation:

Does anyone today still believe that landscape can be the subject of great painting? Artists as renowned as Gerhard Richter and Alex Katz have made memorable landscape paintings—­albeit under the sign of photography in Richter’s case, abstraction in Katz’s, and therefore ostensibly evading the charge of anachronism. Nevertheless, the unspoken assumption of the contemporary art world is that landscape is old-fashioned, a dusty souvenir of the 19th century.

Maureen Gallace thinks otherwise. The 12 small paintings of hers from 2013 to 2015 recently exhibited at the 303 Gallery in New York City could probably, from the viewpoint of technique, have been made at any point in the last 150 years. Their size alone—ranging from nine by 12 inches to 10 by 13—all but dares you to dismiss them as minor. And their subject matter is timeless: trees, flowers, the ocean, houses so plain and rendered with so little detail that dating them seems beside the point. Only the white line down the middle of a road flanked by utility poles indicates the automobile age. Yet there is nothing stale or dowdy about these works. Gallace’s self-consciousness about the conventions of painting (her “postmodernism,” I think it fair to say of an artist who was educated in the 1980s and has been exhibiting since 1990) clicks into place with a fresh, ingenuous responsiveness to things observed in a manner that feels new or at least unfamiliar, no matter the kinship you might sense with Edwin Dickinson or Giorgio Morandi, Lois Dodd or Albert York.

more here.

John Douglas Millar and Hal Foster at Eurozine:

Well the line that comes to mind first is an old statement by Edward Said from The Anti-Aesthetic where he said, “the humanities now represent human marginality or the marginality of the human”. That was over 30 years ago. In my own case it's complicated in the sense that modernism and the question of postmodernism could and were discussed in the remnants of the public sphere. Certainly in the States there once was such a thing as an independent intellectual and public sphere. That's really how October began and that's how I began too; I worked as a writer and editor for art magazines in that context. However, the art market came to dominate in the 1980s and with the triumph of neoliberalism came the deregulation of the art world and of art institutions in general. So, yes, we went to the academy for sanctuary only to discover that work is a commodity there too. Also, ironically that was the moment in the 1980s and into the early 1990s when critical theory had a special cache and itself became a prized commodity. Well that quickly ended when it turned out universities were not so keen to have this critical virus in their midst. The situation with the humanities now is complicated. Like you say, I work at an elite institution, on the other hand because Princeton is wealthy it has abundant scholarships so that if a young person is admitted to Princeton he or she does not have to pay, so it's actually quite economically diverse, if not sufficiently ethnically diverse, and so those kids are not quite so driven to become investment bankers. Ironically then, it's at the state universities that we see the crisis in the humanities where people are asked to develop as human capital, to develop their portfolio of skills to make them good grist for the neoliberal machine.

more here.

Molly Roberts in Smithsonian:

What makes photography wonderful is its ability to capture a piece of our reality in a fraction of time, while also creating an image that connects to a universal human experience. The key to success is the photographer’s point of view. The ten books below are ones not to miss this year because of these artists’ unique perspectives. From photographing a place that you’ll never have access to (The Long Shadow of Chernobyl) to creating a gallery of hope in a war torn country (Skate Girls of Kabul) these books celebrate the talent of these photographers and give you another way of experiencing the world.

Street artist JR brings art into spaces where it’s not normally seen, often using photographs as social commentary on issues affecting the site. This book offers a behind-the-scenes look at his entire body of work and the process of creating these moving juxtapositions. The book is an inspiration for those trying to create socially engaged art and make a difference in marginalized communities.

More here.

Patrick Blanchfield over at his website:

First, not all “mass shootings” are created equal. The very fact that we’re paying attention to this event in the first place, and calling it a “mass shooting,” is the function of selective economies of attention and predetermined narrative framings.

Much like “gun violence” itself, there is no settled, universal definition of what a “mass shooting” is. When counting and talking about “mass shootings,” some academics and members of the media will use the FBI definition of a “mass murder,” others will use its working definition of a “mass killing.” One key difference between these definitions is body count: if your definition of “mass shooting” is synonymous with the FBI’s “mass murder,” then it’s four dead, not including the shooter; if you’re using their definition of a “mass killing,” it’s three. The kicker here is that people have to die in order for it to qualify. In other words, if you’re wedded to either of these definitions, when seventeen people are shot and injured in a single incident at a block party in New Orleans, then this is technically not a “mass shooting.” As Gwyneth Kelly pointedly notes, variations in mass shooting data provide ready fodder for some pro-gunners to wave away the problem and discredit research in general. Meanwhile, crowd-sourced datasets like the Mass Shooting Tracker (which Jennifer Masica has written lucidly about here) count incidents where multiple people can be wounded, but many of these are acts of violence tracked by other FBI datasets (i.e., gang-related incidents) that rarely capture the same degree of media attention – or activate the same public emotional response – as do rampage killings by active shooters.

In other words, for you to be seeing that “Mass Shooting” news alert, a whole range of selection processes have already occurred. It’s not a one-way-street, though. The media is giving you news that you are presumed to care about, and your attention to it fuels the process. And so we need to ask a question here. It’s so obvious, and yet also asking it seems like violating a taboo, like callousness. Here it is, regardless:

Why do we care about these events so much? Of rather – why do we perform caring about these events so much? Not that caring and performance are mutually exclusive, of course – but what if there’s something about the latter that undermines our ability to do the former?

More here.

Over at Aeon, Margaret Wertheim on consciousness:

The idea that the laws of nature might be able to account for conscious experience – a position known as physicalism – steadily gained supporters in the 19th century and was given a particular boost with the advent of Maxwell’s equations and other powerful mathematical frameworks devised by physicists in their golden age. If the invisible field of a magnet can result from natural laws, then might the same not be true for feelings?

Yet, as some philosophers of the early 20th century began to point out, physicalism contains a logical flaw. If consciousness is a secondary byproduct of physical laws, and if those laws are causally closed – meaning that everything in the world is explained by them (as physicalists claim) – then consciousness becomes truly irrelevant. Physicalism further allows us to imagine a world withoutconsciousness, a ‘zombie world’ that looks exactly like our own, peopled with beings who act exactly like us but aren’t conscious. Such zombies have no feelings, emotions or subjective experience; they live lives without qualia. As Chalmers has noted, there is literally nothing it is like to be zombie. And if zombies can exist in the physicalist account of the world, then, according to Chalmers, that account can’t be a complete description of our world, where feelings do exist: something more is needed, beyond the laws of nature, to account for conscious subjective experience.

These are fighting words. And some scientists are fighting back. In the frontline are the neuroscientists who, with increasing frequency, are proposing theories for how subjective experience might emerge from a matrix of neurons and brain chemistry. A slew of books over the past two decades have proffered solutions to the ‘problem’ of consciousness. Among the best known are Christof Koch’s The Quest for Consciousness: A Neurobiological Approach (2004); Giulio Tononi and Gerald Edelman’s A Universe of Consciousness: How Matter Becomes Imagination (2000); Antonio Damasio’s The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness (1999); and the philosopher Daniel Dennett’s bluntly titled Consciousness Explained (1991).

It has been said that, if the 20th century was the age of physics, the 21st will be the age of the brain. Among scientists today, consciousness is being hailed as one of the prime intellectual challenges. My interest in the subject is not in any particular solution to the origin of consciousness – I believe we’ll be arguing about that for millennia to come – but rather in the question: why is consciousness perceived as a ‘problem’? How exactly did it become a problem? And given that it was off the table of science for so long, why is it now becoming such a hot research subject?

More here.

Philip Hoare at The New Statesman:

In the autumn of 1849, a young American wearing a new green coat – of which he was inordinately proud – arrived in London. He checked in to a boarding house on Craven Street, a narrow road running down from the Strand to the then unembanked Thames. The house is still there, at the end of a Georgian terrace, an improbable survivor. You may have passed the turning many times and never thought to have walked down it. Even if you had, you may not have noticed that on the wall of the end house, whose bow window still looks out on to the river, is an equally improbable blue plaque. The young American was Herman Melville and the plaque commemorates the author and his greatest creation – the wondrous phantasmagoria that is Moby-Dick, which was born in that boarding house.

That November, the writer wandered around the imperial metropolis, down its “anti-lanes” and river tunnels, from tavern to publisher’s office, trying to sell his latest book,White-Jacket. Melville had been youthfully famous from his debut, a bestselling book of sensual tales of the South Seas, Typee, first published in London, but had become increasingly obscure in his literary output. He knew he had to come up with something spectacular – “a romance of adventure, founded upon certain wild legends in the Southern Sperm Whale Fisheries”.

more here.