Sarah Coolidge at The Quarterly Conversation:

After the suicide of Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes wrote what he considered to be his most important poetic work, Crow: From the Life and Times of the Crow. At the book’s center is Crow, one of folklore’s iconic figures. Hughes uses this feathered symbol of death to take on mythology, Christianity, and conventional poetry.

Crow performs monumental tasks—in one poem, he binds the Heavens to the Earth—but always with the nefarious air of a trickster: when the nail he uses to join the terrestrial and the celestial becomes “gangrenous and stank . . . Crow / Grinned.” In another poem, aptly named “A Childish Prank,” we are given the origin story of the two sexes. Crow is the creator, biting a worm in two and sticking one end partially into man and the other end completely into woman.

This is more or less the same Crow we find in the pages of Max Porter’s debut novel Grief Is the Thing with Feathers. Except that here, in a slim novel barely more than 100 pages, Crow is given the space to grow beyond his folkloric origins. The book’s premise is simple. A father and his two sons are mourning in the wake of the mother’s unexpected death. Dad, as the recent widower is called, was in the middle of writing a book about Hughes’s Crow when his wife died. And the boys, always referred to in the plural, are perplexed by the lack of chaos in the wake of tragedy. All three are unsure of how to proceed with their lives. Then one night Crow arrives on the doorstep of their London flat.

more here.

James Goodman at the New York Times:

“The African-Americans love me,” Donald Trump said back in January. Nine months later, evidence of that love is exceedingly rare. Polls put Trump’s black support in the low single digits, smaller in several samples than the margin of error. In 1964, Barry Goldwater, who had voted against the Civil Rights Act in the summer and won the enthusiastic endorsement of the Klan in the fall, received 6 percent. Ronald Reagan received 12 and then 9 percent. Even John McCain, running against Barack Obama, received 4.

Whether because of those numbers or despite them, the academic study of black Republicans is booming. Last year, Leah Wright Rigueur, a historian at Harvard, published “The Loneliness of the Black Republican,” a spirited study of conservatism, politics and race. Now we have Joshua D. Farrington’s “Black Republicans and the Transformation of the GOP” and Corey D. Fields’s “Black Elephants in the Room.” Other books have been published, and more are on the way. We may soon have more books on black Republicans than actual black Republican voters.

more here.

Joshua Kurlantzick at The Guardian:

Goscha has provided quite simply the finest, most readable single-volume history of Vietnam in English. He takes on some persistent myths about the country. First, that Vietnam has been constantly preyed on. In the pre-colonial period, southeast Asia’s own empires constantly colonised each other. A series of Vietnamese empires conquered parts of modern-day Laos and Cambodia between the 15th and 19th centuries, while alternately fighting and placating China’s rulers, who saw Vietnam as a vassal state.

Second, Goscha shows that Vietnamese dynasties were actively modernising the country before French colonisation began in the mid to late 19th century. The Nguyen dynasty was establishing new tax and irrigation systems, new schools and a modern bureaucracy when France declared its rule over Indochina.

Under the Nguyens, the French and the two governments of South and North Vietnam, the country was hardly monoethnic, though the pictures most Americans saw of Vietnam were of ethnically Viet people. Vietnam, as Goscha argues, has long been influenced not only by the majority ethnic Viet and by Chinese Confucian culture, which spread south over centuries, but also by a far broader range of cultures and peoples.

more here.

Ariel Dorfman in The New York Times:

Indeed, the defining experience of Cervantes’s life was the harrowing five years starting in 1575 that he spent in the dungeons of Algiers as a prisoner of the Barbary pirates. It was there, on the border of Islam and the West, that Cervantes came to appreciate the value of tolerance toward those who are radically different, and it was there he discovered that of all the goods men can aspire to, freedom is by far the greatest. While awaiting a ransom that his family could not pay, confronted with execution each time he attempted to escape, watching his fellow slaves tormented and impaled, he longed for a life without manacles. But once he returned to Spain, a crippled war veteran neglected by those who had sent him into conflict, he came to the conclusion that if we cannot heal the misfortunes that assail our bodies, we can, however, hold sway over how our soul responds to those sorrows. “Don Quixote” was born of that revelation. In the prologue to Part 1 of his novel he tells the “idle reader” that it was “begotten in a prison, where every discomfort has its place and every sad sound makes its home.” Whether that jail was in Seville or in Castro del Río, this recurring experience of incarceration forced him to revisit the Algerian ordeal and put him face to face with a dilemma that he resolved to our joy: Either succumb to the bitterness of despair or let loose the wings of the imagination. The result was a book that pushed the limits of creativity, subverting every tradition and convention. Instead of a rancorous indictment of a decaying Spain that had rejected and censored him, Cervantes invented a tour de force as playful and ironic as it was multifaceted, laying the ground for all the wild experiments the novelistic genre was to undergo.

Cervantes realized that we are all madmen constantly outpaced by history, fragile humans shackled to bodies that are doomed to eat and sleep, make love and die, made ridiculous and also glorious by the ideals we harbor. To put it bluntly, he discovered the vast psychological and social territory of the ambiguous modern condition. Captives of a harsh and unyielding reality, we are also simultaneously graced by the constant ability to surpass its battering blows.

More here.

Dayna Tortirici in n+1:

The investigative journalist Claudio Gatti’s “months-long investigation” into public real estate records in Rome makes the compelling case that Ferrante is, as the stones knew, Anita Raja. Gatti’s previous subjects include JP Morgan Chase and Silvio Berlusconi—targets more deserving of his skills. The article was rolled out in multiple languages simultaneously, like the NSA leak: “in English by NYR Daily, in Italian by Il Sole 24 Ore, in German by the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, and in French on the investigative website, Mediapart,” as the footnote read. Reporting on the reaction to Gatti’s story, the New York Times reached Ferrante’s publisher, Sandra Ozzola Ferri, for comment. “If someone wants to be left alone, leave her alone,” she said. “She’s not a member of the Camorra, or Berlusconi. She’s a writer and isn’t doing anyone any harm.” Ferrante’s readers were quick to denounce Gatti’s revelation. I myself was irritated. Even the stones know that Ferrante is Ferrante, and that’s the way her readers want it. More than Ferrante herself, her readers have benefited from her choice, spared so much extradiegetic noise. We are as invested in her anonymity—and her autonomy—as she is. It is a compact: she won’t tell us, we won’t ask, and she won’t change her mind and tell us anyway. In exchange, she’ll write books and we’ll read them. The feminist defense of Ferrante’s privacy was especially swift. It’s difficult to read a man’s attempt to “out” a writer who has said she would stop writing if she were ever identified as anything but an attempt to make her stop writing.

…“I believe that, today, failing to protect writing by guaranteeing it an autonomous space, far from the demands of the media and the marketplace, is a mistake,” Ferrante told the Financial Times last year. This is an uncontroversial truth. Writers need space to work. One word for this space is room; another is freedom; another is privacy. Each writer finds this space where she can. Woolf pragmatically emphasized the material: “give her a room of her own and five hundred a year, let her speak her mind and leave out half that she now puts in, and she will write a better book one of these days.” (She needed the metaphysical, too: “I need solitude,” Woolf wrote in her diaries. “I need space. I need air. I need the empty fields around me; and my legs pounding along roads; and sleep; and animal existence.”) Kafka found his space at night: “The burning electric light, the silent house, the darkness outside, the last waking moments, they give me the right to write even if it be only the most miserable stuff. And this right I use hurriedly. That’s the person I am.” When she was young, Dorothy West asked her mother for permission to close her door so she could think, and to lock it so she could write. “

ore here.

Alexander Kharazishvili in Inference Review:

Among various philosophical categories, the finite and the infinite are of pivotal importance. The relationship between them is so close, sophisticated, and profound that neither can be perceived and studied without appealing to the other. Both notions are the subject of extensive mathematical research. Modern set theory is entirely devoted to the study of the most general properties of finite and infinite families of objects.

A set of objects is finite if there exists a one-to-one correspondence, or bijection, between the set and some natural number n. It is assumed that nis identified with the set of all strictly smaller natural numbers. It follows that 0 is identical to the empty set ∅, and 1 coincides with the one-element set {∅}, while 2 is equal to {∅,{∅}}, and so on. If a set of objects is not finite, it is infinite. For example, it is a straightforward to demonstrate that the set N of all natural numbers is infinite.

Galileo offered some useful remarks about the paradoxical nature of infinite sets in the seventeenth century.¹ There is a one-to-one correspondence between the natural numbers and their squares. N is equinumerous with a proper part of itself. This is impossible for a finite set of objects.

Bernard Bolzano suggested defining infinite sets as those sets that are equinumerous with their proper subsets.² This is the definition adopted by Richard Dedekind.³ All sets satisfying this definition are now known as infinite in the Dedekind sense: D-infinite sets.⁴

^{More here.}

Jonathan Jones in The Guardian:

Two women are holding a man down on a bed. One presses her fist against his head, so he can’t raise it from the mattress, while her companion pins his torso in place. They are well-built with powerful arms but even so it takes their combined strength to keep their victim immobilised as one of them cuts through his throat with a gleaming sword. Blood spurts from deep red geysers as she saws. She won’t stop until his head is fully severed. Her victim’s eyes are wide open. He knows exactly what is happening to him.

The dying man is Holofernes, an enemy of the Israelites in the Old Testament, and the young woman beheading him is Judith, his divinely appointed assassin. Yet at the same time he is also an Italian painter called Agostino Tassi, while the woman with the sword is Artemisia Gentileschi, who painted this. It is, effectively, a self-portrait.

Two big, blood-drenched paintings of Judith and Holofernes by Gentileschi survive, one in the Capodimonte in Naples, the other in the Uffizi in Florence. They are almost identical except for small details – in Naples Judith’s dress is blue, in Florence yellow – as if this image was a nightmare she kept having, the final act to a tragedy endlessly replaying in her head.

“This is the ring you gave me and these are your promises!” yelled Gentileschi as she was tortured in a Rome courtroom in 1612. Ropes were wrapped around her fingers and pulled tight. The judge had advised moderate use of the sibille, as this torture was called, for she was after all 18. Across the court sat the man who had raped her. No one thought of torturing him. Defiantly, Gentileschi told him her thumbscrews were the wedding ring he’d promised. Again and again, she repeated that her testimony about the rape was reliable: “It is true, it is true, it is true, it is true.”

Gentileschi was the greatest female artist of the baroque age and one of the most brilliant followers of the incendiary artist Caravaggio, whose terrifying painting of Judith and Holofernes influenced hers.

More here.

Cynthia Haven at The Book Haven:

Vladimir Mayakovsky was the celebrated hero poet of the Russian Revolution. His suicide in 1930, at the age of 37, rocked the Soviet world. What had happened? Had he become disillusioned with the new order he had championed? Or was it foul play? The Soviets put forth a different story – romantic disappointment. But the truth, as always, is more complicated.

Enter his biographer Bengt Jangfeldt, perhaps the foremost Mayakovsky expert in the world. I had the good fortune to visit Bengt in Stockholm this summer. He is one of the foremost authors in Sweden, and undoubtedly one of Scandinavia’s most generous spirits. He was not well that day, however, so we had to postpone a whirlwind tour of Stockholm for another visit and chat over coffee at his apartment in the old part of the city.

more here.

Nathan Jefferson at The LA Review of Books:

Born in Cleveland to two teachers, Chester Himes had one of the fascinatingly varied backgrounds seemingly required for early 20th-century writers. Expelled from Ohio State for taking students to a speakeasy/brothel, he later served seven years in prison for his role in a jewel theft. While imprisoned, he began to write, eventually publishing several short stories in Esquire. After his release, he moved to Los Angeles and held 23 jobs in the three years he spent there — one of them was a screenwriting gig for Warner Brothers. Himes later said that “under the mental corrosion of race prejudice in Los Angeles I became bitter and saturated with hate,” and the fiction he wrote during this time reflects this attitude. He eventually became famous and financially comfortable thanks to the more conventional Harlem Detective novels he wrote as an expat in Paris, but his Los Angeles novels stand alone as singularly harsh examples of noir.

Himes well understood that the rhythms and motions of the detective novel are every bit as important as its plot. Indeed, it’s more accurate to say that motion drives plot; for the detective, locomotion matches and propels thought and reasoning. No one setting or state of consciousness has all the answers; it’s only through the continued movement from location to location that a full and complete image begins to emerge. It’s a tradition that has its roots in narrative ease — the first detective stories were serials, and a sequential, compartmentalized structure lends itself well to weekly installments — but soon became a cornerstone of the genre, even more so than first-person narration or femme fatales.

more here.

Will Rees at The Times Literary Supplement:

The Danish philosopher and theologian Søren Kierkegaard (1813–55) was firmly convinced that his first book was also to be his last. His family’s grim medical history led him to assume that he would die young, and he felt that his short time would be more agreeably spent as a rural pastor. But “things did not go as I expected and intended”, he later wrote. “Oh, no.” Because that first book,Either/Or (1843), quickly propelled Kierkegaard to literary celebrity and signalled the beginning of one of history’s most frantic writing careers.

As a child Kierkegaard was sensitive, sulky, ironical and precocious. In other words, he had precisely that youthful temperament which, while not a sufficient condition, is nonetheless a necessary condition for the later burgeoning of genius. In adolescence, Kierkegaard’s shyness gave way to defensive wit, his lack of physical endowments conditioning the need for a different type of strength. At school, he was talented but not exceptional, always overshadowed by his eldest brother, Peter. But posterity has been kind to the younger Kierkegaard: his childhood indolence is seen now as an indictment of the tedious pedagogical system of the time, rather than of his moral or intellectual stamina. Indeed, it is precisely here, in the oppressive nineteenth-century classroom, that the mature Kierkegaard’s radically individualistic, anti-authoritarian attitude developed – even if, for now, it could only manifest itself as naughtiness.

more here.

Matt Langione in JSTOR Daily:

This past spring, Google began feeding its natural language algorithm thousands of romance novels in an effort to humanize its “conversational tone.” The move did so much to fire the collective comic imagination that the ensuing hilarity muffled any serious commentary on its symbolic importance. The jokes, as they say, practically wrote themselves. But, after several decades devoted to task-specific “smart” technologies (GPS, search engine optimization, data mining), Google’s decision points to a recovered interest among the titans of technology in a fully anthropic “general” intelligence, the kind dramatized in recent films such as Her (2013) and Ex Machina (2015). Amusing though it may be, the appeal to romance novels suggests that Silicon Valley is daring to dream big once again.

The desire to automate solutions to human problems, from locomotion (the wheel) to mnemonics (the stylus), is as old as society itself. Aristotle, for example, sought to describe the mysteries of human cognition so precisely that it could be codified as a set of syllogisms, or building blocks of knowledge, bound together by algorithms to form the high-level insights and judgments that we ordinarily associate with intelligence.

Two millennia later, the German polymath Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz dreamed of a machine called thecalculus ratiocinator that would be programmed according to these syllogisms in the hope that, thereafter, all of the remaining problems in philosophy could be resolved with a turn of the crank.

But there is more to intelligence than logic. Logic, after all, can only operate on already categorized signs and symbols.

More here.

Perspective

When I see the two cops laughing
after one of them gets shot
because this is TV and one says
while putting pressure on the wound,
Haha, you're going to be fine,
and the other says, I know, haha!,
as the ambulance arrives—
I know the men are white.
I think of a clip from the hours
of amateur footage I've seen
when another man at an intersection
gets shot, falls, and bleeds from a hole
the viewer knows exists only by the way
the dark red pools by the standing cop's feet,
gun now holstered, who
yells the audience back to the sidewalk.
I know which one is dying
while black and which one stands by white.
I think this morning about the student
in my class who wrote a free write line
on the video I played
that showed a man pouring water
on his own chest, “…the homoerotic
scene against a white sky” with no other men
present. Who gets to see and who follows
what script? I ask my students.
Whose lines are these and by what hand
are they written?
.

by Amy King
from PoetryNow
The Poetry Foundation

.

Melissa Healey in LA Times:

Life-extension zealots have championed many strategies aimed at prolonging our days here on Earth, and not all sound like much fun (I'm thinking specifically about caloric restriction). Supercentenarians – those rare humans who live beyond the age of 110 – by contrast seem to embrace much more appealing life-extension strategies: They routinely endorse regular naps, consumption of large quantities of chocolate, and a daily nip of strong drink, for instance. In short, when it comes to living longer, mysteries abound. The question is not just how to do it, but whether, even if scientists could distill the fountain of youth, there is a limit to how long humans could be made to live. A new study offers a tentative answer to the latter question. Writing in the journal Nature on Wednesday, researchers at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City conducted a complex statistical calculation and concluded that there is such a limit. Led by geneticist Jan Vijg, the team asserts that humans who have walked among us have hit that limit. And they calculate that if we could cobble together 10,000 people who had reached the age of 110 (a big and theoretical if), the statistical likelihood that just one of them would live beyond 125 in any given year would be 1 in 10,000.

Long odds, those.

In 1997, the longest-lived human ever recorded – a 122-year-old Frenchwoman named Jeanne Calment – died, reportedly with her mental faculties still intact. Attributing her long life to a diet rich in olive oil, port wine and chocolate, Calment was the only person whose age, at death, was verified to have exceeded 120. Today, at 116, an Italian woman named Emma Morano is the oldest known person alive. At 113 and 111, respectively, Americans Adele Dunlap and Agnes Fenton (both living in New Jersey) are not far behind. To reach this point, all of those women (and yes, supercentenarians are overwhelmingly women) have made it out of infancy, fought off dangerous infections, survived childbirth and eluded the deadly talons of heart disease, cancer and injury.

But eventually, they will all die of something. Why?

More here.

Linch Zhang speaks to Scott Aaronson in the Huffington Post:

Linch: Sixteen years ago you tried to get Nader and Gore voters to team up with NaderTrading. Sixteen years later, you’re bringing the idea back – why now?”

Scott: Naturally, because of the urgent need to stop Trump from taking over the US.

I should add that NaderTrading wasn’t my idea—in 2000, I simply created a website to defend the practice, after others had already written about it and were engaging in it. In any case, we NaderTrading defenders were able to reach thousands of people, including in swing states like Florida, but it wasn’t quite enough. That, of course, is one of the reasons why we got eight years of George W. Bush.

Linch: What, in your own words, is “votetrading” and how could I use votetrading right now?

Scott: The idea is very simple. Supporters of a third-party candidate, like Gary Johnson, who live in a swing state like Ohio, should vote for Hillary Clinton (assuming they prefer her over Trump), but should also arrange for a Hillary supporter in a safe state like Texas or California to vote for Johnson on their behalf.

This helps to compensate for the insanity of the Electoral College—which, the way we use it today, neither makes sense nor bears any real relation to what the founding fathers intended. Because of the Electoral College, only a few states matter for presidential general elections, and the residents of other states are basically voiceless.

More here.

Oliver Milman in The Guardian:

The global temperature has increased to a level not seen for 115,000 years, requiring daunting technological advances that will cost the coming generations hundreds of trillions of dollars, according to the scientist widely credited with bringing climate change to the public’s attention.

A new paper submitted by James Hansen, a former senior Nasa climate scientist, and 11 other experts states that the 2016 temperature is likely to be 1.25C above pre-industrial times, following a warming trend where the world has heated up at a rate of 0.18C per decade over the past 45 years.

This rate of warming is bringing Earth in line with temperatures last seen in the Eemian period, an interglacial era ending 115,000 years ago when there was much less ice and the sea level was 6-9 meters (20-30ft) higher than today.

In order to meet targets set at last year’s Paris climate accord to avoid runaway climate change, “massive CO2 extraction” costing an eye-watering $104tn to $570tn will be required over the coming century with “large risks and uncertain feasibility” as to its success, the paper states.

“There’s a misconception that we’ve begun to address the climate problem,” said Hansen, who brought climate change into the public arena through his testimony to the US congress in the 1980s. “This misapprehension is based on the Paris climate deal where governments clapped themselves on the back but when you look at the science it doesn’t compute, it’s not true.

More here.

Debunking the meritocratic argument on its own terms.

Didier Jacobs and Sam Pizzigati in Evonomics:

Back in 2010, Oxfam’s new stats show, the world’s 62 richest billionaires collectively held $1.1 trillion in wealth, far less than the $2.6 trillion that then belonged to humanity’s least affluent half.

Now the numbers have reversed. The world’s top 62 billionaires last year held $1.76 trillion in wealth, the bottom half of the world only $1.75 trillion.

“Far from trickling down,” Oxfam concludes, “income and wealth are instead being sucked upwards at an alarming rate.”

Flacks for grand fortune have a justification for this top-heavy state of affairs. We live, they assure us, in a meritocracy. Those with great wealth have made great contributions. They merit their “success.” If we want to encourage talent and hard work, we simply have to accept the inequality that meritocracy will inevitably produce.

Do our grandest fortunes really reflect merit? Oxfam economist Didier Jacobs last year set out to examine that question, and he has just published a paper that offers a fresh new take on meritocracy and the rhetoric and reality behind it. Too Much editor Sam Pizzigati last month asked the Boston-based Jacobs to share the thinking that underlies his innovative new research.

More here.