In Which the Cartographer tells Off the Rastaman

The cartographer sucks his teeth
and says – every language, even yours,
is a partial map of this world – it is
the man who never learnt the word
‘scrupe’ – sound of silk or chiffon moving
against a floor – such a man would not know
how to listen for the scrupe of his bride’s dress.
And how much life is land to which
we have no access? How much
have we not seen or felt or heard
because there was no word
for it – at least no word we knew?
We speak to navigate ourselves
away from dark corners and we become,
each one of us, cartographers.

by Kei Miller
from The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion
Carcanet, Manchester, 2014

Sameer Rahim in Prospect Magazine:

Despite his shaky poll ratings, Donald Trump’s brand of charismatic nastiness has plenty of appeal and could yet propel him to the American presidency. His recent attacks on Ghazala and Khizr Khan, the Muslim parents of an American soldier killed in Iraq in 2004, showed how low he is prepared to strike. (Though is it churlish to ask why it has taken so long to point out the outrageousness of his plans to ban Muslims from the “land of the free”?) Yet there are already conspiracy theories flying around about Khizr Khan being a Muslim Brotherhood plant; an article he wrote in 1988 about Islamic law has been dredged up to prove his un-Americanness. You can be sure these are the articles being shared by Trump supporters on social media—not the mainstream outrage from Democrats and some Republicans. We are witnessing the paranoid style in American politics, turbo-charged by the internet age. How did we get to this point? Is there anything new to say about Trump and his phenomenal rise? Amid the welter of opinion, it might be worth turning to fiction. In 2004, Philip Roth wrote a brilliant counter-factual novel, The Plot Against America, which imagined the US electing a celebrity far-right leader with bigoted views about minorities and a weakness for foreign strongmen. Reading the novel, you can’t help seeing striking parallels with the rise of Trump. Roth, writing about the past but of course also about the present, anticipates the rightward shift in post-9/11 US politics.

Beginning in 1940, The Plot Against America is set in a fictionalised version of Roth’s own Newark family. The narrator is a young Philip, looking back over the troubled times of his early life. The opening lines, with a couple of adjustments, could apply equally well today to a young Muslim in Florida or a Mexican in Nevada: “Fear presides over these memories, a perpetual fear. Of course no childhood is without its terrors, yet I wonder if I would have been a less frightened boy if Lindbergh hadn’t been president or if I hadn’t been the offspring of Jews.” Charles A Lindbergh was a real person. An ace pilot, in 1927, at the age of 25 he flew solo non-stop from New York to Paris. Overnight he became a hero across America. In 1932, his baby son was kidnapped and killed by an immigrant ex-convict, which brought him widespread sympathy. By 1936, Lindbergh was in Berlin for the Olympics, describing Adolf Hitler as “undoubtedly a great man… [who] I believe has done much for the German people.” In 1941 he spoke at America First rallies (the slogan resurrected by Trump), and was touted by many as the next president.

More here.

Juan Gabriel Vasquez in The New York Times:

Colson Whitehead’s novels are rebellious creatures: Each one of them goes to great lengths to break free of the last one, of its structure and language, of its areas of interest. At the same time, they all have one thing in common — the will to work within a recognizable tract of popular culture, taking advantage of conventions while subverting them for the novel’s own purposes. “The Intuitionist,” with its dystopian concerns and futuristic mood, gave way to the folkloric past of “John Henry Days”; “Zone One,” Whitehead’s contribution to the unquenchable American thirst for zombies, was his departure from “Sag Harbor,” with its coming-of-age feeling and concessions to nostalgia. His new novel, “The Underground Railroad,” is as different as can be from the zombie book. It touches on the historical novel and the slave story, but what it does with those genres is striking and imaginative. Like its predecessors, it is carefully built and stunningly daring; it is also, both in expected and unexpected ways, dense, substantial and important.

The central conceit of the novel is as simple as it is bold. The underground railroad is not, in Whitehead’s novel, the secret network of passageways and safe houses used by runaway slaves to reach the free North from their slaveholding states. Or rather it is that, but it is something else, too: You open a trap door in the safe house or find the entrance to a hidden cave, and you reach an actual railroad, with actual locomotives and boxcars and conductors, sometimes complete with benches on the platform. “Two steel rails ran the visible length of the tunnel,” Whitehead writes, “pinned into the dirt by wooden crossties. The steel ran south and north presumably, springing from some inconceivable source and shooting toward a miraculous terminus.” The trains pass at unpredictable times and go to unpredictable places, but that is obviously good enough for those wanting to flee the misery and violence of slavery: its sheer inhumanity, a word that in Whitehead’s unflinching explorations seems to fill up with new meanings.

More here.

Rachel Toor in the Chronicle of Higher Education:

Steven Pinker is about as close as you can come to being an academic celebrity. The Harvard professor of psychology has written seven books for a general readership in addition to his scholarly work, which is wide-ranging. Pinker frequently writes about language for The New York Times, The Guardian, Time, and The Atlantic, and also tackles subjects such as education, morality, politics, bioethics, and violence.

All of which makes him a prime candiate for this Q&A series, Scholars Talk Writing.Listing all his honors and awards could cause us mere mortals to feel inferior; you can find them on his website, Stevenpinker.com (where you’ll also see that he has a great head of hair).

Perhaps the most important thing for writers from across the disciplines to know about Pinker is that he has a recent book: The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century, which should be required reading. (An excerpt can be found here.)

Who are the writers who influenced you in terms of your own prose?

Pinker: Since many people are under the misconception that you have to write badly in academia to be taken seriously, I’ll just mention some renowned scholars in my own field whom I read as an undergraduate and who were sparkling prose stylists…

More here.

From Phys.org:

IBM scientists have created randomly spiking neurons using phase-change materials to store and process data. This demonstration marks a significant step forward in the development of energy-efficient, ultra-dense integrated neuromorphic technologies for applications in cognitive computing.

Inspired by the way the biological brain functions, scientists have theorized for decades that it should be possible to imitate the versatile computational capabilities of large populations of neurons. However, doing so at densities and with a power budget that would be comparable to those seen in biology has been a significant challenge, until now.

“We have been researching phase-change materials for memory applications for over a decade, and our progress in the past 24 months has been remarkable,” said IBM Fellow Evangelos Eleftheriou. “In this period, we have discovered and published new memory techniques, including projected memory, stored 3 bits per cell in phase-change memory for the first time, and now are demonstrating the powerful capabilities of phase-change-based artificial neurons, which can perform various computational primitives such as data-correlation detection and unsupervised learning at high speeds using very little energy.”

The artificial neurons designed by IBM scientists in Zurich consist of phase-change materials, including germanium antimony telluride, which exhibit two stable states, an amorphous one (without a clearly defined structure) and a crystalline one (with structure). These materials are the basis of re-writable Blu-ray discs. However, the artificial neurons do not store digital information; they are analog, just like the synapses and neurons in our biological brain.

More here.

Alec Balasescu writes:

The act of killing is as frightful as it is present, and even banalized.

In our global society, when political or ideological orientations radicalize themselves, they start to justify killing. This is not what Islam does, it is what every ideology does when pushed to the extreme.

What are the internal resorts that determine an individual to kill? What are the types of justifications used, when the act itself is not legal? In the current context, when the political agenda both in Europe and the US is easily redefined by terrorist acts, I think it is important to undertake an in-depth exploration of these questions.

Mass killing in public spaces are more and more common. One may distinguish two types of motives: individual and political. Mass shootings in US or the mass stabbing in Japan seem to be individually motivated.

Terrorism is a politically motivated (or rationalised) mass killing that frightens through its cruelty, its discretionary and rudimentary methods (that remind us of the frailty of life), and throughs its highly symbolic targets.

It is important to observe the similarity between the jihadist terrorism, other ideologically motivated terrorism such as the mass killing perpetrated by Brejivik, and those that appear to have purely individual motives. Individual is always political.

More here.

Dustin Illingworth at Literary Hub:

Few literary artifacts remain as consistently enigmatic as the author’s journal. It seems to me that the more we read of them, the more elusive their provenance becomes. The very names we employ—the aforementioned “journal,” the stuffy “diary,” the tepid “notebook”—are failures of imagination, if not outright misreadings. Staid synopses and ossified lives these are not. Rather, what we find within their pages are wild, shapeless, violent things; elegant confessions and intricate codes; portraits of anguish; topographies of mind. Prayers, experiments, lists, rivalries, and rages are all at home here, interbred, inextricable from one another. A piece of petty gossip sits astride a transcendent realization. A proclamation of self-loathing becomes a paean to literary art. News of publication shares the page with the most banal errands imaginable. That juxtaposition, in which the profound and the prosaic rub elbows, creates the space for something like a revelation of character, one that finds the writer enmeshed in the sordidness of life, either striving to ennoble it or wading in its depths like warm mud. It is hardly surprising, then, that this is a portrait enriched by trivia, vulgarity, ennui, and triumph, by messiness, by the glitter and churn of raw thought. Far from the intimidating polish of more august work, the author’s journal reveals the human substance beneath the cultural effigy, mediumistic insofar as it is both supremely meditative and utterly marginal. For fans of literary biography—or anyone interested in the unrehearsed inner-workings of genius—this is an addicting pleasure indeed.

more here.

Jerry Saltz at New York Magazine:

You knew this sculpture before you saw it. The pose is almost as well known in the mind as that of another sculpture from the ancient world — also on hand, no less — of a boy removing a thorn from his foot. But there's a piercing difference. We engage with the boy with sweetness, this softness, youth, incipient-innocence-on-the-verge experience. Dying Gaulspeaks to us in a tenor of tremulous enmeshed cosmic pathos.

Dying Gaul was part of a large sculptural grouping of an epic monument to commemorate decisive Hellenistic victories over the invading Gauls from nearby Galatia, in what is modern-day Turkey. The work was made between 100 and 200 B.C.E. and is a Roman copy of a lost bronze Greek original made about a century before by the great Hellenistic sculptor Epigonos (yes, artists had names then, too). The lost (probably melted down) bronze original was unceremoniously taken from Turkey by the Emperor Nero to Rome where it was used to decorate his gigantic gold, jewel-encrusted Golden House. Copy or not, time and distance collapse when you stand before it — a mysterious abyss opens between us and the sculpture, and recognition rushes in. We are seeing layers of beauty, strength, inwardness, isolation, vulnerability, and the sensuous antecedents of Michelangelo’s beautiful David — all the way to the even-older wisdom of Homer.

more here.

Daniel Sarewitz in Nature:

If, as the French counter-revolutionary Joseph de Maistre wrote in 1811, every nation gets the government it deserves, what might the United States have done to deserve Donald Trump?A well-functioning democracy should undercut the appeal of blustering, xenophobic demagogues by ensuring that most citizens have a stake in government and hope for the future. And although no single cause or problem can explain Trump’s appeal to a large part of the American electorate, his nomination as the Republican presidential candidate should be cause for serious reflection about what is going wrong in America. For many Americans, one thing that has gone wrong is that the promise of scientific and technological progress has not been fulfilled.

As Nobel-prizewinning physicist Leon Lederman put it in 1992: “What’s good for American science … is good for America.” Maybe not. Although Trump supporters are by no means a homo­geneous lot, a clever analysis in The New York Times in March showed that they can most reliably be characterized by two attri­butes. First, they identify their ancestral heritage as American, rather than any particular ethnic or religious stock. And second, they live in regions of the country that have not only failed to benefit economically from innovation, but have been harmed by it. Mainstream media analysis of the Trump phenomenon almost never links it to the science and technology policies pursued by the nation since the Second World War. Yet technological revolutions arising from these policies have contributed to more than 40 years of wealth inequality, disappearing middle-class jobs and eviscerated manufacturing communities in the places where support for Trump is strongest. Indeed, economic theory throws aside these millions of people as the inevitable losers in the ‘creative destruction’ that science catalyses, as if ruined cities and livelihoods are just side effects of the strong medicine of science-based innovation. These people are the cost of the prevailing myth of progress, and, given their core identity as ‘Americans’, it is no wonder they are susceptible to Trump’s jingoistic populism.

More here.

Questions of Travel

There are too many waterfalls here; the crowded streams
hurry too rapidly down to the sea,
and the pressure of so many clouds on the mountaintops
makes them spill over the sides in soft slow-motion,
turning to waterfalls under our very eyes.
– For if those streaks, those mile-long, shiny, tearstains,
aren't waterfalls yet,
in a quick age or so, as ages go here,
they probably will be.
But if the streams and clouds keep travelling, travelling,
the mountains look like the hulls of capsized ships,
slime-hung and barnacled.

Think of the long trip home.
Should we have stayed at home and thought of here?
Where should we be today?
Is it right to be watching strangers in a play
in this strangest of theatres?
What childishness is it that while there's a breath of life
in our bodies, we are determined to rush
to see the sun the other way around?
The tiniest green hummingbird in the world?
To stare at some inexplicable old stonework,
inexplicable and impenetrable,
at any view,
instantly seen and always, always delightful?
Oh, must we dream our dreams
and have them, too?
And have we room
for one more folded sunset, still quite warm?

Read more »

An interesting data tool from Measure of America capturing the Human Development Indices of New York neighborhoods:

DATA2GO.NYC brings together for the first time federal, state, and city data on a broad range of issues critical to the well-being of all New Yorkers. The website includes over 300 indicators for New York City’s 59 community districts—and 150 of these indicators are also available by census tract. Many of these indicators were previously unavailable to the public.

DATA2GO.NYC was created to provide reliable, up-to-date information on neighborhood assets and challenges. It is a tool people who are dedicated to a city in which “everyone counts” can use to craft effective solutions, target policies and services, advocate for change, and hold elected officials accountable for human progress. DATA2GO.NYC has funding for five years of data updates and the addition of new indicators based on user demand.

The data come predominantly from public entities, including the US Census Bureau and the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, the New York State Departments of Health and of Agriculture and Markets, and New York City agencies responsible for promoting the well-being of New Yorkers in many areas: children’s services, corrections, education, environmental protection, health, homelessness, sanitation, the police and fire departments, and more. DATA2GO.NYC also includes a first-ever dataset on philanthropic giving from the Foundation Center.

More here.

Elizabeth Anderson in Boston Review:

Uniquely among the world’s rich countries, the United States lacks a comprehensive, universal social insurance system. This is largely due to ideological opposition by Republican Party elites. It took nearly seventy years for Democrats to achieve the expanded, still-less-than-universal coverage provided by the Affordable Care Act—against unanimous Republican opposition. Republicans have continued to sabotage the ACA, successfully blocking the extension of Medicaid coverage in nineteen states. The GOP’s primary plan for Medicare is to shift costs to the elderly. It has resisted full funding of Social Security Disability Insurance and insists that the only acceptable plan for ensuring the financial stability of Social Security is to cut benefits. Meanwhile, thirty-three states, nearly all GOP-led, have cut workers’ compensation programs since 2003, often drastically.

What accounts for this extreme hostility to social insurance? Social Security and Medicare are popular programs, even among the GOP’s base. Republican leaders, however, tend to think of social insurance as a socialist or communist scheme designed to undermine private property and free markets. Their arguments can be traced to Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek, whose 1944 book The Road to Serfdom warned that the emerging social democratic regimes of Europe were stepping onto a slippery slope to totalitarianism. Adapted into an illustrated booklet distributed widely by General Motors in the mid-1940s, The Road to Serfdom has fueled American opposition for decades now. Ronald Reagan, probably inspired by Hayek, made a recording opposing Medicare for the American Medical Association in 1961, predicting that it would lead to the state dictating to people what jobs they must perform and where they must live and work.

The ironies here are rich. Conservative criticisms of social insurance reflect profound misapprehensions of its relation to private property. Social insurance, in both theory and practice, arose in defense of private property and against communist and socialist threats. Exploring these origins is essential now because they contain important lessons that will help us strengthen social insurance to meet the challenges of post-industrial capitalism.

Thomas Paine, the great American revolutionary, proposed the world’s first realistic plan to abolish poverty. What he devised were universal social insurance and stakeholder grants, outlined in the 1797 pamphlet Agrarian Justice. (The relation of this work to later programs is not lost on the Social Security Administration, which reproduces the text on its website.)

More here.

Mervyn King in the NY Review of Books:

Two questions that should have been at the forefront were largely absent from the campaign. First, what will the EU look like in the future? Second, what is the place of Britain in Europe? It is helpful to distinguish three distinct entities: Europe, the EU, and the eurozone.

No referendum can alter the fact that Britain is and will continue to be in Europe. Not even politicians can change geography, even if they rewrite history. Cheap travel has meant that opportunities formerly available only to the privileged few who embarked on the Grand Tour are now open to all of us—young and old, left and right. We experience the pleasure and privilege of discovering the many countries of Europe and revel in their differences, their cultures and cuisines, their languages and landscapes. We are lucky indeed to live in Europe where so much variety can be experienced within such short travel times. So the referendum was not about whether Britain is in Europe. It is and always will be, and we take pride in that fact.

The same cannot be said of the eurozone. The monetary union is now facing serious problems. As I explain in my book The End of Alchemy, the failure of some member countries to maintain competitiveness during the first decade or so of its existence means that the eurozone is now confronted with the choice of pursuing one, or some combination, of four ways forward. First, continue with high unemployment in the periphery countries in the south until wages and prices have fallen by enough to restore the loss in competitiveness. Second, create a period of high inflation in Germany and other surplus countries, while restraining wages and prices in the periphery. Third, accept the need indefinitely for explicit transfers from the north to the south to finance the trade deficits that would emerge if those latter countries returned to full employment. Fourth, break up the eurozone.

More here.

Richard Skinner in 3:AM Magazine:

If you tell the story of Citizen Kane, it’s not much of a story. An old rich mogul man is dead. He said a word we don’t understand. We don’t discover so much, just some pieces of his life and finally it is just a sled. Is that a story? It is not much. What makes Citizen Kane so interesting is the way [Welles] told us about the man—intriguing us about what people think about him.
— Agnès Varda

If Agnès Varda’s 1985 movie Vagabond is like any other movie, then it would be Citizen Kane. When you’ve seen both, you see that Varda almost certainly used the structure of Orson Welles’ 1941 movie as a blueprint for her own. Both start with a death, both are an investigation into a life, both end inconclusively.

Vagabond is about a young woman, Mona, played by Sandrine Bonnaire, who has perished from the cold, and the attempts by numerous people who crossed her path to assign meaning to her chosen way of living. There are 18 ‘visions’ of Mona presented by those who came across her. The film is a series of gazes, of one-way exchanges from different people—dropouts, hippies, a prostitute, an itinerant worker, a maid (the ‘punctum’ moment when the maid addresses the camera directly)—but each of these ‘witnesses’ is not seeing Mona, but a reflection of their own regrets, secrets, longings. As the film makes transparently clear, Mona refuses to be co-opted into any image they may have of her. She defies identification and empties the mirror of any meaning. Her peripatetic and solitary existence (‘I move’) is a deliberate choice and functions metonymically for her unfixability. Mona is the blank centre of the film and she leaves no trace of her existence.

In Cléo from 5 to 7 (1962), Agnès Varda made frequent use of tracking shots to follow Cléo along Parisian streets; there is a lot of the same kind of camerawork in Vagabond. But while the narcissistic Cléo is nearly always in the center of the frame, Mona can barely stay in the picture. As she walks along beaches, streets, fields—confirming the viewer’s sense of her restlessness and rootlessness—she either walks into the frame of an already-in-motion tracking shot, or falls behind, or walks out of frame as the camera keeps moving. It’s as though she is on the periphery of her own movie. Varda says, “The whole film is one long tracking shot … we cut it up into separate pieces and in between them are the ‘adventures’.” There are 14 of these highly formal tracking shots and they all frame Mona at some kind of juncture. They are Mona’s ‘signature’.

More here.

Ruth Marshall in The Immanent Frame:

Beyond Religious Freedom: The New Global Politics of Religionmakes an extremely important and timely contribution to a conversation that the discipline of political science should be but still isn’t really having. The continued lack of serious, analytically sophisticated attention to religion and religious phenomena by scholars of international relations and comparative politics is all the more baffling given the place of religion in political life around the world today. Religious affiliation has become thecentral category for a geo-political remapping of the world since 9/11. The results have been depressingly vapid analyses that underscore, once again, the ideological force of Samuel Huntington’s self-fulfilling prophecy, and the bankruptcy of dominant approaches in our discipline that continue to treat religion in the most reductionist, identarian, instrumentalist, and frankly, unthinking fashion. In this regard, Shakman Hurd’s book constitutes a truly novel and vital contribution and I cannot recommend this book highly enough to my co-disciplinarians, whether interested in religion or not. I underscore this point, since many scholars who frequent The Immanent Frame are not mainstream political scientists and are thus unaware of the bleak nature of the wilderness into which rare and prophetic voices like Shakman Hurd’s are crying.

In her approach to the intellectual and political stakes of the current global doxa on religious freedom, her central focus and angle of attack is a deconstruction of the problematic ways in which the category “religion” is deployed in academic, governmental and policy discourses and practices, and the ways these should prompt us to think more critically about the contradictions of liberalism, in particular, the ambivalence of liberalism’s understanding of religion and the connection between its discourses of tolerance, pluralism, rights, freedom and new forms of global governance. This choice of focus is crucial, since political scientists, (unlike scholars of religion or anthropologists) appear completely unaware of the problematic ways in which the category of “religion” is used in the literature. The unreflective use of a highly Christian, indeed Protestant, understanding of religion as belief, inner conviction, and a matter of personal choice which can be entered into and exited freely, has come to dominate the academic and policy field, enabling “scholars, practitioners and pundits to leap straight into the business of quantifying religion’s effects, adapting religion’s insights to international problem-solving efforts, and incorporating religion’s official representatives into international political decision making, public policy, and institutions.”

More here.

Thessaly La Force at Artsy:

Over the last couple of decades, Ed Ruscha’s work has come to symbolize Los Angeles and the West, but lately, it seems, Ruscha the artist has too. At 78, he is still very much a handsome man, with placid blue eyes and rugged features. He speaks deliberately and slowly, with a slight drawl—he says “Los Angeles” instead of “L.A.,” and “Cali-for-knee-ah,” not “Califor-nyah.” It’s a way of speaking that is reminiscent of the late ’50s and early ’60s, when cowboys first roamed through Marlboro ads and Marilyn Monroe dressed down in Levi’s rolled at the cuff. To those who admire him now, Ruscha is a little bit like a Kennedy, a type of man that we lost in the 21st century—old-fashioned but masculine, well-mannered but tough. He possesses a laid-back cool that has helped to define—along with others such as the late Chris Burden and John Baldessari—what we understand as the Los Angeles artist.

Opening this month at the de Young Museum in San Francisco, “Ed Ruscha and the Great American West” emphasizes Ruscha’s deep commitment to place, and acknowledges the pioneer he was for heading west, not east, when he first set out to be an artist. “I felt California had something to offer me,” said Ruscha earlier this week over Skype, explaining his decision at the age of 18, in 1956, to attend the Chouinard Art Institute (now known as California Institute of the Arts or CalArts). “New York was the center of the art world,” Ruscha conceded. “People dreamed about New York. When I visited, it was every bit of what I thought it would be like. But I didn’t have the urge to move there. It seemed to be too cold and complicated and expensive. It would have been difficult to get across town with a piece of lumber.” Instead, the palm trees and sunsets and sprawl were more alluring. “California,” he said, “was like a new swanky place for me to go.”

more here.

Allen Shelton at Public Books:

For at least three decades, starting in the 1970s, Michel Foucault was a phenomenon nearly comparable to the Beatles, or his predecessor on the academic scene, Claude Lévi-Strauss. In a history of the leather jacket in the New York Times Magazine, Foucault appears like a god alongside Marlon Brando and the Ramones as a marker for the mid-1970s, when he was becoming a worldwide celebrity. I first encountered Foucault in collections of structuralist essays in the stacks of a small Southern college library around that time. Only one other person at the school read those books; a bald French professor named Simpson. His name was always ahead of mine on the checkout card. Unbeknownst to me, Foucault was in New York at the time, as a visiting scholar for the French department at SUNY Buffalo. While he was there he visited the town of Attica, and the prison there. He gave a lecture on Manet at the museum on a Thursday night. He lived in an old hotel half a mile from where I would eventually live. A friend of mine saw him give a lecture at the university. He was dressed in a black velvet suit. The talk was entirely in French. My friend didn’t understand a single word, but he described it as a turning point in his life. There were shockwaves emanating from Foucault. This was before he became an institution and declined into something like an ancient part of Las Vegas; the inevitable result of thousands of dissertations, essays, and books appropriating his voice. Is it possible today to write anything about Foucault that isn’t already empty?

This is the big question the sometimes poet, hypertext novelist, and theorist Michael Joyce’s epistolary novel confronts. The letters are addressed to a ghost-like woman named Gabrielle, and to the historical figures of Foucault’s lover Jean, his mother, and a colleague and mentor.

more here.

Jesse McCarthy in Harvard Magazine:

Colson Whitehead ’91 has written a zombie-apocalypse novel, a coming-of-age novel set in the world of the black elite, a satiric allegory following a nomenclature consultant, a sprawling epic tracing the legend of the African American folk hero John Henry, a suite of lyrical essays in honor of New York City, and an account of drear and self-loathing in Las Vegas while losing $10,000 at the World Poker Series. That work has won him critical acclaim. He received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2002, and has been a finalist for almost every major literary award; he won the Dos Passos Prize in 2012 and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2013. In an era when commercial pressure reinforces the writerly instinct to cultivate a recognizable “voice,” his astonishingly varied output, coupled with highly polished, virtuosic prose, makes Whitehead one of the most ambitious and unpredictable authors working today.

He has gained a reputation as a literary chameleon, deftly blurring the lines between literary and genre fiction, and using his uncanny abilities to inhabit and reinvent conventional frames in order to explore the themes of race, technology, history, and popular culture that continually resurface in his work. In a country where reading habits and reading publics are still more segregated than we often care to admit, his books enjoy a rare crossover appeal. His first novel, The Intuitionist, is a detective story that regularly turns up in college courses; the zombie thriller Zone One drew praise from literary critics and genre fiction fans alike; Sag Harbor, about black privileged kids coming of age in the 1980s, was a surprise bestseller. Beyond the books, Whitehead swims effortlessly in the hyper-connected moment: he maintains an active presence on Twitter, where his sly and dyspeptic observations on the curious and the mundane have gained him a devoted following. A sampling includes sagacious tips for the aspiring writer—“Epigraphs are always better than what follows. Pick crappy epigraphs so you don’t look bad”—and riffs on Ezra Pound: “The apparition of these faces in the crowd / Petals on a wet, black bough / Probably hasn’t been gentrified though.”

More here.