Josephine Livingston at n+1:

In 1995, Acker was touring in Australia, almost all of her major books already done. She was big in the way that avant-garde artists can be big: she was culty, glam, and cool. Acker embodies a lot of the things about 1990s femininity that are bang on trend right now: she was a tattooed confesser in silver jewellery and clompy boots, vocal about sex and vocal about vocalizing. In ‘95 Blood and Guts in High School and Great Expectations were selling pretty well. Wark was (and still is) a professor who thinks about screens and globalization and the way that we perceive events happening very far away via the little screens that are so close to us all the time. In 1995, Wark had just published Virtual Geography: Living With Global Media Events, a landmark achievement in media theory that made his name internationally, at least as far as such fame can go for an academic: one review was very positive, but referred to Wark as “she” throughout. Wark and Acker met in Sydney that year and, like so many human beings before them, didn’t stop at a kiss on the cheek. Two cool kids, tangled up. Plus ça change!

This book collects the after-messages following that short romance. The dialogue only spans a few weeks. Each email is timestamped, with Acker and Wark’s nerdy ‘90s email addresses repeated over and over again, page after page. They map the unwinding and rewinding and unwinding again of tension, attention, and affection, telling the story-about-nothing of the first truly great collection of electronic love letters.

more here.

Alice Jones in The Independent:

Aziz Ansari is an American comedian and a star of the sitcom Parks and Recreation. In both guises he is obsessed with the opposite sex. As Tom in Parks and Rec, he is a relentless flirt whose pick-up technique is to hand out spare house keys to attractive women. In his stand-up, his main meat is dating and sex, marriage and children. Unmarried and childless, he doesn’t have much time for the latter two. In his 2013 live show, Buried Alive, he describes the idea of getting married – saying “I want to keep hanging out with you until one of us dies” – as “the most insane thing ever”, and mocks the proposal tales of his audience. As for children, when his friends send him baby pictures, he replies with a single word: unsubscribe.

It is all good fodder for stand-up and now, aged 32, good material for a book about love in the 21st century. The catalyst was a text message he sent to a girl he met at a party, which never got a reply. “Then I look on social media. I see her logged onto Facebook chat. Do I send a message? No! Don’t do that, Aziz. Be cool. Be cool. Later I check Instagram, and this clown Tanya is posting a photo of some deer. Too busy to write me back, but she has time post a photo of some deer?”

More here.

From KurzweilAI:

A decade of work at Johns Hopkins has yielded a computer program that predicts, with far more accuracy than current methods, which mutations are likely to have the largest effect on the activity of the “dimmer switches” (which alter the cell’s gene activity) in DNA — suggesting new targets for diagnosis and treatment of many diseases. A summary of the research was published online today (June 15) in the journal Nature Genetics. “Our computer program can comb through the genetic information from a specific cell type and predict which ‘dimmer switch’ mutations are most likely to alter the cell’s gene activity, and therefore its function,” says Michael Beer, Ph.D., associate professor of biomedical engineering at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.

Which genetic mutations matter?

“The plan is to continually improve the formula as we learn more about these regulatory regions,” he says, “but already it can narrow down a list of disease-associated mutations by a factor of 20, allowing researchers to focus on the ones that are most likely to matter.” Researchers have sequenced the genomes of many patients suffering from common multigene diseases, looking for shared mutations in their control regions. The trouble is, Beer says, that these studies yield hundreds of mutations, most of them benign. So he and his team of researchers designed a computer program that could learn the difference between mutations that are likely to affect gene activity levels and those that likely won’t. “There are a lot of common diseases, like diabetes, that are probably the result of several different mutations in control regions. The mutations don’t directly cause a change in the proteins [that are] made, but they impact their abundance,” he says, and sorting out which ones matter most in diseases is key to advancing treatments.

More here.

In My Spare Time

During my long, boring hours of spare time
I sit to play with the earth’s sphere.
I establish countries without police or parties
and I scrap others that no longer attract consumers.
I run roaring rivers through barren deserts
and I create continents and oceans
that I save for the future just in case.
I draw a new colored map of the nations:
I roll Germany to the Pacific Ocean teeming with whales
and I let the poor refugees
sail pirates’ ships to her coasts
in the fog
dreaming of the promised garden in Bavaria.
I switch England with Afghanistan
so that its youth can smoke hashish for free
provided courtesy of Her Majesty’s government.
I smuggle Kuwait from its fenced and mined borders
to Comoro, the islands
of the moon in its eclipse,
keeping the oil fields in tact, of course.
At the same time I transport Baghdad
in the midst of loud drumming
to the islands of Tahiti.
I let Saudi Arabic crouch in its eternal desert
to perserve the purity of her thoroughbred camels.
This is before I surrender America
back to the Indians
just to give history
the justice it has long lacked.

I know that changing the world is not easy
but it remains necessary nonetheless.

.
by Fadhil al-Azzawi
from Poetry Internation Web

Hello,

The editors of 3QD have made their decision. The twenty semifinalists have been winnowed down to six, and three wildcard entries added. Thanks again to all the participants. Details of the prize can be found here.

On the right is a “trophy” logo that our finalists may choose to display on their own blogs.

So, here it is, the final list that I am sending to Jonathan Kramnick, who will select the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd prize winners from these: (in alphabetical order by blog or website name here)

1. Avidly: Editing as carework: the gendered labor of public intellectuals
2. Granta: Ventimiglia
3. Los Angeles Review of Books: Richard Pryor's Comedy of Fear
4. Novel Readings: “A life entirely through objects”: Edmund de Waal, The Hare with Amber Eyes
5. Public Books: The Essential Gratuitousness of Cesar Aira
6. Terrain: The Good, the Bad, and the White Man's Mexico Novel
7. The Brooklyn Rail: Palace Art Squat
8. The Millions: Dance to the Music of Time
9. The Quarterly Conversation: Breathturn into Timestead: The Collected Later Poetry of Paul Celan

Good luck!

Abbas

P.S. The editors of 3QD will not be making any comments on our deliberations, or the process by which we made our decision, other than to simply say that we picked what we thought were the best six posts out of the semifinalists, and added three others which we also liked.

Charlie Fox in Cabinet:

“Now, ladies and gentlemen, I have really something of great interest to the public!” The former vaudevillian Ed Wynn is providing the introductory patter to a segment in an episode of his eponymous comedy show, broadcast live in primetime on 9 December 1949. Wynn, who would later voice the Mad Hatter in Disney’s adaptation of Alice In Wonderland (1951), is a jolly host: he looks like a horned owl in a clown costume, plump and bespectacled with a rubbery excitement to his expressions that suggests he’s already half-cartoon. His speech has an avuncular warmth, tumbling with a ringmaster’s glee through his slightly pinched sinuses. The other treats on the show have included a special guest appearance from the famously deadpan actress Virginia O’Brien, nicknamed “Miss Ice Glacier,” who sang “Bird in a Gilded Cage,” and blubbery Ed’s attempt to dance a ballet overture. The curtains behind Wynn that hide the set from the audience are fuzzy, gray, and monstrously thick, looking like nothing so much as a carefully graded spectrum of various sorts of domestic dust; the studio has the acoustics of a damp attic. Wynn tells the audience that they are about to have “the great privilege in seeing for the first time, certainly on television, and alive,almost!”—an odd thing to say, don’t you think?—“one of the greatest of the great comedians of the silent moving-picture days. Mr. Buster Keaton!”

Here he is, a little man in his trademark outfit of porkpie hat and rumpled suit. He ignores all conversational prompts, playing dumb and nodding a little as if out of beat with the situation, mid-daydream. “The American public would like to hear you say something. Would you say something? Go ahead,” Wynn cajoles him, “speak!” And upon these ventriloquist’s orders, Buster commences a routine that looks like a ludic premonition of the anguished choreographies found in Samuel Beckett’s plays. (Shortly before his death, he would appear as the solitary figure in Beckett’s metaphysically queasy 1965 short, Film).

More here.

Tim Folger in Nautilus:

While some scientists search for extraterrestrial life by landing rovers on Mars, launching telescopes into space, and scanning the skies with giant radio dishes, geobiologist Joseph Kirschvink thinks that the first telltale signs of alien life may be sitting on a shelf at NASA’s Johnson Space Center, bundled in a Martian rock that conveniently fell to Earth.

On the wall of Kirschvink’s office at Caltech hangs a black and white photo of the meteorite. Radioactive dating shows that the rock formed 4 billion years ago, when Mars was a warmer, wetter place. It was propelled to Earth about 16 million years ago, after a meteorite impact blasted fragments of the Martian surface into space.

Eventually the rock landed on the ice cap of Antarctica, in an area called Allan Hills, where meteorite hunters found it in 1984. Scientists named it ALH84001 after the date and location of its discovery. They traced its Martian origin by analyzing gases trapped in the rock’s pores. Those gases matched the atmospheric chemistry measured by the two Viking spacecraft, which landed on Mars in the 1970s.

What’s more, ALH84001 seemed to contain signs of life, suggesting not only that life could have once existed on Mars, but that it could have made its way to the Earth across the void of space. In fact, Kirshvink thinks it’s likely that life arose only once in our solar system—and that it didn’t start on Earth. “I think there were bacteria on Mars 4 billion years ago,” he says.

More here.

Each week in Bookends, two writers take on questions about the world of books. When James Joyce’s “Ulysses” was first published in 1922, it was banned for obscenity and the U.S. Postal Service burned copies. This week, in honor of Bloomsday on June 16, Charles McGrath and Rivka Galchen discuss how the book would be received if it were published for the first time today.

From the New York Times:

By Charles McGrath

Joyce’s book might seem preening, needlessly erudite, even a little old-fashioned in its naughty bits.

By the standards of today’s dirty books, “Ulysses” seems pretty tame, and it’s hard to put yourself back in the mind-set of those who took such strenuous offense in the ’20s, when the book was first published by the heroic Sylvia Beach. For some reason the passage that most upset the prosecutors was not the famous Molly Bloom soliloquy, or even the Nighttown sequence, which involves anal penetration, if you read carefully, but the relatively innocuous scene in which Leopold Bloom fondles himself while staring at Gerty MacDowell’s knickers. As Kevin Birmingham points out in “The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses,’ ” his valuable account of how the book got published, it wasn’t just sex that the censors worried about but the very fabric of civilization. If you let in even a little smut and self-abuse, there was no telling what chaos might follow.

As we know now, the novel’s greatest transgressions were not against decency and morality but against the forms and conventions of fiction writing itself. The entire action of “Ulysses” takes place in a single day, skipping from character to character in seemingly no particular order. Stylistically, the book mingles high and low, poetry and banality, profundity and cliché. There are moments described from inside a character’s head, as well as stretches of pastiche and parody; burlesque chapters; a chapter in play form and one that’s a mock catechism; and even some sections that come close to gibberish. After reading the Sirens section — the one that begins: “Bronze by gold heard the hoofirons, steelyrining imperthnthn thnthnthn” — Ezra Pound worried that Joyce might have “got knocked on the head.”

More here.

Jay Rubin at the Times Literary Supplement:

The most lamentable sign of the decline of the Japanese language, as Mizumura sees it, is the current state of Japanese literature, which is written by “brainless writers of crap”. The literary scene is “like a playground where everything [is] small and clamorous – just juvenile”.

“Representative works of today’s Japanese literature often read like rehashes of American literature . . . . [W]orks of contemporary fiction tend to resemble global cultural goods, which, like Hollywood blockbuster films, do not require language – or translation – in the truest sense of the word. No wonder Japan’s best and brightest have turned their backs on literature.”

There are a few exceptions, she suggests, but the youngest writers she mentions were born in 1935 and 1943. Fans of contemporary Japanese literature may wonder where the presumptive Nobel nominee Haruki Murakami (b. 1949) fits into Mizumura’s bleak landscape, but one can only assume that he is the 800-pound gorilla in the room. His Vonnegut-flavoured narratives are surely the worst of the “rehashes” that Mizumura so abhors.

more here.

Mark Cocker at The New Statesman:

The recent expansion of “new nature writing” is among the most significant developments in British publishing this century. If you missed its inception or have not the inclination to read the scores of books appearing under its banner, you could do worse to catch up than to read a single chapter in Michael McCarthy’s new book, The Moth Snowstorm: Nature and Joy. It is the one entitled “The Great Thinning” and it powerfully and succinctly summarises the unfolding national story.

The phrase refers to the inexorable diminution of wildlife on these islands since the Second World War, primarily at the hands of farmers armed with an array of industrially produced chemicals. “The country I was born into,” McCarthy writes, “possessed something wonderful it absolutely possesses no longer: natural abundance . . . Blessed, unregarded abundance has been destroyed.” His most powerful and strangely poignant example of this is something that only people over 50 would have seen: the blizzard of nocturnal insects that would eventually obliterate the vision of any driver on a long car journey during a summer’s evening. I remember it, just.

Over the decades, during his time as a journalist, McCarthy sensed the public’s abil­ity to hear this story in its piecemeal form and ignore it almost entirely. Even now, he points out, the scale of what has happened on these islands eludes many people.

more here.

Brandon M. Terry at The Point:

“Ferguson,” Cornel West declared in the wake of the November unrest, “signifies the end of the Age of Obama.” This, at least from the vantage point of African-American politics, appears appropriate. Though not many wanted to say it at the time, a notable chill fell over progressive and radical black politics from 2007 until roughly 2012, the year of Trayvon Martin’s slaying. This deep freeze stemmed from strategic concerns about Obama’s reelection prospects and political standing, genuine outrage at the intransigence and hostility he has faced from some Republicans, broadly shared affective investments in his and his family’s symbolic import, and an optimism born of the improbable fact of his electoral success.

The Ferguson eruption and the movement that arose in its aftermath are only the most spectacular evidence that these factors appear to be less constraining on African-American politics than at any time since Obama’s ascendancy. For a rising number of African-Americans and their racially egalitarian allies, the reactions to the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner—and the non-indictments of those responsible—dramatized the need for another path. That the protestors in Ferguson were met with such an enthusiastic and imitative response across the country signals the thawing out of the black protest tradition and a rejection of more conciliatory and consensus-oriented conceptions of black politics. Once again, extraordinary effort is being devoted to building militant, independent social movements with organized African-American participation, capable of transcending the limits of conventional electoral politics and effectively channeling black rage and resentment.

more here.

John Travis in Science:

Last month, millions of people watching ABC’s prime-time television show Shark Tank learned what Christopher Sakezles says his wife already knew—that he can sweat a lot when nervous. Despite a perspiration-drenched presentation on 8 May in front of the show’s five celebrity investors—he ignored his wife’s suggestion to spray his face with antiperspirant—the polymer scientist landed the biggest deal in Shark Tank’s history. With a life-size synthetic cadaver as a prop, Sakezles persuaded technology entrepreneur Robert Herjavec to pay $3 million for a 25% stake in SynDaver Labs, a firm that Sakezles founded a decade ago to create realistic artificial tissues, organs, and whole bodies for surgical training and other purposes. But as fans of Shark Tank know well, not every deal struck on the show lasts once the cameras turn off. After Sakezles and Herjavec traded further information and initial terms, the partnership fell apart. One sticking point was obvious on the show, as the investors challenged Sakezles’s plan to invest SynDaver’s immediate profits back into the company for further product development. “They wanted to replace me as CEO and this is not something I will allow at this point,” Sakezles says. (Herjavec doesn’t comment on deals that aren’t completed, one of his publicists says.) Don’t feel sorry for Sakezles, however. SynDaver is on track to make $10 million this year, he says, adding that the company has lined up investors who place an even higher valuation on the company than Herjavec did. Sakezles predicts SynDaver will expand from its current 100 employees to 500 within 3 years. “We’re growing like wildfire.”

The company’s history traces back to the 1990s, when Sakezles, a graduate student at University of Florida, set out to evaluate a new endotracheal tube his lab had designed. The team couldn’t afford to test it on animals, so they bought an artificial trachea from an outside company. Sakezles recalls it as being little more than a plastic tube. “It was a pure piece of crap. I took one look and threw it in the circular file. I had to essentially build my own model.” So he and colleagues crafted a trachea from multiple polymers, realistically simulating cartilage rings, muscles, and a mucosal layer. After getting his Ph.D. in 1998, Sakezles eventually began consulting for medical device firms. He found they were interested in his experience building realistic models of tissues and organs. “The company grew out of that. It wasn’t a burst of lightning. It was a gradual thing. I never thought of it as a standalone business.”

More here.

The voting round of our arts & literature prize (details here) is over. Thanks to the nominators and the voters for participating.

So here they are, the top 21 (there was a tie for the last four places), in descending order from the most voted-for:

1. The Millions: One Long Country Song: What Friday Night Lights Taught Me About Storytelling
2. 3 Quarks Daily: Transmutations of the Qasida Form and Ghalib’s Qasida for Queen Victoria
3. The Millions: Dance to the Music of Time
4. Vapour Trails: Miss Lonelyhearts
5. The Art of Future Warfare: War in Heaven
6. The Millions: The Last English Teacher
7. Literary Kicks: First There Is A Mountain
8. The Quarterly Conversation: Breathturn into Timestead: The Collected Later Poetry of Paul Celan
9. The Philosopher's Beard: The Case for Subsidising Art (and Taxing Junk Entertainment)
10. Anatomy of Norbiton: Spatial
11. Terrain: The Good, the Bad, and the White Man's Mexico Novel
12. Los Angeles Review of Books: 18 Hours Before the Mast
13. The Homing Pigeon Experience: Skin in the Game: Two Versions of Cheap Meat
14. 3 Quarks Daily: Eight Decades of Indian Contemporary Art
15. Novel Readings: “A life entirely through objects”: Edmund de Waal, The Hare with Amber Eyes
16. A Wine Dark Sea: On Smoking Whale Vomit
17. 3 Quarks Daily: A Place Called Home
18. Avidly: Editing as carework: the gendered labor of public intellectuals
19. Avidly: Weird Sex
20. Granta: Ventimiglia
21. The Millions: Gestation of Ideas: On Vertical Writing and Living

The editors of 3 Quarks Daily will now pick the top six entries from these, and after possibly adding up to three “wildcard” entries, will send that list of finalists to Jonathan Kramnick for final judging. We will post the shortlist of finalists tomorrow.

Porochista Khakpour in Bookforum:

“IF YOU CANNOT GET RID OF the family skeleton, you may as well make it dance,” goes the only George Bernard Shaw quote I’ve ever bothered to fling around. Its best use may be for describing Alison C. Rose’s 2004 memoir, Better Than Sane: Tales from a Dangling Girl, where family—including, but not limited to, actual blood relatives—is a sort of game, and there is frankly little choice but to dance. The impossibly resilient, delightfully lunatic Rose was one of the less buzzed-about writers of William Shawn’s sunset years at the New Yorker—a bit by her own design, we come to realize in these pages. Better Than Sane is the most radical anti-memoir I’ve read: no answers, no questions even, but instead a sort of anti-tribute to the art of finding one’s people, or thriving in the failure to do so. We begin with Rose’s real family: Here is the brash psychiatrist father who threatens to have her committed, who calls all the women in the family a variation of “Babs” (no clues about why); a detached problem mother with an Oriental-object fetish who purrs, “Miss Jones, I presume,” when her daughters are at the door, a joke the sisters don’t get (neither do we). Everyone crushes on everyone else—boundaries? why?—mother’s friends on father, mother on sister’s boyfriends, sister’s boyfriends on Rose, Rose on them all. It somehow makes sense, then, that Rose’s first friendships come in the form of three mops (literally) and colored pencils (also literally).

Objects are safe, whereas humans are not, and the only thing that tethers Rose to her family is a desire for knowledge: “There was a total education right there in our house if anybody wanted it. Largely, this education consisted of men . . . and books.” And this paves the way for the central obsessions of the memoir: As she says, her father “was a bully and a tyrant and some kind of handsome star and completely depressed and droll. It stands to some kind of reason, then, that I might think a perfect boyfriend was a bully and tyrant and some kind of handsome star and completely depressed and droll.” Enter Harold Brodkey and George W. S. Trow, each embodying every NYC lit kid’s holy trinity of mentor, friend, and lover.

More here.

Colin Eatock in Wolfgangs Tonic:

There are many pianists, but there is only one Valentina Lisitsa. She’s classical music’s first “YouTube sensation,” who famously became famous by posting clips of her performances on the popular video-sharing website. Since 2007 the 41-year-old musician with flowing blonde hair has posted about 200 clips online, receiving about 80 million views worldwide. Today, she has an international career and a recording contract with the Decca label.

In retrospect, it almost sounds easy – all she needed was a piano, a camera, a microphone, and some technical know-how. But scratch below the surface, and it’s clear that this particular kind of success could only have been achieved by a particular kind of artist. Lisitsa has always refused to play by the rules of the classical music industry, or to accept the decisions of its gate-keepers. She’s determined, opinionated, street-smart and not afraid of a fight. (And she certainly found herself in the midst of a fight in Toronto, in April. We’ll get to “Lisitsa vs. the Toronto Symphony Orchestra” a little farther down.)

She proudly acknowledges her outsider status in the music business. “Yes, definitely yes!” she declares, in her thick East European accent. “I am an outsider. The music establishment looks at me that way. Sometimes critics may something like, ‘For a YouTube pianist, she’s not so bad.’ I try to take it in stride, but I know where I stand.”

More here.

More here.

Thanassis Cambanis at The Boston Globe:

EIGHT HUNDRED YEARS AGO this summer, King John and a group of feudal barons gathered at Runnymede on the banks of the Thames River. There he agreed to the Magna Carta, which for the first time limited the absolute power of the monarch and established a contract between ruler and ruled. The mother of modern treaties and law, the Magna Carta began a global conversation about the responsibility of the powerful toward people under their control.

A scant four decades ago, also this summer, another gathering in the Finnish capital of Helsinki produced a second series of accords. While far less well known, the signing of the Helsinki Accords was a critical juncture in the long struggle of the individual against state authority. Building on some of the same ideas that undergirded the Magna Carta, the Helsinki Accords codified a broad set of individual liberties, human rights, and state responsibilities, which remain strikingly relevant today, whether the subject is China’s Internet policy, the Islamic State’s latest outrage, or the American “war on terror.” The language of human rights has become the lingua franca for criticizing misbehavior by states or quasi-governments.

more here.