Our own Morgan Meis in The Smart Set:

Francisco Goya was felled by a mysterious illness in 1792. He didn’t die, he just fell. The illness made him dizzy and disoriented. Goya stumbled; he teetered. He was nauseous. Voices sounded in his head. He was frequently in terror. His hearing began to fail. Soon, he was completely deaf. By all accounts, he was temporarily insane at points. Then he recovered, though he would never regain his hearing.

Before the illness, Goya had been a successful painter for the Spanish court. He was good, but unremarkable. After the illness, Goya became the extraordinary artist whose paintings — like The Third Of May 1808 — are among the most celebrated works in the history of art. In the late 1790s, Goya began working on a series of prints known asLos Caprichos. The Caprichos are commonly interpreted as satire. Goya was making fun of society’s corruptions and stupidities. Goya himself described the Caprichos as illustrating “the innumerable foibles and follies to be found in any civilized society, and from the common prejudices and deceitful practices which custom, ignorance, or self-interest have made usual.” The most famous print from the Caprichos is number 43, which bears the inscription: “El sueño de la razon produce monstrous,” or, “The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters.” You’ve likely seen the print. It shows a man, presumably Goya, asleep with his head on a desk. He’s been writing or drawing something. Behind the sleeping man are a number of creatures. Some of the creatures are owls. There are also bats. A lynx sits at the foot of the desk looking directly at the sleeping man. Goya’s fascination with monsters and the edge of reason stayed with him until his dying day.

In his early 70s, Goya had another bout of illness. This second illness caused Goya to begin his final series of paintings, known as the Black Paintings.

More here.

Fredrik deBoer on his blog:

At its most benign, the tendency to treat praising Coates as a kind of secular sacrament simply makes that praise more awkward than it should be, robs people of the language of simple sincere gratitude that we use to give thanks. He and his essay deserve that sincerity. At its worst, though, it’s an example of a really ugly tendency of white readers to treat black writers as a blank canvas on which to work out their own personal shit about race. Years ago, a commenter on Coates’s blog took this to a certain extreme: “I wish that I could articulate how this article reverberated in my soul. Better, I wish that you, TNC could feel that reverberation, and I could read how you described it.” I don’t know what that is. But it’s not real praise and it’s not real respect. The first respect to pay a writer is the first to pay to any human being, and that’s to treat them as their own particular human self. And my impression is that Coates feels some of this too. Recently, he wrote, “I have no desire to be anybody’s Head Negro—that goes for reparations and beyond.”

I have a transgendered friend who frequently complains that her liberal friends end up treating her as a kind of vessel through which they work out their attitude towards trans issues. I just think that’s a terrible kind of emotional violence to commit against someone. She is quick to say that this is better than an uglier alternative, and that’s true, of course, it is better. But that’s a false choice: we can respect and love people or their work without treating them as symbols first and people, or writers, second.

Read the rest here.

Tony Morrison in The Telegraph:

The idea of paradise is no longer imaginable or, rather, it is overimagined, which amounts to the same thing — and has therefore become familiar, commercialised, even trivial. Historically, the images of paradise in poetry and prose were intended to be grand but accessible, beyond the routine but imaginatively graspable, seductive as though remembered. Milton speaks of “goodliest trees, loaden with fairest fruit, Blossoms and fruits at once of golden hue… with gay enamelled colours mixed…; of Native perfumes.” Of “that sapphire fount the crisped brooks, Rolling on orient pearl and sands of gold…” of “nectar visiting each plant, and fed flowers worthy of Paradise… Groves whose rich trees wept odorous gums and balm; Others whose fruit, burnished with golden rind, Hung amiable… of delicious taste. Betwixt them lawns, or level downs, and flocks Grazing the tender herb.” “Flowers of all hue and without thorn the rose.” “Caves of cool recess, o’er which the mantling vine Lays forth her purple grape and gently creeps Luxuriant …”

That beatific, luxurious expanse we recognise in the 21st century as bounded real estate owned by the wealthy and envied by the have-nots, or as gorgeous parks visited by tourists. Milton’s Paradise is quite available these days, if not in fact then certainly as ordinary, unexceptionable desire. Modern paradise has four of Milton’s characteristics: beauty, plenty, rest and exclusivity. Eternity seems to be forsworn. Beauty is benevolent, controllable nature combined with precious metal, mansions, finery and jewellery. Plenty in a world of excess and attending greed, which tilts resources to the rich and forces others to envy, is an almost obscene feature of a contemporary paradise.

More here.

.
you receive a letter
which is so flat
that it’s nearly
empty

so white
and flat
that it cuts
itself into you
unread

into your eye
tightens your throat
turns your stomach inside out

stop,
says the child

I don’t want
this letter

yes, I say
it’s already written

it’s already on its way
into your eye

by Monica Aasprong
from Et diktet barn
publisher: Cappelen Damm, Oslo, 2010,
translation: 2013, May-Brit Akerholt

Read more »

Anne Somerset at Literary Review:

Packed with events so implausible a novelist would blush to include them in a work of fiction, the Diamond Necklace Affair had lasting consequences. In 1785 a fraud perpetrated for short-term gain by a shameless adventuress sowed 'the seed of the Revolution' that took place in France four years later, playing such a crucial part in Marie Antoinette's downfall that Napoleon later opined, 'The Queen's death must be dated from the diamond necklace trial.'

The adventuress in question, Jeanne de La Motte-Valois, boasted descent from a bastard son of a 16th-century French king. Having grown up in penury, she set about regaining her fortunes at the court of Louis XVI by duping Cardinal de Rohan in the most spectacular fashion imaginable. A scion of one of the grandest families in the land, Rohan had the prestigious position of Grand Almoner, but Marie Antoinette could not abide him. Rohan deluded himself that if he overcame her aversion, high ministerial office awaited him. Jeanne artfully exploited his gullibility by persuading him she held the key to the queen's favour.

Although the queen had walked on by when Jeanne tried to attract attention by staging a fainting fit, Jeanne convinced Rohan that Marie Antoinette had shown regal concern and that, having made her acquaintance in this way, she had progressed to becoming a royal confidante.

more here.

Joshua Rothman at The New Yorker:

There’s a very concrete struggle at the center of the book: the struggle between Knausgaard and his father. “I was so frightened of him that even with the greatest effort of will I am unable to recreate the fear; the feelings I had for him I have never felt since, nor indeed anything close,” Knausgaard writes, in the just-translated third volume. “His footsteps on the stairs—was he coming to see me? … The wild glare in his eyes. The tightness around his mouth. The lips that parted involuntarily. And then his voice … . His fury struck like a wave, it washed through the rooms, lashed at me, lashed and lashed and lashed at me, and then it retreated.” Much in the first three volumes, at least nominally speaking, has been about the experience of being this father’s son. When he’s a kid, Karl Ove thinks constantly about how to avoid his father’s anger or how to retaliate against it, or forgive it; as an adult, he struggles to write about it.

But Knausgaard’s book is more abstract than that; it’s about more than the experience of a son. That’s because, in exploring that experience, Knausgaard has ended up exploring all experience. If being a writer is like being a swimmer, and life is like the ocean through which you swim, then Knausgaard’s book starts out being about the waves but ends up being about the stroke. His father’s anger is one of those waves, and Knausgaard, early on, learned to see the wave coming, to brace himself, to swim up its face and, hopefully, to dive beneath before it swept him up. (If not—if he was knocked backward and pulled under—he learned the skill of patience: “Everything passed.”) You find that Knausgaard approaches all events in the same way. He traces the same pattern of serial, wave-like growth and recession in every context: love, friendship, sex, music, writing, art, intellectual life, spirituality.

more here.

Maria Konnikova in The New York Times:

Does handwriting matter? Not very much, according to many educators. The Common Core standards, which have been adopted in most states, call for teaching legible writing, but only in kindergarten and first grade. After that, the emphasis quickly shifts to proficiency on the keyboard. But psychologists and neuroscientists say it is far too soon to declare handwriting a relic of the past. New evidence suggests that the links between handwriting and broader educational development run deep.

Children not only learn to read more quickly when they first learn to write by hand, but they also remain better able to generate ideas and retain information. In other words, it’s not just what we write that matters — but how. “When we write, a unique neural circuit is automatically activated,” said Stanislas Dehaene, a psychologist at the Collège de France in Paris. “There is a core recognition of the gesture in the written word, a sort of recognition by mental simulation in your brain. “And it seems that this circuit is contributing in unique ways we didn’t realize,” he continued. “Learning is made easier.”

More here.

William T. Vollmann at Bookforum:

I BELIEVE THAT BOTH of our Iraq wars have been unjust wars, fought for specious reasons, and therefore productive of great evil. It is an understatement to say thatRedeployment and The Corpse Exhibition fortify my opinion.

What Klay himself thinks about the current Iraq war I don’t know for certain. Since the most haunting aspect of Redeployment, for me at least, is what its “message” might be, I have pored through it for clues. The dedication of Redeployment is “for my mother and father, who had three sons join the military in a time of war.” But if you read this book through, you will be hard put to find a character who feels enthusiastic about the American “accomplishment” in Iraq, no matter how many times he redeploys. To tell the truth, Klay’s soldiers are equal-opportunity haters. They hate Iraqis, and they despise the fat, self-indulgent civilians like me who are against these wars, not to mention all the other fat civilians who act proud of American soldiers and grateful for their service. (Did I leave anyone out?) Hence this soldier’s summation of Iraq Veterans Against the War: “We lived in a place that was totally different from anything those hippies in that audience could possibly understand. All those jerks who think they’re so good. . . . Alex is gonna go and act like a big hero, telling everybody how bad we were. We weren’t bad. I wanted to shoot every Iraqi I saw, every day. And I never did. Fuck him.”

more here.

Alphabetical list of nominated blog names followed by the blog post title:

(Please report any problems with links in the comments section below.)

For prize details, click here.

1. 3:AM Magazine: Honest work: an experimental review of an experimental translation
2. 3 Quarks Daily: Ahsan Akbar talks to K. Anis Ahmed
3. 3 Quarks Daily: Digging Up Bones or, The Labyrinths beneath Our Feet
4. 3 Quarks Daily: European Crime Fiction – Mini Reviews
5. 3 Quarks Daily: Every Genuine Encounter Destroys Our Existing World: On Things
6. 3 Quarks Daily: Ghazal, Sufism, and the Birth of a Language
7. 3 Quarks Daily: Haiku and Landays in Science
8. 3 Quarks Daily: Industrial Township-ness or How I learnt to be Bourgeois
9. 3 Quarks Daily: Jake and Dinos Chapman: Come and See
10. 3 Quarks Daily: Landings
11. 3 Quarks Daily: Mental Illness, the Identity Thief
12. 3 Quarks Daily: My Pakistan Television Show
13. 3 Quarks Daily: On Reading Emerson as a Fourteen-Year-Old Girl
14. 3 Quarks Daily: San Francisco and the Storm of Progress
15. 3 Quarks Daily: The Short Bus
16. 3 Quarks Daily: The Terrain of Indignities
17. 3 Quarks Daily: Three Seconds: Poems, Cubes and the Brain
18. Book Haven: An interview with Philip Roth
19. Campus Diaries: An Encounter with Lady Luck
20. Gilded Birds: Kwame Anthony Appiah
21. Gilded Birds: Michael Rosen
22. Guernica: Poetry as Life, Life as Poetry
23. Industrial Revelation: The Boiling Frog
24. Kuppuswami: Looking and Seeing
25. Los Angeles Review of Books: How Auden Was Modified in the Guts of the Living
26. Los Angeles Review of Books: On Mario Bellatin’s “Mishima’s Illustrated Biography”
27. Medium: The Death of the Urdu Script
28. Meta-Metaphoricity: Is Poetry Universal? -a gristly verse of Mir
29. n + 1: Everywhere and Nowhere
30. n + 1: Fear and Agression in Florida
31. n + 1: Kunicki, Water (I)
32. New Savanna: What's Photography About Anyhow?
33. Nobody Expects The Spanish Inquisition: I am Philip Seymour Hoffman . . . Minus the Heroin
34. Northeast Review: Mofussil Junction
35. Open Letters Monthly: It Might Have Been
36. Orienteringsforsok: Dreaded analogy…not so fast
37. Paris Review: Drinking in the Golden Age
38. St. Orberose: José Saramago: The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis
39. Strange Violin Music: Some Things a Former Soldier of the Third Reich Told Me
40. The Bombay Column: A Republic of Regret
41. The GetHigh Files: A Room With a View
42. The Mercenary Researcher: A Friend and a Feast
43. The Millions: The Fictional Lives of High School Teachers
44. The Nation: Breaking the Cycle of Anger
45. The Smart Set: Under the Influence
46. View from Elephant Hills: Trophies 101: a year of books and bookstores
47. Vissi d'Arte: Elegy for Jon
48. World Literature Today: World Literature Isn’t Foreign Food
49. Writing Without Paper: Metastatic ~ A Cento (Poem)
50. Writing Without Paper: Monday Muse Reads “Concertina”

If you are new to 3 Quarks Daily, we welcome you and invite you to look around the site after you vote. Learn more about who we are and what we do here, and do check out the full site here. Bookmark us and come back regularly, or sign up for the RSS feed. If you have a blog or website, and like what you see here, we would very much appreciate being added to your blogroll. Please don't forget!

Voting ends on June 9th at 11:59 pm NYC time.

Results of the voting round (the top twenty most-voted-for posts) will be posted on the main page on June 10th. The finalists will be announced on June 16 and winners of the contest will be announced on June 23rd, 2014.

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Thank you.

Helio Oiticica. Parangoles. 1964-1968.

More here, here, and here.

Muhammad Idrees Ahmad in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

On the day the London Review of Books published a widely circulated article by veteran journalist Seymour Hersh exonerating the Syrian regime for last year’s chemical attack, 118 Syrians, including 19 children, died in aerial bombing and artillery fire. Only the regime has planes and heavy ordnance.

Since last November, Aleppo has been targeted by helicopters dropping explosives-filled barrels from high altitudes. Between last November and the end of March, Human Rights Watch recorded 2,321 civilian deaths by this indiscriminate weapon. Only the regime has helicopters.

For many months after the chemical massacre, the targeted neighborhoods and the Yarmouk refugee camp were kept under a starvation siege. Aid agencies were denied entry. Only the regime controls access.

The regime’s ruthlessness has never been in doubt. Reports by Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, the UN’s Independent International Commission of Inquiry, and myriad journalists and on-the-ground witnesses have repeatedly confirmed it. The regime has demonstrated the intent and capability to inflict mass violence. The repression is ongoing.

So when an attack occurred last August, employing a weapon that the regime was known to possess, using a delivery mechanism peculiar to its arsenal, in a place the regime was known to target, and against people the regime was known to loathe, it was not unreasonable to assume regime responsibility. This conclusion was corroborated by first responders, UN investigators, human rights organizations, and independent analysts.

When a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and a respectable literary publication undertake to challenge this consensus, one reasonably expects due diligence.

More here.

Andrew Mayersohn in Boston Review:

Few Americans claim to follow “very closely” stories that are not above-the-fold headlines, even ones with a strong partisan valence and widespread coverage such as the Keystone XL pipeline (16 percent of Americans as of March, per Gallup) or last year’s IRS scandal (20 percent as of May 2013). That small population of news junkies likely overlaps the minority of Americans who are devotees of Fox News or MSNBC, further diminishing the number of citizens engaging in actual political dialogue. For better or worse, our politics are already fragmented.

The extent of the gap between the politically engaged and disengaged is what makes Anthony Fowler’s findings troubling. He and his coauthors report that get-out-the-vote operations “increase representational inequality” by bringing “more rich, white, educated, churchgoing citizens to the polls.”­ Knowing that their efforts are more likely to affect some than others, campaigns assign “propensity scores” to prospective voters in order to zero in on those who just need a nudge to vote.

This is where big data is most valuable. The Obama campaign’s major analytical accomplishment was to improve propensity scores by combining traditional voter rolls with consumer data and huge numbers of voter contacts, but even before Obama’s 2012 campaign, political operatives were getting much better at honing in on the best prospects among potential voters. For example, political scientist David Nickerson, who served as Director of Experiments for the Obama re-election campaign, has demonstrated that voter contact in Ohio was vastly more concentrated among high-propensity voters in 2008 and 2012 than in 2004—a triumph of intelligence-gathering from a campaign’s perspective, but one that reinforces political inequality. The better campaigns get at concentrating resources on prospective voters, the more they can focus on turning out their base and the less they need to worry about broad mobilization. Senate Democrats have apparently already adopted this strategy to some extent, according to Sasha Issenberg, who says that candidates’ strategy for this November is to “mobilize their way into contention, then persuade their way across the finish line.” In short, even if big data doesn’t inaugurate an era of personalized campaign messaging, it’s already fragmenting our democracy in another way by widening the gap between the engaged and the disengaged.

More here.

Mary Beard in NY Review of Books (Facundo Arrizabalaga/epa/Corbis):

The UK Independence Party, it seems, has drawn its support from across the political spectrum. It attracts—in addition to the xenophobic—the socially conservative (against same-sex marriage and in favor of “traditional British values”), and those who are deeply suspicious of the European Union (“Why be run by Brussels?”). Certainly it includes among its supporters and party candidates some people of extreme right-wing inclinations. But most of all, UKIP appeals to those who feel distanced from modern politics and politicians. They hate the sense of a political class, which consists of those who have never worked in anything other than professional politics, who speak only in carefully controlled, on-message sound bites, and never really engage with “us voters.”

This explains the extraordinary popularity of the party leader, Nigel Farage—a privately-educated, ex-city financial trader who left the Tory party in 1992 to set up UKIP, and who since 1999 has been a Member of the European Parliament, an institution which he is committed to undermining. Farage appears to speak his mind without concern for political correctness (and it is, of course, largely appearance). He relishes nothing more than being photographed outside a pub, with a pint of beer in one hand and a cigarette in the other. There’s hardly another British politician who would be seen dead in public within ten yards of a packet of Marlboro Lights, whatever their secret smoking habits. This looks like a breath of fresh air.

And Farage is not averse to offering his German wife as a defense against the suggestion that there is any personal hatred of “foreigners” in the UKIP campaign – whether on his own part or that of his followers. The party’s official message (and it is, I have no doubt, sincerely believed by some members) is that they are personally a pretty tolerant bunch; they simply want to end the dominance of the EU over British politics, and they want to stop the inflow of EU migrants, particularly from Eastern Europe, who are taking British jobs.

This is troubling enough. But the real danger of UKIP’s success is not its own policies, but the reaction it draws from politicians and supporters of the other parties.

More here.

David P Barash in Aeon (Photo by Lisi Niesner/Reuters):

I like zoos. Really I do. I applaud today’s zoological parks for their increasing emphasis on naturalistic exhibits, their breeding programmes for endangered species, and their efforts to educate the public about wildlife conservation. But the truth is, I mainly like zoos for the same reason that other people do: because I love watching animals.

Animals in captivity might satisfy our desire to cross the existential barrier that separates us from other creatures. Yet the sad reality is that, for the most part, zoo animals have become, as the art critic John Berger put it in 1977, ‘a living monument to their own disappearance’. The greatest pleasure of animal-watching still comes from observing free-living creatures in their natural environment. With enough disposable income, you can go to India, South America or Antarctica on animal-watching trips, ‘bag’ a view of the African ‘Big Five’ (elephant, rhino, lion, leopard, and buffalo), or take a boat to admire great whales exhaling geysers of salty breath.

The wild animals of the world have long inhabited the depths of the human imagination no less than they have occupied the natural habitats of our shared planet. There isn’t a human society on Earth, however primitive or high-tech, that doesn’t concern itself with animal imagery, whether the critters are domesticated or free-living. Indeed, the human fascination with animals is so ancient and so widespread that it seems to be a cross-cultural human universal.

More here.

John Gray in The New Statesman:

The editor of Mao’s Little Red Book writes in the preface that this is “the first scholarly effort to understand Quotations from Chairman Mao as a global historical phenomenon”. It is an accurate description, but the collection has the shortcomings that are to be expected in a book of essays by academic authors. The prose style is mostly stodgy and convoluted, and the contributors seem anxious to avoid anything that might smack of a negative attitude towards the ideas and events they describe. “As a group,” the editor continues, “we are diverse with respect to age, gender, ethnicity and political sympathies.” He is right that, judged by prevailing standards, it is a well-balanced group. All of the relevant disciplines are represented – history, area studies, literature, political science and sociology – and although ten of the 13 contributors teach in the US, the collection is representative of the range of views of China that you will find in universities in much of the world. However, the fact that it reflects the present state of academic opinion is also the book’s most important limitation.

Reading the essays brought together here, you would hardly realise that Mao was responsible for one of the biggest human catastrophes in recorded history. Launched by him in 1958, the Great Leap Forward cost upwards of 45 million human lives. “When there is not enough to eat, people starve to death,” Mao observed laconically. “It is better to let half of the people die so that the other half can eat their fill.” He did not specify how those condemned to perish would be made to accept their fate. Ensuing events provided the answer: mass executions and torture, beatings and sexual violence against women were an integral part of a politically induced famine that reduced sections of the population to eating roots, mud and insects, and others to cannibalism. When Mao ordered an end to the horrific experiment in 1961, it was in order to launch another. The Cultural Revolution was nothing like as costly in fatalities, but it left a trail of broken lives and cultural devastation, the memory of which is one of the chief sources of the post-Mao regime’s legitimacy.

More here.

Private Parts

The first love of my life never saw me naked.
There was always a parent coming home in a half hour,
always a little brother in the next room, always too much
body and not enough time for me to show him.

Instead, I gave him a shoulder, an elbow, the bend
of my knee. I lent him my corners, my edges:
the parts of me I could afford to offer, the parts of me
I had long since given up trying to hide.

He never asked for more. He gave me back his eyelashes,
the back of his neck, his palms. We held each piece we were given
like it was a nectarine—might bruise if we weren’t careful—
we collected them like we were trying to build an orchard.

And the spaces that he never saw: the ones my parents
had labeled “Private Parts” when I was still small enough
to fit all of my self and worries inside a bathtub,
I made up for them by handing over all the private parts of me.

There was no secret I did not tell him,
there was no moment we did not share.
We did not grow up, we grew in: like ivy wrapping,
molding each other into perfect yings and yangs.

We kissed with mouths open, breathing his exhale
into my inhale and back. We could have survived
underwater or in outer space, living only off the breath
we traded. We spelled “love” G-I-V-E.

I never wanted to hide my body from him.
If I could have, I am sure I would have given it all away
with the rest of me. I did not know it was possible
to keep some things for myself.

Some nights, I wake up knowing he is anxious.
He is across the world in another woman’s arms
and the years have spread us like dandelion seeds,
sanding down the edges of our jigsaw parts that used to only fit each other.

He drinks from the pitcher on the night stand, checks
the digital clock, it is five AM. He tosses in sheets and
tries to settle. I wait for him to sleep, before tucking myself
into elbows and knees; reaching for things I have long since given away.
.

by Sarah Kay