Arifa Akbar in The Independent:

Remember Septimus Warren Smith? The returning First World War veteran who haunted the darker recesses of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway? Septimus Smith, who couldn’t stop being tormented by his raw, ravaging, suicide-inducing memories of the front, even as the sun shone on postwar London? He has remained with me in a way that no history lesson has. Sorry Mr Gove, but I’m not embarrassed to say that I learned the best lessons about the Great War through great fiction.

What fiction inspired by the Great War has done – and continues to do – is to bring back the smells, sounds, and electrifying sensations of the front line; the filth and terror of the trenches; and, alongside that, just as validly, the duller terror at the home front. These fictions take you back there; they make you care. And they do more than that. Read a collection of First World War poetry to take you through the intellectual and emotional debates that consider whether war was necessary, whether the ideological victory was worth the loss of 16 million lives, a debate that has been so fervently rehearsed in recent days. Read Mrs Dalloway for insights into the effects of “shell shock”, as it was called then (PTSD, as it is now), on young men returning – seemingly intact but actually psychologically shattered – from the front line.

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Erica R. Hendry in Smithsonian:

Producer and curator Saskia Wilson-Brown and a 13-artist team have convinced at least a few hundred people to make the jaunt from Los Angeles to Japan through only a handful of scents in “Japan in Sixteen Minutes, Revisited,” a show that recreates a trip to Tokyo—from an airport shuttle to the first moments of sleep in a hotel room across the Pacific—with perfumes and an ambient soundtrack.

…First up: strip the audience of sight. Hartmann’s venture featured not only geishas, but also a number of musical and theatrical acts to accompany his scents. Wilson-Brown’s team, however, “really wanted to focus on the olfactory and auditory journey,” and decided to blindfold the audience, though a few visual cues in the program put the performance in context. The choice allowed the group to truly build a performance with smell at its core, a challenge because scent is so subjective. What Brown smells when she steps on a subway, for instance, could be completely different than the aromas sensed by the passenger beside her. Rather than use single scents as Hartmann did in his performance, perfume artist Sherri Sebastian went after more complex aromas, in part to capture the range of smells that identify certain places. The show’s final “scent compositions” are just that: perfumes that use up to two and a half dozen ingredients to recreate places—an airport terminal, city streets, a hotel bed—along the journey. Those smells won’t be as literal as the audience might think. While waiting for a shuttle in L.A., the audience might get a hint of a passing ice cream truck in a perfume with a “creamy lactonic base, sweet candy overtones and a healthy dose of green notes inspired by the vegetation and palm trees in Los Angeles,” Wilson-Brown says. The arrival in Tokyo will overwhelm the room not with gasoline, but with a note of rhubarb. The way the rhubarb's tartness hits the nose sort of mimics the intensity of bright city lights.

More here.

Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note

Lately, I've become accustomed to the way
The ground opens up and envelopes me
Each time I go out to walk the dog.
Or the broad edged silly music the wind
Makes when I run for a bus…

Things have come to that.

And now, each night I count the stars.
And each night I get the same number.
And when they will not come to be counted,
I count the holes they leave.

Nobody sings anymore.

And then last night I tiptoed up
To my daughter's room and heard her
Talking to someone, and when I opened
The door, there was no one there…
Only she on her knees, peeking into

Her own clasped hands
.
.
Amiri Baraka
1934-2014

Paul Tough in the New York Times Magazine:

Looking back, John Aldridge knew it was a stupid move. When you’re alone on the deck of a lobster boat in the middle of the night, 40 miles off the tip of Long Island, you don’t take chances. But he had work to do: He needed to start pumping water into the Anna Mary’s holding tanks to chill, so that when he and his partner, Anthony Sosinski, reached their first string of traps a few miles farther south, the water would be cold enough to keep the lobsters alive for the return trip. In order to get to the tanks, he had to open a metal hatch on the deck. And the hatch was covered by two 35-gallon Coleman coolers, giant plastic insulated ice chests that he and Sosinski filled before leaving the dock in Montauk harbor seven hours earlier. The coolers, full, weighed about 200 pounds, and the only way for Aldridge to move them alone was to snag a box hook onto the plastic handle of the bottom one, brace his legs, lean back and pull with all his might.

And then the handle snapped.

Suddenly Aldridge was flying backward, tumbling across the deck toward the back of the boat, which was wide open, just a flat, slick ramp leading straight into the black ocean a few inches below. Aldridge grabbed for the side of the boat as it went past, his fingertips missing it by inches. The water hit him like a slap. He went under, took in a mouthful of Atlantic Ocean and then surfaced, sputtering. He yelled as loud as he could, hoping to wake Sosinski, who was asleep on a bunk below the front deck. But the diesel engine was too loud, and the Anna Mary, on autopilot, moving due south at six and a half knots, was already out of reach, its navigation lights receding into the night. Aldridge shouted once more, panic rising in his throat, and then silence descended. He was alone in the darkness. A single thought gripped his mind: This is how I’m going to die.

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En Liang Khong in Berfrois:

While China prepared for the 2008 Olympics, the artist Ai Weiwei was busy collaborating with the Swiss architectural firm, Herzog & de Meuron, on the Bird’s Nest stadium. Gradually, Ai began to experience a deep sense of disgust: “I was so involved in architecture that it opened my eyes to society, dealing with bureaucracy, policies and workers,” Ai observes, “and then you start to realise why they are building, and how they are using it. It is a very political act.” He denounced the Games as nothing more than a totalitarian spectacle. Profoundly disenchanted by the enforced relocation of Beijing inhabitants as a result of the Games, Ai began a journey from radical but successful artist to infamous activist.

But Ai reaches back to a longer history when he stakes out his political battleground today. The line between Ai’s performance and politics has constantly pushed against the artist’s remit in an authoritarian situation. He is the son of the modernist poet Ai Qing, who found himself banished to a labour camp along with his family during the 1950s anti-rightist movement. “Now my own position is very simple,” Ai tells me. “I am an individual. I am an artist. I am living in this society which my poet father also lived in. Many other artists and writers live in it. And I just have to give out my opinion on the matters that occur in my daily life.”

More here.

Max Blumenthal in The Nation:

A central player in Israeli affairs since the state’s inception, Ariel Sharon molded history according to his own stark vision. He won consent for his plans through ruthlessness and guile, and resorted to force when he could not find any. An accused war criminal who presided over the killing of thousands of civilians, his foes referred to him as “The Bulldozer.” To those who revered him as a strong-armed protector and patron saint of the settlements, he was “The King of Israel.” In a life acted out in three parts, Sharon destroyed entire cities, wasted countless lives and sabotaged careers to shape the reality on the ground.

The first act of Sharon’s career began after the 1948 war that established Israel at the expense of 750,000 Palestinians who were driven away in a campaign of mass expulsion. Badly wounded in the battle of Latrun, where the Israeli army suffered a bitter defeat at the hands of the Royal Jordanian Army, Sharon momentarily retired from army life. He looked back in anger at the failure to take Latrun, a strategic swath of land containing three Palestinian towns seemingly obstructing the new Jewish state’s demographic continuity. Spineless politicians and feckless commanders had tied the hands of Israel’s troops, he claimed, leaving the Jewish state exposed from within. Sharon yearned to finish 1948—to complete the expulsion project he viewed as deficient.

In 1953, Sharon was plucked out of retirement by Prime Minister David Ben Gurion and appointed the head of a secret commando unit tasked with carrying out brutal acts of reprisal and sabotage. Following a lethal Palestinian assault on an Israeli kibbutz, Sharon led his men into the West Bank town of Qibya with orders from Ben Gurion’s Central Command to “carry out destruction and cause maximum damage.” By the time they were done, sixty-nine civilians—mostly Palestinian women and children—lay dead.

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Jim Newell at Bookforum:

It’s hard to defend a thesis that there’s some sort of worldwide philosophical understanding of the nature of underdogs when all you present is a handful of underdog stories of all types, from across the span of human history. That reinforces the notion that underdogs are still just underdogs; it’s just that occasionally some prevail and get written up in the local paper.

And Gladwell, the cad, seems to know this. He’ll tell someone’s story and then, near the end of it, write something like, which isn’t to say that everyone who sees their father get shot in the face as a child and is born with ten types of cancer will end up running the largest corporation in the world.

Consider his section on dyslexia, introduced by a pair of sentences that would certainly have to be the nadir of Gladwell’s, or any writer’s, career: “You wouldn’t wish dyslexia on your child. Or would you?” He gets to the “no” eventually (just as he does in the section about whether it’s desirable to have one of your parents die in childhood). In between are stories about the famous trial lawyer David Boies, Goldman Sachs president Gary Cohn, and Hollywood producer Brian Grazer, each of whom is dyslexic and, according to them, used that challenge as a motivator to sharpen other, nonreading skills.

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John Banville at The Guardian:

In a letter to Gerald Brenan in March 1968, Hugh Trevor-Roper stated in the simplest terms his aesthetic position: “I find more pleasure in good literature than in dull (even if true) history.” Trevor-Roper had boundless admiration for Brenan, a non-academic, self-taught scholar whose 1943 book The Spanish Labyrinth: An Account of the Social and Political Background of the Spanish Civil War had become a classic. Earlier in the same letter, Trevor-Roper paid his friend and colleague the highest compliment: “Ever since I read The Spanish Labyrinth I have looked upon you as my ideal historian – you see the past in the present, and the present in the past, imaginatively, and yet with corrective scholarship, and you express it in perfect prose.

This characterisation could be applied equally well to Trevor-Roper himself. As a historian, he had the finest prose style since Gibbon, one of his abiding heroes (“I think I would rather be thought to write like Gibbon than any other writer of English”); and indeed, for clarity of expression and beauty of form he often outstripped the chronicler of imperial Rome.

more here.

Visitors from Abroad

1

Sometime after I had entered
that time of life
people prefer to allude to in others
but not in themselves, in the middle of the night
the phone rang. It rang and rang
as though the world needed me,
though really it was the reverse.

I lay in bed, trying to analyze
the ring. It had
my mother’s persistence and my father’s
pained embarrassment.

When I picked it up, the line was dead.
Or was the phone working and the caller dead?
Or was it not the phone, but the door perhaps?

2

My mother and father stood in the cold
on the front steps. My mother stared at me,
a daughter, a fellow female.
You never think of us, she said.

We read your books when they reach heaven.
Hardly a mention of us anymore, hardly a mention of your sister.
And they pointed to my dead sister, a complete stranger,
tightly wrapped in my mother’s arms.

But for us, she said, you wouldn’t exist.
And your sister — you have your sister’s soul.
After which they vanished, like Mormon missionaries.

Read more »

From Faz.net:

The Internet had yet to be born but the talk still revolved around it. In New York, that was, half a century ago. „Cage,“ as John Brockman recalls, „always spoke about the spirit that we all share. That wasn’t some kind of holistic nonsense. He was talking about profound cybernetic ideas.“ He got to hear about them on one of the occasions when John Cage, the music revolutionary, Zen master and mushroom collector, cooked mushroom dishes for him and a few friends. At some point Cage packed him off home with a book. „That’s for you,“ were his parting words. After which he never exchanged another word with Brockman. Something that he couldn’t understand for a long time. „John, that’s Zen,“ a friend finally explained to him. „You no longer need him.“ Norbert Wiener was the name of the author, Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine the name of the book. Page by page Brockman battled his way through the academic text, together with Stewart Brand, his friend, who was about to publish the Whole Earth Catalog, the shopping primer and bible of the environmentally-driven counterculture. For both readers, physics and mathematics expanded into an infinite space that no longer distinguished between the natural and human sciences, mind and matter, searching and finding.

Like the idea of the Internet—which was slowly acquiring contours during these rambling 1960s discussions—the idea of Edge, the Internet salon around which Brockman’s life now revolves, was also taking shape. Edge is the meeting place for the cyber elite, the most illustrious minds who are shaping the emergence of the latest developments in the natural and social sciences, whether they be digital, genetic, psychological, cosmological or neurological. Digerati from the computer universe of Silicon Valley aren’t alone in giving voice to their ideas in Brockman’s salon. They are joined in equal measure by other eminent experts, including the evolutionary biologists Richard Dawkins and Steven Pinker, the philosopher Daniel Dennett, the cosmologist Martin Rees, the biological anthropologist Helen Fisher, the economist, psychologist and Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman, the quantum physicist David Deutsch, the computer scientist Marvin Minsky, and the social theorist Anthony Giddens. Ranging from the co-founder of Apple Steve Wozniak to the decoder of genomes Craig Venter, his guest list is almost unparalleled even in the boundless realm of the Internet. Even the actor Alan Alda and writer Ian McEwan can be found in his forum.

More here.

Andrew Delbanco in The New York Times:

Between the early 16th century and the middle of the 19th, more than 12 million human beings were shipped against their will from Africa to the New World and sold into slavery. An untold number died at different stages of the journey — overland in Africa, during the “middle passage” at sea or soon after arrival. Among those who perished, most died of disease, some by suicide and still others from wounds or execution following failed revolts.

For nearly four centuries, as Greg Grandin writes in his powerful new book, slavery was the “flywheel” that drove the global development of everything from trade and insurance to technology, religion and medicine. To read “The Empire of Necessity” is to get a sort of revolving scan from the center of the wheel. What we see is an endless sequence of human transactions — the production and exchange of meat, sugar, rice, cotton, tobacco, gold, among many other things — all connected, through slavery, by linkages whose full extent cannot be discerned from any point along the way. Slaves, Grandin writes, “were at one and the same time investments (purchased and then rented out as laborers), credit (used to secure loans), property, commodities and capital.”

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Charles Isherwood in the NYTimes:

For all its physical exuberance — the actors often appear to pummel one another with an intensity that you half expect to draw blood — Mr. Farrington’s approach to the material is primarily cerebral, inspired by his fascination with the psychology of boxing and boxers. Divided into thematic “rounds” (“Beauty and Brutality,” “Endurance/Strategy”), the text employs speeches from interviews and news conferences Ali and Tyson gave, but there’s little in the way of standard information conveyed about the victories, setbacks and scandals of their careers. Mr. Farrington is more interested in the men’s psyches — at times surprisingly similar, despite their very different boxing styles — rather than in their historical achievements and the arcs of their lives.

The four performers try only vaguely to impersonate either Ali or Tyson. Mr. Casey bears a nominal resemblance to Ali, and nails his blustery braggadocio. When they are portraying Tyson, the actors sometimes mimic his oddly endearing, whispery lisp. But if you spend too much time trying to figure out who’s who at any given moment, you’re likely to miss the larger point of the show, which is to excavate the drives, fears and obsessions that race around the heads of boxers before, during and after they meet in the ring.

There are, of course, differences in how each of these two celebrated fighters met the challenges of a brutal game that often involves almost as much psychological warfare as it does physical interaction. “I want him to be the hero,” Ali says, speaking of his opponent. “I want everybody to cheer him, and I want them all to boo me … I always love to be the underdog, the bad man. He’s the good American boy, and I’m the bad boy.”

Ali used that kind of me-against-the-world attitudinizing to pump himself up, but also to disarm opponents, who would then be taken by surprise when the underdog started to bite with unerring aim. We hear Tyson evincing a more conflicted and complex version of the prefight mind-set: “When I come out, I have supreme confidence,” he says, but then follows this Ali-like statement with a seeming contradiction: “I’m totally afraid. I’m afraid of everything. I’m afraid of losing. I’m afraid of being humiliated.

Read more here.

Osagie K. Obasogie in the Boston Review:

For several years now, a quiet revolution has been underway in consumer electronics. Gadgets that are a part of our everyday lives have learned to see. Relying on optical devices and software that can detect faces and track body motions, cameras, gaming systems, phones, and other tools have gained access to the mechanisms of visions and recognition that were once considered the unique province of sentient beings.

But some of these technologies have a problem: they have a hard time seeing people of color.

In December 2009 Wanda Zamen and Desi Cryer, two employees at a camping supply store in Waller, Texas, noticed something peculiar about an HP computer at the shop. The computer featured a digital camera that detected and tracked human faces. The system had no problem identifying and following Wanda, who is white, but it could not do the same for Desi, who is black. He demonstrates the glitch in a YouTube video that has been viewed almost 3 million times. “As you can see, the camera is panning to show Wanda’s face. It’s following her around. But as soon as my blackness enters the frame, . . . [the camera] stops,” he says.

A similar bug was found in the Nikon Coolpix S630 digital camera. Designed to overcome the timeless challenge of a blinking subject, the camera detects faces and alerts the photographer when it senses closed eyelids. But when Joz Wang, a young Taiwanese woman from Los Angeles, tried to take pictures of her family, the camera kept showing the same error message: “Did someone blink?” To which Wang responded on her blog, “No, I did not blink. I’m just Asian.”

And Microsoft’s popular Xbox 360 Kinect video game system, which uses facial and body-motion detection to enable interaction, has also had trouble recognizing nonwhite faces.

All of these technological errors are correctable, yet the question remains: Why do they happen at all?

More here.

From The Economist:

MIKHAIL KALASHNIKOV died on December 23rd, aged 94. But his 66-year-old invention, theAvtomat Kalashnikova, has plenty more shots left to fire. Developed in 1947 and first used by Soviet forces in 1949, the AK-47 assault rifle and its many derivatives are now used by the armed forces of more than 80 countries, and by freelancers in many more. No-one knows quite how many are in circulation: 100m is a reasonable guess. As a proportion of all the guns in the world—another number no-one can be quite sure about—Kalashnikovs probably make up more than one in ten of all firearms. Why does an ageing Soviet invention still dominate modern warfare?

The cultural impact of the AK is felt all over the world. Quentin Tarantino’s villains celebrate its appropriateness for “when you've absolutely, positively got to kill every [enemy combatant] in the room”. Mexican outlaws boast about their cuernos de chivo, or “goat horns”, the nickname given to the rifle because of its curved magazine. In some parts of Africa, where the gun is seen as a symbol of the ousting of colonial rulers, Kalash is a popular name for boys. Mozambique displays the gun on its flag. In Lebanon, a model nicknamed the “Bin Laden” sells for twice the price of the standard AK-47, because it is the type that al-Qaeda’s former boss was seen toting in some of his videos.

The gun is nothing special. Its controls are unsophisticated; it is not even particularly accurate. But this simplicity is a reason for its success.

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Carrie Arnold in National Geographic:

Six months ago, visitors to the Peruvian Amazon discovered a mysterious picket fence structure nicknamed Silkhenge. Despite watching the structure for several days, naturalists at theTambopata Research Center couldn’t figure out what type of animal (or fungus) was building it.

When scientist Troy Alexander first announced his find, all he had to show for his discovery was a series of intriguing photographs. He had no idea what Amazonian critter could have created the circular hideaway with a spoke-like outer wall.

After consulting with several entomologists, Alexander hypothesized that it was likely built by a type of cribellate spider, which are known for building elaborate structures.

When we first posted news of the picket fence, readers flooded the blog with suggestions for what had built it and what scientists should name the potential new species. While many of you agreed with Alexander’s hypothesis that the fence was built by a spider, others of you weren’t so sure, guessing that a fungus or caterpillar may have built it.

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Tom Shone in More Intelligent Life:

The Oscar for Best Picture is widely expected to go to “12 Years a Slave”. Adapted from Solomon Northrup's 1853 memoir about being snatched from his family in the north and sold into slavery in Louisiana, the film is constructed almost like a horror movie, each circle of hell bigger than the last. Walloped and poked by a slave-trader, Solomon (Chiwetel Ejiofor) is viciously abused by an overseer, only to arrive—out of the frying pan, into hellfire—at the plantation of a “nigger-breaker” (Michael Fassbender) and his wife, whose chief pleasure in life is to see her husband's prized slave mistress suffer. To adapt Martin Amis's line about shotgun blasts in the films of Sam Peckinpah: after “12 Years a Slave”, a whipping ceases to look like something you bounce back from. This is the third film from Steve McQueen, whose work is all about the control of a body. In “Hunger” that body belonged to the hunger-striker Bobby Sands, played by Fassbender, whose emaciated form became a theatre of war. The film was brutal, austere—as furiously controlled as its subject. In “Shame”, the body was that of a sex addict, also played by Fassbender, propelled around lower Manhattan by appetites uncurbed—the opposite of Sands's predicament. Critics snickered, but there was no doubting McQueen's singleness of focus: in his films the body is a battlefield, scarred and cratered by a fierce, existential fight for autonomy.

It was only a matter of time before he embarked on a film about slavery. That he has made the best film ever made on the subject isn't saying that much. Slavery is one of those black-hole subjects, like the Holocaust, that involved so much suffering that the result is either humanitarian kitsch or exploitation: “The Color Purple” or “Django Unchained”. McQueen resolutely refuses to slot into either tradition, combining the cruel spectacle of the latter with the moral anger of the former. Does he want to put the audience through it? No question. In the most memorable scene, Solomon is left hanging from a tree by a noose, barely able to breathe, his toes slipping in the mud beneath him. McQueen holds the shot for several excruciating minutes while Solomon fights to stay upright. Behind him, other slaves go about their chores, and children play beneath the sun-dappled willows.

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J. Hoberman at Artforum:

Even more than Breathless, its trailer is a kind of manifesto. Narrative parameters established, its subsequent attractions include both the specific (“Humphrey Bogart,” “Picasso,” Jean Seberg’s “nice buns”) and the abstract (“tenderness,” “adventure,” “love,” the last accompanied by the image of a book of photographed nudes), and it ends with the filmmaker’s ringing declaration that Breathless is the “best film out now!”

Godard’s follow-up trailer for A Woman Is a Woman (1961) was in the Hitchcockian mode of personal appearance: The screen flashes ATTENTION . . . ATTENTION as the artist announces, “I, Jean-Luc Godard, arrive on the set,” and he begins explaining his artistic method while Anna Karina repeatedly interjects the movie’s title. But the Breathless trailer provided a template for 1963’s Contempt (“the new traditional movie by Jean-Luc Godard”) and 1965’s Pierrot le fou (“a wonderful love story in a tragic setting”), both facilitated by looped bits of theme music. (Whoever cut the American trailer for Sergio Leone’s The Good, the Bad and the Ugly in 1967 employed a similar strategy.)

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Jonathan Ullyot at The Point:

Coetzee’s title suggests an allegory or a contemporary retelling of the Christ narrative. Creative re-imaginings of the historical Jesus have been popular ever since late antiquity and most recently after The Da Vinci Code, itself a recycling of the sensational (and almost completely unfounded) conspiracy theories in the nonfiction work, The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail. José Saramago wrote an alternative history of Christ, The Gospel According to Jesus Christ, which went so far as to depict a teenage Jesus being tempted to have sex with a sheep. Norman Mailer wrote a very orthodox retelling of the life of Jesus in the first person,The Gospel According to the Son. (He followed it with a creative retelling of the childhood of Hitler, The Castle in the Forest.) More recently, Philip Pullman wrote The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ, which depicts two brothers: Jesus, a moral and god-fearing man, and Christ, a schemer who wants to build a powerful church. Colm Tóibín’s The Testament of Mary imagines that Mary did not believe that her son was also the son of God and that she refused to collaborate with the writers of the gospels.

Coetzee’s The Childhood of Jesus is a story about a bratty kid in a developing socialist country doted on by two very unsympathetic parents. It is replete with philosophical dialogues about the nature of familial love and the proper way of unloading grain from a ship. Jesus is never mentioned. It is not what we expect to find when we pick up a novel called The Childhood of Jesus.

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