An uncompromising NKVD man named Utterly Inadvisabiladze, a brave Soviet spy Dementiy Dogsonov, who’s lost his eye trying to spy on the imperialists through the keyhole, an ideological communist Avdotia Niedoganina, brilliant academician Michurenko (student of Lysurin), and above all Stalin – as always superhumanly intelligent and inhumanly smiling. These are the main characters of a satirical piece by Stanisław Lem, which the author himself for half a century thought missing.

Lem, who gained worldwide recognition for his SF novels, wrote it in the late 1940s, at the height of Stalinism, when people were being imprisoned or even executed for far lesser trespasses. Twenty years later, in the 1960s, writer Janusz Szpotański received a very special literary prize for his unpublished musical satire The Silent and the Honkers – three years in prison.

more from Gazeta Wyborcza here.

The philosopher Bernard Williams once wrote a paper, “The Makropulos Case,” in which he argued that eternal life would be so tedious that no one could bear it. According to Williams, the constancy that defines an eternal self would entail an infinite desert of repetitive experiences, lest the self be so altered as to be emptied of any definition. That is why, in the play by Karel Capek from which Williams takes his title, the three-hundred-and-forty-two-year-old Elina Makropulos, having imbibed the elixir of eternal life since the age of forty-two, chooses to discontinue the regimen, and dies. Life needs death to constitute its meaning; death is the black period that orders the syntax of life.

In “Death with Interruptions” (translated, from the Portuguese, by Margaret Jull Costa; Harcourt; $24), José Saramago, a writer whose long, uninterrupted sentences are relative strangers to the period, has produced a novel that functions as a thought experiment in the Capek/Williams field. (His novel makes no explicit allusion to either.) At midnight on one New Year’s Eve, in a nameless, landlocked country of about ten million inhabitants, Death declares a truce with humanity, a self-interruption, so as to give people an idea of what it would be like to live forever.

more from The New Yorker here.

From The Telegraph:

They say that Samuel Taylor Coleridge was the last person to have read everything. By the time he died there were too many books, they suggest, for any single brain to engage with. “They”, as usual, are wrong. There were already millions of books in Europe by the year 1500, just half a century after the first printed page flew from the first press. To read a million books in a lifetime you would have to read 40 a day for 70 years. I couldn’t even smoke half that many cigarettes for half as long before giving up and it takes a lot longer to read a book than to smoke a cigarette, let me tell you.

Philosophers, wits, novelists, cooks, poets, essayists, herbalists, mathematicians, builders, poets and divines had poured out more thoughts in that first 50 years than had been committed to paper or vellum in the previous thousand. And the rate only continued to increase as it approached this century’s dizzyingly insane levels of oversupply. With so much flowing from so many different human brains, who can be bothered to read it? Not I, sir and madam, not I. It’s all I can do to peruse the side of a packet of breakfast cereal without distraction from radio, television or phone. I have no doubt you are in the same case. You would dearly like to suck intellectual and metaphysical juice from the fruity flesh of the world’s best thinkers and writers but the treetops are all out of reach and it would be too much of a fag to go and fetch a ladder. If only someone would pick, pulp and squeeze that fruit for you.

Your wish has been answered. There has never been a collection like Advanced Banter. Look in vain for the obvious, the banal and the platitudinous. On every page you will marvel at “what oft was thought but ne’er so well expressed”.

A successful man is one who makes more money than his wife can spend. A successful woman is one who can find such a man.
LANA TURNER

Biologically speaking, if something bites you, it’s more likely to be female.
DESMOND MORRIS

A woman is like a tea bag. It’s only when she’s in hot water that you realise how strong she is.
NANCY REAGAN Although sometimes also attributed to Eleanor Roosevelt.

A man can sleep around, but if a woman makes 19 or 20 mistakes she’s a tramp.
JOAN RIVERS

More here.

Mr Kundera, a recluse for decades, insists that he had no involvement in the affair and is baffled by the document. Communist-era records are not wholly trustworthy. But a statement from the Czech archives says it is not a fake; the incident (if it happened) could help explain why Mr Kundera, then in trouble with the authorities, was allowed to stay at university even though he had been expelled from the Communist Party.

True or not, the story echoes themes of guilt, betrayal and self-interest found in Mr Kundera’s own work, such as “unbearable lightness” (dodged but burdensome responsibility). In “The Owner of the Keys”, a play published in 1962, the hero kills a witness who sees him sheltering a former lover from the Gestapo.

As Mr Kundera himself has written so eloquently, “the struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” Under totalitarianism, fairy tales good and bad often trumped truth. Some heroes of the Prague Spring in 1968 had been enthusiastic backers of the Stalinist regime’s murderous purges after the communist putsch of 1948.

more from The Economist here.

more from Big Think here.

Martin Kippenberger seems to have been a bit of an asshole. I’m not making a judgment, just an observation. Some of my best friends are assholes. I never actually met Kippenberger during his fabled L.A. sojourns in the early ’90s, but, given his epic drinking and insatiable anti-authoritarianism, we probably wouldn’t have found much to argue about. And Kippenberger’s assholism is no secret — in fact, it was central to his oeuvre, as well as being the reason his work hasn’t received as much attention as it merits. When you do stuff like buy a gray monochrome painting by one of your former art heroes, screw legs into its stretcher bars and display it as a coffee table — as Kippenberger did with a Gerhard Richter in 1987’s Modell Interconti — feelings are going to get hurt.

more from the LA Weekly here.

///
Alexandria, 641 A.D.
Jorge Luis Borges

Since the first Adam who beheld the night
And the day and the shape of his own hand,
Men have made up stories and have fixed
In stone, in metal, or on parchment
Whatever the world includes or dreams create.
Here is the fruit of their labor: the Library.
They say the wealth of volumes it contains
Outnumbers the stars or the grains
Of sand in the desert.  The man
Who tried to read them all would lose
His mind and the use of his reckless eyes.
Here the great memory of the centuries
That were, the swords and the heroes,
The concise symbols of algebra,
The knowledge that fathoms the planets
Which govern destiny, the powers
Of herbs and talismanic carvings,
The verse in which love’s caress endures,
The science that deciphers the solitary
Labyrinth of God, theology,
Alchemy which seeks to turn clay into gold
And all the symbols of idolatry.
The faithless say that if it were to burn,
History would burn with it.  They are wrong.
Unceasing human work gave birth to this
Infinity of books.  If of them all
Not even one remained, man would again
Beget each page and every line,
Each work and every love of Hercules,
And every teaching of every manuscript.
In the first century of the Muslim era,
I, that Omar who subdued the Persians
and who imposes Islam on the Earth,
Order my soldiers to destroy
By fire the abundant Library,
Which will not perish.  All praise is due
To God who never sleeps and to Muhammad,
     His Apostle.

Translated by Stephen Kessler
///

From The New York Times:

The wild, delirious ride that architecture has been on for the last decade looks as if it’s finally coming to an end. And after a visit to the Chanel Pavilion that opened Monday in Central Park, you may think it hasn’t come soon enough. Designed to display artworks that were inspired by Chanel’s 2.55, a quilted chain-strap handbag, the pavilion certainly oozes glamour. Its mysterious nautiluslike form, which can be easily dismantled and shipped to the next city on its global tour, reflects the keen architectural intelligence we have come to expect from its creator, Zaha Hadid, the Iraqi-born architect who lives in London.

Yet if devoting so much intellectual effort to such a dubious undertaking might have seemed indulgent a year ago, today it looks delusional. It’s not just that New York and much of the rest of the world are preoccupied by economic turmoil and a recession, although the timing could hardly be worse. It’s that the pavilion sets out to drape an aura of refinement over a cynical marketing gimmick. Surveying its self-important exhibits, you can’t help but hope that the era of exploiting the so-called intersection of architecture, art and fashion is finally over.

The pavilion, made of hundreds of molded fiberglass panels mounted on a skeletal steel frame, was first shown in Hong Kong in February. From there it was packed up in 55 sea containers and shipped to Tokyo, closing there in July and heading to New York, where it will be on view through Nov. 9. Chanel is paying a $400,000 fee to rent space in the park and has made a gift of an undisclosed amount to the Central Park Conservancy as part of the deal.

More here. (Note: This is for my nephew Jaffer).

From The Guardian:

Katie Price, eat your heart out. The real celebrity of last week’s Frankfurt Book fair was the Nobel laureate, Günter Grass. He was doing the rounds last week to talk about his new book, Die Box, another voyage into autobiography following 2006’s Beim Häuten der Zwiebel (Peeling the Onion). And the 81-year-old author (October 16 was his birthday) was swamped, buried in the attention. Photographers swarmed, fans were tearful to have met him, his publishers, gathered from around the world, were starstruck. Cosily dressed in a brown corduroy suit, nattily matched with a brown jumper, Grass took it all in his stride, happy to fit in a 10-minute chat if he could do it while puffing on his pipe. We headed outside so he could smoke; by the time we made it out of the hall, I had been elbowed and shoved aside by the human train which followed him all over the fair. He chuckled and found a space in which to conduct the interview, done under the eyes of a circle of fans, a couple of ready-to-pounce photographers and his publicist, who helped out when he couldn’t quite express what he was trying to say in his extremely impressive English.

He was good-natured about the attention, but relieved it was almost over. “I only come when I have a reason, and I’m only here for two days, which is enough.” His reason was the recent publication of Die Box, out in August in Germany but not due in English until at least the end of next year. In it Grass takes up the story of his life from where he left it at the end of Peeling the Onion, beginning with the publication of The Tin Drum at the age of 31, which catapulted him to the forefront of European fiction.

More here.

Johann Hari in Slate:

Every day, you handle the deadliest substance on earth. It is a weapon of mass destruction festering beneath your fingernails. In the past 10 years, it has killed more people than all the wars since Adolf Hitler rolled into one; in the next four hours, it will kill the equivalent of two jumbo jets full of kids. It is not anthrax or plutonium or uranium. Its name is shit—and we are in the middle of a shit storm. In the West, our ways of discreetly whisking this weapon away are in danger of breaking down, and one-quarter of humanity hasn’t ever used a functioning toilet yet.

The story of civilization has been the story of separating you from your waste. British investigative journalist Rose George’s stunning—and nauseating—new book opens by explaining that a single gram of feces can contain “ten million viruses, one million bacteria, one thousand parasite cysts, and one hundred worm eggs.” Accidentally ingesting this cocktail causes 80 percent of all the sickness on earth.

More here.

Michael M. Hughes in AlterNet:

The space resembles a clean, warm, but decidedly offbeat living room. The lighting is spare and soft, emanating from two lamps. A bookshelf holds a variety of picture books and well-known spiritual and psychological classics like Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams and The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James. Above the books sits a wooden sculpture of Psilocybe mushrooms. Behind the couch are a Mesoamerican mushroom stone replica and a statue of a serene, seated Buddha. An eye-popping abstract expressionist painting hangs on the wall, an explosion of color and intersecting lines.

This isn’t a metaphysical retreat center in San Francisco, or the Manhattan office of a New Age therapist-cum-shaman. Lundahl’s first psychedelic experience is taking place in the heart of the Behavioral Biology Research Center building at the Johns Hopkins Bayview campus in Southeast Baltimore, in a room affectionately referred to by both the scientists and the volunteers as the “psilocybin room.” She’s taking part in the first study of its kind since the early ’70s — a rigorous, scientific attempt to determine if drugs like psilocybin and LSD, demonized and driven underground for more than three decades, can facilitate life-changing, transformative mystical experiences.

More here.

Rama Lakshmi in the Washington Post:

In a training session at a suburban call center, groups of fresh-faced Indian recruits jettison their Indian names and thick accents and practice speaking English just like the Americans do. They have hesitant conversations with imaginary American customers who complain angrily about their broken appliance or computer glitch.

The instructor writes “35 = 10” on the board, as though he is gifting the recruits with a magic mantra.

“A 35-year-old American’s brain and IQ is the same as a 10-year-old Indian’s,” he explains, and urges the agents to be patient with the callers.

That is a scene from “Hello,” the first Bollywood movie about the distorted and dual lives of India’s 2 million call-center workers. When it debuted this month, many in the audience cheered and laughed at such scenes, which pandered to the reigning stereotypes about those on both ends of the transcontinental, toll-free helpline — the dumb American customer and the smart, but fake, Indian call-center agent.

More here.

Pedro Meyer. Plantation El Centro. California. 1987-1995.

More on this master Mexican photographer here, here, and here.

The T2F gallery in Karachi has an upcoming show of Pedro Meyer’s Heresies Project.

Secret Society played 3QD’s second annual ball and were amazing.  Lindsay updates us on what’s been happening with them.

Secret Society fans will be excited to learn that the band is poised to record its first studio album, Infernal Machines, in mid-December.

You can download live recordings of the 18-piece steampunk jazz ensemble here, for free. It’s all original material, composed by my partner, DJA, and performed by some of the most talented young jazz musicians in New York.

SecSoc is doing a fall fund drive to defray recording costs. If you’d like to contribute, please click here.

John Kadvany reviews Alain Baidou’s book in Notre Dame Philosphical Reviews (via bookforum):

Like many philosophers, Alain Badiou relies on technical systems of mathematical logic as a foundation for philosophical exploration. Donald Davidson used Tarski’s theory of truth for formal languages to ground his approach to natural language semantics. Modal logic is frequently used to discuss problems of necessity, time, or belief. W. V. O. Quine made the reduction of mathematics to set theory a paradigm of “ontological commitment,” such that an idealized formalization of physical science identified the entities needed to ensure the theory as fundamentally “real.” Indeed, Badiou’s project is exactly in this Quinean mode, with set theory his preferred tool. While Badiou’s set-theoretic interpretations are not typical of those found in Berkeley or Princeton, the overall strategy is nonetheless “analytic.” Hence one’s response to Number and Numbers, and a similar earlier book, Being and Event, will depend on a) the philosophical narrative laid over the mathematics, and b) the treatment of the mathematics vis à vis the interpretation.

This review follows those two themes. But first a word on intellectual context. Badiou is one of several French philosophers pilloried by Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont in Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals’ Abuse of Science (1998). Sokal, of course, authored the sham 1996 Social Text article, concocted as a meaningless essay in high lit-crit-theoretic style, and buttressed by facile, often bogus or inconsistent, appeals to quantum physics or relativity, all undetected by the editors. The hoax was widely reported in the popular press and Sokal has since continued his manic crusade, though with much less panache and success. One of Sokal’s “tests” for intellectual value is whether one can detect a difference in meaning if key words are interchanged, say “being” and “other,” or “mediation” and “reification,” or whatever — sort of a Turing test for intellectual quality. For Badiou in Fashionable Nonsense, Sokal and Bricmont, as they so often do, just selectively quote him, rhetorically ask the reader if it makes sense (of course not, devoid of context), and then go on. The second trick could be applied to Number and Numbers, perhaps with some honesty, but I think ultimately unfairly, as explained below. Badiou’s ontological narrative is allusive, poetic, and deeply metaphorically inspired by his understanding of modern set theory. And Sokal’s “reversal” test also fails. Badiou’s vision is a wholly consistent one, built indeed from a stimulating historical account of the treatment of number by Gottlob Frege, Guiseppe Peano, Richard Dedekind, and Georg Cantor.

Ammon Shea in The Guardian:

I find myself subject to the entire range of emotions and reactions that a great book will call forth from its reader. I chuckle, laugh out loud, smile wistfully, cringe, widen my eyes in surprise, and even feel sadness—all from the neatly ordered rows of words and their explanations. All of the human emotions and experiences are right there in this dictionary, just as they would be in any fine work of literature. They just happen to be alphabetised.

I keep paper and pen by my chair so that I can write down the things in the dictionary that I find interesting. After the first hour I realize that I’ve been writing down far too much, and that if I continue taking notes at this rate I’ll never finish reading. But there is just so much in the dictionary that I wish were in my head, and I read with the constant knowledge that I’m passing by things that later I’ll want to know. The answers to questions that I’ve had for years and the answers to questions that I never knew I had are coming up constantly.

These are some of the pleasures of reading the dictionary, and they are indeed sublime. The frustrations are considerably more pedestrian. After the first three hours of reading I have the kind of headache that makes life feel unfair. It is a pounding that keeps pace with my heartbeat, as though I had a second heart, located in the lower-left back part of my head, the sole purpose of which is to pump tiny spasms of pain, rather than blood.

Amitava Kumar in The Boston Review

I was anxious about my response to The White Tiger. No, not only for the suspicion about the ressentiment lurking in my breast, but also because I was aware that I might be open to the same charge of being inauthentic. My own novel Home Products, published last year, has as its protagonist a journalist who is writing about the murder of a young woman. The case is based on a well-known murder of a poet who had an illicit relationship with a married politician. Kidnapping and rape and, of course, murder, feature quite frequently in the novel’s pages. By presenting these events through a journalist’s eye, I tried hard to maintain a tone of observational integrity. At some level, realism had become my religion.

Since then, I have wondered whether my choice of the journalist as a protagonist is not itself a symptom of an anxiety about authenticity. Was it the worry of an expatriate Indian, concerned about losing touch with the society he took as his subject? To invest in an aesthetic of observation and reportage was to build banks against the rising tide of that worry. I know now that this worry informs my reading of all novels about India.

For years, in the wake of Rushdie, I imagined magical realism to be the last refuge of the nonresident Indian. If you were dealing in invented details, it hardly mattered when you mixed up names and dates. But now, more than magical realism, it is the painstaking attempt at verisimilitude that clearly betrays the anxiety about authenticity. This condition is more subtle. It has limited fiction’s reach, keeping writers to what they know.

A few days ago, a friend whom I love dearly and always find to have attractive ideas asked me, “What do you think is the most difficult cause in our artistic endeavours?” I was first caught unawares and answered, with a slackness of thought, “Never mind! All causes are difficult. If they weren’t, we wouldn’t have called them by the name of cause. The fact that we separate them from other problems is also self-explanatory.” My friend knows me a little. He realised that I was, as my students sometimes like to say, letting go of it. It was the truth.

He had come to me early in the morning and taken me to the Yildiz Park. We were walking underneath a sweet blue sky that refuted all we knew about the winter season. Barren trees resembling imaginary palisades rather than tarnished silver, vibrant green cypresses and pines booming forward like deep cello tunes amidst the silence, and the deep blue, sparkling sea that beckoned us to climates unknown had suddenly fascinated me. But my friend wouldn’t leave me alone. Maybe he had an inherent ability to take on two tasks at once with the same vigour.

more from Eurozine here.