Pablo Picasso. Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. 1907.

Jonathan Jones in The Guardian:

Modernism in the arts is 100 years old, because Pablo Picasso’s painting Les Demoiselles d’Avignon is now 100 years old. In 1907, the Titanic had yet to sink, cinema was a flickering newsreel of the Boer war, Scott of the Antarctic was still alive and the Wright brothers travelled to Europe to publicise their invention of powered flight. San Francisco was still shattered by the previous year’s earthquake. But in a crowded, dilapidated warren of artists’ and writers’ studios on the Parisian hill of Montmartre, home to anarchy and cabaret, a 25-year-old Spanish immigrant was creating the first, and greatest, masterpiece of modern art.

More here and here.

3QD friend Emily Mitchell‘s debut novel has just been published. This is the description from Publisher’s Weekly:

First-time novelist Mitchell pulls off the dazzling trick of allowing readers to see through the eyes of art-photography pioneer Edward Steichen in her excellent reconsideration of his life and art. This would be merely impressive if the book confined itself to the stormy end of Steichen’s first marriage, a subtheme that gets its due and packs a psychological punch. Instead, Mitchell follows Steichen through his airborne reconnaissance work during WWI, providing a devastating portrait of the insanity of war in general and the Great War in particular. Throughout, individual photographs are described in detail, along with surprisingly rich narratives—some reconstructed, some imagined—filling in the stories behind the pictures. Most powerful are the descriptions of what Steichen saw from the air, such as his view of Americans chasing a group of Germans and killing them all, including one who tried to escape. The book offers up glimpses of Paris and the French countryside, including memorable scenes of Steichen’s visit to his good friend and mentor, sculptor August Rodin, but in the end, this commanding novel is about the images one can never quite burn from memory.

This is Donna Seaman of Booklist:

Photographer Edward Steichen, cosmopolitan and controversial, is an excellent subject for historical fiction. But debut novelist Mitchell chose not to reimagine Steichen’s glamorous career as a portrait and fashion photographer. Rather, she zeroes in on Steichen’s life-altering service during World War I. Responsible for aerial reconnaissance, Steichen and his men are in the line of fire as they fly over German troops, and Mitchell vividly imagines the terror of these historic dogfights. Her Steichen is also fighting a private ground war with his wife, Clara, as she seeks revenge for Steichen’s alleged affair with her former best friend. Mitchell uses Steichen’s moody art photographs as stepping-stones between scenes of military suspense and tragedy and the heartbreak of a disastrous marriage. Forced to sacrifice her musical career to fulfill her duties as mother and wife to an artist more ruthless in his devotion to his work than she, Clara is a profoundly poignant figure. And Steichen is no villain. Enriching her intensely psychological tale with cameos of Auguste Rodin and others. Mitchell evokes the spell of creativity and the pain of rupture when following one’s vision severely complicates relationships.

And W. W. Norton’s site has this to say:

An absorbing debut novel about the photograher Edward Steichen’s wartime return to France and his reckoning with his painful past…

Told with the elegance of Michael Cunningham’s The Hours and the historical rendering of Colm Tóibín’s The Master, The Last Summer of the World captures the life and heart of a great photographer and of a world beset by war.

Congratulations to Emily from all at 3QD, (and also for her engagement to former 3QD editor, and current occasional contributor, J. M. Tyree)!

Buy the novel here.

Vaughan Bell at Mind Hacks:

Dr Brad Pasanek is a literature researcher at the University of Southern California who has created a database of metaphors of the mind used in 18th century English literature.

It allows you to search by everything from standard keywords to the politics of the author and has over 8,000 entries.

As illustrated by Douwe Draaisma’s excellent book Metaphors of Memory, our scientific understanding of the mind often uses metaphors of the latest technological developments.

It’s no accident that we now tend to understand the mind in computational terms, as an information processing system, whereas in past centuries it was thought to operate on the principles of pressures, fluids and vapours.

More here.  [Thanks to Ian McMeans.]

I count at least seven great Jewish Diasporas: Babylon-Persia; Hellenistic Alexandria; Muslim and Christian Spain, including Provence-Catalonia; Renaissance Italy; Eastern Europe– Russia; Austria-Hungary together with Germany; the United States. Peter Cole’s The Dream of the Poem devotes itself to the crown of Jewry’s literary achievement in Muslim and Christian Spain: the blooming of a Hebrew poetry that, at the very best, could rival the magnificences of Scripture such as “Song of the Red Sea” (Exodus 15:1b–18), the “War Song of Deborah and Barak” (Judges 5:1–31), and “David’s Lamentation over Saul and Jonathan” (2 Samuel 1:19–27).

more from the NYRB here.

Dear Editor:

I read with particular delight your April feature on monkeys, a topic for which I must confess I have an inexhaustible enthusiasm. The story’s illustrations were both whimsical and touching. (I especially enjoyed one monkey’s difficulty with a party hat!) Please keep the monkey stories coming!

Mackenzie Stephenson
Age 18 months
Toledo, Ohio
– – – –
Dear Editor:

Maybe it’s just these postmodern times, but I finished your April story on gardens with a painful sense of reader’s whiplash. Was it fiction or nonfiction? Your table of contents and editor’s note did little to resolve this question, and the story itself was frustratingly self-obfuscating. One moment the reader is getting helpful advice on seed planting and the next a young boy is speaking with a bunny that’s wearing an ascot. Please don’t throw us so violently down the rabbit hole (pun intended!) again.

Kevin Oberlin
Age 11 months
Missoula, Montana

more from McSweeney’s here.

By the time I arrived in Chicago, my vocation had shifted from fiction to poetry. If I am not mistaken, I was the only one of Leo Strauss’s long-term students who came to him from poetry. I was also virtually uninterested at the time in politics, unlike the majority of Strauss’s students. Instead, I was an avowed meta-physician, who had elaborated a philosophical position partly influenced by T. S. Eliot, one of whose main tenets was that philosophy and poetry are two different languages about the same world. In addition to these intellectual propensities, which most of Strauss’s students regarded as deficiencies, I was undisciplined in the academic sense and spent most of my time writing poetry, with some professional success and with reasonable hopes for future progress. These hopes were sustained by Hayden Carruth, who was then the editor of Poetry Magazine, and Henry Rago, who was about to assume that position, but also by Allen Tate, who taught in the College for a year.

more from Daedalus Magazine (via bookforum) here.

From Seed:

TAIPUSI, China (AFP)—Officials in Inner Mongolia say they have established a living barrier of trees, grass and shrubs wide enough to hold back the Gobi desert and to curb the sandstorms blowing over northeast Asia and hitting the United States.

Taipusi, one of Inner Mongolia’s banners or counties, is at the centre of a project to plant a so-called Green Wall of China, designed to act as a buffer between the expanding desert and Beijing, just 200 kilometres (120 miles) to the south.

Like the original Great Wall, the green wall straddles a patchwork of counties in several northern provinces including arid Hebei and Shanxi.

But unlike the crumbling stone structure, which failed to keep out invading nomads from the north, officials say they believe the new wall will work.

More here.

From Ego Magazine:

Konya, Turkey, November 1244
Face to face stood two strangers, Maulana Jalal al-Din Muhammad Balkhi (Rumi) and Shams al-Din of Tabriz; Rumi, a young demure scholar and Shams, a spiritual wayfarer with a penchant for the uncertain. By the young age of forty, Rumi was a brilliant scholar. Shams, at sixty, was a free-spirited wanderer. The transformation was instant. The sheer opposition of their innate temperament may have been the flicker that caught the coal. By some unverifiable accounts, Shams had initially noticed Rumi in Syria when the latter was 21 years old but had deemed the scholar not yet disposed for their partnership and that he chose to wait for 16 years before approaching him again.

On the streets of Konyathat night, Rumi was on his path home with he came across the strange and hypnotic Shams. The latter, without any introduction, asked him pointed philosophical questions intended to fluster Rumi’s concepts of enlightenment. While Rumi responded, mustering the collective strength and wit of his years of devotion to religion and jurisprudence; the flicker in Shams’ words, his speech, mannerism and conduct compelled Rumi to explore further by inviting the wanderer along and into his home. From that day forward, Shams possessed him. Shams grasped Rumi’s understanding of religion and infused it with a love and devotion that elevated him from scholar to philosopher; He went into seclusion with the stranger, leaving aside all that composed his life – family, students, and disciples. This detachment lasted for three months and inspired him for a lifetime. His heart engulfed his systematic, controlled mind with the message of humanity and oneness with God, a result of his pointed discourses. Rumi’s professorial sermons were replaced with ecstatic soliloquies of God, love and humanity.

More here.

Britta Erickson in The Atlantic:

Contemporary Chinese art is attracting widespread international interest, thanks to the extraordinary prices being paid at auction. Last November, in Hong Kong, Zhang Xiaogang’s Tiananmen Square (1993) sold for $2.3 million, and Liu Xiaodong’s Three Gorges: Newly Displaced Population (2004) sold for more than $2.7 million.

The headline-grabbing sales have been dominated by a handful of Beijing-based painters whose works have a signature look easily recognizable as Chinese. Museums worldwide, though, are beginning to take a much broader interest in the Chinese art scene, exhibiting artists working in a variety of media, from ink painting and sculpture to installations and performance art. Major solo exhibitions—such as those of Huang Yong Ping at Minnesota’s Walker Art Center, Cai Guo-Qiang at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, Zhou Tiehai at Tokyo’s Hara Museum of Contemporary Art, and Yang Fudong at the Kunsthalle Vienna—show an increasing appreciation of the breadth of the work being created in China and provide evidence of the rapid integration of Chinese artists into the international art arena.

More here.

From BBC News:

Dr Craig Venter, the man who led the private sector effort to sequence the human genome, has been working for years to create a man-made organism. But constructing a primitive microbe from a kit of genes is a daunting task. Dr Venter says, eventually, these life forms could be designed to make biofuels and absorb greenhouse gases. The publication of the patent application has angered some environmentalists.

The J Craig Venter Institute’s US patent application claims exclusive ownership of a set of essential genes and a synthetic “free-living organism that can grow and replicate” made using those genes. Dr Venter’s team intends to construct an organism with a “minimal genome” that can then be inserted into the shell of a bacterium. By removing genes, one by one, from a bacterium called Mycoplasma genitalium they identified the minimum number of genes required for this particular organism to replicate, or reproduce, in its controlled environment. They have been able to remove 101 of its 482 genes without killing the bacterium, meaning that 381 were required for replication. But generating a man-made living organism from the bottom up requires much more than just its minimal genome. For example, in order to get the genes to do something, there have to be chemicals to translate the genes into messenger RNA and proteins.

More here.

From my friend Kent Puckett and Derek Nystrom’s conversations with Richard Rorty, Against Bosses, Against Oligarchies (www.prickly-paradigm.com/paradigm3.pdf ):

Q: However, many suggest that your work has shaken the dominance of analytic philosophy. Berel Lang wrote the following in 1990 about both your role as president of the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association during its 1979 convention, as well as the influence of your Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, published in that same year: “It may be too much or even yet too early to claim that the landscape of American philosophy, institutionally but to an extent also substantively, would not be the same after the events of 1979; as with most stirrings in the history of ideas, Rorty’s revisionism was undoubtedly symptomatic as well as causal. But there is no question that in the decade between 1979 and 1989 significant changes occurred in the profession of American philosophy—and that Rorty was and remains a central figure in this process.”

RR: I think that’s wrong. No big changes occurred, and I was never a central figure. 1979 looks big to Berel because the unreconstructed Yalies, the ones who hadn’t retooled themselves, were the center of the so-called pluralist movement. Their faction, made up of everybody in American philosophy who wasn’t analytic, got a majority for their candidate for president of the Eastern Division of the APA. My sympathies were with him because he was the underdog, and the analytic establishment was being very arrogant. I was president that year, and I made a crucial parliamentary ruling in his favor. I’ve never been forgiven by the analytic philosophers for that. I’ve also never been liked or trusted by the pluralists. I managed to fall neatly between two stools.

In The Observer:

Fuelled by the postwar economic crises that have ravaged this stretch of west Africa, a lucrative trade in young players is on the rise. Children who have not even finished primary education are being scouted by the major clubs from France, Belgium, Morocco and Tunisia.

An investigation by The Observer in Ivory Coast last week found that Lebanese businessmen in Abidjan, an entrepreneurial community once preoccupied with diamond and timber smuggling, are turning their attention to football, establishing illegal training schools across the country in an attempt to farm the best talent out to some of the Middle East and Europe’s largest clubs.

[H/t: Alex Cooley]

Sad news: Richard Rorty is dead:

Richard Rorty, the leading American philosopher and heir to the pragmatist tradition, passed away on Friday, June 8.

He was Professor of Comparative Literature emeritus at Stanford University. In April the American Philosophical Society awarded him the Thomas Jefferson Medal. The prize citation reads: “In recognition of his influential and distinctively American contribution to philosophy and, more widely, to humanistic studies. His work redefined knowledge ‘as a matter of conversation and of social practice, rather than as an attempt to mirror nature’ and thus redefined philosophy itself as an unending, democratically disciplined, social and cultural activity of inquiry, reflection, and exchange, rather than an activity governed and validated by the concept of objective, extramental truth.”

[H/t: Asad Raza]

From The New Yorker:

Just about every biography—and this includes the two latest entries—begins with a description of Clinton’s formative years: her middle-class childhood in Park Ridge, Illinois; her stint as a Goldwater Girl in high school; her arrival, in thick glasses and bell-bottoms, at Wellesley College. Most then rush through her years at Yale Law School, a romantic interlude whose unromantic climax is seventeen years in Arkansas. There follows a discussion of the 1992 campaign, Hillary’s critical role in saving Bill from Gennifer Flowers, and the requisite reflection on the complex nature of their marriage. Sympathetic and unsympathetic biographers alike tend to tell Clinton’s more recent history as a sequence of spectacular humiliations—first Gennifer, then health care, then Monica—followed by even more spectacular recoveries: an office in the West Wing, a seat in the United States Senate, a shot at the Presidency. Along the way, they offer some never before disclosed documents or factoids. As the end approaches, they try to come up with an account of what matters to Hillary and what doesn’t—an explanation of who she truly is. Then, in the very last pages, they acknowledge that the effort probably hasn’t quite succeeded and that the reader is still feeling at sea. As the historian Gil Troy observes in his 2006 biography, “Hillary Rodham Clinton: Polarizing First Lady,” the “literature regarding Hillary Rodham Clinton is vast but unsatisfying.” Or, as Gerth and Van Natta put it at the close of their book, “So, who is the real Hillary?” So many pages, so little progress.

More here.

Thousands of apocryphal tales about Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band have been told and retold in the 40 years since the record’s release, but the loveliest is a true one. Immediately following the completion of Sgt. Pepper’s in the wee hours of April 21, 1967, the Beatles decamped from Abbey Road Studios to Mama Cass’ apartment in Chelsea, where they flung open the windows and blasted an acetate of the album into the London morning at top volume. In the surrounding buildings, windows slowly rose in reply, and neighbors leaned out to listen to the Beatles’ newest songs. It’s a delightful image, a metaphor for the flood of joy and wonderment that the four Liverpudlians loosed on the world, and on England in particular—the windows, the minds, that were nudged open by the Beatles’ sonically questing, love-affirming, sad, funny, irrepressibly tuneful music.

more from Slate here.

From MSNBC:

Chimpanzees readily learn and share techniques on how to fiddle with gadgets, new research shows, the best evidence yet that our closest living relatives pass on customs and culture just as humans do. In the wild, chimpanzee troops often are distinct from one another, possessing collections of up to 20 traditions or customary behaviors that altogether seem to form unique cultures. While observing chimpanzees, evolutionary psychologist Antoine Spiteri at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland wanted to help settle the question of whether or not the apes learned such practices by watching others like humans do, as opposed to simply knowing how to perform such behaviors innately.

Spiteri and his colleagues investigated six groups of chimpanzees, each with eight to 11 apes, living in captivity in Bastrop, Texas. The researchers taught a lone chimpanzee from one group one technique for obtaining food from a complex gadget, such as stabbing food with a tool. They next taught one chimp from another group a different technique for extracting food from the same gadget, such as pushing it out down a ramp. Over time, the researchers found each technique for tool use and food extraction spread within each group. In essence, these groups displayed their own unique culture and local traditions.

More here.

A good deal of truth is contained in Richard Rorty’s comment that, in the Middle Ages, God was god; that in the Age of Enlightenment and modernity, reason became god; and that today, in the postmodern age, there is no God. The idol or the god of reason has been shattered. Today, the beloved notion of “rationality”, once one of the most lofty and sacred of terms, conveys little more than a suspect, ambiguous, and modest meaning. Aristotelian reason, Cartesian reason, Kantian reason, Hegelian reason, religious reason, historical reason, dialectical reason, theoretical reason, practical reason, and all the other varieties of reason, have smashed the mirror into a thousand pieces, so as to make it impossible to see any whole and undistorted image reflected in it.

Today when someone speaks of reason, they are referring either to the logical methods of deductive and inductive reasoning, proof and refutation, and so on, or to the products of reason, including philosophy, language, morality, science, and the like. Since these products are all fluid and mutable, it is considered axiomatic in our times that reason changes (or evolves and is infinitely perfectible).

more from Eurozine here.

Larky, fitfully brilliant, as profane as they are aphoristic, Leonard Michaels’s stories stand alongside those of his best Jewish contemporaries — Grace Paley and Philip Roth. Like theirs, Michaels’s vernacular achieves the level of song. And yet, though much celebrated during his lifetime — Michaels died at 70 in 2003 — his sexually kinetic work is little read today. But perhaps now it will be, with the republication of his work in two new volumes that should bring Michaels to a new generation of readers and remind us of his lasting achievement. “The Collected Stories” includes the full contents of his acclaimed first two volumes, “Going Places” (1969) and “I Would Have Saved Them if I Could” (1975), as well as selections from his later writing, including all the existing Nachman stories. “Sylvia” is a fictionalized memoir, first published in 1992, about Michaels’s first wife, Sylvia Bloch, who committed suicide.

more from the NY Times Book Review here.

From wbur.org:

The body of a dancer is celebrated as physical perfection on stage. Long, muscular limbs, executing an almost super-human range of motion help define this form of expression.

Lisa Bufano, a performance artist from Allston (Mass), is challenging that preconception. Bufano is a bilateral below knee and finger amputee, is winning rave reviews in the dance world …

More here.

Sophie Ratcliffe at TLS:

Haruki Murakami: AFTER DARK
Translated by Jay Rubin

We meet the heroine of After Dark in a late-night diner, somewhere in a large Japanese city. The diner is described first. The “unremarkable but adequate lighting”, the “expressionless decor and tableware”, the “innocuous background music at low volume”:
“Everything about the restaurant is anonymous and interchangeable. And almost every seat is filled.
      After a quick survey of the interior, our eyes come to rest on a girl sitting by the front window. Why her? Why not someone else? Hard to say. But, for some reason, she attracts our attention – very naturally. She sits at a four-person table, reading a book. Hooded gray parka, blue jeans, yellow sneakers faded from repeated washing . . . . Little makeup, no jewellery, small, slender face . . . . Every now and then, an earnest wrinkle forms between her brows.”

Gradually, more details about the girl’s late-night vigil are revealed. Her name is Mari, she is in her first year at college specializing in Chinese, and there is trouble at home. With no warning, her elder sister has dropped out of normal existence. Two months earlier, the beautiful Eri declared that she was “going to go to sleep for a while”, and has not woken up.

More here.

An interview with Murakami here.