Vivian Lam in LA Review of Books:
WHEN SUPERGIANT officially released Hades in September 2020, the state of the world wasn’t very far from the literal burning hellscape of the game. Zagreus, the discontented prince of the Underworld, seeks to run away from a home where he’s never felt he belonged — a quest that quickly proves futile, as he is killed over and over again and forced to restart where he began. In many respects, it’s no surprise that a game about repeatedly attempting to escape from a violent, labyrinthine hell from which there is no escape (as one fan noted) continues to strike a chord for many.
But the appeal of Hades lies less in its offer of escapist fantasy than in the way it forces players to confront everything they seek to escape in endless, recursive loops. And it is in the very act of repeated confrontation, the game argues, that survival in the absence of escape becomes possible.
In his Theory of the Novel, literary critic György Lukács attributes the genesis of the novel to the loss of the closed totality of the Homeric epic. He describes antiquity as an era where objective reality could be portrayed “as it is” because there was no disconnect between the self and the world. Divinity had left its fingerprints on every part of materiality, and total understanding of this immanence wasn’t necessary — just full acceptance.
More here.
Philip Andrews-Speed in Green:
Thomas B. Edsall Talks to Adam Shatz over at the LRB podcast (photo Hannah Beier/Alamy):
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There have always been two dominant styles in Cormac McCarthy’s prose—roughly, afflatus and deflatus, with not enough breathable oxygen between them. McCarthy in afflatus mode is magnificent, vatic, wasteful, hammy. The words stagger around their meanings, intoxicated by the grandiloquence of their gesturing: “God’s own mudlark trudging cloaked and muttering the barren selvage of some nameless desolation where the cold sidereal sea breaks and seethes and the storms howl in from out of that black and heaving alcahest.” McCarthy’s deflatus mode is a rival rhetoric of mute exhaustion, as if all words, hungover from the intoxication, can hold on only to habit and familiar things: “He made himself a sandwich and spread some mustard over it and he poured a glass of milk.” “He put his toothbrush back in his shavingkit and got a towel out of his bag and went down to the bathroom and showered in one of the steel stalls and shaved and brushed his teeth and came back and put on a fresh shirt.”
It’s time for our roundup of the biggest Pinocchios of the year.
It used to be that, when you died, what you wanted was an obituary in a good newspaper, not that you’d be around to savor it. Since the introduction of the smartphone, the stakes have been raised. “I got a breaking news alert when I croaked,” some overachiever has surely bragged in the great beyond. “How about you?”
Gilliam’s story is the all-too-familiar one of a Black artist only receiving critical acclaim and attention much later in his career. Although many were aware of his genius well before he came into the limelight, he simply was not given his due as one of the best abstractionists of his generation. I fell in love with his work early on, like many of us, through research and books. His drapery paintings – massive sculptural canvases, stained with whisps of colour and hung in various clumps sans stretcher – singlehandedly revitalized my passion for the medium. He was an expert colourist and a brilliant manipulator of materials. In so many ways, he taught me through his work what it meant to be a true master painter. Recently, I was lucky enough to see two great, posthumous shows of Gilliam’s work: ‘White and Black Paintings: 1975–77’ at David Kordansky in Los Angeles and ‘Late Paintings’ at Pace London. These two exhibitions served as effective bookends to Gilliam’s illustrious career. Many of the works in both shows looked simultaneously contemporary and historical: in the 1960s and ’70s, he experimented with bevelling his canvases, a technique he would return to much later.
Ghost stories continue to be one of the most popular types of short stories, especially since the subgenre first appeared in early gothic novels such as Matthew Lewis’s The Monk (i.e., the ghost story of the Bleeding Nun) and Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. I became enthralled with ghost stories after I read Rhoda Broughton’s Twilight Stories (1873) a few years ago. In particular, Broughton’s “Behold, It Was a Dream!” feels quite modern in its depiction of xenophobia, especially with the story being written over 100 years ago. Ever since reading this collection, I’ve been an avid ghost story collector, and, needless to say, I was eager to get my hands on not just one but two new collections of supernatural tales and ghost stories: Even in the Grave and Other Terrors: An Inclusive Anthology. Published in July 2022, both anthologies illustrate that the ghost story is alive and well despite being a classic genre.
In Ghana, a nation of 32 million people, there are only 62 psychiatrists.
Elaborately engineered immune cells can not only recognize cancer cells, but also evade defences that tumours use to fend off attacks, researchers have found. Two studies published today in Science
Despite being the culmination of a century-long dream, no better word describes the much-discussed output of OpenAI’s ChatGPT than the colloquial “mid.”
Our goal isn’t to try convince you to take one side over the other in a debate about optimism and pessimism – the world is far too muddled for that. Instead, it’s to remind you that away from the headlines, millions of people from every corner of the planet did their best to solve the problems that could be solved, and stayed open-eyed and open-hearted even in the most difficult of circumstances.
IT’S A FUNNY THING TO LEARN