Jonathan Carroll’s Impossible Realism

Gary K. Wolfe at the LARB:

JONATHAN CARROLL’S The Crow’s Dinner, a 2017 collection of anecdotes, vignettes, and short essays (now republished in ebook form by JABberwocky Literary Agency, along with five other Carroll titles), offers a delightful and generous sampling of the American author’s thoughts about life, art, and living in his adopted hometown of Vienna, but it might seem a bit sparse when it comes to clues about the enigmas of his unique brand of fiction. There are some notable exceptions, though: one is a short piece titled “Impossible Realism,” a term he tells us “may sound like oxymoron” but “makes a great deal of sense when we permit ourselves to look beyond the quotidian and once again open up fully to wonder, like we used to as children.”

As a literary descriptor, “impossible realism” avoids the considerable baggage attached to “magic realism”—which has often been invoked to describe Carroll—as well as the more genre-oriented boxes of fantasy and horror, which Carroll has justifiably complained about, despite having won both the World Fantasy Award and the Bram Stoker Award (probably the most prestigious award for horror fiction).

more here.

Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.

Picture imperfect

Charles Piller in Science:

In 2016, when the U.S. Congress unleashed a flood of new funding for Alzheimer’s disease research, the National Institute on Aging (NIA) tapped veteran brain researcher Eliezer Masliah as a key leader for the effort. He took the helm at the agency’s Division of Neuroscience, whose budget—$2.6 billion in the last fiscal year—dwarfs the rest of NIA combined. As a leading federal ambassador to the research community and a chief adviser to NIA Director Richard Hodes, Masliah would gain tremendous influence over the study and treatment of neurological conditions in the United States and beyond. He saw the appointment as his career capstone. Masliah told the online discussion site Alzforum that “the golden era of Alzheimer’s research” was coming and he was eager to help NIA direct its bounty. “I am fully committed to this effort. It is a historical moment.”

Masliah appeared an ideal selection. The physician and neuropathologist conducted research at the University of California San Diego (UCSD) for decades, and his drive, curiosity, and productivity propelled him into the top ranks of scholars on Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease. His roughly 800 research papers, many on how those conditions damage synapses, the junctions between neurons, have made him one of the most cited scientists in his field. His work on topics including alpha-synuclein—a protein linked to both diseases—continues to influence basic and clinical science.

More here.

Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.

Thursday Poem

Buddha

I used to sit under trees and meditate
on the diamond bright silence of darkness
and the bright look of diamonds in space
and space that was stiff with lights
and diamonds shot through, and silence

And when a dog barked I took it for soundwaves
and cars passing too, and once I heard
a jet plane which I thought was a mosquito
in my heart, and once I saw salmon walls
of pink and roses, moving and ululating
with the drapish

Once I forgave dogs, and pitied men, sat
in the rain countin Juju beads, raindrops
are ecstacy, ecstacy is raindrops—birds
sleep when the trees are giving out light
in the night, when rabbits sleep too, and dogs

I had a path that I followed through piney woods
and a phosphorescent white hound-dog named Bob
who led me the way when the clouds covered
the stars, and then communicated to me
the sleepings of a loving dog enamoured
of God.

On Saturday mornings I was there, in the sun,
contemplating the blue-bright air, as eyes
of Lone Ranger penetrated the dust
of my canyon thoughts, and Indians
and children, and movie shows

Or Saturday morning in China when all is so fair
crystal imaginings of pristine lakes, talk
with rocks, walks with Chi-pack across
Mongolias and silent temple rocks in valleys
of boulder and tarn-washed clay,—shh—
sit and otay

and if men were dyin or sleepin in rooftops
beyond, or frogs croaked once or thrice
to indicate supreme mystical majesty, what’s
the diff? and I saw blue sky no different
from dead cat—and love and marriage

No different than mud—that’s blood—
and lighted clay too—illuminated intelligence
faces of angels everywhere, with Dostoyevsky’s
unease praying in their X-brow faces,
twisted and great,

And many a time the Buddha played a leaf
on me at midnight thinkin-time, to
remind me “This Thinking Has Stopped,’
which it had, because no thinking was there
but wasnt liquidly mysteriously brainly there

And finally I turned into a diamond stone
and sat rigid and golden, gold too—didn’t dare
breathe, to break up the diamond that cant
even cut into butter anyway, how brittle
the diamond, how quick returned thought—
impossible to exist
………… Buddha say:
………… ‘All’s possible’

by Jack Kerouac
from Poems All Sizes
City Light Books San Francisco, 1992

Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.

Robert Downey Jr. Is a Novelist With a Novel Muse in ‘McNeal’

Jesse Green in The New York Times:

Certainly Jacob McNeal, played by the formidable Robert Downey Jr., is more a data set than a character. A manly, hard-driving literary novelist of the old school, like Saul Bellow or Philip Roth, he is not at all the magnetic and personable man Akhtar describes in the script; rather, he is whiny, entitled and fatuous. (“At my simple best, I’m a poet,” he says.) About the only time he engages instead of repels is when, in the amusing opening scene, as his doctor (Ruthie Ann Miles) prepares to deliver bad news, he fails to get ChatGPT to tell him his chances of winning the Nobel Prize.

“I hope this was helpful,” the bot types.

“It was not, you soulless, silicon suck-up,” he replies.

We are meant to understand that McNeal is a man who wears his awfulness, in this case his vanity, as an adorable idiosyncrasy, as if it were a feathered hat. He flirts and philanders with equal obliviousness to moral implications. He aggressively asserts his anti-woke bona fides. While being interviewed by a New York Times journalist, who is Black, he asks if she was a “diversity hire.” And when she fails to take the bait, he adds, as a man of his sophistication would know enough not to, “Did I say something wrong?”

More here.

Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.

Wednesday, October 9, 2024

The bookies’ odds for tomorrow’s Nobel Prize in Literature

Emily Temple at Literary Hub:

The 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature will be announced this Thursday, October 10. Who will win? As ever, no one knows. But everyone likes to guess…and bet. And because money talks, the betting odds can tell you a lot. Or a little. Or, something, anyway!

To figure out where to put my (extremely metaphorical) money this year, I consulted Ladbrokes, the UK’s premiere (?) betting outlet, which offers an extensive list of favorites, including many old hats and a few new ones.

Can Xue tops the list for the second year in a row. Is this her year? (I wouldn’t be surprised—last year, I predicted that she would win in 2024.) Australian novelist Gerald Murnane is in second place. Is it his year? After all, last year he was third, and in second place was Jon Fosse, who won. So it only follows. Maybe, maybe. Murakami is hanging around as always; César Aira is in the mix; the Greek writer Ersi Sotiropoulos makes a surprise appearance. Margaret Atwood has rather come up in the world since last year, when her odds were 39/1. Robert Coover is on the list, though very sadly, now ineligible. J.K. Rowling is in the insult slot, which made me laugh.

More here.

Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.

Review of “The Third Realm” by Karl Ove Knausgård

Lara Feigel in The Guardian:

“Signs are taken for wonders,” TS Eliot’s speaker observes soberly in Gerontion. But what is the difference between a wonder and a sign – and which do we prefer? Such questions flow through Karl Ove Knausgård’s Morning Star series of novels, an ongoing effort to open fiction up into a kind of vast Book of Revelation in which visions of red deer, landlocked crabs and devils stream across a rural Norway populated by Knausgård’s familiar hotel bars and supermarkets.

In the first volume, 2021’s The Morning Star, a disparate group of Knausgårdian characters – a jaded academic with a manic-depressive wife, a doubting vicar with a jealous husband – found their lives illuminated and sent off kilter by a new, preternaturally bright star in the sky. The vicar buried a man she’d seen alive after his death; two characters shared a vision of a ghost. This was followed by The Wolves of Eternity, a tighter story where a funeral director with an unexpected zest for life meets his half-sister, watched over by that same potentially diabolical star, amid a series of disquisitions on resurrection. Both novels had flashes of brilliance, but were unable to find a satisfying structure to blend the everyday with the supernatural and philosophical.

The Third Realm is quite different, even though the characters come from the earlier novels. With breathtaking confidence, Knausgård mirrors The Morning Star, giving us other, richer perspectives on the material.

More here.

Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.

Google DeepMind boss, Demis Hassabis, wins Nobel for proteins breakthrough

Georgina Rannard at the BBC:

British computer scientist Professor Demis Hassabis has won a share of the Nobel Prize for Chemistry for “revolutionary” work on proteins, the building blocks of life.

Prof Hassabis, 48, co-founded the artificial intelligence (AI) company that became Google DeepMind.

Professor John Jumper, 39, who worked with Prof Hassabis on the breakthrough, shares the award along with US-based Professor David Baker, 60.

Proteins are the building blocks of life and are found in every cell in the human body.

Better understanding proteins has driven huge breakthroughs in medicine. It is used in solving antibiotic resistance and to image enzymes that can decompose plastics.

Prof Hassabis said it was the “honour of a lifetime” to receive the Nobel.

“I’ve dedicated my whole life to working on AI because I believe in its potential to change the world,” he said in a press conference on Wednesday.

More here.

Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.

China Builds A New Eurasia

Jacob Dreyer at Noema:

Over the past few years, the flimsy states and territories that cover the Eurasian continent as lightly as gauze have been getting pushed and pulled into a new way of being. In response to volatile oil prices, temperatures creeping ever higher, forests burning and deserts growing, China is reordering the internal logic of the supercontinent under the banner of a technological dream of endlessly renewable electricity.

The sources of this electricity, as if in fulfillment of an ancient pagan dream, are the rays of the sun, the breeze across the prairie and the cascades of mountain rivers. While new reservoirs of fossil fuels and seams of ores are being penetrated here too, two-thirds of all wind and solar projects that are currently under construction are located in China, and the country is expected to install more than half of the world’s total solar power in 2024 alone, both within and outside its borders. Across these huge distances and extreme temperatures — what the English geographer Halford Mackinder called the “Heartland” of the “World Island” — new towns are being built, even new capitals, all linked by lengths of glass and plastic wires to vast fields of solar panels and wind turbines and mega-dams.

more here.

Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.

Wednesday Poem

Carpe Diem

Night and day
seize the day, also the night —
a handful of water to grasp.
The moon shines off the mountain
snow where grizzlies look for a place
for the winter’s sleep and birth.
I just ate the year’s last tomato
in the year’s fatal whirl.
This is mid-October, apple time.
I picked them for years.
One Mcintosh yielded sixty bushels.
It was the birth of love that year.
Sometimes we live without noticing it.
Overtrying makes it harder.
I fell down through the tree grabbing
branches to slow the fall, got the afternoon off.
We drove her aqua Ford convertible into the country
with a sack of red apples. It was a perfect
day with her sun-brown legs and we threw ourselves
into the future together seizing the day.
Fifty years later we hold each other looking
out the windows at birds, making dinner,
a life to live day after day, a life of
dogs and children and the far wide country
out by rivers, rumpled by mountains.
So far the days keep coming.
Seize the day gently as if you loved her.

by Jim Harrison
from Dead Man’s Float.
Copper Canyon Press, 2016

Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.

A Small RNA with a Big Impact on Cell Aging

Kamal Nahas in The Scientist:

All cells in the body reach a point where they stop dividing, but some get there quicker under the influence of pressures, such as DNA damage or oxidative stress.1 Biologists have long studied how proteins hasten cell senescence in response to such signals but they know little about the role that RNAs play.2

Publishing in Cell, scientists zeroed in on an RNA that triggers cells to stop dividing by inhibiting the production of ribosomes.3 Beyond expanding what scientists know about the roles of this class of biomolecules in cell senescence, these findings could inform the design of novel treatments for ribosomal diseases. Ribosomes provide cells with the surplus of proteins needed to continue to divide, placing these protein factories as key players in controlling cell senescence. Researchers have shown that small nucleolar RNAs (snoRNAs) modify bases in ribosomal RNAs, but Joshua Mendell, a molecular biologist at the University of Texas Southwestern and study coauthor, wanted to know whether these tweaks can cause ribosomes to ramp down protein production and trigger cell senescence.

More here.

Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.

What Good Is Great Literature?

A O Scott in The New York Times:

On Thursday, the Swedish Academy will award the Nobel Prize in Literature, the pre-eminent — perhaps only — global arbiter of literary greatness.

What distinguishes the Nobel isn’t that it singles out the best new poems, novels, essays and plays — that kind of reader service is the job of the National Book Awards, the Booker, the Pulitzer and the dozens of other worthy prizes that crowd the calendar. The academy does not celebrate great books; it consecrates great writers, compiling not a canon but a pantheon, not a reading list but a roster of immortals.

It’s easy enough to second-guess the choices, to count the past winners who have fallen into obscurity (no disrespect to Salvatore Quasimodo) and list the non-winners who have stuck around for posterity (Vladimir Nabokov was totally robbed). Questioning the wisdom of the Nobel Committee is a cherished paraliterary ritual, along with guilt-buying the works of an author you’ve never heard of. (I swear I’ll get to Jon Fosse, as soon as I’m done with Herta Müller and Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio.) Mostly, though, the busy and distracted reading public is content to take the learned Swedes at their word, to balance skepticism and bewilderment — wait, who? — with a measure of relief. We can rest assured that, for one more year, an important cultural principle has been upheld.

But what purpose does the principle serve? What good is greatness?

More here.

Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.

Churchill’s Citadel: Chartwell and the Gatherings Before the Storm

Richard Vinen at Literary Review:

It was during the 1930s that Chartwell mattered most. Churchill was out of office. He had a flat in London but no official residence and, for much of the time, no particular reason to be in the capital. Chartwell was not, though, a retreat from the world. It was a kind of factory, filled with secretaries and research assistants who hammered Churchill’s literary and political productions into shape. It was also a meeting place – close enough to London for people to come down for lunch, dinner or an evening of conspiracy. It was, to a large extent, at Chartwell that Churchill plotted his political campaigns of the decade. Two of these were misguided. He sought to resist the limited reforms that the Baldwin government proposed to British rule in India and to defend Edward VIII during the crisis that sprang from the king’s insistence on marrying an American divorcée. Another campaign he led from there – against the appeasement of Nazi Germany and in favour of British rearmament – would, in retrospect, be seen as the most important in interwar British politics.

Churchill still had the best address book in Europe. Officials and ministers talked to him and sometimes provided him with confidential information.

more here.

Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.

Tuesday, October 8, 2024

Review of J.M. Coetzee’s new book, “The Pole”

Ellena Savage in the Sydney Review of Books:

In ‘As a Woman Grows Older’, the second story in J.M. Coetzee’s very funny 2023 book The Pole and Other Stories, Elizabeth Costello complains to her son John:

‘The word that comes back to me from all quarters is bleak. Her message to the world is unremittingly bleak. What does it mean, bleak? A word that belongs to a winter landscape has somehow become attached to me, like a little mongrel that trails behind, yapping, won’t be shaken off. I am dogged by it. It will follow me to the grave. It will stand at the lip of the grave, peering in and yapping bleak, bleak, bleak!’

When I told friends I was rereading Coetzee’s novels for a review of his new book, their responses fell into two categories. The first was a variation of ‘bleak!’, and the second was ‘I once thought about writing a PhD on him’ – another version of bleak. Only those in the second category admitted they sometimes found Coetzee ‘funny’, and even then, only some of them did. When I typed ‘bleak’ and ‘J. M. Coetzee’ into my search bar, the results confirmed the diagnosis: ‘Frighteningly bleak,’ says the New Statesman; his works ‘mirror the bleakness of the human condition’ – the New York Times. In The Guardian, Coetzee’s vision explores ‘the human condition with a bleak, dispassionate sympathy’. ‘I do have some difficulty with the bleak emotional weather of his autobiographical works,’ says the London Review of Books. Furthermore: ‘bleak’ (Salon); ‘bleak’ (British Council); ‘bleak’ (Prospect Magazine).

More here.

What AI images reveal about our world

Rachel Ossip in The Guardian:

When faced with a bit of downtime, many of my friends will turn to the same party game. It’s based on the surrealist game Exquisite Corpse, and involves translating brief written descriptions into rapidly made drawings and back again. One group calls it Telephone Pictionary; another refers to it as Writey-Drawey. The internet tells me it is also called Eat Poop You Cat, a sequence of words surely inspired by one of the game’s results.

As recently as three years ago, it was rare to encounter text-to-image or image-to-text mistranslations in daily life, which made the outrageous outcomes of the game feel especially novel. But we have since entered a new era of image-making. With the aid of AI image generators like Dall-E 3, Stable Diffusion and Midjourney, and the generative features integrated into Adobe’s Creative Cloud programs, you can now transform a sentence or phrase into a highly detailed image in mere seconds. Images, likewise, can be nearly instantly translated into descriptive text. Today, you can play Eat Poop You Cat alone in your room, cavorting with the algorithms.

More here.

Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.

How the US Lost the Solar Power Race to China

David Fickling at Bloomberg:

To make the solar cells that are projected to become the world’s biggest source of electricity by 2031, you first melt down sand until it looks like chunks of graphite. Next, you refine it until impurities have been reduced to just one atom out of every 100 million — a form of elemental silicon known as polysilicon. It’s so vital to the production of solar panels that it can be likened to crude oil’s role in making gasoline. The polysilicon is then drawn out into a vast crystal, resembling a Jeff Koons steel sculpture of a sausage, before being sliced into salami-thin wafers. These are then treated, printed with electrodes, and finally sandwiched between glass.

The basic process has changed little since the first cell was invented in 1954 by scientists at Bell Laboratories in New Jersey exploring whether silicon could be used to power computer processors. “It may mark the beginning of a new era,” The New York Times wrote at the time in a front-page article announcing the discovery, “leading eventually to the realization of one of mankind’s most cherished dreams — the harnessing of the almost limitless energy of the sun for the uses of civilization.”

The seven decades since tell the remarkable story of how America squandered its invention of solar photovoltaics, or PV, to the point where it will never recover.

More here.

Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.