by Claire Chambers

Rebecca F. Kuang’s new novel Yellowface, a hilarious and haunting satire about the publishing industry, is proving a literary fiction bestseller this summer. However, it is her previous book Babel, or the Necessity of Violence that interests me here. Whereas Yellowface concerns contemporary America, Babel is a capacious piece of speculative fiction mostly set in Oxford during the 1830s. It was published in the Covid-19 pandemic under the young author’s abbreviated first name, and was a surprise hit due in part to its popularity on BookTok. As I will discuss, the novel deals with issues of language, translation, and colonialism in a startlingly original way.

Protagonist Robin Swift had been born in Canton and given a Chinese name that is never disclosed. After his mother’s death in the so-called Asiatic Cholera pandemic of the late 1820s, a professor called Richard Lovell becomes his guardian for reasons initially unknown. Lovell allows the boy to choose his own name (he decides on ‘Robin’ for the bird, and ‘Swift’ from Gulliver’s Travels) before bringing him to England.

Lovell prepares Robin for admission at the prestigious Royal Institute of Translation at Oxford, known to students as Babel. Compared with the classist and white supremacist patriarchy of the rest of Oxford University in that period at least, Babel is multilingual, multicultural, and even admits girls. Here Robin makes three friends: Ramy from Calcutta, Haitian Victoire, and the English rose Letty. In the institute’s intensive language programme, the teenagers’ friendship too quickly becomes intense. Ramy, Victoire, and Robin still feel a complex loyalty to the (quasi-)colonized homelands they had to leave behind. Cracks start to emerge in their relationship with Letty, who holds sympathy for the British civilizing mission. Read more »

by Ed Simon

I am condemned to be free. —Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness

Well, I wish I could be like a bird in the sky,
how sweet it would be if I found I could fly,
Oh, I’d soar to the sun and look down at the sea,
and then I’d sing ’cause I’d know, yeah,
I’d know how it feels
I’d know how it feels to be free. —Nina Simone, “I Wish I Knew How to be Free”

First mixing the grounds of red and yellow ocher with water so as to make a viscus, sticky gum which she puts between her cheek and whatever teeth she may have had, the woman placed her rough, calloused, weather-beaten, sun-chapped hand against the nubbly surface of the limestone cave’s wall, and then perhaps using a hollow-reed picked from the silty banks of the Rammang-rammang River she would blow that inky substance through her straw, leaving the shadow of a perfect outline. This happened around forty thousand years ago and her hand is still there. A little over two dozen of these tracings in white and red are all over the cave wall. What she looked like, where she was born, whether she had a partner or children, what gods she prayed to and what she requested will forever be unknown, but her fingers are slim and tapered and impossible to distinguish from those of any modern human. “It may seem something of a gamble to try to get close to the thought processes that guided these people,” writes archeologist Jean Clottes in What is Paleolithic Art?: Cave Paintings and the Dawn of Human Creativity. “They are so remote from us.” Today a ladder must be pushed against the surface of the cave’s exterior, which appears as if a dark mouth over the humid, muddy Indonesian rice fields of South Sulawesi Island, so as to climb inside and examine her compositions, but during the Neolithic perhaps they simply cleaved alongside the rock face with their hands and feet. Several other paintings are in the complex; among the earliest figurative compositions ever rendered, some of the sleek, aquiline, red hog deer, others of chimerical therianthropes that are part human and part animal. Beautiful, obviously, and evocative, enigmatic, enchanting, but those handprints are mysterious and moving in a different way, a tangible statement of identity, of a woman who despite the enormity of all of that which we can never understand about her, still made this piece forty millennia ago that let us know she was here, that she lived. Read more »

My wife and her mother walking in the mountains near Meransen, South Tyrol.

by Ethan Seavey

“Man is born free and everywhere he is in chains.” —Jean-Jacques Rousseau (some guy who wound up as the father of French philosophy)

How much you can divide this sentence into similarly incorrect phrases?

[Man is born free and everywhere he is.] “Everywhere” is incorrect because the idea of a man is extremely limited to the societal sphere in which he lives. The American white man is gendered so differently from the French white man. The American white man is also different from his neighbor who is Black, his neighbor who is gay, and his neighbor who is white but born into poverty. They are all Men and they experience that differently. Any attempt to define what a man is by social attributes alone is futile because it will always exclude people who identify as men.

[Man is born free] is incorrect because they are subjected to forces more powerful than them which force them into labor and strip freedoms.

[Man is born] is incorrect because Man is made. Consider: a baby is born into a world. A doctor inspects the baby’s genitalia. The doctor decides which sex the baby will be labeled. In some cases, the doctor will modify the baby’s body to ensure that they will fit into one of two options. Then the baby is not a baby. He is a baby boy; she is a baby girl. In that order. He is a To-Be-Man; she is a To-Be-Woman. The troubling part is that every person is labeled a To-Be-Something before they have the opportunity to decide what they are, or what that even means for them.

The position of being a Young Man or a Young Woman may be the first time that the person has the opportunity for choice. With the independence to explore their connection to their gender for the first time, it can be exciting. For cisgender, heterosexual people, it’s a euphoric moment of being recognized as you truly want to be.

For queer people, this euphoria does not come with being recognized as a Man or Woman. The very opposite is true, leading to what I’d call Gender Insecurity. In my own experience, I found that Gender Insecurity transformed into two different manifestations, fighting within myself. Read more »

by David J. Lobina

It is often stated that natural language is both ambiguous and inexplicit to be the medium of thought – to be the medium in which we think, as opposed to the conceptual language of thought I have gone on about for some time here at 3 Quarks Daily. But what do we mean when we say that language is ambiguous and inexplicit?

In the case of ambiguity, there are two relevant cases: lexical ambiguity, where a word may mean different things in different contexts (think of the word bank and all the things it can refer to); and structural ambiguity, as in the sentence below, which can receive different interpretations depending on what part of the sentence the phrase in Paris actually modifies.

The author of Stephen Hero decided to write Finnegans Wake in Paris.

That is, did the decision to write Finnegans Wake take place while the noted author was in Paris, or did the author of Stephen Hero decide that Paris would be a suitable place in which to carry out the foreseen writing? Or to put it in more linguistic terms: does the prepositional phrase in Paris modify the overall phrase decided to write Finnegans Wake or just the internal and thereby shorter phrase to write Finnegans Wake? Given the differing interpretations, such a sentence couldn’t possibly constitute an object of thought, for there is no such thing as an ambiguous thought. How could a person even have an ambiguous thought? Read more »

James Barnor. Portrait, Accra, ca 1954.

More here, here, and current show here.

Thanks Aruna!

by Oliver Waters

Panic about runaway artificial super-intelligence spiked recently, with doomsayers like Eliezer Yudkowsy prophesising that, if current progress continues, literally everyone on Earth will die.

In a way, he’s right. Humanity will probably die out as technology progresses, but not quite in the depressing way he imagines. ‘Humanity’ after all, refers to two distinct things. The first is our biological species – homo sapiens. The second is our collective cultural existence – the beliefs, attitudes, and creations that make us truly who we are. Our biology is merely a platform for our humanities to dance upon, and it is a platform that transhumanists wish to eventually supersede.

If all goes well, we will design and build better bodies and neural systems that more seamlessly integrate with our information technologies. On this trajectory, there will be no grand dichotomy between humans and ‘Artificial General Intelligences’. All persons, whether descended from apes or designed in a lab, will be constantly upgrading their cognitive systems to be ever wiser and sturdier.

The first big step on this journey will involve scanning your brain for all relevant neural information, which would then be loaded into a synthetic brain, attached to a comfortable artificial body. Science fiction has already imagined the countless benefits of existing in such a digital, computational brain. Practical immortality is at the top of the list, given you can ‘download’ your backed-up state of mind into a new body if you happen to be hit by a train or are notoriously assassinated. Read more »

by Nate Sheff

Not long ago, I went to the Yale University Art Gallery and saw their collection of Egyptian art. Seeing the dates on some of the pieces, it occurred to me that I had never really considered just how old Egyptian civilization is. I looked up some historical events to get perspective, and learned that I am closer in time to the assassination of Julius Caesar (44 BCE, which is 2,066 years ago) than Julius Caesar was to the construction of the Great Pyramid of Giza (circa 2500 BCE, over 2,400 years before Caesar’s death). Caesar’s death is ancient history, and the building of the Great Pyramid is also ancient history, but – for the sake of perspective here – the Great Pyramid’s construction was also ancient for Julius Caesar. That’s how old Egyptian civilization is.

Four-and-a-half millennia is a long time on a human timescale, but not all timescales are human. A core sample from Methuselah, a bristlecone pine living – alive – in the White Mountains of California, shows the tree to be about 4,800-years-old. By the time they started building the Great Pyramid, Methuselah had already spent a couple centuries photosynthesizing on a mountainside, adding rings but not counting them.

Methuselah is the oldest known non-clonal tree. When we consider trees that can reproduce asexually, say, by growing new individuals from existing root systems, we find organisms like Pando, a colony of genetically-identical quaking aspens in Utah, estimated to be about 15,000-years-old. Pando had been alive for several thousand years before Göbekli Tepe, the site of the earliest known megaliths, appeared in Anatolia.

Think of how many generations of birds might have started their lives in Pando’s branches by then. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Varun Gauri

When Yiyun Li took questions about her new novel, The Book of Goose, at my local bookstore, someone said her new novel felt awfully dark. (I don’t remember the precise wording, though Yiyun might, as she sometimes offers people she has met briefly “a detailed account” of their encounter “out of mere mischief.”) Yiyun acknowledged the darkness, then offered an explanation — she was once a propagandist for the Chinese government, she was good at it, but now she hates propaganda, especially propaganda for life. 

There was an audible gasp in the audience, then silence. I suspect many were asking themselves if they could manage without propaganda for life. In my case, I felt called out. What are A Christmas Carol, one of my favorite books, and the movie It’s a Wonderful Life, another favorite, but propaganda for life?

The Book of Goose is the story of two French farm girls, Agnès and Fabienne. Fabienne’s older sister died in childbirth, her father is a drunk, and her mother has passed away, meaning Fabienne has to tend the farm rather than attend school. Agnès’ older brother was badly wounded in the war, her sisters have gone and married, and her parents are narrow-minded and conventional. The girls, poor and lonely, already know the world is “full of nonsense.”  Read more »

by Ed Simon

What then is time? If no one asks me, I know what it is.
If I wish to explain it to him who asks, I do not know. —Augustine, Confessions (397)

Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once. —Richard Cummings, The Girl in the Golden Atom (1922)

Twenty-six years ago, on a late-afternoon, late-summer sojourn down Liverpool’s Bold Street, a High Street of dark pubs and record stores, Donner kebab counters and chip shops, Frank accidentally walked into 1965. On his idyl perambulations to meet up with his wife at Waterstone’s, where she was grabbing a copy of Trainspotting, and Frank noticed a different slant of light, an alteration in the atmosphere, a variation in the sounds from the street, a drop in temperature. The summer odor of warm beer and fetid air replaced with the crispness of Christmas time. Approaching the bookstore, the Cranberries blaring on the music system, and mid-tune it’s replaced with a tinny radio playing a Herman’s Hermits number. Bold Street’s pedestrians were no longer wearing Oasis and Blur t-shirts, now they were men in boating jackets and mop tops, women in Halston dresses and pixie cuts. The road no longer paved, but cobblestoned. Frank noted that the Waterstone’s façade was now of a shop named “Cripps,” a woman’s clothing store that had been on this spot but closed decades before. Just as he crossed the threshold, and Cripps was abruptly transformed back into a bookstore. Misapprehension, misconception, misinterpretation? Hallucination or hoax? Vortex or ghosts? As paranormal writer Rodney Davies helpfully opines in Time Slips: Journeys into the Past and Future, “One theory state that past, present, and future are all one… But our limited consciousness can only experience time by being in what we know as ‘the present.’” Mayhap.

If you are the sort who absent-mindedly scrolls through accounts of the occult with dubious provenance, or as has spent innumerable hours listening to Art Bell’s Coast to Coast A.M., if you’ve ever heard of “John Titor” and wanted to believe, then you may already be familiar with Frank’s temporal flickering in the “Liverpool Time Slip.” Not the only such anomalies – there are accounts of tourists coming upon Marie Antoinette’s retinue while at Versailles and of guests in Cornish manor houses wandering into the seventeenth-century, backroad drivers in Arizona overtaken by futuristic vehicles and London streets destroyed by the Luftwaffe restored to pre-war completeness. Read more »

A stationary passenger train behind and between two cars of a moving cargo train, at the train station in Bozen, South Tyrol.

by Mike Bendzela

“What genre do you play in, Mike?”

“Old time.”

“That’s rather vague, isn’t it?”

[An actual conversation.]

Old time music (some write “old-time” or “oldtime”) is where my interests in rural American folk history, cultural evolution, and language-play come together to form a most satisfying way to lay waste to time. Yes, old time is a thing.

At the end of the last century, at the age of 39 and seemingly without conscious volition, I rented a violin. I thought I wanted to be a “bluegrass” player. I was so naive I had to ask the clerk at the music rental store, Is the fiddle the same as the violin?

The answer is, Yes, but no. Turns out, I wasn’t actually interested in playing no stinkin’ bluegrass violin. This requires some explanation.

The radio station at the local university where I work used to have a program called “Lost Highway,” which featured old country music: folk, old time, honky-tonk, all of which I thought of as “bluegrass.” Some of this bluegrass I liked; some of it I found extremely irritating. I had yet to learn the fine distinctions among genres. But some of this music was enchanting, haunting, primeval.

Then, in 2002, I swung by The Appalachian String Band Festival (“Clifftop”) at Camp Washington-Carver, in the West Virginia mountains, on the way back to Maine after a family reunion with some relatives in Kentucky. I tend toward social avoidance and usually don’t go to such places, but Clifftop turned out to be a road-to-Damascus moment for me: At last, I had found my genre—and, presumably, my people. When I expressed my amazement over lunch to an Asian-America fiddler and software developer sitting at a picnic table with me, he enthused, “Start listening to Bruce Greene!” I was on my way to learning a new language. The timing was perfect: my ambitions of being a fiction writer had quietly crashed, and I was seeking something redemptive to do. Finding old time was like being handed a loaf of crusty bread after a ten-year diet of wet sawdust. Read more »