March 16, 2011 At Work The Spring Issue: Peter Cole By Robyn Creswell The spring issue of The Paris Review includes five poems of Kabbalah translated from Hebrew by Peter Cole. Cole has translated several volumes of poetry, including The Dream of the Poem: Hebrew Poetry from Muslim and Christian Spain, 950–1492 and Aharon Shabtai’s War & Love, Love & War: New and Selected Poems. His most recent book of poems is Things on Which I’ve Stumbled, and Sacred Trash: The Lost and Found World of the Cairo Geniza, a book of nonfiction written with his wife, Adina Hoffman, was just released by Schocken/Nextbook. I’ve never read poems quite like these—wild yet severe, also a little bit unearthly. Can you give some context for understanding them? What is their relation to Kabbalah? The anthology these poems are drawn from—The Poetry of Kabbalah: Mystical Verse from the Jewish Tradition, forthcoming from Yale—covers some fifteen hundred years, and the poems emerge from diverse varieties of Jewish mystical thought and practice: Palestine of Late Antiquity, the eleventh- and twelfth-century Jewish communities of Muslim Spain and medieval Germany, and, later on, Christian Spain, Ottoman Palestine, Yemen, North Africa, Italy, and Eastern Europe. By and large, Jewish mystics were preoccupied with other masochistic pleasures (rolling in nettles, fasting and wearing sackcloth, observing turbocharged versions of the traditional commandments, et cetera), so there isn’t a great deal of Kabbalistic poetry. But the best of it epitomizes an extraordinarily potent if lesser-known aspect of Judaism. That wild severity and otherworldliness you describe reflects the history of Jewish esotericism through the ages, some of which is in fact shockingly mythic, intricate, erotic, and often just plain weird. Read More
March 14, 2011 At Work Brian Christian on ‘The Most Human Human’ By Eric Chinski Photograph by Michael Langan. Brian Christian, who studied computer science, philosophy, and poetry, has just published his first book, The Most Human Human: What Talking with Computers Teaches Us About What It Means to Be Alive. Recently, he answered my questions about the Turing test, online romance, and conversation fillers. Your new book has an odd but intriguing title: The Most Human Human. Can you explain what it means? The Most Human Human is an award given out each year at the Loebner Prize, the artificial intelligence (AI) community’s most controversial and anticipated annual competition. The event is what’s called a Turing test, in which a panel of judges conducts a series of five-minute-long chat conversations over a computer with a series of real people and with a series of computer programs pretending to be people by mimicking human responses. The catch, of course, is that the judges don’t know at the start who’s who, and it’s their job in five minutes of conversation to try to find out. Each year, the program that does the best job of persuading the judges that it’s human wins the Most Human Computer award and a small research grant for its programmers. But there’s also an award, strangely enough, for the human who does the best job of swaying the judges: the Most Human Human award. British mathematician Alan Turing famously predicted in 1950 that computers would be passing the Turing test—that is, consistently fooling judges at least 30 percent of the time and as a result, generally considered to be intelligent in the human sense—by the year 2000. This prediction didn’t come to pass, but I was riveted to read that, in 2008, the computers came up shy of that mark by just a single vote. I decided to call up the test’s organizers and get involved in the 2009 contest as one of the human “confederates”—which meant I was both a part of the human “defense,” trying to prevent the machines from passing the test, and also vying with my fellow confederates for that intriguing Most Human Human award. The book tells the story of my attempt to prepare, as well as I could, for that role: What exactly does it mean to “act as human as possible” in a Turing test? And what does it mean in life? Read More
March 8, 2011 At Work Jacques d’Amboise on ‘I Was a Dancer’ By Yona Zeldis McDonough Jacques d’Amboise, born Joseph Jacques Ahearn in 1934, began his dance training at the age of seven with Madame Seda in Washington Heights. Within a year, he was hopping on the subway to the School of American Ballet, the feeder school for the fledging company started by George Balanchine and Lincoln Kirstein. By the age of fifteen, he had joined the New York City Ballet, and by seventeen, he had dropped out of high school and become a soloist. For the next three decades, d’Amboise partnered with some of the most exquisite ballerinas of the day, and as Balanchine’s protégé, he had numerous ballets made specifically for him. Critics hailed him as “the definitive Apollo,” a role that he claims changed his life. He was also known for his wildly exuberant screen presence, most notably as Ephraim in Seven Brides for Seven Brothers and the Starlight Carnival barker in Carousel. As his dancing career was winding down, d’Amboise embarked on a spectacular second act: founding the National Dance Institute in 1976, a program that brings ballet into public schools around the country through classes, residencies, and performances—all for free. His memoir, I Was a Dancer, published this month, recalls his seven decades of dance. Although d’Amboise says he is slowing down, the evidence suggests otherwise: as we sat over cups of café au lait in SoHo, he felt compelled to rise from the table to demonstrate a particular sequence of ballet steps. The other patrons were as surprised—and delighted—as I was. Where did your mother get the idea that you should study dance? She never finished elementary school, but at home, everybody read books. Especially French books: Victor Hugo, Maupassant, Dumas. She always dreamed that she would be an actress, in drama, and that educated her: she’d dance, recite poetry, use beautiful words, speak French, and act and sing. And her dream was that all her children would be brought up that way. And it came true! It did—for three of us. In the early days of New York City Ballet Society, we were all in. My sister stopped because she married the company doctor and she was quarter ballet girl. She had a minor solo once in a while but nothing really. I think I did my solo before I was seventeen and I was doing principal roles while I was still quarter ballet. And Freddie Ashton came to the U.S. and did a ballet for me, and then I did my first movie. I turned eighteen on the set. I just did what I wanted and had everything given to me. And in a way that was why I started National Dance Institute: I never had to audition for anything; I never had to pay for a dance class. Read More
March 2, 2011 At Work Adrienne Rich on ‘Tonight No Poetry Will Serve’ By Kate Waldman Photograph by Robert Giard. Adrienne Rich needs no introduction. One of the twentieth century’s most exhaustively celebrated poets and essayists, she counts among her many honors a National Book Award, a Book Critics Circle Award, and the Lannan Lifetime Achievement Award. Robert Hass has ascribed to her work the qualities of salt and darkness, praising its “relentless need to confront difficulty.” But Rich’s latest collection, Tonight No Poetry Will Serve, ranges from dismay to joy, the outraged to the erotic. Over e-mail, Rich shared her thoughts on poetry and power, the search for a more nuanced wartime aesthetic, and the meaning of the “woman citizen.” Let’s start with the title, Tonight No Poetry Will Serve. The book has an epigraph from Webster’s Dictionary: definitions of the verb “to serve.” It’s an interesting range of meanings, from the idea of obedient servitude to the authoritative (from law, the military, a prison sentence), to the meeting of another’s needs, to being of use. The title poem begins with an erotic moment registered in a world of torture and violence. It turns, midway, from the sensual and “poetic” to an official grammar, parsing violent policies as you might diagram a sentence in a classroom. The poem was inflected, you could say, by interviews I was hearing on Amy Goodman’s program, Democracy Now!—about Guantánamo, waterboarding, official U.S. denials of torture, the “renditioning” of presumed terrorists to countries where they would inevitably be tortured. The line “Tonight I think no poetry will serve” suggests that no poetry can serve to mitigate such acts, they nullify language itself. One begins to write of the sensual body, but other bodies “elsewhere” are terribly present. Read More
February 28, 2011 At Work Justin Taylor on ‘The Gospel of Anarchy’ By Natalie Jacoby The Gospel of Anarchy is the debut novel from Justin Taylor. The story follows a group of anarchist hippies living together in Fishgut, a house turned commune in the college town of Gainesville, Florida. Philosophizing on religion, freedom, and happiness, they await the return of their Anarchristian friend, Parker, whose left-behind journals have become their own gospel. I met with Taylor to talk about the book. The Gospel of Anarchy is your first novel. Did you encounter any challenges in the process of switching from the short story format? One of the hardest parts of writing a novel is figuring out the structure. Mine went through a lot of different versions. The “zero draft” was all in first person, told by David, and then it was all rewritten in third, but still just about him. I wanted to include the others’ perspectives, so I tried doing it in a first-person round, almost like Rashomon or something, which didn’t work either, and somehow or other I came around to what you see now. The way in which the topic of faith is discussed in the book reminds me of Flannery O’Connor. Was she on your mind in writing this story? Were their other authors that influenced your writing? Flannery O’Connor was definitely an influence, especially her “other” novel, The Violent Bear It Away, which I actually like much better than Wise Blood. Violent is very funny but very dark, and the stakes of the entire book are basically whether this idiot child should be baptized. For her this is a matter of life and death, and the baptism might actually be more important than death, and I love that. Another author I really love is DeLillo. You can end up in some pretty murky waters trying to do your own take on DeLillo, so hopefully the book steers clear of imitation, but he was a big influence and there are a couple DeLillo shout-outs in the book. The first comes early on, when a character named Thomas sarcastically quotes the opening of White Noise in conversation. Later on, a couple characters compile a zine based on their friend Parker’s journal, which itself is a jumble of uncited allusions, quotes, and references to all kinds of political and religious thinkers mixed with Parker’s original thoughts. But there’s a line slipped in there about how “our faith makes us crazy in the world.” That’s from the Moonie character in DeLillo’s Mao II. Read More
February 15, 2011 At Work Kevin Young on ‘Ardency’ By Elizabeth Hoover Photograph by Kate Tuttle. In Ardency, the poet Kevin Young chronicles the experiences of fifty-three Africans who mutinied aboard the Amistad slave ship in 1839. After killing two of their Spanish captors, they sailed up the coast of the United States, only to be intercepted by a naval brig and thrown in a Connecticut jail. Their case eventually made it to the Supreme Court, which affirmed the earlier court’s decision: because the international slave trade had been abolished, the men and women aboard the Amistad were not legally slaves and thus had been illegally captured. They were entitled to use force to secure their freedom. The Amistad mutiny would be one of the many events that gave the abolitionist movement traction leading up to the Civil War. In this book, Young conjures their voices in letters, poems, and songs, documenting their violent capture and eventual return to Africa in 1842. Young has tangled with the complexities of American history in his six previous collections, including For the Confederate Dead and Dear Darkness. He recently edited the anthology The Art of Losing: Poems of Grief and Healing and is finishing The Gray Album, a nonfiction work about music and history, forthcoming from Graywolf next year. You spent twenty years working on Ardency. What originally drew you to the story of the Amistad? I stumbled on letters the Amistad prisoners wrote from jail. I was struck by their poignancy and how the prisoners spoke in this new language of English. But I was struck by what the letters didn’t say, what was permitted of them to say, and, then, what they did mange to say because of or despite those limits. What was so great about working on this book was that no one knew about it. I didn’t know if I was ever going to do anything with it, but I knew that there was this story I wanted to learn more about. Also, I knew that I wanted to write in the voice of Cinque, who led the rebellion, but wasn’t ready to write in his voice yet. There are many strangely beautiful phrases in the letters—“be my dear benefactory,” “Cold catch us all the time,” “I am your perfect stranger”—that have the urgency of someone really trying to master the language. Master is an interesting verb. They had masters who bought them in Cuba and forged documents giving them new identities saying they were born in Cuba. Though he international slave trade was illegal, you could still purchase slaves who were born into slavery. So they were learning English to become free, but there is a sense in the letters that they are trying to free themselves from English. Read More