March 5, 2018 The Moment The Moment of the Doorway By Amit Chaudhuri Christian Gottlieb Kratzenstein, Orpheus and Eurydice, 1806. My mother often told me how much I’d looked forward to my first day of school. Although I find the thought extraordinary—I loathed school—it’s plausible. I was an exuberant boy. The deceptively effervescent nursery, which no longer exists, was located in an old house on Nepean Sea Road in Bombay. My mother dropped me there but lingered, to look out for me (she was very protective) but also to spectate. From afar, she watched me push a boy—a gesture of friendliness, she’d later insist. At this, the teacher apparently smacked me. I took great umbrage and began to cry. My mother swooped down and plucked me from the crowd of children. She believed the teacher had punished me because the boy I’d pushed was European. I went home but did not stop crying. In the evening, I got a fever. I didn’t want to go to school the next day. The honeymoon period was over. After that first experience, my parents struggled to put me into a series of kindergartens. I finally found myself attending a school called Sunny Side, a seven-minute walk from the flat we then lived in on Malabar Hill. Once, when my father dropped me off on the way to the office, I refused to get out of the car. I remember him opening the door on the left, then the right, as I moved sideways each time to the opposite direction. Occasionally, I resigned myself to mornings in Sunny Side School. My favored spot was the doorway, where I said goodbye to my mother, watched her walk home, studied her as she turned to wave, and instructed her, with a gesture of my hand, to come back soon. Read More
March 1, 2018 Poetry Rx Poetry Rx: Snowy Forests and Urgent Hearts By Sarah Kay In our new column Poetry Rx, readers write in with a specific emotion (like “when you love someone so much you want to rip them apart and live inside them”) and our resident poets—Sarah Kay, Kaveh Akbar, and Claire Schwartz—take turns prescribing the perfect poems to match. This week, Sarah Kay inaugurates the series. A quick note on Poetry Rx: This is not meant to be an advice column in the traditional sense, in that we are wholly unqualified to offer you any solutions for the dilemmas in your life. Something Sarah says a lot is, “No, I don’t think that poetry will save us. And yet, and yet … ” The “and yet” is what this column is for. And yet, maybe we can find poems that vibrate at the same frequency that your heart is humming. And yet, maybe we can find a poem you can escape inside of for a few minutes. And yet, maybe you just needed an excuse to share the vulnerable parts of yourself, and what better way to honor that courage than to offer you the poems that carry us through our own vulnerable times. —Sarah Kay, Kaveh Akbar, and Claire Schwartz Read More
February 13, 2018 Hue's Hue Eau de Nil, the Light-Green Color of Egypt-Obsessed Europe By Katy Kelleher Alfred Hitchcock, The Birds, 1963, still from a color film, 119 minutes. In 1849, when twenty-seven-year-old Gustave Flaubert left Paris for his life-changing trip abroad, his homeland was in the grips of Egyptomania. The fad had invaded the arts, design, and the home decor of the upper classes. For Flaubert, like for many of his fellow Frenchmen, the Orient, as it was often called, was a source of endless fascination, but visiting wouldn’t be easy on his wallet or his waistline. It was an arduous journey: from mail coach to riverboat to railway then finally to a room aboard an ungainly and fragile boat named Le Nil, which was equipped with a sail, a tall funnel, and a pair of paddle wheels. “The ugly little ship staggered the length of the Mediterranean like a drunkard,” writes Geoffery Wall, author of Flaubert: A Life. After eleven days on board Le Nil, Flaubert arrived in Alexandria, where he found himself overwhelmed by the noise of the animals, the scents of the food, and, above all, the colors. “I gobbled up a bellyful of color, like a donkey filling himself with oats,” he writes. In another letter, dated 1850, he compares the country to being alive in “the middle of one of Beethoven’s symphonies … For the first few days, may the devil take me, it’s an astounding hubbub of color, and your poor old imagination, as if it were at a fireworks display, is perpetually dazzled.” Read More
February 12, 2018 Artificial Intelligentsia Absurdist Dialogues with Siri By Mariana Lin Nagg: Me sugar-plum! Clov: There’s a rat in the kitchen! Hamm: A rat! Are there still rats? Clov: In the kitchen there’s one. Hamm: And you haven’t exterminated him? Clov: Half. You disturbed us. Hamm: He can’t get away? Clov: No. Hamm: You’ll finish him later. Let us pray to God. Clov: Again! Nagg: Me sugar-plum! —Samuel Beckett, Endgame For many years now, I have sat down daily to script lines for AI characters such as Siri and Sophia. It’s an unusual task. First, it involves channeling the personality of a nonhuman living among humans. Then, even more confounding, one must trace the ideal conversation between human and robot. In voice interface design, this is called the “happy path.” And the existence of a happy path implies, of course, the existence of many more “unhappy paths.” Read More
February 9, 2018 Écuyères Selika, Mystery of the Belle Epoque By Susanna Forrest Selika Lazevski exists in six black-and-white photographs and nowhere else. I first saw her when those six studio portraits appeared on Tumblr in 2012. They quickly spread around the Internet as readers asked, Who is she? But although I’ve searched for years, every pin I place to try to map the real woman snaps and slides out of place, multiplying new leads that take me nowhere. I wrote a blog post about her name, guessed the wrong photographer, and saw my error replicate around the Internet, too, even turning up in the publicity materials for a short film about Selika. This much I do know: she was a black amazone in Belle Epoque Paris, a city where black “Amazons” were shown in a human zoo; she was a celebrity who left no other trace than these six tokens of her celebrity; she was a horsewoman without a horse, a power hinted at but not granted. In the first portrait, she stands with her body turned away from the camera but confronts the photographer with her gaze. The backdrop is hazily painted with trees—European deciduous trees in a landscaped park, natural and artificial at once. She wears the respectable tenue sobre of the late-nineteenth-century riding habit: a light-colored top hat and a dark riding jacket that crosses under the breast and is fastened with two rows of three buttons at her waist. A white stock hugs her throat; her strong bare hands emerge from white cuffs. One holds a long cane or whip. The outline of her leg, slightly lifted, is visible through her skirt. She stands before a waist-high couch covered with a shaggy pelt—wolf or bear rather than exotic leopard or tiger. In the second image, she reclines on the fur as comfortably as her short riding corset allows. In the third photograph, the corset is tighter, and her pale habit, which matches the top hat, is wrinkled at the waist. She is almost smiling. In photograph four, she stands, sternly holding the whip at the top of her thighs. Five and six must have been taken at the same time as the first images in the same tenue sobre. Her hands shift position on the whip; her expression tips over into a frown. Most images of black women in nineteenth-century France show slaves, sexualized nudes, or bare-breasted ethnographic curiosities. Who is this anomaly, Selika, and why, as she vaults into an equestrian world where sex, breeding, and power combine, has she no horse? Read More
February 8, 2018 The Moment The Moment of the Tiles By Amit Chaudhuri On watching Ben-Hur in Bombay, remakes, and the wide-ranging repercussions of a loose tile. Still from Ben-Hur (1959). I think I began watching MGM-style historical epics at the New Empire. There was a cluster of three cinemas in the bit of Bombay near my school—Sterling, the New Empire, and the New Excelsior. I have a memory of shamefacedly submitting to The Ten Commandments. These films were shown as reruns in the midseventies, of course, but the crowds were large and easily impressed. I say “shamefacedly” because, even then, I think I was allergic to the genre: the costumes, the sets, the battles, the panoply. To in some way abet such a spectacle seemed beneath one’s dignity at thirteen. When it came to history, my generation was drawn insatiably to the downfall of the Nazis. Biblical stories, given we went to schools with Christian affiliations, weren’t taken seriously. Nevertheless, Dinyar, a boy of superior culture, said gravely (in retrospect, I see his tastes were quite camp), “Have you seen The Ten Commandments? You’re missing something if you haven’t.” So I went to the New Empire and was moved to reluctant tears by the parting of the Red Sea. The cinema and the life I knew had been bereft of miracles, and here was an example of what Dinyar said I’d been “missing,” of what technology and divine intervention could achieve if they chose to. Here, too, I encountered the sculpted, orange-skinned Charlton Heston, who appeared like a plausible link between the vengeful expanse of antiquity and a lithe Californian freedom. Whether I knew him already from Ben-Hur, I can’t say, but I did see Ben-Hur, too, at the New Empire. In a couple of years, I had forgotten these films. I saw them as inextricable from the comic exuberance, hard-nosed commercial agendas, and faux devotionalism of a particular period and consigned them to a category called DeMille movies. Then I saw Ben-Hur again, probably a decade ago. It might have been shown on TV during Christmas or Easter—it is, after all, as the subtitle of the novel it was based on states, tangentially “a story of the Christ.” I rewatched Ben-Hur as you would pick up a storybook you’d read as a child: to check if its pages amused you in some way. I was also curious, I suppose, about what the chariot race at the end, in which the eponymous hero’s survival skills are displayed at their keenest, would look like on an adult review. My prejudice against the genre had grown more ingrained since I was thirteen, and I was also in fundamental agreement with Roland Barthes that these Hollywood epics comprise a weaving of codes (“The frontal lock [of Romans in Hollywood films] overwhelms one with evidence, no one can doubt he is in ancient Rome.”). Yet I discovered, at the end of the four hours, that I was again inexplicably moved. Read More