March 20, 2015 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Mendelsohn, Microgravity, Misconduct By The Paris Review A still from Otolith I. Daniel Mendelsohn’s essay on Sappho has been haunting me since I read last week’s New Yorker. First there’s the history of her poems. We all know these survive today in a few fragments, but to think there were once as many as ten thousand lines—and that these were in wide circulation for a millennium—can make your chair tilt under you a little. Then there are the fragments themselves, a handful quoted by Mendelsohn in his own translation. Maybe it’s the weather, but I’ve found myself going back to his version of Sappho’s most famous surviving poem, the one that begins “He seems to me an equal of the gods— / whoever gets to sit across from you,” as if I’ve never seen a poem like that before. —Lorin Stein The Otolith Group, founded in 2002, produces films and writings around sound, Afrofuturism, and the archive. I’ve been curious about the group for some time; since it’s based in London and exhibits mainly in Europe, I’ve had only glancing experiences with its work. But this week their first film, Otolith I, is available at Carroll / Fletcher Onscreen, an “online cinema” for experimental films. The Otolith Group’s name comes from a part of the inner ear sensitive to gravity and tilt, and Otolith I could be a kind of manifesto: narrated by a woman in 2103, it explains that prolonged time spent in the “microgravity” of space has deformed the otoliths of those born on the International Space Station. This new kind of human cannot survive on Earth and must rely on archival footage in order to understand life on the planet. Our narrator examines footage of the Soviet cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova and of the Iraq war protests in New York in 2003. The former sets up the cosmos as a “zone of peace”; the latter describes a society crippled by collective blindness. “My comprehension erodes under the attrition of American war-speak. Did you know that ‘regime change’ means ‘invasion,’ that ‘preemptive defense’ means ‘attacking a country that is not attacking you,’ that ‘shock and awe’ means ‘military onslaught’?” —Nicole Rudick Read More
March 20, 2015 Our Daily Correspondent Germaine, or the Master Puppeteer By Sadie Stein “And what is the advantage your puppets would have over living dancers?” “The advantage? First of all a negative one, my friend: it would never be guilty of affectation. For affectation is seen, as you know, when the soul, or moving force, appears at some point other than the center of gravity of the movement. Because the operator controls with his wire or thread only this center, the attached limbs are just what they should be … lifeless, pure pendulums, governed only by the law of gravity. This is an excellent quality. You’ll look for it in vain in most of our dancers.” —Heinrich von Kleist, “On the Marionette Theatre” Besides being World Poetry Day, the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, World Down Syndrome Day, Truant’s Day (in Poland), Harmony Day (Australia), and the Anglican Commemoration of Thomas Cranmer, tomorrow (March 21) is World Puppetry Day. Read More
March 20, 2015 First Person What Are Songs For By Brian Cullman Willard Cummings, Barracks Concert (detail), ca. 1942. This was not quite what I’d expected. I’d come to the psych wing of Butler Hospital, in Providence, Rhode Island, to present a music seminar or, more properly, a sing-along, as part of a community service requirement for my college. This was in the late seventies. I was in a brightly lit dining hall that smelled of tobacco and medicine. There were twenty-five or thirty folding chairs but only thirteen or fourteen patients, all of them sad and doughy, middle aged or older. I sat facing them on a gray wooden stool and looked out at the assembled not-quite crowd. They looked like retired firemen, metalworkers, or lunch ladies; men with mustaches, pensions, and bad habits; women with secrets; people who rode the bus, who stood in line and then stood in the same line again. I’d read The Bell Jar, some Randall Jarrell, and I had a vaguely romantic, if ill-defined, sense of life on the other side of what passes for sanity. But this was not a good advertisement for crazy. Read More
March 20, 2015 On the Shelf The Critique of Pure Idiocy, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Kant’s home, vandalized. Outside Kaliningrad, Immanuel Kant’s home still stands, and now it’s adorned with a loving note in his memory: “Kant is a moron.” Russian police have made it their categorical imperative to find the vandals. “With Arthur Schopenhauer dead for 155 years, however, authorities start off with few strong leads.” The Pittsburgh Tax Review—subscribe now—features a new paper by Arthur Cockfield called “David Foster Wallace on Tax Policy, How to Be an Adult, and Other Mysteries of the Universe,” presumably focusing on The Pale King. “The drudgery of taxes is what attracted Wallace to the subject, Cockfield argues. And, he says, Wallace has helpful advice for those of us bogged down by tax season.” “I hate literature,” Varlam Shalamov wrote in a 1965 letter. Nonetheless, he did well by it. “Between 1954 and 1973, Shalamov wrote 147 stories about Russian prisons, transit camps, the mines of Kolyma, life in the camp hospitals, and the troubled experience of returning home … the more you read, the less documentary-like the experience becomes … particular images and phrases repeat; objects exhibit a strong symbolic power; meanings double, as accounts of daily camp life take on aesthetic and philosophical dimensions.” “The flower’s leaves … serve as bridal beds which the creator has so gloriously arranged … and perfumed with so many soft scents that the bridegroom with his bride might there celebrate their nuptials with so much greater solemnity.” Scientists remember Carl Linnaeus today for his binomial system, but his writing on botany was, for the time, frankly sexual. The Encyclopedia Britannica referred to his work as “disgusting strokes of obscenity.” “When the people shall have nothing to eat, they will eat the rich,” Rousseau wrote. But what if intraclass cannibals beat them to it? In Britain, the landed gentry have started hunting themselves for sport.
March 19, 2015 Arts & Culture Man in Hole II: Man in Deeper Hole By Dan Piepenbring Assigning emotional values to words. Last month I wrote about Matthew Jockers’s research on the shapes of stories, which has since met with a welter of reactions within and without academe. His critics ask two questions, essentially: Is it really possible to assign every word a reliable emotional valence? And even if the answer is yes, can we really claim that all the plots in the history of literature take so few basic forms? A rough primer: Jockers uses a tool called “sentiment analysis” to gauge “the relationship between sentiment and plot shape in fiction”; algorithms assign every word in a novel a positive or negative emotional value, and in compiling these values he’s able to graph the shifts in a story’s narrative. A lot of negative words mean something bad is happening, a lot of positive words mean something good is happening. Ultimately, he derived six archetypal plot shapes. (To his credit and my chagrin, he’s refrained from giving them catchy names.) Here’s an example: Read More
March 19, 2015 Our Daily Correspondent Hypotheticals By Sadie Stein A cheese-ball scanner, one of many found at a typical airport. I’m not saying I smuggled a cheese ball through security and onto a domestic flight. That would be illegal, and I would never encourage anyone to break the law, by word or deed. Besides, only a total sociopath would have the hubris to boast of having pulled off such a feat. But let’s say I had. Let’s say the cheese ball in question contained not just cheddar, blue cheese, and cream cheese, but also mustard and many seasonings. Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that it had been rolled in finely chopped nuts. Let’s say I’d thought, These cheese balls are so good, and I’ve made such a large batch, that I believe I shall bring one to my parents. Read More