November 10, 2010 The Culture Diaries A Week in Culture: Tim Wu, Professor By Tim Wu DAY ONE 11:00 A.M., Oakland University, Michigan “We don’t actually have wires sticking out of our heads,” I say, “but if you have an iPhone in your pocket and a laptop on your bag you’re pretty close. You’ve already delegated your memory to Google and Wikipedia; Facebook is there to remind you who your friends are.” I have a bad habit. Whatever I happen to be reading influences me to a degree that is often, in retrospect, embarrassing or ridiculous. You might say I’m a slave to what I’m reading. And that may explain why I’m here with a group of undergraduates discussing whether or not we are, in fact, already cyborgs. While these are my ideas (sort of), they are more honestly a take on Kevin Kelly’s new book What Technology Wants. I’m obsessed. He has got me talking about weird tech-philosophy stuff, such as whether we are cyborgs (see above) or whether it’s a good idea to quit technology altogether and go live in the wild. I’m talking to undergraduates because my first book, coauthored with Jack Goldsmith, was selected to be read, campus-wide, by Oakland University in Michigan. For their part, the undergraduates seem to accept the idea that we are already more machine than man without much resistance, proving again that it is hard to shock the young. Perhaps to them, Darth Vadar had roughly the right idea. 7:00 P.M., Ann Arbor, Michigan I hit up Twitter, where I find that I have said something insane about someone named Dorothy: superwuster DOROTHY you don’t know shit about SHIT so fuck you. Someone must have hacked my Twitter account. It is a bit of a surprise to see things written in my name that don’t fully reflect what I think. On the other hand, that was also the experience of rereading my first book. A little later I notice that in addition to a hacker, I have a Twitter hater, apparently one of the students forced to read my book for school. He writes: julianmgsantos Fuck you tim wu #crazyrhyming julianmgsantos #whatreallycheesesme tim wu and dumb bitches To his credit: At least Mr. Julianmgsantos appears to be enjoying Twitter. Most everyone else views it as a duty, like washing the digital dishes. Nonetheless, my appearance at a student Q & A yesterday prompted a reappraisal: julianmgsantos Not gonna lie i hated tim wu. Until he showed up to this Q&A fried as hell. Im actually gonna read his book now Kelly gets credit for that change in heart. Read More
November 9, 2010 Arts & Culture Houellebecq Triumphant By Nelly Kaprielian Photograph by Vincent Ferrané. To see more photographs of Houellebecq, click the picture above. “I’ve become a cause,” declares Michel Houellebecq when asked how he really feels, a few hours after winning the Prix Goncourt. And it’s true: If he hadn’t won France’s biggest literary prize, it would have been more than a disappointment; it would have been a defeat. (And I don’t even want to think about the bloggers, his fiercest supporters. The bloggers would have exploded.) Now it’s midnight: We’re at the Montana drinking vodka with some kind of blue mint thing in it—“we” being a small gang rounded up by Frédéric Beigbeder after dinner. No way is the novelist and former talk-show host (one of our more energetic littérateurs) going to let his friend Michel crawl into bed with his Goncourt. “Between Michel getting the Goncourt and Virginie Despentes winning le Renaudot,” Beigbeder exclaims, “a whole generation—our generation—has finally won!” There’s a brief silence, and we must all think the same thing without saying it: If we’ve won and there’s nothing to fight for, it’s probably downhill from here. Of course, we can always wait for Houellebecq to get the Nobel. “After France, the world!” jokes Beigbeder, and everybody’s quick to raise a glass. A colleague from Les Inrocks joins us and immediately falls into a passionate discussion with Michel. When I ask Sylvain Bourmeau (an editor at France’s most important news site, Mediapart) what’s got them so worked up, he tells me “charcuterie.” And in fact, when we were all crammed into a car on the way to the Montana, Michel held forth with great precision on the subject of his car (sorry, don’t ask me the make); it occurred to me that this is what makes him so deeply charming and also, perhaps, part of what makes him such a powerful novelist: his capacity to be completely present, without any irony, whether the subject is literature, feelings, or cars. Later, a blond angel of Russian origin absconds with him, once he’s already half-asleep. This would be Maria, the young woman who served as a model for the character of Olga in La Carte et le térritoire. “All my characters are here,” Houellebecq joked during the dinner thrown in his honor at La Mediterranée. He then asked them to rise: Beigbeder, Maria, and his editor, Teresa Crimisi, who shares with Houellebecq a very sportsmanlike air of victory—all calm joy, no bragadoccio. Read More
November 9, 2010 At Work Guy Deutscher on ‘Through the Language Glass’ By Mark de Silva Guy Deutscher, right. Photograph by Janie Steen. Have you ever asked someone if the hot water is in the uphill tap? Maybe you’ve warned a friend of the fire ants north of his foot. Or perhaps you’ve merely suggested, with all delicacy, that your date might like to brush the cake crumbs from her mountainward cheek. Doesn’t make any sense? Maybe that’s because you don’t speak Tzeltal, Guugu Yimithirr, or Balinese. In Through the Language Glass, Guy Deutscher discusses these and other differences in thought and perception occasioned by the world’s many tongues. He is currently an honorary research fellow at the School of Languages, Linguistics and Cultures at the University of Manchester. Recently, he answered some of my questions about his new book via e-mail. In the introduction to your book, you point out the many ways the general public overestimates the influence of language on thought and experience. Why do you think that is? And are there any respects in which ordinary people underestimate language’s influence? Can it be that we tend to overestimate the influence of language partly because we so often underestimate the intelligence of other people? Think about common arguments on the lines of “if you call something X, people will believe it’s X just because of the name.” We rarely hear, “If you call something X, I will start believing it’s X just because of the name.” I obviously know better. But others don’t. This type of overestimation has a long history. One of the earliest discussions of the influence of language on thought was an essay by the Bible scholar Johann David Michaelis from 1760, which won the prize of the of the Prussian academy. In it, Michaelis explains that if, for example, one gave completely different names to two vegetables which are in reality quite similar, “the people” would never suspect that they are similar. He’d obviously not heard of clementines, mandarins, tangarines, and satsumas. On the other hand, it is also true that we underestimate the influence of language, as I tried to show in the book. What we are not sufficiently aware of is the force of the habits that language can create, through the distinctions that it trains us to make and the types of information that it trains us to be attentive to from an early age. And ironically, the areas where the mother-tongue can make a real impact on thought are exactly where common sense would expect all languages to be the same, for instance in the way we describe the space around us or the way we talk about colors. Read More
November 8, 2010 Arts & Culture Six Paintings from Mr. Caplan By Katharina Grosse Katharina Grosse is a German artist based in Berlin. We were captivated by her architectural shapes, and the vivid colors in her paintings. Her process is equally powerful: armed with a spray gun, she covers large canvasses, often close to seven feet heigh, with layers of paint. “I become a different being when I’m spraying,” she said in a recent interview. “I enlarge myself. I’m able to embrace far more than just my bodily presence. I would always start with these very intense yellows and greens and reds because I always assumed that that’s what’s underneath the surface. That’s how I see things. That’s how I see the world. The very strong and raw colors tend to attract or even repulse the viewer. They tend to create certain reactions in a very direct way. To be over-explicit with these raw colors is one of my intentions.” —Thessaly La Force Untitled, 2010, acrylic on canvas, 84 3/4 x 57 3/4 inches Read More
November 8, 2010 A Letter from the Editor Houellebecq Wins Goncourt By Lorin Stein Michel Houellebecq has finally received the Prix Goncourt, France’s most prestigious literary prize. As Susannah Hunnewell suggested in our current issue, the honor is overdue. Click here to read the most in-depth interview with Houellebecq available in English. As our diarist Nelly Kaprielian reported last September in The Paris Review Daily, Houellebecq is still living hard. He has aged visibly in the last couple of years. He even tells her that his latest novel, La carte et le territoire, may be his last. We hope and trust that time will prove him wrong. In the meantime, we send our most heartfelt congratulations.
November 5, 2010 Ask The Paris Review Award-Winning Novels; Fighting Procrastination By Lorin Stein I was having this argument with my friend recently about award-winning novels. I find them stodgy and inaccessible. She thinks I’m not applying myself to the pages long enough to get it. In defense, I invoked a literary heavyweight—Martin Amis. He was quoted a few weeks ago as saying, “There was a great fashion in the last century, and it’s still with us, of the unenjoyable novel. And these are the novels which win prizes, because the committee thinks, ‘Well it’s not at all enjoyable, and it isn’t funny, therefore it must be very serious.’” She tried to tell me that Amis has sour grapes from his Booker Prize near-miss in the early nineties. We need someone to settle this. —Paul Hawkins It may have been sour grapes, but don’t you think Amis is right? The worst is when the judges of literary prizes try to legislate from the bench—flexing their “muscle” by giving a prize to some book that nobody’s ever heard of, or passing over a popular favorite because it’s “too obvious” or “doesn’t need it.” As I wrote the other week, when it comes to literary merit (or sex appeal) there is no such thing as too obvious. And most unfun novels are not much good. My heart sinks when I see a list of unknowns as finalists for a prize I care about. It is usually a case of committee work or telling people what they ought to like (and already know they don’t).Then there are wonderful exceptions, like Tinkers, a fine novel rescued from obscurity by the Pulitzer Prize. Or—a very different case—the most recent recipient of the Nobel, Mario Vargas Llosa, a writer who has been accused of many things, but never of being hard to read. Read More