March 16, 2011 Arts & Culture Sybille Bedford at One Hundred By Lisa Cohen This is Sybille Bedford’s centennial year—she would have been one hundred years old today—and The Paris Review is marking it with a reading on Thursday, March 24. To learn more, click here. If you are interested in attending, please e-mail us. Sybille Bedford, 2004. Photograph by Luciana Arrighi. I have been reading and rereading Sybille Bedford’s work for the past twenty-five years, and I was lucky to get to know her fierce, vulnerable, inimitably vibrant self late in her life. I am writing from London, where I’ve come to attend a birthday dinner in her honor, tonight, in the cellars of the wine merchants Berry Bros. and Rudd. The evening, planned by her friend and literary executor, Aliette Martin, opens with Sybille’s favorite champagne, Pol Roger, and the five-course menu pairs excellent wines with elegant but unfussy food, beginning with a 1998 Gewurztraminer (Hommage à Jean Hugel, Maison Hugel) and foie gras mi-cuit, toasted brioche, and onion confit. Sybille—she disliked the epithet “Bedford”—was born in Germany and spent much of her life in Europe, but she chose to write in English and was one of the language’s great twentieth-century stylists. Much of her work, including her best-known novel, A Legacy, moves freely between fiction and memoir, exploring the pleasures and traumas of her upbringing between the wars in Germany, Italy, England, and the south of France. She is known, too, for her sensual writing on travel and as a connoisseur of food and wine. She had “a genius for living,” an admiring ex-lover told her; she called herself “a sybarite with a political conscience.” Her legal reporting bears out that mixture: covering the trial of Lady Chatterley’s Lover in London, of Jack Ruby in Dallas, of the Auschwitz guards in Frankfurt, and more, she produced crystallized essays about character, justice, and the rituals of law. She has been dubbed a modernist and a traditionalist; her cool, staccato dialogue has been compared to Quentin Tarantino’s. She published her last book, Quicksands, in 2005. Read More
March 16, 2011 The Culture Diaries A Week in Culture: Zachary Kanin, Cartoonist By Zachary Kanin DAY ONE 11:30 A.M. A graduate student came to my house to film me making a sandwich for her documentary, which, as far as I can tell, is about cartoonists eating lunch. 3:30 P.M. While on a stroll in the park, three teenagers ran up behind me, threw me to the ground, and punched me repeatedly in the head. I threw them off and ran far enough away to call the police. I spent the next several days replaying the scene in my head. Read More
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 15, 2011 A Letter from the Editor Sex, Hastily, Then Beignets By Lorin Stein For a long time now, we’ve been thinking that our friends over at The Awl should start a culture diary of their own—and now they have! And with no less an eminence than David Orr, poetry critic of The New York Times Book Review. Hot, hot, hot!
March 15, 2011 Events Spring at ‘The Paris Review’: Our Special Tote Bag Offer By Thessaly La Force The limited-edition New Classic tote. You may have noticed that our site has shed its wintery blue. The spring issue is out today! But wait! Before you run to your local bookstore to buy a copy, listen to this. Every spring, we design a tote bag for the generous donors who attend our Revel. This year, given the excitement surrounding our Year of Bolaño, we thought it would be nice to have a special offer for those of you who have yet to subscribe or for others who want to renew. For $45 (domestic), you’ll receive this limited-edition tote bag along with four issues of The Paris Review (and the entirety of Bolaño’s The Third Reich). The tote bags are gorgeous; they were designed by our art editor Charlotte Strick, using Leanne Shapton’s illustration for the spring cover. I can’t wait for mine to arrive, hopefully just as I put away my winter coat for good.
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