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
March 11, 2011 Look Alexander Gronsky: Less Than 1 By Alexander Gronsky Courtesy of the artist and Gallery.Photographer.Ru. Estonian photographer Alexander Gronsky traveled to the outermost regions of Russia, where the average population is less than one person per square kilometer. To see more of his work, click here.
March 11, 2011 On Design Charlotte Strick Talks to ‘The Atlantic’ By Thessaly La Force Our wonderful art editor Charlotte Strick took some time to talk to The Atlantic about her work as a graphic designer: What’s a design trend that you wish would go away? It’s not so much a design “trend”: the lack of quality in trade book publishing. Because of the rising costs of printing, many publishers are now using thinner paper stocks for book interiors. The paper feels cheap and there’s more “show through” of the text from the previous page. Those of you who still enjoy holding a good old-fashioned book in your hands will know what I’m talking about. You really can feel the difference. What’s an idea you became fascinated with but that ended up taking you off track? Do ex-boyfriends count? I’d say so! Read the rest of Charlotte’s interview here.