September 8, 2020 Arts & Culture Is It Too Scary? By Eula Biss Photo: © kentannenbaum46 / Adobe Stock. I’ve been waiting all this time on the wrong platform and the train just sped by in the wrong direction. The first drops of rain are falling now and I see a taxi idling under the tracks. The driver is an older man in a baby-blue suit and he wants to talk. What do you think, he asks me, of art painted by elephants? If you’re asking if I think it could be beautiful, I tell him, then I think it could, even if the elephant had no intention of making something beautiful. But if you’re asking if abstract art isn’t really art because it could be made by animals or children, then that’s another question. What did you study in college? he asks. He studied architecture, but there wasn’t any work for him when he graduated, with debt. And that’s how he became a taxi driver. It’s good work, he tells me, in that it pays the bills. Do you think it’s wrong, he asks, to make your living teaching something that won’t earn your students a living? No, I say. And then I pause over why. The service I’m doing for my students, I tell him, is teaching them how to find value in something that isn’t widely valued. And I think it’s a gift to give another person permission to do something worthless. Read More
September 8, 2020 Happily All the Better to Hear You With By Sabrina Orah Mark Sabrina Orah Mark’s column, Happily, focuses on fairy tales and motherhood. Arthur Rackham, Aesop’s Fables, 1912 For days Foryst, my cat, seems to have something caught in his throat. I bring him to the vet. “It might be a twig,” I say. “Or a pebble.” “What’s the cat’s name?” she asks. “Foryst,” I say. “Forest,” I say again, “but with a y where the e should go.” The vet is quiet. “How old is Foryst?” she asks. “Thirteen,” I say. She looks in his mouth. “It hurts when he swallows,” I say. Foryst is still. The vet sees nothing. She listens to his heart, his lungs. She hears nothing. It suddenly makes no sense to me that she is a human. Why isn’t she a wolf with great big eyes and great big ears that are all the better to see him with? To hear him with? “I recommend blood work,” she says. I put my face in Foryst’s fur. “Please tell me what’s wrong.” He is silent. There is something in his throat. A word or a dead leaf. I am sure of it. The vet wants blood work. She wants the cold, definitive clink of numbers. I want Foryst to talk so he can tell me what hurts. I want him to cough up a dry spooked O and be suddenly healed. I want him to tell me the future. I call my mother. “There’s something stuck in Foryst’s throat.” “Of course there’s something stuck in Foryst’s throat,” she says. “Why wouldn’t there be something stuck in his throat? There’s something stuck in all of our throats.” She hangs up. I swallow once. I swallow twice. When we get home, I open Foryst’s mouth and shine a flashlight down his throat. Something shines back, like a diamond in a cave. His teeth are hieroglyphs. I want to jot them down so I can read what’s inside him. I want to reach all the way in, but he snaps his mouth shut and growls. I tell my husband there is something stuck in Foryst’s throat. “What?” he says. He lifts his left headphone from his ear. “There is something stuck in Foryst’s throat.” My husband is always wearing headphones. I say everything twice. In fairy tales animals are always talking. Even when they are dead, they are talking. Read More
September 4, 2020 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Blood, Bach, and Babel By The Paris Review Doireann Ní Ghríofa. Photo: Bríd O’Donavan. “To spend such long periods facing the texts of the past can be dizzying,” writes Doireann Ní Ghríofa toward the end of A Ghost in the Throat, her fascinating new hybrid work of essay and autofiction from Dublin’s Tramp Press, “and it is not always a voyage of reason; the longer one pursues the past, the more unusual the coincidences one observes.” The pursuit of the past, and the kind of obsession it can birth in the present, is in fact the focus of this book; as Ní Ghríofa becomes pregnant with and nearly loses her fourth child, her story becomes entwined with that of Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill, an eighteenth-century Irish noblewoman who, distraught over her husband’s murder, drinks handfuls of his blood before composing a poem about him and their love. Past versus present, blood versus milk, birth versus death, the Irish language versus the English: dichotomies abound, but the questions of women’s lived experiences and who history remembers link them all. “This is a female text,” Ní Ghríofa repeats—about her own book, her own body, and Ní Chonaill’s poem, which appears at the end in Ní Ghríofa’s translation. —Rhian Sasseen Read More
September 4, 2020 Artificial Intelligentsia Building Character: Writing a Backstory for Our AI By Mariana Lin “Yes, you squashed cabbage leaf, you disgrace to the noble architecture of these columns, you incarnate insult to the English language, I could pass you off as the Queen of Sheba!” —Henry Higgins in George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion Eliza Doolittle (after whom the iconic AI therapist program ELIZA is named) is a character of walking and breathing rebellion. In George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion, and in the musical adaptation My Fair Lady, she metamorphoses from a rough-and-tumble Cockney flower girl into a self-possessed woman who walks out on her creator. There are many such literary characters that follow this creator-creation trope, eventually rejecting their creator in ways both terrifying and sympathetic: after experiencing betrayal, Frankenstein’s monster kills everyone that Victor Frankenstein loves, and the roboti in Karel Capek’s Rossum’s Universal Robots rise up to kill the humans who treat them as a slave class. It’s the most primordial of tales, the parent-child story gone terribly wrong. We’ve long been captivated by the idea of creating new nonhuman life, and equally captivated by the punishment we fear such godlike powers might trigger. In a world of growing AI beings, such dystopian outcomes are becoming real fears. As we set out to create these alternate beings, the questions of how we should design them, what they should be crafted to say and do, become questions of not only art and science but morality. Read More
September 4, 2020 Eat Your Words Cooking with Italo Calvino By Valerie Stivers In Valerie Stivers’s Eat Your Words series, she cooks up recipes drawn from the works of various writers. The piecrust Tower of Babel. From the bottom: plain, chocolate almond, rosemary, oatmeal, and mascarpone. In the novel The Baron in the Trees, by Italo Calvino (1923–1985), Cosimo Piovasco di Rondò, a young man from a noble family, apple of his parents’ eyes, climbs a tree one night during dinner—because he is refusing to eat his dinner—and then never comes down for the rest of his life. It’s a strong stance on a meal. It’s also a strong stance on our world, “the world as it is,” as Calvino once wrote in a letter. The young baron retreats because he is revolted by the decadence, provincialism, militarism, stupidity, and corruption of his aristocratic family, who serve, among other things, as a stand-in for the Italian Communist Party. The writer fought alongside the Communist partisans as a young man in World War II (against the Fascists and the Nazis), an experience that shaped his worldview and ideals; at the time of the book’s writing, he had recently renounced his membership. The rejected dinner—a dish of snails served up by a mad sister—conveys, partially, his disgust for the revealed truths of Stalinism. In some cultures, snails are a delicacy, but these have come from a barrel of “clotted opaque slime, and colored snail excrement.” The sister also makes a “pâté of mouse liver,” and sets “locusts legs, the hard, serrated back ones” onto a cake “like a mosaic.” The worst dish is “a whole porcupine with all its spines” that “not even she wanted to taste.” Read More
September 3, 2020 Look A Tree Is a Relative, a Cousin By The Paris Review “When that first photograph was taken of Earth from space and you saw this little ball in blackness,” said the artist Luchita Hurtado in a 2019 interview, “I became aware of what I felt I was. I feel very much that a tree is a relative, a cousin. Everything in this world, I find, I’m related to.” This relationship with nature—the human body mingling with the landscape, the landscape blending with the body and assuming its dips and swells—permeates Hurtado’s paintings and drawings. A friend of Frida Kahlo, Isamu Noguchi, and many other luminaries of the art world, Hurtado continued to refine her practice, largely in private, right up until her death in August at the age of ninety-nine. “Luchita Hurtado. Together Forever,” which showcases work from more than half a century of her career, opens at Hauser & Wirth’s Twenty-Second Street location on September 10, 2020. A selection of images from the show appears below. Luchita Hurtado, Untitled, ca. 1960s, graphite and charcoal on paper, 18″ x 24″. © Luchita Hurtado. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth. Photo: Jeff McLane. Read More