April 25, 2019 Arts & Culture What the Scientists Who Photographed the Black Hole Like to Read By Rebekah Frumkin On April 10, 2019, an international team of scientists working on a project called the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) released an image of a supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy Messier 87 (M87). Several years in the making, the image was created from data compiled by a number of telescopes spaced across the planet. The EHT team is a large and diverse group, including many early-career Ph.D. students and postdoctoral researchers from the U.S. and abroad. Rebekah Frumkin spoke to nine of those scientists, all in their twenties or early thirties, about what they like to read, how the black hole is like a work of art, and their advice for writers depicting black holes in their work. (Image: © EHT Collaboration) What kind of fiction or poetry do you like to read, and how has it influenced your research? Sara Issaoun: I like science fiction, the kind that either drifts toward realism or toward whimsy. I’m a big fan of Douglas Adams. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series is probably a classic for most astronomers. Daniel Palumbo: It is difficult for me to choose a particular genre of fiction, so I’ll just pick a recent favorite: Blood Meridian. I find insurmountably evil villains incredibly compelling, though the horror of this book is at times physically painful to read. In science, the situation is the opposite—astronomy is difficult not because of some malicious actor, but due to a cold, uncaring complexity with which humanity contends, largely for the joy of discovery. Michael Janssen: I like to read science fiction novels, for example Isaac Asimov. I want to really understand how our world and the universe work, and what mankind is capable of through technological advancements. Andrew Chael: I pretty consciously try to take Shevek, the main character of Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, as my model for how to act as a physicist. While his physics are a little iffy—or maybe just beyond our current understanding—his approach to research, teaching, and discovery is fundamentally generous while still being influenced by his personal ambition to go further than others have gone. The Dispossessed also points out that all science, even physics, is shaped by its social and political context. Read More
April 24, 2019 Arts & Culture Waterman Redux By Anthony Madrid Waterman at Cornell, 1926 There are times I am facetious in these articles. It’s not always perceived. Therefore, allow me to take a moment to clarify my last piece about the limericks of the poet Paul Waterman. I do not actually think Waterman was crazy, and neither do I think all, most, or even any of his limericks are gibberish. They all make sense. They’re obscure, that’s all. He was eccentric, that’s all. My first piece was written at an early stage of the Waterman Renaissance. It’s been three weeks; much has happened. As you can see from the photograph above, an image of Waterman has surfaced. He is roughly twenty-three years old in that picture. His dates are now known to be July 3, 1903–February 17, 1987. He went to Cornell on a scholarship. For a great many years he owned a small farm in a town called Maryland, New York. He had a twin brother, John Waterman, whom he outlived by twenty-five years. And he is now known to have published ten books, all of them poetry, all of them printed at his own expense: Boy for a Blonde (1932) Cabin for Two (1934) —twenty-one-year hiatus— Love to the Town (1955) —eight-year hiatus— The Limerick Trilogy: Mad Land of Limerick (1963) Those Brats from Limerick (1964) Five Lines to Limerick (1965) Four Books of Haiku: Wee Wings (1966) Brief Candles (1967) Whimseys [sic] (1968; second edition 1973) Thus and Now (1974) Read More
April 24, 2019 Arts & Culture The Roots of a Forgotten Massacre By Julián Herbert In 1911, some three hundred Chinese immigrants were murdered in the northern Mexican city of Torreón. Afterward, their bodies were mutilated, looted, and dumped in a mass grave. More than a century later, a fog of confusion and denial surrounds the massacre. Misinformation and racism abound, and the residents of Torreón remain reluctant to discuss the event. In his new book, The House of the Pain of Others, Julián Herbert sets out to investigate this forgotten atrocity. Below, he examines the roots of anti-Chinese racism in early-twentieth-century Mexico. Torreón in 1911. Public domain. Most historians—including both the most scrupulous, such as Chao Romero, and the less rigorous, for example, Juan Puig—take for granted that in Mexico there was a clear correlation between attitudes toward the Chinese diaspora and social class. They establish the notion that Sinophobia arose informally among the poor after the Torreón massacre in 1911. They then theorize that ideology evolved, became formalized, and contaminated the middle class through a sort of anti-Chinese conference (attended mostly by small-business men) that took place in Magdalena, Sonora State, on February 5, 1916. Romero suggests these developments were never supported by the ruling class. This reading of the situation systematizes the historical discourse but does not reflect reality. Its first fallacy is that a minority ideology, originating among the poorest people in the country, ascended the social ladder at a speed greater than that of any other revolutionary concern (democracy, agrarian and constitutional reform, and so on); I don’t find this particularly convincing. The description also implies that the transnational dimension of the diaspora had no Mexican equivalent: that the anti-Chinese sentiment of the East Coast middle and upper classes and California labor groups did not take root in Mexico during the final third of the nineteenth century. That seems implausible. Many of the first engine drivers to cross López Velado’s “Sweet Nation” (“the train rolling along the track / like a child’s Christmas toy”) were white, English-speaking, and unionized (and very well paid: they earned two hundred pesos a month—between ten and twelve times the minimum wage in La Laguna, and equivalent to approximately 20,000 pesos at current rates). Influential Mexican families (some represented by rich agriculturalists, such as the Maderos in La Laguna, and also the Creels, the Lujáns, the Terrazas, the Mendirichagas, the Gómez Palacios, and the Lavíns) sent their offspring to study in the United States, showing a particular predilection for such cities as Philadelphia, New York, and Boston. In 1896 Coahuila gave scholarships to five graduates of the state teacher training college to undertake specialist studies in Bridgewater, Massachusetts. At least one of those youths—Gabriel Calzada—was from La Laguna, had lived for a time in Torreón, and was extremely close to Francisco I. Madero: some of the letters he exchanged with the spiritualist president have been preserved, and oral tradition has him as the style editor of Madero’s The Presidential Succession in 1910. Read More
April 24, 2019 At Work Writing Postpartum: A Conversation between Kate Zambreno and Sarah Manguso By Sarah Manguso Sarah Manguso (left) and Kate Zambreno (right) Kate Zambreno’s oeuvre is not just a series of books but a body of thought, an uninterrupted exhortation on incompleteness and the intersections of life, death, time, memory, and silence. She challenges my own tendency to treat pieces of writing as discrete objects rather than divisions of consciousness, and I’ve long felt an intimate and continuous access to her mind, so I wanted to ask her about her newest book, Appendix Project, a collection of talks and essays written over the course of the year following the publication of Book of Mutter, her book on her mother, which took her over a decade to write. Her next book, Screen Tests, an excerpt of which appears in the Spring issue of The Paris Review, is forthcoming this July. —Sarah Manguso MANGUSO As for publishing a “small, minor book,” to quote you from earlier … maybe we could start there? I keep trying to write a Big Book, a grand book, a centerpiece around which the rest of my books will gather, but either my fear of death or my general inability to be grand prevents this. And I’m almost always more interested in the small, minor books of people’s oeuvres, anyway. You also work in small forms—the appendix, the miscellany, the essay formed from small compositional units and assembled over a long period. ZAMBRENO I am more interested in the fragment, the notes, what is ongoing or continuing. My desire in this new writing life of the past few years has been to be small, to stay small, thinking of Robert Walser. To write about what is ephemeral, the daily, and to use it to attempt to think through the crisis of the self and what is beyond the self. When I moved to New York, now six years ago, I felt paralyzed by the prospect of a first-person novel, which I was under contract for, and anxious about publishing’s desire to have the new “big” book, one that everyone talks about, that is on all of the lists, that is part of the conversation, where the self written is assumed to be the same self as the author, and the self is stable, charismatic, and articulate. I felt blocked from the novel for years, I just took notes upon notes, and eventually the novel became about block and paralysis. I thought for a while my sudden longing for smaller forms was a lack of ambition, before realizing that it is my ambition. Read More
April 23, 2019 Redux Redux: The One Who Outlives All the Cowards By The Paris Review Every week, the editors of The Paris Review lift the paywall on a selection of interviews, stories, poems, and more from the magazine’s archive. You can have these unlocked pieces delivered straight to your inbox every Sunday by signing up for the Redux newsletter. Notes from Elena Ferrante’s final revisions to The Story of the Lost Child. In this week’s Redux, we’re reading the work of some of the authors featured in our new book, Writers at Work around the World. A celebration of global writers and literature in translation, the latest volume from Paris Review Editions features interviews with Chinua Achebe, Nadine Gordimer, Ha Jin, and more. Read Elena Ferrante’s Art of Fiction interview, as well as Haruki Murakami’s short story “Heigh-Ho” and Jorge Luis Borges’s poem “The Thing I Am,” and then order your copy of Writers at Work around the World today! If you enjoy these free interviews, stories, and poems, why not subscribe to read the entire archive? You’ll also get four new issues of the quarterly delivered straight to your door. Elena Ferrante, The Art of Fiction No. 228 Issue no. 212 (Spring 2015) I publish to be read. It’s the only thing that interests me about publication. So I employ all the strategies I know to capture the reader’s attention, stimulate curiosity, make the page as dense as possible and as easy as possible to turn. But once I have the reader’s attention I feel it is my right to pull it in whichever direction I choose. I don’t think the reader should be indulged as a consumer, because he isn’t one. Literature that indulges the tastes of the reader is a degraded literature. My goal is to disappoint the usual expectations and inspire new ones. Read More
April 23, 2019 Arts & Culture Notes from an Exiled Revolutionary By Victor Serge The writer and revolutionary Victor Serge was one of the few prominent opponents of Stalin to escape the despot’s wrath. In 1936, in the midst of the Great Terror, Serge fled the Soviet Union for France. When the Nazis took Paris in 1940, he fled to Mexico, where he spent the rest of his days in an exile rife with poverty and grief. In a sense, his notebooks became his new home, a place where he felt comfortable contemplating everything from World War II to Russian literature, from the aftermath of the Revolution to the beauty of an erupting volcano. A new volume from New York Review Books Classics, translated by Mitchell Abidor and Richard Greeman, presents for the first time in English Serge’s notebooks in their entirety. Below, in a series of entries from 1944, Serge marvels at the brilliance of his daughter’s art critiques, mourns his friends Antoine de Saint-Exupéry and Max Jacob, and muses on the darkness of a world at war. Victor Serge. Photo: Maurice-Louis Branger. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. August 9, 1944 Read today: A dispatch from Istanbul saying that a Turkish ship transporting 296 Jewish refugees was sunk on the Black Sea; a half-dozen people were saved. Another dispatch on the water shortage and famine in Florence, an open city around which fighting is going on. Notes on London’s nightmare, bombed by rocket missiles. It’s an absurd massacre and people have become accustomed to living under it. An article by Léon Dennen on the extermination of Hungary’s Jews—hundreds of thousands of Jews—by means of asphyxiation cars in a camp in Upper Silesia. The Nazi army brings with it Judenvernichtung Abteil [extermination cars for Jews] that function like efficient offices. The report by an American journalist on the collective suicide of the Japanese population of the island of Saipan, occupied by the Americans. People witnessed an officer decapitating his last soldiers and then, saber in hand, throwing himself on a tank; young girls brush their hair and wash themselves before jumping into the sea; families perform their ablutions and then drown themselves to the last member … (The Americans nevertheless tried to reassure the civilian population and succeeded in interning a portion of it.) An official report of the execution by hanging of eight German generals rightly or wrongly implicated in the recent “plot” against the Führer. (I know how plots of this kind are manufactured.) Scientific reports from America on the famine in China and the variety of deaths by starvation. Saw, almost without emotion, photos showing the ruins of ancient churches in Russia and Italy; prostitutes in Cherbourg with their heads shaved; French collaborationists hunted down on the streets and begging for mercy on their knees. We’ve reached the level of the dark times of the early Middle Ages. Need to reflect on this. Extreme difficulty of reflecting on this. Read More