February 13, 2018 Arts & Culture White Supremacy and the Dangerous Discourse of Liberal Tolerance By Ismail Muhammad A scene at the race disturbance in Wilmington, North Carolina. Originally published in Colliers Weekly, November 26, 1898. Watching Donald Trump speak about the violent white-supremacist rally that took place in Charlottesville last summer was a surreal experience. Not the first press conference where he referred to neo-Nazi protestors as “very fine people.” I mean the second time, when he repudiated those fine people. “Racism,” he intoned, clearly reading from a teleprompter, “is evil … white supremacists and other hate groups are repugnant to everything we hold dear as Americans.” Nobody could mistake his droning boredom for actual investment in the words he was speaking: his attempt to embrace the decorous discourse of liberal tolerance was baldly hypocritical. As the summer ended and the fall semester began at U.C. Berkeley, where I study literature, far-right agitators descended along with the cool weather. A succession of activists and pundits—Ben Shapiro, Milo Yiannopoulos, and their ilk—made their way to campus. They brought the far-right protestors and threats of violence along with them, all the while invoking the language of tolerance and free speech. Berkeley’s former chancellor Nicholas Dirks even cited the campus community’s “values of tolerance” in defending Yiannopoulos’s appearance. The myriad ways in which people were deploying the word tolerance managed to drain the already-insufficient term of its content. All that was left was am empty concept that could accommodate any agenda. It was more clear than ever that the language of tolerance had become ineffective, just a mask behind which antipluralist demagogues could hide. Read More
February 12, 2018 Artificial Intelligentsia Absurdist Dialogues with Siri By Mariana Lin Nagg: Me sugar-plum! Clov: There’s a rat in the kitchen! Hamm: A rat! Are there still rats? Clov: In the kitchen there’s one. Hamm: And you haven’t exterminated him? Clov: Half. You disturbed us. Hamm: He can’t get away? Clov: No. Hamm: You’ll finish him later. Let us pray to God. Clov: Again! Nagg: Me sugar-plum! —Samuel Beckett, Endgame For many years now, I have sat down daily to script lines for AI characters such as Siri and Sophia. It’s an unusual task. First, it involves channeling the personality of a nonhuman living among humans. Then, even more confounding, one must trace the ideal conversation between human and robot. In voice interface design, this is called the “happy path.” And the existence of a happy path implies, of course, the existence of many more “unhappy paths.” Read More
February 12, 2018 Arts & Culture The Hamburger: An American Lyric By Carol J. Adams Campaigning for president in 1992, William Jefferson Clinton proved himself to be the citizen’s candidate by his penchant for hamburgers. Burgher: citizen of the city. There he would be, according to the press, stopping in for hamburgers at local diners. Bill Clinton, not just the citizen’s candidate, he was the citizen candidate; he liked the average Joe’s kind of food (not the sloppy joe; though they use a burger bun, they are not burgers). “It’s the economy, stupid,” was the mantra of the Clinton campaign. The burger is the citizen’s economic food choice, the Everyman’s lowest common denominator. His opponent, President George H. W. Bush, on the other hand, scion of a prominent New England family with a banker father who became a senator, had been cast as out of touch with the average citizen of the United States. “Poor George,” the future Texas governor Ann Richards famously said in 1988, “he was born with a silver foot in his mouth.” Not Bill Clinton: from the media reports, one got a sense he had been born with a hamburger in his mouth. And not a hamburger like President Lyndon Johnson’s favorite hamburger in the midsixties, made from thirty-five-dollar-per-pound ground-up aged sirloin. (Factoring in inflation that would be about $280 in 2017.) Read More
February 12, 2018 Arts & Culture When Women Aren’t Angels By Francine Prose Detail from the poster for Der Blaue Engel Not long ago, I watched, on the Internet, footage of myself being interviewed by Charlie Rose. It was May, 2000, and the subject of our interview was Blue Angel, my then-recent novel about—of all things—sexual harassment. Or at least, that’s what Charlie thought the novel was about. Early in the course of our conversation, it became clear to me that he hadn’t read my book, but that someone at the other end of his earpiece had. And, just in case I hadn’t figured that out, Charlie told me, moments after the cameras stopped rolling, that he didn’t “have time to read fiction,” but his girlfriend did. As he said this, his face wore precisely the same blurry mask of interest that it had worn when we spoke on camera. In Blue Angel, a middle-aged novelist, who teaches creative writing at a small New England college, falls in love with (and ruins his life for) a talented female student. Charlie didn’t want to talk about sentence structure or about where the idea for the novel came from. The earpiece steered us straight to the subject of sexual harassment and political correctness. Read More
February 9, 2018 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Rachel Lyon, Radiohead, and Richard Pryor By The Paris Review Karin Tidbeck. Karin Tidbeck’s collection Jagannath strings together a chain of eerie vignettes where the fantastic creeps in from a place just outside your peripheral vision, subtly seeping into a reality you thought you recognized. Tidbeck translated these herself from her native Swedish, and the end result is a clear, succinct prose style that makes for a crisp blank canvas so that the strangeness of her plots and ideas stands out against a clean background. These stories are quick and varied, though Tidbeck deftly navigates each shift between narratives, keeping the reader hooked with swift, absorbing plots and empathetic, human characters. They often arrive at their endings unresolved but satisfying, and rarely ever in a place you thought they would take you. —Lauren Kane Rachel Lyon. Photo: Debra Pearlman. I read a draft of Rachel Lyon’s debut novel, Self-Portrait with Boy, in 2014. The finished book, published this week by Scribner, has evolved and changed, but the essentials were in place from the beginning. The story is told in crisp, clicking, photographic prose and has the narrative momentum of a thriller, though the question isn’t what tragedy will befall the main character but what that character will do with a tragedy once it’s happened—and, most interestingly, happened to someone else. The story is set in DUMBO in the eighties. Pipes leak. Artists squat. Developers are only just beginning to arrive. The central character is the struggling photographer, Lu Rile. Rile happens to be taking a self-portrait in her apartment as a neighbor’s child falls to his death outside her window. She catches the moment and ends up with the image of a lifetime. Now she must decide what to do with it. She harbors the secret as she comforts the child’s mother. They become increasingly close, but all the while, Rile is developing the film in her apartment right downstairs, in her makeshift darkroom, adjusting its size, trying out different versions—Lyon makes this process especially thrilling—creating the work of art that she knows could lift her from obscurity into the amoral splendor of the eighties art world. For those of us who have loved this novel for years, this week feels like something out of its pages. Finally, the secret is out. —Brent Katz Read More
February 9, 2018 Arts & Culture Gabriel García Márquez’s Road Trip Through Alabama By Caleb Johnson García Márquez in his home in Mexico in 2003. Photo: Indira Restrepo. In the summer of 1961, Gabriel García Márquez lived with his family in the Webster Hotel on West Forty-Fifth Street in New York City. They paid two hundred dollars a month for a room. The thirty-three-year-old García Márquez had moved to the city a few months earlier to join Prensa Latina, the fledgling Cuban state news agency with offices at Rockefeller Center. While he worked, his wife, Mercedes, and infant son Rodrigo spent their days strolling Central Park. The FBI was monitoring the newsroom, which was itself consumed with subterfuge and rumors over who among the journalists were counterrevolutionaries. Before long, García Márquez’s friend Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza, who worked at the agency’s Havana bureau, heard of impending mutiny and flew to the States to warn him. By the time Mendoza arrived, Gabo, as he was affectionately called, had already quit. He had enough money to get his family to New Orleans aboard a Greyhound bus. Mendoza returned to Bogotá and wired the cash the family would need to reach Mexico City. There, Gabo had friends and the prospect of part-time journalism work to sustain him while he wrote his next novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude. Read More