May 24, 2017 On the Shelf I Can Name Your Disease, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring It’s right on the tip of my tongue … I’ve always thought I would be good at naming diseases. The problem with most disease names is that they have all these scary words in them: flu, disorder, virus. That’s bad for business. If I were in charge, I’d name them after deodorants (Aqua Reef, Cool Burst, Sport) or Yankee Candles (Bahama Breeze, Vanilla Cupcake, Clean Cotton). But get this: It’s not just one person naming all the world’s diseases. It’s a whole committee of international bureaucracies, which explains why so many of our world’s most dangerous illnesses have such lousy titles. Laura Spinney writes on the winding, often fraught course through which a disease gets its name: “The Spanish flu stands as a monument to the ugly history of disease naming. The world was at war in 1918, and the belligerent nations censored their press, not wanting to damage their populations’ morale … The world came to see the disease as pulsing out from Spain, a belief that was encouraged by propagandists in other countries whom it suited to shift the blame. The naming of diseases has always been as much about politics and the human need to identify a scapegoat as it has been about accurately labeling a new threat to life. Periodic attempts have been made to remove the subjective from the process. Three United Nations agencies—the World Health Organization (WHO), the Food and Agriculture Organization, and the World Organization for Animal Health—play a particularly important role when it comes to infectious diseases, which don’t respect borders. WHO hosts the International Classification of Diseases (ICD), which has long assigned the final name to any human disease. And in 2015, WHO came up with an updated set of guidelines for labeling infectious diseases, which account for the vast majority of threats to human life.” Thought experiment: Say a kind of distant friend of yours gives you a big statue of Karl Marx. Do you accept it? Should you be happy about it? What if Karl Marx is kind of a contentious figure for you because half your nation embraced Communism not long ago, with disastrous results? Didi Kirsten Tatlow writes on a minor controversy unfolding between China and Germany: “For weeks, Chinese have been debating the meaning of a superhero-size statue of Karl Marx headed to Trier, the German town where the political philosopher was born. An attempt to spread Communist revolution back to democratic Germany? A joke? The eighteen-foot work by the sculptor Wu Weishan is a gift from the Chinese government and is to be unveiled next May as part of wider commemorations for the two hundredth anniversary of Marx’s birth … This noble-looking Marx gazing into the future expresses ‘the confidence of today’s China in its own theories, path, system and culture,’ Mr. Wu wrote in People’s Daily, the party newspaper … Historians and politicians asked whether it was appropriate to honor so uncritically a man whose ideas led to dictatorship, including in the former East Germany. In April, Trier’s City Council gave final approval to the gift but whittled down its size by more than two feet.” Read More
May 23, 2017 On Technology Salvation Mode By Zack Hatfield The forgotten joys of the screen saver. When I first encountered Jorge Luis Borges’s “The House of Asterion,” a short story whose narrator runs with madness through an endless labyrinth, a remote feeling of déjà vu eased into one of bizarre, welcome recognition. The house’s infinite doors, its emptiness, the dizzy futility—Borges seemed to be describing a popular screen saver from the nineties. Surely you know the one, the Windows maze, that redbrick warren of untold pivots summoned by the computer monitor when no one was around. The ending of Borges’s story, wherein the narrator is revealed as the slain minotaur of Greek mythology, only reinforced the connection; to me, screen savers have always afforded some tenuous connection to the afterlife. The first one I can remember, on my family’s household desktop, featured a crimson psychedelia that overtook the screen’s blackness, a kaleidoscope of paisleys and helixes forever in a state of irresolution. Late at night, I’d prepare an unhealthy snack and sit patiently in front of the monitor to watch it, a child beseeching death. How fitting would it be, I thought then, if we all ended up trapped behind a pane of glass roiling with pixels? My instinct was only reaffirmed by a childhood friend’s widowed grandmother, who held onto the conviction that her husband was trying to communicate to her through her Dell’s wispy screen saver. She spent her evenings careful not to disturb the cursor, basking in her lover’s strange séance. If screen savers still have an eschatological tinge for me, it’s also because of their own demise. We no longer need them now, when our phones nudge us at all hours, our inboxes bloat, and dystopian headlines scorch themselves onto our consciousnesses. Our laptops, when we look away from them, have optimized screen protection with a bland and dreamless sleep mode. What we abandoned with the death of screen savers—themselves testifiers of disuse—was a culture that could accept walking away from life onscreen. Read More
May 23, 2017 From the Archive Another Passionless Day By Dan Piepenbring Our complete digital archive is now available. Subscribers can read every piece—every story and poem, every essay, portfolio, and interview—from The Paris Review’s sixty-four-year history. Subscribe now and you can start reading our back issues right away. “The mere has always been a useful category,” Donald Barthelme said in his 1981 Art of Fiction interview. And he’s right. I love the mere. To be merely this, merely that, merely the other—this is the mark of someone who eschews the limelight, who moves in the margins, who rejects the all-consuming ethos of fullness. To be mere is very close to being entirely irrelevant, and that’s the grand prize. And yet there are days, and this may well be one of them, when we find ourselves afflicted by all that’s mere in the world: when constellations of objects conspire to trip you up. When current events draw you into the mire. When something is as good as anything. Between skimming the headlines and making phlegmatic trips to the refrigerator for more seltzer, I’ve been admiring Sidney Wade’s poem “Another Passionless Day,” from our Summer 1998 issue, which nails the sensation of “mereness”; in lines that are somehow full of momentum, Wade describes exactly how it feels not to have any. And as her nouns begin to accrue (in that stochastic way that is the hallmark of the mere; find another poem that has hockey pucks, clarinets, and giant pastries within spitting distance of one another), Wade puts her finger on what’s always been to me the scariest part of apathy, and the hardest to shake: the sense that it will settle over everything you see like a fine layer of dust, that it is contagious and terminal. I won’t spoil the second half—which I haven’t included here; the idea is to get you to pay for it, see—except to say that it won’t turn on you. That is, it won’t swerve to offer some undeserved, bullshit, inspirational pick-me-up in the end. This is, after all, a mere poem. And I say that as the highest praise. Read More
May 23, 2017 On the Shelf The President Is a Computer, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring President Donald J. Trump, right, with boyhood friend. Does the president pass the Turing test? I’m afraid not. When I listen to his answers to basic questions and compare those answers to a real human’s, it’s plain to see that he’s a computer—most likely, my research suggests, a Tandy 1000 EX purchased from a RadioShack in Secaucus, New Jersey, sometime in December 1986. If this is the case, it explains a lot of his more mystifying decision-making procedures. The neurologist Robert A. Burton sees plenty of evidence that the president uses machine learning, making him a rudimentary artificial intelligence: “Trump doesn’t operate within conventional human cognitive constraints, but rather is a new life form, a rudimentary artificial intelligence-based learning machine. When we strip away all moral, ethical and ideological considerations from his decisions and see them strictly in the light of machine learning, his behavior makes perfect sense. Consider how deep learning occurs in neural networks such as Google’s DeepMind or IBM’s Deep Blue and Watson. In the beginning, each network analyzes a number of previously recorded games, and then, through trial and error, the network tests out various strategies. Connections for winning moves are enhanced; losing connections are pruned away. The network has no idea what it is doing or why one play is better than another. It isn’t saddled with any confounding principles such as what constitutes socially acceptable or unacceptable behavior or which decisions might result in negative downstream consequences … As there are no lines of reasoning driving the network’s actions, it is not possible to reverse engineer the network to reveal the ‘why’ of any decision.” There’s a new Haruki Murakami book out, and, as Christian Lorentzen notes, you can pretty much guess how it’s gonna go: “In the novels there will always be cats, mundane kitchen activities, dingy barrooms, pop and/or classical theme tunes set against a surreal, Manichaean danger zone into which the humble yet increasingly resourceful hero must plunge in search of what he’s missing, most likely to find something else. The hero will spend some time at the bottom of a well, or some other deep and lonely space. His mind and heart will be tugged between desire for an ethereal, spiritual woman (usually the one who’s gone missing) and attraction to a sassy, sexy, down-to-earth gal (who at first seems more like a sidekick on his vision quest but may turn out to be just what he needed all along) … There’s always a bit of Chandler, Kafka, and Salinger mixed into Murakami’s fiction, and it’s tempting to say that the Salinger quotient has been growing too pronounced. But for all the dark elements at play in Murakami’s book—rape, murder, suicide, incest, mental illness, war trauma, etc.—Salinger’s vision of adolescence and arrested development in the Glass family stories is ultimately darker.” Read More
May 22, 2017 Sleep Aid The Dates of Variously Shaped Shields By Dan Piepenbring Félix Vallotton, Femme couchée dormant, 1899, oil on canvas. It’s late, and you’re still awake. Allow us to help with Sleep Aid, a series devoted to curing insomnia with the dullest, most soporific texts available in the public domain. Tonight’s prescription: “An Attempt to Classify and Date the Various Shapes Found in Heraldic Shields—Principally in England, with Incidental Datings,” the first chapter of George Grazebrook’s The Dates of Variously Shaped Shields, published in Liverpool in 1890. It seems necessary, by way of introduction, to say a few words on the circular convex shields used from very early times by our Saxon and Norman ancestors. These were of wood, with a central boss of bronze, and were sometimes of very large size; frequently, if we may judge from contemporaneous illuminations, as much as four feet in diameter. Across the inside of the boss a handle was fixed, and the shields, which were thus held out almost at arm’s length, as represented in many ancient MSS., must have been most cumbersome. It is hard to see how the sword or lance could have been conveniently used. The round shape must have interfered greatly with the view of one’s opponent, and a bungler would inevitably slice pieces from off his own shield while attacking his enemy. Moreover, such shields must have been lightly made: we know exactly how the bosses were fastened with rivets through the shield, for they are constantly found in Anglo-Saxon grave mounds, and the wood is thus known to have been of some thickness. But we can obtain from contemporary writings many more particulars. Read More
May 22, 2017 Arts & Culture Before a Million Universes By James McWilliams The pros and cons of the digitized Whitman and his “lost” novels. Walt Whitman with a butterfly, 1873. When I was a history graduate student in the waning days of the analog nineties, there were three kinds of researchers. Most impressive were the archive rats. These chain-smoking, type-A cranks entered an archival collection, knew precisely the evidence they needed, and did everything but ransack the place to find it. They chewed their nails to the nub and suffered insomnia, but their work showed a rare, if manic, evidentiary depth. Then there were the curious browsers: laid-back dreamers with a loosely generalized notion about what they sought. They limited themselves to documents that seemed interesting, floating among their sources with poetic insouciance. Their work, like cloud formations, drifted until it cohered into elegance. (They were also the only grad students I knew who smoked weed.) Finally, there were the surgical strikers. Soulless but engineered for accuracy, these students knew precisely which few documents to examine, did so with disinterested velocity, patched the holes in their dissertations, and then went to lunch. Prolific was how the rats and browsers praised the surgical strikers—faintly, of course. Read More