March 28, 2017 On the Shelf Steal This Coin, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring I bet you can pick it up all by yourself. Hey, are you busy tonight? I want to run something by you: I think we should steal the world’s largest gold coin. Yes, it is 221 pounds. Yes, it is Canadian, and unfortunately known as the “Big Maple Leaf.” And yes, it was just stolen—like, two nights ago—from a museum in Berlin. But don’t you see? This makes our work even easier. The original thieves already took care of the hard part. All we have to do is find them, neutralize them, and abscond with our booty in a very large, very stable cart. Here’s Melissa Eddy with some background: “The coin is about twenty-one inches in diameter and over an inch thick. It has the head of Queen Elizabeth II on one side and a maple leaf on the other. Its face value is 1 million Canadian dollars, or about $750,000, but by gold content alone, it is worth as much as $4.5 million at current market prices. And though it weighs about as much as a refrigerator, somehow thieves apparently managed to lug it through the museum and up at least one floor to get it out of a window at the back of the building. The police are still trying to figure out exactly how they did it … Their theory for now is that the thieves dragged the coin through the museum, out the window and then along the railway track, possibly reaching a park on the opposite bank of the river near the Hackescher Markt, a public square in Berlin that is home to a number of late-night bars and cafes.” (This is where we’ll begin our quest.) Dora Zhang reminds us not to confuse our love of literature with a generic, feel-good love of books—and not to allow the exploitation of literature: “If it seems natural today that we can and do love literature, a popular strain of bibliophilia predicates that love precisely on its utility—in particular its capacity to make us better people. This is evident from the moral uplift of Oprah’s Book Club to Alain de Botton’s project of rewriting the Western literary canon in the genre of self-help. His London-based School of Life organizes retreats in sumptuous country estates, promising discussions about how books can change us and individual consultations with ‘bibliotherapists’ who can make personalized recommendations. (One can only imagine the prescriptions—for greater stoicism, one dose of Hemingway; for better friendships, a splash of Montaigne; for cheerful optimism, avoid Beckett at all costs.) There’s little doubt that books can transform us. But transformation isn’t always comfortable—‘a book must be the ax for the frozen sea inside us,’ Kafka said. When literature is at once luxury commodity and magic pill, the change we seek from it is unlikely to be the kind that comes from being alienated, devastated, or having the ground under us whisked away.” Read More
March 27, 2017 On Music Blues to Come By Adam Shatz Harriet Tubman’s new album Araminta has a joyous aura of creative destruction. Harriet Tubman In 1967, Thelonious Monk wrote his only waltz: a slow, sweet, faintly melancholy tune he called “Ugly Beauty,” which appears on his album Underground. The title is probably Monk’s translation of jolie laide, a French expression for a woman whose less pleasing features somehow make her more attractive—though I suspect that Monk had more gnomic intentions in deploying the phrase. The idea that beauty might arise out of asymmetry—out of irregularities, imperfections, and apparent flaws—would no doubt have appealed to the composer of “Off Minor,” with his predilection for dissonant intervals, altered chords and rhythmic displacement. Monk’s music was a world of ugly beauty. The story of musical modernism could also be told as a story of ugly beauty—of the steady triumph, in the face of critical resistance, of deviation, dissonance, and rupture. Many of the sounds we now consider beautiful were at first experienced as strange, unsettling, even frightening. In the feverish rhythms of The Rite of Spring, Adorno detected a fascist call for obedience. Philip Larkin accused John Coltrane of trying to be “ugly on purpose” with his severe, probing improvisations. Some American supporters of the war in Vietnam are said to have heard sacrilege, if not treason, in Jimi Hendrix’s electrical rewiring of the national anthem at Woodstock. The reasons for such resistance are as much political as aesthetic. As the philosopher Jacques Attali put it, “noise is violence: it disturbs.” The struggle to create new sounds, Attali argues in Noise: The Political Economy of Music, is usually received as a “simulacrum of murder” because it challenges the existing musical order. Read More
March 27, 2017 Arts & Culture The Hundred Trillion Stories in Your Head By Benjamin Ehrlich For the father of modern neuroscience, cellular anatomy was like the most exciting fiction. Santiago Ramón y Cajal, “the father of modern neuroscience.” All images courtesy Cajal Legacy, Instituto Cajal (CSIC), Madrid. Fiction is, by definition, a world away from fact—but Santiago Ramón y Cajal, often heralded as “the father of modern neuroscience,” used it to find objective truth. Cajal spent his days at the microscope, gazing down at faint, entangled fibers that appeared to his fellow anatomists as inscrutable labyrinths. Contrary to prevailing theory, the Spaniard discerned that the nervous system, including the brain, comprises distinctly individual cells (neurons), which, he theorized, must communicate across the infinitesimal spaces between them (synapses). It was Cajal who first applied the term plasticity to the brain; he went so far as to recommend “cerebral gymnastics” for mental enhancement, presaging twenty-first century insights and trends about brain exercise. “If he is so determined,” Cajal said, “every man can be the sculptor of his own brain.” If all Russian literature comes from Gogol’s “Overcoat,” and all modern American literature comes from “a book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn,” then international brain research, including grand projects like the BRAIN Initiative and the Human Brain Project, emerges from the unlikely work of Santiago Ramón y Cajal. Cajal was born in 1852, high in the mountains of northern Spain; his head always seemed to belong in the clouds. The landscape of his childhood was epic. Aragonese folklore echoed through dust-colored pueblos, swept through by the specters of conquests and kings. The young Cajal idolized these legendary figures, maybe because village life was incessantly prosaic. Alto Aragón was notoriously inhospitable; the highland region that Robert Hughes, in his biography of Goya (another native son), noted for its “sour wine, straw bedding, tough meat”—“semi-troglodytic conditions.” Almost nothing grew from the callous, fissured soil; Cajal’s home was a ramshackle pile of cobblestone. “Not a flower pot in the windows,” he recalls in his autobiography, Recollections of My Life: “not the smallest decoration on the fronts of the houses, nothing in a word, to indicate the slightest feeling for beauty.” Read More
March 27, 2017 On Sports The Perfume of Narcissus By Rowan Ricardo Phillips Watching the crowds—and the tennis—at this year’s BNP Paribas Open. Elena Vesnina at Indian Wells. Tennis followers have shifted their gaze toward Florida for the next tournament, but my mind is still on the BNP Paribas Open, known casually by the name of the small, fifty-year-old resort town in the Coachella Valley where it’s held: Indian Wells, California. More than a week has passed since I was there, having flown in for the men’s and women’s finals. As I watched the tennis press feverishly filing match reports and injury updates, tweeting about whatever nuggets of information they’d come across during press conferences, I wondered what it would be like to write off the beat, out of synch, out of time. I have a friend, a distinguished historian, who goes out of his way to keep his comments on current events to the bare minimum. He thinks it takes fifteen to twenty years before we really know what happened at any given time; whenever conversation turns to current events, he chimes in with, We won’t know for a long time what was going on, or, That seems to be what happened but we don’t know yet what it means, or, when the hot takes are really flying, Meh. Read More
March 27, 2017 On the Shelf Scared Shitless, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Man and woman, scared shitless. Not pictured: absence of shit. Looking for a fun, easy way to spice up your writing? Try throwing in a fecal intensifier or two. They’re the shit, and you’ll be thrilled shitless with the results. As the translator Brendan O’Kane writes, fecal intensifiers are the idiom of the moment, but it’s hard to follow their logic: “A certain distinguished Dutch professor emeritus … noted that ‘people before about 1950 were mostly bored shitless.’ This cracked the room up, naturally, but it also seemed slightly off … I might be scared shitless, but I’m unlikely to be amused, bored, delighted, outraged, or annoyed shitless. This is curious, since shitlessness would seem to be the natural result of something scaring, boring, or annoying the shit out of me—all distinct possibilities, according to my understanding of the idiom. In particularly unexpected circumstances, one might even shit oneself—as a response to fear, outrage, amusement, or surprise, rather than delight or (unless as a last resort) boredom.” If shitlessness is too taboo for you, there are other ways to jar and unnerve your potential readers. Take pains to pepper your prose with irregardless, for example, and watch the hate mail pour in. According to Kory Stamper, a lexicographer at Merriam-Webster, “Irregardless is one of those words that people love to hate. No one is lukewarm about irregardless. I don’t use it, but what I love about it that it has hung around on the periphery of English for over 200 years. It’s like this barnacle that you can’t get off the hull of the language, and I think that’s great.” Read More
March 24, 2017 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Crusaders, Complaints, Competition By The Paris Review From Bob, Son of Battle: The Last Gray Dog of Kenmuir. José Maria de Eça de Queirós, where have you been all my life? Dead, obviously—the man died in 1900 at the age of fifty-five—but his novels are acknowledged as classics in his native Portugal, and by well-educated people the world over. As readers of the Daily may remember, I tore through my first Eça book a few months ago. And now Margaret Jull Costa has translated The Illustrious House of Ramires, his last novel, about a provincial aristocrat—a dreamer and amateur historian—who tries to write a novella based on the exploits of his Crusader ancestors. Comedy and mayhem ensue. As in The Crime of Father Amaro, Eça’s tone shifts from light to dark, from tender irony to horror, then back again, in a single page, almost in a sentence, as Ramires—like a fin de siècle, Portuguese Quixote—tries to re-create the chivalry of his forbears. The plot is full of surprises, but even when our hero is just sitting at his desk, dreaming up deeds of valor, Eça takes us inside the fantasy, until we start to wonder whether Ramires has crossed the fine line between idiocy and genius. It’s rare to find such a thrilling portrait of the writer at work. —Lorin Stein The other day, I picked up Letters to His Neighbor, a collection of Marcel Proust’s notes to Marie Williams, the women who lived above him at 102 Boulevard Haussmann. Translated from the French by Lydia Davis, the letters begin in 1908 and span some eight years of sincere pleasantries (“I think of you all the time”) and gentle complaints (“like all those who are ill I have learned to spend my life surrounded by ugliness”). In true Proustian fashion, the prose is winding, musing on everything from the properties of imagination (“when one is endowed with [it], as you are, one possesses all the landscapes one has loved … ”) to the Great War, which claimed Williams’s brother in 1915. Above all, Proust writes about the noise coming from the Williams’ floor, which disturbs him greatly; he’s always asking “that there not be so much [of it] tomorrow.” You’d think that would limit their correspondence, but Proust is a charmer: he showers Mrs. Williams with small gifts, like flowers and books and pieces of music; it’s no wonder the exchange lasted nearly a decade. —Caitlin Youngquist Read More