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
March 24, 2017 Arts & Culture Papa the Investor By Andrea di Robilant How Hemingway became a major shareholder in a venerable Italian publishing house. Ernest Hemingway, with pigeons, in Venice, Italy, 1954. Ernest Hemingway had a rough time with his Italian publisher, Einaudi, the venerable Turin-based house that still prints a good portion of his titles today. The issue, as is so often the case, was money: Einaudi, Hemingway complained, were communists looking for any excuse to withhold his overdue royalties. After 1947, he’d grown so exasperated that he refused to publish another book with them. So it’s all the more startling to discover that in the spring of 1955, he quietly agreed to convert a large part of his growing credit with the house into company stock, becoming a major shareholder overnight. Hemingway was usually very prudent with his money—and the chronically mismanaged Einaudi was hardly a safe investment. But having a stake in the publication of his own books, he hoped, would make it easier to get his hands on his growing pile of Italian cash. As an author, Hemingway had gotten a late start in Italy. During the twenties and thirties, when the Anglophone world consecrated him as one of its brightest talents, he was persona non grata in the country. His blacklisting started as early as 1923, when Hemingway, still a young reporter for the Toronto Star, described Mussolini as “the biggest bluff in Europe.” In 1927, he wrote a few sardonic sketches on Fascist Italy for the New Republic. But it was the 1929 publication of A Farewell to Arms, with its antimilitarism and its powerful description of the rout of the Italian Army after Caporetto, that made him an enemy in the eyes of the Mussolini regime—a reputation further sealed by his support for the Republican cause in the Spanish Civil War. Read More
March 24, 2017 On the Shelf The Cows Will Kill You, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Henri Rousseau, Scene in Bagneux on the Outskirts of Paris, 1909. Go ahead and laugh at the cows, with their multiple stomachs, their indolent cud chewing, their superfluity of feces. The cows will kill you. Deep in a cow’s soul is an existential rage, a hatred of its own cowness that, once activated, generates an unslakable thirst for blood. And it is human blood they crave, for it is humans who have made their condition one of endless bondage. The statistics bear me out on this—at least in the United Kingdom, where, as Glen Newey writes, you’re more likely to die under the hooves of an angry steer than you are at the hands of a terrorist: “The HSE [Health and Safety Executive] logs seventy-four ‘fatalities involving cattle’ in the UK in 2000–15, compared to fifty-three deaths caused by Islamist terrorism in the same period. Many of the victims were farm workers, while eighteen were ‘MOPs’ or members of the public. These victims were disproportionately older people (only one was under fifty, thirteen were over sixty and as many as five were over seventy). More chilling still, as the HSE report makes clear, is the specific threat posed by out-of-control mothering cows. Of incident reports where the gender of the assailant was identified, ten involved cows with calves, and only one a bull. Hence it emerges that predominantly older people are being targeted by nursing cattle. Vegans seem largely to have been spared. But nobody is wholly safe from this civilizational threat, not just to our persons but to our old, carnivorous values.” Since the election, Sinclair Lewis’s novel It Can’t Happen Here has been having a moment, as Americans continue to wrap their minds around the basic irony that it has, in fact, happened here. But Steven Michels recommends another book by Lewis—his 1919 novel, Free Air, which is one of the earliest iterations of road-trip literature and presents, Michels says, “Lewis’s most affirmative vision” of freedom: “Free Air is the story of two young people, Milt and Claire. Milt is a small-town mechanic and garage owner, and Claire is from Long Island and in the middle of a coast-to-coast trip to Seattle with her father. Like many Northeasterners, Claire believes that the rest of the country is filled with folks who are good but simple. Milt knows better. He had been plotting an escape from its dreary doldrums, but is enthralled with Claire when she comes through town, and he ends up following her and her father on their journey west. Claire quickly falls for the heartiness of the outdoors, even though she sees Milt more like a brother than a romantic partner. ‘There is an America!’ Claire cheers by her tent, after she and Milt forgo her usual hotel … Once they get to their destination, however, they discover that everyone is obsessed with ‘the View’ and ranks houses accordingly. What’s worse is that everyone builds and buys from the assumption that houses ought to resemble the East Coast as much as possible.” Read More