December 1, 2016 Books The Pleasures of Incomprehensibility By Michael LaPointe Why we don’t need to decode “the world’s most mysterious book.” Pages from the Voynich Manuscript. Medieval manuscripts are survivors—of Viking raids, of damp and decay—but even with delicate, fragile pages and binding, many of them remain luminous, their vellum illuminated in gold and silver, embellished with vegetal and animistic imagery, and sketched through with the marginalia of generations of owners. Even editions made from common calfskin can inspire the same awe as the upper reaches of cathedrals. The Voynich Manuscript, an early fifteenth-century volume housed in Yale’s Beinecke library, looks at first like any such edition, with its loopy text and colorful illustrations. Yet as soon as you try reading the book, it resists. There’s no author, no title. It isn’t written in a foreign language; rather, this language is totally unknown. And while the illustrations appear to be plants or stars or baths, in fact they have no analogue in the known world. It’s as outside of genre as dancer Vaslav Nijinsky’s diary, and indeed it’s hard to shake the feeling that it was composed by someone descending into madness. Scholars have tried to decode it for centuries. Some have suggested it was written by the philosopher Roger Bacon, while others insist it must have been bestowed on humanity by aliens. More cynical thinkers believe that the manuscript is a hoax, probably created by medieval charlatans. But no matter how hard people search for answers, the book refuses to yield meaning—it’s totally incomprehensible. Read More
December 1, 2016 Our Correspondents In Comparison By Wei Tchou Asking Ma about life in Shanghai during the Cultural Revolution. My mother and I were decorating the Christmas tree during a quiet afternoon last week when I thought to ask her if the sorrow I have been inclined toward postelection is anything like what she experienced during the Cultural Revolution, when she was a teenager. I had flown home to Georgia for Thanksgiving feeling exhausted and emotionally volatile—still trapped in what felt and continues to feel like grief. “Some of it seems familiar,” she said, “but no, it’s nothing in comparison.” I asked her what felt the same, as I scooped up a handful of ornaments. Our collection neatly comprises my family’s entire United States’ life: here are a few mice knitted by my grandmother when my parents first arrived in America; a sand dollar tied with a red ribbon from the first church they joined in Kentucky; a bell cut from orange construction paper with a photograph of my pudgy face pasted on it, from 1991. Read More
December 1, 2016 On the Shelf Robots Are Superior Buddhists, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring That’s a good robot. Whenever someone asks me how I’m doing, I say, Good! The robots haven’t eradicated me or my species yet! I’ve been going on this way my whole adult life—but now Genevieve Bell, an anthropologist who studies tech, has convinced me that my real fear isn’t the robots. It’s staring right back at me when I look in the mirror. “Western culture has some anxieties about what happens when humans try to bring something to life … What we are seeing now isn’t an anxiety about artificial intelligence per se, it’s about what it says about us. That if you can make something like us, where does it leave us? And that concern isn’t universal, as other cultures have very different responses to AI, to big data. The most obvious one to me would be the Japanese robotic tradition, where people are willing to imagine the role of robots as far more expansive than you find in the West. For example, the Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori published a book called The Buddha in the Robot, where he suggests that robots would be better Buddhists than humans because they are capable of infinite invocations … Mori’s argument was that we project our own anxieties and when we ask: ‘Will the robots kill us?’ what we are really asking is: ‘Will we kill us?’ ” The CIA tried for years to assassinate Castro—with a poison pen, an exploding underwater seashell (I’m not making this shit up), and a cigar tainted with botulism. It was only fair that the New York Times began drafting his obit in 1959: for a minute there it seemed as if he was not long for this world. Now the Times remembers its many false alarms: “The development of the Castro obituary is as legendary as the man himself. Countless colleagues—spanning many different technologies and platforms—have massaged it and passed the baton. Each of the many death scares gave us the opportunity to dust off the package and reassess our digital strategy based on ever-changing audience consumption habits and storytelling tools.” Read More
November 30, 2016 Look Foreign Body By Dan Piepenbring Hurvin Anderson’s exhibition “Foreign Body” is at Michael Werner Gallery in New York through January 14. Anderson is a British painter of Jamaican descent: “The first time I went to Jamaica, I was fourteen,” he told Sotheby’s a few years ago. “My elder siblings all came from there and I got to know the island through them. I wasn’t born there, so I didn’t actually fit in. I feel more British than Jamaican at times and vice versa. My painting is a dialogue between these two territories—trying to get these two places to meet. Hurvin Anderson, Studio Drawing 9, 2012, acrylic on drafting film, 19″ x 33″. Read More
November 30, 2016 From the Archive Who’s This “Borges” Guy? By Dan Piepenbring Our new, redesigned website marks the debut of our complete digital archive: now subscribers can read every piece from The Paris Review’s sixty-three-year history. Subscribe now and you can start reading 0ur back issues right away; you can also try a free ten-day trial period. Read More
November 30, 2016 Our Correspondents On Swift By Anthony Madrid William Powell Frith, Jonathan Swift and Vanessa, 1881. Jonathan Swift is 349 years old today. Which is to say he’s beginning his 350th year. What was he anyway? Or never mind what he was; what did he think he was? Did he think he was mainly the author of Gulliver’s Travels—? Did he think he was a journalist? Deep down, did he consider himself mainly a “Church of England man”? Maybe. I don’t believe he would have said, I am a satirist. I don’t think he thought that was a job. Or a life. Perhaps he mainly thought he was the cat who walks through the Wet Wild Woods, waving his wild tail and walking by his wild lone. Heaven knows that’s what I think, but I want to know what he thought. We know what Thomas Jefferson thought Thomas Jefferson was. He designed his own grave marker and spelled everything out: Read More