May 2, 2018 Arts & Culture Black and White and Black: On the Comics of Chris Reynolds By Ed Park Around the start of the first millennium, a territory on the northern coast of Africa fell under control of the Romans, who dubbed it “Mauretania,” possibly derived from a native word or from the Greek for “dark” (or “obscure”)—the root that eventually informed the term Moor. Centuries later, the Cunard Line affixed the name to a giant ship, built in Newcastle and launched in 1906, which for several years enjoyed distinction as both the world’s fastest and largest ocean liner, beloved by many, though called by Kipling “the monstrous nine-decked city.” It was scrapped between 1935 and 1937, and parts of the interior found a home in a pub in Bristol. Eight decades after the RMS Mauretania’s maiden voyage, Chris Reynolds, a Welsh-born artist in his mid twenties, embarked on what would be his life’s work, a beguiling series of loosely connected stories that he called Mauretania Comics. The work had nothing to do with that remote place or with seafaring vessels of yore, and the name was just one of its many elusive mysteries. The stories were and are easy to consume but tantalizingly difficult to characterize. Droll dialogue gives way to utterly melancholy voiceover; locales like “The Lighted Cities” and “Mouth City” are mapped on the same imaginative terrain as some version of England, one where a blasted figure out of J. G. Ballard might run across Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker. Monitor, Mauretania’s signature character, always dons a helmet with a striplike visor masking his eyes. (Today he wouldn’t look so out of place: it resembles nothing so much as a virtual-reality headpiece.) The architecture alone is worth the trip: lipstick-shaped temples of music, a house like a geodesic dome crossed with a web made by a spider on acid. Read More
May 2, 2018 Artificial Intelligentsia How to Write Personalities for the AI Around Us By Mariana Lin You just can’t differentiate between a robot and the very best of humans. —Dr. Lanning in I, Robot, by Isaac Asimov As a little twenty-first-century cocktail-party experiment, quote that line to someone, and observe whether it elicits hope or fear. Asimov understood the core terror of AI-human relations: replication, confusion, eventual domination, and chaos. What makes his statement discomfiting nowadays is how quickly we are advancing toward a reality in which those relations are increasingly commonplace. Yet it stands to reason that more versions of the “very best of humans”—or, alternatively, more things that bring out the “very best of humans”—would make the world a better place. Today the list of AI who are household names is short: Siri, Watson, Alexa, Sophia, Paro, Cortana, Pepper, Erica … But on a day not far from tomorrow, I’m quite sure this list will be a hundred times as long. The AI arena is expanding rapidly, and virtual and robotic products are being developed as quickly as we are finding needs for them. Within a decade or so, AI will be everywhere, corporeally and incorporeally living among us: driving us, assisting in medicine, teaching our children, guiding us on tours, getting our coffee, or, perhaps more important, spouting original, personally crafted limericks. If we design our AI to simply function well, our society may progress with increased speed in efficiency and convenience. But if we are also designing them to have thoughtful personalities and belief systems, our society may advance in areas where we have ostensibly made less progress—enhancing joy, delight, compassion, and deeper relationships. Read More
May 2, 2018 Hue's Hue Scheele’s Green, the Color of Fake Foliage and Death By Katy Kelleher Spray of artificial flowers, 1898–1935. According to folklore, one of the nineteen riddles the queen of Sheba posed to Solomon had to do with flowers. The queen brought garlands of cloth flowers or bouquets of wax blossoms—stories differ—and asked Solomon to pick the true flower hidden among the faux. Solomon couldn’t do it by sight alone (they were good fakes), and so he asked the queen whether he could throw open the windows and let some fresh air into the palace—to help him think, he said. As though he had been invited, a fat, drowsy pollinator came inside, and he was pulled, by instinct and hunger, to the true flower. And where the bee flew, so did Solomon’s finger point. “That one,” he told her. “That one is the real flower. The rest are facsimiles.” This story isn’t in the Bible, though the Old Testament does allude to the episode. There’s a moral here (something about every animal having something to contribute), but I’m not interested in morals. Like the queen of Sheba herself, I’m interested in fake flowers and their equally fake foliage. Read More
May 1, 2018 Redux Redux: The Story of the Story By The Paris Review Every week, the editors of The Paris Review lift the paywall on a selection of interviews, stories, poems, and more from the magazine’s archive. You can have these unlocked pieces delivered straight to your inbox every Sunday by signing up for the Redux newsletter. This week, we bring you Lorrie Moore’s Art of Fiction interview, Rachel Kushner’s story “Blanks,” and Kevin Young’s poem “Homage to Phillis Wheatley.” Lorrie Moore, The Art of Fiction No. 167 Issue no. 158 (Spring–Summer 2001) If one loves stories, then one would naturally love the story of the story. Or the story behind the story, pick your preposition. It does seem to me to be a kind of animal impulse almost, a mammalian curiosity. For a reader to wonder about the autobiography in a fiction may be completely unavoidable and in fact may speak to the success of a particular narrative, though it may also speak to its failure. Certainly literature has been written about and taught in this manner for a long time; it’s not new. It is sometimes, however, like so many things that are natural, unfortunate. Read More
May 1, 2018 Look May ’68: Posters of the Revolution By The Paris Review In 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy were assassinated, Richard Nixon was elected president, the war in Vietnam intensified, and black Americans and anti-war activists were persecuted by the FBI. Anti-war demonstrators chanted, The whole world is watching, as police beat and teargassed them. On the other side of the Atlantic, a revolution brewed in Paris. “Be realistic! Demand the impossible!” was one of the slogans of the uprising that May. “No replastering, the structure is rotten!” and “Neither god nor master!” In the aftermath of the bloody Algerian war, and following increasingly fervent labor strikes, the students united with the factory workers. They formed barricades in the street, led massive strikes, and occupied the universities. The protests brought the city to a standstill, and for a brief month in spring, it seemed as if a more liberated, equitable reality was possible. But the goals of the revolution were vague: a desire to speak, to be free, to be united, to be young and alive. The new world order the revolutionaries vowed to never stop fighting for failed, and still fails, to materialize. Fifty years later, many French people question what exactly May ’68, for all its earnest hope and idealism, achieved. Some argue it has done little more than infuse politics with empty impractical rhetoric. Others argue it left a permanent positive spirit of freedom. One thing is easily agreed upon: the posters were beautiful. They carry a simple iconography—the raised fist of the revolutionary, the spiked silhouette of the factory, blocky silhouettes that strive to represent a universal figure. Most of these were created by a collective of radical artists based at the occupied art school dubbed the Atelier Populaire. (“Populaire,” used in this sense, translates roughly to “communal” or “classless.”) Whatever the legacy of that fevered month of May, these posters have a lasting power. —Nadja Spiegelman Read More
May 1, 2018 History May ’68: A Great Lyrical Community By Mitch Abidor Fifty years later, we look back at the student-led protests that shook Paris in May 1968 and have occupied the French political imagination ever since. May 1968, Paris. Photo: Bruno Barbey. The events of May 1968 in France emerged seemingly out of nowhere, yet they brought the country to a halt. High schools and universities in all corners of the country were occupied by students, and millions of workers went on strike. Although some have maintained that the uprising was actually an outgrowth of the strike movements that had swept the country in the previous year, May ’68 was not the result of worker discontent: they only joined the fray ten days after the students set it off. The movement emerged from the students. Its premonitory signs appeared at the new University of Nanterre in late 1967 and early 1968 with protests over the right for boys to visit girls’ dorms and vice versa and in defense of the students who were threatened with expulsion for their participation in an anti–Vietnam War demonstration. What would become known as the May events began when students gathered at the Sorbonne in Paris and threw stones at police occupying the courtyard. Why, in the midst of the trente glorieuses, the thirty glorious years of postwar prosperity, did France suddenly find itself in a revolutionary crisis? The issues that directly set off the uprising hardly seem to be enough to detonate a revolution. In my book May Made Me, an oral history of the events, I interviewed those involved in the moment in an attempt to understand. Jean-Michel Rabaté, now a professor at the University of Pennsylvania but then a student in Bordeaux preparing his entrance to the École Normale Supérieure, offered his explanation for May. “De Gaulle lied. He lied to everyone … There were so many lies, so many lies about our heroic past. France needed more truth, and that was the effect of May ’68: May ’68 allowed for greater truth.” For Jean-Michel, the goals of the movement were difficult to inscribe on a banner: “May was, We’re going to be more true, and that was the case. We came closer to the truth.” Read More