December 18, 2015 First Person Holiday Travel By Thomas Beller The night crowd. I grew up in a Manhattan apartment whose view encompassed sky, clouds, and other apartments. For a while I kept a pair of binoculars on the windowsill. I used them before going to bed, a kind of voyeuristic nightcap. Most of the pleasure I got came from noting which lights were on and which were off in other people’s apartments. I would sometimes wonder if somewhere out there, in one of the unlit windows, perhaps, there was a kid with binoculars looking back at me. Once, when we were thirteen or so, a friend in the building and I took his massive telescope to the roof. This was before all modes of entrance and egress in Manhattan apartment buildings and hotels were locked down and wired with alarms. We probably almost died getting the tripod up the fire ladder. Once we were up there, we took turns slowly rotating the telescope across the landscape as we peered through with one eye closed. We did this on a few occasions, and only once achieved the semi-nirvana of seeing a naked woman. She was sleeping on her stomach. A sheet covered most of her. But enough of her back, and a bit of leg, was visible to infer that she was naked. The question was if she would wake up, or at least roll over. We stayed up there for a long time, waiting. I don’t think she ever woke. Read More
December 18, 2015 On the Shelf The Power of Human Ingenuity, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring An illustration by Félix Vallotton from Paul Scheerbart’s Rakkóx the Billionaire & the Great Race, 1901. New York Review of Books. The Danish writer Dorthe Nors decided to leave Copenhagen for Jutland, and she’s having a wild time: “Just about the time that I seriously began to consider moving from Copenhagen, the first wolf was sighted in Jutland. Big commotion! Wolves had been wiped out a couple of centuries previous, and suddenly: ‘a wolf in Jutland!’ Interest groups sprouted up that felt the wolf should be shot. A wolf-free Denmark, they said. Out trickled tales that seemed to have come from the Brothers Grimm. Letters fired off to editors screamed, ‘The wolf is coming, the wolf is coming!’ People said they were afraid that the wolf would approach their houses, would snatch their children. ‘But Jutland is a big place,’ said others, who knew that the most dangerous wolf is the one that lurks in our minds. ‘Let’s welcome the wolf back.’ The debate was heated.” Vinson Cunningham has been staring at a lot of ugly things—and reading Gretchen Henderson’s new Ugliness: A Cultural History. The role of ugliness in our culture is changing, he writes: “I can’t remember the last time I heard one person call another person ugly. Art: sure. But when it comes to other human beings, we seem to have invested almost totally in metaphoric deployments of the word: ‘ugly’ now describes degrading items like the steadily worsening rhetoric of Donald Trump; or, simply, sinful behavior, as in: ‘God don’t like ugly.’ This may seem like progress, but it could also be regarded as a kind of absurd end state for Aristotelian thinking. No longer does the outward merely track the inward: by an almost forgotten transitive process, the two have become one. And so, today, ugly means evil, and the philosopher’s conflation is complete.” Today in the quest for utopia: pause to remember Paul Scheerbart (discussed previously on the Daily), a German writer whose work was animated by “unfashionable, childlike hopefulness”: “Scheerbart often reads like an apocalyptic mystic out of the Middle Ages who was somehow transported to the age of railroads and telegraphs. He returns again and again to the idea that existence—our own, or those of aliens on other planets—can be transformed into a paradise inhabited by beings who are like gods … Yet the agency of earthly renewal, in Scheerbart’s work, is not divine—at least, not directly. It is, rather, the power of human ingenuity, operating with hitherto unimaginable tools and techniques, that will literally remake the face of the earth.” A new exhibition, “Splendor, Myth, and Vision: Nudes from the Prado,” gives a sumptuous public presentation to paintings that were once strictly a private affair: “During the culturally repressive late-sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Spanish kings often secreted away their nude paintings in rooms known as ‘salas reservadas,’ where they could enjoy them in private … ‘These types of paintings were considered anathema,’ said Kathleen Morris … ‘The royals, the kings and their entourage found a way around the idea that they were not considered to be appropriate.’ ” If I know you, you’ve been living in your little bubble, completely ignoring South Korean abstract art. Well, it’s time to stop ignoring South Korean abstract art, says Barry Schwabsky, who has paid attention while the rest of us distracted ourselves: “One attraction is that ready-made label: tansaekhwa (sometimes rendered dansaekhwa). The word means ‘monochrome painting,’ but it’s usually translated as ‘Korean monochrome painting’ to distinguish it within the genre that came into existence in Russia when Malevich painted his white-on-white canvas in 1918 … Tansaekhwa deserves the attention of anyone with a genuine interest in painting, in part because it originated in a deep ambivalence about painting. In South Korea, education in painting runs on two separate tracks: ‘Oriental’ (ink) and ‘Western’ (oil). The tansaekhwa artists, born and partly educated in the prewar period of Japanese occupation, may not have been trained under this system, but it’s worth considering their work not so much as a synthesis of these supposedly separate Asian and Euro-American strands, but in opposition to both—as well as in opposition to the very dichotomy between them.”
December 17, 2015 On Language Thanks, Sounds Good, I Love You By M. G. Zimeta How Smart Reply attempts to mimic the way we talk. Google’s inbox logo—now with an enviable, elusive sense of satisfaction. Last month, researchers at Google unveiled Smart Reply, a piece of artificial intelligence that scans the e-mail you’re reading on your phone and suggests three possible responses. Why bother composing an answer yourself? Now you can choose one of Smart Reply’s with a quick tap. “Do you have any vacation plans set yet?” asks the sample e-mail. “No plans yet,” you might choose; or “I just sent them to you”; or “I’m working on them.” Smart Reply uses neural networks to calibrate its future suggestions, meaning it learns from how we use it. But Greg Corrado, a senior research scientist on the project, observed a “bizarre feature of our early prototype”: “its propensity to respond with ‘I love you’ to seemingly anything.” Analysis suggested “that the system was doing exactly what we’d trained it to do, generate likely responses—and it turns out that responses like Thanks, Sounds good, and I love you are super common.” Read More
December 17, 2015 Our Daily Correspondent Holiday Spirit By Sadie Stein Photo: cyclonebill, via Flickr When my grandmother was alive, she would make rum balls every Christmas. Hers were the standard heavyweight confection: Nilla wafer crumbs and pulverized nuts, mixed with cocoa and bound with corn syrup and raw rum, then rolled into truffle-like spheres. They arrived as leaden bundles wrapped in foil, and they were always a cause for celebration, heralding as they did the holiday season, and evoking her other Christmas traditions—the jolly Santa drawn in glass wax on the bay window and the collection of little elf figurines at the center of the table. But it must be said: they never tasted very good. Read More
December 17, 2015 Correspondence No Stranger to Excess By Terry Southern Terry Southern, as pictured on the cover of Yours in Haste and Adoration. A letter from Terry Southern to Fayette Hickox, dated June 29, 1978, and sent to the offices of The Paris Review. Southern, a novelist and screenplay writer, contributed often to the Review; he died in 1995, and our humor prize is named after him. Hickox—who is, as Southern was apparently unaware, a man—was George Plimpton’s assistant and a former managing editor of the magazine. Gene Andrewski, referred to below, was a former managing editor, too, and Maxine Groffsky ran the Review’s offices in Paris from 1966 until it moved to New York in 1973. (The letter’s original spelling and punctuation have been retained.) This letter appears in Yours in Haste and Adoration: Selected Letters of Terry Southern, edited by Nile Southern and Brooke Allen, out now from Antibookclub. Read More
December 17, 2015 On the Shelf Poe’s Only Best Seller, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring An illustration from Wyatt’s Conchology. This and other beautiful illustrations were omitted from Poe’s much cheaper abridged edition. Edgar Allan Poe had only one best seller in his lifetime. It wasn’t The Raven and Other Poems. Nor was it The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, his only novel. It was The Conchologist’s First Book: Or, a System of Testaceous Malacology, Arranged Expressly for the Use of Schools, in Which the Animals, According to Cuvier, Are Given with the Shells, A Great Number of New Species Added, And the Whole Brought Up, as Accurately as Possible, to the Present Condition of the Science. The first edition sold out in two months. And Poe wasn’t even its original author; the book was an abridgment of Thomas Wyatt’s Manual of Conchology. “Poe re-ordered the plates, arranging the organisms from simplest to most complex, and contributed a new preface and introduction. Though the book was intended ‘expressly for the use of Schools,’ the author appears to have done little calibration of his writing style for a young audience. Poe biographer Jeffrey Meyers writes: ‘Poe’s boring, pedantic and hair-splitting Preface was absolutely guaranteed to torment and discourage even the most passionately interested schoolboy.’ ” Sōtatsu, a seventeenth-century Japanese artist, found fame for his screens, the most popular of which depicted roiling waves and rocks. (NB: I’ve refrained, with some difficulty, from deploying a “making waves” joke here, but the link you’re about to follow has no qualms about wave jokes.) Sōtatsu’s name faded from memory, but now he’s due for a comeback, courtesy of the Smithsonian: “The six-fold screen at the center of the exhibit, Waves at Matsushima, with its shimmering gold and silver tones, is believed to have been created about 1620 … Likely originally commissioned for a temple by a wealthy sea captain, Waves at Matsushima only became wider known after a pair of exhibitions in the early twentieth century.” What does Rodin’s Thinker teach us about violence? “In the original 1880 sculpture, the thinker actually appears kneeling before the Gates of Hell … Sat before the gates, the thinker appears to be turning away from the intolerable scene behind. This, we could argue, is a tendency unfortunately all too common when thinking about violence today … In the original commission the thinker is actually called ‘the poet.’ This, I want to argue, is deeply significant for rethinking the future of the political. The Thinker was initially conceived as a tortured body, yet as a freethinking human, determined to transcend his suffering through poetry. We continue to be taught that politics is a social science and that its true command is in the power of analytical reason. Such has been the hallmark of centuries of reasoned, rationalized, and calculated violence, which has made the intolerable appear arbitrary and normal. Countering this demands a rethinking of the political itself in more poetic terms.” It’s settled! Here’s what you should buy Dad this Christmas. “I had cufflinks made out of World War II history books ripped out of his favorite old baseball stadium. Headphones made out of whiskey stone drillbits. It tracks your fitness barbecues. Dads love it. Wireless meat suitcase. A watch made out of more expensive watches. Steve McQueen is here, and he named a star after you. I want to give you something, but your hands weren’t made to accept anything.” You’ve seen Michael Mann’s Heat, right? Al Pacino? Robert de Niro? Val Kilmer? Come on! Heat! It’s got that famous scene in it, you know, where de Niro and Pacino meet for a cup of coffee even though they’re mortal enemies? Anyway, it came out twenty years ago, and now Michael Mann has some critical information about that scene: it’s based in life. “Heat began really with a friend of mine named Charlie Adamson, who killed the real Neil McCauley in Chicago in 1963; he’d been telling me about how interesting this guy was. Charlie had great admiration for Neil as a thief, because he was very professional, very disciplined, and very, very smart … Charlie was dropping off his dry-cleaning at a little shopping center in Chicago on Lincoln Avenue, and he saw McCauley, who he had already been surveilling, getting out of his car to go in for a cup of coffee … Adamson says, ‘Come on, I’ll buy you a cup of coffee.’ They went in, sat down and had coffee at the Belden Deli, which is no longer there. They had kind of a version of that same dialogue scene that I wrote and put in the movie, but it was very personal—the kind of intimacy you can only have with strangers who think in ways that are not dissimilar to the way you think.”