Month: December 2012

Kris Saknussemm shares how he approached writing his own memoir, which he prefers to call a "memory book":

By redefining the concept of a memory-based work in terms of how my memory really works, I’ve tried to expand the nature of the story beyond my life (however I’ve imagined or misremembered it) to instead be a piece of writing focusing on the mysteries and vagaries of memory, while seeking a literary style that reflects this. The relationship between imagination and memory is of course the key point. It may be that memory is best considered as another form our imaginations take, a critical function, but not a distinctly different function.

Sixty seconds in the city:

Kevin Kelly is unafraid of automation:

Before we invented automobiles, air-conditioning, flatscreen video displays, and animated cartoons, no one living in ancient Rome wished they could watch cartoons while riding to Athens in climate-controlled comfort. Two hundred years ago not a single citizen of Shanghai would have told you that they would buy a tiny slab that allowed them to talk to faraway friends before they would buy indoor plumbing. Crafty AIs embedded in first-person-shooter games have given millions of teenage boys the urge, the need, to become professional game designers—a dream that no boy in Victorian times ever had. In a very real way our inventions assign us our jobs. Each successful bit of automation generates new occupations—occupations we would not have fantasized about without the prompting of the automation.

He continues:

It is a safe bet that the highest-earning professions in the year 2050 will depend on automations and machines that have not been invented yet. That is, we can’t see these jobs from here, because we can’t yet see the machines and technologies that will make them possible. Robots create jobs that we did not even know we wanted done.

"A Brief for the Defense" by Jack Gilbert:

Sorrow everywhere. Slaughter everywhere. If babies
are not starving someplace, they are starving
somewhere else. With flies in their nostrils.
But we enjoy our lives because that’s what God wants.
Otherwise the mornings before summer dawn would not
be made so fine. The Bengal tiger would not
be fashioned so miraculously well. The poor women
at the fountain are laughing together between
the suffering they have known and the awfulness
in their future, smiling and laughing while somebody
in the village is very sick. There is laughter
every day in the terrible streets of Calcutta,
and the women laugh in the cages of Bombay.
If we deny our happiness, resist our satisfaction,
we lessen the importance of their deprivation.
We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure,
but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must have
the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless
furnace of this world. To make injustice the only
measure of our attention is to praise the Devil.
If the locomotive of the Lord runs us down,
we should give thanks that the end had magnitude.
We must admit there will be music despite everything.
We stand at the prow again of a small ship
anchored late at night in the tiny port
looking over to the sleeping island: the waterfront
is three shuttered cafes and one naked light burning.
To hear the faint sound of oars in the silence as a rowboat
comes slowly out and then goes back is truly worth
all the years of sorrow that are to come.

Please consider supporting the Poetry Society of America here.

(Reprinted from Collected Poems © 2012 by Jack Gilbert. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House. Photo by Flickr user the_toe_stubber)

Hitch once wrote that "a serious person should try to write posthumously…one should compose as if the usual constraints—of fashion, commerce, self-censorship, public and, perhaps especially, intellectual opinion—did not operate." The novelist Jeffrey Eugendies, speaking at an awards ceremony for young writers, pivots off that passage to offer advice for his audience:

All of the constraints Hitchens mentions have one thing in common: they all represent a deformation of the self. 

To follow literary fashion, to write for money, to censor your true feelings and thoughts or adopt ideas because they’re popular requires a writer to suppress the very promptings that got him or her writing in the first place. When you started writing, in high school or college, it wasn’t out of a wish to be published, or to be successful, or even to win a lovely award like the one you’re receiving tonight. It was in response to the wondrousness and humiliation of being alive. Remember? You were fifteen and standing beside a river in wintertime. Ice floes drifted slowly downstream. Your nose was running. Your wool hat smelled like a wet dog. Your dog, panting by your side, smelled like your hat. It was hard to distinguish. As you stood there, watching the river, an imperative communicated itself to you. You were being told to pay attention. You, the designated witness, special little teen-age omniscient you, wearing tennis shoes out in the snow, against your mother’s orders. Just then the sun came out from behind the clouds, revealing that every twig on every tree was encased in ice. The entire world a crystal chandelier that might shatter if you made a sound, so you didn’t. Even your dog knew to keep quiet. And the beauty of the world at that moment, the majestic advance of ice in the river, so like the progress of the thoughts inside your head, overwhelmed you, filling you with one desire and one desire only, which was to go home immediately and write about it.

A family reacts:

In a review of the three books on Alan Turing, Michael Saler revisits Andrew Hodges’s 1983 biography, reissued in 2012. The Enigma explores "the centrality of Turing’s sexual identity to his thought and life": 

[H]e made a convincing case that Turing’s teenage crush on a fellow schoolboy, Christopher Morcom, was an important catalyst for his lifelong preoccupation with the relationship between brain and mind. Morcom’s unexpected death at the age of eighteen was a shattering blow to Turing, who began to reflect on whether his friend’s consciousness might survive after death or whether it was simply a result of complex material processes and expired when life did.  Hodges also linked the famous “Turing Test”, in which a computer attempts to pass as an intelligent human being, to Turing’s own dilemma as a gay man in a homophobic world. (Turing called his test the “imitation game”, and Hodges observed, “like any homosexual man, he was living an imitation game, not in the sense of conscious play acting, but by being accepted as a person that he was not”.)

"White Spine" by Henri Cole:

Liar, I thought, kneeling with the others,

how can He love me and hate what I am?

The dome of St. Peter’s shone yellowish

gold, like butter and eggs. My God, I prayed

anyhow, as if made in the image

and likeness of Him. Nearby, a handsome

priest looked at me like a stone; I looked back,

not desiring to go it alone.

The college of cardinals wore punitive red.

The white spine waved to me from his white throne.

Being in a place not my own, much less

myself, I climbed out, a beast in a crib.

Somewhere a terrorist rolled a cigarette.

Reason, not faith, would change him.

Please consider supporting the Poetry Society of America here.

("White Spine" from Pierce the Skin: Selected Poems: 1982-2007 © 2010 by Henri Cole. Used by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. All Rights Reserved. Photo by Flickr user nkpl)

Physicist Lawrence Krauss, an atheist, sees a silver lining in our cosmic insignificance: