Month: September 2013

Cornel Bonca details the five recently-discovered, unpublished manuscripts:

[T]his is the biggest literary “get” of the American 21st century.

The books include a World War II novel featuring Sergeant X from “From Esme,” the most intriguing character outside Holden and the Glass family that Salinger ever created. It includes a novella, in diary form, written by a World War II counterintelligence officer — Salinger’s job during the war — “culminating in the Holocaust.” Given Salinger’s war experience and his painstaking writing process, these two works could conceivably add up to a contribution to American World War II literature on a par with the work of Mailer, Jones, Heller, and Pynchon.

A third manuscript is, we’re told, a “manual of Vedanta,” a book explaining Vedanta Hinduism (and presumably, its relation to Salinger’s work), “with short stories, almost fables, woven into the text.” Finally, there are two compilations, one entitled The Family Glass, gathering all the published Glass stories together with five new storiesabout Seymour, the last of which “deals with Seymour’s life after death.” Given that once Salinger got going on the Glasses, his “stories” inevitably metastasized into novellas, this book is likely to be a real tome, and might conceivably be the greatest contribution Salinger makes to American letters, dealing as it must, with the question of how to live a genuine spiritual life in a postwar, post-Holocaust world.

Then there’s the final book, which [biographers David] Shields and [Shane] Salerno describe as “a complete history of the Caulfield family,” gathering Catcher, six previously published (and I would imagine, wholly rewritten) Caulfield stories written in the early-to-mid 1940s, as well as new stories featuring, presumably, Holden, Phoebe, Allie, and D.B. Caulfield. Five new Salinger books! Doubtless, they will make us entirely reconceive Salinger’s current oeuvre. If the books are even close in quality to Catcher or Franny & Zooey, they might reroute the course of late 20th-century American literature.

This week, the National Institutes of Health released a report on the future of neuroscience, which Gary Marcus calls “the first substantive step in developing President Obama’s BRAIN Initiative.” Marcus considers the report’s nine outlined goals:

The most important goal, in my view, is buried in the middle of the list at No. 5, which seeks to link human behavior with the activity of neurons. This is more daunting than it seems: scientists have yet to even figure out how the relatively simple, three-hundred-and-two-neuron circuitry of the C. Elegans worm works, in part because there are so many possible interactions that can take place between sets of neurons. A human brain, by contrast, contains approximately eighty-six billion neurons.

To progress, we need to learn how to combine the insights of molecular biochemistry, which has come to dominate the lowest reaches of neuroscience, with the study of computation and cognition, which have moved to the forefront of fields such as cognitive psychology.

(Though some dream of eliminating psychology from the discussion altogether, no neuroscientist has ever shown that we can understand the mind without psychology and cognitive science.) The key, emphasized in the report, is interdisciplinary work shared as openly as possible: “The most exciting approaches will bridge fields, linking experiment to theory, biology to engineering, tool development to experimental application, human neuroscience to non-human models, and more.”

Perhaps the least compelling aspect of the report is one of its justifications for why we should invest in neuroscience in the first place: “The BRAIN Initiative is likely to have practical economic benefits in the areas of artificial intelligence and ‘smart’ machines.” This seems unrealistic in the short- and perhaps even medium-term: we still know too little about the brain’s logical processes to mine them for intelligent machines. At least for now, advances in artificial intelligence tend to come from computer science (driven by its longstanding interest in practical tools for efficient information processing), and occasionally from psychology and linguistics (for their insights into the dynamics of thought and language). Only rarely do advances come from neuroscience. That may change someday, but it could take decades.

Recent Dish on neuroscience and the BRAIN Initiative here, here and here.

The organizers of the Man Booker prize announced this week that Americans will be eligible to win the prize starting next year. M.A. Orthofer applauds the Booker’s inclusiveness, but Radhika Jones protests:

[U]ltimately, the American inclusion would mean that the Man Booker is voluntarily ending its status as an arbiter of English literature—a canon with a longer and decidedly different cultural and political history than American lit, which the Booker itself played a role in transforming. Considering how quickly the Booker earned that arbiter status, it seems to me a pity to give up the prospect of continuing it.

Tim Parks is also opposed:

[T]he Man Booker Prize is simply following a trend which tends to weaken ties between writers and their national communities. … [Considering American novels] would reinforce the illusion that Britain and the US share a common culture. Above all it would contribute to a growing feeling that the author is an international entertainer rather than an artist involved in a home community with a literary tradition. In fact the rise of the international award goes hand in hand with the decline of the novel as a serious influence in national debate, or a medium where the native language might be mined and renewed. To top it all, the Americans, basking in a global power that confers cultural self-sufficiency, would be underwhelmed. No American author will prefer the Booker to the Pulitzer.

Leo Robson finds the hand-wringing unncessary:

Certainly the prospect, for a British writer, of a whole new category of competition, whatever the nationality, will not be welcome. But to imagine that Booker juries will be engulfed by a wave of American genius is to exhibit an odd inversion of Cultural Cringe, whereby the former empire becomes falsely convinced that, compared with those of a successful former colony, its own achievements are piffling, irrelevant, and drab.

Robert McCrum approves of the decision and puts it in context:

[I]n the evolution of English-language culture in the contemporary world, this is a small but significant milestone, a recognition that you cannot lay claim to being “most important literary award in the English-speaking world” and exclude the American literary tradition. …

Here’s the bottom line. Booker is a longstanding literary trophy. But no amount of longevity can disguise its essential character: it’s a lottery; a sweepstake. It has only a coincidental and fortuitous relationship with literary excellence. As Julian Barnes put it (in a phrase that’s almost obligatory to quote in these discussions), Booker and the other prizes are simply “posh bingo”.

Nora Caplan-Bricker applauds director Haifaa al-Mansour’s Wadjda, the first movie filmed entirely in Saudi Arabia:

[Mansour] was making the film for a Saudi audience—the only one that could truly understand the strictures its female characters face, and the one that needed to hear its message—and she didn’t want to run the risk that it wouldn’t be shown there. “I don’t want to work in a vacuum,” she explained.

The director chose a child for her heroine partly because pre-adolescents aren’t so rigidly circumscribed in Saudi society, and she needed Wadjda to be able to run around. The movie is all about mobility: It centers on Wadjda’s efforts to buy herself a bicycle so that she can beat her friend, Abdullah, in a race. Every time she reveals her plan, however, she’s greeted with a chorus of “girls don’t ride bikes!” A bike is anathema to feminine virtue, but it is also freedom from a life like Wadjda’s mother’s, who is stranded at home every time her grouchy driver decides not to show up. The right to drive has been a hotly politicized issue in Saudi Arabia for years, and it says a great deal about Mansour’s deftness as a filmmaker that the coveted bicycle can be both a potent symbol and the linchpin of a classical, poetically simple plot.

In the above video, Mansour explains what Wadjda means to her. In an interview with Alyssa Rosenberg, she discusses life in Saudi Arabia:

The relationship between drivers and women are very funny. It is very funny because it is a power struggle all the time. Because women, they think they are the boss since they are paying, and the drivers know that women cannot go anywhere without them. So they know that they are ultimately the boss. And women are not the best, like they are late, they don’t pay on time, but they are the customer, the biggest customer. So there is always a power struggle between the two.

Previous Dish on Wadjda, including its trailer, here.