Moreintelligentlife.com is the website of Intelligent Life magazine. Articles about Arts, Lifestyle, Travels, and Ideas

THE FEED: JULY 29TH

What we're reading:

The Last supper grows bigger
(ARTnews): Portion sizes in depictions of the Last Supper have increased over time

Dame badass, Helen Mirren
(Atlantic): "[S]he's at her best when she's playing someone with a genuine unpleasant or strange edge"

"In Defense of Amazon"
(New Republic): Don't blame the behemoth for the publishing industry's failures

Today's quote:

"In a world of Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter (not to mention texting), pithy allusion substitutes for exposition. Where once the Internet seemed an opportunity for unrestricted communication, the increasingly commercial bias of the medium—'I am what I buy'—brings impoverishment of its own."

~ Tony Judt, "Words" (New York Review of Books)  read more »

TEA WITH JULIAN ASSANGE

Julian Assange, the notoriously elusive founder of Wikileaks, may not have hand-picked The Economist to receive an advance notice of its cache of more than 90,000 military documents about Afghanistan (that honour was given to the Guardian, New York Times and Der Spiegel). But he did have tea with the paper and discuss his motives.  

The exchange is fascinating. In response to a question about the upshot of the big leak—government officials say new details could help the enemy; analysts suggest there's little that's new (The Economist calls the Afghan War Diary "long on detail and short of revelations")—Assange huffs:

Typical nonsense from analysts who can’t actually be bothered to read the material. How do they know there’s nothing new there. 91K reports—have they read 91k reports? Even our journalistic team are only reading detail. 

An example he then offers, about the real reason for certain Canadian casualties (discovered by a Canadian newspaper from the leaked reports), indicates that there are indeed devils in the details.  read more »

THE Q&A: VENDELA VIDA, NOVELIST

If the idea of a trilogy offers authors an organising principle and a formal constraint, it offers readers the reassuring promise of more where the first book came from. Vendela Vida’s trilogy began in 2003 with “And Now You Can Go”, a starkly witty exploration of a young woman’s travels after a trauma, and continued with “Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name” (2007), whose young heroine unravels the question of her parentage over the course of a journey in far north Lapland. Vida’s newest offering, “The Lovers”, concludes the series by entering the consciousness of an older and decidedly wiser (though no less adrift) presence. The novel concerns a widow, Yvonne, who returns to the scene of her honeymoon and discovers, in the gently decomposing old town, several new ways of thinking about her marriage and herself, not all of them a comfort.

Vida, who is also a founding co-editor at the Believer, spoke with More Intelligent Life about “The Lovers”.  read more »

THE FEED: JUL 28TH

What we're reading:

Do the languages we speak shape the way we think?
(Wall Street Journal): New cognitive research into a time-worn and controversial question

No cure for creative block
(BBC): A London professor writes a fairly insipid article about the ubiquity of depression, drug-use and alcoholism among creative types

Gay families on television
(New York Times): They've been around for years, and they've helped broaden acceptance for the new nuclear

Today's quote:

"The arts are affordable and profitable, costing as little to fund as half a pint of milk a week per person. The government would be idiotic to cut them."

~ Daniel Bye, "Arts funding cuts reveal the government's poor business sense" (Guardian theatre blog)  read more »

A PUNCHY READ

There are moments when an event will entirely dislocate what came before it and what comes next. Individual experiences momentarily coalesce, investing that moment with the potential to explore the human condition. From Samuel Coleridge to Ian McEwan, writers have long been fascinated by such ruptures.

“The Slap” begins with such a moment, when a man hits a child at a barbeque on a late summer afternoon in Melbourne. This slap reverberates, to varying degrees, through the lives of eight of the partygoers. Using these characters, Christos Tsiolkas explores themes of gender, sexuality, age and ethnicity in painful detail. From Hector, whose pride and physical beauty belie emotional vulnerability, to Rosie, whose terrible marriage and obsession with her child leads her on a martyr’s search for retribution, and Marios, an ageing first-generation Greek Australian, hindered in his expression of emotion by tradition. This is muscular, straightforward writing, and the men and women whose lives we follow provide compelling studies in human frailty. No wonder the judges of the Man Booker prize were so taken with it.

Mr Tsiolkas, himself a Melbourne local, conjures up a city of never-ending suburbs and carefully tended veggie patches, of houses that are full of the smell of garlic and lemon juice and Indian spices. The white Australians that feature in "The Slap" are often the outsiders in this new Australian’s Australia.  read more »

FOUND IN TRANSLATION: "THE ELEPHANT"

Penguin’s Central European Classics showcase brilliant prose from an era blighted by Soviet control. Slawomir Mrozek, famous in Poland for his glasses, also has a unique eye. His first story collection, "The Elephant" (1957, translated 2010 by Konrad Syrop), distils the absurd realities of his time.

An ideal foil to Solzhenitsyn’s forensic tomes, these three-page tales mix paranoia with oblique plotting and mordant wit. A man finds a torpedo in his coffee, and the authorities respond by introducing straws. Justice is arbitrary—a cat is arrested even though it has ID, as that alone arouses “justified suspicion”—but Mrozek doesn’t spare anyone. A woman rushes to a confessional on finding her husband of seven years is made of plasticine. When the priest proposes an annulment, she shrieks “Father, that’s impossible—we have children!” So Mrozek lays bare civilian gullibility, the church’s impotence and the malleability of Poland’s men. His matter-of-fact tone mocks the blind faith of his own generation and finds little hope for the next. Best of all is the title story, which rivals Guy de Maupassant’s “Boule de suif” in its devastating brevity.

"The Elephant" (Penguin) by Slawomir Mrozek, translated by Konrad Syrop, paperback, out now  read more »

WHAT? A NEW CULTURE BLOG?

Because the world needs more voices, or, rather, more thoughtful, rarified ones that can be imagined with a British lilt, The Economist has just launched "Prospero", a new blog named for the hero of Shakespeare's "The Tempest", an expert in the power of books and the arts (ie, he was more or less undone by them). The blog will be full of literary insight, cultural commentary and coverage of the art market.

Already readers can find the paper's take on the Man Booker prize longlist (announced today, and full of impressive young writers, as predicted), and on Andrew Wylie’s new deal with Amazon to publish electronic versions of books by some of his authors (seen by some traditional publishers as a declaration of war). There are also quite a few posts that should look familiar to readers of More Intelligent Life because, frankly, we're one big happy family over here at The Economist's culture desk.

Picture credit: Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com (via Flickr)

THE FEED: JUL 26TH

What we're reading:

Something to do at lunch
(New York Times): Paul-André Fortier performs a 30-minute solo, "30 x 30", at noon for 30 days in Lower Manhattan

On "Antwerp"
(Smart Set): The poetic Romanticism of Roberto Bolaño's first book

Matisyahu's Hasidic-reggae music made me cry
(Atlantic): A music critic explains the reason for his breakdown

Today's quote:

"I never recommend my movies to anyone. I never feel comfortable recommending them to anyone. In some sense, I think they have to be discovered or sought out. Not everyone is the right audience. But those who do respond will find something of value for them."

~ Todd Solondz, "Patron Saint of Pessimism" (Salon)  read more »

SUNSET PARK STANDSTILL

Brooklyn is not what it once was. In the last 20 years (and especially in the last ten) it has shed most of its dangerous, dilapidated neighbourhoods in favour of bustling businesses, exclusive boutiques and shiny glass condos (that now sit mostly vacant, spectres of the boom). The downtown area is a robust mini-metropolis, the third-largest business district in the city. Artists have taken over the disused industrial spaces in Williamsburg and Bushwick; writers have moved into the garrets of Fort Greene and Cobble Hill; and young parents in search of a place to stuff their kids are littered throughout. Despite some recent softening, Manhattan's housing prices remain exorbitant. Living in Brooklyn has become a source of pride.

Sunset Park, however, is something of a relic. This is not a fashionable place to live, or even to visit. In a city where streets host relentless reincarnations, Sunset Park's stasis, its imperviousness to gentrification, is the source of its charm. An archetypal immigrant community, this area is seemingly immune to the changes that have swept through much of the borough, despite its proximity to Park Slope, its grandly transformed posh neighbour.  read more »

101 PLACES TO NEVER SEE

"I am a person who routinely writes lists of things I've already done, just to make myself feel more accomplished," writes Catherine Price in the introduction to her new book. Ah yes, we all know the type. Price is the consumer to whom guides like "100 Places to See in Your Lifetime" and "1,000 Places to See Before You Die" are marketed: a compulsive list-maker, an organiser, an ambitious gatherer of experiences. So it makes some sense that Price, a contributing editor at Popular Science, would take hold of this imperative device and subvert it, as she does in her new anti-manual, "101 Places Not To See Before You Die".

The concept is simple: pick 101 terrible places or situations, explore them and live to tell the tale. The table of contents reveal the creative leeway within these confines, with chapters devoted to everything from a Chinese coal mine to a vomitorium to "Amateur Night at a Shooting Range" and "An AA Meeting When You're Drunk". Clearly, the concept contains a multitude, and Price's choices range from the psychologically humiliating to the sexually discomfiting to the physically painful. The entries themselves are short, sweet and sometimes entirely imagined for comic effect (as in the case of "The Room Where SPAM Subject Lines Are Created").

In a chapter devoted to nyotaimori, or "female body presentation", Price explains the technicalities of a practice known to laypeople as "Naked Sushi":  read more »