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Jeffrey Eugenides published his first novel, “The Virgin Suicides”, in 1993. He was 33 years old and had been fired from his job at the American Academy of Poets for working on the manuscript during business hours. His second novel, “Middlesex”, followed in 2002, and won him the Pulitzer prize for fiction.   

For the following nine years he worked on a third book, “The Marriage Plot”, which was published in October. It tells the story of three college students—Madeleine, Leonard and Mitchell—who graduate from Brown University in 1982 and spend a lot of time discussing literary theory, Derrida, Tolstoy, Austen and Hemingway. It is a book about other books, and a postmodern twist of the marriage plot of the Victorian novel. But it is also an exploration of mental illness, failed romance and one man’s battle with religious faith. 

In a conversation with More Intelligent Life, Eugenides spoke about the extent of free will, why semiotics is needlessly convoluted and why reading James Joyce made him choose writing over religion.

Why is there so much literary theory at the start of this novel? 

There was a lot of literary theory in my life when I was in college and as soon as I graduated it began to fade away, as it does in my novel. It was a very passionate time for reading as I recall, and a time when what you were reading was influencing the person you thought you were, or were becoming, so I couldn’t imagine these characters without all the books they were reading.

Are the French literary theorists you write about in the book—Derrida, Foucault and Barthes—writers you return to and continue to respect?   read more »

Michael Pawlyn is a British architect with an affinity for the natural world. So he is passionate about biomimicry—a discipline that looks at nature’s best ideas to inspire solutions to human problems. The Eden Project in Cornwall (pictured bottom), where Pawlyn worked as a lead architect, is probably the best-known example of this approach. The pillowy and interlocking design of these biomes was influenced by dragonfly wings. 

Since leaving Grimshaw, a British architecture firm, in 2007, Pawlyn has concentrated exclusively on environmentally sustainable projects that are influenced by nature. One of his goals is to turn linear consumption models into cycles, whereby waste is used to fuel something else, much like the interdependency of ecosystems.  

Having noticed that the boundaries of deserts shift over time, Pawlyn’s latest scheme is to help reverse desertification in arid regions by growing vegetation. His Sahara Forest project (pictured below) is an ambitious attempt to use concentrated solar power and seawater-cooled greenhouses to produce renewable energy, crops and water. Its success thus far has inspired new feasibility studies in Jordan and Qatar.

Earlier this autumn Pawlyn published his first book, "Biomimicry in Architecture". In a conversation with More Intelligent Life, Pawlyn talks about his latest enterprises and his plans for the future.

Why were you drawn to biomimicry?  read more »

Robert Bringhurst is a poet out of time. Last year, Cape published his “Selected Poems”, which collects work from his 40-year career. Much of it rubs against the grain of contemporary poetry. Bringhurst’s writing is direct, crystalline and more interested in the world outside than the personality inside. It also shows a preference for the past rather than the present, invoking ancient literature and myth, from the Bible to the Haida stories of his native Canada (of which he is a scholar and translator). In his poem “Deuteronomy” he assumes the voice of Moses; in “The Stonecutter’s Horses” the voice of the poem belongs to Francesco Petrarca, an Italian scholar and poet from the 14th century known as the father of humanism. “These / poems are as heartless as birdsong, as unmeant / as elm leaves,” he writes in “These poems, she said”, channelling his critics, who have accused him of being dry and distant. But while he is never emotionally indulgent, his poems are nevertheless full of passion—for the natural world and for the voices and stories of the past.    

As well as 15 collections of poetry, Bringhurst has published 13 books of prose on subjects from moral philosophy to typography. More Intelligent Life spoke to him about his love of Greek philosophy, his preoccupation with death, and how the Bible is a misinterpreted work of literature.   

What does Greek philosophy—which you reference in your poetry—teach us about the modern world?    read more »

Promotional fliers for rock shows typically end up in the trash. But David Ensminger collects them. He's stockpiled them for more than 30 years, documenting a Xeroxed history of punk gatherings, an anthropologist of punk rock's printed images and text.
 
The do-it-yourself tradition of punk-rock fliers are just part of his new book, "Visual Vitriol: The Street Art and Subcultures of the Punk and Hardcore Generation", published by the University of Mississippi Press. The book covers punk's cultural crossover into graffiti and skateboarding, and includes insight into queer, female and Hispanic punk scenes.
 
To promote the book, Mr Ensminger organised a travelling exhibition of punk-rock gig posters and fliers. The wall-sized collage, assembled recently at Rough Trade East in London, embodies a mostly American, anti-authoritarian sensibility from the 1980s. (The fliers include calls to "Rock Against Reagan" and vote for
"[Jello] Biafra For Mayor".)
 
Mr Ensminger plays with The Biscuit Bombs and No Love Less, and founded the punk zine Left Of The Dial. He teaches folklore, composition, and humanities at Lee College in Baytown, Texas, and he runs websites that archive the history of female punks and black punks, and punk scenes in Florida, Texas, California, New York City and America’s midwest. More Intelligent Life reached out to Mr Ensminger via e-mail to find out if punk is still relevant today.
   read more »

Somewhere in Tom Scocca’s new book, "Beijing Welcomes You: Unveiling the Capital City of the Future", the author finds himself touring the city’s glittering jewel: the Bird’s Nest stadium, built for the Olympics in 2008. As he walks the grounds he sees an exposed portion of pillar; he runs his finger across it and discovers some concrete dust. But weren’t stadium’s tresses made of steel? During his time in Beijing—the years leading up to the Games—Scocca is never quite sure if he is seeing the curtain or peering behind it.

Scocca is a journalist­­—known to most as a Slate blogger and former New York Observer columnist—who travelled between America and China for the better part of a decade. He observed the capital city ratchet up huge changes—cosmetic and social—to become an international civic showcase. His book on the subject is funny, strange and sharply reported. More Intelligent Life spoke to Scocca about the book and what he thought the Olympics accomplished for Beijing.

How did you come to write "Beijing Welcomes You"?

My wife was living in Beijing and I was in New York, and one of us was going to end up in the same city as the other. The more I was going back and forth to Beijing the more it seemed to me that it was a great place to be a reporter. There was this amazing story unfolding in the way that the city was transforming. As someone who wasn’t a China specialist, it made me a better audience. It was sort of aimed at me, especially as a member of the foreign press.

Was censorship an issue?  read more »

James Marsh is a British film-maker drawn to stories of radical experiments. His 2008 documentary “Man on Wire”, for example, told the story of Philippe Petit's notorious tightrope walk on a wire strung between the towers of the World Trade Centre in 1974. “It was out of the human scale," says Petit when he sees the towers for the first time. “Impossible.” The film ended up winning the Academy Award for best documentary. 

“Project Nim”, Marsh’s new film, follows the fortunes of another attempt at transcendance. In 1973 Herbert Terrace, a psychologist from New York’s Columbia University, set out to teach a young chimpanzee named Nim how to speak using sign-language. The film, built from archival footage of Nim’s education and interviews with the oddball humans who raised him, is a moving portrait of the life and times of a young chimpanzee fostered and then abandoned by a series of masters. It also manages to be a powerfully unsettling study of our own animal instincts, a narrative driven by lust and ambition as well as a scientific quest. More Intelligent Life spoke to James Marsh at London’s Bloomsbury Hotel.     

Why did you want to make “Project Nim”?  read more »

Mohammed Saeed Harib is the creator of  “Freej”, the first 3D animation show to come from the Middle East. Since premiering in 2006, the show has gained the region-wide, cross-generational popularity of an Arab "Simpsons". This month sees the start of series four, timed to coincide with Ramadan.  read more »

Jason Zinoman's book “Shock Value” succeeds where countless trailers failed: it will convince people who dislike horror films that they are missing out on a vital school of art.

In the late 1960s the genre shook off its Gothic dust and consigned werewolves, caped vampires, swoony ghosts and Vincent Price to the kitsch closet. In their place were ambiguously Satanic babies, hordes of hungry zombies, faceless and implacable serial killers and demons embodied in 12-year-old girls. The most horrifying events took place in familiar worlds.

Revelatory and entertaining, “Shock Value” conveys the thrill of discovery felt by horror-film directors such as Wes Craven, John Carpenter and Roman Polanski as they pushed the boundaries of a stale genre. Zinoman is an incisive critic and a born storyteller (and occasional contributor). I know this also because (full disclosure) he is among my oldest and closest friends; I have been listening to and laughing at his stories since high school. I interviewed him for More Intelligent Life over e-mail.  read more »

Mark Rylance is one of those rare performers who manage to make everything more interesting. His magnetic presence elevates even the most staid entertainment traditions, including BBC dramas, Shakespeare revivals and the Tony Awards ceremony (where he recently read, in lieu of an acceptance speech, a poem by Louis Jenkins, a Minnesota writer). 

Mr Rylance has acted in films, but he is best known for his work on the stage. He made his name first with Shakespeare, performing with the Royal Shakespeare Company during the 1980s, and winning an Olivier Award for a celebrated turn as Benedict in “Much Ado About Nothing” in 1993. He then became the first artistic director of Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre in London.  What many wrote off as a tourist attraction soon became an important player in London’s theatre scene—notably the company’s all-male (“original practices”) performances using Elizabethan music, costumes, and stage techniques. His turn as the countess Olivia in “Twelfth Night” in 2002 was a particular success and toured America the next year.  read more »

With "The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears" (or "Children of the Revolution", depending on which side of the Atlantic you're on), Dinaw Mengestu earned his reputation as an impressive young novelist on the rise.

His 2007 debut illustrated a facility with grand subjects, such as displacement and identity. It was a textured story about the immigrants' struggle in America, rendered in beautiful prose and from the perspective of an African shop-owner in Washington, DC. His latest novel, "How to Read the Air", not only confirms his nascent place in the world of letters, but delivers an even more profound story, this time about two generations of Ethiopian immigrants in America—the parents who fled their homeland in search of a life in Nashville, Tennessee, and their son who retraces their steps years later. The story is the son's, Jonas, now an English teacher in a fraught marriage in New York, who eagerly mines these stories about the past for truths about himself.

Mr Mengestu has earned quite a bit of attention for both books. In 2010 he was also named one of the New Yorker's "20 Under 40" fiction writers to watch. Here he speaks to More Intelligent Life about trying to define the American novel, the loneliness of immigrants and the beauty of myth-making.  read more »