Carolyn Kellogg at the LA Times:

Salter's reputation as a novelist was made with 1967's “A Sport and a Pastime,” a story of an American's affairs in postwar France that was laudedby the New York Times as “a tour de force in erotic realism.”

In the 1975 novel “Light Years” Salter wrote, “Life is weather. Life is meals. Lunches on a blue-checked cloth on which salt has spilled. The smell of tobacco. Brie, yellow apples, wood-handled knives.”

He often considered the connection between writing and life. In his 1997 memoir “Burning the Days” he wrote, “In describing a world you extinguish it,” and, more optimistically, “Life passes into pages if it passes into anything.”

In 2013, at age 88, he surprised many readers with his first novel in 35 years. “All That Is” is a sweeping novel of an American soldier who returns from World War II to work in publishing and, over the course of four decades, seeks love and romance.

more here.

Robert McCrum in The Guardian:

Among the many turning points in the constant remaking of the English novel – the dazzle of Sterne (No 6 in this series); the quieter, witty genius of Austen (No 7); the polyvalent brio of Dickens (No 15); the vernacular brilliance of Twain (No 23), and so on – the appearance of Midnight’s Children in 1981 now stands out as a particularly significant milestone. Salman Rushdie’s second novel took the Indian English novel, revolutionised it by marrying the fiction of Austen and Dickens with the oral narrative tradition of India, and made a “magical realist” (the label was still in its infancy) novel for a new generation. This emergent global readership would find, in a story set in Bombay, a work of contemporary fiction that mashed up tales of east and west into a self-confessed fabrication narrated by the highly symbolic figure of Saleem Sinai, an Indian boy born on the stroke of midnight, 15 August 1947, a boy whose distinctive nose seems like a miniature embodiment of the sub-continent whose history has just taken him prisoner. Saleem sets out his stall as the narrator in the novel’s third paragraph: “I have been a swallower of lives; and to know me, just the one of me, you’ll have to swallow a lot as well. Consumed multitudes are jostling and shoving inside me…” And so, off we go. Saleem, whom Rushdie inhabits for his own purposes, is a character with many unusual powers, especially a psychic connection to all the other children born as he was, at the very moment of modern India’s birth. An equally important, and sometimes neglected, element of the novel is Rushdie’s angry response to the repressions of the 1970s “Emergency”. With Saleem, the personal and the historical become indistinguishable, and Rushdie makes a further duality when he exchanges his narrator for a second baby, an alter ego who expresses Saleem’s dark side. All this is described in Indian English prose that pulsates between the tumultuous and the fantastic.

A page of Rushdie is a rich, jewel-encrusted tapestry of allusions, puns, in-jokes, asides, and the unconsidered trifles of popular culture. Some readers may find this diet close to indigestible, but Rushdie’s charm, energy and brilliance, with his sheer joie de vivre, justify the critic VS Pritchett’s verdict (in the New Yorker) that, with Midnight’s Children, “India has produced a great novelist… a master of perpetual storytelling”.

More here.

Gina Kolata in The New York Times:

From 2003 to 2013, the death rate from coronary heart disease fell about 38 percent, according to the American Heart Association citing data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute, the primary federal agency that funds heart research, says this decline has been spurred by better control of cholesterol and blood pressure, reduced smoking rates, improved medical treatments — and faster care of people in the throes of a heart attack. “It may not be long before cardiovascular disease is no longer the leading cause of death” in the United States, said Dr. Michael Lauer, the director of the Division of Cardiovascular Sciences at the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute. And care has improved not just in elite medical centers, but in local hospitals like Our Lady of Lourdes, here in a city littered with abandoned buildings and boarded-up homes that is among the poorest in America, according to the Census Bureau. Disparities that used to exist, with African-Americans, Hispanics and older people facing the slowest treatment times, have disappeared, Dr. Harlan Krumholz, a cardiologist at Yale, and his colleagues said in a paper in Archives of Internal Medicine.

The reinvention of protocols to hasten treatment is part of a broad rethinking of how to tackle coronary heart disease, which accounts for one of every seven deaths in the United States or 375,000 a year. Just this month, powerful drugs from the first new class of medicines to lower bad cholesterol levels in a generation neared approval by the Food and Drug Administration, raising hopes that they will further reduce the death rate from heart disease. At the same time, new, less invasive methods for replacing aged heart valves are raising hopes that ailing patients will be able to live longer. And researchers are immersed in resolving issues that remain unsettled: the utility of stents to treat the heart pain known as angina and the ideal level for blood pressure.

More here.

Justin E. H. Smith in his own blog:

In the first days following the news of Rachel Dolezal’s ruse, there appeared to be some real hope emerging that, at long last, the deadlock of identitarian politics might finally be over. Compelling voices spoke up to acknowledge the simple truth, that identitarianism is essentialism, no matter how much its defenders will ornament their essentialism with the acknowledgment that race is, in the end, a social construction. No one said it more compellingly than Adolph Reed, Jr., who seemed almost poised to become the progressive voice of the new political moment: one that pays attention to serious things.

But then, yesterday, yet another racist attack by a homegrown terrorist took place, and even before the crime scene had been cleaned up we Americans were being scolded for having considered the possibility, for a moment, that racial categorisation (and the essentialism that flows from the practice) is something we might hope to move beyond. Right away, people were being referred to, in the identitarian manner, as ‘bodies’ instead of as people. And the fact of ‘being a black body’ was reinscribed back into the natural order of things. As Jelani Cobb wrote in The New Yorker, closing off the Dolezal affair, “The existential question of who is black has been answered in the most concussive way possible: the nine men and women slain as they prayed last night at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, in Charleston, South Carolina, were black.”

But the existential question needs to be asked again and again, and the belief that there is a simple answer to it is part of the reason America cannot overcome its murderous pathology, cannot really end the Civil War. Rachel Dolezal grew up in a society that told her, constantly: “You're white, you're white, you're white,” and she seems to have thought to herself, “Really, now, can it be so simple as that?”

More here.

Ed Yong in Not Exactly Rocket Science:

Here’s David Attenborough, chilling out on a rock in the middle of Africa, with four lumps of plasticine. The smallest one on the far left represents the brain of a bushbaby, a small primate that lives on its own. The next one is the brain of a colobus monkey, which lives in groups of 15 or so. The one after that is a guenon, another monkey; group size: 25. And on the far right: a baboon that lives in groups of 50. “Were you to give a skull to a researcher who works on monkeys, even though they didn’t know what kind of monkey it belonged to, they would be able to accurately predict the size of group in which it lived,” says Attenborough.

That sequence, from The Life of Mammals, is a wonderful demonstration of the social brain hypothesis—a bold idea, proposed in the 1980s, which suggests that living in groups drove the evolution of large brains. Social animals face mental challenges that solitary animals do not: they have to recognise the other members of their cliques, cope with fluid and shifting alliances, manage conflicts, and manipulate or deceive their peers. So as social groups get bigger, so should brains. This idea has been repeatedly tested and confirmed in many groups of animals, including hoofed mammals, carnivores, primates, and birds.

What about insects? Ants, termites, bees, and wasps, also live in large societies, and many of them have unusually big brains—at least, for insects. But in 2010, Sarah Farris from West Virginia University and Susanne Schulmeister from the American Museum of Natural History showed that in these groups, large brains evolved some 90 million years before big social groups. If anything, they correlated with parasitic body-snatching rather than group-living.

More here.

Hunter Dukes at 3:AM Magazine:

Perhaps the strangest object to surface after the 2003 US invasion of Iraq is known only as the Blood Quran. When I first heard its name, I pictured Dead Sea scrolls of carmine papyrus, quartered away in some limestone crypt. But while the words are ancient, the edition is new. Commissioned by the late Iraqi President Saddam Hussein on his 60th birthday, the book was printed in the blood of its patron. Over the course of two years (and twenty-something litres) master penman Abbas Shakir Joudi al-Baghdadi calligraphed 605 pages of sanguine verse. Now, kept under lock and key in a Baghdad mosque, the book presents a double bind. It has been ruled haram (forbidden) to copy the Quran in bodily fluids; it is also frowned upon to destroy a working copy of the sacred text. This exegetical uncertainty, the language’s messy entanglement with the actual life force of a former despot, and the surprisingly aesthetic quality of the object make it difficult to determine what should be done with the book of blood.

Knowingly or not, Hussein was acting in lineage with a number of religious precursors, real and imagined. The British Library holds a tenth-century copy of the Diamond Sutra, written in the blood of an ascetic octogenarian who pricked a finger when his nib ran dry. The Codex Gigas (or ‘Devil’s Bible’) might be the largest surviving medieval manuscript, but its red ink is rumored to have flowed through human veins before being set upon the page. H.P. Lovecraft’s Necronomicon, a fictitious grimoire that appears across his writing, was revised by horror director Sam Raimi into a work of anthropodermic bibliopegy—bound in skin, written in blood.

more here.

The Editors at The Guardian:

Pope Francis’s encyclical on climate change, Laudato Si’, is the most astonishing and perhaps the most ambitious papal document of the past 100 years, since it is addressed not just to Catholics, or Christians, but to everyone on earth. It sets out a programme for change that is rooted in human needs but it makes the radical claim that these needs are not primarily greedy and selfish ones.

We need nature, he says, and we need each other. Our need for mutuality, and for giving, is just as real as the selfish aspects of our characters; the need for awe and stillness in front of nature is just as profound as any other human need. The care of nature and the care of the poor are aspects of the same ethical commandment, and if we neglect either one we cannot find peace. The environment, in the pope’s use of the word, is not something out there: nature as opposed to the human world. The term describes the relationship between nature and humans, who are inextricably linked and part of each other. It is that relationship that must be set right.

Starting from that premise, he launches a ferocious attack on what he sees as the false and treacherous appetites of capitalism and on the consumerist view of human nature.

more here.

Josephine Livingston at n+1:

In 1995, Acker was touring in Australia, almost all of her major books already done. She was big in the way that avant-garde artists can be big: she was culty, glam, and cool. Acker embodies a lot of the things about 1990s femininity that are bang on trend right now: she was a tattooed confesser in silver jewellery and clompy boots, vocal about sex and vocal about vocalizing. In ‘95 Blood and Guts in High School and Great Expectations were selling pretty well. Wark was (and still is) a professor who thinks about screens and globalization and the way that we perceive events happening very far away via the little screens that are so close to us all the time. In 1995, Wark had just published Virtual Geography: Living With Global Media Events, a landmark achievement in media theory that made his name internationally, at least as far as such fame can go for an academic: one review was very positive, but referred to Wark as “she” throughout. Wark and Acker met in Sydney that year and, like so many human beings before them, didn’t stop at a kiss on the cheek. Two cool kids, tangled up. Plus ça change!

This book collects the after-messages following that short romance. The dialogue only spans a few weeks. Each email is timestamped, with Acker and Wark’s nerdy ‘90s email addresses repeated over and over again, page after page. They map the unwinding and rewinding and unwinding again of tension, attention, and affection, telling the story-about-nothing of the first truly great collection of electronic love letters.

more here.

Alice Jones in The Independent:

Aziz Ansari is an American comedian and a star of the sitcom Parks and Recreation. In both guises he is obsessed with the opposite sex. As Tom in Parks and Rec, he is a relentless flirt whose pick-up technique is to hand out spare house keys to attractive women. In his stand-up, his main meat is dating and sex, marriage and children. Unmarried and childless, he doesn’t have much time for the latter two. In his 2013 live show, Buried Alive, he describes the idea of getting married – saying “I want to keep hanging out with you until one of us dies” – as “the most insane thing ever”, and mocks the proposal tales of his audience. As for children, when his friends send him baby pictures, he replies with a single word: unsubscribe.

It is all good fodder for stand-up and now, aged 32, good material for a book about love in the 21st century. The catalyst was a text message he sent to a girl he met at a party, which never got a reply. “Then I look on social media. I see her logged onto Facebook chat. Do I send a message? No! Don’t do that, Aziz. Be cool. Be cool. Later I check Instagram, and this clown Tanya is posting a photo of some deer. Too busy to write me back, but she has time post a photo of some deer?”

More here.

From KurzweilAI:

A decade of work at Johns Hopkins has yielded a computer program that predicts, with far more accuracy than current methods, which mutations are likely to have the largest effect on the activity of the “dimmer switches” (which alter the cell’s gene activity) in DNA — suggesting new targets for diagnosis and treatment of many diseases. A summary of the research was published online today (June 15) in the journal Nature Genetics. “Our computer program can comb through the genetic information from a specific cell type and predict which ‘dimmer switch’ mutations are most likely to alter the cell’s gene activity, and therefore its function,” says Michael Beer, Ph.D., associate professor of biomedical engineering at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.

Which genetic mutations matter?

“The plan is to continually improve the formula as we learn more about these regulatory regions,” he says, “but already it can narrow down a list of disease-associated mutations by a factor of 20, allowing researchers to focus on the ones that are most likely to matter.” Researchers have sequenced the genomes of many patients suffering from common multigene diseases, looking for shared mutations in their control regions. The trouble is, Beer says, that these studies yield hundreds of mutations, most of them benign. So he and his team of researchers designed a computer program that could learn the difference between mutations that are likely to affect gene activity levels and those that likely won’t. “There are a lot of common diseases, like diabetes, that are probably the result of several different mutations in control regions. The mutations don’t directly cause a change in the proteins [that are] made, but they impact their abundance,” he says, and sorting out which ones matter most in diseases is key to advancing treatments.

More here.

In My Spare Time

During my long, boring hours of spare time
I sit to play with the earth’s sphere.
I establish countries without police or parties
and I scrap others that no longer attract consumers.
I run roaring rivers through barren deserts
and I create continents and oceans
that I save for the future just in case.
I draw a new colored map of the nations:
I roll Germany to the Pacific Ocean teeming with whales
and I let the poor refugees
sail pirates’ ships to her coasts
in the fog
dreaming of the promised garden in Bavaria.
I switch England with Afghanistan
so that its youth can smoke hashish for free
provided courtesy of Her Majesty’s government.
I smuggle Kuwait from its fenced and mined borders
to Comoro, the islands
of the moon in its eclipse,
keeping the oil fields in tact, of course.
At the same time I transport Baghdad
in the midst of loud drumming
to the islands of Tahiti.
I let Saudi Arabic crouch in its eternal desert
to perserve the purity of her thoroughbred camels.
This is before I surrender America
back to the Indians
just to give history
the justice it has long lacked.

I know that changing the world is not easy
but it remains necessary nonetheless.

.
by Fadhil al-Azzawi
from Poetry Internation Web

Hello,

The editors of 3QD have made their decision. The twenty semifinalists have been winnowed down to six, and three wildcard entries added. Thanks again to all the participants. Details of the prize can be found here.

On the right is a “trophy” logo that our finalists may choose to display on their own blogs.

So, here it is, the final list that I am sending to Jonathan Kramnick, who will select the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd prize winners from these: (in alphabetical order by blog or website name here)

1. Avidly: Editing as carework: the gendered labor of public intellectuals
2. Granta: Ventimiglia
3. Los Angeles Review of Books: Richard Pryor's Comedy of Fear
4. Novel Readings: “A life entirely through objects”: Edmund de Waal, The Hare with Amber Eyes
5. Public Books: The Essential Gratuitousness of Cesar Aira
6. Terrain: The Good, the Bad, and the White Man's Mexico Novel
7. The Brooklyn Rail: Palace Art Squat
8. The Millions: Dance to the Music of Time
9. The Quarterly Conversation: Breathturn into Timestead: The Collected Later Poetry of Paul Celan

Good luck!

Abbas

P.S. The editors of 3QD will not be making any comments on our deliberations, or the process by which we made our decision, other than to simply say that we picked what we thought were the best six posts out of the semifinalists, and added three others which we also liked.

Charlie Fox in Cabinet:

“Now, ladies and gentlemen, I have really something of great interest to the public!” The former vaudevillian Ed Wynn is providing the introductory patter to a segment in an episode of his eponymous comedy show, broadcast live in primetime on 9 December 1949. Wynn, who would later voice the Mad Hatter in Disney’s adaptation of Alice In Wonderland (1951), is a jolly host: he looks like a horned owl in a clown costume, plump and bespectacled with a rubbery excitement to his expressions that suggests he’s already half-cartoon. His speech has an avuncular warmth, tumbling with a ringmaster’s glee through his slightly pinched sinuses. The other treats on the show have included a special guest appearance from the famously deadpan actress Virginia O’Brien, nicknamed “Miss Ice Glacier,” who sang “Bird in a Gilded Cage,” and blubbery Ed’s attempt to dance a ballet overture. The curtains behind Wynn that hide the set from the audience are fuzzy, gray, and monstrously thick, looking like nothing so much as a carefully graded spectrum of various sorts of domestic dust; the studio has the acoustics of a damp attic. Wynn tells the audience that they are about to have “the great privilege in seeing for the first time, certainly on television, and alive,almost!”—an odd thing to say, don’t you think?—“one of the greatest of the great comedians of the silent moving-picture days. Mr. Buster Keaton!”

Here he is, a little man in his trademark outfit of porkpie hat and rumpled suit. He ignores all conversational prompts, playing dumb and nodding a little as if out of beat with the situation, mid-daydream. “The American public would like to hear you say something. Would you say something? Go ahead,” Wynn cajoles him, “speak!” And upon these ventriloquist’s orders, Buster commences a routine that looks like a ludic premonition of the anguished choreographies found in Samuel Beckett’s plays. (Shortly before his death, he would appear as the solitary figure in Beckett’s metaphysically queasy 1965 short, Film).

More here.

Tim Folger in Nautilus:

While some scientists search for extraterrestrial life by landing rovers on Mars, launching telescopes into space, and scanning the skies with giant radio dishes, geobiologist Joseph Kirschvink thinks that the first telltale signs of alien life may be sitting on a shelf at NASA’s Johnson Space Center, bundled in a Martian rock that conveniently fell to Earth.

On the wall of Kirschvink’s office at Caltech hangs a black and white photo of the meteorite. Radioactive dating shows that the rock formed 4 billion years ago, when Mars was a warmer, wetter place. It was propelled to Earth about 16 million years ago, after a meteorite impact blasted fragments of the Martian surface into space.

Eventually the rock landed on the ice cap of Antarctica, in an area called Allan Hills, where meteorite hunters found it in 1984. Scientists named it ALH84001 after the date and location of its discovery. They traced its Martian origin by analyzing gases trapped in the rock’s pores. Those gases matched the atmospheric chemistry measured by the two Viking spacecraft, which landed on Mars in the 1970s.

What’s more, ALH84001 seemed to contain signs of life, suggesting not only that life could have once existed on Mars, but that it could have made its way to the Earth across the void of space. In fact, Kirshvink thinks it’s likely that life arose only once in our solar system—and that it didn’t start on Earth. “I think there were bacteria on Mars 4 billion years ago,” he says.

More here.

Each week in Bookends, two writers take on questions about the world of books. When James Joyce’s “Ulysses” was first published in 1922, it was banned for obscenity and the U.S. Postal Service burned copies. This week, in honor of Bloomsday on June 16, Charles McGrath and Rivka Galchen discuss how the book would be received if it were published for the first time today.

From the New York Times:

By Charles McGrath

Joyce’s book might seem preening, needlessly erudite, even a little old-fashioned in its naughty bits.

By the standards of today’s dirty books, “Ulysses” seems pretty tame, and it’s hard to put yourself back in the mind-set of those who took such strenuous offense in the ’20s, when the book was first published by the heroic Sylvia Beach. For some reason the passage that most upset the prosecutors was not the famous Molly Bloom soliloquy, or even the Nighttown sequence, which involves anal penetration, if you read carefully, but the relatively innocuous scene in which Leopold Bloom fondles himself while staring at Gerty MacDowell’s knickers. As Kevin Birmingham points out in “The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses,’ ” his valuable account of how the book got published, it wasn’t just sex that the censors worried about but the very fabric of civilization. If you let in even a little smut and self-abuse, there was no telling what chaos might follow.

As we know now, the novel’s greatest transgressions were not against decency and morality but against the forms and conventions of fiction writing itself. The entire action of “Ulysses” takes place in a single day, skipping from character to character in seemingly no particular order. Stylistically, the book mingles high and low, poetry and banality, profundity and cliché. There are moments described from inside a character’s head, as well as stretches of pastiche and parody; burlesque chapters; a chapter in play form and one that’s a mock catechism; and even some sections that come close to gibberish. After reading the Sirens section — the one that begins: “Bronze by gold heard the hoofirons, steelyrining imperthnthn thnthnthn” — Ezra Pound worried that Joyce might have “got knocked on the head.”

More here.

Jay Rubin at the Times Literary Supplement:

The most lamentable sign of the decline of the Japanese language, as Mizumura sees it, is the current state of Japanese literature, which is written by “brainless writers of crap”. The literary scene is “like a playground where everything [is] small and clamorous – just juvenile”.

“Representative works of today’s Japanese literature often read like rehashes of American literature . . . . [W]orks of contemporary fiction tend to resemble global cultural goods, which, like Hollywood blockbuster films, do not require language – or translation – in the truest sense of the word. No wonder Japan’s best and brightest have turned their backs on literature.”

There are a few exceptions, she suggests, but the youngest writers she mentions were born in 1935 and 1943. Fans of contemporary Japanese literature may wonder where the presumptive Nobel nominee Haruki Murakami (b. 1949) fits into Mizumura’s bleak landscape, but one can only assume that he is the 800-pound gorilla in the room. His Vonnegut-flavoured narratives are surely the worst of the “rehashes” that Mizumura so abhors.

more here.

Mark Cocker at The New Statesman:

The recent expansion of “new nature writing” is among the most significant developments in British publishing this century. If you missed its inception or have not the inclination to read the scores of books appearing under its banner, you could do worse to catch up than to read a single chapter in Michael McCarthy’s new book, The Moth Snowstorm: Nature and Joy. It is the one entitled “The Great Thinning” and it powerfully and succinctly summarises the unfolding national story.

The phrase refers to the inexorable diminution of wildlife on these islands since the Second World War, primarily at the hands of farmers armed with an array of industrially produced chemicals. “The country I was born into,” McCarthy writes, “possessed something wonderful it absolutely possesses no longer: natural abundance . . . Blessed, unregarded abundance has been destroyed.” His most powerful and strangely poignant example of this is something that only people over 50 would have seen: the blizzard of nocturnal insects that would eventually obliterate the vision of any driver on a long car journey during a summer’s evening. I remember it, just.

Over the decades, during his time as a journalist, McCarthy sensed the public’s abil­ity to hear this story in its piecemeal form and ignore it almost entirely. Even now, he points out, the scale of what has happened on these islands eludes many people.

more here.