In Christina Dalcher’s novel Vox, another futuristic novel about misogyny, a “right-wing regime elected by the Bible Belt about year before the book’s action begins has affixed word-counters to the wrists of every woman and girl—counters that electrocute the wearer who speaks more than her allotted 100 words per day.” If only there were a device like that for authors of simplistic political novels … Here’s Alice B. Lloyd: “Whatever you make of its renewed political currency (hogwash), Atwood’s best-known novel remains a riveting read—and Vox’s silliness is only more apparent in light of their common comparison. It’s goofy enough for Trump-era resistance types to impose their misdirected doom projections onto Atwood’s novel. But Vox projects onto itself. It’s a set-up for panicky projection, a play for the profitable feminist fad market—and not much else.”
You can now read entire novels on Instagram thanks to the New York Public Library. “‘Stories’ are being given new meaning on the social platform, with full-length prose being posted on the library’s Instagram story with accompanying animated illustrations and graphics. The first novel published to the social media service is Lewis Carroll’s 1865 novel, Alice in Wonderland.”
Catullus is known for his love poems, but he also wrote a minor epic poem that, Daisy Dunn writes in The Los Angeles Review of Books, “rivaled Homer in its profundity.”
Phones are changing family life, and no one is happy about it—not even teens: “Phones have saturated teenage life: Ninety-five percent of Americans ages 13 to 17 have a smartphone or access to one, and nearly half report using the internet ‘almost constantly.’ But as recent survey data and interviews have suggested, many teens find much of that time to be unsatisfyingly spent. Constant usage shouldn’t be mistaken for constant enjoyment, as any citizen of the internet can attest. A new nationally representative survey about ‘screen time and device distractions’ from the Pew Research Center indicates that it’s not just parents who think teenagers are worryingly inseparable from their phones—many teens themselves do, too.”
A Reader Recommends: In the rush to get Prufrock out before the first faculty meeting of the academic year yesterday, I forgot to include the weekly fiction recommendation. Here it is today from David Kern: “I would like to recommend the novels of Eric Ambler, especially Epitaph for a Spy and A Coffin for Dimitrios. Considered by many to be the Godfather of spy fiction, Ambler masterfully wove early 20th-century international political intrigue with everyman adventure such that the likes of Graham Greene and Alfred Hitchcock frequently extolled his work publicly.”
Essay of the Day:
Why do people espouse conspiracy theories? For one, they’re fun, Clare Coffey writes in a wonderful piece over at The New Atlantis. They are also the result of our innate desire to make sense of the world:
“For all its expertise on conspiracy theories and fringe beliefs in general, the book never really describes the quality of their attraction, only the mechanisms that enable or reinforce it. The nearest attempt — borrowing words from journalist Damian Thompson — is the throwaway line that ‘unconventional beliefs can be “a passport to a thrilling alternative universe in which Atlantis is buried underneath the Antarctic, the Ark of the Covenant is hidden in Ethiopia, aliens have manipulated our DNA, and there was once a civilization on Mars.”’ But, Brotherton reminds us, we generally don’t believe things just for the fun of it.
“Fringe beliefs, though, can be tremendously fun. Brotherton underestimates how near the desire for knowledge is to a species of play — not contemplation, nor creation, but a restless activity driven wholly by its own internal ends. For that matter, he undersells human intellectual capacity in general. Proportionality bias will cause you problems if you aren’t aware of it, and psychologists do valuable service in articulating various pitfalls of this kind. But proportion is in fact important to the structure of the world. This insight lay behind the ancient music of the spheres, the notion that the mathematically proportioned movements of heavenly bodies constituted a harmony, akin to song we could not hear.
“That the movements of the human mind, its bent for narrative and order, might correspond to something real besides raw evolutionary fitness simply does not compute for Brotherton. And once you undersell the capacity of the human mind to know and love the world, you have lost the thread on both conspiracy and cryptozoology. However toxic certain strains are, both are a kind of world-loving. Conspiracy theories obsesses over human history and insist that it can be known, not as a collection of data points and mass social tendencies through time, but on a human-sized stage with real human actors. Cryptozoology taps into a tradition of natural history in which nature is wild, and jealous of her secret oddities. Its amateurism and eagerness towards all phenomena distinguish it from science, but it is precisely in those qualities that its riches lie. It does not assume an enchanted world, precisely, but a world that has never lost its edges, where discovery has never ceded precedence to technical tinkering.
“At the cognitive fringes you’ll find not just pathology, or even psychological mechanisms, but an instinct for cartography. The world is strange and wonderful, and its contours can be mapped in all directions.”
Photo: Santa Maria della Pietà near Rocca Calascio
Poem: Eric Pankey, “All Shall be Restored”
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