The Paris Review's Blog, page 693

Ribbons, Lambs, and Strawberry Jam

Samuel S. Carr, Holding the Lamb, nineteenth century

When I was twelve and visiting my grandparents in California, we made weekly stops at the Naval Postgraduate School Thrift Shop, where the proprietress suggested that I enter a competition—she wanted me to submit my own concept for the theme of the next summer’s Monterey County Fair.

The fair was a highlight of our annual summer visits: the rides, the crop shows, the 4-H cake booth—all of it seemed magical to those of us from fair-deprived regions of the country. Raised on a steady diet of 1950s kids books, I fiercely envied the challenging but rewarding existences of those 4-H kids. I knew I could never raise my own livestock (let alone have the character to auction it), or work the cake booth, or display my crafts in the dedicated exhibition buildings. My talents, such as they were, lay in other directions. But each year, the posters and exhibits were organized around a central theme, and someone had to come up with that.

I dashed off page after page of increasingly hackish ideas. In the end, I submitted about twelve, in the spirit of playing the odds. And, come February, back in New York, I received a fat envelope from the Monterey County Chamber of Commerce: my concept of “Ribbons, Lambs, and Raspberry Jam” would be the theme of the summer’s fair. (Except that in deference to the region’s booming strawberry industry, the flavor of the jam would be altered accordingly.) It was the most exciting moment of my life. It was considerably more exciting than receiving similar envelopes from colleges six years later. For one thing, there were way more perks involved: in exchange for this top-notch ad work, I received a check for twenty-five dollars, a free family-pass to the fair, and a gift certificate to an establishment called Grandma’s Kitchen.

Needless to say, what followed was thrilling. Everywhere we went, we saw posters emblazoned with my doggerel. Ribbon-bedecked cartoon lambs gamboled amongst groves of large, ruddy-hued jars. And on the day of the fair itself, I felt like a visiting dignitary. Pies, dioramas, original art: all had been forced to bend to my idiotic theme. Random stuffed lambs poked their blank faces out of arrangements in the horticulture building. A bow-tie quilt displayed an enormous strawberry. The jam-makers, needless to say, had gone wild. Wherever we went, my grandfather announced to people that I was the originator of the theme. I pretended to be bashful; I was delighted.

After three days of glory, the excitement had dimmed somewhat. The fairgrounds were dusty, the flowers wilted. But one treat yet remained: the gift certificate to Grandma’s Kitchen. My whole family dressed up and piled into the station wagon. What a treat to be able to take everyone out myself! In the back seat, I clutched the gift certificate.

Grandma’s Kitchen sounded fantastic. I imagined homemade pies, rocking chairs, maybe a flower garden. My excitement mounted as we drove the half hour to the address we had carefully mapped at home. When we reached it, though, there seemed to be some mistake.

It was a cinderblock building in the middle of a parking lot. There were no other cars there, but that might have been because it was five-thirty. Were we in the right place? There was a sort of little guardhouse at one end of the lot; we decided after some consultation to make inquiries of the person whose shadow we could see moving about within. My grandmother slowly pulled the car abreast of the window.

“Excuse me,” she began, “is this—”

“Get out of here,” hissed a disembodied voice.

We were all sort of stunned.

“Get out of here,” the voice said again.

So we went home. I could take a hint.

Desire and Despair

Germany vs. Portugal; Iran vs. Nigeria; USA vs. Ghana.

Watching the World Cup in DUMBO. Photo: Rowan Ricardo Phillips

The greatest poverty is not to live
in a physical world, to feel that one’s desire
Is too difficult to tell from despair.
—Wallace Stevens

Yesterday, in a tunnel down under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass, a flatscreen floated in the light of an arch like the iris of a giant eye. Tables and benches of the sort you’d find at a picnic site were spread about; it was one of those rare times in New York that space was clearly not at a premium. The tunnel was shady and cool. Behind the flatscreen, at the end of the long arch where the noon light seemed irrelevant, a renovated factory glittered.

On the screen, we watched as Germany took apart Portugal. The Portuguese team exhibited their typical flaws: an overreliance on hierarchy and on their best player; a rash of madness by their most hotheaded player, which led to his ejection; a lack of belief against a team with a higher pedigree. The German team, on the other hand, exhibited their typical strengths: you know, German stuff. They won 4-0.

Soon afterward, the tournament saw its first draw, with Iran and Nigeria sputtering through a scoreless game. The big story of the match was probably Nigeria’s forest and key-lime-green color palette, combined with their fluorescent pink-and-yellow shoes. That, and that Iran had a Christian on their team. The world, like a football, is round and confounds.

Watching Nigeria’s very good players amble toward no reward, I couldn’t help but think of twenty years ago, almost to the day, when the country debuted in the World Cup by beating the eventual semifinalist Bulgaria 3-0. Back then, Nigeria’s team was fearless, ebullient—they quickly became one of the darlings of the tournament, a favorite of the neutrals, and supposedly the harbinger of Africa’s footballing arrival on the world stage. That’s proven to be the case, but it hasn’t exactly been a meteoric rise. We’ve yet to see an African team reach the semifinals. Over the years, they’ve found themselves eliminated from the Cup in a variety of heartbreaking ways.

Ghana will probably be no exception. By now you know who won the Ghana-U.S. game. The Ghanaian team exhibited their typical weaknesses. They were profligate in front of the goal; they confused being thirty yards out with being in front of goal; they demonstrated a bewildering taste for timely lapses in defense. The U.S. team, meanwhile, exhibited their typical strengths: a fundamentalist reliance on sheer effort, a tendency to huff and puff toward whatever result fate has laid out for them, and a belief in the virtuousness of those first two qualities.

Rowan Ricardo Phillips’s second book of poems, Heaven, will be published next year. He is the recipient of the 2013 PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award and a 2013 Whiting Writers’ Award.

Bad Connection

Living with the Turing test.

Researchers from the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) using an IBM type 704 electronic data processing machine in 1957. Photo: Wikimedia Commons

As of last week, the Turing test has—allegedly—been passed. In 1950, Alan Turing famously predicted that in the early twenty-first century, computer programs capable of sending and receiving text messages would be able to fool human judges into mistaking them for humans 30 percent of the time, and that we would come to “speak of machines thinking without expecting to be contradicted.” Two weekends ago, at a Turing test competition held at the Royal Society in London, a piece of so-called “chatbot” software called “Eugene Goostman” crossed that mark, fooling ten of the thirty human judges who spoke with it.

The official press release described this as a “milestone in computing history”—a “historic event.” Was it? We should not, of course, take a press release’s word for it. (Said release describes the winning chatbot program as a “supercomputer,” a head-scratching conflation of hardware with software.)

The release says this is the first time a computer program has scored above 30 percent in an “unrestricted” Turing test. This appears to be plausibly true. We don’t have access to the transcripts of these conversations—the organizers declined my request—but we know that the persona adopted by the winning chatbot (“Eugene Goostman”) was that of a thirteen-year-old, non-native-speaking foreigner. The Turing tests of the 1990s were restricted by topics, with the judge’s questions limited to a single domain. Here, the place of those constraints has been taken by restricted fluency: both linguistic and cultural. From correspondence with the contest organizers, I learned that the human judges were themselves chosen to include children and nonnative speakers. So we might fairly argue about what, for a Turing test, truly counts. These questions are deeper than they seem.

There’s an important methodological point that’s been lost, though, in most of the discussion so far of these results. The Turing test is a paired comparison. It’s not that a judge chats with Goostman, is then asked, “Do you think that was a person?” and says, “Sure, why not?” It’s that the judge chats with Goostman and a human, and is then asked which is alive. In other words, we can’t say that Goostman, to ten out of the thirty judges, seemed plausibly human. It’s that Goostman, to ten human judges, seemed more plausibly human than ten real people.

I was, myself, one of those real people—known as “human confederates”—at the Loebner Prize Turing test competition several years ago, battling bots much like Goostman for the judges’ faith. I’d studied the test transcripts before I participated, and have studied them since, and the simple truth is that bots have just not come particularly far in their annual Turing test performance since these annual contests began in the early nineties.

The story is elsewhere. What they have done is completely saturate modern life.

Part of the modern drudgery of the aughts-and-tens Internet is the tedium of filling out CAPTCHAs—those tiresome forms made to prevent spam by forcing us to prove that we’re human, with the most common and recognizable being Google’s “reCAPTCHA.” These checkpoints of the Web are, in fact, Turing tests: computer-judged Turing tests. (To wit, Completely Automated Public Turing tests to tell Computers and Humans Apart.)

Within the CAPTCHA is a quiet but perceptible arms race. When they debuted, they made us read text. First we had only to read text to attest our humanity; then it was distorted text; then it was photographs of the blurry or misprinted text that the best computer vision algorithms couldn’t make sense of—much of it legitimately ambiguous. Confronted with an eighteenth-century text, is the correct answer “Loft” or “Lost” when I see “Loſt”? And how am I supposed to know, outside of all context, if that’s a “1”, “l”, or “I” in some grainy print?

ReCAPTCHA claims to be “Tough on bots. Easy on humans.” And yet Google announced this spring that its own computer vision algorithms were now better than humans at identifying text in images. Where does this project end? This is a Turing test in continuous operation, with cybersecurity at stake. As with all Turing tests, our very participation is used to hone the opponent. As necessary as ever, the CAPTCHA is discomfitingly dynamic—that is to say, unsustainable.

We have cared about what distinguishes the animate from its simulacra since at least as far back as Descartes, but we have never needed the answers as we do now. In the last year, for instance: The Internet’s “Robot Exclusion Standard” turned ten years old, enforced only by etiquette. The Federal Trade Commission bankrolled a “Robocall Challenge” in the hopes of stemming the tide thereof, awarding twenty-five thousand dollars to a company called “Nomorobo.” The former CTO of Pixar’s new company released its first product: an iPad app for elementary schoolers whose characters are chatbots powered by the cloud. The makers of the most popular video game of all time won a seven-million dollar lawsuit against a firm making bots that play said game. The big shockwave in experimental literature came when a seemingly automated Twitter account was revealed to be a person. And the Oscar for Best Screenplay went to the tale of a man who separates from his wife and falls—quite sympathetically—in love with his digital personal assistant.

A Google search for “plagued by bots” in 2014 turns up some twenty-five thousand results, largely from online gamers. Broadening the search, we confront story after story of the scourge of Twitter bots, Facebook bots, Tinder bots. Spike Jonze, speaking of his initial chatbot conversations that inspired Her, recalled the feeling of “trippy” verisimilitude, followed by the disappointment of seeing the program for what it was. That thrill and disappointment has, for most of us, worn off at this point. In its place is a kind of harried vigilance.

In 2013, a voice introducing itself as “Samantha West” placed a series of near-identical telephone calls across the country, asking people questions about their health care. Some believed it the work of chatbot software. Others, an almost more unsettling configuration: nonnative speakers an ocean away, listening mutely and playing clips of the spokeswoman in response.
 
Meanwhile, flesh-and-blood call-center employees are increasingly asked whether they’re human. Even during the most informal and conversational customer-service calls that I’ve had in recent years, there are portions where the person I’m talking to is very obviously reading something verbatim. I know what to listen for: the diction changes, the syntax changes, the prosody changes. The person becomes temporarily insincere, momentarily hijacked, dissociated: running alien code.
 
Asked point-blank if she was a robot, the voice of “Samantha West” said, with identical delivery each time, “No, I am a real person. Maybe we have a bad connection.”

The great irony of the recent history of the Turing test is that we’re blurring the line between man and machine from both sides: deliberately meeting the machines halfway. Paul Ekman, arguably the world’s top expert on deceit, notes straightforwardly that “the more words spoken the better the chance of distinguishing lies from truthfulness.” I might adjust that maxim only to generalize it: from wpm to bitrate. The progression of technology for the last several decades has led us, counterintuitively, toward lower-bandwidth forms of connection. Calling, for example, used to mean showing up at someone’s house; now we regard even its disembodied modern version as invasive. “David [Foster Wallace] may have been the last great letter writer in American literature,” writes his biographer D. T. Max—“with the advent of email his correspondence grows terser, less ambitious.” And “terser, less ambitious” is precisely the direction in which we have moved away from e-mail. We are, in effect, fighting with our hands tied behind our backs: rather, eight of our ten fingers tied, wearing a gag—and a mask.

Our best weapons are the oldest. There are forty-three muscles in the human face. There are hundreds of ways to read almost any sentence aloud. The human retina is estimated by UPenn Medical School researchers to transmit some ten million bits of information to the brain every second. A text message filled to the brim contains eleven hundred twenty. The Turing test may, for its purposes, push intelligence through a straw: the good news is we’re not obliged to drink from it.

Brian Christian is the author of The Most Human Human .

True Objective Occurrences

Crookes in an 1876 portrait from Popular Science

William Crookes, born today in 1832, was a deft scientist—in Britain, he identified the first sample of helium, discovered thallium, invented a radiometer, and developed a vacuum tube to study cathode rays. But he was also a total naïf.

Swayed by spiritualism and the faddish pseudoscience of the day, Crookes regularly attended séances and joined both the Theosophical Society and the Ghost Club—still extant, should you care to sign up. The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, perhaps the best-named misguided occultist group in the history of misguided occultist groups, inducted him in 1890.

What drew someone of Crookes’s occupation into such fraudulent circles? Some say it was grief—Crookes’s brother had died from yellow fever at only twenty-one, and the scientist presumably yearned to speak with him again. Whatever the case, Crookes’s research papers on the paranormal, and thus whole years of his life, are swathed in a kind of dramatic irony. He was one of the few men in his profession who bought into these shaky accounts of the otherworldly. His writing on supernatural phenomena, so outwardly rigorous, shines with melancholy when you realize how deeply he wanted to believe. It’s bad science on good faith.

His 1974 report, “Notes of an Enquiry into the Phenomena called Spiritual during the Years 1870–1873,” is available in full online. The title alone carries all the official, upright skepticism of the Royal Society—from which Crookes was nearly ejected, when he started writing on this subject in earnest—and the scientific method. For all its seeming caution, its every page is grossly erroneous. Crookes divides the “phenomena” into thirteen increasingly vague classes, e.g., “The Appearance of Hands, either Self-Luminous or Visible by Ordinary Light”; “Special Instances Which Seem to Point to the Agency of an Exterior Intelligence”; “Miscellaneous Occurrences of a Complex Character.” He swears up and down that he’s scrupulous and objective, but he seldom mentions the specifics of his methodology; instead, he writes with evident rapture about the seemingly impossible (read: impossible) marvels he’s seen. And heard, for that matter:

I have heard delicate ticks, as with the point of a pin; a cascade of sharp sounds as from an induction coil in full work; detonations in the air; sharp metallic taps; a crackling like that heard when a fractional machine is at work; sounds like scratching; the twittering of a bird, etc. … In the case of Miss Fox it seems only necessary for her to place her hand on any substance for loud thuds to be heard in it, like a triple pulsation, sometimes loud enough to be heard several rooms off … I have tested them in every way that I could devise, until there has been no escape from the conviction that they were true objective occurrences not produced by trickery or mechanical means.

Elsewhere, he writes, “Under the strictest test conditions, I have more than once had a solid, self-luminous, crystalline body placed in my hand by a hand which did not belong to any person in the room.” And he introduces a section called “The Levitation of Human Beings” like so: “This has occurred in my presence on four occasions in darkness.”

All of this says disquieting things about our capacity to be deceived. When you read Crookes’s paper in light of his brother’s early death, it’s hard not to be affected by lines like this: “To the touch, the hand sometimes appears icy cold and dead, at other times, warm and life-like, grasping my own with the firm pressure of an old friend.”

The science historian Sherrie Lynne Lyons wrote, “Here was a man with a flawless scientific reputation, who discovered a new element, but could not detect a real live maiden who was masquerading as a ghost.” Harry Houdini put it more bluntly: “There is not the slightest doubt in my mind that this brainy man was hoodwinked.”

Calm Down with Some Landscapes, and Other News

Li Shan, Wind and Snow in the Fir Pines, mid-twelfth to early-thirteenth century

Robert Frost: the least understood of the great modernists.
Marshall McLuhan: the most understanding of early teenagers.
“I never dreamed of being a dominatrix, as a child might imagine driving a steam train, but when I became one I learned a trade as intricate, and as British, as that of the steam-engine driver.”
In twelfth-century China, the Confucian elite knew how to blow off steam: “In lieu of a literal return to nature, court figures would instead purchase landscape paintings and hang them on their walls. When they felt their souls growing jaded and heavy from quotidian concerns, they’d gaze at the lush scenes and transfer themselves into the place of their inhabitants—ink-brush silhouettes holding fishing rods, gathering plum blossoms and sipping a refreshing beverage in a rustic tavern.”
“You would think that a theme park attraction called the Palace of Unicorns would be a charming fantasy world. You’d be wrong. Located within Suoi Tien Cultural Theme Park in Ho Chi Minh City, the Palace of Unicorns is a graphic depiction of Buddhist hell.”

Café Entertainment

Károly Ferenczy, Fiatal lány a babával

In honor of James Joyce, I’ve spent Bloomsday carrying around a pair of doll’s underpants. I encourage all Joyce enthusiasts to do the same.

Doll underpants figure in Ulysses as a signifier in Leopold and Molly’s courtship—they’re what the critic David Cotter terms “a fetish charged with a tension between extremes.” As Molly Bloom recollects, she gave Leopold just such a talisman after one of their first dates:

so now there you are like it or lump it he thinks nothing can happen without him knowing he hadnt an idea about my mother till we were engaged otherwise hed never have got me so cheap as he did he was lo times worse himself anyhow begging me to give him a tiny bit cut off my drawers that was the evening coming along Kenilworth square he kissed me in the eye of my glove and I had to take it off asking me questions is it permitted to enquire the shape of my bedroom so I let him keep it as if I forgot it to think of me when I saw him slip it into his pocket of course hes mad on the subject of drawers thats plain to be seen always skeezing at those brazenfaced things on the bicycles with their skirts blowing up to their navels even when Milly and I were out with him at the open air fete that one in the cream muslin standing right against the sun so he could see every atom she had on when he saw me from behind following in the rain I saw him before he saw me however standing at the corner of the Harolds cross road with a new raincoat on him with the muffler in the Zingari colours to show off his complexion and the brown hat looking slyboots as usual what was he doing there where hed no business they can go and get whatever they like from anything at all with a skirt on it and were not to ask any questions but they want to know where were you where are you going I could feel him coming along skulking after me his eyes on my neck he had been keeping away from the house he felt it was getting too warm for him so I halfturned and stopped then he pestered me to say yes till I took off my glove slowly watching him he said my openwork sleeves were too cold for the rain anything for an excuse to put his hand anear me drawers drawers the whole blessed time till I promised to give him the pair off my doll to carry about in his waistcoat pocket

Writing in James Joyce & the Perverse Ideal, Cotter observes,

That this fetish is underpants suggests that it represents the immanence and physicality of women. That it is a doll’s underpants stresses the fetish as an imaginative token of woman as generic object of desire, the ideal ego resexualized.

It’s no secret that this particular signifier was drawn from life. In the typically authoritative words of my favorite book, The Secret Sex Lives of Famous People, Joyce “was a true underwear fetishist, and even carried a pair of doll’s panties in his pocket.”

Adds Harold Bloom in his James Joyce, the author “had a longtime fascination with women’s underwear; he kept a pair of doll’s panties in his pocket, often providing café entertainment by putting two fingers in them and walking then seductively toward a friend.”

This is clearly the ideal way to celebrate Bloomsday. But it takes work. I daresay in interwar Dublin one could simply go around picking up doll underpants on every corner, that un petit slip could be found in the average Parisian toy shop. Nowadays, it’s a trickier matter.

I think of myself as someone with a relatively well-stocked doll closet. But when I opened my miniature trunk to investigate the underthings on offer, I found that those little slatterns, Carol Channing and Sadie Dollhead, had been prancing around without panties for the entire time I’ve known them. There was a small girdle, true, a half slip, an undershirt, but nothing to protect their asexual plastic modesty. I tried wresting a sort of cotton diaper-cover from a baby doll, but they barely fit in the pocket of my shorts—any suggestive sashaying was completely out of the question.

Here’s what to do if you want to feel creepy: go into a series of toy stores on the Upper West Side and paw through doll clothes looking for tiny underpants. If you really want to up the ante, ask a suspicious clerk about it. Extra points if there are small children in the vicinity. It’s all much more in the spirit of Bloomsday, I fancy, than some costumed pub crawl.

At length, I found in my closet a tiny pair of bloomers that I sewed when I was ten for a doll called Tasha Tudor. I stripped her, pocketed them, hied myself to Zabar’s Café, bought some whitefish and a bagel, settled myself at the communal table, and slipped the little drawers onto my fingers. They walked seductively toward the only other occupants—an elderly woman in a wheelchair, eating a piece of cherry strudel, and her nurse. Neither seemed to notice. “To learn one must be humble. But life is the great teacher.” 

Sketches of Spain; England Acquits Itself Well

A still from video of Italy’s victory over England.

Rowan Ricardo Phillips, from New York:

Thursday has turned to Monday. The World Cup has blossomed. The opening game seemed intent on mocking any potential pleasure or faith you may have had in this tournament—but now it’s become so good, so quickly, that some people are already calling it the best World Cup they’ve ever seen. Eleven games thus far and not a single draw; the matches have been, for the most part, tightly contested. The Swiss threw in a last-gasp winner against an extremely naïve Ecuador; teams have sought to be positive, to attack, sometimes without thinking before rushing forward. But enough of that, Jonathan will no doubt be writing about England; his memoir is called Kick and Run, after all.

Almost all the big players have played up to their lofty status. Almost.

Spain, as you likely know by now, was atomized by the Netherlands to the tune of 5-1. The score flattered Spain: Holland could have, and really should have, scored a few more. To put into proper context, remember: Spain is the two-time defending European Champion and allowed a total of two goals (two!) in the last World Cup, which they also won, beating a Holland team so intimidated that instead of playing the osmotic football for which they’re famed, they played like the Steven Segal All-Stars, bastardizing themselves among the long line of great and balletic Dutch teams.

Four years later, the main actors were the same (including these two), but Holland was deadly and Spain soporific. What changed?

Sure, there were tactical shifts, at least on Holland’s end. On Spain’s end, as I’ve written about elsewhere, the will and desire to pressure their opponent off the ball was simply absent. Does winning everything sap you of desire? Does a long domestic season make, in the summer, the legs more stubborn? Perhaps. To their credit, Holland played a highly fluid 5-3-2: the three midfielders became four or five not robotically, but intuitively. Their coach, Louis van Gaal, is a mad genius: in the late nineties, when he was coach of Futbol Club Barcelona, he took a risk on youngsters by the name of Xavi Hernández, Carles Puyol, Andrés Iniesta, and Victor Valdés: the spine, head, and nervous system of the greatest club team the world has ever seen. But in Spain, van Gaal found fame not for his shrewd coaching but for his terribly accented—and incorrectly gendered–upbraiding of a journalist in Barcelona: “¡Tú eres muy malo … siempre negatifa, siempre negatifa; nunca positifa!” (For the record, he was right about the press—but I digress.)

The real problem for Spain was a torqued version of the simple problem we all face: time. Four years are only four years, except in football, where four years are like twelve. Back in 2010, Holland tasted the bitterness of defeat in extra time, to Spain, in the last game of the Cup. Now, in their first World Cup game of 2014, they faced Spain again, meaning they had the greatest gift a football player can hope for: chance.

Spain, on the other hand, were dour; their defenders sloughed around, enervated and out-sprinted, as though they carried their own urns in their arms. The midfield couldn’t conduct the chorus—they were, as Keats put it, “the spirit ditties of no tone.” This team seemed less Spain than a sketch of Spain.

Speaking of: when the legendary composer Joaquín Rodrigo was told that Miles Davis had just released an album called Sketches of Spain—and that it began with a marvelous interpretation of Rogrido’s most well-known composition, “Concierto de Aranjuez”—Rodrigo reportedly turned speechless and then became incensed. “¿Qué es eso de hacer un arreglo de mi música sin mi permiso?” he said, meaning roughly, Who is he to make an arrangement of my music without permission? Rodrigo knew little about jazz or the concept of standards, how music departs from its creator and exhibits thirst in itself for change. Spain, by way of the success of Barcelona, set a virtuosic standard for football over the past six years and three major tournaments. But they’ve shown up in Brazil playing the same notes and expecting to hear the same notes from others—notes of capitulation. Five goals later, one wonders if the response from deep within was “¿Qué es eso de hacer un arreglo de mi fútbol sin mi permiso?” Spain seemed to arrive with things backwards: vici, vidi, veni. And for emperor, king, or champion of the world, that’s simply not how things work.

* * *

Jonathan Wilson, from London:

In the one of the more bizarre off-field incidents of this World Cup, the French coach Didier Deschamps reported to FIFA last week that a drone hovered over his team’s training ground in Ribeirão Preto. “Apparently drones are used more and more,” he said; one assumes he had in mind the surveillance of prospective opponents’ tactical plans, unless he was just talking about the Bourne movies. It’s a possibility, of course, that the drone recently employed to deliver a pizza to the rooftop of a twenty-one-story apartment building in South Mumbai had wandered off course on its second run, or had made an earlier delivery to the Uruguayan team, who certainly looked like they’d been eating pizza: they had a slow, large-with-everything-except-the-anchovies defense, and the speedy and athletic underdogs from Costa Rica tore them apart, 3-1.

And while we’re on the subject of Italian food: in order to keep my enemy close, I sought out a trattoria on London’s Charlotte Street a few hours before the England v. Italy game. When the check came, I asked the waiter who he thought would win, and he said, “I don’t really care, I’m Polish.” Then he added, “I suppose as I live and work here, I would like the UK to win.” Of course, “the UK” does not have a team, which may come as a surprise to Americans for whom the generic term Brits reflects a yearning for harmony on the British Isles that has never existed. If the UK did have a team, it would undoubtedly do better than England, who really could have done with Gareth Bale, a Welshman, running down the left wing against Italy instead of Wayne Rooney—poor guy is starting to look a little past his sell-by date. An England loss is fully regretted only in England. In Scotland it is wildly celebrated—England’s “Hand of God” nemesis Diego Maradona was greeted as a hero when he visited Glasgow in 2008; in Wales, it’s largely ignored; and in Northern Ireland, it’s an occasion, on sectarian grounds, for both cheers and jeers.

So England duly lost in steamy Manaus. Andrea Pirlo, “aging” at thirty-five, produced yet another masterful display in the midfield, brilliantly selling a dummy to set up Italy’s first goal and nearly scoring himself in the last minute with a free kick that seemed to challenge several laws of physics before hitting the crossbar. Mario Balotelli, operatic as ever, headed in the winner. I wouldn’t say there was gloom all over England. After all, the young team had acquitted itself well, had played with panache, and the nineteen-year-old Raheem Sterling had been electrifying. In any case, you can’t have universal soccer-related anything when half a million of your residents’ first language is Polish, and your capital is, in expat population, the sixth largest city in France. There are even sixty thousand Brazilians in London. Thus, as these games roll out, there are explosions of joy, some large some not, all over the city.

Most people, however, enjoyed Holland’s 5-1 energized and euphoric demolition of Spain last Friday. The reason? Soccer fans outside the newly kingless kingdom have had it up to here with ticky-tacky. Van Persie’s glorious timed-to-perfection header and Robbens’s wrecking-ball strikes meant sundown for Spain, evening’s empire returning to sand.

And then, after ten games in four days, and just in case we had forgotten him, Lionel Messi took the field for Argentina against Bosnia in Sunday’s last game and produced a goal splendid in form and movement, perfect in execution and clearly designed to confound any hovering drone.

Rowan Ricardo Phillips’s second book of poems, Heaven, will be published next year. He is the recipient of the 2013 PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award and a 2013 Whiting Writers’ Award.

Jonathan Wilson’s work has appeared in The New Yorker, Esquire, The New York Times Magazine, and Best American Short Stories, among other publications. He is the author of eight books, including Kick and Run: Memoir with Soccer Ball. He lives in Massachusetts.

 

Odysseus in the Yard

Celebrating Bloomsday in prison.

An illustration of Leopold Bloom from Joyce’s notes, ca. 1941.

The man I affectionately termed Odysseus, though never to his face, was sixty-five and ailing. He was Philip Rubinitz, a onetime actor who had served about twenty years by then for the crime of stabbing his best friend through the heart with an antique SS dagger. Nevertheless, he was the facility rabbi’s clerk. His liver was failing and his back hurt, but he took laps with me around the yard of Green Haven Correctional Facility, observing our simulated Dublin through cataracts in his eyes. It must have been hard for him to keep up with my much younger legs, but he tottered around our Nightown seeking out a way home to his long-lost wife with the same fervor that Leopold Bloom had. His parole date was still five years away. I followed around full of the overconfidence and energy of youth and insecurity, much like Stephen Dedalus. It was June 16, several years ago now, and little did Rubinitz know that he was helping me celebrate Bloomsday in the yard.

After I’d been convicted, my father had said, “Good. You’ll finally read Joyce.” But it took a few years inside to finally come to it. Having initially avoided Ulysses, my mind was blown when I finally gathered the fortitude to read it—the scales fell from my eyes, and from then on I decided I had to celebrate Bloomsday with the rest of the converts.

None of whom, it seemed, were anywhere near me. Working as a prison librarian, I had seen a few men attempt A Portrait of the Artist, but our edition of Ulysses always stood on the shelf gathering dust. Grim, thick, and foreboding, it was too imposing in reputation for even the most ambitious of convicts. Finnegans Wake wasn’t available at all. The civilian librarians knew better.

The Green Haven Correctional Facility in 1941, when it first opened. Photo: Library of Congress

I had access to NPR, which of course did celebrate Bloomsday with me—but despite what our old futurists once promised, it’s still impossible to radio in a kidney. My father would kindly report on the New York readings, costumed and lubricated, after having visited the pubs and stages in person. And I would sit on my cot and have a bit of cheese that I pretended was Gorgonzola and lift a glass of root beer to the twentieth century’s masterpiece, the one book that contains all other books within it. (Pipe down, Karamazov, not today!) I read along with the radio, finally learning certain pronunciations I’d wondered about.

But does a Bloom necessarily need to know that he is a Bloom? That June 16, when I walked around with Rubinitz and witnessed him wax lyrical, reciting assorted non-Joycean monologues from memory and bowing to an audience of astounded gang members, I felt I was celebrating Bloomsday much more veritably than I had through my nonsense with the cheese. Here was a lost Ulysses, wandering for twenty years, passing between the Scylla and Charybdis of the metal detector every time he stepped into the yard. He had grown old and intermittently wise on his quest. That day his fine fettle appeared to be from the sixty milligrams of illicit morphine he had consumed.

Our Martello looked over us as we spun the yard, taking in the monsters and the maniacs. Though we were both Jews, we became Irishmen against the oppressive English guards. The real Irishmen were discussing how best to tattoo a Celtic cross at a table they always favored. They knew who Joyce was, just like they knew the names Yeats and Shaw and Beckett, but only as passwords. It was part of their ethnic schtick, their “inheritance”—they could roll off Bobby Sands and Parnell and the Molly Maguires just as easily, but all that had little to do with appreciating those things. It was just about being a gang in jail. When they finally got a guy with a brogue, they were happy to forgive the fact that his twenty-five years were for tying a girl to a bed and strangling her, and soon they sat him at their table. Erin go bragh.

But what kind of Stephen Dedalus was I? I had taught, without much pleasure, myself, and I had certainly indulged, though instead of whiskey it was heroin, and the consequences of that habit are a bit more severe. But if truth, at least lyrical truth, lies in intentions, then I was a fine Dedalus to follow my makeshift Bloom around. I too wrote on scraps of paper, and I too wished for literary fame and glory. Rubinitz had had these dreams himself once, but the decades had erased them. A fine Bloom. Only Penelope was missing.

And I had one, a fine Molly at home in the form of a beautiful Hungarian woman whose infidelity I could worry about endlessly. But that was Bloom’s job—and instead, Rubinitz wanted to talk about Thomas Mann. He hadn’t read Ulysses, and I did not bring up Bloomsday, but I did steer the conversation to literature of the Gaelic nature. We both enjoyed our Beckett and could talk about Molloy. It was a rare friendship, between a sixty-five-year-old grizzled con and me, the “newjack,” but I needed the guidance, since they don’t teach prison etiquette in universities, and he needed someone to talk to about Karl Kraus. We matched each other just fine. There were times when I began to feel like his Molly, as friendships in prisons are quite a different matter from the real world; jealousy sparks easily. Throughout my stint in prison, I cut contact with Rubinitz three times, but I always ended up forgiving him. Bloomsday comes every June, and he was the finest actor in the prison.

Daniel Genis is the author of Narcotica, a novel. His memoir is forthcoming.

Recapping Dante: Canto 32, or Area Man Discovers Hell Has Literally Frozen Over

Canto XXXII

We’re recapping the Inferno. Read along! This week: breaking news from the thirty-second canto.

INFERNO—After traveling nonstop for many hours through an array of chthonic geological obstacles, local political activist Dante Alighieri has found that the apocalyptic landscape has actually frozen over.

“I was supposed to be traveling through hell,” says Dante, who has seen everything on his journey from demons to the elusive and heavily mythologized lonza. “I thought the fire and brimstone would only get hotter as we journeyed farther toward Lucifer. There’s no way I could have predicted this—the ice, the chill, the subzero temperatures.”

The discovery will undoubtedly cause an iconological fiasco, challenging our contemporary of notion of hell altogether.

Dante, who has been gathering material for a yet-unnamed “hell project,” claims he was so caught up in seeing the sights around him—notably a giant wall—that he didn’t notice the floor made of ice in hell until a strange voice warned him to watch his step. “It’s a good thing a mysterious voice warned me,” he says. “I could have slipped through a thin patch.” Roman poet and limbo-dweller Virgil, who has accompanied Dante on the journey, added that, in Dante’s defense, the giant wall was indeed very, very large.

Lodged in the inexplicably ethereal frosted path is a large network of bodies, buried to the neck in ice. “It’s like they’re just stuck there, forever. I have no idea who would do such a thing,” Dante said, describing the scene and adding that on second thought, everyone there probably had it coming.

Upon seeing Dante, a pair of conjoined sinners buried in the ice began to shed tears, which quickly froze on their faces. The sinners—whom Dante later learned were twins known for butting heads when they were alive—were now only able to touch their foreheads to each other. “I can definitely see the irony in a punishment like that,” the Florentine added, snickering at his clever understanding of the infernal punishment, which will only intensify the debate over whether it is in fact worse to burn or freeze to death.

Though its climate is unlike that of other areas in hell, the frozen wasteland has attracted no shortage of Florentine sinners. Traitors from both the white and black Guelph parties are present, shedding light on the petty nature of Tuscan politics. “I thought I saw someone I recognized among the sinners, so I asked Virgil to wait for me, and then I may or may not have kicked the sinner in the face,” says Dante, of his meeting with Bocca, a Guelph who turned against the party in battle.* Some eyewitnesses have offered a testimony suggesting Mr. Alighieri may have tripped, although all accounts agree that he then walked over to the sinner and pulled his hair in an attempt to interrogate the sinner.

Dante, who undertook the journey through hell after becoming lost in a forest, sees the discovery of this cold front as a good omen for his love life: “Beatrice, the woman I love, once told me that she would be with me when hell froze over—those were her exact words, I kid you not. I was starting to lose hope, but now, after this, I’m in it to win it.”

*When Bocca is kicked, he cries out “Why trample me?” This bears a remarkable similarity to the line spoken by Pier delle Vigne, the human tree, in canto 13, when Dante breaks off his twig: “Why do you tear me?” In fact, this entire scene may unintentionally refract the scene in canto 13; just as a pathetic shrub in 13 asks to have his fallen leaves gathered and deposited by his roots, Dante rips the hair out of this similarly immobile sinner in 32. But there’s a lot of inconsistency here. Not only is Dante far more aggressive toward this frozen sinner—he actually inflicts upon Bocca the same kind of indignity and pain that he lamented in canto 13. And why does Virgil keep quiet? Back in canto 8, when Dante cursed another sinner, Virgil chastised him; but in canto 32 he doesn’t speak.

To catch up on our Dante series, click here.

Alexander Aciman is the author of Twitterature. He has written for the New York Times, Tablet, the Wall Street Journal, and TIME. Follow him on Twitter at @acimania.

Tolkien by Jansson, and Other News

“The dirty secret of poetry is that it is loved by some, loathed by many, and bought by almost no one.” (That may be dirty, but is it a secret?)
Everyone can rattle off the names of alcoholic male writers—it’s time to give the women their due. “Jean Rhys was briefly in Holloway prison for assault; Elizabeth Bishop more than once drank eau de cologne, having exhausted the possibilities of the liquor cabinet. But are their reasons for drinking different? And how about society’s responses, particularly in the lubricated, tipsy twentieth century; the golden age, if one can call it that, of alcohol and the writer?”
Among the artists to have illustrated international editions of The Hobbit over the years: Tove Jansson, Maurice Sendak, and Tolkien himself.
No one can explain the success of “A Dark Room,” a best-selling game composed of words and not much else—harking back to the earliest computer games of the seventies. “These language games draw on a tradition of using language patterns as a form of play that precedes computers by thousands of years, something to which more recent video games remain indebted.”
Look to 1984—the year, not the novel—for a curious episode from the annals of bioterrorism: “In rural Oregon, a small religious sect led by an Indian mystic was busy organizing a massive voter-fraud campaign that nearly enabled it to take over an entire county … The Rajneeshees would try to depress turnout among regular voters by poisoning thousands of residents with Salmonella.”
Journalists reporting from more than ninety countries are collaborating on a new project called Deca: “Once a month, Deca publishes a nonfiction story about the world. Somewhere between a long article and a short book, each piece is written by one member, edited by another, and approved by the rest.”