In any case, my boyfriend has mail from Amazon. Two children carry the parcel around the apartment, not understanding, just as I don’t, why the parcel doesn’t get unpacked right away. My boyfriend rescues his parcel and eventually tells us what’s in there: pants. Our older son complains and wants something too, and the younger one keeps on lugging the parcel around; it’s almost as big as he is. Two pairs of pants, says my boyfriend, and each pair was 30 euros cheaper than in the store.
Each pair? I ask. Each pair, he says. Damn, I say.
Days later, I spy the parcel in the hallway again, its corners slightly dented, ready for returning. The pants were the wrong color, my boyfriend says. They weren’t dark blue, they were blue-black. I shrug, kind of glad he didn’t manage to save 60 euros that easily, but perhaps that’s not true either. Perhaps I don’t care either, and anyway we’re not talking about these two pairs of pants bought by my boyfriend, we’re talking, for example, about the bluffs and cheats that Hannes Hintermeier described in a rather old article in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, using the example of a nonfiction author who preferred to remain anonymous. This author, I read, “hated Amazon, with the full force of his passion. He preached that we ought to stand up to the monopolist with all our might. Admittedly, whenever he wanted a book, he simply told his wife and she ordered it for him—from Amazon.”
Science season in Antarctica begins in November, when noontime temperatures at McMurdo Station climb to a balmy 18 degrees Fahrenheit and the sun hangs in the sky all day and night. For a researcher traveling there from the United States, the route takes time as well as patience. The easiest way is to fly from Los Angeles to Christchurch, New Zealand—a journey of 17 hours, if you’re lucky—and then to McMurdo, a charmless cluster of buildings that houses most of the southern continent’s thousand or so seasonal residents and both of its ATMs. McMurdo isn’t the end of the line, though. Often it’s just a pass-through for scientists hopping small planes to penguin colonies or meteorological observatories farther afield.
Few places in Antarctica are more difficult to reach than Thwaites Glacier, a Florida-sized hunk of frozen water that meets the Amundsen Sea about 800 miles west of McMurdo. Until a decade ago, barely any scientists had ever set foot there, and the glacier’s remoteness, along with its reputation for bad weather, ensured that it remained poorly understood. Yet within the small community of people who study ice for a living, Thwaites has long been the subject of dark speculation. If this mysterious glacier were to “go bad”—glaciologist-speak for the process by which a glacier breaks down into icebergs and eventually collapses into the ocean—it might be more than a scientific curiosity. Indeed, it might be the kind of event that changes the course of civilization.
Today, it’s hard to imagine a cinematic world where humans don’t fly. Or at least leap across miles, jump through wormholes, and zoom to the farthest reaches of space while battling impossible armies of intergalactic demons. Sometimes, the humans are not humans at all but vaguely human-like creatures, transformed by makeup and other enhancements, that move like us and talk like us, but are bigger, stronger, thicker, and purpler than us. Anything, it seems, is possible.
And maybe that’s the problem. This year, a giant mutant death pirate from the other end of the galaxy came to Earth, fought our greatest superheroes, and then wiped out half the universe, and I barely blinked. Three years ago, an entire Eastern European city was raised into the sky and then dropped back down to Earth by an evil, all-powerful, sentient robot; many of us just shrugged. It’s not that the VFX were bad; often, they were quite good. But they also felt curiously underwhelming.
Jonathan Kramnick’s Paper Minds: Literature and the Ecology of Consciousness mounts a nuanced and persuasive account of how literary studies might thread the needle by both insisting on its disciplinary identity and modeling ways literature professors might bring literary insights into contact with the discoveries of other fields. While much of the book demonstrates his method by applying it to encounters between philosophy of mind and literature, he begins more generally, by criticizing the forms “anti-disciplinary thinking” has recently taken. Kramnick describes several flavors of hostility to the autonomy and integrity of the discipline, from the scientific reductionism that subordinates literary study to evolutionary psychology, to the historical reductionism that by uncovering the discipline’s origins seeks to debunk it.
Yet although he sets himself against the homogenising effects of globalisation, Gilbert is no Goodhartian reactionary. His interest in the relationship between nature and people in cities is open and inclusive. The presence of new plant species on London’s streets, he writes, “reflects our imperial past or the growth of global trade”, but it also reflects the contemporary demographic makeup of an area: new kinds of weed can be found in areas where immigrants have taken their plant life with them. “Our story,” Gilbert concludes, “is recorded in our street plants”, and in this warm, rich and fascinating book, he shows how attending to the particular can help us tell stories that are universal.
My guess is that you've never read a book quite like Heather Rose's The Museum of Modern Love. I know I haven't. This is the Australian author's seventh novel, though it's her first published in the United States, and it's a real find. Rose celebrates the transformative power of art with an artful construct of her own — the profound response of a handful of fictional characters to Marina Abramovic's performance piece, The Artist is Present, in which the Serbian artist sat perfectly still and silent at a table in New York's Museum of Modern Art for a total of 736 hours over the course of the performance.