When Nuar Alsadir went to clown school, she wasn't there for a career in clowning. The poet and psychoanalyst was researching laughter for a new book –- going out to comedy clubs and improv shows to really listen to the audience and hear when they laughed.
What she learned at clown school surprised her.
The Internet, however, has only one currency, and that currency is attention. On the Internet, we endlessly raise awareness, we platform and deplatform, we signal-boost and call out, and we argue about where our attention should be directed, and how. What we pay attention to and the language in which we pay attention are the only realities worth considering, which is one reason why stories are so often framed by the idea that nobody is talking about a problem, when the problem is often quite endlessly talked about—just not solved. Why isn’t the media covering this story? is a common refrain that is just as often accompanied by a link to an article about the story, which is how the complainer learned about it in the first place.
But with a dearth of evidence for any of these ideas, a dark horse theory has emerged. In those first seconds of the Universe, there might have been another ingredient in the primordial soup: black holes. These black holes from the very beginning of time, known as primordial black holes (PBHs), could still be lurking around today – and some scientists believe they could solve the problem of dark matter.
Fitting with geology, thousands of years passed and little happened. Snow that started as flakes was transformed to dense glacial ice as it moved quickly, about four miles per year, toward the west coast of Greenland. Ice weakens as it nears the coast, because every day, particularly in the summer, enormous walls of ice flake off the glacier and fall into the ocean.
This is how ocean icebergs form. But it was one particular iceberg that fell in the summer of 1909 that would drift toward infamy. Around too briefly to have a name, this iceberg was more than two miles wide and one hundred feet tall at its birth, big enough to dwarf the Colosseum in Rome and all the pyramids put together, at least before it started melting. It would tower over the largest steamship ever conceived, which was also formed in that summer of 1909.
Let’s imagine that a corporation transforms into a person. Pretend that it inhabits a human body with a beating heart and a back that aches when it sleeps on the wrong side of the bed. Who is that person? What are they like? Do you see them as a co-worker or even a friend? Would you want to join them for drinks after work? Would they get an invite to your wedding? These questions aren’t as outlandish as they appear, especially if you’re familiar with the legal concept of corporate personhood. Corporations can hold property, enter contracts, and sue like any human being — and, controversially, they maintain First Amendment rights to spend money on elections and object to federal birth control mandates on religious grounds, according to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Now comes Emma Donoghue, another popular and critically acclaimed novelist, with “Haven,” a monastic story of her own. But Donoghue has ratcheted up the stakes by taking on a trifecta of bestseller killers: First, she moves the clock back even further, to around 600 A.D. Second, she portrays a culture inhabited only by men. And third, her characters live and move and have their being in an atmosphere fully imbued with their primitive Christian faith.
In short, very few readers have been praying for a novel like this. But “Haven” creates an eerie, meditative atmosphere that should resonate with anyone willing to think deeply about the blessings and costs of devoting one’s life to a transcendent cause.
Skellig Michael, a jagged outcrop off the coast of County Kerry, was used as the location of Luke Skywalker’s hideaway in two Star Wars films, but tradition holds that human habitation on the island dates from AD600, when ascetic Irish monks began retreating to ever-more remote spots. Emma Donoghue’s brooding, dreamlike new novel, Haven, imagines who those first souls might have been and how they might have survived. Suffice to say, the refuge they imagine – somewhere far from temptation and worldly chatter – soon becomes a very different kind of place as their faith in God and one another is tested to extremes.