Print Over a decade ago I gave my friend Jane a copy of Catherine Cusset’s novel “The Story of Jane,” mostly because of the title Jane heard a feature on NPR about Cusset’s new project on the artist David Hockney and Hockney’s relationship to Los Angeles was love at first sight Many of his best-known works conjure quintessential Los Angeles: palm trees Hockney’s paintings are evocative; they don’t so much capture a place or a person so much as they convey an essence and a vision Cusset attempts to render Hockney in that way The backstory of her book has been a bit sensationalized: the heterosexual English artist and writes a novel about a living person “Life of David Hockney” is a formal experiment: a biography as novel Since my own work focuses on one of Hockney’s close friends the Anglo-American writer Christopher Isherwood I’m intrigued by what Cusset sets out to accomplish She told NPR that she wanted to “understand Hockney from the inside,” adding that “the book is very factual But what interested me is really the emotional truth.” The book’s inside flap calls it a “meticulously researched novel.” But is it and she provides a bibliography that could hardly be called exhaustive Cusset’s assertions about accuracy and invention call to mind two literary antecedents “The Things They Carried,” in which the author and/or the narrator distinguishes between “happening-truth” and “story-truth.” Happening-truth is what “really” occurred whereas story-truth is more of the resonance The other antecedent is in Isherwood’s diary a few months after the 49-year-old author became seriously involved with 19-year-old Don Bachardy They met at Will Rogers State Beach and a few months later began a relationship that would last the rest of Isherwood’s life Experiencing writer’s block and frustrated with the novel he’d been working at for more than three years Isherwood realized he had a “lack of inclination to cope with a constructed invented plot.” He even considered rejecting fiction: “Why not write what one experiences from day to day Why invent — when Life is so prodigious?” This is close to what Cusset had in mind for her Hockney “life.” Bachardy who would become a very accomplished painter in his own right met Hockney at the same time Isherwood did Isherwood and Bachardy each appear in Cusset’s book in which the two men are seated side-by-side in rattan chairs in their Santa Monica living room “were the first long-term gay couple [David] had met … He wouldn’t be painting their portrait; rather he would be painting his dream.” She describes the work as “intimate and monumental a classic and very contemporary painting which reveals Christopher’s feelings for Don and the depth of their relationship.” There are other ways to interpret the image and the relationship between the figures: as separated their feelings about each other more ambiguous This rather florid passage encapsulates Cusset’s book: It contains good attention to detail and to the painter’s technique The excerpt also exemplifies the “novelistic” within the biographical sketch though readers may wonder whether those are his emotions or Cusset’s story-truth — her imagination of his feelings Cusset’s challenge in such an undertaking is to find the nuance in the details: What are the keys to Hockney’s life and work What she has written feels like an overview or which is a shortcoming of her formal experiment: Cusset doesn’t get to the interior narrative of Hockney some of which are experiments in autofiction or what used to be called autobiographical fiction were sometimes criticized for being too personal The obverse is the situation here: Where is Cusset in this Hockney narrative she identifies with him as a fellow artist One hopes Cusset’s presence isn’t lurking in her description of Hockney’s reaction to a bad review he once received: “It was always the same old argument — serious versus pleasure — clothed in well-turned phrases He cut out the review and stuck it on the wall of his studio — a little reminder of the stupidity of critics and the abyss that separated them from creators.” This sort of comment seems like a preemptive strike “Life of David Hockney” is pleasant enough easily enjoyed on a chaise beside a Hockney swimming pool One gets little more from this book than one could glean from watching one of the four documentaries Cusset cites in her “Selected Bibliography” and reading his Wikipedia entry I don’t want to be the reviewer who asks an author to write a book that she didn’t want to write though maybe her editor should have pushed her to do more There could be a very fine book in this material Rebecca Mead’s “My Life in ‘Middlemarch’ ” comes to mind: part memoir and part critical analysis of that classic Victorian novel Something like “My Year with Hockney” might have been fascinating that Cusset gets the year that Isherwood met Bachardy wrong Or that her Isherwood had pancreatic cancer (It was prostate cancer.) Is this prosaic license especially in a “meticulously researched” one “Life of Hockney” is not both/and; it is a novel posing as a biography One more thing: I don’t know whether my friend Jane liked “The Story of Jane,” but I needed her to “Life of David Hockney” Catherine Cusset, translated by Teresa Lavender Fagan Chris Freeman teaches English and gender studies at USC. He is co-editor, with James Berg, of “Isherwood in Transit,” forthcoming next year from the University of Minnesota Press. Lifestyle Television Books Subscribe for unlimited accessSite Map Please enable JS and disable any ad blocker Metrics details sea-ice plays a central role in the functioning of marine food webs and its rapid shrinking has large effects on the biota It is thus crucial to assess the importance of sea-ice and ice-derived resources to Arctic marine species we used a multi-biomarker approach combining Highly Branched Isoprenoids (HBIs) with δ13C and δ15N to evaluate how much Arctic seabirds rely on sea-ice derived resources during the pre-laying period and if changes in sea-ice extent and duration affect their investment in reproduction Eggs of thick-billed murres (Uria lomvia) and northern fulmars (Fulmarus glacialis) were collected in the Canadian Arctic during four years of highly contrasting ice conditions isotopic (carbon and nitrogen) and energetic composition Murres heavily relied on ice-associated prey and sea-ice was beneficial for this species which produced larger and more energy-dense eggs during icier years fulmars did not exhibit any clear association with sympagic communities and were not impacted by changes in sea ice like other species more constrained in their response to sea-ice variations therefore appear more sensitive to changes and may become the losers of future climate shifts in the Arctic unlike more resilient species such as fulmars it appears crucial to assess the dependency of key Arctic species on sea ice and its resources and to understand the risks associated with its current decline IP25 and diene provide direct evidence for the contribution of sympagic algae to the diet of the studied organisms a tri-unsaturated HBI (triene) is mostly synthesized by open-water diatom species representing an indicator of the phytoplankton contribution constitute powerful analytical tools for assessing environmental effects on marine biota and combining them would enable to better understand how much sea ice and its derived resources are important among Arctic marine ecosystems from zooplankton consumers up to top predators Further understanding about the role and importance of sea ice for these species is therefore required especially since investigations involving HBIs and Arctic seabirds are currently missing the observed decline in Arctic sea ice extent and modifications in phenology could have strong implications on the fate of seabird populations sea ice represents a physical barrier for seabirds excluding certain areas for foraging and thus potentially increasing their energy expenditure to access prey in open water an extensive ice cover does not impede them to access sympagic resources if several leads are present between ice floes that allow them to dive and feed sea ice could provide high-quality sympagic resources for breeding birds and investigations on the profitability of sea ice are thus required we investigated the sensitivity of thick-billed murres (hereafter ‘murres’) and northern fulmars (hereafter ‘fulmars’) to variations in sea-ice conditions in the vicinity of their breeding grounds More specifically we used a multi-biomarker approach combining HBIs and stable isotopes to: (i) determine if changes in sea ice conditions influence bird association with ice-derived resources; and (ii) investigate how this association influences bird feeding ecology and egg parameters (proxies of bird investment in the reproduction) of each species Between 2010 and 2013, both northern fulmars and thick-billed murres encountered contrasting ice conditions around PLI during the entire breeding season (Supplementary Fig. S1), including egg formation (Fig. 1). open-water was accessible between multiple big ice floes (500–2000 m) of thick first-year ice (>120 cm) consolidated fast ice combining thick first-year ice (>120 cm) and new ice (<10 cm) surrounded the island The ice margin was located far away (>250 km to the east) a dense and thick first-year fast ice (>120 cm) was present around PLI but open water remained accessible near the colony (~50 km) open-water conditions were present in the entire region in 2011 Fast ice was only present in coastal areas close to Devon Island shores as medium-sized (100–500 m) but sometimes large ice floes (2–10 km) of thick first-year ice (>120 cm) the colony was still surrounded by a dense and consolidated fast ice (medium and thick first-year ice 70− 120+ cm) and the ice edge was still located more than 250 km away to the east (Lancaster Sound Polynya) although the area was surrounded by dense fast ice with thick first-year ice (>120 cm) the ice edge was easily accessible located 50 km away from PLI Thus, we distinguished two major ice regimes (Fig. 1): (1) 2010 and 2012 represented heavy ice years and (2) 2011 and 2013 were defined by an early ice break up (i.e in May) and a restricted sea ice cover or an easy access to open water we noticed a gradient over the years from icy to open-water conditions 2013 and 2011 for murres (mid-June) and from 2012 to 2010 Relationship between ice use index and ice concentrations in the 100 km radius circle around the colony for thick-billed murres (TBMU H-Print (%) for eggs of thick-billed murres (grey) and northern fulmars (white) (n = 15/year/species) collected on Prince Leopold Island for four consecutive years with contrasted ice conditions (2010–2013) For fulmars, the H-Print exhibited a significant inter-annual variability (F3,52 = 6.6, p < 0.001, ANOVA; Fig. 3) where ice biomarkers were more abundant (i.e 33.9 ± 28.1% in 2010 and 27.3 ± 23.9% in 2011) H-Print values were intermediate (47.6 ± 33.1%) while in 2013 triene was more dominant in the eggs (i.e There was a significant positive linear relationship between H-Print and ice concentrations around the colony (p < 0.001 in contrast to fulmars for which no relationship was found (p > 0.05) Stable isotope results confirmed the distinct feeding ecology of each species with murres exhibiting higher δ15N values (15.6 ± 0.67‰) than fulmars (13.2 ± 0.33‰) (p < 0.001, t72.3 = −23.9, Welch two-sample t-test; Supplementary Fig. S4) Influence of ice association (ice use index) on δ15N ratios measured in eggs of thick-billed murres between 2010 and 2013 For fulmars, δ13C values were different across years (Table 2; F3,52 = 6.8 with 2013 differing from all other years (−19.7 ± 0.2‰ versus −19.3 ± 0.2‰ in 2010 −19.4 ± 0.3‰ in 2011 and −19.4 ± 0.2‰ in 2012) δ15N values also differed across years (F3,52 = 7.0 with 2012 (13.4 ± 0.3‰) different from 2010 (13.0 ± 0.3‰) and 2011 (13.0 ± 0.30‰) δ15N did not linearly respond to varying ice use index (p = 0.9) Egg volume (cm³) and egg energetic content (kcal) of northern fulmars (NOFU, white) and thick-billed-murres (TBMU, grey) between 2010 and 2013. Influence of ice association (ice use index) on egg parameters of thick-billed murres: egg volume (top) and egg energetic content (bottom) murres laid eggs with biomarker (HBI and carbon stable isotopes) patterns suggesting high ice use in contrast to biomarker patterns from low ice years The positive linear relationships observed between ice concentrations and ice use index suggest that murres strongly respond to changes in sea ice and would thus be more sensitive to potential impacts of climate change where open-water is more predictable across years and algal blooms may occur earlier fulmars are easily able to reach open waters even during extreme years and this could explain the lack of interannual differences in this species studying GPS-equipped birds would help refining their actual feeding grounds and adjusted analyses of ice conditions in this particular area would help clarify the influence of sea ice for northern fulmars thick-billed murres naturally lay eggs at a time closer to seasonal ice retreat and are hence already exposed to larger variations in ice conditions the much lower interannual variations in sea ice cover might be below the threshold for northern fulmars to be influenced by sea ice variations (as they are constrained to breed early and fly far to complete chick-rearing before migration) and maybe that only extremely early open-water conditions (e.g as early as in mid-May) would lead to observable impacts and during years like 2010 where ice was abundant but highly fragmented ice precludes access to much of the sympagic prey for murres and birds would forage more in the open water spending much energy while focusing on fish the presence of fast ice close to the shore could negatively impact reproduction performance of Adelie penguins by reducing their access to prey items prey availability (accessibility and/or quality) clearly influences the breeding performance of various seabird species we provide evidence that ice-derived resources influence murre egg size (proxy for breeding investment) and further investigations including other breeding parameters (such as chick growth rate and survival breeding success) would help to confirm the observed trends and understand murre vulnerability to sea ice declines in the Arctic sea ice represents a real and valuable asset for ice-associated seabirds that might be more sensitive to future changes in Arctic sea ice fulmars thus appear less sensitive to sea ice variations which do not seem to impact their investment in reproduction northern fulmars are more likely to be dramatically affected by a « tipping point » in Arctic sea ice conditions at the time of egg development in females; a point at which previously small changes become significant enough to impact their feeding ecology and reproductive investment Further investigations on fulmars during years of highly variable ice conditions are thus required to fully understand the influence of sea ice for this species Our study examined the importance of sea ice and ice-derived resources for breeding Arctic seabirds in a context where the Arctic might become ice-free in summer within the next decades Instead of considering the sea ice cover as a physical barrier preventing seabirds to access their prey we highlight the importance of sea ice via the resources it provides to marine predators combining highly branched isoprenoids and stable isotopes showed how important sea ice is for seabirds and how its use conditions different aspects of their biology which has exceptional ability to fly long distances but must breed early to complete its long breeding period presumably because birds have adapted to fly long distances to open water remote from the colony but predictably open early in the season the influence of sea ice is especially important for species such as diving thick-billed murres perhaps more constrained in their response to sea ice variations that rely heavily on local environmental conditions murres appear to have “optimal” ice conditions when ice cover is heavier but still broken up providing feeding locations; ice-associated biomarkers and proxies of reproductive effort are reduced at higher or lower ice conditions we provide new and essential knowledge to comprehend the consequences of current and future climate changes on the fate of Arctic seabird populations We also emphasise the importance of combining different biomarkers to better understand the importance of sympagic resources for top predators within changing Arctic marine ecosystems Egg contents were homogenized and stored frozen at −40 °C in acid-rinsed polyethylene vials One- or two-gram aliquots (15 eggs per species per year) were sent to Laval University (Quebec City) where HBI and caloric content analyses were performed The remaining pixels were classified into two categories (open water or sea ice) using a K-means clustering procedure The clustering has been performed using the RGB values of the pixels A maximum of 100 iterations was allowed for convergence The proportion between pixels classified as open water and sea ice was then calculated and used as a proxy for the proportion of sea ice around the colony diene and triene were determined to integrate 350.3 The ratio of these responses against those of internal standards (m/z 266) was normalized to the mass of the sample and multiplied by the mass of standard added to the sample response factors were determined by injection of authenticated standards and results are expressed in ng.g−1 in the absence of pure standards results are expressed in ng of standard equivalent.g−1 50 and 100% correspond respectively to a sympagic (i.e ice algae and phytoplankton) and a pelagic (i.e Aliquots of dried homogenized samples (n = 32) were compressed to form pellets and analysed in a Parr 6300 Automatic Isoperibol-Oxygen Bomb Calorimeter A Benzoic Acid standard was added to each sample (0.3–0.7 g) due to low sample weight (<0.2 g) Instrument precision was determined by running Benzoic Acid standards (6318 cal.g−1) prior to the samples Results were expressed in both cal.g−1 dry and wet sample The energy available per egg (kcal) was calculated by multiplying cal.g−1(wet) with the total egg weight the weight of the shell of each egg was not determined prior to homogenization and we make the assumption that the variation amongst individuals is negligible A principal component analysis (PCA) was performed using the two sea-ice tracers (H-Print and δ13C) in order create a single variable representing bird-ice association (hereafter named Ice Use Index) The first principal component (PC1) explained 78.4% and 79.3% of the total variance in murres and fulmars on which individual coordinates were projected To investigate the influence of ice association on bird feeding ecology and reproductive parameters we tested linear or quadratic regressions of δ15N egg volume and energetic content with the Ice Use index Normality of residuals and homoscedasticity were tested prior to interpretation using the Shapiro-Wilk normality test and a Breusch-Pagan test and data were log-transformed when assumptions were not respected a Multivariate Analysis of Variance (MANOVA) was performed to test whether there were significant differences in the isotopic niche (δ13C One-way ANOVA then enabled to test significant differences of each variable between years and posthoc Tukey HSD tests were performed to locate these differences Residuals normality and variance homogeneity were tested prior analysis with tests described above and data were log-transformed when these assumptions were not respected All applicable institutional and national guidelines for the care and use of animals were followed and methods were carried out in accordance with relevant guidelines and regulations including appropriate scientific and land use permits All eggs were taken under appropriate annual research and collection permits (e.g Nunavut Wildlife Research Licence 2012–040; Environment Canada NUN-SCI-12-04) The local indigenous community was consulted and had representatives participate in the work in most years The datasets generated and analysed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on a reasonable request Current state and trends in Canadian Arctic marine ecosystems: II Energy flow through the marine ecosystem of the Lancaster Sound region and benthic microalgae to primary production in nearshore regions of the Beaufort Sea Near-ubiquity of ice-edge blooms in the Arctic Current state and trends in Canadian Arctic marine ecosystems: I Export of algal biomass from the melting Arctic sea ice New measurements of phytoplankton and ice algal production in the Arctic Ocean II and III to the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change Accelerated decline in the Arctic sea ice cover Perspectives on the Arctic’s shrinking sea-ice cover Decline in Arctic sea ice thickness from submarine and ICESat records: 1958–2008 Near zero replenishment of the Arctic multiyear sea ice cover at the end of 2005 summer Large decadal decline of the Arctic multiyear ice cover Changing state of Arctic sea ice across all seasons Recent changes in Arctic sea ice melt onset Arctic climate change: observed and modelled temperature and sea-ice variability Future Arctic Ocean seasonal ice zones and implications for pelagic-benthic coupling Sea ice phenology and timing of primary production pulses in the Arctic Ocean Effects of sea ice cover on satellite-detected primary production in the Arctic Ocean Continued increases in Arctic Ocean primary production Climate forcing multiplies biological productivity in the coastal Arctic Ocean: upwelling and productivity in the Arctic A guide to sea-ice-associated biodiversity in this time of rapid change (Conservation of Arctic Flora and Fauna (CAFF) Ecological responses to recent climate change Biomagnification and bioaccumulation of mercury in an arctic marine food web: insights from stable nitrogen isotope analysis benthic-pelagic coupling and trophic relationships within the Northeast Water Polynya: insights from 613C and 615N analysis Seasonal food web structures and sympagic–pelagic coupling in the European Arctic revealed by stable isotopes and a two-source food web model Distinctive 13C isotopic signature distinguishes a novel sea ice biomarker in Arctic sediments and sediment traps Highly branched isoprenoids as proxies for variable sea ice conditions in the Southern Ocean A novel chemical fossil of palaeo sea ice: IP25 Identifying variable sea ice carbon contributions to the Arctic ecosystem: A case study using highly branched isoprenoid lipid biomarkers in Cumberland Sound ringed seals Populations and trends of Canadian Arctic seabirds The food consumption of the world’s seabirds big effects: the little auk (Alle alle) transforms high Arctic ecosystems Seabirds as monitors of the marine environment Seabirds as indicators of aquatic ecosystem conditions: A case for gathering multiple proxies of seabird health Seabirds as indicators of marine food supplies Seabird diet indicates changing Arctic marine communities in eastern Canada Black-legged kittiwakes as messengers of Atlantification in the Arctic Arctic climate change and pollution impact little auk foraging and fitness across a decade ice conditions and reproduction in an Arctic nesting marine bird: Brunnich’s guillemot (Uria lomvia L.) Variation in ice conditions has strong effects on the breeding of marine birds at Prince Leopold Island Annual movement patterns of endangered ivory gulls: the importance of sea ice Gaston, A. J. & Hipfner, J. M. Thick-billed Murre (Uria lomvia). Birds N. Am. Online, https://doi.org/10.2173/bna.497 (2000) Mallory, M. L., Hatch, S. A. & Nettleship, D. N. Northern Fulmar (Fulmarus glacialis), version 2.0. Birds N. Am. Online, https://doi.org/10.2173/bna.361 (2012) in auks support the biomechanical hypothesis for flightlessness in penguins The Thick-billed Murre of Prince Leopold Island (Environment Canada - Canadian Wildlife Service Mallory, M. L., Gaston, A. J., Gilchrist, H. G., Robertson, G. J. & Braune, B. M. Effects of climate change, altered sea-ice distribution and seasonal phenology on marine birds. 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Rev. 1–26, https://doi.org/10.1139/er-2018-0067 (2018) Thick-billed murres and black guillemots in the Barrow Strait area during spring: diets and food availability along ice edges Summer feeding ecology of seabirds in eastern Lancaster Sound Trophic relationships at High Arctic ice edges Observations of foraging Northern Fulmars (Fulmarus glacialis) in the Canadian High Arctic Temporal and spatial patterns in the diet of northern fulmars Fulmarus glacialis in the Canadian High Arctic Aspects of the biology of Arctic cod (Boreogadus saida) and its importance in arctic marine food chains Does sea ice constrain the breeding schedules of high arctic northern fulmars Intercolony differences in the summer diet of Thick-billed Murres in the eastern Canadian Arctic In-situ observations on the distribution and behavior of amphipods and Arctic cod (Boreogadus saida) under the sea ice of the High Arctic Canada Basin Arctic warming: nonlinear impacts of sea-ice and glacier melt on seabird foraging and consequent breeding adjustment in a marine bird: a case of progressive mismatching - cambio de eventos estacionales y de ajuste consiguiente en reproducción de un ave marina: un caso de desajuste progresivo algal food quality and Calanus glacialis reproduction and growth in a changing Arctic Parental investment in eggs and its effect on nestling growth and survival in Magellanic Penguins The relationship between egg size and posthatching development in the thick-billed murre Intraspecific variation in egg size and egg composition in birds: effects on offspring fitness Importance of ice algal production for top predators: new insights using sea-ice biomarkers Diet and foraging effort of Adélie penguins in relation to pack-ice conditions in the southern Ross Sea Foraging strategies of male Adélie penguins during their first incubation trip in relation to environmental conditions Reproductive performance and diving behaviour share a common sea-ice concentration optimum in Adélie penguins (Pygoscelis adeliae) and sea ice: Euphausia superba and its changing environment Sea ice cover and its influence on Adélie penguin reproductive performance Effects of recent decreases in arctic sea ice on an ice-associated marine bird Ocean climate prior to breeding affects the duration of the nestling period in the Atlantic puffin Response of pigeon guillemots to variable abundance of high-lipid and low-lipid prey identification and quantification of the Arctic sea ice proxy IP25 from marine sediments Using stable isotopes to determine seabird trophic relationships Stable isotopes of carbon and nitrogen in the study of avian and mammalian trophic ecology R: A Language and Environment for Statistical Computing Download references part of the NASA Earth Observing System Data and Information System (EOSDIS) FC benefited from scholarships from Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (Discovery grant to GM) This study represents a contribution to the French Polar Institute ADACLIM research program (IPEV Pgr 388) performed the experiments and acquired the data contributed to analysis and interpretation of data All authors revised the article and approved the submitted version The authors declare no competing interests Publisher’s note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations Download citation DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-019-51788-4 Anyone you share the following link with will be able to read this content: a shareable link is not currently available for this article Sign up for the Nature Briefing: Anthropocene newsletter — what matters in anthropocene research The dates displayed for an article provide information on when various publication milestones were reached at the journal that has published the article activities on preceding journals at which the article was previously under consideration are not shown (for instance submission All content on this site: Copyright © 2025 Elsevier B.V. Catherine Cusset was born in 1963 in Paris and represents a generation of intellectuals with a brilliant humanities education and an inquisitive mind she defended her doctoral dissertation on de Sade and taught 18th-century literature at Yale University Catherine Cusset is the author of 13 novels published by Gallimar which won the Goncourt Lyceum Award in 2008 Confessions d'un radine, and New York Journal d’un cycle) are described as autofiction a French literary movement that is a hybrid of fiction and autobiography Cusset's work has been translated into 22 languages (Belarussian Join ZOOM meeting on Sunday The novel Un brillant avenir is an autofictional saga of 4 generations which unfolds from 1950 to 2006 at the intersection of Romania The translation into Ukrainian was made in 2017 by the publishing house K.I.S (translator - Maryna Marchenko) within the Skovoroda Publishing Assistance Programme Catherine Cusset will give an online lecture on zoom in which she will talk about her own literary space between New York and Paris and the novel Un brillant avenir The Romanian heroine of this novel has three surnames and two first names during the course of the novel Her mother died when Elena was very young and she is adopted by her mother’s sister and her husband Elena settles down with her adoptive parents As Cusset tell the story in chapters for a specific year and does not tell them chronologically we have a pretty good idea of what is going to happen to Elena during her life She becomes a nuclear physicist but remains an obedient daughter paying lip service to the communist ideal but does not have her adoptive parents’ fervour for the cause Her wit and style, brought to life by these directors, make for a most enjoyable evening in Ryan Coogler’s hit film is a riff on the uses and abuses of genre Two books trace the extraordinary rise and rapid fall of Yevgeny Prigozhin Robert Macfarlane and James Scott seek to understand the ways of water The greatest civilisations of the past 3,000 years were the opposite of MAGA You are using an outdated browser. Please upgrade your browser or activate Google Chrome Frame to improve your experience Subscribe online and gain access to the entire archive Mark Greif Published in Issue 3 : Reality Principle I’ve wondered why there’s no philosophy of popular music Critics of pop do reviews and interviews; they write appreciation and biography Their criticism takes many things for granted and doesn’t ask the questions I want answered Everyone repeats the received idea that music is revolutionary and can date the music by ear with surprising precision in the sense that it represents some aspect of exterior history apart from the path of its internal development I know pop does something to me; everyone says the same Does it really influence my beliefs or actions in my deep life or does it just insinuate a certain fluctuation of mood The answers are difficult not because thinking is hard on the subject of pop but because of an acute sense of embarrassment Popular music is the most living art form today contemporary people would grab their records first; we have the concept of desert island discs because we could do without most other art forms before we would give up songs Songs are what we consume in greatest quantity; they’re what we store most of in our heads But even as we can insist on the seriousness of value of pop music we don’t believe enough in its seriousness of meaning outside the realm of music with ears tuned precisely to a certain kind of sublimity in pop and cant about pop—in any attempt at a wider criticism—precisely because we feel the gap between the effectiveness of the music and the impotence and superfluity of analysis This means we don’t know about our major art form what we ought to know We don’t even agree about how the interconnection of pop music and lyrics accomplishes an utterly different task of representation more scattershot and overwhelming and much less careful and dignified than poetry—and bad critics show their ignorance when they persist in treating pop like poetry as in the still-growing critical effluence around Bob Dylan If you were to develop a philosophy of pop you would have to clear the field of many obstacles to let people know you had not floated into generalities and to let them test your declarations You’d have to announce at the outset that the musicians were figures of real importance but not the “most” anything—not the most avant-garde This would preempt the hostile comparison and sophistication that passes for criticism among aficionados If you said once that you liked the band’s music there would be no more need of appreciation; and if it were a group whose music enough people listened to there would be no need of biography or bare description and let me be fool enough to embark on this And if I insist that Radiohead are “more” anything than some other pop musicians—as fans will make claims for the superiority of the bands they love—let it be that this band was more able to pose a single question: How should it really ever be possible for pop music to incarnate a particular historical situation With how many people did people used to sleep The double-bind he’s in has made him lose his mind None of us can prove our books are of genuine worth yet Today the concept of global peak oil is widely accepted in the energy field When you wear the Fordson tractor belt buckle my father gave me one knows what it is like to receive a harsh review; and yes one is aware of the basic inhumanity of the critic’s task A specter is haunting the academy—the specter of close reading its thingness easy to lose in the sound and the fury The point of these shows was not just how people would be altered the antipolitics of fear would deprive the person of his status as a political You reach points in life at which you can no longer live like other people The growing influence of the Italian philosopher’s work seems in many respects to depend on his remarkable sense of taste n+1 is a print and digital magazine of literature We also post new online-only work several times each week and publish books expanding on the interests of the magazine Terms & Conditions | Privacy Policy This year’s must-see shows range from a Nordic Pavilion exploring transgender spaces to a compelling Lebanese project confronting the realities of ecocide Frieze returns to The Shed in May with more than 65 of the world’s leading contemporary art galleries and the acclaimed Focus section led by Lumi Tan thinkers and writers transformed an experimental journal into a global hub for radical ideas In the introduction to Hatred of Capitalism (2002) – a collection of Semiotext(e)’s foremost writings – editor Sylvère Lotringer remarked that Western society was ‘in the last gasp of Marxism’ – a final surge of radical thought amidst the waning tides of revolutionary fervour This oral history delves into the press’s past 30 years focusing on its transformative journey through the early 2000s and its migration to Los Angeles yet never losing sight of its roots as an experimental journal and imprint championing French theory and post-Marxist ideology we explore how Semiotext(e) evolved from a provocative outpost for intellectual rebellion to a cornerstone of contemporary radical thought Chris Kraus By the time we were compiling Hatred of Capitalism Sylvère and I were not living together anymore I was in LA; he was in New York – but we’d still spend time together We both were really burnt out on the idea of critical introductions and one of his premises for the ‘Foreign Agents’ series [1983–ongoing] was that it would be ‘theory brut’ without any critical introductions to any of the books it was in that spirit that we did the introduction to Hatred of Capitalism lying in bed together because that’s how the whole Semiotext(e) publishing project emerged – from personal It’s become different throughout the years but I think the press continues to be forged by community McKenzie Wark Semiotext(e) changed my life My whole trajectory was founded in Jean Baudrillard’s Simulations [1983] and in Pure War [1998] encountering Semiotext(e) in the 1980s offered a fresh perspective after the series of historic defeats of social movements connected to critical theory The press continues to be forged by community Wayne Koestenbaum Semiotext(e) came into my life in the mid-1980s Mark’s Bookshop – an emporium for the sexiest and smartest writing Those early Semiotext(e) titles were the stars on the front tables and I think they even had a spinning rack with the ‘Foreign Agents’ series at a magazine shop in the West Village in 1981 Lynne Tillman My first memory of Semiotext(e) must be from November 1975 when I went to a fascinating conference that the editors had organized at Columbia University called ‘Schizo-Culture’ And one night there was a party at the Maison Française at Columbia University for Semiotext(e) I knew Chris from the mid-1970s – we were cohorts of the Poetry Project at St Chris was always a theory girl: I have memories of her spouting theory in a G-string during a performance at St I remember Chris and Sylvère getting together she was introducing the ‘Native Agents’ series CK When the first set of books in the ‘Foreign Agents’ series came out in 1983 Sylvère and I were living together in New York The ‘Foreign Agents’ writers were getting all of this cultural currency and prestige But the people I was friends with who I thought were the most important thinkers and writers – like Eileen Myles why not try and import some of that prestige to my friends I made up a story for Sylvère about how the ‘Native Agents’ series would be an analogue to ‘Foreign Agents’ and it would be the practice of the radical subjectivity that some French theory was talking about since he didn’t immediately know those writers I think he came to know them better and to respect and appreciate them the French had really bad taste in American literature I love Semiotext(e)’s indifference to certain constructs of taste LT Chris started ‘Native Agents’ to publish fiction and more women and she said she wanted to do a book with me The Madame Realism Complex [1992] was quite an unusual bunch of stories but I think it probably alerted some writers to this combination of fiction and art writing I was doing which wasn’t done at all really at that time Veronica Gonzalez Peña ‘Native Agents’ was transformative for me my book was being rejected by agents for not being ‘Mexican enough’ – despite my immigrant background from Mexico City my book Twin Time was eventually published by Semiotext(e) in 2007 they took the ‘Native Agents’ series as a package deal but I don’t think they necessarily wanted it at the time CK Sylvère was very insistent that MIT had to take the whole of Semiotext(e) HEK I remember when certain titles were going out of print Bruce Hainley Mueller’s Walking Through Clear Water in a Pool Painted Black [1990] and Myles’s Not Me [1991] led me to Semiotext(e) that Semiotext(e) wasn’t the boys’ club some mistakenly thought it to be WK The ‘Native Agents’ series stood for a necessary form of avant-garde but you would really have had to be dead not to catch the vibrancy of what Semiotext(e) was doing for literature at the time Mueller’s Walking Through Clear Water in a Pool Painted Black Myles’s Not Me – which remains one of my favourite books of poetry of all time – and Tillman’s The Madame Realism Complex influenced my development as a writer EM I was director of the Poetry Project at the time and Chris was like ‘We should do your book of poetry.’ It seemed mind-boggling to me that my poems would wind up in such a setting as the first book of poetry Semiotext(e) published Not Me put my writing in a completely other framework Christine Pichini I first came to Semiotext(e) as a reader in the early 1990s Myles’s Not Me and The New Fuck You [1995] were major books for me I loved her quicksilver voice; it opened up longed-for worlds The New Fuck You nodded to Ed Sanders’s magazine I wanted to live in those poems: I was young I had just come out and those works were ideal I didn’t know what to make of it – particularly since I knew the real Dick this is something different.’ And that got clearer the more I read Chris’s books my own writing took a turn in that direction which collated my email exchanges with [former lover] Kathy Acker is an accidental piece of autofiction that I didn’t particularly want to publish I only sent it to Hedi and Chris because I thought no one else would get it The thing I love about Semiotext(e) is that indifference to certain constructs of taste and authority Chris and Hedi are just going to publish the books that matter in their world CK I remember when we did Amira Hass’s book it was really a watershed moment for Sylvère because he had always resisted learning about Zionism and Israel He had a reflex loyalty to Israel because of his Jewish Holocaust background When he opened himself up to reconsidering the Israeli occupation of Palestine through Amira’s work and became alert to the whole situation It was a lot more than a topical political project: it was a transformation for him personally LT Everybody in the New York downtown scene knew who Sylvère was His family had been deeply affected by the Holocaust Sylvère and myself – did a crazy tour of Germany to promote the ‘Native Agents’ series Sylvère wanted to read a piece he had written relating to the Holocaust but he was anxious about doing it for a German audience ‘Just do it!’ He had such a strong French accent that I don’t know what people understood He’d come to class in red cowboy boots and a cowboy hat EM I remember the German men we met on the ‘Native Agents’ book tour were furious a bunch of women talking about feminism and sex?’ People didn’t quite accept that ideas about the body and gender and sexuality were part of theory François Cusset I first met Sylvère in 1993 when I was working as a young cultural attaché to the French Embassy in New York I was in charge of giving stipends to American publishers for translating French titles and it’s in this context that Sylvère approached me We immediately got along so well that we became friends MW After I emigrated from Australia to the US I got to meet Sylvère a few times in New York during the 1990s He turned down my book A Hacker Manifesto [2004] but he took me to lunch and was very encouraging WK I reviewed Sylvère’s book about sex offenders for the now-defunct gay newspaper New York Native [1980–97] I met Sylvère at a conference at Columbia University and he remembered my review Sylvère and I had an amazing conversation in the 2000s while we were riding the Metro-North train together back to New York from New Haven Noura Wedell I came to Semiotext(e) through Sylvère who I met in the early 1990s when I was an undergrad at Barnard College I took a class with him on Stéphane Mallarmé after living and working in LA for a few years I decided to go back to school at Art Center That’s where I met Sylvère when I got involved in a school publication that he was co-editing with Giovanni Intra like finishing the book BURROUGHS LIVE: The Collected Interviews of William S which I think was Vaginal Davis’s old apartment before she moved to Berlin CK Sylvère was seriously considering dropping the whole thing He was coming up on retirement and thinking ‘Maybe the press has taken enough of my life and I want to have more personal time and do something else now.’ I felt very strongly that he shouldn’t because Semiotext(e) was such an important part of his legacy we needed to bring in more people and take it a step up we acquired Maurice Dantec’s Babylon Babies [1999/2005] The book also became a somewhat unremarkable movie starring Vin Diesel [Babylon A.D. The other publications were Baudrillard’s The Conspiracy of Art Bernadette Corporation’s novel Reena Spaulings and Mark von Schlegell’s sci-fi Venusia [all 2005] We also changed the design of the books slightly to look more current Many of the books Hedi publishes opt for a radical lucidity WK I love the bigger format that Hedi introduced in 2005 and he would start sending me books he knew I’d appreciate I understood and admired the way that Hedi was keeping alive the French sexual-transgressors channel there remains a vibrant attentiveness to the relation between formal experimentation and sex/gender polyphony Experimentation doesn’t always mean opacity: many of the books Hedi publishes opt for a radical lucidity CK Hedi started bringing in other writers at that time – legacy French gay fiction writers from the 1970s and ’80s like Tony Duvert and Guy Hocquenghem – that we would never have thought of which changed the character of the list a lot if we’re going to republish these texts from the 1970s and early ’80s we might as well add other titles that had never previously been translated to the ‘Foreign Agents’ series FC There are three phases in the history of Semiotext(e): the journal the New York imprints – ‘Native Agents’ and ‘Foreign Agents’ – and LA HEK There was a moment around the time of the relaunch when we became aware that we didn’t really have a presence in LA People thought of Semiotext(e) as being in New York so we did a lot of events to make ourselves known I launched this film-screening series called ‘Deleuze from A to Z’ at the Mandrake bar in Culver City We showed a lot of stuff – even an interview Sylvère filmed with Paul Virilio about the financial crash in 2008 – and started to generate a little bit of a scene in LA I was at the very first event and I was at the very last event on top of being a great designer and editor He organized these screenings at the artist-run Mandrake bar which were inspired by L’Abécédaire de Gilles Deleuze [Gilles Deleuze’s Alphabet Book 1988] – an invaluable documentary in which Deleuze riffs on philosophical concepts evoked by letters of the alphabet Hedi would pair each letter with a couple of striking and pretty obscure films encyclopaedic knowledge of subcultural material and genius for subtext to film programming.  BH I was at the very first event and I was at the very last event I can’t say I was at every single event because their calendar was packed Semiotext(e) runs parallel to the art world and it sometimes functions like an alternative art school when too many MFA programmes sway toward market forces Sylvère’s incredible intellectual élan – from his tenure at Columbia University where his students included members of Bernadette Corporation to his time teaching at ArtCenter from the mid-1990s to the early 2000s – coordinated ways to activate theory as inherent to art and living CP My introduction to Hedi was through Bruce Hainley in 2016 My first contribution was a translation I had done in the early 2000s of Michel Leiris’s Journal 1922–1989 [1992] – a text I return to time and again we started working on Hervé Guibert’s Crazy for Vincent [1989] which was another project I had begun on my own so I was very happy to take that on for Semiotext(e) The art world descended on the casino; by most accounts WK I first met Hedi at some event I did in LA in the late 1990s or early 2000s The nice thing about LA is that everyone comes to the literary events there Hedi got invited by the University of Southern California to teach a theory class for the MFA programme I got the gig and stayed in LA with that job until 2018 LA at that time with Semiotext(e) was a lot of fun Noura lived with me for a while in the house that Jorge [Pardo] designed for the Museum of Contemporary Art in LA The whole bottom section used to be his studio LM I started working with Semiotext(e) in 2017 on Reynaldo Rivera’s Provisional Notes for a Disappeared City [2020] It was a profound excavation of an archive; this was 40 years of Rey’s work that had hardly been shown the backstage scenes of LA in the 1980s and ’90s The book was seeded by a long friendship between Chris and Rey and she asked Rey to be the photographer of her ‘Chance Event’ – a three-day ‘philosophical rave’ at Whiskey Pete’s casino in the Nevada Desert It was meant to be her irreverent follow up to Sylvère’s ‘Nova Convention’ She invited Baudrillard to be the headliner almost as click-bait but other speakers included the poet Diane di Prima and artist Shirley Tse The art world descended on the casino; there were installations in bedrooms; by most accounts FC Semiotext(e) is likely remembered as much for its wild events as its books Three stand out: the 1975 ‘Schizo-Culture’ symposium on Deleuze Félix Guattari and Michel Foucault that turned into a downtown party; the 1978 ‘Nova Convention’ which became a madhouse with performances from the B-52s the Sex Pistols and Patti Smith; and the 1995 ‘Chance Event’ in the Nevada Desert – which I attended – featuring conferences Butoh dance and Baudrillard singing in a spiked jacket CK Hedi and I will bicker and contradict each other which can be very productive in helping us think of new projects Semiotext(e) is such an amateur enterprise in the sense that everyone does it for love It’s gotten more efficient over the years – more books are being published that reach a lot more people and sell more copies – but the process is still very much the same There have been junctures where we’ve talked about whether we should change things but then we look at what it would mean to professionalize the press further it’s always been a very fragile economic proposition: publish a lot of books that are going to lose money and some that mysteriously sell copies BH Semiotext(e) is fortunate to have such a vital group of translators: Noura is a crucial interlocutor and member of Semiotext(e); Christine has the same kind of vivid force but they bring so much to bear intellectually to what they’re doing in addition to excelling as electric writers MW Semiotext(e) is just that right level of cowboy operation: you’re not dealing with massive editorial bureaucracies to get something done but they’re professional and have great distribution WK Hedi seems to like to work in person rather than via email so with both the books I’ve done for them – The Cheerful Scapegoat: Fables [2021] and Stubble Archipelago [2024] – we talked on the phone to finalize the editing typesetting and designing: a pleasingly old-fashioned approach taking over the office to produce an issue after he approved the theme The result was often an issue that came out despite his efforts VGP Mark von Schlegell once said to me that being part of Semiotext(e) was like being part of a dysfunctional family HEK The Coming Insurrection [2009] by The Invisible Committee was huge for us financially It ended up on the Glenn Beck show on FOX News We had bought the rights to the book and it was in the process of being translated when the Tarnac Nine – a group of people living in a commune – were arrested by a SWAT team in France and accused of sabotage and conspiracy it was suggested that the group allegedly wrote The Coming Insurrection some of our friends in New York who were involved with the book including John Kelsey and other members of Bernadette Corporation decided to hold an impromptu and unofficial launch at Barnes & Noble in Union Square HEK People started reading aloud excerpts from the book they got kicked out of Barnes & Noble and went to a nearby Sephora store That fiasco was written up in The New York Times and I think that’s how Beck got wind of the book describing it as ‘quite possibly the most evil book I have ever read’ It became the number one bestseller on Amazon overnight BH There are so many books that wouldn’t have been printed without that strange It was a very important moment for Semiotext(e) despite being completely unplanned – albeit exactly the kind of work they have long been doing and precisely the sort of book they alone would publish Who else in the US is going to release a title like The Coming Insurrection which was founded when being smart was sexy and everybody wanted to be a theoretical girl This article first appeared in frieze issue 249 with the headline ‘Then Came a Stranger’ Christopher Wierling and Hopscotch Reading Room ‘Nietzsche Returns’ (detail),1978. Courtesy: Semiotext(e) Hedi El Kholti is a writer and editor based in Los Angeles Chris Kraus is a writer based in Los Angeles I Must Be Living Twice: New and Selected Poems Her most recent title is Mothercare (Soft Skull Press Soft Skull Press is publishing a book of her selected stories titled Thrilled to Death of Reverse Cowgirl (Semiotexte), Raving (Duke) and Love and Money Terence Trouillot is senior editor of frieze His books include French Theory (University Of Minnesota Press 2008) and The Inverted Gaze (Arsenal Pulp Press Veronica Gonzalez Peña is a writer and filmmaker how death befell me (2007) and So Far from God (2013) Christine Pichini is an artist and translator KAJE and Soft Network lead a bold new wave of risk-taking spaces In a moment of political pressure and shrinking public funding interim director Jed Morse discusses the museum’s mission the frieze team shares the new releases they’re most excited to read artists and academics – debate the changing role and visibility of artists’ moving image A curatorial research trip became a profound reckoning with resistance The artist discusses the challenges of survivor’s guilt and fostering community through shared experience Assistant editor Cassie Packard on confronting the toxicity that permeates our environments The artist’s film and performance challenge how Middle Eastern history is constructed and portrayed Gala Porras-Kim works to heal institutional spaces shaped by the lasting impacts of colonial extractivism curators and the founder of the nomadic biennial come together to discuss the political and cultural hurdles involved in decentralizing the Catalan capital A new wave of spaces has emerged to embrace the city’s pop sensibility and challenge the status quo © FRIEZE 2025 Cookie Settings | Do Not Sell My Personal Information Blaming French theory for the extremes of the American Left has been a popular line for that last few years Public intellectual Jordan Peterson has blamed “postmodern neo-Marxism” for the rise of a hypersensitive yet coercive activism connecting the term to everything from safe spaces The same move is made by Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay in their book Cynical Theories They argue that the adoption of French theory — particularly the work of Michel Foucault — has given rise to bizarre grievance-filled academic specialties which threaten all claims to knowledge French theory is not the original sin from which our current woes sprang What’s missed in their analysis are the distinctly American cultural influences driving a political culture of cancellations Let’s focus on the ultimate fall guy for ‘wokeism’ If you were to read anti-woke commentary about Foucault you would be under the impression that his main insights are: nothing is true all truth is power and all claims to truth are oppressive Foucault was not a rabid ‘activist’ bent on tearing down scientific institutions His work documents how knowledge changes over time how some ideas become valorised whilst others get pushed to the margins and how expertise shifts as a result of cultural and historical change but helping to place it within a broader historical context Truth could not help being “a thing of this world” These are simply types of discourse which society “accepts and makes function as true; the mechanisms and instances which enable one to distinguish true and false statements the means by which each is sanctioned; the techniques and procedures accorded value in the acquisition of truth; the status of those who are charged with saying what counts as true.” Foucault focused on the history of the “self” noting the scientific quest to understand phenomena such as madness He frequently refers to “power” in his explanations but his definition of power is not what you think It describes a “a mode of action upon the action of others” There is no moral connotation to Foucault’s use of “power”; it can have both positive and negative effects His most useful insight is that power can be “constructive” – generating subjectivities that hadn’t previously existed By Jarryd Bartle Foucault challenged the “repressive hypothesis” that Western society beginning in the 17th century right up until the mid-20th century gradually became more prudish and repressed Foucault’s work demonstrates that all societies have had elaborate taboos on sexuality and that they stem from differing understandings of the self the so-called “prudish Victorians” actually led to the proliferation of thought regarding sexual habits that created they show us that our understanding of what makes a human being is often subject to significant change What Foucault is calling for isn’t activism Attempts to connect Foucault to the excesses of woke politics have to take some significant conceptual leaps the authors do this by separating out postmodernism proper from the “applied postmodernism” of activist circles But this involves turning the descriptive work of scholars like Foucault into a prescriptive model for political action This isn’t just nit-picking about historical narratives but crucial to understanding French theory itself Foucault was heavily influenced by the work of German philosopher Frederich Nietzsche His approach to ideas is directly inspired by Nietzsche’s Of The Genealogy of Morality a work charting the evolution of moral concepts over time was highly sceptical of claims of absolute morality seeing life as a chaotic unfolding of a blind will to power Even the body within which individuals treat each other as equals … will have to be an incarnate will to power become predominant — not from any morality or immorality but because it is living and because life simply is will to power The sheer moral certainty one sees in the American Left — that they are “on the right side of history” as Barack Obama often put it  — doesn’t reflect this more contemplative and historical perspective on the nature of morality one valid criticism of many 20th century French intellectuals from Foucault to Derrida to Baudrillard is that they weren’t moral enough they frequently circled the drain of nihilism By Julie Bindel to analyse its formal conditions in order to make a critique of it but in order to see how it was actually constituted.” What’s commonly called identity politics emerged out of broader counter-cultural trends of the 1960s These movements were influenced by American ideas of freedom and were heavily focused on individual liberation and smashing stuffy bourgeois sentiments This led to the development of humanist psychologies that promised to maximise individual self-actualisation The nexus of social justice activism and psychology is still seen today in discussions of “toxic masculinity” and  “implicit bias” as well as the heavy focus on “trauma” and “minority stress” If it became “the problem of sexual existence” then identity would “become the law Identity then becomes another way of controlling people Whilst it’s true American progressives will often cite Foucault and other French theorists as influences they tend to fragment their work in ways that serve particular purposes The History of Sexuality will be cited to praise a queer liberationist future of a “different economy of bodies and pleasures” — but fail to mention Foucault’s silence as to whether this will be better than the status quo or his critique of identity By Robert Tombs This co-option also tends to downplay the old Left political sympathies of French scholars many of whom were self-avowed communists (although Foucault’s political leanings were more obscure) There’s also a shift from the contemplative demeanour of French philosophy toward an individualistic emphasis on confrontation in his excellent book “French Theory: How Foucault Derrida & Co Transformed The Intellectual Life Of The United States” succinctly describes the strange way that French theory was adopted by American universities in the 1980s American scholars did not study French theory and removed so much of its context that it no longer made sense For Cusset this co-option of French theory in pursuit of American cultural politics was a “structural misunderstanding” for current trends in American activism — which are quickly spreading across the globe — it’s crucial to re-evaluate some of values and claims to truth which underpin this activism I’ve got just the philosopher for the task educator and consultant on vice regulation Δdocument.getElementById( "ak_js_1" ).setAttribute( "value" Δdocument.getElementById( "ak_js_2" ).setAttribute( "value" Please click here to view our media pack for more information on advertising and partnership opportunities with UnHerd Microchemical JournalCitation Excerpt :Heavy metal pollution poses a great challenge for environmental protection and human health [1,2] Environment InternationalCitation Excerpt :However very few historical data sets exist to capture the temporal increase of THg contamination in the deep-sea megafauna and seabirds show an increase in mercury levels at a growing pace since the Industrial Revolution affecting most severely the Northern Hemisphere (e.g. while models predict a slower rate increase of Hg in deep-sea environments that will prolong even in a scenario of a future decline in Hg emissions (Streets et al. therein) and while deep-sea sediment records do show such an increase in anthropogenic Hg (Ogrinc et al. the temporal increase of THg contamination in deep-sea megafauna has yet to be resolved Benjamin Kunkel The great white Mylar-covered peaks of the terminal they were catching the late afternoon light “I will miss you baby.” Many years ago she dropped her faintly braying banker-Irish accent in favor of a somewhat imaginary Western way of talking distinguished among other things by a liberal use of the word baby Christ,” I naturally responded after a poignant week (the mood of last week was quiet had spent each day packing boxes and I’d returned from the office each night to a slightly emptier house who smiled her frank smile from the passenger seat we ate take-out and drank copious wine in the emptying house the way evidently you will when your spouse is leaving for good The last week was very gracious and untypical and so for me the last week seemed strangely like the visit of a guest and all week long we were quiet and even ceremonious with one another It occurred to me that it was as if we were bowing to each other “I’ve become as polite as you are!” Viv said once hostilely She dressed yesterday in a tailored blue suit for Vivian air travel has remained a formal occasion I packed the trunk with her two suitcases and then drove her the three hours to the new airport I’m the one who originally enticed her out here I had boasted of the open space and ideal climate the friendly people and the tucked-away valley for ourselves Her mother lives these days in an assisted living facility yet all the same I felt I was sending her home There wasn’t much talk until we’d passed through the Eisenhower Tunnel In my case a large part of the pleasure derives from his being the sort of child you don’t have to worry about too much except in the vague sense that you think of him always Mostly what Viv and I discussed was Tim’s fiancée (his second) his new bio-diesel car (Tim believes in a small impact it’s a matter of strong conviction with him) Small talk has an aspect of bravery when things are winding down and talked about little and then about nothing of the new international airport rose up from the plains we’d reached the place where the airport road bifurcates Most voters who went for Bush did so in circumstances of adequate information and sufficient freedom Neotraditionalism has been not only ascendant in the work of writers but articulate in the views of prominent critics the combination of Hg speciation and stable isotopic composition can provide complementary information to investigate both biological and physico-chemical processes of Hg in the environment and animal tissues Arctic seabirds have been extensively studied in the context of toxicity and conservation (e.g since this region is considered as a sink of Hg (Dastoor et al. nitrogen and carbon stable isotopes are proxies for bird trophic status/diet and feeding habitat Marine Pollution BulletinCitation Excerpt :Even small changes in diet can affect trace element concentrations (Braune et al. and these can be affected by sea-ice conditions (Pratte et al. ice-derived resources can influence Hg concentrations in murre eggs (Cusset et al. and presumably it could also influence the concentrations of other trace elements through a similar mechanism in that species Foraging range is also likely a confounding factor Environmental ResearchCitation Excerpt :These elements reach the oceans transported mainly by rivers and many metals and metalloids are assimilated and accumulated in aquatic organisms (Carravieri et al. few studies have been carried out to understand the temporal dynamics of metal contamination in seabirds (e.g particularly in tropical regions (Ma et al. the assessment of potential human-induced effects on metal concentrations in tropical seabirds over time becomes difficult to evaluate especially in areas subjected to acute or chronic inputs of contaminants Pankaj Mishra The subject was the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan—or the Soviet “intervention,” as I termed it in a “fraternal Communist country threatened by imperialism.” I had followed events in Afghanistan anxiously if somewhat fitfully; we had no television reported American threats to boycott the Moscow Olympics but said little about what was going on inside Afghanistan I boldly predicted that the Soviets would modernize a backward and feudal country and set it on the path of prosperity and peace another crushing defeat on the forces of reaction and imperialism I traveled on the road from Uzbekistan across the Oxus River on which the first Soviet convoys had rolled into Afghanistan twenty-five years before the Soviets had mined the surrounding desert right up to the verges; and venturing out of the car for a pee I walked into a minefield—one of the many across Afghanistan that had killed and maimed hundreds of thousands of people—and then had to learn how hard it is literally to retrace one’s steps even if the intense fear of losing one’s life seems a very severe karmic punishment for some youthful cliché-mongering drinking alone and hard in my gloomy hotel room in Mazar-i-Sharif for the first time in many years I remembered my essay and I couldn’t help but wonder: What the hell had I been thinking Perhaps I was no more deluded than people in Europe and America who thought that the Soviets wanted to conquer the world and who had made elaborate plans to fight At least I’d had the excuse of being 10 years old But it was still odd to remember how during my childhood and adolescence I was an admirer and supporter—unpaid and thus very sincere—of the Soviet Union I wasn’t quite sure what such words as socialism and imperialism really meant; but I was ready to believe in the superiority of socialism over capitalism simply because this was the official ideology of the Soviet Union A framed photograph of Lenin stood on my desk And self-consciously I’d prepared myself for adult life in the Soviet Union This was by no means a merely natural consequence of my straitened lower-middle-class circumstances Genteel poverty of the kind we knew had drawn most people in my Brahmin family closer to the Hindu nationalists and to a politics of resentment My father denounced as hypocrites and frauds the Communists he encountered in his work as a trade unionist in Indian Railways and he took a skeptical view of my Sovietophilia in North Indian railway towns in the ’70s and ’80s where nothing much happened apart from the arrival and departure of trains from big cities the Soviet Union alone appeared to promise an escape from our limited to recall the sensuous poverty of the towns I lived in: the white light falling all day from the sky upon a flat land only slightly relieved by bare rock and the occasional tree painted government posters for family planning or garish posters for Bollywood films—could provoke a sense of wonder It explains the eagerness with which I awaited Soviet Life which was really an illustrated press release boasting of Soviet achievements in science Welcome to live coverage of stage 3 of the 2016 Paris-Nice from Cusset to Mont Brouilly Paris-Nice stage 2 report Video highlights of Paris-Nice stage 2  Discuss the stage in the Cyclingnews forum 10 riders to watch for Paris-Nice Listen to the latest Cyclingnews Podcast with Bradley Wiggins Good afternoon and welcome to stage 3 of Paris-Nice and the first venture into the mountains We've got seven classified climbs on the menu today.  The race is already underway and with so many climbs to come a break has been quick to form There are 14 men out front who lead the peloton by 3:30 with two men trying to chase them down at 1::04.  The riders out front are: Marcus Burghardt (BMC) The two chasers are Paul Martens (LottoNl-Jumbo) and Roy Curvers (Giant-Alpecin).  Michael Matthews remains in the leader's yellow jersey for today's stage He's only got 14 seconds over Tom Dumoulin at the moment so it's likely to be all change at the finish today Here is how the top 10 looks at the moment.  1 Michael Matthews (Aus) Orica-GreenEdge 9:41:46 2 Tom Dumoulin (Ned) Team Giant-Alpecin 0:00:14 3 Patrick Bevin (NZl) Cannondale Pro Cycling 0:00:19 4 Jon Izaguirre (Spa) Movistar Team 5 Geraint Thomas (GBr) Team Sky 6 Lieuwe Westra (Ned) Astana Pro Team 0:00:24 7 Dries Devenyns (Bel) IAM Cycling 0:00:25 8 Arnaud Demare (Fra) FDJ 9 Rafal Majka (Pol) Tinkoff Team 0:00:27 10 Richie Porte (Aus) BMC Racing Team News coming through that Arthur Vichot has climbed off and abandoned Vichot was one of the riders dropped earlier in the day Curvers and Martens have joined forces with the leading group The escapees have an advantage of 3:35 at almost 40km gone.  The race jury will be hoping to play less of a role in today's stage. They were busy post-stage yesterday after a controversial sprint into Commentry They deemed that Bouhanni had veered off his line in the sprint and relegated the Frenchman You can watch the highlights from yesterday and make up your own mind on that sprint right here.  As to be expected, Bouhanni vehemently defended himself after that sprint. Read what he had to say.  The riders have been subjected to the elements in the earlier stages of the race and it continues today It is raining over the peloton at the moment The peloton are not happy with having such a big group at the front and they've cut down the advantage to 2:25 as we approach the first of many climbs today.  This is what today's stage looks like and you can see that they will make one ascent of Mont Bouilly before the finish so they will get a chance to scope it out before the real thing.  The gap to the 16 riders out front continues to decrease They now have just 1:45 on the bunch and it continues to drop They're going to have to shed a few riders if they want a little longer out front today.  Romain Bardet is one of the pre-race favourites for the overall classification He had this to say before the stage.  "We would have preferred better weather conditions It's a tough stage with two ascents of Mont Brouillly and rain forecast It's not the hardest stage of the week but threading contenders will have to be present." As the gap comes down by another 15 seconds the leaders are on the first ascent of the day the Côte de Vernay A short 2.3km climb that averages 4.6 per cent.  Away from Paris-Nice, there is some good news for the Giant-Alpecin team. Ramon Sinkledam is back to racing today and John Degenkolb could be back in action by May, despite almost losing his finger in a training crash in January. Read about the news here.  Daniel Teklehaimanot (Dimension Data) has climbed off Taklehaimanot is not a fan of the cold conditions that the peloton has faced in recent days.  citing a respiratory illness for his decision to abandon.  The Belgian said after his abandon that he is hoping to get back to full health for Milan-San Remo.  Some movement in the leading group as Fernandez suffers a mechanical and Reza is dropped The two riders work together though and make it back The advantage to the 16 men out front is 1:35 Earlier we brought you the news that Arthur Vichot had called it a day His directeur sportif Thierry Bricaud told the official website that Vichot has been ill.  "Arthur had been unwell for the past two days He had no legs this morning and given the weather conditions With the rain and snow if it keeps falling Some riders will have lost their GC ambitions tonight." Gougeard has had enough of the status quo and has decided to attack the leading group He now has a small advantage on the escapees.  Bienvenue sur la #courseausoleil @ParisNice #ALLEZALM pic.twitter.com/BhpEEuBRiJ AG2R-La Mondiale posted this picture earlier with the caption welcome to the race to the sun Gougeard's multiple attacks has split the leading group He has taken Didier and Lutsenko with him and they have a 42-second lead on the 13 chasers.  Gougeard and his band of brothers are on the second ascent of the day the Côte de Châteauneuf They've got an intermediate sprint not too long after the summit and then they're climbing once again.  A video from Team Sky shows that the now is falling pretty hard at the feed zone which is just at the top of the third climb of the day who are layering up against the elements.  This is the second time it has snowed during Paris-Nice who is still on the comeback trail since crashing at the end of last year was very critical of the decision to allow the racing to continue He's likely not to be too happy about it today either.  Here is what he had to say at the end of stage 1. the gaps between the groups has come down significantly The three leaders have just 1:20 on the peloton and the chasers are only 35 seconds ahead of the group it will be a tough day out for everyone but especially for the escapees.  Herrada has bridge the gap to the leaders while Alexis Vuillermoz has crashed on the descent of the last climb He appears to be ok and is chasing back on.  Vuillermoz is the latest rider to abandon the race the peloton have caught the second group of escapees leaving only four in the lead.  It remains to be seen if the extreme weather protocol will be used today the riders carry on up the third climb of the day and close in on the halfway point.  Thomas De Gendt was dropped in the early stages of the race but he has now set off in pursuit of the four leaders He has Lilian Calmejane of Direct Energie for company.  De Gendt has joined the front group but it seems that Calmejane is back in the peloton Perrig Quemeneur is the next rider to make a move off the front of the peloton the gap to the escapees has increased to two minutes You have to wonder if the peloton are now just playing it safe in these conditions although we have no confirmation as to who they are The leaders are about to hit the top of the Col des Écharmeaux where the snow is coming down pretty hard.  It is now 3:10 for our five intrepid escapees.  Lutsenko is the best placed of the escapees in the general classification The Astana rider is just 33 seconds down on race leader Michael Matthews.  It has taken some time but the stage has been neutralised because of the conditions with 69km to go The riders will now climb off their bikes and be taken almost 30km up the road to resume the race they will decide whether or not to resume racing.  The restart will be at km 125 in Villié-Morgon close to the foot of Mont Brouilly with around 40km to the finish.  The five escapees had 3:30 on the peloton when the race was neutralised and they will be given that as a head-start should the race resume.  Snow is also falling at the finish but it is nowhere near as hard as is was at the feedzone there will be plenty of discussion before they make a decision on racing again.  Trek-Segafredo reporting that the stage has been cancelled and there will be no restart We'll wait for confirmation on that however.  Official confirmation from the race organisers that the stage has been cancelled with this brief statement.  "The race jury and direction decided to cancel today's third stage becauee of the weather conditions The times will not be taken into account but the points scored at the first intermediate sprint of the day and on the climbs completed so far will count." Keep with us and we will get you the latest reaction from stage 3. While this has been going on, BMC has won the opening team time trial at Tirreno-Adriatico.  Riders are wrapping up at the feedzone while they wait for the team busses to make their way from the finish.  You can also keep updated with the cancellation of stage 3 of Paris-Nice here Michael Matthews will remain in the race lead with no time gaps taken This is the second time that the extreme weather protocol has been used after Clasica Almeria was cut short due to high winds.  Former rider turned Sky DS Gabriele Rasch posted this picture of himself and Luke Rowe getting warm follow the cancellation.  The extreme weather protocol was brought in for this season after a number of incidents last year including the extreme heat at the Tour of Oman last February.  Reports that the temperatures have crashed to -4 at Paris-Nice. If you're not familiar with the new extreme weather protocol you can read up on it here.  Further reaction from the organisers following the cancellation of stage 3 "The road was extremely slippery and the safety was no longer guaranteed We promise we'll come back to Mont-Brouilly It's a pity but the riders will start again tomorrow from Julienas." Great we have an extreme weather protocol now but how about we just move the whole calendar back 1 month Another shot from the feedzone where the riders are getting into cars and making their way back to the hotel.  The riders will be hoping for much better weather tomorrow's stage from Juliénas to Romans-Sur-Isere which at 195km is the second longest of the race.  As well as Matthews keeping his yellow jersey Jon Izagirre will retain the mountains jersey for another day.  EWP implementation will evolve/improve w/ experience Read the full details of today's cancelled stage here Keep turned to Cyclingnews.com for all the reaction from today's cancelled stage and come back tomorrow for more live coverage of Paris-Nice.  Organisers said the frontrunners were on the day’s third climb when the race jury decided it was too dangerous to continue the hilly 168km (104-mile) stage from Cusset to Mont Brouilly in the Beaujolais wine region. Television images showed concerned riders talking to each other as the snow fell on them, before heading back to their team cars with about 70km remaining. Read moreThe overnight leader, Michael Matthews, of Australia, who won Tuesday’s second stage to go with the prologue on Sunday led Tom Dumoulin of the Netherlands by 14 seconds with Patrick Bevin of New Zealand in third place The Belgian rider Philippe Gilbert (upper respiratory infection) and Frenchman Pierrick Fedrigo (bronchitis) pulled out before the stage “I really love this race so it is disappointing to have to stop racing,” Gilbert said “But I have one of my biggest goals for the season around the corner and in order to perform well there I need to fully recover from this illness.” Thursday’s fourth stage is a 195.5km (121-mile) trek from Julienas – another region specialising in light red wines – to Romans-sur-Isère at the foot of the Vercors mountain range in the Alps of southeastern France Britsh actor and former weightlifter Dave Prowse has died aged 85 following a short illness His agent Thomas Bowington tweeted: "It's with great regret and heart-wrenching sadness for us and millions of fans around the world to announce that our client Dave Prowse MBE has passed away at the age of 85." Prowse auditioned for the first Star Wars after director George Lucas saw him play a bodyguard in A Clockwork Orange, The Telegraph reported He chose to audition for Darth Vader over Chewbacca "because you always remember the bad guys," he said in a BBC interview.  Prowse originally recorded Darth Vader's voice but his rural English accent was deemed unsuitable and replaced by James Earl Jones.  the late Carrie Fisher who played Princess Leia said on The Jonathan Ross Show in 2016: "We called him Death Farmer." He went on to feature in the original Star Wars trilogy. Prowse's face doesn't appear in any of the films either because as he was replaced for the unmasking scene, according to The Telegraph.  The 6ft 6in actor also represented England in weightlifting at the Commonwealth Games in the 60s, The Telegraph added During this time, Prowse became friends with his competitors, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Lou Ferrigno, the BBC reported.  He was also the personal trainer who helped the late Christoper Reeve prepare for his role as Superman, the BBC added.  Mark Hamill played Darth Vader's son Luke Skywalker in the films said on Twitter: "So sad to hear David Prowse has passed He was a kind man & much more than Darth Vader "Actor-Husband-Father-Member of the Order of the British Empire-3 time British Weightlifting Champion & Safety Icon the Green Cross Code Man "He loved his fans as much as they loved him. #RIP" Prowse's acting career spanned 50 years and included Doctor Who and famous Brtish comedy shows of the 1970s and 80s The Two Ronnies and The Morecambe & Wise Show Scammell who remained his wife until his death and the couple had three children together Brought up in Bristol, Prowse spent his later years living in Croydon, south of London, as "a loving husband, father and grandfather," the BBC reported for sharing a remarkable feast by Jan Buhrman Gail Tipton was one of the lucky 27 ladies who attended the Women’s Qigong Workshop held at the CCC and told me Nan Doty plans to bring Deborah Davis back to share her self-healing techniques If you happen to be getting gas or stopping by the Menemsha Texaco station She just finished her freshman year at Simmons College where she plans to major in biology Dance classes at The Yard have begun, offered on Mondays to Fridays by Yard staff and visiting artists. Go to dancetheyard.org for a complete schedule of classes If you still need an extra-special graduation gift that reflects the beauty of our ocean go no further than Joan LeLacheur’s wampum jewelry Open Studio Aquinnah or contact her directly at 508-645-9954 or Joanlela57@gmail.com Congratulations to all the graduating Chilmark Seniors at MVRHS: Samantha Bunker We wish you safe and amazing life journeys as you venture forth at his A Gallery opening of Landscapes of the Four Corners on Saturday Chilmark documentary filmmakers Marjory and Robert Potts will offer a Q&A after presenting their one-hour documentary “You May Call Her Madam Secretary,” Sunday 7:30 pm at the Hebrew Center in Vineyard Haven ($5 suggested donation) FDR’s Labor Secretary and before that a leader of industrial reform in New York state Did you know her work became the basis for much of the New Deal — especially the Social Security Act Come and learn about this remarkable woman I began singing with Roberta Kirn five years ago to help heal my heart In case you have not yet heard local authors Tom Dresser “Martha’s Vineyard in World War II,” Friends of the Chilmark Library are sponsoring their book talk on Wednesday Please call 508-645-3360 for more information The MV Times comment policy requires first and last name for all comments Essaying the pop culture that matters since 1999 Inspired by Didier Eribon’s eponymous autobiography Jean-Gabriel Périot’s film Returning to Rimes (Fragments) urges French citizenry to reinvent democracy Even the word inequality is a euphemism that tones down the reality of the raw violence of exploitation Parisian intellectual Didier Eribon released Returning to Reims an autobiographical work that traces the writer’s return to his eponymous hometown after the death of his conservative and homophobic father one could see why reconciliation would be difficult The book was released to critical acclaim to both European and American readerships, with an English translation released in 2013 via MIT Press. Returning to Reims synthesizes the personal and the political using Eribon’s family’s transformation from oppressed laborers to Communist party members voters of France’s ultra-far-right National Front party as a backdrop to tell the story of the French working class and the post-Cold War world as a whole At this year’s 59th New York Film Festival, French director Jean-Gabriel Périot, himself gay and from a working-class background, premiered an adaptation of Eribon’s book. The film is part of the Currents program which aims to paint a “more complete picture of contemporary cinema with an emphasis on new and innovative forms and voices.” With Haenel’s voice undergirding the collision of images shown on the screen emphasis is put on how gender and sexual politics have evolved in French culture This ranges from the abuse women suffered at the hands of their fellow citizens for being romantically involved with Germans during WWII to displaying them in arduous and alienating factory jobs later in the 20th-century Returning to Reims strikes its loudest note in its prescience In tracking the changing loyalties of working-class French voters we are left with a story that is all too familiar in our time From the popularity and the disastrous consequences of the conservative and imperialist politics of American president George W Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair nearly two decades ago to the resurgent forces of nationalism and authoritarianism across the globe in the last several years Périot’s film dares its audiences to imagine a world in which class solidarity can once again be rooted in material concerns as opposed to myths about the racialized “other” The film reminds me of François Cusset’s How the World Swung to the Right (2018) which details what “ideological and socioeconomic seeds” birthed the “rotten fruit” that is contemporary far-right politics Cusset argues that a leftist from the 1960s would find it impossible to identify what we today deem as “leftist” political policies or parties The epilogue of Returning to Rimes warns that it is “not easy to rid oneself of lasting political ties and new ties cannot be forged overnight…,” yet what is needed is a “new view of the world and life itself.” In an era of constant crisis and the seemingly unending Covid-19 pandemic we must heed Cusset’s call to “reinvent everything”.