This Is Your Brain on Writing
Carl Zimmer NY TIMES

A novelist scrawling away in a notebook in seclusion may not seem to have much in common with an NBA player doing a reverse layup on a basketball court before a screaming crowd. But if you could peer inside their heads, you might see some striking similarities in how their brains were churning.

That’s one of the implications of new research on the neuroscience of creative writing. For the first time, neuroscientists have used fMRI scanners to track the brain activity of both experienced and novice writers as they sat down — or, in this case, lay down — to turn out a piece of fiction.

The researchers, led by Martin Lotze of the University of Greifswald in Germany, observed a broad network of regions in the brain working together as people produced their stories. But there were notable differences between the two groups of subjects. The inner workings of the professionally trained writers in the bunch, the scientists argue, showed some similarities to people who are skilled at other complex actions, like music or sports.

The research is drawing strong reactions. Some experts praise it as an important advance in understanding writing and creativity, while others criticize the research as too crude to reveal anything meaningful about the mysteries of literature or inspiration.

Dr. Lotze has long been intrigued by artistic expression. In previous studies, he has observed the brains of piano players and opera singers, using fMRI scanners to pinpoint regions that become unusually active in the brain.

Needless to say, that can be challenging when a subject is singing an aria. Scanners are a lot like 19th-century cameras: They can take very sharp pictures, if their subject remains still. To get accurate data, Dr. Lotze has developed software that can take into account fluctuations caused by breathing or head movements.

For creative writing, he faced a similar challenge. In previous studies, scientists had observed people doing only small tasks like thinking up a plot in their heads.

Dr. Lotze wanted to scan people while they were actually writing. But he couldn’t give his subjects a keyboard to write with, because the magnetic field generated by the scanner would have hurled it across the room.

So Dr. Lotze ended up making a custom-built writing desk, clipping a piece of paper to a wedge-shaped block as his subjects reclined. They could rest their writing arm on the desk and scribble on the page. A system of mirrors let them see what they were writing while their head remained cocooned inside the scanner.

To begin, Dr. Lotze asked 28 volunteers to simply copy some text, giving him a baseline reading of their brain activity during writing.

Next, he showed his volunteers a few lines from a short story and asked them to continue it in their own words. The volunteers could brainstorm for a minute, and then write creatively for a little over two minutes.

Some regions of the brain became active only during the creative process, but not while copying, the researchers found. During the brainstorming sessions, some vision-processing regions of volunteers became active. It’s possible that they were, in effect, seeing the scenes they wanted to write.

Other regions became active when the volunteers started jotting down their stories. Dr. Lotze suspects that one of them, the hippocampus, was retrieving factual information that the volunteers could use.

One region near the front of the brain, known to be crucial for holding several pieces of information in mind at once, became active as well. Juggling several characters and plot lines may put special demands on it.

But Dr. Lotze also recognized a big limit of the study: His subjects had no previous experience in creative writing. Would the brains of full-time writers respond differently?

To find out, he and his colleagues went to another German university, the University of Hildesheim, which runs a highly competitive creative writing program. The scientists recruited 20 writers there (their average age was 25). Dr Lotze and his colleagues had them take the same tests and then compared their performance with the novices’.

As the scientists report in a new study in the journal NeuroImage, the brains of expert writers appeared to work differently, even before they set pen to paper. During brainstorming, the novice writers activated their visual centers. By contrast, the brains of expert writers showed more activity in regions involved in speech.

"I think both groups are using different strategies," Dr. Lotze said. It’s possible that the novices are watching their stories like a film inside their heads, while the writers are narrating it with an inner voice.

When the two groups started to write, another set of differences emerged. Deep inside the brains of expert writers, a region called the caudate nucleus became active. In the novices, the caudate nucleus was quiet.

The caudate nucleus is a familiar part of the brain for scientists like Dr. Lotze who study expertise. It plays an essential role in the skill that comes with practice, including activities like board games.

When we first start learning a skill — be it playing a piano or playing basketball — we use a lot of conscious effort. With practice, those actions become more automatic. The caudate nucleus and nearby regions start to coordinate the brain’s activity as this shift happens.

"I was really happy to see this," said Ronald T. Kellogg, a psychologist who studies writing at Saint Louis University. "You don’t want to see this as an analog to what James Joyce was doing in Dublin. But to see that they were able to get clean results with this, I think that’s a major step right there."

But Steven Pinker, a Harvard psychologist, was skeptical that the experiments could provide a clear picture of creativity. "It’s a messy comparison," he said.

Dr. Pinker pointed out that the activity that Dr. Lotze saw during creative writing could be common to writing in general — or perhaps to any kind of thinking that requires more focus than copying. A better comparison would have been between writing a fictional story and writing an essay about some factual information.

Even the best-designed scanning experiments might miss signs of creativity, Dr. Pinker warned. The very nature of creativity can make it different from one person to the next, and so it can be hard to see what different writers have in common. Dr. Pinker speculated that Marcel Proust might have activated the taste-perceiving regions of his brain when he recalled the flavor of a cookie. But another writer might rely more on sounds to evoke a time and place.

"Creativity is a perversely difficult thing to study," he said.

Woman Sentenced to 41 Months for Fake Water Park

Monique Madan NY TIMES

 

An Orange County, N.Y., woman who duped investors out of more than $1 million through a fictional proposal to build a water park for foster children was sentenced on Tuesday to 41 months in prison.

The woman, Liliana Trafficante, used the funds for personal expenses, including rent and personal debt, said John C. Meringolo, a federal prosecutor.

Before being sentenced, Ms. Trafficante asked for leniency, apologizing to the judge, Deborah A. Batts of United States District Court in Manhattan, and acknowledging that she made a "huge mistake."

"I was a fearful person," Ms. Trafficante said. "I gave into my fears."

Ms. Trafficante, 47, was arrested on May 26, 2010, and was accused of soliciting more than $1 million under false pretenses, transferring the funds into her personal bank account, a complaint said. She told investors that the water park would be on a 120-acre lot in Goshen, N.Y., court records show.

Ms. Trafficante represented herself as the owner and founder of Manhattan-based International Dreams, an entity that prosecutors said she made up. She was also affiliated with other fake entities, some purporting to have offices at 255 Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, a complaint said.

The government said that numerous emails were sent between Ms. Trafficante and investors, discussing their donations. In one email, Ms. Trafficante thanked an investor for a contribution, adding that "these steppingstones may seem small but they were vital in facilitating the big funds."

Mr. Meringolo said Ms. Trafficante’s crime was "not to be taken lightly, solely because of the victims."

"The impact that this had on the victims she’s defrauded is immense," Mr. Meringolo said. "These victims desired to help orphans in some way. It is very unlikely that the victims will get their money back. This crime is particularly reprehensible in the eyes of the government."

After pleading guilty in 2010, Ms. Trafficante was on bail pending trial when she was arrested again, this time on state charges. She served 14 months in prison for the state charges, and was then immediately taken into federal custody to serve an additional seven months.

"I have learned a lot in these 21 months; they have taught me a lot," Ms. Trafficante said in court. "Before this, my spirituality was not strong. But now, I have a church backing me up at home. I can now be a better mother to my son."

Her lawyer, Eugene E. Ingoglia, asked the judge for "the lowest possible sentence." He stressed that his client "has a mental disorder."

"She has narcissistic behavior," Mr. Ingoglia said. "I’m not saying she’s an angel; she’s certainly not. All I ask is that you take into consideration her mental illness."

Judge Batts concluded that Ms. Trafficante was "legally mentally competent at the time of her plea until now," and ordered her to serve the prison term, followed by three years of supervised release. Ms. Trafficante was also ordered to pay $750,000 in restitution; at least 15 percent of any gross pay after her release must go toward that purpose.

Putin’s War on Pillows

Masha Lipman The New Yorker

The Moscow International Open Book Festival is an annual event in which writers, poets, translators, graphic designers, and publishers meet with readers in tents outside a large exposition hall. There are also dance and music performances and workshops. Cookbook authors offer freshly prepared food. There is a children’s book program and there are plays. This year, two puppet productions caught the attention of the government. One, "Herbivores," had been described by a critic as "a kind of fairytale on steroids." The other, a children’s show called "The Soul of a Pillow," is set in a nursery school, and the characters are children’s pillows. There’s one that is different—filled with buckwheat hulls instead of down and feathers. It has a hole in it, and is afraid that it will be discarded as garbage, but it is eventually befriended by a boy, also a loner.

On June 9th, two days before opening, the festival received a letter on the official stationery of Vladimir Aristarkhov, the First Deputy Minister of Culture. "According to available information, in the play ‘The Soul of a Pillow’ one may discern elements of propaganda of homosexuality among minors," he wrote. "The play ‘Herbivores’ has foul language. The content of both plays is in conflict with traditional moral values accepted in the Russian culture." The letter warned, "In the event that these items are kept in the program, the Ministry of Culture will withdraw its consent to feature as an official patron."

Given the absurdity of the reprimand, the government’s threat to withdraw its patronage may seem laughable, but, as Vladimir Putin’s regime has stepped up constraints on self-expression, Russians are reacting by and large with submission, not resistance. The festival’s organizers were no exception. They agreed to remove the productions from the program.

This month marks the first anniversary of the infamous anti-gay bill, which I have written about before. It bans "propaganda of nontraditional sexual relations" among minors—part of the Kremlin’s general shift toward social conservatism. Since Putin has repeatedly emphasized Russia’s "traditional values" as a safeguard against the immoral and decadent West, scores of aggressive loyalists have rushed to vilify and condemn unpatriotic Russians who share Western values or who are just too modern and independent-minded, whether in art, culture, or politics. Kirill Serebrennikov, an innovative Moscow theatre director, says he has been barred from guest tours in the provinces. A primary-school math textbook was pronounced unfit, because it mentions characters from Western fairy tales. Local administrators have come up with suggestions (so far mostly declined) for determining which books should be removed from libraries. A member of the Public Chamber, a government-organized civic assembly, called for the use of a single, approved schoolbook of Russian literature, so that children won’t be exposed to unwanted ideas. Russia’s brilliant art critic Grigory Revzin was recalled from his position as curator of the Russian pavilion at the Venice Biennale, and a prominent historian, Andrey Zubov, was fired from his university—in both cases for criticizing the annexation of Crimea.

This week, as news of the Culture Ministry’s "Pillow" ultimatum spread, a large group of the festival’s participants, in a rare instance of solidarity, resisted. "We are saddened to announce that we are cancelling our presentations," a respected publishing house, Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie ("New Literary Review"), said in a statement. "We can’t afford not to react to the Ministry of Culture’s attempts … to establish censorship and decide what is in conformity with ‘Russia’s traditional moral values.’ " Memorial, an organization that has been engaged in human rights, historical research, and education for many years, also condemned the Ministry’s letter. A children’s-book publisher, KompasGid, stated, "Unfortunately, the government’s attempts to regulate cultural life are no longer a surprise," and added, "But this doesn’t make them any less absurd or outrageous."

Several other publishers, along with authors and cultural figures, have refused to participate in the event, as well. Many said they would move their events to alternative venues. The Open Book Festival has become a festival of civic disobedience.

The festival opened on Wednesday, as scheduled, but a notice appeared on its Web site: "ATTENTION! Dear guests of the festival! For reasons beyond our control, changes have been made in the festival’s program. Please, be careful and check the program on the Web site." Those who refused to participate held their events in a large downtown café, in Memorial’s own offices, or at the Andrei Sakharov Center.

Alternative venues may still be found in Moscow, but, as Putin’s government clamps down on freedom of expression, the public realm—in art and culture, civic organizations, and nongovernment media—is shrinking by the day. The trend will almost certainly continue, and calls to mind many earlier periods of repression in Russian and Soviet history. "The aggressive, hard, dense cultural and psychological environment that has emerged is forcing people of a certain state of mind to raise their hands and admit: I can’t bear it anymore," Alexander Gorbachev, the thirty-year-old editor of Afisha, Russia’s best arts and culture magazine, said in an interview. He has quit his job and is about to leave the country.

Photograph: Davide Monteleone/VII

Bayside Tower posible agreement?

By Andres Viglucci

aviglucci@MiamiHerald.com

The 1,000-foot-tall, $400 million observation tower that developer Jeff Berkowitz wants to build on the downtown Miami waterfront has been alternately hailed as visionary and decried as a folly. And that’s when it’s not provoking sniggers for its suggestive shape.

But Berkowitz and the city are now dead serious about getting SkyRise Miami built on a 1.85-acre spit of publicly owned land behind Bayside Marketplace.

To pave the way for the tower, Berkowitz, Miami officials and Bayside’s operators have reached a complex deal — virtually all of it to be privately financed — that would result in an extensive facelift for the aging retail and entertainment complex while plowing tens of millions of dollars into the cash-strapped city’s coffers.

First, though, Miami city commissioners must agree to put the deal, which calls for extending Bayside’s lease to 99 years, up for a referendum as early as August. The commission will take up the proposal Thursday.

Then, if voters approve, Berkowitz, who has pledged to dip into his own pocket for the first $30 million of the tower’s cost, must raise the balance from private investors.

Berkowitz and Miami administrators say the risk falls entirely on the developer, while the potential payoff for the city and Bayside operator General Growth Properties — which would be obligated to spend at least $22 million on improvements — is substantial.

The agreements are premised in part on some prodigious attendance and revenue projections for SkyRise that its proponents contend are entirely realistic — more than three million visitors a year and first-year revenue of $100 million.

Under the new lease, rental payments to the city for use of the Bayside property, which includes the tower site, would rise from the current $1 million a year to a minimum of $2.6 million in the first year of expanded operations — $1.06 million from SkyRise and $1.5 million from Bayside. The rents would increase annually based on inflation.

Both entities would also give the city a percentage of gross revenues above a certain cut-off point, meaning the city stands to earn $200 million more over the life of the lease, according to projections provided by Berkowitz. Under the current Bayside lease, the city is entitled to a percentage of profits, but that clause has not yielded a penny in 27 years of the mall’s operation, Miami officials say.

In addition to increased rent, Bayside must make a one-time, $10 million payment to the city. The city could also see additional revenue from an expanded parking garage and a valet lot beneath the tower’s base of at least $241,000 a year, in addition to the minimum $675,000 share it now gets from the parking operation. SkyRise would provide a new fire substation and a new marina office to the city without charge.

"The city was extraordinarily aggressive in negotiating," said Berkowitz, a veteran mall developer whose projects include Dadeland Station and The Shops at Fifth & Alton in Miami Beach. "These were the most brutal negotiations I’ve ever been involved in."

General Growth communications vice president David Keating declined a request for an interview.

Miami administrators say the agreement gets the city several things it wants at no cost to taxpayers: a revamp of Bayside, substantially improved lease terms and a major new tourist attraction they believe could do for Miami what Gustave Eiffel’s pet project did for Paris 125 years ago.

SkyRise would include three observation decks that would provide views with a 40-mile radius, enough to see the Everglades, north Key Largo and northern Broward County on a clear day, Berkowitz says.

It would also constitute, in effect, a vertical entertainment center, with a fine-dining restaurant, a nightclub, a ballroom, a store and three theme-park-style rides: A 570-foot controlled bungee jump and a 650-foot "drop" ride that Berkowitz says would be the longest in the world, both of which would operate along the tower’s exterior flanks; and a theater designed by the creators of Soarin’, the simulated hang-glider ride that is Disney World’s most popular. SkyRise’s version would have visitors "fly" above South Florida and "plunge" below the Atlantic Ocean for a view of reefs and marine life.

The hairpin-shaped tower would occupy what is now a marina parking lot. Its base would contain two areas — an open-air covered amphitheater and a shop — that Berkowitz said would be publicly accessible without a tower admission charge, as well as an interactive exhibition space.

The developer says he will also extend the landscaped Baywalk from Bayfront Park all along the back of Bayside, now an unappealing hodgepodge of a service area for the marina and restaurants, to the base of SkyRise and create an adjacent public plaza.

Berkowitz has also sought $10 million in state money for improvements, including a reconfigured access road at Bayside’s southern entrance and the Baywalk extension. The Florida Legislature approved $2 million, but that was vetoed by Gov. Rick Scott. Berkowitz said he would probably try again for the money.

The tower project has not drawn organized opposition, but it has received some skeptical scrutiny from blogs like the Crespogram Report and Curbed Miami, which have questioned its viability and its unusual design.

Its architect, Arquitectonica co-principal Bernardo Fort-Brescia, has likened its shape to a jumping fish or a cresting wave, and said it is designed as a mostly porous structure to allow it to withstand winds of up to 186 miles per hour. Berkowitz says the design has been engineered and tested in wind tunnels several times.

Though some wags have compared the tower to various phallus-like objects, most people seem to like it, said Berkowitz, even as he chuckled over an online comment by one woman who said it reminded her of a sex aid.

Berkowitz also said SkyRise’s design and mix of attractions have no rival among the score or so of popular and profitable observation towers around the world, most of which are shaped like pointed spires, including Tokyo’s 2-year-old Skytree, which attracted over 6 million visitors its first year.

"I can tell you I’ve visited 12 towers around the world, and there’s nothing that approximates what we’re trying to do," he said in an interview. "This is a totally unique design. It’s going to be a symbol of the new Miami."

The deal also requires Bayside to embark on extensive renovations demanded by the city. Some officials, including City Commissioner Marc Sarnoff, whose district includes downtown and who chairs the Downtown Development Authority, have long complained that General Growth has allowed the property, which opened in 1987, to become rundown.

On a recent visit, sections of the complex, including common areas, the food court and some restaurants, appear dated and even dingy. Signage is often cheap-looking, railings are corroded and some outdoor dining areas are cluttered. Still, General Growth says the complex receives over 20 million visitors a year.

Sarnoff says he wholeheartedly supports the SkyRise proposal, but questions whether the agreements require Bayside to do enough to improve its appearance and maintenance.

"The lease requires it be kept in a first-class condition. It’s not even second-class condition now," Sarnoff said. "My paramount concern is that we see a significant change in the capital infrastructure and maintenance of Bayside, because it needs a lot."

The agreements would extend Bayside’s lease, which still has 46 years to run, by an additional 53 years.

City administrators say they will hold General Growth’s feet to the fire. The agreements not only enumerate improvements — including new flooring, paint and finishes, lighting, restrooms, repairs to worn stairs and a total redo of the food court — but also include renderings detailing how they should look when done, said Deputy City Manager Alice Bravo.

In addition, Bayside will be required to add two levels to its three-level garage and cover its blank garage facade on Biscayne Boulevard — where the Bayside sign now sits on a landscaped plot — with 17,000 square feet of new shops opening to the sidewalk, Bravo said. Critics have long complained that the garage wall constitutes a dead spot along the boulevard and that Bayside’s design isolates it from the street.

"The idea is that a street is more inviting if you have activated storefronts rather than just the side of a parking garage," Bravo said.

The retail operations and SkyRise together should prove profitable for Bayside’s operator, she said. Because SkyRise would sublease from Bayside, the tower also must pay rent separately to the mall operator, starting at $1.35 million a year, and improvements made by its operator should be commensurate, the city says.

"We think that it will be a benefit to Bayside," Bravo said. "We see the renderings of SkyRise, and we see it’s a modern, up-to-date design. We want Bayside’s appearance to improve as well to match that."

Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/2014/06/11/4172532/bayside-lease-skyrise-up-for-miami.html#storylink=cpy

What Is the Struggle in "My Struggle"?

Joshua Rothman The New Yorker

This week sees the publication of the third volume of "My Struggle," the thirty-six-hundred-page autobiographical novel by Karl Ove Knausgaard, the Norwegian novelist. (James Wood reviewed the first volume, in 2012.) It’s hard to overstate the strangeness of the book’s success. The six volumes of "My Struggle" chronicle, in hypnotic detail, episodes from Knausgaard’s life. There is no plot to speak of, unless you consider real life a plot. And yet, in Norway, one book has sold for every nine adults; as translations have proliferated, readers all over the world have fallen in love with Knausgaard. Part of the appeal is that he has left many of the names and details unchanged; you can do a Google images search and see many of the characters you read about. But the appeal isn’t just gossipy. Perhaps because he is so candid and open, Knausgaard has made his memories into common property. He encourages readers to look inside and find their inner Karl Oves. Or the reverse: he holds a mirror up to his life; you look, and see yourself.

Broadly speaking, there are two ways to recognize yourself in "My Struggle." The first is to notice where your own thoughts and experiences coincide with Knausgaard’s—to find, as many readers have, that he has written the diary that you would’ve written, were you a Norwegian man born in 1968. (Reading the first volume, I was delighted to find that Karl Ove and I liked the same bands—New Order, Talk Talk, Talking Heads—and that we have the same elaborate theory about why they’re good.) The second is to discern, in the rhythms and textures of the book, the rhythms and textures of your own life. This second kind of recognition is the secret to "My Struggle" ’s popularity. Set aside the particular events that Knausgaard describes: doesn’t your life feel like his?

Writers have portrayed consciousness in all sorts of ways: as what William James called "an alternation of flights and perchings" ("Mrs. Dalloway"), as a river-like flow, carrying thoughts and perceptions in its current ("Ulysses"), as the creation of an unseen, inner artwork ("In Search of Lost Time"). Knausgaard has found his own way of understanding it: as a struggle. It’s the struggling that gives life its texture—constant, absorbing, and unending, the same whether you’re nine, nineteen, or thirty-nine. Like many struggles, this one is simultaneously tormenting and rewarding, heroic and pathetic, dynamic and static, purposeful and a waste of time. The main thing is that you can’t stop struggling. You’re a creature of struggle. You desperately want to win each battle but you never want the war to end.

There’s a very concrete struggle at the center of the book: the struggle between Knausgaard and his father. "I was so frightened of him that even with the greatest effort of will I am unable to recreate the fear; the feelings I had for him I have never felt since, nor indeed anything close," Knausgaard writes, in the just-translated third volume. "His footsteps on the stairs—was he coming to see me? … The wild glare in his eyes. The tightness around his mouth. The lips that parted involuntarily. And then his voice … . His fury struck like a wave, it washed through the rooms, lashed at me, lashed and lashed and lashed at me, and then it retreated." Much in the first three volumes, at least nominally speaking, has been about the experience of being this father’s son. When he’s a kid, Karl Ove thinks constantly about how to avoid his father’s anger or how to retaliate against it, or forgive it; as an adult, he struggles to write about it.

But Knausgaard’s book is more abstract than that; it’s about more than the experience of a son. That’s because, in exploring that experience, Knausgaard has ended up exploring all experience. If being a writer is like being a swimmer, and life is like the ocean through which you swim, then Knausgaard’s book starts out being about the waves but ends up being about the stroke. His father’s anger is one of those waves, and Knausgaard, early on, learned to see the wave coming, to brace himself, to swim up its face and, hopefully, to dive beneath before it swept him up. (If not—if he was knocked backward and pulled under—he learned the skill of patience: "Everything passed.") You find that Knausgaard approaches all events in the same way. He traces the same pattern of serial, wave-like growth and recession in every context: love, friendship, sex, music, writing, art, intellectual life, spirituality. And he faces these waves in the same way each time, preparing for each experience, scaling it, sometimes diving beneath and into it, sometimes being swept up and thrown away from it—in every case finding himself, afterward, waiting for the next wave. He is fascinated by the inexhaustibility of the passions, which are themselves wave-like, always returning, drawn out by the gravity of an inner moon.

Reading "My Struggle," you’re pulled inside these rhythms; at the same time, you’re surprised by the subjects out of which they emerge. It makes sense for big, important experiences to be understood in this way: the consummation of a romance, the death of a father, the birth of a child, writing a book. It makes less sense for lesser experiences. And yet Knausgaard finds this same rhythm everywhere: in a long drive to see his grandparents; in a swimming lesson; in grocery shopping; in playing guitar; in making tea; in cleaning a bathroom. In this volume, called "Boyhood," he talks this way not just about childhood crushes—you understand how immersive those are—but about searching a dump for porno magazines; going to the store to buy new soccer clothes; and walking down a forest path, to the gas station, to buy candy. These are events he anticipates, fears, and relishes, and in which he understands himself as performing well or badly. He takes them seriously. But it’s not that these events matter—they don’t. It’s that this is life, and life is a struggle; to live is to care. "Indifference is one of the seven deadly sins, actually the greatest of them all, because it is the only one that sins against life," he writes, at the end of the second volume.

Since reading the first volume of "My Struggle," in 2012, I’ve noticed the Knausgaardian rhythms in my own life. Making coffee in the morning, working out at the gym, shaving afterward, reading a book, thinking deep thoughts, writing an essay, visiting a museum, browsing in a bookstore, cleaning my desk, calling my mother. Over and over, it’s the same pattern: envision, fantasize, plan, execute, and then succeed or fail, gloat or mourn, survive to fight another day, summon up, or discover, your will again. Knausgaard sees life as built out of many small acts of will, most of them objectively meaningless, but all of them subjectively—and non-negotiably—meaningful. ("Meaningful, meaningless, meaningful, meaningless, this is the wave that washes through our lives and creates its inherent tension," he writes.) Who knows which of these acts will survive in memory? So far, each of the volumes of "My Struggle," because it deals with different epochs of Karl Ove’s life, has shown us different kinds of struggles: the struggles of adolescence and mourning, in Volume 1; of marriage, family, creativity, and honesty, in Volume 2; of childhood, and its claustrophobia and newness, in Volume 3. What’s stayed constant is the struggle. It has a fractal quality: the shape is the same, whether the import is large or small.

The big question hovering over the book has to do with the significance of the struggle. Does it mean anything that we approach life in this way? I’m not sure yet—we’re only on the third volume of six. My guess, though, is that it does. Other novelists have thought about life as a struggle: naturalist writers, like Jack London or Edith Wharton, who saw their protagonists as locked in a struggle with their environments. Knausgaard’s struggle is different. It’s internal and personal, rather than universal and natural: my struggle, not the struggle. And Knausgaard’s idea of struggle isn’t a negative one; it’s value-neutral, even positive. In "My Struggle," struggle can be fun; often, Karl Ove yearns for it. He loves sports and competition, and thrives on the intensity, the spiritual athleticism, that struggle unlocks. It’s tempting to see something of Beckett in Knausgaard’s ever-trying, ever-failing seriality. But I suspect that Knausgaard is actually the anti-Beckett. He doesn’t take a cosmic view. If there’s a metaphor in the book that feels like it captures Knausgaard’s artistic aims, it’s guitar-playing. Here he is as a teen-ager, in Volume 1:

I had bought an extra-long guitar lead so that I could stand in front of the hall mirror and play, with the amplifier upstairs in my room at full blast, and then things really started to happen, the sound became distorted, piercing, and almost regardless of what I did, it sounded good, the whole house was filled with the sound of my guitar, and a strange congruence evolved between my feelings and these sounds, as though they were me, as though that was the real me. I had written some lyrics about this, it had actually been meant as a song, but since no tune came to mind, I called it a poem when I later wrote it in my diary:

I distort my soul’s feedback
I play my heart bare
I look at you and think:
We’re at one in my loneliness
We’re at one in my loneliness
You and me
You and me, my love.

I don’t think Knausgaard is working up to some big philosophy of life, at least not consciously. Instead, he’s amplifying his life, playing it as loud as he can, trying to get inside it—and letting its vibrations get inside of him. The struggle doesn’t "mean" anything, but it is something: not a tune, but a frequency, uniquely his. Perhaps we each have our own.

All of this was there in Volumes 1 and 2. Volume 3 has added a twist. Of everything we’ve read so far, this volume brings us closest to Knausgaard’s father. The more we learn about the relationship between father and son, the more we wonder about its influence on Knausgaard’s inner life. Is Knausgaard’s struggle his own? Or is it actually an echo from his childhood—a way of being that he learned and has never let go of? In what may be the most surprising and moving passage of "Boyhood," Knausgaard thinks through the fact that he has few clear memories of his mother. He knows that she was there, taking care of him and his brother: "All the things mothers do for their sons, she did for us," he writes; "if there was someone there, at the bottom of the well that is my childhood, it was her." So why is she largely absent from his childhood recollections? Could it be that his father’s dominant tone—the expression, perhaps, of his own inner struggle—drowned her out?

Knausgaard has said that his book is "anti-ideology, in all senses." Perhaps its unsettling title (in Norwegian, it’s called "Min Kamp") reflects its wary relationship with its own central idea of consciousness as struggle. Even as he sees struggle everywhere, Knausgaard wonders if there’s a way of being that does without it. With his own children, he continues, "I have tried to achieve only one aim: that they shouldn’t be afraid of their father":

When I enter a room, they don’t cringe, they don’t look down at the floor, they don’t dart off as soon as they glimpse an opportunity, no, if they look at me, it is not a look of indifference, and if there is anyone I am happy to be ignored by it is them. If there is anyone I am happy to be taken for granted by, it is them. And should they have completely forgotten I was there when they turn forty themselves, I will thank them and take a bow and accept the bouquets.

Behind the idea of the struggle, there’s something else: a wish that it were possible to sink beneath the waves and stay there.

Photograph by Gunter Gluecklich/laif/Redux.

 

Coming Issues over IRAN Nuclear deal

 

George Perkovich Op-Ed May 21, 2014 Council on Foreign Relations

Summary

Iran and the P5+1 are unlikely to reach an agreement on Iran’s controversial nuclear program by July 20, but a partial accord is possible by the end of the year.

Iran and the so-called P5+1 [the United States, UK, France, Russia, China, and Germany] are unlikely to reach an agreement on the former's controversial nuclear program by the stated goal of July 20, says George Perkovich, director of Carnegie's Nuclear Policy program, but he feels a partial accord is possible by the end of the year. The biggest challenge, he explains, is on the issue of uranium enrichment—Iran wants to more than double its nineteen thousand centrifuges while the P5+1 wants to limit this number to about four thousand. Perkovich says that opponents to nuclear diplomacy in both countries will likely try to leverage the missed deadline to derail the process.

The latest round of nuclear negotiations between the P5+1 and Iran ended last Friday with no visible progress, and both sides were gloomy in their brief comments to the press. The talks are expected to resume next month. You've been watching them and getting briefings. Are you upbeat? Do you think they will meet their July 20 deadline for the talks' conclusion?

From the beginning, I haven't felt that the July 20 deadline was going to be met. So the seeming lack of progress last Friday was not surprising for several reasons. One is that the requirements the Iranians feel they have to satisfy for a final agreement are simply unsupportable in the United States and in other partner countries. Similarly, the requirements that we feel the Iranians have to satisfy are not supportable in Iran's domestic politics.

Could you spell these out?

There are a number of gaps. The biggest is over the question of ongoing uranium enrichment. The P5+1 have long demanded and would prefer Iran have zero enrichment activity going forward, but privately they understand that Iran needs some ongoing enrichment. So the question is the scale and scope of that ongoing enrichment.

The P5+1 feels that [allowing Iran some enrichment] is a huge concession, and generally insists that Iran, which has nineteen thousand first generation centrifuges, has to scale back to four thousand. That's a number that's been floating around out there and is predicated on the criteria of breakout—how long it would take Iran to make a nuclear weapon if it chose to. The idea is to provide for six months' warning.

Iranians say they won't dismantle any centrifuges, begging the question of whether they would take them offline. But whereas we say they should go from nineteen thousand to four thousand, they want to go to fifty thousand. So reconciling the positions of both sides isn't going to happen before July 20. That's the hardest issue, while the others are more readily manageable.

There is also another reason why the July 20 deadline is not realistic: [Iranian] domestic politics and its negotiating tradition. The Iranians can't agree to something before a deadline. By definition, if you agree to something before a deadline, you did not negotiate hard enough. You have to go beyond a deadline, to a point where there is a crisis, and then pull back and tell your critics at home that you got the most you could.

So what does that mean?

It means we're headed for a rough patch in July because the Iranians aren't going to make the concessions that we want. And then some people in the U.S. Congress and in the media—who have been skeptical on this all along and have been trying to pin another failure on the president—are going to take the non-agreement and say, "You see, we were right all along, and we should pin new sanctions on Iran."

As soon as they propose that, the elements in Iran who were especially wary of disengagement are going to say, "You see, all along these people were for regime change. They didn't want to make a deal." So they are going to press for a ratcheting up of nuclear activity in Iran. The risk is that we will go back to a tit-for-tat escalation.

Now, I am optimistic that can be avoided. I didn't think we would get an agreement by July 20, but my guess is that even though we will be close to a crisis by then, both sides will agree to not go back to what we had for the period between 2005 and 2013, when there was no real diplomatic traction and Iran kept expanding its capability. No one wants to go back there.

I predict that when we get to the crisis over the inability to make a final deal, the two sides will agree to keep the process going forward. Even after last Friday's culmination of talks, there was no recrimination. The P5+1 was not saying bad things about the Iranian team, and the Iranians were not saying bad things about the P5+1. That is really remarkable.

Is there something the Iranians can do short of a deal?

They have indicated they can modify the research at Arak to greatly reduce the plutonium.

Arak is a heavy water reactor?

Yes. It's something the Israelis are particularly worried about. There are some technical modifications Iran can make to greatly reduce the facility's plutonium production and at the same time allow the reactor to produce medical isotopes. These are verifiable measures they could take that would address one of the major concerns, but not all of them.

The Iranians would say, "We need something from you too—something more in the way of sanctions relief." We won't give them the most leveraged financial sanctions, but we could give them some sanctions relief. So you could move [the process] forward without necessarily reconciling everything, without being clear when you might reach a final agreement, because the politics are so difficult. That is the most likely outcome.

So the talks would just continue past July 20.

There is a limit to how far this can go. There will be pushback in Iran. President Hassan Rouhani and Foreign Minister Javad Zarif are already under attack from those in Iran who want the country to basically remain isolated. This is a fundamental issue of autarky, of folks in the Revolutionary Guard who make money from a closed economy and will use any opportunity to trash Rouhani and Zarif. This is similar to the situation here in the United States, where there are people who fundamentally want regime change in Iran and do not want a deal because they want to squeeze things to a crisis.

Are we going to have an agreement this year?

We will not have an agreement before July 20. But if you ask me if there is going to be one before December 31, 2014, I think that is possible.

What about other issues?

There's another issue the IAEA has about the experiments Iran conducted in the past to design a nuclear weapon. One experiment was at Parchin, a military facility where it is believed Iran had a fairly significant military explosion to test a nuclear device. There has been a lot of cleanup there to cover up this activity.

There is a longer list of activity and experiments that the IAEA and foreign governments believe can only be explained by Iran's ambition to work on nuclear weapons design. Iran committed last November to never make nuclear weapons. So if there is some evidence that they had been working to that end in the past, the IAEA needs to understand whether that was the case in large part then to better monitor and verify in the future that Iran is not seeking nuclear weapons.

It's a very important, but very difficult issue, and it has been bedeviling Iran and the international community for multiple reasons. Let's say some Iranians did conduct experiments related to nuclear weapons. If they admitted that, Iran would be punished further. But also, the supreme leader has issued a fatwa against nuclear weapons. If they were to acknowledge such activities, it would make the leader look like a liar. There are artful ways of handling this without having to confess having had a nuclear weapons program, but the world needs information on the research program.

This interview was originally published by the Council on Foreign Relations.

Front-Runner in Ukraine Election May Be Shifting Putin’s Stance

By DAVID M. HERSZENHORN

　

Petro Poroshenko, a pro-Western billionaire known as a pragmatist, has business interests in Russia.

　

KIEV, Ukraine — On a Sunday in December when the Ukrainian uprising seemed about to tip into wide-scale violence, Petro Poroshenko, a pro-Western billionaire, thrust himself between antigovernment protesters and riot police officers clashing outside the presidential headquarters, climbed on a bulldozer that was threatening to plow through the crowd and grabbed an orange plastic megaphone.

"Friends, calm down," he shouted, as pro-government thugs brought in to antagonize the demonstrators cursed him and hurled anti-Semitic slurs, though he is a member of the Ukrainian Orthodox faith, not Jewish. As chaos swirled, Mr. Poroshenko, 48, stood his ground, helping keep injuries to a minimum, but also cementing his status as a leader of the pro-European opposition and defying the stereotype of the superrich above it all.

Now, with less than a week to go until a presidential election here, Mr. Poroshenko is once again at the center of a fracas that most of his fellow oligarchs would rather avoid. The latest polls show Mr. Poroshenko, a confection magnate known as the Chocolate King, as the heavy favorite, likely to avoid a runoff with his strongest opponent, former Prime Minister Yulia V. Tymoshenko. Ms. Tymoshenko insists that the polls are wrong and that she will surge ahead.

A poll by the Kiev International Institute of Sociology, conducted April 29 to May 11, found Mr. Poroshenko supported by 34 percent of all voters, compared with 6 percent for Ms. Tymoshenko and 4 percent for Sergey Tigipko, a member of Parliament and former economics minister; 25 percent said they were undecided. The survey had a margin of sampling error of plus or minus three percentage points.

Among voters who said they had made up their minds, Mr. Poroshenko was supported by 54.7 percent — enough to avoid a runoff — with 9.6 percent for Ms. Tymoshenko and 6.7 percent for Mr. Tigipko.

With the country still roiled by separatist violence in the east, the growing air of inevitability around Mr. Poroshenko, who has deep business interests in Russia, has redrawn the Ukraine conflict. It has presented the Kremlin with the prospect of a clear negotiating partner, apparently contributing, officials and analysts say, to a softening in the stance of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.

After weeks of threatening an invasion, Mr. Putin now seems to have closed off the possibility of a Crimea-style land grab in the east, and even issued guarded support for the election to go forward.

"You can have a kind of a civil war and this kind of gray zone and be completely separated and face a higher degree of economic sanctions," said Adrian Karatnycky, an expert on Ukraine at the Atlantic Council, describing the choice facing Mr. Putin. "Or you can see if it’s possible to bargain with this new guy, who has businesses in Russia, who has never been known to be a big ultranationalist."

Mr. Poroshenko is a veteran of Ukrainian politics, having served as foreign minister under President Viktor A. Yushchenko; as economics minister under the ousted president, Viktor F. Yanukovych; and as a longtime member of Parliament, including a stint as speaker.

"The reasoning on Poroshenko is that he is a pragmatist and he was in the Yanukovych government," Mr. Karatnycky said. "He is a person who is a dealmaker. From that point of view, it may mean that Putin is willing to give it a chance of trying to get something out of this."

Exactly what Mr. Putin wants to get remains to be seen. Some analysts believe he wants a guarantee that Ukraine will not join NATO. Others think he will settle only for a federalized government that permanently weakens Kiev, while still others believe he will continue destabilizing the country.

Recently, Mr. Poroshenko has struck a conciliatory tone, promising to mend ties with Russia and saying at a news conference on Sunday that he opposed holding a referendum on Ukrainian membership in NATO. He has also sought to bring normalcy to the campaign, assuring voters that he will provide security if elected but stressing a more traditional message: jobs.

"A new way of life means to be well off," Mr. Poroshenko said, repeating his campaign slogan during a recent visit to a turbine factory in the eastern city of Kharkiv. "A new way of life means that the priority of any government, any authority should be to create new jobs. Our first goal is to guarantee security to all who live in Ukraine, to lead us out of the state of military tension."

In recent weeks, however, he has kept some distance from the provisional government, which is viewed with deep suspicion in the east.

Mr. Poroshenko’s support for European integration will inevitably complicate his talks with Russia if he is elected. There is also a personal element to any negotiations. The Russian government has seized and closed a main factory and warehouse of his company, Roshen, in Lipetsk in southern Russia.

Among Ukraine’s political cognoscenti, Mr. Poroshenko’s election is regarded these days as a foregone conclusion. "He is going to be president," said Mustafa Nayyem, a reporter with the online news site Ukrainska Pravda who is leading a team preparing the questions for debates on Channel 1, the national television station.

Mr. Poroshenko’s views already carry heavy influence in the provisional government in Kiev, including his belief that the government must crack down on armed insurgents in the east.

In some respects, Mr. Poroshenko is already being treated as president-in-waiting. In recent weeks, he has been meeting regularly with world leaders.

But while the West seems excited about the prospect of a Poroshenko presidency, some good-government advocates in Ukraine fear that Mr. Poroshenko’s business interests and his ties to other oligarchs may mean he would largely maintain the status quo.

Mr. Poroshenko’s path to the presidency was eased substantially in March when his main rival, the former boxer Vitali Klitschko, agreed to drop out of the race, endorse Mr. Poroshenko and run for mayor of Kiev instead.

The deal was reached at a meeting in Vienna orchestrated by Dmitry V. Firtash, the gas-trading tycoon, who was a longtime political patron of Mr. Yanukovych and has close business ties to Gazprom, the Russian state-controlled energy giant. Mr. Firtash’s role has raised concerns among some Western officials who are hoping to prevent a recurrence of surreptitious and corrupt side deals that have bedeviled Ukraine since Soviet times.

During a recent 90-minute debate between Mr. Poroshenko and two other candidates, he seemed comfortable with the attention accorded him as front-runner. He spoke easily, his words punctuated by hand gestures. His positions were mostly uncontroversial, but with a clear Western bent.

"The main direction of development has to be European integration," he said at one point, "And it’s not a subject for discussion."