In 2014, a graduate student at the University of Waterloo, Canada, named Cohl Furey rented a car and drove six hours south to Pennsylvania State University, eager to talk to a physics professor there named Murat Günaydin. Furey had figured out how to build on a finding of Günaydin’s from 40 years earlier — a largely forgotten result that supported a powerful suspicion about fundamental physics and its relationship to pure math.
The suspicion, harbored by many physicists and mathematicians over the decades but rarely actively pursued, is that the peculiar panoply of forces and particles that comprise reality spring logically from the properties of eight-dimensional numbers called “octonions.”
After Literati, I read at two more bookstores: Books Are Magic and Politics and Prose. Both are bookstores I’ve long admired (Politics and Prose was actually the first indie bookstore I ever stepped foot in), and at both readings, I wore my Literati shirt. The primary reason for this costume was to rep my indie bookstore love. But hidden underneath that love was a more confused desire. I wanted to feel like I belonged in those bookstores. For some reason, the fact that I was an author invited to read in the bookstore was not reason enough to feel comfortable there.
I first became intimately aware of smoothies’ utilitarian mealworthiness when, in 2014, I moved to a Manhattan apartment that ended up having no cooking gas for ten of the twelve months I lived there. Grilling frozen chicken on my roommate’s George Foreman was getting tedious, so one night, conscious of the fact that I hadn’t yet eaten a single vegetable that day, I made a smoothie for dinner. Not, mind you, the kind of “green” smoothie your hippie yogi friend drinks that looks like liquefied grass clippings and tastes like, well, liquefied grass clippings. My smoothie was a calorically bountiful blend that was physical shorthand for a bunch of complementary foods liquefied—milk, overripe bananas, end-of-season berries, arugula, oats. Despite being thrown together with the limited number of edible items already in my kitchen, it tasted good. This, for me, was a novelty. And, because it was comprised of so many largely unprocessed foods, I didn’t feel guilty for having put it inside my body. Another novelty.
Max Neely-Cohen says he’s long harbored the idea for this kind of project, but wasn’t sure existing technology could manage what he had in mind. “There are all these visuals that work off of different parameters of live music,” he briefed me over the phone, after my visit. “A lot of them are just volume, but more sophisticated ones can analyze pitch and all these different things. They create a visual space out of that. I wondered, can you do that with a reading? For a really long time, the answer I got was ‘no.’ And the reason is that speech-to-text sucks for live transcription. But it’s been getting better.”
You could argue that the sudden death is a narrative convenience introduced to enforce a dramatic conclusion. But Donkor’s principal achievement is the dignity and generosity of spirit with which he imbues a central character from a largely invisible seam of African society.