Some modern literary scholars hate the idea of genius. Only a collective can produce truly amazing works because individuals, according to one version of this anti-human bias, are unremarkable and inescapably governed by false consciousness and the idea of a personal anything, be it property or style. Shakespeare could not have possibly written, say, Hamlet on his own, or so the argument goes. Of course, Shakespeare did collaborate on a number of his plays. Collaboration is a common practice across the arts—both in the past and today—and it can be difficult to determine which works were the result of a single pen and which ones were the result of many. Recent research on the epic poem Beowulf may help in answering this question: “While some argued the work is the product of multiple poets, others – including the scholar and Lord of the Rings author JRR Tolkien – have said the evidence suggests it is a single poet’s work. Recently the debate has resurfaced with some suggesting the poem is the result of two different works joined together – one involving Beowulf’s escapades in Denmark and one involving the dragon. Now a study adds to a growing body of work suggesting Beowulf was composed by just one poet.”

Speaking of genius of a kind, I am looking forward to reading Leo Damrosch’s group biography of Johnson, Boswell, Joshua Reynolds and others. Lyndall Gordon reviews it for The New York Times, and, of course, it has the obligatory remark on the terrible, no good, very bad attitudes these men had towards minorities and women: “Inevitably, certain opinions are alien, even offensive to modern ears: Johnson’s invoking the phrase ‘barbarous nations’ to describe the victims of Britain’s imperial wars; his dismissal of the American colonists’ protest against taxation without representation; and, despite sympathizing with Native Americans whose lands were being wrested from them, his refusal to suggest that these lands should be returned to them. Regarding women, all these 18th-century British men endorsed a double standard. Women, Johnson said bluntly, must be taught to keep their legs together. The rationale was pragmatic: to secure the line of inheritance that kept property in male hands. We read on because we are drawn by the alluring drama of character. This drama is biographical, not political.” I appreciate that last sentiment. What is truly interesting about people is the drama of their lives, which is the drama of all our lives in one way or another, not their political positions (and how dim they were compared to our righteous brightness). But why mention politics at all? Are the readers of the Times so puritanical that they must be convinced that Johnson and Boswell, of all people, are interesting despite their insufficiently progressive attitudes?

Modern concrete corrodes in seawater, but the concrete of ancient Rome doesn’t. Why? Brian Gallagher writes about the elusive search for the Roman “recipe”: “The samples contained aluminum tobermorite, a rare mineral and not an ingredient in conventional concrete, which accounted for their great durability and strength. In a 2017 study, the researchers found that the aluminum tobermorite grew out of a silicate mineral common to volcanic ash, called phillipsite, spurred by ocean contact. ‘We’re looking at a system that thrives in open chemical exchange with seawater,’ Jackson said. The tobermorite’s long plate-like crystals grant the concrete an unusual flexibility under stress that increases with time submerged. ‘It’s a very rare occurrence in nature,’ Jackson said. By contrast, modern concrete, made from a mix of Portland cement and coarse aggregate, corrodes in seawater within decades, making the application of Roman concrete, Jackson noted, an enticing option for steel reinforcement-free seawalls that guard against rising sea levels.”

History as entertainment from the past to today: “Entertainment and popular culture drawing from history is nothing new — Shakespeare’s histories were still plays, after all — but, ironically, our current shining moment of history entertainment comes amid the full-scale collapse of history as an academic discipline. As Harvard history professor Fredrik Logevall and Colorado School of Mines history professor Kenneth Osgood wrote in The New York Times, ‘The public’s love for political stories belies a crisis in the profession.’”

Brian Allen surveys artist’s books: “The artist’s book is easy to define; the concept, less easy to grasp. It’s a book, more or less, made by an artist. One artist is making all the choices. There’s no editor or publisher. Every facet, from materials to graphics, imagery, and words, is the product of one artist. It’s a book, which means mixed media — paper, words, pictures almost always — and it means multiple pages bound or cased together. We experience it in a sequence. Almost always, artist’s books are witty and erudite. You’ll find puns and epigrams. They’re often meant to be taken apart and examined closely, since things are rarely what they seem. They’re unlike wall art. They’re not really for display. They defy a one-shot look.”

Essay of the Day:

In Quanta Magazine, Natalie Wolchover writes about recent research in synchronization and why patterns do or do not arise:

“It was Kuramoto’s Mongolian post-doc, Dorjsuren Battogtokh, who first noticed a new kind of synchronous behavior in a computer-simulated population of coupled oscillators. The identical oscillators, which were all identically coupled to their neighbors, had somehow split into two factions: Some oscillated in sync, while the rest drifted incoherently.

“Kuramoto presented his and Battogtokh’s discovery at a 2001 meeting in Bristol, but the result didn’t register in the community until Steven Strogatz, a mathematician at Cornell University, came across it in the conference proceedings two years later. ‘When I came to understand what I was seeing in the graphics, I didn’t really believe it,’ Strogatz said.

“‘What was so weird,’ he explained, ‘was that the universe looks the same from every place’ in the system. And yet the oscillators responded differently to identical conditions, some ganging together while the rest went their own way, as if not coupled to anything at all. The symmetry of the system ‘was broken,’ Strogatz said, in a way that ‘had never been seen before.’

“Strogatz and his graduate student Daniel Abrams, who now studies synchronization as a professor at Northwestern, reproduced the peculiar mix of synchrony and asynchrony in computer simulations of their own and explored the conditions under which it arises. Strogatz dubbed it the ‘chimera’ state after a mythological fire-breathing monster made of incongruous parts. (Months earlier, Strogatz had written a popular book called Sync, about the pervasiveness of global synchronization.)

“Two independent teams realized this chimera state in the lab in 2012, working in different physical systems, and more experiments have seen it since. Many researchers suspect chimeras arise naturally. The brain itself seems to be a complicated kind of chimera, in that it simultaneously sustains both synchronous and asynchronous firing of neurons. Last year, researchers found qualitative similarities between the destabilization of chimera states and epileptic seizures. ‘We believe that further detailed studies may open new therapeutic methods for promoting seizure prediction and termination,’ said co-author Iryna Omelchenko of the University of Berlin.

“But the chimera state is still not fully understood. Kuramoto worked out the math verifying that the state is self-consistent, and therefore possible, but that doesn’t explain why it arises.”

Read the rest.

Photos: Giant technicolor squirrels 

Poem: Amit Majmudar, “Rigidity”

Receive Prufrock in your inbox every weekday morning. Subscribe here.