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(om italiensk bogtyv og -forfalsker)
- tilegnet Peter Adolphsen
In one of the most intriguing elements in the lower-court proceedings,
Mr. De Caro also testified that he had several copies of Galileo’s
“Siderius Nuncius” forged in Argentina, including one that he placed in
the national library in Naples, and that he had taken the original. Last
year, Nick Wilding, a scholar, uncovered the forgery.
Asked on Monday outside the courtroom in Naples how you go about forging
a book by Galileo, let alone one that was sold at auction and fooled
some of the world’s leading experts, Mr. De Caro smiled with excitement.
“Borges, in ‘Ficciones,’ wrote that when a book is false, it is equal
to, if not better than, the original,” he said. One of his lawyers
quickly approached and said the conversation was over.
(om hollandsk forfatter i New York med elektroder på hovedet)
- tilegnet Amalie Smith
Over the past two weeks, Mr. Grunberg has spent several hours a day
writing his novella, while a battery of sensors and cameras tracked his
brain waves, heart rate, galvanic skin response (an electrical measure
of emotional arousal) and facial expressions. Next fall, when the book
is published, some 50 ordinary people in the Netherlands will read it
under similarly controlled circumstances, sensors and all.
Researchers will then crunch the data in the hope of finding patterns
that may help illuminate links between the way art is created and
enjoyed, and possibly the nature of creativity itself.
“Will readers of Arnon’s text feel they understand or embody the same
emotions he had while he was writing it, or is reading a completely
different process?” said Ysbrand van der Werf, a researcher at the
Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience and the VU University Medical
Center in Amsterdam, who designed the experiment with Jan van Erp of the
Netherlands Organization for Applied Scientific Research. “These are
some of the questions we want to answer.”
This experiment is connected with the burgeoning field of
neuroaesthetics, which over the last decade or so has attempted to
uncover the neural underpinnings of our experience of music and visual
art, using brain imaging technology. Slowly, a small but growing number
of researchers have also begun using similar tools to scrutinize the
perhaps more elusive, and perhaps endangered, experience of literary
reading.
Last year, researchers at Stanford University drew headlines with the
results of a functional magnetic resonance imaging (or fMRI) experiment
showing that different regions of the brain were activated when subjects
switched from reading Jane Austen’s “Mansfield Park” for pleasure to reading it analytically. And this fall, a study
out of the New School for Social Research showed that readers of
literary fiction scored higher on tests of empathy than readers of
commercial fiction, a finding greeted with satisfied told-you-sos from
many readers and writers alike.
