formula

Dread = Uncontrollability + Unfamiliarity + Imaginability + Suffering + Scale of Destruction + Unfairness

source: The Unthinkable: who survives when disaster strikes and why by Amanda Ripley

“the height of the shelves”

Alberto Manguel remembers his “father’s largely unused library in Buenos Aires.” The boy Alberto was “always alone in the library, since [his] father used it only on the rare occasions when he had to meet someone at home rather than at his office.” The father “had instructed his secretary to furnish the library, and she had bought books by the yard and sent them to be bound to the height of the shelves, so that the titles at the page-tops were in many cases trimmed, and sometimes even the first lines were missing.”

In his History of Reading Manguel later quotes Seneca on this sort of thing. Seneca scorned the man “’who gets his pleasure from the bindings and labels’ and in whose illiterate household ‘you can see the complete works of orators and historians on shelves up to the ceiling, because, like bathrooms, a library has become an essential ornament of a rich house.’”

I confess I try to read the titles of the books on the shelves in a stage play. I look over the books propped in bookcases in uninhabited houses (the house being up for sale, handsome furnishing having briefly been imported to suggest a lifestyle).

source: A History of Reading by Alberto Manguel

Sexton and Madonna, part II

Last spring I was reading a biography of Madonna and blogged about Madonna's affinity for Anne Sexton.

Today I read that Madonna cribbed from Sexton when composing a love poem for her bodyguard.

A fax dated December 24, 1993 reads: "I was the girl of the love letter/the girl full of talk of dreams and destination... the one with her eyes half under the covers/with her large gun-metal blue eyes/with the thick vein in the crook of her neck."

In comparison, Sexton wrote: "I was the girl of the chain letter/the girl full of talk of coffins and keyholes... the one with her eyes half under her coat/with her large gun-metal blue eyes/with the thin vein at the bend of her neck."

hat tip to CDY

Plutarch's God

“To [Plutarch] a superstition was not a mistaken belief, a kind of religious stupidity; it was an unmitigated evil, far worse than absolute disbelief. Atheism, he says, denies God, but superstition wrongs Him. It makes God evil or silly. It uses the very worst of all weapons, terror. It fills the world after death with ‘flaming fires and awful shapes and inexorable judges and horrible torments’; in this world it teaches people to practice absurd penances and self-torturing. Better far not to see God at all than see Him like that. ‘I had rather have it said that there was not and never had been such a fellow as Plutarch, than that he was fickle and vindictive and would pay you out for not calling upon him.’”

source: The Echo of Greece by Edith Hamilton

Rambo v. Hulk

Reading a book about a family in the Bronx I came across this curious paragraph, probably evidence of a change of mind by the writer (or an editor?) about whether to use the undercover officer’s alias:

Rambo, a Bronx homicide detective, changed out of his sweat suit and into a Con Ed employee uniform. Hulk’s choice of a disguise was appropriate: gas leaks, like fires, were common in the neighborhood. That morning, a tip had come in … Hulk and the other undercovers drove to Anthony Avenue. …

Rambo, nicknamed for his pumped-up body, was known for solving cases.

So which is it? Hulk? Or Rambo? It’s pretty clear from context that we are only talking about one person. I suspect the real nickname was “Hulk” as the Hulk is known mainly for being big & beefy, whereas Rambo is known mostly for being a loner and revenge-o-phile. But who knows. Maybe we have the author to thank for both.

source: Random Family: love, drugs, trouble, and coming of age in the Bronx by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc

The People’s Almanac

Over the years I’ve clung to certain ambitions. One of them was to read The People’s Almanac from cover to cover (and, presumably, The People’s Almanac #2 and The People’s Almanac #3, which have also been part of my library).

I don’t know how my family acquired The People’s Almanac, which was published in 1975; I was ten at the time. Was it a gift?

I knew kids who’d claimed to have read the dictionary and the encyclopedia (Britannica or World Book?); neither project appealed to me. OK. Yes. I did try reading a dictionary a few times. Boring! As suspected.

Something about that title fascinated me: The People’s Almanac. I didn’t know what an almanac was. The People’s Almanac was not like The Farmer’s Almanac, which included “a calendar for the year as well as astronomical information” (that’s from the Microsoft Word dictionary definition of “almanac”). Rather, The People’s Almanac was a seemingly random collection of information – a year by year history of the U.S. (1797: “In retirement, General Washington dined well. One of his favorite menus: cream of peanut soup, Smithfield ham with oyster sauce, string beans with mushrooms, Southern spoon bread, Virginia whiskey cake.”), thumbnail descriptions of all the nations (“Nauru is composed largely of phosphate-rich guano or, as it is better known, bird droppings. This unusual resource has provided Nauruans with one of the highest per capita incomes in the world …”), supposed buried treasure troves, words commonly misspelled, offbeat artists, stories of great boxing matches, and so on.

The idea of imbibing all these facts was far more fascinating the actual process – there was just so much information, I discovered, about which I did not care!

Still, wasn’t there something special about the possessive? The “People’s” … I recognize it now as particularly 70s. At the time it had an aura of rebellion, offering a fresh new take without the tired old rigidity and irrelevance of the established authorities, whoever & whatever they were. Oughtn’t something belonging to “people” also be more fun? Such seemed logical to me at the time.

When I was clearing out my mother’s house I brought The People’s Almanac and its sequels home to Berkeley (aka “The People’s Republic of Berkeley”). They sat on the floor of the library upstairs – the shelves having already been taken by other books. Now that renovations are going on the books have all been boxed up and sit once again in inaccessible stacks. I didn’t box The People’s Almanac.

Because I decided I wasn’t going to keep it anymore. That old ambition, that I was going to sit down and read the thing through? I’m letting it go.

word of the day: pyrrhuloxias

“[R]ed birds such as cardinals and pyrrhuloxias … apparently need sufficient carotene from reddish fruits to maintain their plumage colors, so they feed on red berries. Such berry specialists will pick up chile [chili?] fruits now and then, which are about the same size, hue, shape, and brightness [as] the birds’ mainstay berries. … [W]ild chiles fequently become established under wolfberries and hackberries, for they are probably dispersed beneath the canopies of these shrubs when the birds pick their berries. Once they have germinated there, they find a buffered microclimate more suitable for growth than open, barren ground.”

source: Enduring Seeds: Native American agriculture and wild plan conservation by Gary Paul Nabhan

photo from Birds as Art

Mossberg stands up to Swisher’s mother

From a New Yorker profile of Wall Street Journal consumer technology columnist Walter Mossberg:

“Mossberg is not shy about expressing his opinions. He helped recruit Kara Swisher from the Washington Post [to the WSJ] in late 1996 … When she and Megan Smith, a Google executive, decided to marry, Swisher told [Ken Auletta], her mother ‘was troubled by the idea of a gay wedding.’ She and Smith have two children, and she recalls that when she came home with the first baby Mossberg was there, and so was her mother, who ‘really likes Walt a lot.’ Swisher went on, ‘We were having dinner and she was being difficult – she was arguing with me. I was getting really uncomfortable. Walt took her down like I’ve never seen anybody take anybody down: “How dare you talk to her like this? This is an important issue and you have to be supportive no matter what as a parent.”’”

Gay marriage as a political issue is really about straights. It seems to me straights ought to be talking to straights about it. Would Mossberg be up for a 30-second ad?

source: The New Yorker, May 14, 2007

“dared commit”

“Although the [18th Century Romantic] era’s effusive declarations of passionate friendship were long discounted as overheated formulas for merely platonic affection, the reverse is more likely: in a time of harsh public scrutiny, more went on physically than all but a few writers dared commit to paper.”

One might note that even though the kiddies danced to the hits of the Village People and the Navy considered using one of their songs in a recruiting campaign and straights still gesture to “YMCA” at ball games, the band members exemplify gay sexual fetishes. It may have been the case that lots of non-gay folks innocently adopted the language of passionate friendship but that hardly erases the passion or means it was always chaste.

source: Pictures and Passions: a history of homosexuality in the visual arts by James M. Saslow

Christianity as “barbarous interruption”

“Renaissance thinkers recast the Christian era as the barbarous interruption of a Golden Age whose lost wisdom and erotic innocence they yearned to restore in a third, modern age.”

Them Christians, still a bunch of butt-in-skis.

source: Pictures and Passions: a history of homosexuality in the visual arts by James M. Saslow

Life and death laundry

In a New Yorker profile of Milton Bradley and his Game of Life Jill Lepore says Life is in “a class of board games [called] ‘spiral race games.’”

“The oldest spiral race game,” she says in a parenthetical, “may be the Hyena Game, played by Arabs in Sudan, in a groove traced in the sand with a stick and involving a race between pebbles representing the players’ mothers, who leave their village and head to a well at the spiral’s center, where they must wash their clothes and return home before a hyena catches them.”

source: New Yorker, May 21, 2007

what Dads like

Steve Martin had a difficult father. Rare was the praise, frequent were the cold rages and seeming contempt. After more than ten years plugging away at his comedy, Martin was finally seeing success that did more than get him out of debt. His father acted unimpressed, even talking his son down around friends and colleagues. “I suppressed everything I felt about his comments because I couldn’t let him have power of my work,” Martin says.

Martin became a household name, was selling out arenas. Father “remained uncomplimentary … [W]hat I did about it still makes sense to me: I never discussed my work with him again.”

My own parents divorced when I was a toddler; I don’t remember them living together. My dad lived thousands of miles away – me, my brother & my mother in Northern California, Dad in Alaska with his new family. But Mom kept us in contact with letters and phone calls and, when we were kids, Dad usually managed two visits a year. So I had a dad – distant but existent, someone I felt a connection to, better, I suppose, than some I hear about who lived in house. Mom would have my brother & me send our creative work to Dad and he acknowledged it and tried not to say belittling things about it even when it wasn’t to his taste – mostly, it seems, it wasn’t.

When my poetry got more & more “avant-garde,” Dad responded by enthusing about cowboy poetry. “That’s what I really like,” I remember him saying.

I have nothing against cowboy poetry. It’s not something I do. It’s not something that interests me, other than in a vague academic sort of way. Oh, Dad likes that, huh? What he doesn’t like is what I do. So I stopped sending him examples. I stopped talking about it.

source: Born Standing Up: a comic’s life by Steve Martin

“I’m not sure what I meant”

Back in 1967 change in the air. Though he claims in his memoir that his studies, philosophy & ee cummings, both fascinated, excited, and baffled him, Steve Martin tried to alchemize from them a fresh new comedy. In a letter to his girlfriend he wrote, “I have decided my act is going to go avant-garde. It is the only way to do what I want.”

Commenting on that 40 year old assertion, Martin notes, “I’m not sure what I meant, but I wanted to use the lingo, and it was seductive to make these pronouncements.”

I suspect we pretend we know what we’re talking about at least as often as we really do. Sometimes that’s a problem. But mostly?

“I have learned,” Martin continues, “there is no harm in charging oneself up with delusions between moments of valid inspiration.”

source: Born Standing Up: a comic’s life by Steve Martin

monkey butts

“By the way, paying for porn is no longer unique to humans. Researchers at Duke University offered male rhesus monkeys the chance to see pictures of female monkey bottoms, but only if they paid for it by giving up their fruit juice. The monkeys paid up.”

source: How Sex Works: why we look, smell, taste, feel, and act the way we do (2009) Dr. Sharon Moalem

sex stinks

So I’m reading How Sex Works and I come across discussion of a study on how people respond to body odor, specifically how “four categories [of persons] – heterosexual men, heterosexual women, homosexual men, and homosexual women - ... indicate their preference among odors collected from ‘odor donors’ in the same four categories.”

Let’s skip over the methodology and get right to the rather queer results:

“Homosexual males, heterosexual females, and lesbians preferred odors from heterosexual males over odors from gay males,” the study stated. “Gay males preferred odors from other gay males … Heterosexual males, heterosexual females, and lesbians over the age of 15 (but not those 18-25) preferred odors from lesbians over odors from gay males … Finally, gay males preferred odors from heterosexual females over those from heterosexual males.”

Last I remember reading about odor studies like this the results were of the men-prefer-the-smell-of-women-women-prefer-the-smell-of-men variety, with zero consideration of sexual orientation. I’m glad some scientists are being more open to subtlety and variety. The study’s results, though, what can one say of them? Hm. This deserves more study?

source: How Sex Works: why we look, smell, taste, feel, and act the way we do (2009) Dr. Sharon Moalem

pile of reading

Swallowdale (1931) Arthur Ransome
I remember a friend of the family (was it the Averas?) gave my brother and me the gift of Swallows and Amazons, the cover of which featured some kids gathered around a campfire dreaming of battling each other over rowboats, or small sailboats. I remember not finding it very attractive. But at some point our mother, who would read to us each night (she got us all the way through the Lord of the Rings trilogy), picked up Swallows and Amazons and I was surprised. I loved it! For a long time I didn’t know Arthur Ransome had written several sequels. When I did find that out enough time had passed I didn’t remember much in detail about Swallows and Amazons so figured I ought to reread it before I turned to a sequel. Well, here I am, 43 years old, and I just reread Swallows and Amazons. Can’t say whether or not I enjoyed it as much this time as the first but I did enjoy it, and the Claremont branch of the Berkeley Public Library where I work has several of the sequels. I have just begun Swallowdale.

How Sex Works: why we look, smell, taste, feel, and act the way we do (2009) Dr. Sharon Moalem
I like pop science books. Some are better than others, of course. There are times I feel like I’m reading about the behavior of middle class college students – so many studies are conducted at universities, and students are cheap and readily available experimental subjects. The more pop science books you read the more you find yourself wondering if this mish-mash of facty material actually collages into a revealing picture or we just pretend it does. I brought this one home because Moalem includes gay people (older books science books on sex either ignored gay sex or disparaged it; many contemporary books treat it rather like a footnote – yeah, gay sex exists, and it’s not sick or evil but, like, I care?). “As any woman who has explored her sexual responsiveness knows,” Moalem says, then interjects a parenthetical before preceding, “(and any man or woman who has explored it with her knows as well), female orgasms come in many different shapes and styles.” Or woman, huh?

Enduring Seeds: Native American agriculture and wild plant conservation (1989) Gary Paul Nabhan
As I push through the collection, weeding out damaged books and books that have been barely touched in the years of sun-fading residence on public racks, I do think to myself fairly often, Looks like a book worth reading. Mostly I talk myself out of checking them out – got plenty to read, thanks! But Enduring Seeds touched on more than one enduring interest – the interaction between animals and plants, traces of Native American history, and the (fragile?) foundations of what we take for granted. I’m not far into it, and already it’s depressing. Written twenty years ago the text anticipates widespread devastation of the environment. Maybe the intervening decades haven’t been as diastrous as anticipated. But I don’t think an author writing a book like this today would be optimistic.

The American Reader: words that moved a nation (2000) edited by Diane Ravitch
This is a selection of poetry, essays, and speeches from early American history to the present. Includes Benjamin Franklin aphorisms, Emily Dickinson poems, Woody Guthrie songs, etc. Just read Ravitch’s severe 4-page edit of Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, and liked it better than the long version.

The Complete Poems (1981) Anne Sexton
Years ago I read Sexton’s poems in the original books, then bought this complete edition. I enjoyed the first reading and wanted some day to revisit the experience. Doing that. I prefer Sexton’s later messier verse to her early tightly controlled stuff.

Tristes Tropiques (1955) Claude Levi-Strauss, translated by John & Doreen Weightman
Levi-Strauss was an influential anthopologist. I was assigned a chapter of this book in a class in college. I didn’t have time or energy to read more than that. But I hung onto the book. Reading it now, slow, though I like it. Levi-Strauss does surprising stuff like devote five pages to a description of sunset at sea: “[A]t each new stage in its fall, one or other of its rays would pierce the opaque mass [of clouds] or would find its way through along a path which, at the moment when the beam of light appeared, cut the obstacle into a pile of circular sectors, different in size and luminous intensity. At times, the light would be withdrawn, as if a fist had been clenched and the cloudy mitten would allow no more than one or two stiff and gleaming fingers to appear. Or an incandescent octopus would move out from the vaporous grottoes and then there would be a fresh withdrawal.”

The New Yorker May 21, 2007
From the Michael Ryan poem: “Watching you [ghost of dad], / aluminum softball bat drooping like a penis [in my hand], // I’m a cartoon of hurt …”

Scientific American June 2005
The search for extra solar planets continues to find ‘em!

word of the day: reptation

In the short story “Moebius Strip” the Argentine author Julio Cortazar depicts a person struggling in a sort of afterlife:

“Little by little (little by little in a condition outside of time? a manner of speaking) other states were presenting themselves, had perhaps already been presented, although already would mean before and there was no before; now (or any now either) a wind state prevailed and now a crawling state … [imagine] a caterpillar crawling over a leaf suspended in the air, passing over its faces and passing again without the slightest sight or touch or limit, infinite Moebius strip reptation to the edge of a face to arrive at or already to be on the opposite side and to return ceaselessly from one side to the other, a very slow and painful reptation there where there was no measure of slowness or suffering but where one was reptation and being reptation was slowness and suffering.”

definition: The act of creeping.

source: dictionary.com

the typical gap

Reviewing possible causes of aging Atul Gawande drops this little statistic:

Only six per cent of how long you’ll live, compared with the average, is explained by your parents’ longevity.

So “good genes” aren’t it?

Even genetically identical twins vary widely in life span: the typical gap is more than fifteen years.

Huh? Really?

Gawande doesn’t source that one (unless it’s from the same Max Planck institute for Demographic Research in Rostock, Germany that he attributes the 6% figure to).

15 years? What’s the “typical gap” between non-identical twins or age disparate siblings? I would have thought it much closer than 15 years. What does he mean “typical”? He doesn’t use the word “average” so does he not mean the mean? Maybe he means the median – half of all twins live 15 years longer than the dead twin, half of all twins live fewer than 15 years longer. Or the mode? Most twins who lose a twin live 15 more years. Or, rather, “more than fifteen”.

A mysterious number.

source: The New Yorker, April 30, 2007

Frank Marshall Davis

As a youth in Hawaii, Barack Obama was introduced by his grandfather to an old black intellectual, a poet. “Frank”, Obama calls him in his memoir. No last name.

Curious if anyone had done the detective work to find out who this “Frank” was (I mean, a poet!) I found, indeed, Gerald Horne in his pre-election hitpiece, The Obama Nation, had fingered Frank Marshall Davis, an old communist, as the poet in the memoir. While rebutting some of Horne’s insinuations the Obama campaign acknowledged Davis the poet.

Now I want to read his stuff. Looks like a couple collections have been published recently - Black Moods: Collected Poems (2002) and Writings of Frank Marshall Davis: A Voice of the Black Press (2007).

O

Barack is still in Chicago, "hoping to convince [more black ministers] to join the organization. It was a slow process ... most black ministers were fiercely independent, secure in their congregations and with little obvious need for outside assistance. Whenever I first reached them on the phone, they would often be suspicious, uncertain as to why this Muslim - or worse yet, this Irishman, O'Bama - wanted a few minutes of their time."

source: Dreams from My Father: a story of race and inheritance by Barack Obama