Finally forced by my inability to find any book I actually want, I tried to bring order to my bookshelves tonight. I’ve tried this from time to time – with always the same effect. I get asthma from all the dust and within about half an hour, I find an old book I’d forgotten I owned and start reading. This time, it was a collection of the poet Philip Larkin’s prose. I’ve always been a lover of Larkin’s painful, subtle and often hilarious poetry – but he’s also a brilliant raconteur and curmudgeon, much of which, it turns out, was for show. Anyway, I thought you’d all get a kick out of this interchange from the Paris Review. Larkin was famous for giving interviews to pretentious literary types and spending most of the time quietly making fun of them. Here’s a classic:
“You haven’t been to America, have you?
Oh, no, I’ve never been to America, nor to anywhere else for that matter… I suppose everyone has his own dream of America. A writer once said to me, If you ever go to America, go either to the East Coast or the West Coast: the rest is a desert full of bigots. That’s what I think I’d like: where if you help a girl trim a Christmas tree you’re regarded as engaged, and her brothers start oiling their shotguns if you don’t call on the minister. A version of pastoral.”
So in the great red-zone vs. blue-zone debate, I think we know where Larkin would stand. Now, back to the bookshelves – oh, never mind.
COGNITIVE DISSONANCE WATCH: Browsing through the Washington Times over my Number 3 Supersized tonight, I came across a Bill O’Reilly column arguing that the pedophile group NAMBLA should be made illegal even for disseminating its views that under-age boys are old enough to have consensual sex. The First Amendment be damned – these people are evil! On the next page, I read that Alabama’s attempt to reform its marriage laws so that fourteen-year-olds can no longer legally marry has failed because of a filibuster. Fourteen? So let’s get this straight. In some states, what Mary Eberstadt would call a frightening new tolerance of pedophilia has been around and fully legal for more than a century. And Eberstadt didn’t even mention it in her recent Weekly Standard article on “pedophilia chic”? And O’Reilly is apparently unaware of it as well. One wonders why the religious right isn’t campaigning against a law which essentially condones child-abuse. And then one realizes that when pedophilia is heterosexual and in Alabama, some on the religious right couldn’t give a damn.
BUTCH ENOUGH: So-so piece in the L.A. Times on new research into the origins of homosexuality. But one nugget interested me: according to some researchers, gay men might be gay because they were exposed to higher than normal levels of testosterone in the womb. By analyzing how men and women hear differently, researchers expected to find gay men somewhere in between female and male hearing patterns. What they found is that gay men have hyper-masculinized hearing patterns – more attuned to “male” sounds than most straight men. Similarly, according to another researcher, the wonderfully named Marc Breedlove, the length of most gay men’s fingers suggests that they were exposed to greater-than-normal levels of male hormones prenatally. Breedlove also cites less reliable studies that show that gay men may have slightly higher levels of testosterone than straights and bigger genitalia. Hmmmm. We’re at such an early stage of understanding these things scientifically that I’m leery of making a call here. But my own experience would lead me to think that what might be at fault here is the single notion of homosexuality. Maybe there are homosexualities. Maybe some are more effeminate than usual; maybe some are more masculine. Hence drag queens and leather bars, flaming nellies and masculine bodybuilders. The fact that one can be attracted to members of the same gender doesn’t mean you have to be feminine; it might even mean you’re more masculine. How else do you explain the Marines?
The Dish 