Month: September 2010

Jesse Bering unleashes a flood of unexpected uses for and effects of, yes, semen:

In fact, semen has a very complicated chemical profile, containing over 50 different compounds (including hormones, neurotransmitters, endorphins and immunosupressants) each with a special function and occurring in different concentrations within the seminal plasma. Perhaps the most striking of these compounds is the bundle of mood-enhancing chemicals in semen.

There is good in this goo. Such anxiolytic chemicals include, but are by no means limited to, cortisol (known to increase affection), estrone (which elevates mood), prolactin (a natural antidepressant), oxytocin (also elevates mood), thyrotropin-releasing hormone (another antidepressant), melatonin (a sleep-inducing agent) and even serotonin (perhaps the most well-known antidepressant neurotransmitter). …

For both men and women, heterosexual and homosexual, knowing that the penis is capable of dispensing a sort of natural Prozac—whether obtained vaginally, anally or orally—without also considering the viral arms race involving sexually transmitted infections, can lead to very tragic decisions indeed and many undocumented high-risk private bedroom “experiments.” But here’s just one reason to put the breaks on such plans: The HIV-virus, which evolved long after these adaptive antidepressant factors, has apparently come to pirate human semen, such that certain protein factors in seminal plasma, particularly a protein called prostatic acid phosphatase , make HIV up to 100,000 folds more potent than it is outside of the plasma.

"When the Young Husband…" by Donald Hall appeared in The Atlantic in March of 1993:

When the young husband picked up his friend's pretty wife
in the taxi one block from her townhouse for their
first lunch together, in a hotel dining room
         with a room key in his pocket,

midtown traffic gridlocked and was abruptly still.
For one moment before Klaxons started honking,
a prophetic voice spoke in his mind's ear despite
          his pulse's erotic thudding:

"The misery you undertake this afternoon
will accompany you to the ends of your lives.
She knew what she did, when she agreed to this lunch,
         although she will not admit it;

and you've constructed your playlet a thousand times:

cocktails, an omelet, wine; the revelation
of a room key; the elevator rising as
          the penis elevates; the skin

flushed, the door fumbled at, the handbag dropped; the first
kiss with open mouths, nakedness, swoon, thrust-and-catch;
endorphins followed by endearments; a brief nap;
          another fit, restoration

of clothes, arrangements for another encounter,
the taxi back, and the furtive kiss of good-bye.
Then, by turn: tears, treachery, anger, betrayal;
            marriages and houses destroyed;

small children abandoned and inconsolable,
their foursquare estates disestablished forever;
the unreadable advocates; the wretchedness
            of passion outworn; anguished nights

sleepless in a bare room; whiskey, meth, cocaine; new
love, essayed in loneliness with miserable
strangers, that comforts nothing but skin; hours with sons
          and daughters studious always

to maintain distrust; the daily desire to die
and the daily agony of the requirement
to survive, until only the quarrel endures."
         Prophecy stopped; traffic started.

(Image by Flickr user dawnnakaya)

In a beautiful essay, Rivka Galchen reviews Robert Walser's The Microscripts. Walser is famous for writing "many of his manuscripts in a highly enigmatic, shrunken-down form":

Let's lie and say there are only two kinds of writers I like, the caffeinated and the sleepy. Balzac exemplifies the caffeinated. He drank coffee to the point of a trembling hand — something like thirty cups a day — and then he'd masturbate to the very edge of orgasm, but not over, and that state — agitated, excited to the point of near madness — was Balzac's sweet spot, in terms of composing. Then there's the sleepy: De Quincey with his opium, Milton waking up his red-slippered daughters to take down verses that had come to him in a dream.

We might also think of the method by which Benjamin Franklin purportedly came up with inventions: he'd deprive himself of sleep, then, exhausted, sit in an uncomfortable chair while holding a heavy metal ball in each hand so that when he'd nod off a hand would go limp and its ball would fall, making a sound that would wake him from his dreams. That was how he came up with his best ideas for inventions, basically asleep — just not so asleep that he couldn't take down a few notes.

The caffeinated writer and the sleepy writer share the aspiration to be, essentially, not themselves. Which is to say that the creative method is that of vanishing, of disappearing from the drafting table. Robert Walser made of that method — vanishing by whatever means — a kind of art all unto itself. And the paradox is that by becoming so small, so quiet, so penciled, Walser became vast, indelible.

A sample:

And would it have been worth it, after all,
After the games, social media, the blogs,
Among the twitters, among some talk of IRC logs,
Would it have been worth while
To have bitten off the fandom with a smile,
To have squeezed the internet into a ball
To roll it toward some ass on Yahoo Questions
To say, "I am Babbage, come from the dead,
Come back to ban you all, I shall ban you all" —
If one, sending a textmessage, autocorrected
Should say: "That is not what I typed at all.
That is not it. LOL."

Balk welcomes the change of season:

The new Woody Allen movie that you are not going to go see because, get real, can you even remember the last time you went to see one, has arrived in the theaters. Fall! The 2010 television season has begun, bringing both funny fat people on the networks and expensive prestige pieces on HBO. Fall! We have already determined this year's Great American Novel and had a tiresome debate over whether or not that construct is still valid in this modern era, and there are still new books coming. Fall! The search for the "song of the summer" is long since over, and now we can turn our attention to albums from serious white guys noodling around on guitars. Fall!

Thank God for Bruce Bartlett for keeping exposing the GOP insanity that just won't end – despite the massive evidence against it.

Researchers at the University of Toronto asked college students to shop online for products at either an eco-friendly or a normal store. When asked afterwards to divide a small amount of money between themselves and a stranger, those who went the eco route gave less to the stranger:

“When we engage in a good deed, that gives us a kind of satisfaction,” says Nina Mazar, professor of market­ing and a co-author of the paper. With that self-satisfied feeling can come tacit permission to behave more sel­fishly next time we have the oppor­tunity, Mazar says. Previous research has documented this licensing effect in other contexts; a study published last year revealed that asking people to ruminate on their humanitarian qualities actually reduced their char­itable giving.

John Horgan attempts to prove that "if anything, expressing aggression, anger, fear, hatred—whether with a psychotherapist, spouse, friend, office-mate, neighbor, stranger—makes you more aggressive, angry, fearful, hateful, not less." He experimented with Airsoft, a sort of bb-gun warfare game in the woods, to test his theory:

Airsoft war games began in Japan more than 30 years ago before spreading to the U.S. and Europe. Since World War II, Japan has had a pacifist constitution and has outlawed gun ownership. Some Airsofters I met in Tolland speculated that Japanese guys love Airsoft because it gives them a chance to play war, which is banned. Japan, in other words, provides tentative evidence for Lorenz's view of sports as healthily cathartic.

But the situation is quite different when you look at the U.S. Many American Airsofters, including some I met in Tolland, were or are soldiers. My group's commander—a mild-mannered guy about 30 years old—was an Army veteran who'd done tours in Afghanistan and Iraq. Lots of other players were vets, too. After serving in real wars these men come home and play war for fun.

Leon Wieseltier responds to his good friend, the publisher of Franzen's Freedom, on the art of negative criticism, and why TNR relishes its negative reviews:

Literature is a felicity, but it is not a festival…

So yes, dear Jeff, business as usual: contention without end; an excess of ambition and pride in the making and taking of books; exhilaration in the quarrelsomeness about things that matter; the disturbance of the peace. Rather like your business, in fact: the seriousness trade. In the age of one hundred and forty characters, we sink or swim together.

I'm totally with Leon on this, except when his commissioned negative reviews are not motivated by genuine criticism, but by personal vendettas, or envy of those more intelligent or better writers than he.