Month: October 2010

Eryn Loeb meditates on virtual friendships:

The process of accumulating friends on Facebook is pretty much the opposite of making a guest list for a real-life, in-person event like a wedding. A guest list has a limited number of spots, and it should be pretty clear who makes the cut and who doesn’t. On Facebook, your network is at once sprawling and concentrated, a group of friends and enemies and acquaintances keeping cautious, largely superficial tabs on each other. Hanging out in alphabetical order, everyone looks sort of interchangeable.

…One day—one day soon—all of this will become too mundane to be worth mentioning, but for now, while all this access still feels at least a little bit surreal, there are stages to move through as you test the limits of connectivity and your own willingness to connect. Sign on, and suddenly everyone is right there, posting exclamation-point-ridden messages to your wall about how “It would be so great to see you! We should get together!!!” that you quickly come to understand are mostly symbolic, a kind of conventional shorthand similar to the uncaptioned sonograms that passive-aggressively announce new pregnancies and changes to the clinical-sounding “relationship status” that don’t need to be conveyed personally because Facebook delivers the news itself, as a weirdly neutral intermediary.

London, England, 5 pm

Vaughan Bell highlights a new study in the Journal of the History of the Neurosciences on the penis within phantom limb history:

Scottish surgeon and anatomist John Hunter […] reported on what can only be described as phantom wanking:

A serjeant of marines who had lost the glans, and the greater body of the penis, upon being asked, if he ever felt those sensations which are peculiar to the glans, declared, that upon rubbing the end of the stump, it gave him exactly the sensation which friction upon the glans produced, and was followed by an emission of the semen.

"Autumn" by Bliss Carman first appear in The Atlantic in 1916. For a more contemporary take you can read Adam Roberts' Righteous Skeptic's Guide to Reading Poetry.

Now when the time of fruit and grain is come,
When apples hang above the orchard wall,
And from a tangle by the roadside stream
A scent of wild grapes fills the racy air,
Comes Autumn with her sun-burnt caravan,
Like a long gypsy train with trappings gay
And tattered colors of the Orient,
Moving slow-footed through the dreamy hills.
The woods of Wilton, at her coming, wear
Tints of Bokhara and of Samarcand;
The maples glow with their Pompeian red,
The hickories with burnt Etruscan gold;
And while the crickets fife along her march,
Behind her banners burns the crimson sun.

(Image by Mr. dale, via Laughing Squid)

E.J. Wagner recounts the eerie Salem, Massachusetts murder that captivated the nation and likely influenced the literature of Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne:

Nobody knows if Poe followed the trial as it occurred, but by 1843, when he published “The Tell-Tale Heart,” he had clearly read about it. Poe scholar T. O. Mabbott has written that Poe relied critically on Webster’s summation in writing the story. At the trial, Webster spoke of the murderer’s “self-possession” and “utmost coolness.” The perpetrator, he added, ultimately was driven to confession because he believed the “whole world” saw the crime in his face and the fatal secret “burst forth.” Likewise, Poe’s fictional murderer boasts of “how wisely” and “with what caution” he killed an old man in his bedchamber. But the perfect crime comes undone when Poe’s murderer—convinced that the investigating police officers know his secret and are mocking him—declares, “I felt that I must scream or die!…I admit the deed!”

James Mustich interviews Greil Marcus and Sean Wilentz on their new books about Bob Dylan, released this month and last month, respectively. Here is Marcus on the majesty of Dylan's Hibbing High School, how it informed Dylan's love of learning, and meeting his former English teacher:

Think about how rare it is for anyone to encounter a teacher who can … open you up to the notion that there is an infinite amount of meaning and possibility and inspiration in the smallest thing before you.  That's what this teacher could do. That was the poetry on the walls.  Yes, there is literally poetry chiseled on the walls of Hibbing High School, from Wordsworth and any number of other people, and it's pretty great stuff. But this was a different kind of poetry.

Emily Gould excerpts Martin Amis' Experience:

Actually there’s a good reason, a structural reason, why novelists should excite corrosiveness in the press. When you review a film, or appraise a film-director, you do not make a ten-minute short about him (or her). When you write about a painter, you do not produce a sketch. When you write about a composer, you do not reach for your violin. And even when a poet is under consideration, the reviewer or profilist does not (unless deeply committed to presumption and tedium) produce a poem.

But when you write about a novelist, an exponent of prose narrative, then you write a prose narrative. And was that the extent of your hopes for your prose — bookchat, interviews, gossip? Valued reader, it is not for me to say this is envy. It is for *you* to say this is envy. And envy never comes to the ball dressed as Envy. It comes dressed as something else: Asceticism, High Standards, Common Sense. Anyway, as I said, I don’t complain about all that — because fame is so great.

Brett and Kate McKay ask whether forgiveness is manly:

Perhaps the manliest benefit of forgiveness is the way it enables you to not only free yourself from being locked inside bitterness, but how it creates a powerful legacy for those who come after you. You may come from a family where generation after generation has been hurting each other and keeping those feelings locked up, sickening the men from the inside.

Instead of making the same mistakes with your kids as your parents did with you, forgiveness says, “The buck stops here with me.” You have the courage to acknowledge and feel the pain and then to let it go instead of passing it on. You have the power to weld a new link in the chain of generations, and manliness.

This reminds me of a wonderful little treatise I just read, "On Kindness." Worth every penny.