Month: August 2011

Jesse Bering overshares:

Long before I knew very much about anything regarding sex, I did what many young males do, which of course is to place an empty paper-towel roll over my penis and suck hopefully upon the cardboard end. Okay, perhaps not everyone does this; I was a little confused about the suction principle. And now I'm a bit embarrassed by the story, although it's been a full year since the event and I'm much better informed on the subject of fellatio today. Oh, settle down, I'm only joking.

Well, kind of. I did actually attempt this feat, but I was 12 or 13 at the time, which, to give you a clearer sense of my unimpressive carnal knowledge at that age, is also around the time that I submitted to my older sister with great confidence that a "blow job" involves using one's lips to blow a cool breeze upon another's anus.

Switching gears, Bering delves into the scant scientific literature over whether autofellatio implies homosexuality:

The most recent psychiatric investigations on autofellatio date to the late 1970s (around the time that Freud's particular grip on psychiatry lost its tenuous hold), and the earlier ones to the 1930s, so as a rule the men described therein faced baseless moralistic proscriptions against homosexuality. This meant other men's penises were very hard to come by. So it's not terribly surprising that those too frightened to perform fellatio on another man would develop severe neuroses after indulging in their own penises.

Michael Weiss unloads on the British rioters:

The ostensible cause of the riots was last Thursday's shooting of Tottenham resident Mark Duggan, a 29-year-old father of four, in circumstances that the London Metropolitan Police can't seem to explain. A thorough investigation is pending. But if this is the Amadou Diallo moment for Blighty, then why are minorities and the working class the principal victims of "socially excluded" aggression?

(Photo: Floral tributes and messages are placed at the spot where a pensioner was attacked during rioting this week on August 8, and later died of his injuries, in Haven Green, Ealing on August 12, 2011 in London, England. Richard Mannington Bowes, 68, suffered head injuries in the attack as he tried to put out a fire. A 22 year old man has been arrested. After four nights of rioting in London and around Britain, a massive police operation has helped to quell the violence. By Jim Dyson/Getty Images.)

In his book Between Meals (1959), A.J. Liebling opined:

The standard of perfection for vodka (no color, no taste, no smell) was expounded to me long ago by the then Estonian consul-general in New York, and it accounts perfectly for the drink’s rising popularity with those who like their alcohol in conjunction with the reassuring tastes of infancy—tomato juice, orange juice, chicken broth. It is the ideal intoxicant for the drinker who wants no reminder of how hurt Mother would be if she knew what he was doing.

Victorino Matus traces how America went from "a brown-spirits nation" to the vodka-swilling one we find ourselves in today, with the help of Absolut advertising and product placement:

Dr. No serves Agent 007 a vodka martini, famously “shaken, not stirred,” and the vodka of preference is Smirnoff. It’s a strange way to make the cocktail, according to Jason Wilson, drinks columnist for the Washington Post: “A martini should always be stirred,” he writes. “That’s the only way you can achieve that silky smooth texture and dry martini clearness .  .  . a shaken martini is a weaker drink.” And don’t get him started on vodka substituting for gin: “There simply is no such thing as a vodka martini. The martini is certainly more of a broad concept than a specific recipe, but the one constant must be gin and vermouth. Beyond correctness, vodka and vermouth is just a terrible match.” Nevertheless, the drink caught on, and by 1967, vodka had overtaken gin as the most popular white spirit in America.

Christine Sismondo, author of America Walks into a Bar, reveals the racial intolerance behind much of the anti-alcohol movement:

Laws shutting taverns on Sunday in the 1850s are the worst example, because they targeted immigrants. Taverns were the only recreational space they had access to and Sunday was the only day they had off. But city governments, especially in Chicago, wanted to stifle the machine politics of the immigrant taverns. During Prohibition, the chasm between working-class and respectable drinking places was even clearer—the law wasn’t enforced equally. … [Prohibition detractor Clarence] Darrow pointed out that the Anti-Saloon League had racist and class motives. He defended the saloon as a gathering place for minorities and people with radical ideas. He has a great quote that not every Anti-Saloon Leaguer is a Ku Klux Klanner, but every Ku Klux Klanner is an Anti-Saloon Leaguer.

Vaughan Bell summarizes a 2005 study about the rise of different styles of psychology in different nations:

In France, a clinical method and an interest in the exceptional, perhaps pathological, individual case (the hysteric, the prodigy of memory, the double personality) was characteristic of early work. In Germany, the dominant academic interest, supported by an experimental methodology adapted from physiology, was in the conscious content of the rational adult mind. This interest interacted with philosophical questions about the foundations of knowledge. … In Russia, stark opposition between a conservative politics of the soul expressed in Orthodox belief and radical materialism led, in the Soviet period, to support for psychology as a theory of ‘higher nervous activity’, in Pavlov’s phrase, which threatened to make psychology part of physiology.

Matthew Dear – "Slowdance" by Charles Bergquist from Ghostly International on Vimeo.

April Bernard tries to tone it down:

Here’s what I hate about Writers’ Houses: the basic mistakes. That art can be understood by examining the chewed pencils of the writer. That visiting such a house can substitute for reading the work. That real estate, including our own envious attachments to houses that are better, or cuter, or more inspiring than our own, is a worthy preoccupation. That writers can or should be sanctified. That private life, even of the dead, is ours to plunder.

From the collection of Sad Etsy Dogs.