Month: December 2011

Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 11.33 am

Benjamin J. Dueholm tried to get various friends to attend church. He failed:

[I]t may be more difficult than many of us imagine to develop a habit of churchgoing, even once a month. For most of us, church has been woven into our lives for a long time, and a week without it feels very unusual. Perhaps we’ve been faithful worshippers since we were children. I came to church in college, when it was a refreshing alternative to the social reclusiveness of the University of Chicago. We may not even remember what it was like to begin to accommodate our lives to this peculiar practice of public worship. I find it very difficult to add anything to my life, whether it’s twenty minutes of jogging a few times a week or even a new hour-long television show. Whatever else we can and should claim for church participation, it’s something for which room has to be made.

Maria Popova reviews Joanna Bourke's What It Means to Be Human: Historical Reflections from the 1800s to the Present:

[I]n The Third Chimpanzee, [Jared Diamond] wondered how the 2.9 percent genetic difference between two kids of birds or the 2.2 percent difference between two gibbons made for a different species, but the 1.6 percent difference between humans and chimpanzees makes a different genus. …

Curiously, Bourke uses the Möbius strip as the perfect metaphor for deconstructing the human vs. animal dilemma. Just as the one-sided surface of the strip has "no inside or outside; no beginning or end; no single point of entry or exit; no hierarchical ladder to clamber up or slide down," so "the boundaries of the human and the animal turn out to be as entwined and indistinguishable as the inner and outer sides of a Möbius strip."

(Video: Möbius strip II, by M.C. Escher)

A must-read from one of his closest friends, Ian McEwan. Money quote:

This was a man in constant pain. Denied drinking or eating, he sucked on tiny ice chips. Where others might have beguiled themselves with thoughts of divine purpose (why me?) and dreams of an afterlife, Christopher had all of literature. Over the three days of my final visit I took a note of his subjects. Not long after he stole my Ackroyd, he was talking to me of a Slovakian novelist; whether Dreiser in his novels about finance was a guide to the current crisis; Chesterton's Catholicism; Browning's Sonnets from the Portuguese, which I had brought for him on a previous visit; Mann's The Magic Mountain – he'd reread it for reflections on German imperial ambitions towards Turkey; and because we had started to talk about old times in Manhattan, he wanted to quote and celebrate James Fenton's A German Requiem: "How comforting it is, once or twice a year,/To get together and forget the old times."

“To the Harbormaster” by Frank O’Hara:

I wanted to be sure to reach you;
though my ship was on the way it got caught
in some moorings. I am always tying up
and then deciding to depart. In storms and
at sunset, with the metallic coils of the tide
around my fathomless arms, I am unable
to understand the forms of my vanity
or I am hard alee with my Polish rudder
in my hand and the sun sinking. To
you I offer my hull and the tattered cordage
of my will. The terrible channels where
the wind drives me against the brown lips
of the reeds are not all behind me. Yet
I trust the sanity of my vessel; and
if it sinks, it may well be in answer
to the reasoning of the eternal voices,
the waves which have kept me from reaching you.

Olivia Cole untangles the poem, about O'Hara's relationship with Larry Rivers:

Rivers’s involvement with O’Hara was against his better judgement, and in his autobiography he claims never to have had full sex with a man, a fact that partly explains the poem’s fixation with impossibility and insurmountable distance. O’Hara was a far more emotionally demanding lover than any of Rivers’s girlfriends. (As Rivers wrote of his relationships with women at the time: Q: “Sure, you like sex with me, Larry. But what are your intentions?” A: “To continue fucking you at the lowest possible price.”) 

I find O’Hara’s hopefulness one of the most comical and touching aspects of his love poems. O’Hara was a glass-half-full revisionist of reality. He could make a virtue of anything, even a row (“That’s not a cross look, it’s a sign of life”) or of being left alone (“You never come when you say you’ll come but on the other hand you do come”).

(Photo by Evan Leeson)

A viral video argues no:

Camille Chatterjee took on this question a decade ago. She argues that male-female friendship isn't just possible; it's important:

Although women dig men's lighthearted attitude, most male-female friendships resemble women's emotionally involving friendships more than they do men's activity-oriented relationships, according to Kathy Werking, at Eastern Kentucky University and author of We're Just Good Friends. Her work has shown that the number one thing male and female friends do together is talk one-on-one. Other activities they prefer—like dining out and going for drives—simply facilitate that communication. In fact, Werking found, close male-female friends are extremely emotionally supportive if they continuously examine their feelings, opinions and ideas. "Males appreciate this because it tends not to be a part of their same-sex friendships," she said. "Females appreciate garnering the male perspective."

Overheard in the kitchen of Dan Savage:

Straight person: "We're looking for a regular third—a hot, safe girl who wants to play with us as a couple. It's impossible."

Gay person: "Yup, they're hard to find. That's why straight couples in open relationships and swingers call them 'unicorns.' So hard to find they might as well be mythical."

Straight person: "What do gay couples in open relationships call guys who are willing to play with couples?"

Gay person: "Horses."

Ashley Fetters wonders:

Indiana University sex researchers Debby Herbenick and Vanessa Schick found in a recent study that nearly 60 percent of American women between 18 and 24 are sometimes or always completely bare down there, while almost half of women in the U.S. between 25 and 29 reported similar habits. Herbenick's numbers show a clear-cut trend: More women lack pubic hair than ever before. What's happening to America's vaginas? Is pubic hair going extinct?

A couple months ago Roger Friedland explored how Italians view the hair down there: 

Although waxing kits are readily available, total depilation is rare among Italian women. Men don’t like it if there is not a tuft remaining on the mons. "They would not know where to go," the Italian women joke. Likewise, hairless pre-pubescent girls are not a big segment of the Italian pornography market. Italian men, who are major consumers of porn, organize their alternative erotic reality around women, not girls.

(Photo by Sarah Friedland)

Pulling back the curtain on the medical marijuana trade:

Brian Palmer wonders if alcohol makes for a better writer:

Consider a 1992 study on alcohol and creative writing. Participants were asked to write creatively for 10 minutes, using a couple of obscure paintings for inspiration. The test group, with an average blood alcohol content of 0.09, wrote significantly more words than their sober colleagues, and a higher percentage of their sentences included figurative language and novel word combinations. The study had problems, though. Many psychologists believe that thinking you’re drunk, rather than the drunkenness itself, may increase verbosity and lower inhibitions.