Year: 2013

Jeanette Bicknell considers whether physical and moral revulsion are essentially the same:

According to [author of Don’t Look, Don’t Touch, Don’t Eat: The Science of Revulsion Valerie] Curtis, moral disgust evolved out of physical disgust and originally served the same purpose of infection avoidance. We need to interact with others, but we don’t want to risk contamination with their bodily fluids. So we work out a system of manners and rules so that we can interact without contamination. This is the beginning of morality, says Curtis. We are disgusted by social “parasites” just as we are by sources of (literal) disease and infection. Our disgust at immoral behavior makes us shun perpetrators, who in turn become ashamed and less likely to break moral rules in the future.

Psychologist Paul Rozin has defended a different view.

According to him, disgust is deeply connected with the ideas of contagion and contamination rather than with genuine sources of disease. For example, Rozin and his colleagues found that adults would not eat chocolate that had been formed into the shape of dog feces. The disgust aroused by poop was transferred onto the harmless (and delicious) chocolate. According to Rozin, the things that disgust us are not only those that might make us sick, but also those things that remind us of our animal nature. Humans eat, excrete, and copulate like other animals. Yet we are deeply uncomfortable with the idea that we are, in fact, animals, and like all other animals, we’re destined to die. Disgust functions as a “defense mechanism” to keep awareness of our animal nature and our mortality at bay. Once disgust is in place as a “guardian” of the physical body, it can be elicited not only by things that could make us ill, but by very different kinds of stimuli. Each human culture “co-opts” disgust, says Rozin, and projects the emotion onto people and behavior it considers immoral, even if they present no significant risk of disease.

Related Dish on the subject here.

Clancy Martin believes that Michael Clune has captured it in his “terrific memoir White Out“:

Any addict can give you a hundred reasons why he should quit, tell you dozens of stories that would make any other person quit. But the decision to quit and “what would make you stop” are two very different things for the addict. Here’s how Clune—now an associate professor of English at Case Western Reserve University, and “clean for over a decade”—describes one of his own attempts to kick heroin: “(a) I had made a promise to myself to quit dope, (b) it was bad for your heart to quit too abruptly, (c) my rear window was all smashed in, and (d) if I was ever going to get moving with quitting, I needed to get high right now. Right this very second.”

“Blackout” is a metaphor for the alcoholic’s relationship with alcohol; “white out,” in Clune’s memorable phrase, is the junkie’s analogous space of cognitive emptiness surrounding the question of heroin. “I sing the song because I love the man / I know that some of you don’t understand,” Neil Young sang about heroin addicts. What the non­addict doesn’t understand, perhaps cannot ever really believe, is that a sentence like “if I was ever going to get moving with quitting, I needed to get high right now” makes sense in addict-logic.

A blackout or a white out is the brain’s way of telling the drug: You win. You’ve got the wheel. Aristotle analyzed the philosophical problem of why anyone would willingly choose an action other than the good one (first posed by Plato in Protagoras) as akrasia, and we usually translate this as “weakness of will.” But what he actually argued is that akrasia is a failure in reasoning that comes from a kind of powerlessness in the brain. Clune identifies the failure more precisely: It’s a “memory disease.”

(Video: Neil Young performs “The Needle and the Damage Done”)

One hundred years ago this week, Proust published Du côté de chez Swann (Swann’s Way), the first volume of À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time). Richard Lea ruminates on what draws Proust aficionados back to the seven-volume novel again and again:

The memories that the narrator recalls over the course of seven volumes include childhood anguish in the country, an intrigue with a courtesan, a portrait of high-society entertaining, an exploration of fin de siècle gay life, a relationship doomed by jealousy and more and more and more. It’s a novel so voluminous, so capacious, so complete you can spend weeks, months or even years submerged in its crystalline waters. When you surface – gasping a little from the spectacular dénouement – you find that the world you have just left seems big enough, mighty enough to encompass the world around you, to measure up to life itself. For about a year or so after I finished Le Temps retrouvé I couldn’t read another novel without thinking Proust had written it already. It’s a universe that you are obliged to explore at the languid pace of Proust’s serpentine prose, snaking from enumeration towards explication, from description into deviation.

If you’ve attempted to crack the novel and been turned off, you’re not alone, as Adrian Tahourdin recounts:

As is well known, André Gide turned the novel down for the [literary magazine] Nouvelle Revue Française, thinking it, on the evidence of the sections he skimmed, the work of a snobbish dilettante – a decision he was to regret for the rest of his life (and a lesson to all publishers’ readers maybe); by 1918, he was writing in his Journal of “Proust’s marvellous book, which I was rereading”, almost as if in a quest for private redemption for his earlier misjudgement.

Fortunately another publisher, Bernard Grasset, stepped in. William Carter writes in his mammoth and invaluable Marcel Proust (2002) that Grasset regarded the publication of Proust’s work as a “business deal” and had tried to read it “but found it impenetrable”. He told a friend “it’s unreadable; the author paid the publishing costs”.

Colin Marshall marks the centennial by digging up a letter from a 16-year-old Proust to his grandfather, pleading for 13 francs to cover a disappointing visit to a brothel:

I so needed to see if a woman could stop my awful masturbation habit that Papa gave me 10 francs to go to a brothel. But first, in my agitation, I broke a chamber pot: 3 francs; then, still agitated, I was unable to screw. So here I am, back to square one, waiting more and more as hours pass for 10 francs to relieve myself, plus 3 francs for the pot. But I dare not ask Papa for more money so soon and so I hoped you could come to my aid in a circumstance which, as you know, is not merely exceptional but also unique. It cannot happen twice in one lifetime that a person is too flustered to screw.

Also in commemoration, The Public Domain Review has assembled a collection of works of art mentioned in Swann’s Way. Previous Dish on Proust here, here, and here.

Buzzfeed’s new books editor, Isaac Fitzgerald, made waves when he announced that the site won’t publish negative reviews:

He will follow what he calls the “Bambi Rule” (though he acknowledges the quote in fact comes from Thumper): “If you can’t say something nice, don’t say nothing at all.” … “Why waste breath talking smack about something?” he said. “You see it in so many old media-type places, the scathing takedown rip.”

Tom Scocca snarkily suggests that Fitzgerald’s background in publicity might have something to do with his editorial attitude:

Publicity is a job where you try to help people become interested in books and feel positively toward them, so that they buy books and the books’ authors feel successful and everyone enjoys things very much. In some sense, it could be argued that the publicist is the best friend that books have. Now BuzzFeed will also be a good friend to books. This is very nice news.

Eric Levenson insists that “everyone loves a good takedown,” and Paul Constant argues that “with self-publishing exploding and publishers catering to a more and more insular audience, we need negative book reviews more than ever.” Scott Lemieux finds Buzzfeed’s policy “bizarre,” writing that “opposing negative reviews as a blanket policy is just indefensible, of service to nothing but advertising revenues”:

For example, consider Dwight Garner’s review of a new book about fracking this week. It’s a fine piece of writing in itself, and for people who might consider purchasing the book the fact that it’s badly written and doesn’t make any serious effort to deal with many of the issues surrounding fracking seems worth noting. I’ve linked to it before, but consider also Ruth Franklin’s superb essay about Freedom. Again, it needs no further justification for being published than its own excellence. And beyond that, it makes valuable explicit and implicit contributions to a major ongoing debate within the culture. When critics hail the book as a masterpiece without noticing or (caring) about things like the fact that the memoir-within-the-novel written by the character we’re told again and again is a nonverbal jock is in nearly the same voice as the rest of the novel, or that the novel’s answer to the question of What Women Want is “to have sex with the thinly-veiled stand in for Jonathan Franzen,” this seems worth knowing. Particularly when one of these critics was editing the New York Times book review at the time and was facing justified criticism for gender double standards.

Maria Bustillos joins the debate, writing, “The reader who disagrees clearly and well is the greatest treasure of all. How else can we progress? What else is the point of all that hard work?”:

I find the very idea that one should “respect” the authors of books by publishing only positive reviews to be absurd. I think that, rather, the exact opposite must be true: real respect means having balls enough to publish the unvarnished results of a close reading. No adult author writes for praise alone. Surely any serious writer writes because he has an urgent message to impart, one that he hopes will be of some use to the reader. I don’t know the origin of the idea that writers are such delicate creatures, barely able to withstand public scrutiny of their genius, but it seems ever-present.

The respectful critic, then, is the critic who, to borrow [Heidi] Julavits’s phrase, “reads hard.” He brings the results of his researches, whatever they may be, to interested readers who can then take his views and use them to begin compiling their own. If we accept that the making of meaning is a collaborative process between artist and audience, then the value of honest criticism becomes immediately apparent. Dialogue is what counts: praise or blame are similarly irrelevant.