Year: 2013

Allie Brosh, author of the brilliant web-comic Hyperbole and a Half, has published her first book. In an interview, Brosh discusses her approach to comedy:

Stand-up was originally the thing that I wanted to do. I love stand-up, I watch a lot of it, I’m just very, very into stand-up. It’s always been a dream of mine to do that. I haven’t figured out how to do it in a way that I feel comfortable with. I almost think my writing and drawing is a result of my attempts to – subconscious attempts, of course – to bring the look or the feel of stand-up to this inanimate space. So there is more of facial expressions in drawings, so there is more of that sense of watching someone’s facial expressions and body language while you’re listening to them tell you jokes.

Linda Holmes applauds Brosh for writing so candidly about her ongoing battles with depression:

First-person cultural narratives about major battles are often written through the distorting haze of a long memory — that’s what David Carr was trying to counter when he investigated his own past for his memoir Night Of The Gun. But there’s no substitute, really, for the necessary honesty that comes with currency. Allie Brosh is Allie Brosh right now. You can wish her well, but she’ll tell you she’s not sure how it’s going. That’s part of why people with depression believe her. It’s part of why they trust her so much. She told The Telegraph about depression: “It’s sort of like a thing that is maybe a tunnel, but also maybe a giant tube that just keeps going in a circle. And you can’t tell which one it is while you’re in it. There might be light, but there might just be more tube.”

If you want to know how hard it is, she’s telling you that’s how hard it is. Not was, is. And as uncomfortable as that might be, it’s a perspective worth offering.

In another interview, Brosh reflects on the response she got to her posts on depression:

I got great feedback. It’s strange. People said they identified with it and related to it, and it helped them feel less alone. Depression can be an extremely isolating experience. But after I posted it and people said, “Hey, I related to this,” it did the same thing for me. [Depression] was isolating for me, but to have people saying they went through something similar was reassuring to me too… It was liberating to be able to take this thing, the worst thing that had ever happened to me, and really look at it. And look at all the absurdities of it. It just felt so freeing to really own it.

The above cartoon comes from an excerpt from her book. Previous Dish on Brosh here, here, and here.

A recent study investigated the connection between sexual feelings and synesthesia, a condition in which the perception of one sensory experience (e.g. hearing) simultaneously triggers another sensory perception (e.g. color). What the study found:

The sexual synaesthetes described different perceptual sensations for different stages of sexual activity from arousal to climax. Initial fantasy and desire triggered the colour orange for one woman. As excitement built for another participant, this went together with colours of increasing intensity. With excitement plateauing, one person described fog transformed into a wall. Orgasm was then described as the wall bursting, “ringlike structures … in bluish-violet tones.” The final so-called resolution phase was accompanied for another participant with pink and yellow. …

The survey results showed that the sexual synaesthetes scored higher than control participants for sexual desire and for altered states of consciousness during sex, including “oceanic boundlessness” (feelings of derealisation and ecstasy) and “visionary restructuaralisation” (hallucinations). Surprisingly perhaps, the synaesthetes also reported less sexual satisfaction than the controls. Their interview answers suggested this is because their synaesthetic experiences enrich their own sexual sensations but leave them feeling disconnected from their partner. It’s all very well if sex triggers your own personal light show, but if you can’t share it, well … it must be kind of isolating.

The Library of America recently published John Updike’s Collected Stories in two volumes. In a review, James Santel considers “the larger problem of John Updike: he was incapable of writing badly, but was he capable of writing, for lack of a better word, importantly?”

Having read nearly 200 of Updike’s stories in rapid succession, I’m more sympathetic to the critics’ point of view than I had been. While not willing to go as far as [Jonathan] Franzen, who argues that Updike was “wasting” his “tremendous, Nabokov-level talent,” I was surprised by how many of Updike’s stories impressed me while I read them, and how few left an impression.

One can open the Collected Stories to almost any page and find a surprising metaphor, a lovely description, or a wry morsel of irony without remembering much of anything about story that contains it. The stories that I’d already read and admired, the ones widely regarded as Updike’s best — “Pigeon Feathers,” “A Sense of Shelter,” “In Football Season,” “The Persistence of Desire,” “The Happiest I’ve Been,” and, of course, “A&P,” for decades a stalwart of high school curricula — now strike me as a largely comprehensive list, in little need of emendation in light of Updike’s larger corpus.

The curious paradox of Updike is that he made art into a craft, but only rarely did he transcend craft to achieve art. In a sense, then, the answer to [critic James] Wood’s question [“of whether beauty is enough”] is that beauty is not enough, at least not the beauty of finely tuned prose and vivid images that was Updike’s specialty. Art requires the wedding of aesthetics and morals, and the case might be made that the morals are more important; few people would call Dostoyevsky a beautiful writer, but even fewer would contest that he was a great artist.

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Readers respond to a recent post:

One thing that’s often overlooked when talking about the placebo effect is that placebos can result in physical and measurable changes. In Parkinson’s, placebo doesn’t just affect the mind; it can affect the brain itself by increasing the release of dopamine, which can lead to the improvement of motor symptoms. I work in the Parkinson’s community and there is a strong interest among people living with the disease to harness placebo as a treatment in and of itself.

Of course that comes with significant ethical issues – the purposeful deception of patients as standard care is not an easy idea to swallow. However, there is perhaps one easy way around this quandary: tell patients they’re on a placebo. A study on irritable bowel syndrome published a few years ago found an improvement in symptoms when they did just that.

Another reader:

I think that Aidan O’Donnell has a skewed perspective on the placebo effect.

Rather than being “the added satisfaction patients derive from a treatment, over and above its actual benefits,” the placebo effect is in fact the baseline benefit against which the efficacy of medical treatments are measured. It does not refer to just a “feeling” of being better. It is a measure of actually being better in the same way as that achieved via medical treatment. In other words, our bodies are capable of some degree of healing without medical intervention, and our physiological processes are affected by our psychological state.

Another:

What Dr. O’Donnell seems to be missing is the fact that what people are looking for would be unethical for doctors to provide. People aren’t just looking to feel better; modern medicine does a pretty good job of managing pain. If all people wanted was more human contact and a small boost to overall well being and happiness, they could turn to a massage or some other spa treatment. What people want is an answer to their problems. They want to someone to tell them that it will be alright and that they can be fixed, and that the fix won’t be difficult or cause them pain. And so they turn to chiropractors and acupuncturists and homeopathic doctors. Because these people will tell them that they can make it better, even when they can’t (and they never can). Their success cases depend on the human body’s own recovery and the placebo effect. Their costs are small compared to real medical care, and they do no lasting harm, and you feel better when they are done. It’s easy to get sucked in.

Real medical doctors need to tell their patients the truth, that many times things look bad, and recovery may be long and painful. That isn’t to say that they don’t make mistakes, and that there are no improvements to be made. But it’s uncertainty that people are paying to get rid of, even if it’s a pleasant lie that they are buying.