Month: September 2013

Anna Brooks and Ricky Van Der Zwan delve into the phenomenon of “cute aggression”:

A team from Yale University reported that viewing images of critters high in baby schema characteristics [cuteness] inspires what appears to be observer aggression. Specifically, observers were more likely to report wanting to say “grr” and squeeze the cutest of a range of different critters to which they were exposed. They were more also likely to pop bubble wrap – an indicator of aggression – when looking at them.

Despite its initial apparent contradiction with care-giving behaviors, this link to aggression has at least some intuitive appeal. Many of us have experienced the desire to almost literally squeeze the life out of something adorable, even if only as children. Those childhood desires to squeeze a kitten tightly and pluck the eyes off a teddy bear are reflected in adult language: “You’re so cute, I want to eat you all up.”

So why might cuteness elicit a combination of care-giving and aggression? The Yale researchers suggest that aggressive tendencies manifesting in response to cuteness are a type of distorted outcome of the intense emotions elicited by cute things. They speculate that frustration at not being able to satisfy the intense desire to care for the viewed object results in a type of violent response – a form of caregiving instinct gone feral.

Previous Dish on the cuteness-cruelty nexus here.

Virginia Hughes reviews the latest talk over Big Science projects like the BRAIN Initiative (explained above) and other research efforts characterized by “big budgets, big lists of participating institutions, big press coverage, and big pronouncements”:

It’s worth talking about why Big Science is popular and why it has the potential, at least, to do good. It’s hot partly because of the global economic crisis. Federal agencies (in the U.S. and many other countries) are giving out fewer and fewer grants to individual scientists. Big Science, though, is more resilient to cutbacks because its big teams can create a lobbying force, and make their pitch directly to legislators and the popular press. …

Others point out, though, that the most famous successes in Big Science — the Human Genome project, the moon landing, the Manhattan Project — were essentially engineering projects, not basic discoveries. Take the Large Hadron Collider, an enormous particle collider that the European Organization for Nuclear Research built over 10 years in order to find the elusive Higgs particle. “It tested a hypothesis rather than developing it,” Matthews writes …. “Recall that it was Peter Higgs — a single creative scientist — whose theory ‘discovered’ the Higgs boson.”

In an interview, Ursula K. Le Guin discusses what makes fiction so worthwhile:

INTERVIEWER

In Steering the Craft, you say—and you seem to be speaking as both a reader and a writer—“I want to recognize something I never saw before.”

LE GUIN

It has something to do with the very nature of fiction. That age-old question, Why don’t I just write about what’s real? A lot of twentieth-century— and twenty-first-century—American readers think that that’s all they want. They want nonfiction. They’ll say, I don’t read fiction because it isn’t real. This is incredibly naive. Fiction is something that only human beings do, and only in certain circumstances. We don’t know exactly for what purposes. But one of the things it does is lead you to recognize what you did not know before.

This is what a lot of mystical disciplines are after—simply seeing, really seeing, really being aware. Which means you’re recognizing the things around you more deeply, but they also seem new. So the seeing-as-new and recognition are really the same thing.

Joel Dinerstein describes the theories of Albert Murray, who passed away last month at the age of 97:

Albert Murray confidently theorized the two formative aesthetic elements of what W. E. B. Du Bois called “the gifts” of the slaves to American culture. First and foremost, the affirmative impulse in the groove that pulsates and rejuvenates the spirit, from ragtime to hip-hop. “Everybody profits by the affirmative outlook the slaves had on life [to survive],” he said.

Second, the quality of improvisation—the room for individuality—in each musical form, often called “the break” in jazz. This was the main thrust of artistic analysis in The Hero and the Blues: When the band drops out, the musician faces the void just as a writer faces a blank piece of paper, except in public and in real time. Right then the musician has to spontaneously compose something worthy of getting himself, the band, and the audience over to the other side. He looked up to see if I understood and then jumped through time and space back into Harlem in the 1930s to drive home his point: “every day is like either … cut your throat or be down at the Savoy [Ballroom] by 9:30.” In other words, the importance of music and dance to African Americans, and by extension to everyone willing to participate, is that musicians and dancers collaborate in this rejuvenatory ritual. Together, everyone stomps their blues away.

Two extensive profiles of Murray are here (subscription required) and here.

Daniel Rachel talks to a variety of English songwriters about their craft. Below, The Jam’s Paul Weller discusses what makes a song particularly British:

“Down in the Tube Station at Midnight” revealed your sophistication and depth as a songwriter. Can you describe the evolution of that song and your changing ability to hone in on the small and the particular?

That started as a long prose-poem thing, like a short story in a way. It came from my insecurity and paranoia at being in London. I didn’t have any music for it. I was in two minds whether to do it. I was coaxed and talked into it by Vic Smith, our producer at the time. He was saying: “This is really good, you should try and set it to music.” The attention to the details is part of the person I am anyway, but it’s also bound up in the mod ethos which is predominantly all about attention to detail. We were talking about English songwriters: it’s picking up on the mundane, the everyday things and putting them, into a different setting, the very, very ordinary feelings, emotions or details that, once in song, you hear them in a different way. Without something too poncey or pretentious I was thinking about pop artists as well, where they took the everyday objects and made them into art. I don’t think it’s that dissimilar.

What was the appeal in chronicling the mundane?

It’s a very English thing, the way we all like to moan about the weather or we like a cup of tea or a particular fucking biscuit and all that nonsense, but it’s us. It’s our identity, isn’t it?