Author: Andrew Sullivan

Bob Dylan, Curator

We already introduced Dish readers to David Kinney’s new book, The Dylanologists. Chris Francescani highlights the incredible sleuthing of one superfan, a New Mexico DJ named Scott Warmuth, who has shown that Dylan’s 2004 memoir, Chronicles: Volume One, is “full of fabrication, allusion, and widespread appropriation of material from a vast and surprising spectrum of sources” – and so are many of his songs:

Dylan’s Chronicles, one of five finalists for the prestigious National Book Critics Circle Award for biography or autobiography, appears to sample everything from Ovid and Virgil to Twain, Hemingway, H.G. Wells, a March 31, 1961 issue of Time magazine, and scores of other far-flung source material—even self-help books.

Since 2003, when a Minnesota schoolteacher came across lines from Dylan’s 2001 album Love and Theft in an obscure biography of a Japanese mobster, the legendary songwriter has faced accusations of plagiarism. His subsequent album Modern Times also borrowed liberally from the work of Henry Timrod, a Civil War-era poet from Charleston, South Carolina.

But Kinney, following Warmuth, doesn’t view this as a straightforward act of plagiarism. Ian Crouch explains:

Warmuth’s reading of Dylan’s memoir has revealed that Dylan’s “appropriations were not random. They were deliberate. When Scott delved into them, he found cleverness, wordplay, jokes, and subtexts.” The thefts that Dylan made were part of the story—he had, as Kinney writes, “hidden another book between the lines.”

Kinney remarks on an especially intriguing section of “Chronicles,” in which Dylan seems to be explaining the method behind his guitar playing. Dylan writes, mysteriously, “You gain power with the least amount of effort, trust the listeners to make their own connections, and it’s very seldom that they don’t.” If this sounds inscrutable as musical technique, that’s because it is lifted from a self-help book about gaining influence over others called “The 48 Laws of Power,” by Robert Greene. This, then, is a cunning bit of dark humor: Dylan purports to explain the magic behind his music, but he’s really just revealing how susceptible devoted fans are to this kind of florid nonsense.

This unpacking of Dylan’s memoir, and the increased scrutiny given to his recent albums, is a reminder that Dylan’s work has always been spurred on by his own fannish, idiosyncratic obsessions. Michael Gray, who has written extensively about Dylan’s songwriting, tells Kinney, “You want him to be this lone genius who came from another planet. He never pretended to be. He’s created something out of something else.” Dylan’s earliest songs borrowed chords and lyrics from traditional folk songs; he has lifted lines and licks from the blues; he has repurposed and reassembled the Bible, press clippings, English poetry, the American songbook, and a half century of cultural comings and goings to create a kind of ongoing, evolving musical collage. Dylan is an archivist and a librarian in addition to being an artist.

For more, check out Popova’s selection from a 1991 interview with Dylan about songwriting here.

Time To Punish Maduro?

José R. Cárdenas wants sanctions against Venezuelan officials involved in human rights abuses:

By its own admission, the [Obama] administration believes that if it acts unilaterally in Venezuela, it would “bilateralize” the conflict; that is, it would give the Venezuelan government a new drum to bang in its ongoing cacophony of anti-American rhetoric, thus diverting attention away from the protestors’ grievances. That, however, is giving credence to a problem that doesn’t exist. The view that sanctioning human rights observers will somehow make Venezuelans think any less of skyrocketing inflation, rampant street crime, and shortages of everything from electricity to basic consumer goods is as divorced from reality as is the Venezuelan government’s belief it can beat its people into continued submission.  …

As the saying goes, when you exhaust all your other options, you may as well do the right thing. The crisis in Venezuela has churned for four months now because the government hasn’t had to face any costs for its truculent behavior. The Obama administration has an opportunity to change that equation through the principled application of sanctions against behavior no one who wants what is best for the Americas should accept.

The State Department appears to have backed down from its opposition to a bill that would do just that:

“I’m not saying that the State Department loves it,” Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, the Miami congresswoman who introduced the bill, said on Tuesday. “But this time they’re not actively against it. …

Ros-Lehtinen’s bill, which would freeze assets and ban entry to the U.S. for people found guilty of human rights abuses against Venezuelan protesters, passed the House Foreign Affairs Committee earlier this month despite a campaign by the State Department to pause the bill and its counterpart in the Senate. Ros-Lehtinen hopes to pass it by a voice vote on Wednesday.

Roberta Jacobson, the State Department’s assistant secretary of state for western hemisphere affairs, had argued that the Venezuelan opposition had said they were against the bill — something Venezuela’s opposition coalition, known as MUD, later denied. The opposition has engaged in talks with the government aimed at resolving months of political unrest that have resulted in the deaths of more than 40 people.

David Noriega compares South Florida’s pro-sanctions Venezuelan-American community to the Cubans of Miami, who have spend decades lobbying for tougher anti-Castro policies:

There were about 250,000 Venezuelans living in the United States in 2012, according to census data, of which almost 65,000 are American citizens. But what defines the population is not its size but its political cohesion: The vast majority of Venezuelan immigrants have arrived in one way or another as a consequence of the rise to power of Hugo Chávez, whose regime was marked by aggressive wealth redistribution, expropriations of private enterprise, and other measures that negatively impacted the wealthier sectors of Venezuelan society.

“Compared to, say, Mexicans or Dominicans or other Latino populations, these are almost exclusively people from the middle class and upper middle class,” said David Smilde, a senior fellow and Venezuela expert at the Washington Office on Latin America and a professor at the University of Georgia. “This is a diaspora of people who are very anti-Chávez and now anti-Maduro, whose interests have been touched upon, who fear the rise of a dictatorship, or who have been victims of some kind of political persecution.”

Update from a reader:

I think that American sanctions against Venezuela would be a horrible, terrible, very bad, not good idea, and a godsend gift to President Maduro. Let me explain.

I am originally from Latin America. Even though it is hard to believe for people outside of it, much of the Latin American Left still believes that Cuba is the worker’s paradise. Whenever some rational person points out the poverty that Cubans live in today, the immediate answer is “American Sanctions!” The sanctions have became a magical trick that the Latin American Left can use to explain anything that it is wrong with Cuba.

The exact same thing will happen in Venezuela. Forget the fact that the economic difficulties have been going on for quite some time: the second that the United States imposes sanctions, the Left will immediately start blaming the sanctions for the Venezuelan economic hardships. In fact, it will feed the old Latin America mystique, that some brave leaders like Fidel and Chavez (and, by extension, Maduro) had risen to fight for the poor people in Latin America against the American imperialists. That way, sanctions would actually give credence to Maduro: he can turn to the protesters and say “You are either with Venezuela (and me) or with the American imperialists”.

What is currently happening in Venezuela is gut wrenching. Our natural impulses are to do something about it. But, please, the best thing America can do for Venezuela is to stay as far away as it can.

Art In The Age Of Mechanical Reproduction

Kalliopi Monoyios is an illustrator who bristles at questions about how much of her work is digital. She ponders perceptions of machine-aided art:

[I]f a machine could draw on its own, would it be able to produce images that move us in the same way that images made by a thinking, feeling human do? It would seem that a fair number of people hold the view that art produced by a machine could never hold a candle to “hand-drawn” images, despite their being enamored with animated films and hyper-realistic video games. In the same way that love still feels real and powerful and fraught with meaning even with the knowledge that it is, at its core, just a chain of chemical reactions, a drawing rendered by a machine can stir something deeply human even if you are aware of its mechanical origin.

She goes on to point to illustrations produced by Iron Genie (seen above), a harmonograph constructed by the artist Anita Chowdry:

Why was Chowdry, who clearly has the skills to create delicate and elaborate drawings with her own two hands, compelled to make an instrument to draw for her?

While it’s amusing to think she might have burned out on creating herintricate and exacting rosettes, the reality is quite different. In her own words,

The immediate appeal of the Harmonograph to me is that you can witness the unfolding of natural dynamic geometries that have always existed independently of our aesthetic sensibilities. We cannot draw them ourselves without the aid of mechanical devices. They have existed long before we discovered them, before we even began to understand the physics that drives them, before we had the language to define them in mathematical terms.

They are a part of the dynamics of the universe – they have existed long before us, and perhaps that is why we find it so hypnotic to watch the drawings unfold before our eyes as the swinging pendulums drive the movements of the pen and paper… in our own slick, virtual, digital age in which we feel less and less in control, a venerable analogue machine with simple workings that we can see, understand, and touch, offers a reassuring physicality.

Loose List Sinks Spook

Over the weekend, the White House accidentally let slip the name of the CIA’s top official in Afghanistan in a list e-mailed to news organizations:

The White House recognized the mistake and quickly issued a revised list that did not include the individual, who had been identified on the initial release as the “Chief of Station” in Kabul, a designation used by the CIA for its highest-ranking spy in a country.

The disclosure marked a rare instance in which a CIA officer working overseas had his cover — the secrecy meant to protect his actual identity — pierced by his own government. The only other recent case came under significantly different circumstances, when former CIA operative Valerie Plame was exposed as officials of the George W. Bush administration sought to discredit her husband, a former ambassador and fierce critic of the decision to invade Iraq.

Jonathan Tobin expresses outrage, decrying what he sees as a partisan double standard:

Let’s remember that what occurred this past week was far worse than anything that happened to Plame. Plame was, after all, serving in an office in Virginia and, while classified, was no secret. By contrast, the CIA station chief whose name was released is in peril every day in Kabul. He is serving on the front lines of a shooting war and the release of his name in this indiscriminate manner may well have compromised his effectiveness if not his safety.

The White House has, in fact, ordered an investigation. And Ambinder counters that, while the Plame leak compromised a number of vital intelligence operations, this one has less dangerous implications:

Station chiefs of major CIA stations are generally known, at least by name, often by sight, to rival intelligence agencies almost from the get-go. Certainly, the station chief, in working with a number of different agencies in Afghanistan, would have to accept that his degree of freedom to control his cover is probably tiny at this point. When the CIA appoints chiefs of stations, the agency generally understands and accepts the risk that the identity, and perhaps the person’s cover history, might be exposed. Occasionally, this can lead to compromised operations, although generally, enough time has elapsed between these officers having actively run agents and operations (as opposed to having managed them) that the risk is — again, to the use the word — acceptable. The more dangerous consequence is not so much that rival spooks figure out the name of the CIA’s man or woman in a certain country. It’s that the country or targeted entity can use this information to pin a target on the person’s back, which is exactly what elements of the Pakistani government did during a dispute about drones and intelligence-sharing a few years back.

Meanwhile, Jack Goldsmith finds it odd that the press has so far been scrupulous about not printing the station chief’s name, but is happy to publish classified information about intelligence and surveillance methods:

I believe the answer is that journalists still tell themselves that they will not publish a secret that, as Bart Gellman put it in a 2003 lecture (not on-line), “puts lives at concrete and immediate risk.”  And publishing the name of a covert operative may appear to put a life at concrete and immediate risk more obviously than publication of a method of infiltrating a communications system.  It is interesting that Gellman – who represents mainstream elite journalistic opinion on this matter – included in his 2003 list of too-risky disclosures not just the “names of clandestine agents,” but also “technical details that would enable defeat of U.S. weapons or defenses.”  I think it is fair to say that eleven years later, and post-Snowden, technical details concerning communications intelligence operations related to U.S. weapons or defenses are no longer considered remotely unpublishable.  I expect that journalists today would argue that such disclosures do not put lives at concrete and immediate risk. …

Let us concede for purposes of argument that Snowden-like revelations do not cause concrete and immediate risk to lives.  The real question is: Why privilege “concrete and immediate risk” to lives over diffuse and indirect risk to lives?  The harms to lives from disclosing communications secrets are harder to see because they are usually diffuse and probabilistic rather than concrete and immediate.  But they are no less real.

Scapegoating Sugar?

David Despain criticizes the new Katie Couric-narrated documentary about youth obesity, Fed Up, for its single-minded focus on added sugar, while largely ignoring other factors, such as exercise:

While added sugars are a significant part of the problem because they are widely used to make food appetizing, they are far from the whole problem, says Dr. David Katz, director of Yale University’s Prevention Research Center and listed as a member of the scientific advisory board for Fed Up. “In terms of overall health outcomes, the evidence overwhelmingly indicates the conjoined importance of what we do with our forks and what we do with our feet,” he says.

If Dr. Katz is straightforward in his criticism, he is joined by many other nutrition experts and organizations who have taken a harder line against the film. Angela Lemond, a registered dietitian nutritionist and AND spokesperson, says that the film’s minimizing of the benefits of exercise is “truly unfortunate” and “irresponsible,” noting that sugar is a quickly absorbed source of carbohydrate that is crucial for exercise performance. Moreover, the film’s focus on sugar as a major factor in contributing to obesity is a “biased view” not shared by the majority of objective scientists, says James O. Hill, a professor of pediatrics and medicine at the University of Colorado, Denver and an ASN spokesperson. “Research is clear now that adding sugar to a diet and taking away the same number of calories does not cause weight gain or any other of the outcomes attributed to sugar in this film,” Hill says.

Michael O’Sullivan finds that the film could have done more to address a deeper issue at work, noting that federally mandated nutrition labels don’t include the “daily value” percentage for sugar:

[T]he real problem isn’t sugar, but sugar education. If consumers only knew that the stuff is not just addictive, but poisonous — one of the film’s experts calls it a “chronic, dose-dependent” liver toxin — they might make better choices at the checkout counter. Unfortunately, “Fed Up” doesn’t seem to recognize the problem of food deserts, which can hamstring even the best-intentioned efforts to teach people how to eat right. (For an exposé of the food desert phenomenon, in which many communities simply don’t have options other than buying processed foods, I strongly recommend the 2012 documentary “A Place at the Table.”)

Celebrities appearing in “Fed Up” include former president Bill Clinton and former FDA commissioner David A. Kessler, both of whom bemoan the lack of government foresight on obesity and diabetes. (Opponents of so-called nanny state efforts to regulate, say, soft drink size are given short shrift.) But it’s author-activist Michael Pollan who delivers the film’s most succinct message when he says that the single best way to improve one’s diet is simply to cook what you eat. And no, that doesn’t mean microwaving a Hot Pocket.

Paula Forbes faults the documentary for ignoring economic inequality’s role in making Pollan’s suggestion difficult to put into practice:

In fact, it is on this point that the film stumbles into blitheness. Michael Pollan at one point states home cooking can be cheaper than fast food as well as being healthy. This he holds, uncontested in the film, as proof that all we need to do is cook ourselves. But he misses the point.

It’s not just about money, it’s about time. The US Congress just defeated a bill that would raise the minimum wage to $10.10. This means the federally mandated minimum wage remains $7.25. (And guess who lobbied against the increase?) Who is going to crisp that kale, who will visit the neighborhood farmers market — which Pollan suggests is a panacea — that will magically appear in the food deserts of New York and Newark and in the poor precincts of Baltimore not to mention Tuscaloosa and Kokomo, if you’re working 70 hours a week to make ends meet?

News To Befuddle Larry Kramer

From Vancouver:

The dedicated HIV/AIDS ward at St. Paul’s Hospital has closed due to a lack of patients.

“It was not that long ago that HIV/AIDS was a death sentence and those who came to this ward at St. Paul’s were here to die,” said Dr. Julio Montaner, director for the BC Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS. “Today, ward 10C will provide treatment, support and care for those living with HIV-related issues. We have worked hard to make this day happen and I commend everyone who has supported our efforts.”

Guys Fake It Too, Ctd

Readers keep the emails, er, coming:

In the film 3, there’s a funny scene of a guy spitting into a condom when his girlfriend goes to the bathroom.

Another:

I’m a gay man and I’ve faked it with one new partner a couple month ago.  We had been corresponding online and after proper testing and planning we decided to meet in Vegas.   He wanted to have condom-less sex and I was excited to have my first try at it.  But the hot online affair failed to ignite the proper passion for some reason.  Sex was mechanical and uninspiring, and his pleas for me to ejaculate inside him soon became a turn off.  At one point it seemed we were both waiting for the other to climax and get it over with.

So, I faked it.

I acted out the proper movements and vocalizations and ended it, collapsing to his side in the typical male exhausted post coital disengagement.   I don’t recall if he came or not, and till today I don’t know if he bought it.  I hoped the copious amount of cheap lube we used masked my missing contribution. What’s worse, this repeated two more times over that odd Vegas weekend.

I never got to have my first full bareback experience. And frankly, I can’t tell if the root cause was my anxiety over unprotected sex, or if I should chalk it up to simple sexual mismatch.    I thought he was a handsome and very nice guy, and we had fun in all our other Vegas activities.  The chemistry was somehow lacking between us.

A female reader shifts the gender focus:

First of all, kudos for running a blog that makes me comment on things I had no idea I would be commenting on. Even anonymously. And if you ever have that discussion about opening up a comment section again, please count this email as a solid NO because I wouldn’t be writing in about things like abortion and orgasms in an open comment section because … well, I’m a woman who grew up on the Internet and I’ve sadly learned to think twice about clicking on the Post button.

Moving on to the 50-year-old lady who doesn’t orgasm: That could be me writing in, twenty years in the future.

I like sex. With men. I have orgasms. I simply don’t experience them all at the same time. I started having orgasms early, by accident, when I was around 11 years old or so and a very active imagination soon helped me … broaden my horizons, shall we say? I have absolutely no problems having orgasms by myself but I’ve faked it with everyone I’ve ever slept with. There’s just too much going on in my head when there’s another person involved for some reason. Maybe it’s a control thing? I don’t know. I just can’t find the “release” button, so to speak, when I’m sharing the bed with someone else.

None of the other women I know seem to have this problem. However, considering how I don’t mention it myself, maybe we’re all a bunch of liars just maintaining the status quo.

The reason why I don’t say anything is because I’m hoping to change it. I still think the problem might be psychological rather than physical and I would like to experience a “traditional orgasm” someday. Although now that I think about it, after reading my fellow reader’s email, I don’t really know why I’m so invested in fitting in. I don’t think the sex I’ve had is unfulfilling. It was great sex. I got off thinking about it later on, haha!

Another tosses something out there:

You really want to get people talking? Start a thread about people who come too fast instead of not at all.

Another can attest:

I’ve faked orgasm many a time, but most of the responses you’ve posted so far involve guys who have trouble achieving orgasm. Maybe it’s my uncircumcised status (Sully Bait), but I have the exact opposite malady with the exact same remedy.  When I fake, it’s because a) I’ve cum embarrassingly early and I need to save face, b) she’s seems ready to orgasm within the next minute or two but I can’t wait that long, or, much more rarely, c) I’ve been drinking and I have a similar problem to your other respondents.

In the case of a) and b), it involves not only the fake orgasm, but the fake non-orgasm.  The latter is a good deal trickier.

I’ve always wondered whether other guys do this.  Maybe it’s because I’m not browsing the right forums, but I’ve never seen an online discussion on the subject before.

Creepy Ad Watch

mexico-city-breastfeeding-hed-2014

Rebecca Cullers frowns:

Activists and health advocates are rightly upset over this poorly executed campaign to get Mexico City mothers to breastfeed. It shows topless celebrities with a carefully placed banner running right over their breasts that says, “No les des la espalda, dale pecho,” which translates to, “Don’t turn your back on them, give them your breast.”

The first problem is how overtly sexualized the women are. The act of breastfeeding is not a sexual act. It vacillates between being painful, annoying, exhausting, inconvenient and heartrendingly sublime. The sexualization of breastfeeding is a large part of the reason so many people shame mothers for breastfeeding in public, and a factor in low breastfeeding rates. (This campaign by two students nicely illustrates this part of the problem.)

Update from a reader:

I think something may be getting lost in translation.

The problem the Mexican advocates have with this campaign is that it seems to blame mothers, suggesting that not breastfeeding is “turning your back” on your child.  Mexico has very low rates for exclusive breastfeeding, but that is because most women breastfeed and supplement with formula (about 94% of babies in Mexico are breastfed, compared to 77% in the US).  Part of that is because many Mexican women see formula as offering something extra to the baby (it is scientifically formulated!), so in that sense having celebrities advocating nursing might make sense. (One of the most effective pro-breastfeeding campaigns in the ’80s featured then telenovela queen Veronica Castro.)

However, the thing that started the controversy with this campaign was that the creator stated that this campaign is targeting women who do not breastfeed because they want to maintain their figure. That is such an ignorant and ridiculous take on the true barriers for breastfeeding mother in Mexico I don’t even know where to start taking it apart. But the complaints are not about the pictures sexualizing breastfeeding. As a foreigner, it seems to me that seeing these ads as sexualizing breastfeeding says more about American hang-ups with bare breasts than about anything else. I’ve never heard of a woman being asked to breastfeed in a restaurant’s restroom in Mexico, for example.

The Evolution Of Marriage

A piece predicting the state of marriage in the foreseeable future sent a shiver up Rod Dreher’s leg yesterday. The gist of the piece?

[T]he future of marriage … may turn out to be a lot like the Christian Right’s nightmare: a sex-positive, body-affirming compact between two adults that allows for a wide range of intimate and emotional experience. Maybe no one will be the “husband” (as in, animal husbandry) and no one the chattel.  Maybe instead of jealousy, non-monogamous couples will cultivate “compersion” to take pleasure in their partners’ sexual delight.

Well, you learn a new word every day. Rod runs with this notion and focuses on the fate of children:

If marriage as an institution is culturally redefined entirely to suit the desires of adults, and that is considered a virtue — as Jay Michaelson hopes for — then the children raised in a society like that lose out.

Rod rightly doesn’t blame marriage equality for this, but rather sees marriage equality as a product of this shift. And, look, in so far as marriage is about raising kids, then the potency and importance of monogamy is a point well-taken. But I tend to think the worries are overblown. I very much doubt that parents of toddlers will be engaging in compersion any time soon – not least because they’re always so fricking tired. Maybe gay dads might be tempted to have a few discreet and consensual dalliances, but my own sense is that the act of parenting tends to make them more like straight couples than other gay ones. In fact, I’d argue that the differences between gay and straight marriages are minor compared with the differences between marriages with kids and marriages without them. A new study just shed a little light on that:

Research has shown that a new mother’s brain activity changes after having a baby. Turns out, gay men’s pattern of brain activity also adapts to parenthood, and resembles that of both new moms and new dads, in findings published Monday.

As for childless couples, my own view is that we should chill out on their sexual lives. Most straight ones will be largely monogamous, most lesbian ones super-monogamous, and gay male couples will negotiate their own paths – but the point is that each will find their own equilibrium. On that possibility, Rod intones:

You can have freedom, or you can have stability, but you can’t have both.

I think that’s way too crude a formulation. The question is not a totalist either/or for anyone. It’s a question of balance between the two. Married mothers balance children and economic freedom all the time – and many find a compromise that works, which is why divorce rates have declined. It may also be that for gay male couples, total monogamy may lead to less stability, not more. Men are men, after all, and any honest assessment of marital history would record plenty of extra-marital sex by the husbands. With two men in a marriage, rigid monogamy over a lifetime might therefore actually destabilize the union. With two women, monogamy may be easier, and child-rearing more obvious a priority. The point in all these relationships is not, it seems to me, to support a single rule of “stability” over “freedom”, but to find a sustainable balance between the two in the modern world, and to take the best care of children as possible. How they do that is best left for the couples to decide, in private, because every couple is different. But the best compromises lead to the best marriages.

Perhaps that’s why bringing ideology into the question marriage can be so fruitless. We’re all humans, living in a much different world than humans have been used to for the vast majority of our time on the planet. And in those circumstances, best to let the couples adapt, as best they can, as the institution evolves, as it must and as it always has, to meet the needs of adults and children.

I have confidence in that human evolution, which is why I am not a theocon. I am a conservative.