Quote For The Day

Rose

“He has spent his literary life exploring the watershed of sex from that uncharted side which goes by the name of lust and it is an epic work for any man. . . . Lust exhibits all the attributes of junk. It dominates the mind and other habits, it appropriates loyalties, generalizes character, leaches character out, rides on the fuel of almost any emotional gas — whether hatred, affection, curiosity, even the pressures of boredom — yet it is never definable because it can alter to love or be as suddenly sealed from love,” – Norman Mailer, quoted in a diverting essay by Katie Roiphe on the comparatively pallid sexuality of today's male fiction-writers.

Read the whole thing and make your own mind up. One small observation – Roiphe sees, it seems to me, what the Christianist right doesn't: that sex has fatally lost its allure of risk, adventure and revolt in today's middle class culture and has become a kind of bo-bo banality, to be viewed through the prism of knowingness and irony and indifference. Safer sex made Roth's obsessions remote – and almost admirable in their rawness and candor. 

Perhaps only one generation can experience the unqualified thrill of sexual revolt – in the window between the pill and AIDS. I remember my one long personal conversation with Mailer in Provincetown maybe fifteen years ago. He explained how he couldn't see sex with condoms as sex at all and had never used them; I explained how I had never had sex without a condom at that point in my life and could barely understand sex at all by his definition.

So sexual intercourse ended in 1983. And just too soon for me.

The Limits Of Willpower

Jonah Lehrer sketches them:

The lesson is that the prefrontal cortex can be bulked up, and that practicing mental discipline in one area, such as posture, can also make it easier to resist Christmas cookies. And when a dangerous desire starts coming on, just remember: Gritting your teeth isn't the best approach, as even the strongest mental muscles quickly get tired. Instead, find a way to look at something else.

The Quest For The Profound

Kurt Anderson profiles the Large Hadron Collider:

So many years, so much effort, so much money and matériel, so much energy and cutting-edge ingenuity. And yet the wizards at the controls aren’t really out to produce anything practical, or solve any urgent human problem. Rather, the L.H.C. is, essentially, a super-microscope that will use the largest energies ever generated to examine trillionth-of-a-millimeter bits of matter and record evanescent blinks of energy that last for only trillionths of a trillionth of a second. It’s also a kind of time machine, in the sense that it will reproduce the conditions that prevailed 14 billion years ago, giving scientists a look at the universe as it existed a trillionth of a second after the big bang. The goal—and it’s a hope, a dream, a set of strong suspicions, rather than a certainty—is to achieve a deeper, better, truer understanding of the fundamental structure and nature of existence.

In other words, it’s one of the most awesome scientific enterprises of all time, even though it looks like a monumental folly. Or else, possibly, the reverse.

The View From Your Recession: Checking Back In

Tunnel

This reader was an unemployed journalist whose wife had had an extramarital affair. Original post here. The reader writes:

Things have actually been going well here, for the most part. My wife, sadly, lost her job in early November, so it will be a slightly stingy Christmas, but I was able to take my time away from work to find something rewarding that I enjoy doing. I'm self-employed (and marginally enough that I still freak out about finding enough work every month), but we're doing all right.

And we're doing all right personally too.

The work on the marriage, which I don't know we would have undertaken had I not been unemployed, continues apace. It's definitely a merrier Christmas than last year's was, and we have enough breathing room (and enough love in our hearts, I guess) to buy each other a few small gifts. We're crawling out of two holes, very slowly and by tiny inches, but we're making it out nonetheless.

It's worth saying that the only reason we have health insurance anymore and the only reason we're afloat is because of money from the ARRA. COBRA's been much, much more affordable than it was when we looked into it the last time we switched jobs, and that's directly thanks to the passage of that bill.

Photo by Megan Scheminske.

Touching A Raw Nerve, Ctd

A reader writes:

Following Glenn's link in his post I read,

"YEAH, BUT WITHOUT ANDREW SULLIVAN’S ANTI-TORTURE BLOGGING IT WOULD HAVE BEEN 56%: 58% Favor Waterboarding of Plane Terrorist To Get Information."

And I immediately got confused.

Who cares what the favorability rating of torture is? Our laws are based upon principle not passion, it's what keeps us from taking "justice" into our own hands and devolving into a mob. It may be deemed self-righteous to write of things like principles and the rule of law, and true, your bad writing and your lack of persuasion might be junking up the internets, but at least you read like a man of conscience and not someone trying to win a fucking contest.