Sex In Literature

Lee Rourke doesn’t approve:

Sex does not belong on the page, not the type of sex scene we read in contemporary literary fiction anyway; for me, when I encounter it there, in countless modern lifestyle novels, it is a form of nothingness, hanging on the page, dislocated from the rest of the book.

When novelists try to make their sex scenes literary, when they try to orchestrate each moan and groan into the book, wasting all that time trying to create the perfect scene, trying to make it seem believable, they fail miserably. The literary approach to writing a decent, believable sex scene is the most embarrassing thing about contemporary literary fiction today.

Just do it.

Thinking, Re-Thinking Iraq, Ctd.

A reader writes:

I have come to view the Iraq occupation in terms of post Civil-War Reconstruction.

When the North ended its occupation of the former Confederacy, it arguably left something as bad as–or possibly worse than–the slavery it had deposed in the Civil War…the Jim Crow South. Possibly worse because it was built on a lie, the political lie that the black man was free and equal to his former white masters, while slavery was at least open and honest about the status of the black in society.

The North could have stayed until the South was ready to really live up to the words of the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments … but that might have taken most of a century to achieve, a century in which the natives of the old Confederacy would have festered a deep resentment of their occupiers, as any occupied people will–while the North grew to resent the money and manpower required to control a restive South.

I think the analogy to Iraq is clear. Staying or going  is harmful to the US as a nation. The question is which is worse. I think staying is worse, because it gives no chance for the people of Iraq to work out their own solutions.

Creating An Electronic Brain

As fascinating as it is, in many ways, disturbing:

After only a few electrical jolts, the artificial neural circuit began to act just like a real neural circuit. Clusters of connected neurons began to fire in close synchrony: the cells were wiring themselves together. Different cell types obeyed their genetic instructions. The scientists could see the cellular looms flash and then fade as the cells wove themselves into meaningful patterns. Dendrites reached out to each other, like branches looking for light. "This all happened on its own," Markram says. "It was entirely spontaneous." For the Blue Brain team, it was a thrilling breakthrough. After years of hard work, they were finally able to watch their make-believe brain develop, synapse by synapse. The microchips were turning themselves into a mind.

Hat tip: Mind Hacks.

Quote For The Day II

"I don’t know there was much she did apart from accompanying Bill [Clinton] going around. She visited when things were happening, saw what was going on, she can certainly say it was part of her experience. I don’t want to rain on the thing for her but being a cheerleader for something is slightly different from being a principal player," – David Trimble, former First Minister of Northern Ireland on Hillary Clinton’s absurd lie that she "helped bring peace to Northern Ireland."

Washington Moment

I was lucky enough to be invited to an off-the-record dinner with the king and queen of Jordan last week. Under the rules, I can’t say anything they said, but I did have a rare laugh. I was seated next to Eugene Robinson of the Washington Post who was impressed, as anyone would be, with the beauty of one of his hosts.

"I’ve never seen a queen with muscle tone like that," he whispered over the starter.

He’s clearly never been to my gym.