Andrew Brown asked the rockstar and writer Patti Smith what makes music sacred:
[S]he replied that it was an entirely subjective process, and for her encompassed everything from a song her mother had sung to Jimi Hendrix singing “Are you experienced” and the noise of the swifts wheeling above the courtyard of her hotel. Her signature tune, Van Morrison’s Gloria, is a song about a girl that she sings as if it were about the glory of God, and incorporates the wonderful chilling howl: “Jesus died for somebody’s sins, but not mine”…
She talks a great deal about prayer, and about spirituality. But although I am sure I have read an interview in which she described herself as Christian once, what really sets her against conventional Christianity is not just her trampling blasphemy, but the optimism and democracy of her views and her cheerful pantheism. … When she’s playing it is only the power of her feelings that comes across. The context is so determinedly one of passionate transcendence that nothing else matters.
Recently, Maria Popova highlighted “Remembering Robert,” a spiritually-inflected poem from Smith’s collection, The Coral Sea, written in the aftermath of photographer Robert Maplethorpe’s death. It begins this way:
Blessedness is within us all
It lies upon the long scaffold
Patrols the vaporous hall
In our pursuits, though still, we venture forth
Hoping to grasp a handful of cloud and return
Unscathed, cloud in hand. We encounter
Space, fist, violin, or this — an immaculate face
Of a boy, somewhat wild, smiling in the sun.
He raises his hand, as if in carefree salute
Shading eyes that contain the thread of God…
Read the rest, and listen to a recording of Smith reciting the poem, here.
Danielle King profiles “Frank,” a successful pot dealer in Florida, and wonders what will happen to him and his ilk as acceptance of cannabis spreads:
The statewide legalization now playing out in Colorado and Washington will present us with a fascinating case study, though it’s hard to tell how quickly or effectively this will scale to the rest of the country. Even if they’re not much on voters’ minds, it’s worth asking what decriminalization would do to reliable suppliers. What will become of the Franks of the world when they have to compete with folks who have business licenses and pay income taxes?
Though Frank has legions of loyal buyers, there’s a lot of vulnerability in his model. One day in the future, federal lawmakers and their state-level counterparts will vote to make smoking weed legal. Soon after comes the legalization (and aggressive regulation) of the sale of cannabis. …
What if government pot smokes the way that “government cheese” tastes?
Might we be required to present our driver’s licenses to purchase tightly restrained amounts of shake weed at higher prices to cover the sales tax? Given our track record with cigarettes and alcohol, and the way control over those markets is exerted by the Big Three tobacco companies or the Anheuser-Busch conglomerate, there’s a clear potential for monopolization. The enterprising, shirtless, teenaged stoner dealer only a text away could disappear entirely. And what then will happen to the culture of weed smoking, as it evolves from something wholly outside the law into something available at your local gas station?
But whether it’s bravado, experience, or the combination of the two, Frank isn’t worried: “Well, I guess it would kill a lot of the fun in getting a buzz if you could just buy it at a store. There’s something cool about your first pickup, meeting a guy in a parking lot and having him jump in your backseat. I don’t think I’m too worried, though. Good business won’t get run out by new business. You’re only in trouble if the new guy is better than you. And there’s not really a lot of business, at least here, that’s better than me. That’s not arrogance, it’s just the truth.”
Richard J. Williams suspects that architects have underestimated a key component of human nature:
It’s odd how little architects have had to say on the subject of sex. If they’re routinely designing the buildings in which sex happens, then you might expect them to spend more time thinking about it. Buildings frame and house our sexual lives. They tell us where and when we can, and cannot, have sex, and with whom. To escape buildings for sex — to use a park, a beach, or the back seat of a car — is a transgression of one kind or another. Most of us keep sex indoors and out of sight. …
According to [sex therapist Esther] Perel, sex wastes time, needs space, and (most intriguingly) is inhibited by too much intimacy. All these things have implications for architecture, which in the West has been coloured by the language of efficiency for at least a century.
His proposal?
For me, the ideal would be some form of co-housing, the best-known example being Sættedammen in Denmark, established in 1972 (with the founding creed: ‘Children should have 100 parents’). It occupies the right space between the wilder forms of intentional community, and market-dominated individualism. It doesn’t explicitly challenge sexual norms. However, by providing shared facilities (childcare, gyms, swimming pools, saunas, rooms for parties), it provides time and space to play, and addresses the deficits that Esther Perel identified as inhibiting our sexual lives (sex loves to waste time, remember).
But I’d add some sort of therapeutic role, too. If we were to live more communally, we would need help to resolve inevitable interpersonal conflicts. The odd thing is that we already strongly value co-housing, albeit in an occasional and time-limited form. University students live like this, and we do the same thing on holiday; both forms seem to provide a better emotional environment in which to explore and develop primary relationships — including sexual ones. If we can accept such communal living for some of our lives, why not the rest of the time? Then we might have an architecture that actually supports, rather than impedes, our sexual lives.
Fifty years after her suicide, Terry Castle reflects on the enduring controversies surrounding the life, death, and work of Sylvia Plath:
What to make of it all after half a century? From one angle Plath had only herself to blame for the rhetorical excess she provoked—and still does provoke—in readers. She was crazy, after all. Even fifty years on, the gruesome mental suffering that she wrote about continues to pierce and frighten and exasperate.
In her defense: Plath used the pain as best she could. Though attempts over the decades to see her as a protofeminist oracle fail to convince, it has to be said that Plath’s writing captured the central and most disturbing psychic component in the lives of conventional middle-class American heterosexual women of the 1950s and early 1960s: a toxic, typically unconscious longing—sadomasochistic in structure—to be both adored and degraded, cherished and abjected, by a powerful man resembling one’s father. The fantasy contaminates (and sickens) any number of now-canonical Plath poems:
“Electra on the Azalea Path,” “Two Views of a Cadaver Room,” “Medusa,” “Cut,” “Daddy,” “The Jailer,” “Lady Lazarus”—all those kitsch near-masterpieces that make the poet a sensation still (sometimes) among bulimic female undergraduates. Plath exposed, as no one had before, the quintessential “nice girl” sex-anguish of her time: a mode of female desiring as incoherent, narcissistic, passive-aggressive, and self-canceling as it was misogynistic, daddy-obsessed, and morbidly heterosexual.
But one shrinks at the ugliness and hysteria of the vision. Most off-putting, to my mind, is the way Plath made a repugnant and meticulously curated longing for death feel sexy and sublime. At least, that is, for a minute or two. Like Sylvia and Ted [Hughes] colliding at St. Botolph’s, Eros and Thanatos not only lock eyes in Plath’s poems, they’re already so far gone—so mad and humpy with crazy love—that we know they’ll end up killing each other. One doesn’t wish to remain too long in close proximity.
Daniel Lende searches for a middle ground on neuroscience amidst a mounting backlash against the field. He tries to streamline current controversies by citing Professor Nikolas Rose, seen above:
One tension highlighted by Rose is whether the “psy complex” (the fields from the 20th century focused on psychology and mind) will be overtaken by a “neuro complex” in the 21st century. In one sense, that’s what the big fight going on right now is about. Will the autonomous self, with self-control and rationality and an accompanying unconscious, be replaced by a reductive brain? How will one century’s core understanding give way to a new type of materialism, united around ideas of circuits, whether those are neural or technological?
We like to think that our thoughts are inside. We reveal them to others by making them external in the form of action, words, writings, messages and the like. That’s all well and good for describing ordinary life. We can keep secrets. We can publicize our deepest yearnings. But actually, there is no inside. Or rather, use any device you like — from the scalpel to the brain scan — and you won’t find meaning, significance, value, in the head, just as you won’t find value in the coin’s material body. The very inside/outside distinction breaks down.
Lende asks, “Does this mean that, as Marshall McLuhan famously said, the medium is the message? That the circuit is the mind?”:
In my research, that conflict can boil down to whether addiction is primarily a brain problem or a societal problem. And yet all my years of work have convinced me time and again that addiction is both. And that’s the rub. If we take Noe seriously, and we break down the inside/outside distinction, then how do we still make sense of addiction? … One idea is to break the fundamental linkage of mind as defining person, this legacy of the 20th century. Addiction is not defined by the person, and thus the mind (and from there, now, thus the brain). Rather, addiction is a pattern of activity where brain and society meet, and relies on both at once. …
[F]or neuroscience, the funny thing is how much they’ve bought into the “psy complex.” Use the brain to explain the mind, and you’ve found the holy grail. But that’s last century’s holy grail. The middle ground isn’t the mind, whether explained by brain or by society. The middle ground is simply where we live our lives.
Previous Dish on the subject here, here, and here.
The LARBcontinues its series on fairy tales, introducing Hans Christian Andersen’s 1836 story The Little Mermaid. Sarah Kuhn defends her motivations:
The Little Mermaid, no matter how her tale is told, is a heroine with the ultimate mundane dream: to be a boring human instead of the utterly fantastical creature she already is. She gets a lot of flack for transforming her body to pursue what is basically a crush, but I can’t help but feel her quest is bigger than that — a yearning for an unknown that seems fantastical to her because it’s the complete opposite of her daily existence.
A. N. Devers prefers the conclusion of Andersen’s original story – the mermaid dissolving into “a daughter of the air” – to the Disney-fied ending of the 1989 movie:
Andersen’s heroine may lose her soul, but Disney’s mermaid sacrifices her physical identity in order to claim her man. There’s no question that around the time this film came out there was a cultural shift. Is it a coincidence that the media started reporting stories about teens requesting boob jobs and liposuction for their birthdays around the same time as this film’s release? Maybe. Or more likely, Disney’s fairy tale reflected the contemporary culture that had already made a disturbing change. …
I wonder what the tale might look like decades from now, when it is adapted to reflect a new cultural moment. Instead of validating stereotypical gender roles and/or reflecting our culture’s acceptance and near-celebration of plastic surgery, I like to dream there will be a little mermaid who can have her man and keep her tail too.
Assessing Paris France, Adam Gopnik describes Gertrude Stein’s “marked” writing style:
All marked styles—and any style that isn’t marked isn’t a style; what we call a “mannered” style is simply a marked style on a bad morning—hold their authors hostage just a bit. Stein’s style makes subtle thoughts sound flat and straightforward, and it also lets straightforward, flat thoughts sound subtle. Above all, its lack of the ordinary half-tints and protective shadings of adjectives and semicolons—the Jamesian fog of implication—lends itself to generalizations, sometimes profound, often idiosyncratic, always startling. It is the most deliberately naïve style in which any good writer has ever worked, and it is also the most “faux-naïf,” the most willed instance of simplicity rising from someone in no way simple. (E. B. White and Robert Frost were neither of them the simple Yankees their styles liked to intimate, but both were more like simple Yankees than Stein was ever like a simple San Franciscan, or a simple anything.) Stein’s style is to writing what sushi is to cooking—not so much an example as a repudiation of the whole idea that still manages to serve the original function.
Gopnik illustrates how Stein’s unconventional prose “can even be made to look normal”:
[A]ny sentence, no matter how many qualifications it contains, is almost always written by Stein in commaless, undivided form. This makes her thoughts seem plain even when they are very fancy. Reading Stein is a bit like reading Emily Dickinson before punctuation got imposed on her: both claim, in every sense, our undivided attention. Many of Stein’s sentences can even be made to look normal just by punctuating them normally. “It is nice in France they adapt themselves to everything slowly they change completely but all the time they know that they are as they were.” Simply inserting a period after the first five words and a dash after the next six makes the writing seem much less eccentric: “It is nice in France. They adapt themselves to everything slowly—they change completely but, all the time, they know that they are as they were.”
“Suicide is an event of human nature, which, whatever may be said and done … in every epoch must be discussed anew,” said Goethe, as quoted in Alexandra Kimball’s thoughtful exploration of media coverage of suicide. She examines the idea that heightened coverage – including social media – correlates with increased suicide rates:
What gets lost in the discussion of suicide coverage is the logic behind contagion—why news of one suicide might cause a domino effect, especially in young people.
On a sunny day in May, I returned to Kids Help Phone to interview my old boss, Alisa Simon, VP of counselling services, and the new director of Program Development, Carolyn Mak. “Young people have specific vulnerabilities,” Simon tells me; contagion jibes with what we know about adolescent psychology and the way young people process stories. Young people tend to identify with prominent cultural narratives, to position themselves in the stories they hear most often. And “developmentally, [young people] don’t necessarily understand what the outcomes of their [actions] might be,” Mak explains. “Do kids understand the finality of death? Do they really get that?”
Think about it, Simon says: you’re young, “you’re struggling with significant challenges, and part of that is feeling like nobody cares, you’re not noticed. [Then], you see that another young person has taken an action that is getting them attention, and the attention you potentially want… Their picture is all over the place, there are thousands of people expressing grief and making admiring comments.” When enough stories about teen suffering end in suicide, she says, death begins to seem like a natural solution. “One of Rae’s pet peeves,” wrote Leah Parsons on a Facebook memorial page for her daughter, Rehtaeh, “was that when someone passed away, suddenly they were liked and people cared.” The risk is that readers will understand suicide as a type of redemption.
But there is another narrative to be told:
Suicide contagion is often called the “Werther effect,” after the rash of suicides that followed the publication of Goethe’s novel [The Sorrows of Young Werther], but there is another phenomenon named after Papageno, a character in Mozart’s The Magic Flute. In the opera’s final act, Papageno is dissuaded from suicide by three spirits who invoke images of the future. Clinicians use the term “Papageno effect” to describe how stories about people who choose against suicide can actually reduce the suicide rate.
[Dr. Jitender] Sareen sends me links to a number of recent studies, the most interesting of which is a 2005 Austrian study that compared how different kinds of suicide narratives link up with suicidal behaviour. Repeated exposure to traditional kinds of media suicide coverage, including stories that focused on suicide epidemiology or expert opinions, were positively associated with suicide. But one type of suicide story was negatively associated with suicide, meaning people who consumed it were less likely to take their lives than people who heard nothing: the “mastery of crisis” narrative, which describes people who think about suicide but, like Papageno, decide against it. Understood thusly, the tendency of young people to identify with dominant narratives can be harnessed for good.
I’ve been following this thread and I have to wonder: I’m a straight guy who is dying to have sex with a beautiful, 100% passable, pre-op transsexual. What in the bloody blue hell does that make me??? I’d love to know if there’s a term (or a “letter”) for me!
Another:
I am a bisexual male who has been completely comfortable with his sexuality for over 25 years. I exist, I am real, and I happily have sex with both men and women – sometimes separately, sometimes together. My experiences with each gender are very different, as is my role in each encounter. I would not be complete without both of them. I am not monogamous; I am not gay; I am not straight. In fact, my most satisfying sexual encounters have been with people who don’t identify as either male or female. These transgender people don’t fit within the binary, and explode the whole notion of being attracted to a single sex.
Another:
Argh! I both love and hate this discussion. Human sexuality is so wonderfully fluid. And all the pronouncements about whether there are true this or true that just drives me nuts!
For the record, I’ve long identified as a gay-identified bisexual (despite my occasional forays, I’m part of the gay community). I love having sex with women even if it’s not frequent. And as an HIV+ person, I find the opportunities more difficult given that:
1) there are more gay men with HIV expanding my horizons and 2) I prefer all-out sex that is stymied by either some women’s rejection of sex as fun or my own coding of women as not to be purely sexualized (I’m from the South and our coding of gender roles was strong). I recently dated a guy who is bisexual and had an easier time having sex with women but is dating men exclusively right now to get better at it. And I have recently been having sex with and dating a good many FTMs who identify as gay men. The crux of the matter is that I like, um, pussy. And I also like masculine energy – at least that part that sort of is animalistic and allows us to nearly devour each other.
What does that make me? A freak. And I’m quite fine with that.
Another:
What I’d like to reinforce from all of the comments about bisexuals is that sexuality is complicated, and complex. Sexuality is different from gender, yet we define it based on gender. I know I myself can’t find a label, but use bisexual because it’s the most encompassing.
I’m a male, but I tend to be attracted to women. More specifically, I tend to be attracted to boyish-looking women. Small breasts, small hips, short hair. Sometimes they’re butch, sometimes they’re trans men. And then there are the men I find attractive, which I can’t even define well. But I would say, as a whole, that it tends to be people that are not typically masculine or feminine, are gender-bending, or are non-gendered or androgynous.
I don’t know the term for this. I also know that butch women have been fetishized and I want to be aware of that. But at the end of the day, there’s my broad level “type”, and then there’s the individual who I get to know and have a relationship with. I call this being bisexual.
Another:
My husband and I are bisexuals, but we identify as gay. We have been together for over 20 years and are less promiscuous then we used to be, but in our younger days we did have several threesomes with female friends. While I find women attractive, I have a hard time forming emotional bonds with them. I am also attracted to individuals that defy gender stereotypes, particularly feminine men and masculine women.
Another:
It goes to show the connection to your audience that I’m writing these thoughts down for the first time. I’ve been married for over 15 years and yet here I share them with you.
I’m 35 years old and male. My earliest memory of an erection was seeing Christie Brinkley in Vacation on home video. That led to finding guy-on-girl porn in my dad’s extensive video and magazine collection. All through growing up, and looking back, my infatuation was with girls. I lost my virginity at 16, had only a few partners, then met my wife at 20 and have been monogamous ever since.
In the last few years I have found myself increasingly intrigued by anal play. But here’s the rub: I feel a longing in my prostate for stimulation. Over the last few years that need has started to grow more intense. Going back even five years I never had these feelings. The more I explore the area more convinced am that the biology is asking for things I haven’t felt since the first time I found masturbation. I suppose toys are the next step and asking my wife for a good hard pegging. The problem is that approach feels weird in a way that anal sex with a man does not. Toys have never been fun. I want human contact.
So am I gay? I love the thought of multiple female partners, which my wife and I have discussed. I can’t say I’ve ever been infatuated with a guy or would love a guy. But would I fool around with a guy in a threesome with my wife? I don’t see any reason why not. And I expect we’ll soon be talking about that. If I really enjoy that experience, what does it make me? Is a biological urge for stimulation reducible to identity? What if my prostate is simply enlarging with age and so now I’m now just more aware of the pleasure it can lead to.
Honestly, I don’t see why I need an identity here. I am happily married. And to this point our sex life has been more than I need. But here I am with biological urges that my wife doesn’t have the equipment to satisfy. Going outside the marriage for that satisfaction seems like an exploration in the same way that different drugs, foods or travel might be. I just don’t see the sexual categories as adding anything of substance for my life.
Isn’t it enough that we’re sexual beings, and in a way in which morality doesn’t apply among consenting adults?
Alyssa wonders if the passing of James Gandolfini marks the end of the Anti-Hero Age of television:
The anti-hero genre Gandolfini made popular has soldiered on in the years since Tony Soprano flipped to “Don’t Stop Believing” on the jukebox and Gandolfini went on to play generals, CIA directors, and kind-hearted monsters, leaving space for the legend of The Wire‘s Omar Little, the pathos of Mad Men‘s Don draper, and the rise of Breaking Bad‘s Walter White. But as Gandolfini is laid to rest, anti-hero television is showing some decided strain. If the purpose of The Sopranos was to ask how far we could sympathize with a man like Tony Soprano who was a criminal and the head of a family, a serial cheater who also loved his children, and a man whose closest friendships could end in blood and be bound up by murder, maybe in the intervening years, we’ve found our answers, and it’s time to move on to other questions.
In a later post, Alyssa ventures as to why few female anti-heroes exist:
There really isn’t an equivalent framework available for women, who get penalized rather than rewarded for displaying masculine traits like aggression, physical force, ambition, or selfishness. Efforts to create female anti-heroes with masculine qualities like Damages’ Patty Hewes (Glenn Close) have failed because those characters are initially seen as evil rather than admirable. And trying to make anti-heroism work in a distinctly feminine way, by giving heroines characteristics like weakness, indecisiveness, or self-absorption, as has been the case with Girls, doesn’t quite land either. Shows with difficult female heroines have to travel in a different direction than shows about difficult men do, dismantling distaste for their female characters and building sympathy for them, rather than moving toward a moral revelation about how we’ve fooled ourselves by worshiping that man.
The Dish 