///
“Lord Forgive Me”
Kathryn Maris

Kyrie eleison! I said it in the pub.
I said it to my bitter, then I said
it to my heart, with nothing not to dread:
my sins were great: I drank there with my love.

Kyrie iesu christe, God above
and me below, drinking at the Hog's Head.
“So. Will you love me better when I'm dead?”
He knew it was no joke and didn't laugh

but turned away to look at the TV.
(Arsenal was playing Everton.)
Another man was fixed upon the game

and held his hands together on his knee
and chanted and rebuked. But not my man,
who recognizes neither loss nor blame.
///

Anthony Holden reviews Sex, Drugs and Chocolate: the Science of Pleasure by Paul Martin in The Telegraph:

We Brits have a way of feeling guilty about our pleasures, as if there were something morally dubious, or beyond the merely vulgar, in the pursuit of happiness enshrined in the constitution of our more overtly fun‑loving American cousins. This is not an issue addressed by Paul Martin in his extensive survey of the pros and cons of pleasure, and its bittersweet role in all our lives. Mercifully, however, he does seem to conclude that pleasure-seeking is, on balance, a good thing, for all the efforts of religious and (often) socio-political forces to persuade us otherwise.

But pleasure is also, as he insists from the outset, “a slippery beast”. Plato argued that it was “the greatest incentive to evil”, Aristotle the opposite, and so it has confusingly continued ever since, via the likes of Nero and Casanova to Schopenhauer, Freud and beyond. For Martin, a behavioural biologist, the “holy trinity” of pleasures that can inevitably lead to pain, not least in the shape of potentially lethal addiction, are those of his title – sex, drugs and chocolate.

Sex is discussed in blindingly obvious, at times somewhat alarming, detail and is generally recommended, “preferably with someone else”. In this, as in most of the other pleasures on his menu, Martin is commendably non-judgmental, short of pornography and paedophilia, even when discussing the more exotic sexual variants to which some societies have seen fit to attach a death sentence. Recreational drugs don’t get off so lightly; however tantalising readers might find his evidence that some can apparently evoke sensations 20 times as pleasurable as an orgasm, these kinds of drug can also kill you – which is deemed, on balance, not such a good thing.

More here.

Christopher Benfey in The New York Times:

Charles Darwin, a 22-year-old dropout from medical school who subsequently considered becoming a priest, boarded the Beagle in late 1831 and spent five years on the ship, traveling the world and collecting natural specimens. Despite its cuddly name, the Beagle was a naval brig outfitted with 10 guns. Darwin was a “gentleman dining companion” whose official responsibility was to provide civilized banter with the captain.

Darwin visited Tierra del Fuego, Tahiti and Tasmania, along with other exotic locales, but he never set foot in the United States. Around 1850, charmed by popular tales of lush country­side and the exciting adventures of the Underground Railroad, and still withholding from public view his explosive theory of evolution, he flirted briefly with the idea of moving his large family, with seven children under the age of 11 and another on the way, to Ohio. The middle states, he wrote, are “what I fancy most.”

Two arresting new books, timed to co­incide with Darwin’s 200th birthday, make the case that his epochal achievement in Victorian England can best be under­stood in relation to events — involving neither tortoises nor finches — on the other side of the Atlantic. Both books confront the touchy subject of Darwin and race head on; both conclude that Darwin, despite the pernicious spread of “social Darwinism” (the notion, popularized by Herbert Spencer, that human society progresses through the “survival of the fittest”), was no racist.

More here.

John Horgan and Denis Dutton discuss Dutton's new book, The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, and Human Evolution:

Mike Jay in nth position:

Bruce Alexander is best known – though deserves to be much better known – for the 'Rat Park' experiments he conducted in 1981. As an addiction psychologist, much of the data with which he worked was drawn from laboratory trials with rats and monkeys: the 'addictiveness' of drugs such as opiates and cocaine was established by observing how frequently caged animals would push levers to obtain doses. But Alexander's observations of addicts at the clinic where he worked in Vancouver suggested powerfully to him that the root cause of addiction was not so much the pharmacology of these particular drugs as the environmental stressors with which his addicts were trying to cope.

To test his hunch he designed Rat Park, an alternative laboratory environment constructed around the need of the subjects rather than the experimenters. A colony of rats, who are naturally gregarious, were allowed to roam together in a large vivarium enriched with wheels, balls and other playthings, on a deep bed of aromatic cedar shavings and with plenty of space for breeding and private interactions. Pleasant woodland vistas were even painted on the surrounding walls. In this situation, the rats' responses to drugs such as opiates were transformed. They no longer showed interest in pressing levers for rewards of morphine: even if forcibly addicted, they would suffer withdrawals rather than maintaining their dependence. Even a sugar solution could not tempt them to the morphine water (though they would choose this if naloxone was added to block the opiate effects). It seemed that the standard experiments were measuring not the addictiveness of opiates but the cruelty of the stresses inflicted on lab rats caged in solitary confinement, shaved, catheterised and with probes inserted into their median forebrain bundles.

February 14th marks the 20th anniversary of the Khomeini's fatwa calling for the death of Salman Rushdie for The Satanic Verses. [I may buy another copy to commemorate.] Hillel Italie in the AP:

The Ayatollah is long dead and Rushdie has stopped worrying about his safety, although the fatwa has never been withdrawn. On Sunday night, he questioned the accuracy of the Quran, used profanity when referring to Islamic leaders and bragged about once wearing a T-shirt that read, “Blasphemy is a Victimless Crime.”

But he believes that “a culture of offendedness,” in which any religious criticism is regarded as insensitive or even blasphemous, has intimidated others. Last year, Rushdie strongly criticized his own publisher, Random House, Inc., for pulling Sherry Jones' “The Jewel of Medina” over fears that the novel would set off violence. (“The Jewel of Medina,” about one of the Prophet Muhammad's wives, was released by Beaufort Books without major incident).

Calling himself an early victim of attempted censorship, Rushdie likened his place in history to a scene from Alfred Hitchcock's thriller, “The Birds.” He recalled a scene in which Tippi Hedren spotted a crow outside her window. Hedren paid little attention until she noticed hundreds more had arrived.

“I think I was the first crow,” Rushdie said.

John Whitfield is blogging the Origins of the Species over at his Seed blog, between now and February 12th:

Man, this guy didn't know anything.

I don't mean that as an insult. Darwin, as he admits, knew almost nothing about inheritance, about how variation is produced, or about the origins and history of domesticated plants and animals. You'd think that would be a handicap in using domestication as an analogy for evolution.

And yet, in chapter 1 of the Origin, 'Variation Under Domestication', Darwin uses what little knowledge he has so deftly that nowhere do you feel his conclusions are outstripping his data. This, believe me, is quite a skill, both in a scientist and a writer. What, he asks, is the minimum we can infer from what we know?

Well, here's what his readers can be sure of at the end of the chapter:

Domestic animals and plants vary – most obviously between different breeds of the same species.
Domestic animals and plants have changed through time.

This change results from humans breeding selectively from individuals that carry a valuable trait, because offspring tend to look like their parents. And that's about it — hard to argue with any of that, then or now. Darwin does speculate about mechanisms: most variation, he suggests, comes from within the organism, by “the conditions of life … [acting] on the reproductive system”. You could see this as analogous to mutation, although I think that would be stretching inference beyond knowledge. There's also a shorter discussion of inheritance, the laws governing which are “quite unknown”.
But none of this speculation is load-bearing — the only essentials are right before our eyes.

Emma Rothschild in the NYRB:

The cataclysm of the American automobile industry has been an odd combination, so far, of immediate and historical anxieties. The government loan of $13.4 billion to General Motors and Chrysler in December 2008 was presented by the outgoing administration as an unsolicited gift, lest a “disorderly liquidation of American auto companies” should “leave the next President to confront the demise of a major American industry in his first days of office.” It was restricted explicitly to the very short term: “The firms must use these funds to become financially viable…. In the event that firms have not attained viability by March 31, 2009, the loan will be called.”

But there are also intimations of the deep past and the distant future. The present and impending disorder of the automobile companies is a reminder, even more than the decline of the housing and banking industries, of the desolation of the Great Depression. It is a reminder, too, of economic history, or of the rise and decline of industrial destinies. When the listing of the “Fortune 500” began in 1955, General Motors was the largest American corporation, and it was one of the three largest, measured in revenues, every year until 2007. GM was the “largest industrial corporation in the world,” in its own description of 1989, and it was engaged, at the time, in “the most massive reindustrialization program ever attempted.” It was an incarnation of American economic change, as a GM vice-president suggested during the earlier automotive crisis of 1973: “To say that a company that has successfully grown over a period of 65 years—a period marked by two world wars and a major economic depression—will suddenly be unable to adapt to the changing challenge…flies in the face of common sense”; it “denies history.”

Can you grow one? YES YOU CAN. Easy to do… Fun to Grow. Full growth 1-2 weeks Reuse your Chia indefinitely Contains: * Chia Obama handmade planter * Chia Seed packet for 3 plantings * Convenient Drip Tray * Planting and care instruction sheet

more from Chia Obama here.

Dutton has evidently spent plenty of time wrestling with the theories of art propounded by thinkers from Aristotle and Kant to Clive Bell and Michel Foucault. He touches on all the major issues of aesthetics in this fairly short book and invariably illuminates them. There are also treatments of such lesser riddles as why we have art of sounds and colors, but not of smells. Of particular value is his discussion of three heated controversies: the role of artists’ intentions; the implications of forgery and plagiarism; and the status of Dadaist provocations, like Marcel Duchamp’s “Fountain” — a urinal put forward for exhibition in 1917. He tests these cases against a cluster of 12 characteristics that he argues are collectively definitive of art and finds that the difficulties stem from conflicts or tensions among these characteristics. Thus a perfect forgery may succeed in producing the same pleasure the original was designed to elicit, but we nevertheless feel cheated because it does not demonstrate the originality of mind we expect to find expressed in art. For Dutton, this expectation of originality derives from art’s ancient function of demonstrating that the artist would make a desirable mate. But it seems to me that his analyses work just as well without such sexual speculations.

more from the NY Times here.

It was Tuesday, May 30, 1922, the day of the dedication of the solemn and splendid memorial to Abraham Lincoln in Washington, and the ceremony on the Mall featured speeches by President Warren Harding and Chief Justice William Howard Taft. The most interesting observations about the 16th president, however, were not spoken amid the pomp but in the pages of the Crisis, the journal of the NAACP founded by W.E.B. DuBois. “Abraham Lincoln was a Southern poor white . . . poorly educated and unusually ugly, awkward, ill-dressed. . . . He was big enough to be inconsistent — cruel, merciful; peace-loving, a fighter; despising Negroes and letting them fight and vote; protecting slavery and freeing slaves. He was a man — a big, inconsistent, brave man.” DuBois’ observations were brief yet controversial (one reader called them “unkind and uncalled for”), and he defended them in the next edition of the magazine. “We love to think of the Great as flawless,” DuBois wrote. “We yearn in our imperfection toward perfection — sinful, we envisage Righteousness.” Such idolatry, however, serves little purpose: If we require the perfect and the righteous to lead us to higher ground, then we are not likely to get there, for there is not exactly a burgeoning oversupply of perfect and righteous leaders.

more from the LA Times here.

The following information came round on the Rappahannock grapevine. If you had purchased $1,000 of Nortel stock one year ago, it would now be worth $49; the same investment with Enron would have left you with $16.50, Delta Airlines $49 and United Airlines nothing. If, however, you had purchased $1,000-worth of beer a year ago, drunk the beer, and then turned in the cans for the aluminium recycling fund, you would now have $214. This piece of retrospective investment advice is only one of many arguments to suggest that drinkers have done rather better than abstainers in the current crash. And winos have done best of all.

more from the New Statesman here.

Joshua Cohen discusses in Boston Review:

“Liberals and Libertarians: Kissing Cousins or Distant Relatives?” That question was debated at a January 13 event sponsored by Stanford University's Program in Ethics in Society and the Cato Institute. Boston Review co-editor Joshua Cohen gave these comments.

In his book Political Liberalism, John Rawls offers a general description of a liberal political outlook. He intends the description to cover views ranging from the classical liberalism of Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman, arguably in the tradition of Locke and Adam Smith, to the more egalitarian liberalism of his own Theory of Justice. Rawls writes, “the content of a liberal political conception of justice is given by three main features:

1. a specification of basic rights, liberties and opportunities (of a kind familiar from constitutional democratic regimes);

2. an assignment of special priority to those rights, liberties and opportunities, especially with respect of claims of the general good and perfectionist values; and

3. measures assuring to all citizens adequate all-purpose means to make effective use of their liberties and opportunities.

These [three] elements can be understood in different ways, so that there are many variant liberalisms.”

Aren’t these just the typically vacuous abstractions that only a philosopher could love? No. Quite to the contrary, Rawls here identifies the common ground shared by classical and egalitarian liberals. And, I think, the common ground occupied by the participants in this discussion.

The abstract description of shared ground is located at the level of principle, not policy, but it is not vacuous at all, and in two important ways.

Nate Silver over at 538 (via Andrew Sullivan):

Over at EurekAlert, via bookforum:

The research was conducted with the Munduruku, an Amazonian indigenous culture with a limited vocabulary of number words and spatial terms, little or no formal education, and little or no experience with maps, graphs, and rulers.

Munduruku adults and children spontaneously placed numbers on a line in a compressed, logarithmic function, such that smaller numbers appeared at greater spatial intervals. The study suggests that a propensity to relate numbers to space is universal, but that the mapping of successive integers and constant spatial intervals, as on a ruler, is culturally variable and linked in part to education.

The research was conducted by Stanislas Dehaene, professor of cognitive psychology at the College de France in Paris; Elizabeth Spelke, Marshall L. Berkman Professor of Psychology at Harvard University; Veronique Izard, a postdoctoral researcher in psychology at Harvard; and Pierre Pica of Paris VIII University in Paris.

I have a soft spot for art that, in terms of subject matter and material, is in bad taste. It’s art that pushes against psychological and social expectations, that tries to transform decay into something generative, that is replicative in a baroque way, that isn’t about progress, and wants to—as Walt Whitman put it— “contain multitudes.” I am not talking about messiness, schlock, theatricality, or ambition. I am thinking of Paul McCarthy’s excremental installations, Peter Saul’s twisted painted figures penetrating one another, Kara Walker’s race wars of sex and violence, and the Nazis in hell of Jake and Dinos Chapman, art that almost seems too much to take or even to look at, that resists aesthetic metabolism, that exudes a sort of poetics of apotheosis. It’s the way Andrea Fraser slept with a collector on camera, calling it art, and somehow the work escaped being silly academic nonsense or brainy porn. Many artists work with bad taste, but they do so in such conventional ways that their art ends up being predictable and gratuitous but little else. As for pornography, if it isn’t made in a particular way, it doesn’t do what it’s supposed to do; in this way porn is almost like Egyptian art, in that it hardly ever changes. What shocked the art world about Jeff Koons’s porn work was that he so fully and bizarrely crawled into its conventions that it seemed to sprout new conventions.

more from New York Magazine here.

What I prized most about Updike, though, was his marvellous ear for a sentence. In the stories especially, he caught the shimmer of light on the grass, for example, with uncanny skill. He could describe a twitching face, a wrinkled elderly hand, a fond gesture of affection, with shocking ease. I doubt I shall ever forget the painful stories about a family coming apart in Problems (1979); ‘Separating’ is one story I’ve read again and again through the years, with increasing admiration. My guess is that he will long be remembered as a master of the short story, the American equivalent of Maupassant. He will also be considered as a faithful reporter of his era, one of those writers who live fixedly in their own time, paying a kind of rueful but affectionate attention to its idiosyncrasies, its foibles, and its passing glories.

more from The Guardian here.

If science is neither cookery, nor angelic virtuosity, then what is it? Modern societies have tended to take science for granted as a way of knowing, ordering and controlling the world. Everything was subject to science, but science itself largely escaped scrutiny. This situation has changed dramatically in recent years. Historians, sociologists, philosophers and sometimes scientists themselves have begun to ask fundamental questions about how the institution of science is structured and how it knows what it knows. David Cayley talks to some of the leading lights of this new field of study.

An impressive series put together by CBC Radio. There are 24 episodes and while I haven’t listened to them all yet I also haven’t been disappointed yet. So, check it out here.

From The Root:

It’s difficult to avoid being completely fascinated with our new First Lady, Michelle Obama. She’s an Ivy League black woman who’s as tall and fashionable as a supermodel. She’s the mother of 10-year-old twist sporting Malia and sassy Sasha. And President Obama glows every time she’s by his side. But The Buzz is not alone in its “Barack & Michelle Forever” fixation. Tim Shipman, a journalist for the British newspaper The Telegraph, details all the aspects of Michelle’s First Lady swagger in an article published last Saturday.

Shipman writes, “Barack Obama would not be where he is today without Michelle Obama. She helped him understand his race and his country. She showed voters that he is a loving father and that he is a mortal man, one who does not pick his dirty socks off the bedroom floor, rather than a messiah.” And it’s obvious that even Barack knows this. From the way that he looked at her during their first dance, and his many testimonies to Michelle’s strength and intelligence, Barack understands that Michelle was his guiding light during a grueling, yet successful campaign.

“I am so in love with them being in love,” says SweetBee, the 35-year-old from Raleigh, North Carolina, who runs the trailblazer-firstlady website. “For Barack to choose a tall, brown, beautiful woman as his wife means a lot to me. Barack, you single-handedly made it cool once again to love your lady.”

More here.