Word Blur

world wide wack

Kevin Williamson (creator of Dawson's Creek) is back on the small screen and trust me, you need Television Without Pity to make sense of this one -- although they didn't name Liza "The Blonde Joey Potter of Weird Science."  You can thank me for that!

The succinct History of Food: from emmer grain (17,000 BC) to deep-fried Coca-Cola (2006). 

Snooty cam!: get your manatee on.

Rains, pours

As an inveterate gossip whore and lover of all things medieval, I went all gooey when I saw Transforming Talk: The Problem with Gossip in Late Medieval England, a mash-up (okay, actually it's historical scholarship) of a book that looks at the way “gossip functions primarily as transformative discourse.” In a week that has seen Lindsay Lohan’s latest derailment, Mischa Barton’s fainting spell, and Nicole Richie’s birthday invite fiasco, it’s nice to feel that historical precedents suggest our collective analysis of these events might do some good toward “influencing…literary and religious discourse.”

world wide wack

link of the day: LibraryThing's cook book pile contest
bonus link: Fake student & fake physicist take up digs at Stanford.  Give the Stegner Fellowship to JT Leroy!

RIP, Lloyd Alexander

Lloyd Alexander died on May 17^th. He was the author of many, many great children’s books and is most famous for his Chronicles of Prydain, beginning with The Book of Three. My mom read fantastic serials out loud to us growing up: Little House (if you top it off with “on the Prairie” it tags you as one of the uninitiated), Narnia, etc., but I think Lloyd Alexander made the biggest impression on me. Somewhere half way through the series I got way too old for bedtime reading, so I finished it for my younger sister. Than I reread them all one summer with my first great love boyfriend and reread them again last year. They seemed only a little dated – the spunky heroine Princess Eilowny has been outdone in terms of women’s liberation by contemporary standards (not you Hermione!), although as a kid I found her highly subversive; there weren’t many like her. Prydain is drawn heavily from Welsh legends and the scale is appropriately epic, but Alexander’s strength is in driving home the humanity and vulnerability of his characters. To write a story of flawed individuals navigating the battle between good and evil is no small task, but to do it for children with such nuance is nothing short of amazing. It’s hard to imagine a canon that could produce Harry Potter or The Golden Compass without Lloyd Alexander. Sure, we’ll find out whether or not said Harry Potter lives or dies this July, but you’ll have to wait until August to read Alexander’s last novel The Golden Dream of Carlo Chuchio.

world wide wack

Link of the day: Google in 20 years

Twin mania!

Twins and What They Tell Us About Who We Are by Lawrence Wright

You might not know:

Identical twins separated at birth actually score more alike on personality and intelligence tests than identical twins raised together (roughly the same as the same person taking the test on separate occasions). Researchers assume this is because they feel no social pressure to differentiate.

Due to the widespread use of ultrasound, researchers now believe that the number of pregnancies that begin as twins is far greater than previously known. “The frequency of twin [embryos/fetuses] among abortions is three times higher than the frequency of twins at birth.” Many of the embryos simply vanish and are absorbed into the womb or in rarer instances into the body of the remaining twin. Extreme examples: five fetuses removed from the brain of an infant girl, a six-pound fetus discovered during the autopsy of an elderly man.

In rare instances, separate embryos merge together to create a single individual. This phenomenon only comes to light when blood donors are discovered to have two separate blood types (indicating they were merged fraternal twins). It’s probably more common than we think.  You could be two.

 Twin studies are clearly important indicators in the study of the effects genes and environments play in shaping individual traits such as intelligence, personality, happiness, and health, and in shaping larger social conditions and outcomes. And it’s pretty creepy to be a parent reading about study after study that point to the ascendancy of genes (and weirdly relieving in some instances, particularly in light of today’s occasionally holier than thou parenting culture). What’s creepier still is the desire to shape the gene pool that seems to creep into the work of even contemporary behavioral geneticists (did I make that up?), such as David Lykken, who, according to Wright, believes that we should set up a licensing system for childbirth. Since illegitimate children are (on average) 10 IQ points below those born in wedlock, Lykken thinks we should prevent unmarried children from having children. For their first offense they would be incarcerated in a maternity home and then forced to give up the baby. For their second offense they would be sterilized for up to five years. I’m thinking: NO. And yet, while the nurturing loving family (and for the record, in my book, the shape that family takes should be up to you – it’s the most profound decision you make) you create may not be able to prevent the onset of depression, Wright reports that “happiness seems to be largely a gift of the environment…the one thing a good family can do is make a child happy.”

Wack!

I've been loving Wack!: Art and the Feminist Revolution by Cornelia Butler so much I can barely stand it.  It's perfectly organized: pictures, biography, essays.  The biographical section is a different kind of paper so you can look at the whole big, thick, thing and land in more or less the right place.  It's a great mix of artists and does it a good job of trying to represent the performance work that's so central (for me anyway) to the intersection of feminism and art.  It's not just the usual suspects -- lots of South American artists I hadn't heard of, inspiring textile stuff, cool looking film.  It made me feel all hungry.  I want to own it.  Love Catherine Lord's essay.

Bonus: exhibit website.

Well congratulations to me!

Regular Wordblur readers (and there are two or three of you out there!) should know that Wordblur ranks fourth in a Google search for "lipstick and chicken feces."  I know this because a reader stumbled across the site after running just such a search.  Hope you left satisfied!  Now, how should we celebrate?

Women's magazines

First of all: Aaaawww.

I was going to indicate that I was undecided about the Gawker empire's new Jezebel blog, whose exact mission I have yet to determine (tagline = Celebrity, Sex, Fashion for Women.  Without Airbrushing), but then they posted a link (via Salon) to this amazing dispatch on global feminism from the incomparable Joss Whedon.  Now as a Buffy/Firefly fan I'm biased (and also well aware of some of Whedon's own limitations re: gender equity), but read it and see if you think it wasn't the most moving call to arms you've encountered in some time.  More like this please.

Here's something...

...that invites compulsive typing and clicking, despite it's many flaws:

literature-map

Courtesy of Miss Snark

Pretty

I read a beautiful book awhile back: Veronica by Mary Gaitskill. I thought it was pretty nearly perfect, but some of my book group cohorts thought it was too bleak. Actually, for a book about an ex-model succumbing to the ravages of hepatitis while replaying her memories of a friend who died of AIDS, I felt it had a surprisingly hopeful quality. Mostly though, the writing was just, as they say, luminous. Simple, stark, real.

I dug up a bunch of Mary Gaitskill interviews afterwards:
http://nymag.com/nymetro/arts/books/14988/
http://www.altx.com/int2/mary.gaitskill.html
http://www.barnesandnoble.com/writers/writerdetails.asp?z=y&cid=973021#interview
http://www.failbetter.com/19/GaitskillInterview.htm
http://www.nerve.com/screeningroom/books/interview_marygaitskill/

Look at my new category!

I’ve been searching for recommendations for works of fiction that model how humans imagine the future, which specifically brought me to the genre of science fiction, or, as my friend Bill corrected me, SF (a more inclusive acronym, also standing in for speculative fiction). Our email conversation about the genre turned into an interesting post over at Candleblog and made me realize I still have much to learn about the nerdly arts. Insane to think that a girl whose hobby at age 13 was needlepoint could still have anything to learn, but the well is deep my friends.

 Anyway, Bill’s list of seminal SF works bears repeating:

Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein
The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick
Caves of Steel by Isaac Asimov
The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K. Le Guin
Rendevous With Rama by Arthur C. Clark
Snow Crash by Neil Stephenson
V for Vendetta by Alan Moore
Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson

If you have further suggestions, let me know.

Twin research

I’m reading books on twins separated at birth for my futures project and I have to say, I’m crazy loving it. Remember in the 1980’s when that was such a hot topic in the mainstream media: all the uncanny similarities, like both twins loving obscure Swedish toothpaste, or naming their childhood dogs Toy, or marrying people with the same names? It’s completely weird to think that events in any of our lives that seems like pure coincidence or chance could actually be the result of genetic imprint. Also, it’s unnerving, explaining why some cultures view twins as taboo. Much more on this to come, I’m sure. I feel a streak of obsessive interest coming on.  For now find your own books on twins separated at birth.

Alternadad

As I was slowly reading Neal Pollack’s Alternadad (over the last two months), I felt mild annoyance bubbling up in me nearly as often as not. The whole clueless hipster “I just leave that to my wife and fire up the bong because I’m selfish” confessional bent that underlies the work is rendered only nominally less offensive because it’s self-aware. And honestly, it seemed a little rambling, although I definitely laughed out loud a few times and was happy to see a couple of my pals referenced in one way or another.

A funny thing happened when I finished it yesterday though. All of a sudden I found the whole work hopelessly moving. It perfectly captures the rhythm of contemporary parenting: you try so hard, and as often as not so wrong (finding the “perfect” Montessori school, buying organic whole wheat crackers, providing just the right kind of rock-and-roll education), to do the best for your kid until the pressure builds and you have to relax the whole enterprise (crank up the Elmo, escape to Chicago on a bender, meet the other parents’ withering glares head on while acknowledging in the back of your head that they might be right). Maybe this is just where I’m at in my own life, but I found his account of the desperate attempt to balance self and devotion surprisingly valiant.

In the end, my crotchety old judgments seem kind of lame measured against that.