September 17, 2014 On Drugs Extreme, Extreme! By Benjamin Breen The literature of laughing gas. “This is not the Laughing, but the Hippocrene or Poetic Gas, Sir.” Colored etching by R. Seymour, 1829, via the Wellcome Library. What’s mistake but a kind of take?What’s nausea but a kind of -ausea?Sober, drunk, -unk, astonishment.Everything can become the subject of criticism—how criticise without something to criticise? Agreement—disagreement!!Emotion—motion!!! These words were set to paper in 1882 by William James, one of the most celebrated proponents of the new science of psychology, and a newly minted assistant professor of philosophy at Harvard. James was in many ways the paragon of an eminent Victorian—his writing tends to summon images of the author ensconced beside a roaring fire in some cozy wood-paneled study in Cambridge. And yet here James comes off as utterly, absurdly stoned. Because he was. After huffing a large amount of nitrous oxide, James set out to tackle a prominent bugbear of 1880s intellectual life: Hegelian dialectics. He came up with a stream of consciousness that centered on a kind of ecstatic binary thinking: Don’t you see the difference, don’t you see the identity?Constantly opposites united!The same me telling you to write and not to write!Extreme—extreme, extreme! Within the extensity that “extreme” contains is contained the “extreme” of intensitySomething, and other than that thing!….By George, nothing but othing!That sounds like nonsense, but it’s pure onsense!Thought much deeper than speech … !Medical school; divinity school, school! SCHOOL!Oh my God, oh God; oh God! Read More
September 17, 2014 Our Daily Correspondent Life Studies By Sadie Stein A subway ad for the latest “Body Worlds” exhibition. With the passage of time come certain revelations. Sometimes these are melancholy; people you love are aging, your window for having a family is shrinking, you will never again know the euphoria of youth. Others are welcome. It is comforting to know there will always be more good books to read than there is time in the average life. And I know I can die happily—and will—without ever going into space, swimming with dolphins, or visiting any one of the endless iterations of that “Body Worlds” exhibition. When the first such exhibition made its grand tour (in the manner of young gentlemen of a past age), it was a novelty. Vaguely shocking, even—remember the ethics review? Everyone was amazed at the artistry of the preservation. One could lend credence to the creators’ arguments that it taught valuable anatomical lessons and educated the public about biology and physiology and, in so doing, helped encourage healthy lifestyle choices. Imagine how much effort such a show might have saved Michelangelo—to say nothing of grave-robbing Scottish medical students! Read More
September 17, 2014 On the Shelf Austenites Resplendent, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Photo: Jane Austen Festival “Madame Bovary, c’est moi” is all well and good as a witty rejoinder—but in all honesty, which of the women in Flaubert’s life was the real Madame Bovary? At a Jane Austen festival in Bath, 550 people claimed the world record for “the largest gathering of people dressed in Regency costume.” On “reading insecurity,” the newest existential disease: “the subjective experience of thinking that you’re not getting as much from reading as you used to. It is setting aside an hour for that new book … and spending it instead on Facebook.” Among Stephen King’s “most hated expressions”: many people, some people say, and YOLO. (I agree with the first two, but I’ll go to the mat for YOLO any day of the week.) What’s it like to translate a compendium of Alain Robbe-Grillet’s sadistic fantasies? Haunting, but, you know, in a good way: “As translator, I am a filter for material: it travels through me. As such, there’s a residue, but it is difficult to qualify. At best, you might compare the book’s effect on me to its effect on any reader: certain images—many, in fact—remain in you, and surge forth unbidden, superimposing themselves in your mind’s eye on perfectly anodyne and serene scenes of everyday life.”
September 17, 2014 Sleep Aid The Production of Dairy Cows as Affected by Frequency and Regularity of Milking and Feeding By T. E. Woodward It’s late, and you’re still awake. Allow us to help with Sleep Aid, a series devoted to curing insomnia with the dullest, most soporific prose available in the public domain. Tonight’s prescription: “The Production of Dairy Cows as Affected by Frequency and Regularity of Milking and Feeding,” circular 180 from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, published in September 1931. In the management of the dairy herd, milking requires more time and labor than any other phase of the work. The application of recent findings regarding the secretion of milk and the development of milking machines may be expected to produce important changes in the frequency and also in the manner of milking. At the United States Dairy Experiment Station at Beltsville, Md., the Bureau of Dairy Industry has carried on experiments x on the effects of the frequency of milking, change of milkers, and regularity and irregularity in the hours of milking and feeding on the cows’ production of milk and butterfat. The results of these experiments are reported and discussed in this publication. FREQUENCY OF MILKING MILKING THREE TIMES A DAY AS COMPARED WITH TWICE A DAY It is generally known that cows produce more milk if milked three or four times a day than if milked twice a day. Just how much more milk will be produced, however, is a matter upon which investigators differ. Some of the results obtained in comparing three with two milkings a day are as follows: At the Agricultural Experiment Station of the University of Vermont, two cows milked three times a day, in trial periods of 3 to 14 days, gave less milk than when they were milked twice a day. Walker, after carrying on an experiment at Offerton Hall, England, in which he used two groups of five cows each, reported as follows: So far as milking three times a day is concerned, the results obtained in these experiments show no advantage whatever. On the contrary, the extra driving and other undue interference with the treatment of the cows has produced results of a negative character. At the Ontario Agricultural College, Canada, two cows milked three times a day for two weeks gave more milk, but only one of these cows gave more butterfat, than when milked twice a day. At the New York State Agricultural Experiment Station, cows producing about 400 pounds of butterfat a year when milked twice a day gave only about 22 pounds more when milked three times a day. Fleischmann estimated the increase in yield to be about 6 or 7 percent for milking three times a day as compared with twice. According to Huynen, the milk yield when cows were milked twice a day as compared with three times was about 1 per cent less for cows yielding 10 liters and 10 per cent less for cows yielding 30 liters or more, with an average for the herd of about 6 or 7 per cent less. The milkings were 12 hours apart when made twice a day; and 5K 3 6K, and 12 hours apart when made three times daily. Read More
September 16, 2014 Look Cardboard, Glue, and Storytelling By Dan Piepenbring Last year, Sadie Stein wrote here about Matteo Pericoli’s Laboratory of Literary Architecture, a “cross-disciplinary exploration of literature as architecture” in which students create physical models of literary texts. Pericoli has taught the course at the Scuola Holden in Italy, at Columbia University, and elsewhere—now he’s broadening the horizons, and the Laboratory has a robust new Web site to prove it. There’s also a new video—replete with a kind of slinky Sade-ish groove, because why not?—that walks you through the course’s fundamental questions. But perhaps the easiest way to grasp what Pericoli’s up to here is to look at an example—the LabLitArch site features a number of them. Here, for instance, is Katherine Treppendahl, an intern architect, on her literary architecture independent study, seen above, of Ulysses: The exterior space frame represents the overarching role of Joyce, the arranger, as well the modules of time within the text—each partition represents a different time of day. The two primary characters, Bloom and Stephen (Joyce’s Ulysses and Telemachus) are translated into different volumetric typologies. These volumes are stacked and arranged in terms of their presence, importance, and relationship within the story. The reader is represented as a pale tube snaking through these volumes. In the novel, there is a point at which the text shifts from a more conventional narrative style to a more abstract and self-conscious style. Within the model, as the reader moves into this territory, the volumes begin to break open and fracture. They are no longer whole vessels, and the “reader” is visible, moving uncertainly through this landscape. There’s also a very fitting makeshift mission statement drawn from Alice Munro’s Selected Stories: A story is not like a road to follow … it’s more like a house. You go inside and stay there for a while, wandering back and forth and settling where you like and discovering how the room and corridors relate to each other, how the world outside is altered by being viewed from these windows. And you, the visitor, the reader, are altered as well by being in this enclosed space, whether it is ample and easy or full of crooked turns, or sparsely or opulently furnished. You can go back again and again, and the house, the story, always contains more than you saw the last time. It also has a sturdy sense of itself of being built out of its own necessity, not just to shelter or beguile you. Check out more of the student projects here.
September 16, 2014 Our Daily Correspondent As Dolls to Wanton Kids By Sadie Stein Detail from the cover of The Doll’s House. It is an anxious, sometimes a dangerous thing to be a doll. Dolls cannot choose; they can only be chosen; they cannot ‘do’; they can only be done by. Children who do not understand this often do wrong things, and then the dolls are hurt and abused and lost; and when this happens dolls cannot speak, nor do anything except be hurt and abused and lost. ―Rumer Godden, The Doll’s House Rumer Godden was preoccupied with dolls. In her many stories about dolls—including Miss Happiness and Miss Flower, Little Plum, Home Is the Sailor, and, of course, The Doll’s House—we are presented with a cast of characters who are at the mercy of children. Some children are rough and wild; others are conscientious and intuitive. They are little gods, and the dolls are their playthings, and when they feel powerless in their own lives, it is the dolls who bear the brunt of this powerlessness. Godden wasn’t the only author to recognize this essential dynamic—The Velveteen Rabbit, Hitty, and later Toy Story truck in the same themes—but no one makes that reality as scary and lonely as she does. Of all the books, The Doll’s House is perhaps the most sinister. We have Tottie, the stable peg doll; the doll father, who seems to suffer the aftereffects of a rough owner; the mother, who is made of celluloid and so somewhat dotty and scattered. And there is the evil, beautiful Marchpane—more financially valuable in the real world than the others. The dolls are survivors who have found each other—their relationships are resolutely asexual, by the way—but their peace can be shattered by a gust of wind, a candle flame, a child’s whim. It is scary stuff, and compelling, too. There is tragedy here, but even before the tragedy, there is menace. Of course this appeals to a child. Children are both dolls and masters; they know their powerlessness and need to understand their power. While the subject matter sounds sweet, it becomes a stage for something far darker. They made a film of The Doll’s House, and while I don’t think it captures the charm of the book completely—Tasha Tudor illustrated one version—it is strange and forceful in its own right.