September 24, 2013 Arts & Culture Empty Vessels By Alice Bolin “You’ve got a lot to learn,” a man she meets on an airplane says to Lise, the protagonist of Muriel Spark’s 1970 novella The Driver’s Seat. “Rice, unpolished rice is the basis of macrobiotics… It is a cleansing diet. Physically, mentally and spiritually.” “I hate rice,” Lise says. “No, you only think you do,” he replies. This character, the overconfident, pushy bore bent on convincing people they do care about things they aren’t interested in, is so familiar that if we laugh in recognition, it’s only to keep from crying. We can all at least be thankful that in the past five years the problem of men explaining things to women has not only come to public attention, but been packaged, meme-ified, and widely distributed—it’s a thing, a concept with which to view power dynamics and discourse, and avoiding mansplaining is maybe becoming a cultural value. In her November 2012 article “A Cultural History of Mansplaining” for the Atlantic Monthly, Lily Rothman defines mansplaining as “explaining without regard to the fact that the explainee knows more than the explainer, often done by a man to a woman.” This is a phenomenon that people have found instantly recognizable and endlessly applicable to cultural situations and to their own experience. Take for instance this, from Twitter user @PedestrianError: “I don’t normally unfriend people on Facebook, but there’s on perpetual mansplainer that I think is gonna have to go.” Or @abrahamjoseph on the New York Democratic Mayoral Primary debate: “de Blasio using his mansplaining voice on this slush fund question #nyc2013.” It is so useful a concept—and so consistent a pattern, to take The Driver’s Seat as only one example—that it’s strange that no one attempted to articulate it before Rebecca Solnit’s seminal 2008 essay “Men Explain Things to Me.” Read More
September 24, 2013 Arts & Culture Hunting the Whale By Jason Z. Resnikoff Currently on display in halls of the American Museum of Natural History are the complete skeletal remains of two sperm whales, a male and a female. They are the centerpieces of a much-advertised exhibit on whales that opened in March and will remain on view until January of next year. I don’t know precisely what I hoped to encounter when I visited the exhibit earlier this month, but I knew it had something to do with Moby-Dick. I came with the high and ill-defined expectations of a pilgrimage, harboring vague notions that I might eye a peeking corner of the mystery embodied by Melville’s White Whale; I thought, deep in some inarticulate recess of my mind, that I might have the chance to live a dozen pages out of one of the best books I’ve ever read. I hoped I might come to better know it. I thought that I might see the whale. The two sperm whale skeletons are suspended by metal wire from the ceiling of the museum’s fourth floor exhibition space. The male is slightly over fifty-eight feet long, the female much smaller. Seeing them was a shock; reduced to their bare frames they might as well be entirely different animals, so little do they answer to the sperm whale in its skin. They hang in undulating poses over a dais of shiny black plastic, appearing like a pair of monstrous wraiths cresting the surface of forsaken waters. Melville provides a warning of this physical dissonance in Moby-Dick—“For it is one of the more curious things about this Leviathan, that his skeleton gives very little idea of his general shape.”—but that is poor preparation for just how alienating these skeletons can be. There is an unsettling ambiguity in their aspect, like the meeting of bird and snake. While pictures of the whale alive show a creature of curves, sleek fins, and a protuberant forehead, under the roof of the American Museum of Natural History and bereft of their flesh, these whales are assemblies of acute angles. Their peeked skulls, barbed with teeth, taper at the jaws to sharp beaks; looking up at the spiked vertebrae, you see a cutting ridge running along the spine that resolves itself decisively into the pointed tip of the tail. They are almost entirely devoid of the galumphing roundness that makes the living whale seem monumental, endearing, curiously childlike. More surprising than their shape is their size. Reviewing the exhibit for The New York Times, Edward Rothstein was struck by their “immensity” and “commanding power.” He spoke of the show’s more diminutive attractions cowering in the “shadow of the chambers and curves of whalebone filling the high-ceilinged gallery.” “They loom,” he said, “over the video kiosks, wall panels and specimens, as if daring anything to come close.” That was not my experience at all. The exhibit has many attractions: video animations dramatizing the evolutionary history of whales; scrimshaw and ancient harpoons; Maori art and ambergris; an old ledger recording the events of a whaling voyage and an open copy of Moby-Dick, both under glass; a life-sized model of a Blue Whale’s heart, in and around which children climb like scavengers over deep-sea carrion. There is no want of diversion. Still, in the midst of all this edifying activity, I couldn’t help but think that the two sperm whale skeletons—even that belonging to the male, supposedly longer than a school bus—looked small. Read More
September 24, 2013 On the Shelf WTF, and Other News By Sadie Stein Poet Kofi Awoonor was among the victims of the Nairobi terrorist attacks. The African Poetry Book Fund will publish his final collection next year. Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal runs one of his last poems. Following charges of author-bullying, Goodreads has declared that, going forward, it will “delete content focused on author behavior.” China is establishing a naming system for seabed areas based on the oldest known collection of Chinese poetry, Classic of Poetry, also known as the Book of Odes, which dates from the eleventh to seventh centuries B.C. A concise history of WTF.
September 23, 2013 History The Immortality Chronicles, Part 6 By Adam Leith Gollner What have we not done to live forever? Adam Leith Gollner’s research into the endless ways we’ve tried to avoid the unavoidable is out now as The Book of Immortality: The Science, Belief, and Magic Behind Living Forever. Over the past six weeks, this chronological crash course has examined the ways humankind has striven for, grappled with, and dreamed about immortality in different eras throughout history. This week explores the nineteenth century. The final installment will run next Monday. The only secret people keepIs Immortality. —Emily Dickinson, poem number 1748 Last week, Google launched Calico, a new company dedicated to fighting “aging and associated diseases.” The idea of aging as a curable disease (rather than a fact of life) can be traced back to the work of Charles Édouard Brown-Séquard (1817–94), the first medical scientist to make the idea of comprehending—if not controlling—aging a respectable aim. Not much remembered today, Brown-Séquard was the chair of physiology at the Collége de France, one of the most prestigious appointments in nineteenth-century medicine. He is still known for successfully describing Brown-Séquard syndrome, a paralysis caused by severed spinal cords. His late-period research, however, occupies one of the more bizarre footnotes in medical history: toward the end of a distinguished career, he stunned the scientific community by announcing that he’d found a glandular elixir of eternal youth. His speech on June 1, 1889, at the assembly of Paris’s Société de Biologie, is widely considered to mark the commencement of gerontology. (Gerontology, from geron, meaning “old man” in Greek, is the systematic study of aging.) Most members of the society were in their seventies, as was the swarthy, six-foot-four, bushy-bearded gentleman onstage. In unscheduled introductory remarks, Brown-Séquard confessed that his natural vigor had declined considerably over the last decade. At that time, many scientists felt that old age was not a natural phenomenon, so a murmur of commiseration rippled through the room. Those graying authorities knew full well what it meant to grow elderly and infirm, nodding as Brown-Séquard lamented his own chronic pain—the lassitude, the insomnia, and, most delicate of all, the decline of his manliness. He had a pretty young wife, he was rich, successful, accomplished—et quand même. Read More
September 23, 2013 Quote Unquote Unmentionables By Sadie Stein “Where’s the man that could ease a heart like a satin gown?” and other instances of lingerie in literature. (Yes, completely SFW.)
September 23, 2013 Arts & Culture Girls Moping in Hotels By Maggie Lange In Lost in Translation, sad-eyed Charlotte spends much of the film curled up on the windowsill high above Tokyo in a sleek Japanese hotel, gazing balefully over the city, acknowledging her loneliness. Played with winsome melancholy by Scarlett Johansson, Charlotte doesn’t verbalize her isolation, but director Sofia Coppola’s gently circumnavigating camera makes it evident. Charlotte plods the halls like baleful Eloise. She quietly considers her loneliness while curled up in hotel sheets, or judging the patrons at the hotel bar, or diving into the beautifully designed hotel pool. An unlikely literary analog can be found in a passage from D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love. When the protagonist is left by her sister in a hotel room, Gudrun immediately felt her own existence had become stark and elemental. She went and crouched alone in her bedroom, looking out of the window at the big, flashing stars. In front was the faint shadow of the mountain-knot. That was the pivot. She felt strange and inevitable, as if she were centered upon the pivot of all existence, there was no further reality. Gudrun, like Charlotte, is hoisted in isolation, in a sort of heavenly limbo. Lost in Translation, which celebrated its tenth birthday this summer, is the consummate contemporary example of a young woman who finds herself in beautiful accommodations, in a fascinating foreign city, unable to do much but sulk and consider ordering room service. The hotel is, of course, an ideal place for cerebral brooding; hotels are, by their nature, in between. It is where you sleep, but it is not your home. You are a guest without a host, surrounded by scores of strangers hanging up their clothes in the room next door, as close as family. Is it a certain kind of woman who broods in hotels, who peers out over the vista and ponders her existence? Read More