June 19, 2018 Arts & Culture One Word: Castration By Gavin Francis Anonymous, Non biedt kat vis aan in ruil voor penis (detail), 1555 We defend ourselves not against castration anxiety but against death, a far more absolute castration. —Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death The university library at my medical school was shared with students of veterinary medicine. Sometimes I’d find myself at a desk opposite one of the vet students; we’d glance at one another’s textbooks with curiosity, occasionally open at the same subjects—hematology, say, or orthopedic surgery. It was reassuring to see how much common ground there was between medicine for humans and medicine for animals. One day, I was revising prostate cancer: the appearance of its malignant cells under a microscope, the stages of its spread, the radiotherapy, brachytherapy (embedding of radioactive pellets into the tumor), and standard chemotherapies used to treat it. In health, the prostate gland stores semen and mature sperm; it has strong muscular walls that squeeze during ejaculation. Exposure to a lifetime of testosterone increases the growth of the gland as well as its susceptibility to cancers. Many treatments for prostate cancer work by blocking testosterone’s generation within the testicles—with no testosterone, the growth of the tumor slows. “All that for prostate cancer?” asked one of the vet students, glancing over at my notes. “Sure,” I said.“What do you guys do to treat it?” “One word,” he laughed, “castration!” Read More
June 19, 2018 Arts & Culture On Frankenstein, A Monster of a Book By Hernan Diaz Behind the scenes of James Whale’s 1931 Frankenstein. In 1818, it probably would have been more shocking to have a novel about a Victoria Frankenstein doing perfectly normal, boring science than one about Victor making a hodgepodge of body parts come to life. In more than one way, Victor Frankenstein embodies the double contradiction at the core of the mad scientist outlined in the previous installment of this essay. First paradox: though deprived of reason (mad), this character is also the ultimate embodiment of reason (a scientist). Second paradox: even though mad scientists are always outcasts who rebel against the establishment, they tend to represent that very establishment—they are, for the most part, well-to-do white men. True enough, every now and then, Frankenstein looks beyond Europe—for example, in search of a habitat for its monstrous offspring and sedatives that may quiet the nightmare of reason. After his first nervous breakdown, following the creation of the monster, Victor, saturated with Western knowledge, “found not only instruction but consolation in the works of the orientalists.” Together with his friend, Clerval, he learns Persian, Arabic, and Hebrew and reads the texts in the original: Their melancholy is soothing, and their joy elevating to a degree I never experienced in studying the authors of any other country. When you read their writings, life appears to consist in a warm sun and garden of roses,—in the smiles and frowns of a fair enemy, and the fire that consumes your own heart. How different from the manly and heroical poetry of Greece and Rome. Read More
June 18, 2018 Weird Book Room America’s First Female Mapmaker By Ted Widmer From Emma Willard’s Republic of America. Designed for Schools and Private Libraries, 1829. A recent item for sale in the rare-book trade caught my eye. Boston Rare Maps had a series of twelve maps created by America’s first female mapmaker, Emma Willard. They were to accompany a textbook she had written, first issued in 1828. The maps for sale were from the second edition. Willard is well-known to historians of the early republic as a pioneering educator, the founder of what is now called the Emma Willard School, in Troy, New York. But she was also a versatile writer, publisher and, yes, mapmaker. She used every tool available to teach young readers (and especially young women) how to see history in creative new ways. If the available textbooks were tedious (and they were), she would write better ones. If they lacked illustrations, she would provide them. If maps would help, so be it: she would fill in that gap as well. She worked with engravers and printers to get it done. She was finding her way forward in a male-dominated world, with no map to guide her. So she made one herself. The maps for sale show North America in twelve different snapshots. I say “snapshots” because Willard was such an inventive visual thinker. On the eve of photography, she was thinking hard about how to capture a big story inside a single striking image. Read More
June 18, 2018 Nineties Movies In the Nineties, No One Cared About Getting a Job By Nafkote Tamirat Still from Pulp Fiction. “So what then, day jobs?” “Not in this life.” “What then?” —Pulp Fiction When I was a child and Americans asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I told them, “Famous.” This was enough to elicit laughter from the interrogating adult before they moved on to the next would-be astronaut or dancer in the room. Ethiopians never asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up because they already knew: a lawyer. Everyone in my family told everyone else in my family, Nafkote is going to be a lawyer. I heard it so many times that I believed it. Later, when either Americans or Ethiopians asked me what I was going to be, I’d repeat, “Lawyer,” and everyone (including me) would feel enormously satisfied. In my third year of university, a teacher accused me of plagiarism. The allegations were untrue (every member of the executive committee agreed that the paper in question was so awful that only an idiot would think it worth copying), and I was declared innocent and allowed to continue my studies. Despite my name being cleared, I was given an F, I guess in case I got any funny ideas. “Can I still go to law school?” I asked my college dean. His doubt was tangible, as were his good intentions. “The important thing is, if you really want to be a lawyer, no one can stop you.” For the first time, I understood two things: 1. I did not actually want to be a lawyer, and 2. if I did not want to be a lawyer, I had to find something else to be. Read More
June 16, 2018 Arts & Culture Who Gets to Be a Mad Scientist? By Hernan Diaz Photograph from the soundstage of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. In a fit of enthusiastic madness I created a rational creature. —Mary Shelley, Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus Theatrical as it is, the cliché of the mad scientist—a wild-haired, goggle-eyed maniac pacing around a laboratory, operating buzzing contraptions with the help of a hunchbacked assistant—reveals something important about our relationship to knowledge. At least since Aeschylus, science and technology have been bound to madness and criminality: when Prometheus rebels against Zeus, steals the “fire that makes all skills attainable” from the gods, and gives it to the humans—together with tools, technical and scientific knowledge, language, and reason itself—he “is mentally straying, robbed of [his] wits, like a bad doctor who has fallen sick.” Some two thousand years later, a different incarnation of this paradox helped give birth to modern science. Descartes, one of the founding figures of our scientific method, started out by imagining a “malicious demon of the utmost power” that deceived him and confounded his mind so that he doubted everything that presented itself to his senses and his mind. “I shall think that the sky, the air, the earth, colors, shapes, sounds and all external things are merely the delusions of dreams which he has devised to ensnare my judgement,” he writes in his first Meditation. “I shall consider myself as not having hands or eyes, or flesh, or blood or senses, but as falsely believing that I have all these things.” Descartes’s radical skepticism, a deliberate form of madness, is the cornerstone of his method: the demon makes him doubt everything—except that he doubts and therefore thinks and therefore exists. Rationalism is, then, the product of an evil genius. To this day, metaphors of insanity and normalcy are ingrained in the philosophy of science: epistemologists like Thomas Kuhn call “normal science” all work that is done within an accepted paradigm. This, of course, implies that all revolutionary science is, at first, abnormal—or “Abby Normal,” as Igor calls the brain he gets for the creature in Mel Brooks’s Young Frankenstein. Read More
June 15, 2018 This Week’s Reading The Paris Review Recommends Anti-Beach Reads By The Paris Review This summer, we’re going long and hard. In anticipation of the solstice, the staff of The Paris Review has pulled together a list of anti-beach reads: doorstopper books, dense books, books that will tear a hole in your flimsy beach tote, flip over your canoe, and ground your propeller plane. You can’t hold them up to block the sun—you can barely hold them up at all. These are books that will empty the pool if they fall in. Books to swat a mosquito with and accidentally break a limb. Books worth the forty-euro heavy-baggage surcharge. Below is the final list, presented in order of page count, from fairly slim to downright menacing. Happy reading! Read More