The Stuff That Love Is Made Of
“It is actually a very serious matter for finch lovers.”
One more finch tweeting post before I go – thanks for having me, Ed!
Belgian Meritocracy
Ladies and gentlemen, the storied sport of finch tweeting. (via the avian dialectologists and comparative Belgianists at Language Log)
What will Japan boy do next?
this is what writers email each other about
no, Japan boy, no!
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/6656417.stm
very ugly dog (now deceased):
what is this
I’m not sure what this place is or what I’m doing here. I got an email with a login URL, a username, and a password. I forgot about it for half a day then emailed back asking what I should be doing with this. Then I remembered a few days earlier, someone asked me if I wanted to guest blog somewhere. But I didn’t know when. Now I realize that when is now. The reason Ed didn’t return my email is because he’s away; that’s why he needs guest bloggers.
I’m a stranger here, I think.
Here’s an interview with me that was posted on Michelle Lin’s blog today.
In the interview I talk about my book and about how my dog attacked me when I was five. We put the dog “to sleep.” That’s a phrase I like.
Here’s my book, which is called Fires.
Another novel you might like is The Magus by John Fowles. It’s very good.
I’m tired. I ate many oysters tonight, as well as some mango sorbet.
Here’s the beginning of a new novel, which I may never finish:
passing through
Strangelets pass through the planet at 900,000 miles per hour. Space is a great river, the earth is a porous cloth, and in the water are strangelets. (Or you might say they’re a part of it, actually.) Other things in, or of, the water: neutrinos on their way from the sun in the trillions of trillions, muons careening out of deep space, and perhaps even the ghostly and sluggish Weakly Interacting Massive Particle, which no one is sure exists. Those things are all passing through the planet—easily, in numbers beyond comprehension. They are passing through your face now—your eyes and teeth and hair.
Here’s a post on my blog about accidentally going to a gay pool party this weekend.
Three Color Blind Mice: See How They See
Scientific American: “According to Gerald Jacobs, a psychologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, the research that allowed these mice to see in full color was an attempt ‘to replicate what must have been the first stage in the evolution of primate color vision.’ The ability to see the world as humans do, he says, ‘requires an additional sensor—or photopigment—and the nervous system being able to compare the signals.’”
Of Course, This All Assumes That Humans Aren’t Animals
New York Times: “Dr. de Waal, who is director of the Living Links Center at Emory University, argues that all social animals have had to constrain or alter their behavior in various ways for group living to be worthwhile. These constraints, evident in monkeys and even more so in chimpanzees, are part of human inheritance, too, and in his view form the set of behaviors from which human morality has been shaped. Many philosophers find it hard to think of animals as moral beings, and indeed Dr. de Waal does not contend that even chimpanzees possess morality. But he argues that human morality would be impossible without certain emotional building blocks that are clearly at work in chimp and monkey societies.”
Where Modern Love Meets the NYT Science Beat?
New York Times: “Scientists have found other species in which males encourage their own cannibalism. One remarkable twist on this strategy is seen in a species of orb-weaving spiders. The males suddenly die as they mate. The male’s death may be a strategy for preventing other males from mating with the female. In death, its sexual organ becomes stuck in the female’s receptacle. Even if she feeds on the rest of his body, the organ remains behind, preventing her from receiving more sperm.”
So Long and Thanks for Everything But the Fish?
New York Times: “Far from being slow learners, manatees, it turns out, are as adept at experimental tasks as dolphins, though they are slower-moving and, having no taste for fish, more difficult to motivate. They have a highly developed sense of touch, mediated by thick hairs called vibrissae that adorn not just the face, as in other mammals, but the entire body, according to the researchers’ recent work. And where earlier scientists saw in the manatee’s brain the evidence of deficient intelligence, Dr. Reep sees evolution’s shaping of an animal perfectly adapted to its environment.”
Gorilla Warfare
IOL: “The gorilla is threatened with extinction by the mid-21st century if poaching and destruction of its habitat continue at the current rate, the United Nations (UN) has warned. Within a decade, three of the four sub-species of the great ape could be wiped out, it says.” (via Number One Hit Song)
Books To Jump Up and Down Over
Beyond Heaving Bosoms by Sarah Wendell and Candy Tan. The famed writers behind Smart Bitches, Trashy Books have written a very funny and thoughtful volume about romances, both Old Skool and New Skool. Here is a book that any smug and humorless literary manboy beating his flabby passive chest over Banville or Bolano should probably read pronto, if only for the distant possibility that he might get over himself. While the Choose Your Own Adventure segment at the end caused me to have a very disturbing dream involving Shelley Long (don't ask), Sarah and Candy did have me rethinking many of my own misperceptions when I wasn't busy laughing. They're not afraid to take on the New York Times Bok Review or even the groupthink within certain sectors of the romance community.
Alice Fantastic by Maggie Estep. This wild and highly enjoyable narrative involves two sisters (presumably, the third one was still being rented out by Chekhov), a hippie ex-junkie mother who lives with seventeen dogs, a murder, gambling, and libidinous Hollywood actresses who live in Woodstock. But this is the wonderful Maggie Estep we're talking here. And what seems at first like a quirky yarn becomes something unexpectedly moving about connectivity. What I love about Estep's work is the way that she'll juxtapose an extremely astute observation (now that you mention it, why do cab drivers always have somebody to talk with on the phone past midnight?) with an often outrageous story development.
Generosity by Richard Powers. It doesn't come out until September 29th, but Richard Powers's latest will have anyone committed to books reconsidering their literary fervor. I foresee some animosity from the vanilla critics hostile to idea-driven novels, but book bloggers, YouTube chroniclers, and MFAs would do well to plunge into this chance-taking narrative, which introduces vital questions about what the reader's relationship is with media, scientific dissection, and "creative nonfiction." Are we rats fleeing to happy cities? Or can we find the humanism within the purported plague?
Pieces for the Left Hand by J. Robert Lennon. Lennon is one of the most underrated fiction writers working today. Much as On the Night Plain proved that Lennon had a lot more in the toolbox than heartfelt (and often very funny) suburban satire, this slim but fascinating volume juxtaposes 100 small-town anecdotes -- arranged by category -- in a manner that reads, at times, like Nicholson Baker's passions for minutiae and, at other times, Stewart O'Nan's concern for psychological detail. The result is fiction that makes us wonder about whether one person's subjective view of particulars can entirely be trusted. This book never found a publisher in 2005. But thankfully, Graywolf has released it in the United States, along with Lennon's latest novel, The Castle.
Wonderful World by Javier Calvo. This wonderfully raucous volume has been completely ignored by the Washington Post, the New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times. But it's probably one of the most delightful reading experiences I've had this year. Calvo cavalierly mashes up multiple genres and manages to mix up familial subtext with larger-than-life, almost cartoonish characters. (Indeed, one might argue that one mobster's penis is a character of its own in this sprawling novel.). This is not an easy thing to pull off, but Calvo makes it work. And it's helped immeasurably by Mara Faye Lethem's idiom-specific translation. (See longer post.)
The Means of Reproduction, Michelle Goldberg This thoughtful book tackles the complicated (and little discussed) subject of reproductive rights from numerous angles, which includes a number of unpleasant but necessary ones. The upshot is that there isn't a quick fix solution for declining birth rates and fundamentalist abuses. Just about every political faction has contributed to the friction. But you'll want to read this book anyway to refamiliarize yourself with the topic, but also to understand just what's occurred during the past several decades to get us where we are today. (See also podcast interview with Goldberg.)
