Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 255

When Islam Looked To The Sky

Robert Morrison reviews David King’s Islamic Astronomy and Geography, a collection of scholarly essays that shows “the productive relationship between Islam and science”:

Science in Islamic societies began and developed not in spite of Islam, but along with Islam. The general essay (“Islamic Astronomy”) in this volume helps show how the rise of Islamic astronomy was linked not to a passive “download” of information from ancient Greece, Persia, and India, but to how, by the rise of the Abbasid Caliphate in 750, interest in astronomy and astrology helped initiate the Translation Movement, an enterprise in which astronomical texts first from Sanskrit and Persian, and then from Greek, were translated into Arabic. Science served the nascent empire’s purposes, whether calendar calculations, determining prayer times, taxation, or political legitimacy. …

Scholars have shown that Islam’s general opposition to astrological forecasting forced scientists to re-think the relationship between theoretical and mathematical astronomy on the one hand and their application to astrological forecasting on the other. A formal disciplinary distinction between astronomy and astrology was the result, and such a distinction facilitated advances in theoretical astronomy that coincided with the incorporation of astronomy into traditions of Islamic scholarship. Conversely, the prestige of astronomy occasioned transformations in kalam (Islam’s tradition of philosophical theology) and the result was the integration of astronomy and other sciences into traditions of religious scholarship.

(Image: Ottoman miniature from 17th century, depicting the study of the moon and stars, via Wikimedia Commons)

The Divine Vine

Ross Andersen contemplates the spiritual properties of wine:

You can tell our culture values wine by looking at the price we pay for it, and the dandyish glasses we drink it from: the fragile ones with the crystal pedestals. But it’s difficult to say what the first farmers made of this extraordinary substance. Early winemakers decorated their vessels, but the symbols they used have faded with the ages. There is one clue, however – a 7,000-year-old piece of pottery from Eastern Georgia with a grape cluster and stick figure etched into it. The figure appears underneath the cluster, and seems to have its arms raised in worship, suggesting that wine was considered divine from the start. Alas, the etching is too crude and worn to know for sure. What we do know is this: where we find legible symbols next to wine, on ancient vessels, or in the textual recesses of human memory, wine is almost always associated with the gods. And even today, three centuries after the Enlightenment, if you look closely, you’ll find that the vine is still spiralled tight around the supernatural.

(Image of statue of Dionysus at the Vatican by Derek Key)

Quote For The Day

“Despite all the richness of the physical world — the majestic architecture of atoms, the rhythm of the tides, the luminescence of the galaxies—nature is missing something even more exquisite and grand: some immortal substance, which lies hidden from view. Such exquisite stuff could not be made from matter, because all matter is slave to the second law of thermodynamics. Perhaps this immortal thing that we wish for exists beyond time and space. Perhaps it is God. Perhaps it is what made the universe.

Of these two alternatives, I am inclined to the first. I cannot believe that nature could be so amiss. Although there is much that we do not understand about nature, the possibility that it is hiding a condition or substance so magnificent and utterly unlike everything else seems too preposterous for me to believe. So I am delusional. In my continual cravings for eternal youth and constancy, I am being sentimental. Perhaps with the proper training of my unruly mind and emotions, I could refrain from wanting things that cannot be. Perhaps I could accept the fact that in a few short years, my atoms will be scattered in wind and soil, my mind and thoughts gone, my pleasures and joys vanished, my “I-ness” dissolved in an infinite cavern of nothingness. But I cannot accept that fate even though I believe it to be true. I cannot force my mind to go to that dark place. ‘A man can do what he wants,’ said Schopenhauer, ‘but not want what he wants,’” – Alan Lightman, The Accidental Universe.

(Hat tip: Maria Popova)

Evolution’s Expressions

Stassa Edwards calls Darwin’s 1872 work The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals “the most accessible of Darwin’s books”:

Far from a dry scientific text, it’s rich with colorful anecdotes drawn from theater, painting and, of course, photography. In it, he argues that man’s emotional expressions—his smiles, snarls, and frowns — are the result of natural selection. If facial communication stems from natural selection, then man must share it with other mammals. “With mankind some expressions, such as bristling the hair under the influence of extreme terror, or the uncovering of the teeth under that furious rage, can hardly be understood,” he wrote, “except on the belief that man once existed in a much lower and animal-like condition.”

Darwin looked to photography for evidence, which led him to the work of James Crichton-Browne, a neurologist who photographed the mentally ill:

The mentally ill, as Victorian mores held, were emotionally uninhibited and unconstrained. Unable to conform to social norms, the insane were hardly concerned with the suppression of emotion required by the cultured and the sane. To Darwin, Crichton-Browne’s photographs represented something more useful than marketable trinkets. The raw emotion of the inmates at West Riding Lunatic Asylum was primitive, more authentic, and certainly closer to man’s evolutionary ancestors. Crichton-Browne’s project, his interest in capturing the true look of mania, proved a valuable discovery for Darwin. …

Darwin found in Crichton-Browne a fellow scientist sympathetic to his theories and ready to expound on his observations. The correspondence between the two men is colorful…. Though Crichton-Browne refers to very few of his photographs specifically, his letters flesh out the otherwise vacant personalities captured by his camera. In a single letter, he describes the “hilarity” of sexually perverse women; the “remarkable lachrymal secretion” of “melancholics, who sit rocking themselves rhythmically backwards and forwards”; and “a stereotyped smile” of “many idiots and imbeciles who are constantly smiling and laughing, who are ‘pleas[ed] with a rattle, tickled by a straw.’”

(Image: Woman Suffering from Chronic Mania, c. 1869, by James Crichton-Browne, via Wellcome Library, London)

Rejecting Roth

Will Philip Roth ever shake his critics who accuse him of anti-Semitism? Judith Thurman checked in with the author as he recently received an honorary degree from the Jewish Theological Seminary:

The spectre of “outside” voices objecting to his recognition by a bastion of Jewish learning and Conservative theology couldn’t spoil Roth’s pleasure in the morning’s lovefest, but it rankled him. “Look,” he said, “‘Portnoy’s Complaint’ was published ten years after ‘Defender of the Faith,’ in 1969, and the Jewish reaction to it was completely understandable. I can’t say I didn’t expect it. I had no objection to it, either. I’ve always had literate Jewish readers, even if my most virulent enemy was the greatest scholar of Jewish mysticism, Gershom Scholem, who reviewed ‘Portnoy’ in Haaretz, where he wrote, ‘The writer revels in obscenity’ and ‘This is just the book that anti-Semites have been waiting for.’ And I also can’t say that, when ‘Defender of the Faith’ was published, I didn’t know that Jewish nerves were raw. I was not insensitive to the rawness, because I knew where it came from. World War II had ended only thirteen years before, and I came of age in the single most anti-Semitic decade in human history. But rabbis denouncing me from the pulpit, and in their Saturday sermon columns—well, that was disgusting, and it stung.”

The next day, the Forward published an article about the commencement—”PHILIP ROTH, ONCE OUTCAST, JOINS JEWISH FOLD” (it’s a fold that also includes Martin Luther King, Jr., who received an honorary doctorate in 1964)—and Roth sent it to me without comment. But he had one last red-light reflection:

That these displays of narrow-minded literary stupidity that first erupted in response to my work in 1959 should continue to emanate from the McCarthyite right of the Jewish establishment in 2014 is more than a little shameful. Do you think that African-American readers of James Baldwin are still up in arms, if ever they were, because in his fiction Baldwin vividly portrayed black prostitutes, drug addicts, and pimps? Do you think the African-American readers of Ralph Ellison are still up in arms, if they ever were, because in the great opening section of his masterpiece “Invisible Man” Ellison permits a southern black sharecropper to speak with relish of how he routinely has sex with his own young daughter? It’s beginning to appear that I, for one, will not live to see these disapproving Jewish readers of mine attain that level of tolerant sophistication, free from knee-jerk prudery, that has long been commonplace among African-Americans when reading their own writers.

Previous Dish on Roth and religion here.

Mental Health Break

Seniors breathe new life into Pulp’s “Help the Aged”:

Move Aside, Merlin

Benjamin Breen schools us on the original wizard:

John Dee of England, born in 1527, the astrologer to Queen Elizabeth and advisor to Sir Walter Raleigh, was the true founder of the wizardly iconography and mythos. A skilled mathematician, geographer, and inventor, Dee also delved into grimoires, kabbalah, alchemy, and Biblical prophecy. He believed he’d been chosen by God to receive a new divine revelation—angels were sending him a new set of Biblical texts from heaven. And he had a sidekick: Dee believed the ultimate conduit was not himself but his servant, a mysterious ex-con named Edward Kelley, who spoke with the angels through a glass orb that the two called a “shew-stone,” or crystal ball.

Dee’s beliefs gained currency among notables including Sir Walter Raleigh and the poet Philip Sidney. Yet the Dee-Kelley enterprise ended badly, with professional failures and a surprisingly salacious personal dispute—Kelley claimed that the angels required the two men to keep everything “in common,” including Dee’s much younger wife, Jane, who was nonplussed by the idea. Kelley died young, dashing out his brains in a botched escape from a Czech castle where the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II had imprisoned him for claiming to transmute mercury into gold. But Dee and his mythos lived on, resurfacing throughout the seventeenth century in publications with such eye-catching titles as A True & Faithful Relation of what Passed for Many Yeers Between Dr. John Dee and Some Spirits; according to Frances Yates, Dee inspired the character of Prospero in The Tempest.

(Image: Portrait of Dee, 16th century, via Wikimedia Commons)

“A Tech-Enhanced Yenta”

That’s how Maureen O’Connor describes The Dating Ring, a matchmaking start-up that crowdfunded a campaign to fly female New Yorkers to meet men in San Francisco. Along with 15 other women, O’Connor braved the trip. Here’s an excerpt from Day 3 of her journey, which she describes as “the night things get dark”:

Some of the men at this party are more eccentric than those we received as matches. A programmer who donated “several hundred dollars” to the Crowdtilt likens the donation to “giving $2 to a homeless person.” In an affectless voice, he analyzes the relative Asian-ness of each of my facial features, then explains his frustration with online dating: “I prefer to use reality as my platform. There’s zero latency, no lag. Do you know what lag is? When you do something online, you don’t get a response right away. Meeting women in reality — boom! — fully responsive.” As he says this, he begins to touch me. I flee. Soon thereafter, [Dating Ring co-founder] Emma Tessler points out a different man she believes to be “obsessed with” me. She offers to run interference, and I do not see him again. …

As the party grows, we become inundated with men. We are experiencing gender imbalance in the wild, and it is chaos. Every time I turn, there are men lined up waiting to deliver carefully rehearsed greetings or to initiate repartee. At this point, I am so exhausted from constant socializing — even Lyft rides feel like first dates — that I feel a breakdown coming on.

Meanwhile, Shaila Dewan considers dating sites as the quintessential online brokers (NYT):

The good news is that the more seemingly useless brokers are, somewhat counterintuitively, the more valuable they can be in signaling our interest – what [author Paul] Oyer might call the “money to burn” move. If anyone can wink at you free on a dating website, or for that matter beam in a job résumé, their actions don’t mean much. On the other hand, if someone fills out hundreds of questions and pays $60 a month – or in the case of a job applicant, researches a company and writes a detailed proposal – it signals a much deeper interest. Academic economists, in fact, use this sort of signaling in their own hiring process. When top-tier candidates are interested in working at lower-tier schools – for reasons of geographical preferences or spousal considerations, perhaps – they are encouraged to send a special “winking” signal to schools that might otherwise consider them out of their league. [One] Korean dating site has tried something similar, holding a special event in which most participants could send two virtual roses. The signaling worked. Not only was the response rate higher for people who received a rose, but the roses worked better on people of middling desirability, those who might not otherwise believe that someone of higher desirability was a serious suitor. So, on some level, an expensive broker does nothing more than indicate the level of your game.

Inside The Kink Community

Melissa Gira Grant, author of Playing the Whore: The Work of Sex Work, explores the porn production studio of Kink.com. She describes the studio as a “rare accomplishment” that “aims to favorably represent a sexual subculture, that holds free sex parties and (paid) public tours, [and] that positions itself as a San Francisco institution with unironic civic pride.” In the studio’s penthouse, called the Upper Floor, Kink hosts live sex shows:

[F]or some of Kink.com’s community members, performing on the Upper Floor could feel more like a service Kink offered to them. There are probably more public sex play spaces in the San Francisco Bay Area than anywhere else in this hemisphere, but Kink’s are certainly more lavish and, for some, come with a certain prestige that just having kinky sex in a homegrown dungeon—without the cameras, without the “fame”—does not. After the parties, [Upper Floor producer] Stefanos told me, he sometimes sends the guests still photographs that he thinks they’d like as keepsakes. They can post them to their online profiles on sites like Fetlife, on pseudonymous personal blogs, or slightly blurred on Instagram.

“This is almost the ultimate form of ‘do what you love,’” said Georgina Voss, a researcher and writer who examines how technologies are designed, interpreted, and regulated, particularly in the creative and culture industries, including the adult industry.

I rang her over Skype to ask her if the porn industry was going the way of all creative industries online: replacing the professionals with amateurs. With “do what you love,” Voss referred back to Miya Tokumitsu’s of the same name in Jacobin. It’s easier to direct porn performers to “do what you love,” perhaps, when even the producers who depend on it don’t readily regard the work of performing sex as work, but instead as sexual expression.

This reluctance, along with the various poor working conditions we’re supposed to absorb in exchange for “doing what we love,” Voss said, is in a way “almost the perfect storm of what’s going on in culture industries. Because what is more fun than sex—with someone you love in a really nice place?”

Previous Dish on Gira Grant here and here.

“The Poet Laureate Of Twitter”

Sext: The subway shoots like a load through the earth, full of tiny, terrible personalities all trying to be born—
Patricia Lockwood (@TriciaLockwood) March 29, 2014

Sext: I am a living male turtleneck. You are an art teacher in winter. You put your whole head through me—
Patricia Lockwood (@TriciaLockwood) August 09, 2011

Sext: I am a Dan Brown novel and you do me in my plot-hole. "Wow," I yell in ecstasy, "this makes no sense at all"—
Patricia Lockwood (@TriciaLockwood) January 08, 2013

That’s the title Adam Plunkett bestows upon Patricia Lockwood:

Lockwood is famous—more than thirty thousand people follow her on Twitter—but the source of her fame is almost entirely owing to her tweets and not to her poetry. Even the exception, her most famous poem, “Rape Joke,” could read as a series of exceptional tweets. She’s made for the medium. It rewards her particular talents for compression, provocation, mockery, snark.

Her ongoing series of “Sexts,” an extended parody of sexual text messages, is disarming as well as unsettling, because it moves quickly between the dumb voice that Lockwood captures so well and something entirely different—something hectoring, obscene, and sinister.

“‘I’m so wet,’ you murmur. Marmaduke raises his glistening face. ‘That’s because I’m famous for drool,’ he laughs.” “I go up to heaven and open God’s Bible. It contains only a single sext: ‘Im hard.’” … Just as there are always followers to laugh along with her, there are always men who miss the joke. She has said, “It is so funny, still, when a man—and it’s usually a man—responds to you, going, ‘Yeah girl, I want to put soap on your boobies in the shower.’ You’re responding literally to a tweet about me riding down the neck of a brontosaurus until I come.”

Jesse Lichtenstein profiles (NYT) Lockwood, whose newest collection of poetry, Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals, was published this week:

“Whenever anyone asks me about process,” she said, “I’m like a cat stroked the wrong way: Get away from my belly!” But she is fundamentally a sharer, a poet for the age of sharing. “I’m verbally incontinent — anything just pours out of me,” she said. “My father’s that way. He doesn’t worry about it. My mother does. I got both. I say just the worst things the English language is capable of, and then later on I lie awake at night thinking, Oh, Tricia, you’ve done it again.”

Lockwood’s poems are most radical in their ability to convey the essential strangeness of sex and gender. “I consistently felt myself to be not male or female,” she said, “but the 11-year-old gender: protagonist. Maybe it’s a byproduct of reading a lot of books, of projecting yourself into different bodies. As an early teen, I thought I presented as androgynous, which was not true. But I had a short haircut, and I felt androgynous.”