Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 302

A Poem For Sunday

Dish poetry editor Alice Quinn writes:

Ron Padgett’s Collected Poems is the recipient of this year’s Poetry Society of America William Carlos Williams Award for a book of poetry published by a small press, non-profit, or university press in a standard edition in 2012. The citation by poet Tom Lux reads in part: “I can think of no other poet I’ve read over the past forty years who embodies Williams’ spirit and his great heart’s aesthetic. Ron Padgett loves life so much, he finds the stuff of poetry everywhere. I mean everywhere. His most serious poems are playful, and his most playful poems are serious. He’s mischievous!”

“Nails” by Ron Padgett:

How did people trim their toenails in ancient times?

The Virgin Mary’s toenails look fine

in the paintings of the Italian Renaissance,

and it’s a good thing, too, for it would be hard

to worship a figure with very long toenails.

Perugino scoffed at a religion aimed

toward God but whose real attention

was on Mary, but he gave her nice toenails.

I’ve never looked at Jesus’ toenails, even

though they’re near the holes

in his feet, where the other nails were.

Cruelty is so graphic and hard to understand,

whereas beauty, even the beauty of a toe,

makes perfect sense. To me, anyway.

(From Collected Poems © 2013 by Ron Padgett. Used by permission of Coffee House Press. Image: The Deposition by Raphael, 1507, via Wikimedia Commons)

I’m Really Dating Myself Here …

Jeffrey Bloomer considers what Boyfriend Twin, a tumblr dedicated to gay couples who look alike, tells us about human sexuality:

Straight couples who are confused for siblings have been ticklish fodder for lifestyle stories for years, but the boyfriend twins take that a step further, suggesting that what we’re really searching for is our own romantic clone.

This anxiety, of course, long predates the Tumblr, as its anonymous creator has acknowledged, telling BuzzFeed loftily that the photos are intended to spark a conversation about “narcissism, exhibitionism, and sexuality.” For every gay guy who laughs it off, the boyfriend twin is another one’s worst fear realized. One Slate colleague told me his partner will demand a wardrobe change if the two men so much as wear the same fabric on the same day. His fear? “It confirms the whole dumb Freudian model of homosexuality as a kind of narcissism.” Is that really it? Is the lookalike lover a symptom of excessive self-regard, or is it something more elusive?

The answer depends on whom you ask, and there’s plenty of disagreement, even among people who make a living studying such things. But two things are clear: This phenomenon is not particular to gay men, and people do tend to be drawn sexually to people who look similar to them. The real question is why and how that works.

(Image from Boyfriend Twin)

Bottoms Up

Maureen O’Connor, who is quickly carving out the TMI beat, declares that “butt stuff” is officially in:

What [my friend and I] were talking about was heterosexual anal play—not treating the anus like the vagina’s pervier cousin, useful merely for penile penetration, but actually pleasuring it.

That kind of “butt stuff” does seem to have reached a tipping point in straight culture, at least to judge from magazines devoted to conventional gender roles. Playboy published an essay on rim jobs last year, and Cosmo followed suit with a how-to guide a few weeks ago. (“If you are performing anilingus on a hairy guy, just part the hair with your hands.”) And while we’re familiar with the idea that anal sex is getting more and more common, a less talked-about side effect is the rise of “anal messing around”: The CDC reports that 44 percent of straight men and 36 percent of straight women say they have had anal sex, and an academic study found that 51 percent of men and 43 percent of women who’ve had anal sex have also participated “in oral-anal sex, manual-anal sex, or anal sex toy use.” And once the ass is in play, it’s more likely to get played around with: Half of straight men who’ve had anal sex, and one in ten who haven’t, report having inserted a finger up a sex partner’s butt in the previous month. “Oral is the new sex, and rim jobs are the new oral,” a male friend proposed. …

But why? Transgressing a nasty boundary is, for some, part of the appeal. For those people, filth—symbolic and, yes, literal—is a plus. “Do you know why I’m doing this?” a man once asked as he reached for my butt­hole after sex. “Because you know I don’t like it?” I responded. “And for the smell on my hands,” he replied. My horrified reaction seemed only to delight him further.

Building Bigger Games

The Puzzle Facade project transformed a building in Linz, Austria into a giant, solvable Rubik’s cube:

In Puzzle Facade the player interacts with the specially designed interface-cube. The interface-cube holds electronic components to keep track of rotation and orientation. This data is sent over Bluetooth to a computer that runs the Puzzle Facade designed software. This software changes the lights and color of the large-scale Ars Electronica’s media facade in correlation to the handheld interface-cube. Due to the nature of this building and its surroundings, the player is only able to see two sides at the same time. This factor increases the difficulty of solving the puzzle, but as the player is able to rotate and flip the interface-cube, it is not a blocking factor.

In other large-scale gaming news, designers recently honored Philly Tech Week by repurposing a building to host a massive game of Tetris:

The Tetris building was designed by Frank Lee of Drexel University and forms a sequel of sorts to the game of Pong, which he set up on the face of the same building last year and which, until this point, held the Guinness record for Largest Architectural Video Game Display. Tetris works by lighting up coloured LEDs that are attached to the shadow box spandrels on the building. But where Pong only made use of one side of the building, Tetris covers both the north and south faces.

Teens Under The Influence

Paul Bisceglio relays a new study showing a “strong correlation” between underage drinking and musicians name-dropping specific alcohol brands:

During the interviews, [the 15- to 25-year-old] participants were told the titles of radio hits from 2005 to 2007 and asked if they liked the songs and could name any alcohol brands mentioned in them. After their responses were controlled for factors including sex, race, socioeconomic status, and friends’ and parents’ alcohol use, participants who liked the songs and remembered a number of brands were up to twice as likely as others to have binged at least once. Even simply liking alcohol-referencing songs was associated with more drinking.

Julie Beck elaborates:

The survey found that those who scored highest on the measures of “alcohol song receptivity” were three times as likely to have ever had a drink, and two times as likely to have binged than those who scored lowest. Those who were able to identify at least one brand mentioned in a song were at higher risk in both of those categories. “A surprising result of our analysis was that the association between recalling alcohol brands in popular music and alcohol drinking in adolescents was as strong as the influence of parental and peer drinking, and an adolescent’s tendency toward sensation-seeking,” Brian Primack, the study’s lead author, said in a press release.

The legal implications:

“In terms of policy,” said Primack, “it is worth considering whether or not payment to music stars by alcohol companies is in violation of current guidelines. For example, the Distilled Industries Council of the U.S., or DISCUS, states that ‘Alcohol advertising and marketing materials should portray alcohol products and drinkers in a responsible manner.’ This text is vague and challenging to interpret. However, if you watch a few music videos by stars who are spokespeople for alcohol companies, you would likely come away questioning whether these messages portray ‘alcohol products and drinkers in a responsible manner.’ Thus, it may not be a question of enacting new legislation, but rather one of simply enforcing current legislation.”

The Cult Of Kiss

On Thursday, Kiss was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Chuck Klosterman, who has written about the band “semiconstantly for the past 20 years,” celebrates their success while acknowledging “there’s never been a rock group so easy to appreciate in the abstract and so hard to love in the specific”:

Kiss do not make it easy for Kiss fans. … They inoculate themselves from every avenue of revisionism, forever undercutting anything that could be reimagined as charming. They economically punish the people who care about them most: In the course of my lifetime, I’ve purchased commercial recordings of the song “Rock and Roll All Nite” at least 15 times (18 if you count the 13-second excerpt used in the introduction to “Detroit Rock City” on Destroyer). … To “qualify” as a Kiss supporter, you have to be a Kiss consumer. And this is nonnegotiable — it doesn’t work any other way. If you try to enjoy Kiss in the same way you enjoy Foghat or Culture Club or Spoon, you’ll fail. You might like a handful of songs or appreciate the high-volume nostalgia, but it will inevitably seem more ridiculous than interesting. To make this work, you need to go all the way. And this is because the difficult part of liking Kiss — the manipulative, unlikable part — is how you end up loving them.

Here’s a statement only a fool would contradict:

There’s never been a band inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame whose output has been critically contemplated less than the music of Kiss, at least by the people who voted them in. I can’t prove this, but I’d guess 50 percent of the voters who put Kiss on their Rock Hall ballot have not listened to any five Kiss records more than five times; part of what makes the band so culturally durable is the assumption that you can know everything about their aesthetic without consuming any of it. That perception doesn’t bother me, and I certainly don’t think it bothers the band. In many ways, it works to their advantage. But I definitely disagree with anyone who thinks these albums are somehow immaterial. It’s traditionally hard to get an accurate appraisal on their value, because most people who write about Kiss either don’t care at all or care way too much. My publishing this essay arguably puts me in the latter camp (and the argument is not terrible). But it doesn’t feel that way. I know what I know: A few of these records are great, most are OK, several are bad, and some should be buried in sulphur.

Mental Health Break

A NSFW anthem for all you college slackers:

National Novels

Continuing the endless quest to determine the Great American Novel, Michael Dirda steps back and ponders the Great Novels of other countries:

Readers around the world have already elected Gabriel Garciá Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude as the Great Latin-​American Novel. But is India’s central work of fiction Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children—​or could it be Rudyard Kipling’s panoramic Kim, which captures so much of the subcontinent’s rumbustiousness and variety? In Australia Henry Handel Richardson’s saga-​like The Fortunes of Richard Mahony still battles for top honors against Patrick White’s more intense Voss. Though Goethe remains Germany’s leading contributor to Weltliteratur, his finest prose work, Elective Affinities, may be too Mozartian, too heartbreaking to be called the Great German Novel. I suspect that the GGN’s author is, inevitably, Thomas Mann, though whether for Buddenbrooks, The Magic Mountain, or Doctor Faustus remains open to debate.

Dirda brings the debate back to the States with a comment on Lawrence Buell’s The Dream of the Great American Novel:

In his epilogue … Buell returns to the current validity of the GAN ideal. For many writers and readers today, the all-​American super-​novel must seem, on the surface, utterly outmoded in an age when literature has grown increasingly global and transnational. Yet Buell argues that the GAN isn’t necessarily a representation of jingoist brag, and that its greatest exemplars have usually offered diagnoses of our nation’s fragilities and failures, especially with regard to race and class. Given the fraught nature of twenty-​first-​century American life, whether one looks at the increased stratification of our society or the overall loss of status of the United States in the world community, there should be every expectation that the “national” novel will continue to offer writers a form in which to capture and critique the way we live now. After all, the GAN merely exemplifies a more operatic version of what all art aspires to do: structure the chaos of experience, give clarity to complexity, transform a world of troubles and confusion into a thing of beauty and a joy forever.

Previous Dish on the GAN here, here, here, and here.

Face Of The Day

Thomas Card photographed unique styles on the streets of Tokyo:

Since the early 1990s, fashion tribes—from ganguro to Lolita—have united people interested in developing hyperstylized looks. Initially intrigued by an article describing makeup trends among Japan’s nightlife crowd, New York–based photographer Thomas C. Card spent several months in Tokyo in spring 2012 creating portraits of the city’s most striking citizens for his book Tokyo Adorned. Although many of the people he photographed showed characteristics of various fashion tribes, Card noted the fierce individualism his subjects expressed in describing their style.

“The thing I found absolutely amazing once I was on the ground in Tokyo was that the fashions were very much centered around the individual and less around the tribe,” Card said. “In the early part of our production process, we were thinking of this as different tribes and groups that were very close and defined. I was thrilled when I got there to find that nearly all the girls really view this as an expression of themselves.”

See more photos from the series here.

Mom And Moore, Ctd

In a review of Linda Leavell’s biography of Marianne Moore, Bruce Bawer describes the poet’s exceedingly bizarre home life. After a brief stay at college, Moore returned to live with her “terribly sick and suffocatingly possessive mother—a woman who, quite calculatingly, set out to imprison [her children] in a hermetically sealed little world of their own with its own peculiar customs, moral codes, and rules of behavior, all of them determined exclusively by her”:

Consider this: [Moore's mother] Mary established a pattern whereby Marianne, in family conversations and correspondence, was invariably referred to as a boy and identified only with male pronouns. Furthermore, Mary encouraged the siblings to regard each other as “lovers,” and to think of her as their “lover,” too. (In a letter to [Marianne's brother] Warner, for instance, she told him: “you are Mr. Fang’s lover”—Mr. Fang being one of their names for Marianne—and in another letter she described Warner as being her “lover, father, and son all in one.”)

But maybe domestic despotism is what allowed Moore to thrive creatively:

[T]he closest thing Marianne had to an escape from life with Mary was her poems. A key fact about them, underscored by Leavell, is this:

On the one hand, she “could never have become the poet she was without the four years away from her mother at Bryn Mawr,” where she first became part of a creative community and found the freedom and confidence to forge a poetic voice of her own—in reaction, one might say, to the family language Mary had invented—and where, taking biology courses, she was drawn to the rigorous language of science. On the other hand, it was being back home under Mary’s thumb that made her feel compelled to write—compelled to escape from the world Mary had fashioned (itself an escape from the real world) into a literary landscape of her own devising.

Many of Moore’s poems, Leavell reminds us, feature “camouflaged and armored animals” that are “misunderstood, self-reliant, and invariably solitary”—a manifest reflection, of course, of Marianne’s own circumstances. But the poems, as any reader of Moore well knows, are the very opposite of cries of the heart. Mary, after all, read every word—so raw confession, or anything close to it, was not an option. Hence Marianne was forced to devise what amounted to a new type of poem, stunning at the time, not only for being syllabic in form (something which was previously all but unheard of in serious English poetry) but, perhaps even more so, for its extraordinary, even clinical, degree of precision and dispassion. … [J]ust as so much of the power of first-rate Iron Curtain poets like Joseph Brodsky and Czeslaw Milosz can be accounted for by the terrible pressure of the circumstances under which their poems were composed, so the strength of Moore’s own work owes much to the fact that she, like them, created it while living under an iron-fisted tyranny. Only in Moore’s case, the tyranny was that not of a totalitarian state but of a little old lady.

Previous Dish on Moore here.