Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 411

A.I. Intimacy?

In Spike Jonze’s new movie Her (trailer above), a man develops a romantic relationship with “Samantha,” a computer operating system voiced by Scarlett Johansson.  Liat Clark wonders if this premise isn’t such a stretch, asking, “[I]n an age where we love to anthropomorphise our products — with the odd few even falling in love with dolls or marrying virtual girlfriends — is it really that unlikely someone might form a bond with a disembodied companion that sounds like a 40s pinup and can hold a conversation?”

“To be honest, I wouldn’t be surprised,” Mike Burns, CEO of Fuel Entertainment, the company behind the virtual world for 8-to-12-year-old girls SparkCityWorld.com, told Wired.co.uk. In October his service launched a virtual boyfriends feature where users experience the “developing of a relationship” — in the weeks that followed, engagement time doubled. “The fewer barriers between us and our computers, or the more we can employ instinctual communication techniques and emotions while creating, playing, consuming and interacting, the more difficult it will be to define the line between human and machine. Slipping into something like an Oculus Rift after a long day is going to look mighty enticing for many people.”

The adult world is already oversaturated with such offerings.

Invisible Girlfriend launched in November, promising to help you catfish yourself — the $49.99 Almost Engaged plan delivers custom characterisation and live phone calls. The romance factor isn’t exactly high, but it takes the hassle out of actually having to meet a girl while you retain the envy and respect of your peers (at least, we’re guessing that’s the pitch to the young and lonely). Meanwhile Nintendo DS game LovePlus continues to delight and amuse, with one 27-year-old marrying his virtual girlfriend Nene Anegasaki months after the game’s 2009 launch.

Meanwhile, Callie Beusman considers a recent report on the future of sex and relationships, concluding that “robot sex” is “on the horizon, guys!”

Several sex machines exist already — one example touted by leading robot sexuality lecturer Laura G. Duncan in an interview with Thought Catalog has been eloquently dubbed “Fuckzilla.” “Fuckzilla is basically designed like Johnny Five, she explained. “It has appendages, and one arm is a penetrating dildo. The other is a chainsaw that’s had the chain removed, and it’s been replaced with these silicon molded tongues that make a circular motion.” In a more traditionally romantic take on the matter, David Levy, the author of Love and Sex With Robots, speculates that people will be marrying machines by 2050.

A less drastic (i.e., more likely to be used by humans soon) representation of this same concept is teledildonics, or sex toys that can be controlled by a computer. “Sexual devices that you can remotely control already exist, but they’ll catch on more,” Young told me. “Within the next 2-3 years, stores offering devices of that sort will open up.” Frankly, I’m surprised that the proliferation of teledildonic apps hasn’t started already. It’s something that could easily sync up to any extant model of any sex toy, and it could very easily be monetized for long-distance relationships — or, eventually, long-distance casual encounters.

License To Swill

Rachel Nuwer relays the recent findings of enterprising scientists who examined the novels of Ian Fleming and determined that “there is no way … that Bond would have been able to consume the amount of alcohol he is described as drinking … and still have kept up the precision, coordination and critical thinking skills that made him such a successful agent”:

To expose Bond for the drunk he really is, the team combed through all 14 of Fleming’s Bond novels, taking note of any reference to booze. If the novel didn’t specifically mention Bond drinking for a while, they filled in unknowns with conservative estimates. They also took note of days in which the agent would have found it impossible to drink, such as when he spent time in prison.

They used predefined alcohol unit levels to then calculate just how much drinking the character was doing on a weekly basis, which wound up totaling 92 units, or more than four times the recommended amount of alcohol. (Needless to say, on many days, Bond should not have been driving.) Out of 87 days they tallied, Commander Bond took a break from alcohol for just 12 of those days. “The level of functioning as displayed in the books is inconsistent with the physical, mental, and indeed sexual functioning expected from someone drinking this much alcohol,” the authors write.

A Chronicle Of Cocaine

Richard J. Miller describes how the drug took off:

In 1859 an Italian neurologist named Paolo Mantegazza visited Peru and performed a great deal of self-experimentation with coca, ranging from low to extremely high doses. He reported his experiences in a paper entitled “On the hygienic and medical values of Coca,” which discussed the drug’s ability to reduce hunger and fatigue, as well as to produce a mad mental “rush” at higher doses. … Large drug companies such as Parke-Davis in Detroit also got into the cocaine game. They developed processes for the mass production of easily crystallizable and soluble salts like hydrochloride, which could be accurately measured and dispensed. Finely powdered “lines” of cocaine could easily be “snorted” through a cut straw or rolled up banknote and would enter the well-vascularized mucous membranes in the nose and move from there into the blood and then the brain relatively quickly.

Naturally, the most efficient way of taking cocaine, just like morphine, was to inject it intravenously. To satisfy this portion of the cocaine market, drug companies like Parke-Davis also came up with drug-taking paraphernalia such as nifty little boxes that contained syringes, needles, and supplies of cocaine all packaged together as a fashion accessory for the smart set. According to Parke-Davis’ own ads, cocaine “could make the coward brave, the silent eloquent, and render the sufferer insensitive to pain.” As we have seen with other powerful and potentially dangerous drugs, the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century was a time when these things were generally available and not illegal. In fact, cocaine could be purchased over the counter in the United States until 1916.

(Image of advertisement from the January, 1896 issue of McClure’s via Wikimedia Commons)

Face Of The Day

Say hi to the original Bond girl:

When James Bond author Ian Fleming retired to Jamaica to write, it is widely believed that he turned to a Polish-born spy as the inspiration for his first Bond girl.  This muse, born Krystyna Skarbek and later known as Christine Granville, was simply put, captivating.

She had the distinction of being Winston Churchill’s favorite spy; some of her jilted exes actually banded together to form “The Panel to Protect the Memory of Christine Granville”; and even Nazi guard dogs would instantaneously bend to her will. Granville volunteered for the British Secret Intelligence Services at the outbreak of World War II.  While carrying out missions across Europe and the Middle East, she managed to escape capture, certain death and yes, even avalanches on several occasions.

Her life was truly more daring than one that could be imagined for the screen. For example, Cairo, 1941. That summer, the city was lousy with warring factions of secret agents. Granville had just uncovered a Nazi plan to invade Russia, the largest military operation in history. Her urgent reports were quietly ignored, and much to her shock she was accused of being a double-agent (due to escalating tensions between Britain and her native Poland). She had been summoned to Cairo with her partner and lover (and I say lover, because she was married to another Polish agent for Her Majesty’s Secret Service).

Once there, they were simply ordered to await their fate at the hands of British authorities. As they languished in the Cairo summer’s heat, Axis troops were campaigning across the desert towards Egypt with alarming force. Elsewhere, nearly four million enemy soldiers surrounded the Soviet border, poised to invade.  Christine was stripped of her power as an agent.  To make matters somehow worse, her husband arrived in Cairo at her defense, setting off a potent romantic rivalry with her partner (her husband ultimately left, disgraced).

It was only after realizing their horrible mistake in ignoring Christine’s discoveries that British authorities reinstated her as an agent.  Deeply dedicated to the cause, she promptly began espionage in Syria.  For the remainder of the war, her fearless bombast, resourcefulness and undeniable charm would be legendary.

More photos of Granville here.

Breaking The Height Taboo

Six-foot-two Ann Friedman is all for it, lamenting the fact that “only four percent of heterosexual couples feature a shorter man”:

[Neutralize] her insecurity by conveying that bigger is sexy. That you love her in heels. That you don’t feel like less of a man when you’re with her. This is complicated stuff. Some of it boils down to you owning a more classic masculinity—going in for the kiss first, deciding the dinner location, simply being more assertive. But keep in mind that, because you’re asking her to question gut-level beliefs about what she finds attractive, you need to be willing to broaden your own definition of what you find attractive—and convey to her that it does not contain the phrase “smaller than me.”

Of course, women also have to be willing to check their own biases about short men. I consider short guys my natural allies and am constantly making the case to my female friends that they should stop fetishizing tall men. (When one friend narrowed her OkCupid search to men taller than six feet and then complained about a boring date with some guy built like an NBA player, I laughed in her face.) Here’s how I figure it: If a man is comfortable with the fact that I’m taller, he’s also likely to be comfortable with the fact that I’m competitive and outgoing and career-oriented. As in: It means he’s a secure man.

Politics From Another Planet

Tim Kreider explains why science fiction tends be our most politically engaged genre of literature:

Science fiction is an inherently political genre, in that any future or alternate history it imagines is a wish about How Things Should Be (even if it’s reflected darkly in a warning about how they might turn out). And How Things Should Be is the central question and struggle of politics. It is also, I’d argue, an inherently liberal genre (its many conservative practitioners notwithstanding), in that it sees the status quo as contingent, a historical accident, whereas conservatism holds it to be inevitable, natural, and therefore just. The meta-premise of all science fiction is that nothing can be taken for granted. That it’s still anybody’s ballgame.

The contemporary example Kreider holds aloft to make his point? Kim Stanley Robinson, especially his trilogy of “Mars” novels – Red Mars, Green Mars, and Blue Mars.  Kreider writes that “what’s most powerful about the Mars books as political novels is that they envision a credible utopia”:

The first wave of his Martian settlers are all scientists, who are no more perfect than any other human beings but have been rigorously trained in a kind of intellectual integrity. Robinson argues that, now that climate change has become a matter of life and death for the species, it’s time for scientists to abandon their scrupulous neutrality and enter into the messy arena of politics. Essentially, Robinson attempts to apply scientific thinking to politics, approaching it less like pure physics, in which one infallible equation-ideology explains and answers everything, than like engineering—a process of what F.D.R. once called “bold, persistent experimentation,” finding out what works and combining successful elements to synthesize something new. He scavenges ideas from the American Constitution, the Swiss confederacy, “the guild socialism of Great Britain, Yugoslavian worker management, Mondragon ownership, Kerala land tenure, and so on” to construct his utopias. … In his Mars novels, Robinson uses the Red Planet as a historical tabula rasa, a template for creating a saner, more sustainable, and more just human society.

The Daring Dickinson

Last weekend, the Dish featured three poems by Emily Dickinson - here, here, and here – alongside images of the “scraps” of envelopes or wrappers they were originally composed on. Hillary Kelly perceives an autobiographical dimension in the scraps, recently reproduced in the collection The Gorgeous Nothings:

The madcap pencil strokes, torn edges, and higgledy-piggledy line breaks are the work of a quick-thinking, passionate woman. But the carefully crossed through and reworked prose are the mark of a poet bent on perfection. The harmony between the content and use of space, most of all, reveals Dickinson’s self-awareness and inherent knack for poetic construction. One small triangle of paper reads, with the words forming an upside down pyramid, “In this short life/ that only lasts an hour/ merely/ How much — how/ little — is/ within our/ power.” That self-important word, “power,” is smirkingly wedged between a smudge and a tear. On another little rectangle, Dickinson merely wrote, “A Mir/ acle for/ all.” And on an envelope whose face bears a carefully calligraphed “Miss Emily Dickinson” and whose rear is covered with a more elaborate poem, Dickinson has gently pencilled, “To light, and/ then return —”

In a 1955 TNR essay, Jay Leyda defended Dickinson against rigid and confining interpretations of her life as “the poet no one knew”:

Richard Chase built a valuable critical examination of her work on a wobbly base of uncritical acceptance of biographical error. Thornton Wilder went further, allowing a fancied, arch, doll-like figure of the poet to show to him only arch and doll-like qualities in her poetry, and pushing most of her writing aside in the process.

The Dickinson critics who promoted flexibility in our attitudes to her have always been in the minority. It took the perception of Allen Tate to attack the legend: “All pity for Miss Dickinson’s “starved life’ is misdirected. Her life was one of the richest and deepest ever lived on this continent.”

Conrad Aiken was right to call her choice “deliberate and conscious” (but wrong to believe that she chose to become “a hermit”). In Amherst itself, where the temptation was greatest to create a peculiar figure named Emily, George Whicher’s was a lonely voice of objectivity; the insights of his biography. This Was a Poet, will survive factual correction. In a following generation, Henry Wells studied Emily Dickinson’s poetry without noise and with an ear for wit and sharpness, qualities often obscured by the legend; and F. O. Matthiessen examined “the private poet” and her work with a healthy skepticism.

Stefansson has a wonderful term for our reluctance to revise set patterns: “the standardization of error.” We’ve so standardized our ways of thinking about Emily Dickinson that we tend to resent anything that disturbs the neat, cold shape handed us—our fable convenue, our fraudulent monument.

In a recent interview, the poet CAConrad discusses falling in love with Dickinson’s verse as a child, and how “a few years later, she came up in class for the first time and I was disappointed immediately with the teacher’s conversation around her”:

The teacher made Emily Dickinson into this frail, scared, wilting lily. But the true story really is: centuries of poetry came up to her doorstep and she didn’t like any of it. She said, I have to make something new. That’s courageous. You don’t do that if you’re some frail, frightened being. I think she was a real badass, actually. I think that we’re in love with that story because she didn’t participate in the world the right way. But how could she? She was a woman in Amherst at a time when women didn’t have a voice. Period. … Emily Dickinson has zero counterparts in my opinion. She’s completely on her own. She changed everything for us. And the thing is I found out the older I got that story that we were made to accept about Emily Dickinson—living this particular way that made her look kind of spooky in her house in Amherst. It was a prevalent story but I also think it was wrong.

Mental Health Break

Don’t settle for Bff:

The Poem As “Thing”

Mark Yakich ponders “poetry’s contemporary predicament: a poem that is so strange, so other, is also a poem many feel they might as well ignore”:

Here’s a poem from the 1960s by Aram Saroyan:

lighght

Yes, that’s the whole poem. I know, it seems asinine. When I wrote it on the board and asked my students to examine it, one said, “How do you even read it aloud?” When we tried, we began to understand the intent of the poem. The word “light” seems to be implied, but what’s with the apparent typo? After a long silence, another student said, “That’s the point—in the ordinary word ‘light’ we don’t pronounce the ‘gh’—the ‘gh’ is silent, and the double ‘gh’ makes us realize that even more.” The poem calls attention to the system of language itself—the stuff of letters in combination—and the relationship between sound and sense. The familiar—a plain word such as “light”—has been made new if only for a brief moment. In Saroyan’s own words: “[T]he crux of the poem is to try and make the ineffable, which is light—which we only know about because it illuminates something else — into a thing.” When we come across a poem—any poem—our first assumption should not be to prejudice it as a thing of beauty, but simply as a thing.

The View From Your Window

Chicago, Illinois, 7.15 am