Updates and Re-Takes on Some Old Posts

A. Abortion: Not long ago I blogged on some recent stories about abortion and women's access to do with their bodies what they think they need, and I touched on Savita Halappanavar's death in Ireland due to her inability to get a legal abortion. Very quickly I segued into one of my comfort zones, James Joyce. But let us note that the citizenry in Ireland are pushing things on this case, more than six months after Savita's death. Which is heartening.

But I tend to agree with the editor/reporter for Salon, Katie McDonough, who calls the recent gains "infinitesimally small," and that most women in Ireland will continue to have a very rough go of it indeed in future unwanted pregnancies. (Although, if I were a PAID editor at Salon I would hope to avoid pleonasms such as "infinitesimally small," but alas, I'm just some dipshit hack, so whaddyagonna do? But aye: the gap in status between Katie and me, as writers? Katie might say it was gargantuanly huge. And indeed, Katie would be right. Again.)

Gotta admire the brass ones on Taoiseach (President, basically) Enda Kenny, telling the Church's main man in Ireland that "my book is the Constitution." And, basically, threaten me with excommunication all you want, you bullying medievalists.

May wonders never cease, faith! (<-----please read that with your best Irish accent, even if you're Irish.)

Maybe the wild card here is New Pope Francis, who recently performed a quick miraculous exorcism, despite The Church's moving away from "demon possession" stuff in the last few decades. And then, in the same week (or so?), he pronounced that atheists can be good people and make it to heaven too. I am squarely for unorganized religion and consider the Catholic Church a major nuisance as an official entity, but if you're gonna be a highfalutin' carny huckster claiming a hotline to Gee Oh Dee, wearing a dress and traveling in a Popemobile, at least give us a good show. Pour it on.

And with his recent win, he's now infallible, so why not have fun with it? Gosh! Thanks, Francis! I bet the atheists are sleeping better and the faithful are a tad pissed, or at least flummoxed. Some of us look forward to your next Surprise, pontiff. (I will eat Werner Herzog's shoe if he says abortion is now okay, because women should be able to control their own reproduction...and hey: if you clicked on the "atheists" link from the Catholic website, did you get an automatic loud video of a violent Schwarzenegger film too? What's up with all that?)

B. Names: A full moon or two ago I spewed blog on Montaigne and names, and commented on Montaigne's assertion that it's up to a dad to give his children fine names. Then I went into the Zappa kids' names and etcetera. Now New Zealand - no doubt having read my blog - has outlawed 71 names that non-Zappa parents tried to give their kids.

If you take a gander at the list you may agree 100%. Or not. The overweening libertarian in me says the State has no right to say what the parents can or can't name their kids, but I admit you have to wonder about the seriousness and human decency of mom and/or dad (probably dad?) who sought to tag the kid with "Anal" or "Mafia No Fear" or a sole asterisk* and a simple period..

"Apple"seems fine to me, but not in an age in which it's the name of one of the most powerful corporations in the world. 40 years ago, a little girl whose hippie parents named her Apple B. Watson: it's sorta cute. Not anymore.  Why not "Exxon Jones"? If you're a slack-jawed yokel, maybe. But "Facebook" seems heinous to me.

History and the pace of change accelerating as it seems to, logarithmically, things could look quite different by the time the kid reaches school age. "Hey, what's a Facebook?," one kid asks Facebook Smith. "Some thing people used to waste their time on back in, like, 2013," Facebook responds.

I see that Sweden has taken similar steps, but I don't know about you: I want to party with a person (or what the hell: the parents) named "Brfxxccxxmnpccclllmmnprxvclmnckssqlbb111116." I'm guessing the parents got wasted one night on something mind-manifesting, but then I think things maybe went sorta off when one said, "If we have this baby, I think the Ouija Board should pick the name, 'cuz it's a medium between us and the spirit world."

"Okay!"

Besides, let the kid have that name on his birth certificate; it'll be good for endless laffs. And the kid would end up being called "Beearsix" for the first two letters and the last number. Then "Beer." Then "Bear." Then, for awhile, "Six." By the time he's 18? Bjorn, a fine Swedish name. On with it...

C. Hoarding: I really allowed my musings to flow back when I tried to write about hoarding and related ideas HERE. And not long ago I happened upon this article, which extended the ideas I'd crammed for just before I set to typing.

There were a few things new to me here. Psychology professor Randy Frost of Smith College, who has studied hoarding since at least 1993, put forth the intriguing idea that "giftedness in aesthetic appreciation of the physical world, rather than a pure illness" was one way we could look at this. And Andy Warhol was a famous hoarder, so that sorta bolsters Frost's claim.

Did you know about the Collyer Mansion?

Another thing that made me wonder: that 10% of Unistatians pay for storage units, and that 70% can't park their cars in the garage 'cuz there's too much stuff in there. Hoarding seems to have a genetic component, and maybe up to 5% - or 15 million - of Unistatians hoard, to some extent. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy seems to help this OCD-ish behavior, which sounds promising to me. I also thought the ideas of Monika Eckfield of UCSF are interesting: there may be two broad types of hoarders: 1.) impulsive acquirers, which tend to be men, and 2.) worried keepers, which tend to be women.

Every time I read about hoarding I can't help it, I'm obsessively compulsed to think about Prof. George Carlin's ideas about our houses as being places for "our stuff." Boxes with lids on them. When you fly you look down and see all these little boxes with lids on them...places other people keep their shit. And did you ever notice that their stuff is "shit" and your shit is "stuff"? I'll link to the bit as I find it on YT today, but if you're looking at this and the video is not there, please contact me, okay? Here 'tis:

D. Deceit Ubiquitous. Danny Schechter wrote not long ago about "The News That Isn't: How We Are Fed False Stories Driven By Missing Information." He even linked "the news" to (fake) wrestling, which I also did when discussing the kayfabe and other ideas about deception and deceit that seem to be built into our biological beings. It's just so damned pervasive. "News" seems increasingly heat without light, ever-thinner narratives, and missing vital information amidst the scandalous and prurient morality plays. I think maybe we must work very hard in order to live up to the ballyhoo about, I dunno, how we're "the beauty of the world/the paragon of animals," as a melancholy Dane's poet once wrote.

I derived perverse delight from writing that particular piece on biology and deceit, but it didn't seem to impress anyone. Then, a few weeks later, I noticed that piece was getting tons of hits every day, suddenly. I traced the surprising interest back via the rather primitive statistical info that Blogger gives us: some investor's website had linked to it. They saw it as a piece about markets, I'm guessing, after reading their website for awhile. Anyway, it's nice to be appreciated by somebody, even if you get the feeling some of those somebodies would kick their own grandmother down a flight of stairs if it would improve their returns for just that one Wednesday.

"Check this Overweening Generalist dude out: He says it's all fixed...how do we get in on the ground floor?"

And Danny Schechter? He's on my team. That weirdo is on my wavelength.

E. Can Rape Jokes Be Funny? Molly Knefel of Salon thinks not. <yawn goshwhattasurprise> My spill on the topic was HERE. If you're new to this, please read the links in my post and realize I'm not saying rape is funny; I'm merely saying that we ought to be able to laugh at anything. In this territory, I yield all gravitas and hilaritas to Paul Krassner, who has written and ruminated and agonized and rationalized and vacillated and...he's really the go-to person on this thorny topic. But since I wrote on it, the conversation seems to have opened up. And no joking: I consider this a coincidence. We need to talk about this, hopefully with civility. HERE's a podcast link to Slate folk talking about Salon folk's take on a "double standard" regarding rape jokes, and then Sady Doyle on Sam Morrill's "unfunny rape jokes." Just skip ahead to the good stuff, but I implore you to read my blogpost on this topic, especially the end, where, if you are 100% sure that it's impossible for a rape joke to be funny, give the Carlin bit a read and then tell me in the comments that I'm still wrong.

Appreciate it!

F. Generalists: A topic of intellectual flavor that has recurred throughout the lifespan of Overweening Generalist, not long ago I tried to elucidate...something about "generalists." NB that in the first paragraph I write about "generalists" in the field of insurance, or information technologies, and a couple other areas. I failed to mention the field of crime, and had a good time trying to tease out the meanings in this overly technical study. The writers here noted "a large group of suspects who can be described as generalists." Also, I didn't know how influential Gottfredson and Hirschi's General Theory of Crime was, but I'll check it out, literally.

Skip down to the "Conclusions" for the meat of it, and here is my favorite passage:

In parallel, we observe a non-trivial pattern of specialization across time and gender. In general, women are implicated in types of crimes classified in fewer clusters, and tend to be more specialized than men. We also find that older persons are the most specialized suspects. This can be due to three different or combined factors: (i) suspects tend to specialize over time; (ii) there is a group of specialized individuals who remain in crime, while the generalists distance themselves from criminal activity; and (iii) there is a cohort effect such that the younger generation tends to consist of generalists while the older generation consists of specialists.


And while there are nuances, the social scientists considered violent crimes, drug-related crimes, thefts, burglaries, fraud, financial crime, environmental violations and sex crimes, traffic violations, and organized robbery. Can you imagine the "generalist" who had committed at least one of each of those types of crimes? A true generalist. We might not "approve" of his actions, but let us at least give a grudging tip 'o the hat to his dedication to seeing the Big Picture in crime. A life-long, in-depth study of crime is what these older generalist-criminals have accomplished - the ones who never stopped generalist studies and never started to specialize - and they're almost like cultural anthropologists, with lots of knowledge about Urban Studies too. But sociopathic. Sort of. (Hey, no: we don't want people like this within miles of where we live, but they are interesting from a distance, eh?)

Think of the bragging he (and if you read the study, it's probably a "he") can get away with in prison! You wanna improve on organized robbery? You come to me. I done that stuff. You think you know your violent crimes and financial shenanigans? I bet you don't know as much as I do. Pull up a chair and sit at the right hand of the master of fraud and armed robbery with intent to commit aggravated mayhem with a side of meth dealing. Traffic violations? Sex crimes? Identity theft? Dealing guns illegally? Bank robbery? Fencing stolen cars parts? Being a hit man for hire? Friends: I'm here for ya. I've done it all, man! 

I like to think other criminals look up to this guy and refer to his generalism as "Goin' Around The World." 

I like to think the guys in The Big House call my idealized generalist "The Professor." Or hell, perhaps best yet: The Generalist. But then I have a very active imagination, if warped. Next!

G. Rushkoff: I wrote about his most recent book on the the shock of The Present, HERE. And I found out I'd missed his short stint as guest on Colbert. 

Interestingly coincidental?: As I started to do this blog-update thing, I made a short list of some topics to update, and I ended up leaving six updates out, lest this go on far too long. But then I picked up William Gibson's Distrust That Particular Flavor, a collection of essays and speeches by a writer I admire tremendously. And in May of 2010, he gave a talk in New York that sounds like a paraphrase of Rushkoff's recent claims:

"People my age are products of the culture of capital-F Future. The younger you are, the less you are a product of that. If you're fifteen or so, today, I suspect that you inhabit a sort of endless digital Now, a state of atemporality enabled by our increasingly efficient communal prosthetic memory. I also suspect that you don't know it, because, as anthropologists tell us, one cannot know one's own culture." (p.44)
DAY-um! I went on ad nauseum yet again. But then when don't I? Lo siento, mi amigos...

                                         a very young William Gibson

Hoarders: Glad It Ain't Me! (or...is it?)

Ever see the TV show Hoarders? I've seen a couple episodes, which were enough for me. I'm told there is at least one copycat show on cable TV on roughly the same subject. What made me wonder: is this a serotonin imbalance? Is it related to OCD? What? Some researchers at the National Institute for Mental Health are making some inroads using fMRI machines and things like junk mail, but I'll get to that later.

I previously wrote about my baseball card collecting as a youth, and tried to link it to Walter Benjamin's idea about the essence of the Original, which, in my research on Benjamin, I linked to a hashish-inspired idea that has influenced the postmodernists.

Lately - in addition to Hoarders - I've gotten into conversations with friends over their collections, their prized possessions that seemingly would have no value to anyone but themselves, and experiences being in others' dwellings that were...how do I put this delicately? Cluttered badly.

                            I've never been in a house that was this hoarded-up. Click on
                            the pic for a more in-your-face view. You thought You had 
                            problems? 

Robert Sapolsky and Rice Krispie Treats
And I've been thinking of one of my intellectual gurus, Robert Sapolsky, who emphasizes the metaphor of the Continuum when we think of diseases, and it's really easy to see it when we think of things like, say, Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder. Sapolsky would hold a little end-of-the-semester party for students at Stanford, and make sure Rice Krispie Treats would be part of the celebration. The picture I linked to there, notice, has all the little treats cut from the pan in idealized rectangles or squares. At some point, during every party, Sapolsky would sneak back into the room where the cookies and cakes were, and notice that people who had used a knife to cut their own treats would always cut at nice 90 degree angles. Sapolsky would quickly and surreptitiously make some odd, uneven, symmetry-ruining cut in the Treats, eat his confection, then rejoin the party. After a short period when others had gone into the food room for Treats and other goodies, he'd go back in, and sure enough: someone had "fixed" the irregular angle he'd cut and recouped the 90 degree angle. His point? We all have a bit of this OCD-ishness in us, even the best and brightest Neuroscience students at Stanford.

When you drop mail in a public post office box on a street corner, do you ever check again to make sure your mail actually fell into the box and didn't get "stuck" inside the lid? If you do, don't feel bad: more people than you'd think also do this.

If you want to read a really mindblowing essay on how this might relate evolutionarily to the rise of religious ritual and dogma, read "Circling The Blankets For God," from Sapolsky's book The Trouble With Testosterone. Or: HERE 'tis from Scribd.

Ahh...but what does this have to do with hoarding? I'm not sure. Let's delve a bit deeper.

My Own Magical Thinking
When I met my future wife's parents I quickly took a strong liking to her father, who had been born in North Carolina in 1919, with four brothers, and they did subsistence farming near Chapel Hill. During the Great Depression they had nothing except what they grew for themselves. When what we call "World War Two" came around, he enlisted, but his eyes had been crossed since he was born, so the Army fixed his eyesight and he learned radio repair instead of having to fight Germans or Japanese. He caught tuberculosis during the war, and was in a TB ward for five years, until they were sure they had one of a new class of miracle drugs called "antibiotics" that could fix him up without harm. While in the ward he taught himself advanced mathematics, relativity, and the basics of quantum mechanics from books brought around in a bookmobile. After the war he owned the first TV repair shop in Los Angeles - he had no formal college! - and then spent the rest of his life working in aviation and on NASA-related projects as an engineer. This guy was amazing. He was wry, very funny, relentlessly logical, and had a thick North Carolina accent until death. What's my point?

One day my wife, after visiting him, brought me a bunch of his old cardigan sweaters and asked me if I wanted any of them. I said Hell Yes! I had never been a cardigan-wearer, but just wearing her Old Man's old sweaters would be cool. They had something to do with Him.

I wore those sweaters until they were totally unwearable: holes in the elbows, the seams ripped at the shoulder, etc. I guess part of it was I thought my cardigan-wearing fit my "weirdo intellectual" image of myself, but maybe just as much: I thought possibly a bit of my beloved father-in-law's Cool Guy essence was seeping into me, and it's making me a smarter and funnier dude. I dunno. Maybe? I "know" this is crass mysticism on the Main Level. But I didn't throw those cardigans away; I kept them in my closet. After he died, every time I saw those things piled in my closet I thought of him. A few of 'em are still around.

What is this all about? Respect? Yes, but respect doesn't totally explain it.

Dr. Bruce Hood and the Essence Behind Sacred Objects
Cognitive psychologist Bruce Hood sheds some light on all this, I think. In his book Supersense: Why We Believe In The Unbelievable, he relates his delight in a jam-packed memorabilia shop, and how he liked to talk to the owner about why people felt sentimental over Olde Things. Things that were, seemingly, ephemeral. Like trinkets and old postcards. The owner told Hood he thought people collected things in order to remind themselves of when they were younger and happier. Here's Hood:

"Why do people do it? Collecting seems such an odd behavior in a world of instant upgrades, duplication, and modern innovation. Why look backward? When I entered the collector's domain, I discovered a mirror world populated by legions of people who traipse around car trunk sales and flea markets every weekend seeking authenticity. Come rain or shine, these people were out in droves, looking for the original." (198)

                                          A curio shop, somewhere in the East.

The original. We're back to Walter Benjamin again, in his ingenious "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction." Or are we? Is there another, somewhat less romantic way to model the search for the value of the Original? Hood cites superstar neuroscientist Simon Baron-Cohen (cousin of "Borat" Sacha Baron-Cohen, btw), who has shown that men seem more naturally inclined than women to order and systems, and Hood thinks "completing the set" seems more a male thing than female.

Hood has some neuroscientifically fine riffs about art and forgeries. There have been forgeries of famous paintings that sold for a lot of money, because "experts" vouched for the painting's authenticity. When it is found that the paintings are forgeries, the shit hits the fan, people are outraged, and the value of the now-realized-fake sinks into the abyss. But if everyone was fooled until some sleuth figured out there was something amiss with the provenance, why does it matter to people if it was real or a fake?

All of us think we know the answer, and perhaps many of us do know, but what Hood says about Why we care so much seems very interesting to me.

"I think that an art forgery is unacceptable because it does not generate the psychological essentialist view that something of the artist is literally in the work," says Hood on page 203, op. cit.

Psychological essentialism? Well, I get it, if only because of my father-in-law's cardigans. But let's dig a  tad deeper with Hood before I get to the whole hoarding thing...

Plutarch told the story of the preservation of legendary Athenian king Theseus's ship. As years passed, some of the wood rotted and was replaced by new planks. After awhile it became unclear if the ship was still Theseus's. Was it "really" the "same" ship? What if the old rotted planks had been kept and reassembled into some battered old ship...would that be the "real" one?

(No matter how old you are right now, sitting there reading this, most of the cells in your body that make "you" are only ten years old at the oldest. That "you" from 12 years ago? All of the cells have been replaced!)

Hood and colleagues built an impressive-looking Big Machine with lights and dials on it: a Copy Box Machine. Here's what it could do: you asked kids to put their beloved blankie or teddy bear into it, and  one exactly the same but "different" would come out the other side. Every kid wanted the Original back.
(see Supersense, pp.203-213)

"So I would argue that the behavior of the toddler toward his grubby blanket and the obsession of a fanatical collector to own original memorabilia reflect the same human tendency to see objects as possessing invisible properties that originate from significant individuals. By owning objects and touching them, we can connect with others, and that gives us the sense of distributed existence over time and with others. The net effect is that we become increasingly linked together by a sense of deeper hidden structures." (221)

"Distributed existence over time and with others." Is that too much for our egos to ask in an indifferent universe? Apparently not! (More than one blogger has cited their blog as Internet immortality, so I guess you can count me in as one desirous of my existence distributed over time, with others.)

Mutt: You want your existence distributed to others over time?
Jute: Aye! Hey why not?

Hoarding
Then what's with all the hoarding? Dr. David Tolin, working under the auspices of the National Institute of Mental Health, had a control group, a hoarding group, and people with OCD collect their junk mail for a long time, and bring it in to the lab, where they were asked to climb into an fMRI machine. When a picture of their mail came up, the areas of the brain in the hoarders that have to do with weighing the value of things, emotional decisions and assessment of risk, unpleasant feelings, and making a decision about personal possessions showed an unusual lighting pattern: hoarders's brains were not the same as the OCD people's, and the control group was, of course, more "normal." If they saw a picture of someone else's junk mail, the hoarders had an easier time thinking about what they would do with it. Two basic reports on Tolin and his team's findings are HERE and HERE. A CNN video on these findings is HERE.

Bruce Hood, like Sapolsky, emphasizes the Continuum when analyzing his data. Some of us seem to have much less of a magical/religious-like impulse with regard to special objects. Some people may watch Hoarders for lurid reasons, for many reasons, but I think it's well-established that hoarders just have a bit more trouble making sense of what objects are truly valuable than the rest of us do. And as for objects that we're attached to, for sentimental reasons, this seems roaringly on a continuum, and at odds with publicly-stated norms. For example, as Hood writes, "Most people are too embarrassed to admit they still have their sentimental childhood objects. However, a recent survey of two thousand solitary travelers by a U.K. hotel chain revealed that one in five men slept with a teddy bear - more than the female travelers." (210)

Whew! Now I don't feel so weird about hoarding my 2000 some-odd books, many of which I probably won't read again. (But what a pain in the ass when you need to move!)