My Weird Jewish Pangs: A Divulgence

I don't know when it started, but it definitely recurs. Something will trigger it. I'll read something particularly brilliant, and quite often: yep. There it is: a Jewish name attached. I think it all first started for me when I was around 13. My last name? Johnson.

I was one of those introverted, bookish kids. Deep in WASPy Los Angeles suburbia. I don't recall ever knowing a Jewish person; that is, I somehow didn't know what "jewish" meant. I'd heard the word, but it was a cipher. I always had one best friend as a kid, and we spent all our time together. When I was 13, my best friend was a kid that got the best grades in math, and he also broke the school record for the  mile run. I think his background was British, by way of North Carolina. We were both bookish in our own ways. We had other friends, too.

                                                           Woody Allen 

My mom thought we'd like a new movie - new to us, because at the time our little burgh filled with white flighters didn't have its own movie theater - and my mom had to drive my pal and I to an adjacent town to see the second run of a film called Take The Money and Run. I remember we laughed through the whole thing, then stayed and watched it again. As I remember it, we were the only people under 30 in the theater. It felt that way. Back then, if you paid once and you wanted to see the film again, you just remained in your seat and waited for another showing. They didn't chase you out. Anyway, at 13, all I knew was this Woody Allen guy was a genius.

Later, I developed quite a taste for Allen's books and films. As I slowly pieced together for myself ideas of "Jews" - reading the OT on my own, trying to figure out Israel and Palestine, tracing that history, I kept running into writings and ideas that I found endlessly interesting, and almost always some Jew was at the center of it all.

Now: my people are from Norway, Scotland, England, Sweden. But on the West Coast of Unistat, in the last third of the 20th century, in the suburbs of LA, I had no religion. I grew up with no tradition. My mother had been active in the League of Women Voters and was a JFK Democrat. I don't remember my father talking about intellectual ideas at all. He wasn't religious but he was good at sales and had very many friends because he was a master joke-teller and genuinely loved people. He was the life of the party.

How did I become so bookish? Around age 20 or so, I remember I sort of thought I was sort of...jewish. But how incredibly not Jewish I was! My ancestors were not hounded all over he globe and  subject to pogroms.

                                          Franz Kafka, prophet of absurd State power

Well, growing up an introverted asthmatic kid, in suburbia, with long hair and guitar, not Protestant, not wealthy, with an anxious mother who passed that on to me...I escaped into books and other worlds, other ideas. This was a world inordinately influenced by Jews, an influence far above their numbers relative to the larger population.

So: being alienated and persecuted for looking like a dirtbag pothead rock and roller in a small, smoggy white town overwhelmingly clean-cut, Republican and WASPy was one aspect. My bookishness ("Why do you...read books?," I distinctly remember a fellow band-member ask me) was another. The asthma and anxiety was probably another ingredient. Anyway, I most definitely felt (and still to this day feel) as The Other...without any of the Holocaust-y stuff bagged in there.

And by my late teens I had become steeped in Jewish humorists and had become interested in ideas by people like Spinoza, Marx, Freud, Einstein, and later, Chomsky. I had practically memorized Groucho's lines from Duck Soup. 

[It occurs to me my blog entries on "Favored Hungarians" can double as "More Jews That I've Found Fascinating."]

Chaim
I recently became acquainted with a writer friend's friend, a San Francisco writer named Chaim Bertman, roughly my age. He was housesitting for my friend and I went over to check on him and we talked rapid-fire about odd ideas for a solid hour as I stood in the doorway. I asked him if he'd published and he told me of his 10 year old first novel. Later that night I found a library that had it in its catalog so I obtained it a couple days later and read it. He'd previously said he'd like to read my (this) blog. As I read his first chapter, it was so fine, so writerly, that I felt like calling him up to request that he not read my blog. His book - which he seemed quasi-embarrased about, or maybe it was such ancient history to him? - is called The Stand-Up Tragedian and it came out in 2001. If you want to write a novel about not being able to write a novel while having picaresque adventures through Israel, Florence, and all over Unistat, you will have a tough time topping this guy. He writes beautifully. I loved one little moment, when the protagonist (who seemed very like Chaim; it was difficult to not read the book as poetic autobiography) is talking on the phone to his university professor-father, who wants him to finally settle down and "do" something with his life."Eric" dodges the question and tells his father a Hasidic story:

"I asked him if he knew the story of Rabbi Isaac, son of Yekel, in Cracow. I'd found it in an English translation of a book of Hasidic tales. It explained better than I could what had set me into motion - why I wanted to be a writer.

"After many years of poverty, which had never shaken his faith in God, Rabbi Isaac dreamed that someone had bade him look for a treasure in Prague, under the bridge that leads to the King's palace. Rabbi Isaac didn't have a curvy bone in his body: He always told the truth. When he arrived at Prague, Rabbi Isaac ingeniously told a native his dream. 'Treasure, king, bridge, palace,' the man laughed. 'I have dreams too - who doesn't? Me, for instance, I keep having this dream that I find a big treasure under the stove of some poor Jew by the name of Isaac, son of Yekel, in Cracow. But you think I'm going to wear out my shoes, walking to Cracow, where one half of the Jews are named Isaac, and the other Yekel?' And he laughed again. Rabbi Isaac bowed, traveled home, and found his shovel." (p.16)

This tale acts as a fractal for the entire book. His next book will be science fiction, Bertman told me.

                                                             Robert Scheer

Robert Scheer
One of my favorite political writers. My beloved English professor - the best teacher I'd ever had and who was incidentally not a Jew -  told me about Scheer, who I'd never heard of. Scheer had written a book on how dangerous and crazy Reagan and the people he was surrounded with were; Reagan was into his second term and my Professor pointed me toward Scheer's With Enough Shovels. Some Reaganite had told Scheer that nuclear war was winnable, it's not that bad: we can dig holes in the ground and dirt is a wonderful thing. And he was serious.

I followed Scheer closely after that, then realized he had been writing in "my" newspaper, the Los Angeles Times. Later I found out he'd been involved in SDS, had written for Ramparts and maybe even, if memory serves, The Berkeley Barb, all sorts of romantic things.

Anyway, he'd published, in the Times, a very long, three-part piece that ran January 29-31, 1978: "The Jews of Los Angeles." It was filled with history, influential figures, and all sorts of arcane (to me) minutiae about various schisms and causes and immigration routes to LA, and statistics. (You can find it collected in Scheer's Thinking Tuna Fish, Talking Death.) It clarified some things for me about Jewish identity that I've never ceased to think about since: the idea of Jews as a race (and how this must be preserved, and various other dissenting takes by Jews); the idea that Israel is the most important thing to a Jew: to keep Israel safe and thriving. And third: the culture of improvement of the human race, which was based in a universalist idea. It is this face of Judaism - the universal brother and sisterhood of the human race - that appealed to me greatly. (And, in my current state of ignorance, I trace the historical epicenter over this idea, its coalescence, to Holland and Spinoza, but I will leave that for some future blauge/blah-g/blog.)

Scheer wrote of a retired female Jewish garment worker in LA. She didn't care about the ideas in the synagogue; she'd left oppressive Russia 50 years before. She did miss Yiddish speakers, socialist rousers coming to give furtive talks despite right-wing LA's WASP-rulers and their thriving Red Squads. "She missed the young Jewish girls in leather jackets, organizers in the fledgling garment district, transplants from the East Side of New York, trying to have their fiery idealistic commitment, and sunshine and oranges, too. [...] They passed this secular religion of the Jews - this special moral concern that would not quit - on to their young, who then flooded the ranks of the civil rights and antiwar movements."

Now, below is a passage that gave me an envious Jewish pang way back when, when I first read it. Recall that not for one moment was any "idea" ever discussed around my family's dinner table, while my mom and dad were still together, nor even after they split:

(Despite the sunshine and beaches of Santa Monica and the crime rate, rudeness on the buses, etc:) "But their minds were still occupied with social ideas, with what, for generations of Jews, had been the substance of life itself - with issues, with ideas, with what the contemporary Jewish writer Vivian Gornick captures best in her recent book [presumably The Romance of American Communism? published in 1978? - the OG]:

"It was characteristic of that world that during those hours at the kitchen table with my father and his socialist friends I didn't know we were poor. I didn't know that in those places beyond the streets of my neighborhood we were without power, position, material or social existence. I only knew that the tea and black bread were the most delicious food and drink in the world, that political talk filled the room with a terrible excitement and richness of expectation, that here in the kitchen I felt the same electric thrill I felt when Rouben, my Yiddish teacher, pressed my upper arm between two bony fingers, and his eyes shining behind thick glasses, said to me, 'Ideas, dolly, ideas. Without them, life is nothing. With them, life is everything.'" (Thinking Tuna Fish, pp.47-48)

                                              Meghan Daum, hilarious shiksa

Meghan Daum
Not long ago I finally got around to reading Daum's 2001 book of essays, My Misspent Youth. I first encountered Daum in the LA Times. I still read her online. She's wickedly funny, often self-deprecating, sometimes bitchy, always very intelligent. I had never given any conscious thought about whether Daum was Jewish or not. I just knew I had a crush on her because she was such a tremendous essayist.

So I'm reading through, admiring each piece, when I get to "American Shiksa" near the end. That tears it: Meghan is not Jewish. She's a WASP from the East-ish part of Unistat, now living on the Left Coast.

And she's got a variation of my Jewish pang.

When adolescence hit her, she skipped becoming a woman and instead became a shiksa:

"I just didn't have much taste for those praying quarterbacks, those hunks in blue satin choir robes, the hulking social drinkers, the swaggering lifeguards and stockbrokers, the good old boys from the verdant athletic fields of my youth. I discovered Jewish men like I discovered books in the library, tucked away in the dark corners of suburbia, reticent and wise and spouting out words I had to look up in the dictionary. Unlike Christian men with their innate sense of entitlement, with their height and freckles and stamp collections and summer Dairy Queen jobs, all those homages to the genetics and accoutrements of Western Civilization, Jewish men were rife with ambiguity, buzzing with edge. Their sports were cognitive, their affection seemingly cerebral. They were so smart that they managed to convince girls like me that they liked me for my brain, that even though I was a shiksa, even though I had been deprived of Hebrew school and intense dinner debates about the Palestinian Question, I was a smart girl."(pp.129-130)

She goes on in hilarious detail. Daum eventually married a Jew. You could see it coming. Oh my gawd Daum is funny. And she's not even Jewish! (Well, maybe she got some of it via osmosis?) Anyway, I ain't the only one, although I myself have never had a Jewish girlfriend...until my wife found her birth parents and it turns out her biological father is Jewish. I'd rather not get into the particulars as to whether that actually "counts," because it's not my point. My point is: I missed out on Vivian Gornick's tea and black bread and ideas being "everything."

                                            Steve Almond. I identified a lot with the 
                                            main character in his short story, "My Life
                                            In Heavy Metal," which, 'nuff said.

Steve Almond
I recently read, with mounting envy, his collection of essays, (Not That You Asked): Rants, Exploits, and Obsessions, from 2007. His obsession with Kurt Vonnegut, his run-in with Fox News after he quit his Adjunct Professor job at Boston University after they invited Condoleeza Rice to talk. An essay on the Boston Red Sox that is probably the finest piece of sports fandom-sickness I've ever read, and I've read a lot. I'm a connoisseur. Almond writes about sex in the most frank and funny manner. Read his books if only for the sex. He's not an erotic writer, although at times he writes about sex in such a starkly truthful and poignant and poetic way, he seems erotic nevertheless. And then, near the end of the book, an essay on his Jewish identity, "Ham For Chanukah":

"It will be difficult to explain why, as full-blooded Jews, the spawn of actual rabbis, we took part in this deeply fucked-up ritual. But I am going to try to explain. Because that is what Jews do: we try to explain." (p.273)

Almond tells why his upbringing near Stanford was so non-religious: his parents were professionals. They were busy. His grandparents had a lot to do with it, too, and Almond is hilarious about it: "My paternal grandfather Gabriel endured a thorough Jewish education, then went off and became a famous political scientist. His basic attitude was that God had done some interesting work early on, but hadn't published much lately."

Well into his adulthood, Almond didn't seem to consciously identify with any of those three aspects of Jewish identity: Race. Israel. Universalism. Gabriel's wife was Jewish but seemed to so desire assimilation in the US that she seemed almost "tacitly anti-semitic," identifying with German culture and becoming involved with the Unitarian Church.

Eventually, as Almond grows and begins thinking for himself about his background, he gravitates to the universalist aspect of identity:

"My appreciation of Judaism has more to do with pride. I viewed my people as pound-for-pound champions of consciousness - Christ, Marx, Freud, Einstein - stars of the longest-running ethnic drama on earth..." (p.285)

Here's a passage that activated my pang big-time. Almond's mother spoke Yiddish, and passed a large Yiddish vocabulary on to Steve. Almond writes:

"I cannot begin to express my adoration for Yiddish, the official language of the shtetl Jews and the most emotionally precise vernacular ever devised. More than any holiday ritual, Yiddish is the legacy my mother passed on to me. I once actually wrote an entire cycle of poems (awful, all of them) devoted to the Yiddish word schmaltz." (p.285)

He writes that his "recovering Catholic" wife wanted to convert to Judaism, which moved him greatly, and they will bring their daughter up in Judaism. "She will know where and who she came from. She will be loved unreasonably. The rest is hers to determine."

Almond impressed the hell out of me a few months back when he dared to publish a critical essay on Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert - and their slavish fans, of which I guess I'm one - for congratulating themselves for being so cool and hip and smart, when, Almond thought, Stewart and Colbert were more enabling and giving air time to fascists. I admired the essay even though I thought Almond misunderstood the function of satire and comedy - and Almond does both very very well himself - but he really made me think. (I'm always grateful for this.) When the piece was picked up by Huffington Post, I was embarrassed for the 3000 (it seemed like it) liberals in the comments section who lashed out at this "Steve Almond" for offending their immaculate tastes, making fun of his name, no one evincing the slightest hint they knew who he was, accusing him of being a sour grapester who probably got turned down for a writing gig with Stewart or Colbert. Thereby sorta proving - or at least strongly bolstering - Almond's points.

It's this kinda schtuff that get me all lathered up in admiration. A brilliant Jew taking on another brilliant Jew (and Colbert is a Catholic): all ideas are worth fighting over. Words. Ideas. Creativity. Intelligent Talk. Books. Science. Human Universalism.

Hoo-kay! Now: it's out there. My weirdo Jewish pangs of some sort of envy. But in my heart, I'm sort of Jew myself. Indulge me? Do a mitzvah and grant a goy some delusion?

Another Promiscuous Neurotheologist Post (But This One Gets Shanked Into the Chomskyan Rough)

Go ahead and skip this video of Harvard Professor Marc Hauser, but if you do you'll miss out on a bit of Irony. It's 3 minutes, 40 seconds:

Getting back to trying to figure out how religion came about and how it related to moral thought, Hauser at Harvard and Prof Illka Pyysiainen (don't even ask about pronouncing his name) of the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies (and their teams) worked on this problem. The posited positions seem to have been that 1.)We can either think of religion as an adaptation that solved the problem of cooperation among non-genetically related peoples when the tribe got big enough; or 2.) Religion evolved as a by-product of pre-existing cognitive capacities.

Position #1 and its adherents seem to think that the Cooperation Model means there is no morality without religion, although there seem to be a few who like the Cooperation Model but shy away from this "hard" position about "morality" as we know it today.

Position #2 and its adherents see religion as merely one way of expressing one's own moral intuitions.

Note that both assumptions make religious experience a brain experience solely and do not address the existence of any sort of Gaseous Vertebrate of Astronomical Weight and Heft (or: gee ohh dee).

My "intuition" says that, if I'm forced to choose one of the two positions, I'd go with #2, because I grew up irreligious and yet seem to have a modern Industrialized World adult's view of morality that fits in well enough that I'm not ostracized or shunned or forced into exile. I have friends. I'm kind to strangers and my loved ones know I love them. I'm not writing this from a SuperMax prison, where I'm doing Life plus 900 years for some cartoonishly heinous act, like taking over a kindergarten and slitting the throats of all the bunny rabbits and making the kids watch it, and then raping Ms. Schoolmarm in front of little Francine and Billy and Jared and Sally. Or masterminding a secret terrorist bombing of Cambodia.

[Oh wait a minute: that second thing really was done by a guy who's not only not in prison, but he won the Nobel Peace Prize. Talk about Irony!]

Actually, I have no dog in that fight. I think all that will come of it are speculative narratives couched in as much social scientific study as the researchers can muster, the result being, depending on your proclivities, Just-So stories, or Edifying Discourse. I remain agnostic about the origin of religion but enjoy reading the attempts to travel in time to find the Origins. I take a pragmatist's view: what do I find good to think about?

A short precis of the Hauser/Pyysiainen paper appeared HERE. The paper was originally published in Trends In Cognitive Sciences on 8 February, 2010. Pyysiainen and Hauser looked at some plenitude of  studies on moral intuition and were impressed that people from many diverse religious backgrounds, and some people with no religious upbringing or affiliation? They all had no trouble in making moral judgments when faced with unfamiliar moral dilemmas. Ipso facto: people don't need a particular religious background in order to make sound moral judgments. And Hauser/Pyysiainen go to the position I'm guessing they had when they went in: religion emerged from pre-existing cognitive modules.

I thought Pyysiainen was appropriately conciliatory towards religion in his quote from the article in Science Daily: "However, although it appears as if cooperation is made possible by mental mechanisms that are not specific to religion, religion can play a role in facilitating and stabilizing cooperation between groups."

Hey, that's why these guys get the Big Bucks, eh?

The Kicker
Marc Hauser published this paper with his Finnish colleagues while, it turns out, Harvard was doing a five-year investigation on him, for charges of various academic frauds. Around six weeks ago, Harvard finally wrapped it up: Hauser - once an academic star, a favored lecturer at Harvard, prolific publisher, and one of John Brockman's Third Culturalists - was found guilty of scientific misconduct. He fabricated data, manipulated results in multiple experiments, and "conducted experiments in factually incorrect ways." He's no longer affiliated with Harvard. (See HERE for Harvard's findings, and HERE for Hauser's response to the Federal Office for Research Integrity's findings.

For a long and insider's fascinating take on this whole episode see Charles Gross's piece from The Nation from late last year. It seems a fairly rare event when the grad students helping the star Professor turn the Prof in. When they do, it often taints the grad students and makes their life as future scientific researchers very difficult, but this time it does not seem to have harmed the students.

                        Professor Chomsky, most influential linguist of the 20th century, and
                        I think, a bad influence on now-fallen Marc Hauser. Chomsky's
                        reaction to Hauser's resignation, which happened long before
                          Hauser was convicted of academic fraud, is HERE.

The Chomsky Connection
Even though I copped to picking the Hauser/Pyysiainen of the two choices (due to no formal religious upbringing), when I read the piece and saw Hauser's name attached, I had already read he was under a long investigation. And, to be honest, I had become quite biased against his stuff - which ranged over an impressively large biological/philosophical/psychological terrain - because I'd followed him initially as a Chomskyan, who believed in Cartesian rational modules in the mind that get tripped by being in this world and then Do Whatever.

(No talk about neurons or neural circuits or the embodied brain, that's for damned sure! Although, to be fair, I think Hauser would've loved to have seen Chomsky go for more neuroscience...or at least be more open-minded to primatological findings, but he simply could not. Chomsky would not. Why? Because then the syntactical walls come a' tumblin' down, the whole Idealized Universal Grammar schmeer gets canned when you must deal with The Continuum of chimps and birds and singing Neanderthals to neurons and real stuff. Not diagrams.)

Indeed, Hauser and Tecumseh Fitch appear to have talked Noam into co-publishing a paper on the origin of language when, after a lifetime of dodging the issue, Chomsky put his name to a paper on the subject, if only to stop the charges that Chomsky appeared to think that Language arose in an instant, like the Big Bang or Yahweh saying "Let there be light."

A large chunk of Hauser's now-gone academic career seems to have been to extend the Chomskyan model of thinking about linguistics to the realm of Evolutionary Psychology. Indeed, Hauser seems to have been quite gung-ho about Edward O. Wilson's "consilience" project, but claiming it for a sort of Cartesian/Chomskyan intellectual empire.

Now obviously, I've veered way off course from the topic of neurotheology and into the politics of academia, but I couldn't help it: the Irony was too much. Forgive me?

I could could on and on about Hauser and what I consider the 18th century view Chomsky has infected some of academia with (and longtime readers of the OG know I've typed a lot on Noam and I actually love the Man), but to suffice and for further delvings: see George Lakoff's talk on "Philosophy In The Flesh" and then some of his Third Culturalist's responses to Lakoff's 21st century ideas about the embodied human mind. This goes back to March of 1999. Notice Hauser's response, then skip down to see how Lakoff (Chomsky's bete noir in Linguistics; they loathe each other) responds to Chomsky acolyte Hauser's non-understandings.

[For some other blogspew: it could be argued that John Rawls has as much to do with "Nativist" ideas in academia as Chomsky does.]

One of Hauser's books was titled Moral Minds and I have not seen any data about his publisher removing the book from bookstore shelves, as was done to Jonah Lehrer when it was found he'd fabricated quotes about Bob Dylan in his book Imagine. But Hauser still plans to go on and publish in the field of evolutionary psychology/cognitive neurobiology. One article has his next book being titled Evilicious: Explaining Our Evolved Taste For Being Bad, and it should be...interesting. (NB: I refrained from using "Ironic" yet again!) In an article on the Hauser debacle in USA Today, of all places, I noted big-time primatologist Frans de Waal's worry that maybe much more of Hauser's data was cooked than what the investigators looked at. De Waal accuses Harvard of covering up too much for Hauser, possibly damaging the field of animal behavior...

A Head Test: How is Hauser different from Lehrer? And does knowing Hauser made up stuff, etc: does that change how you think of this particular paper on the origin of religion?

Going Out With Hauser
I will let Hauser's quote on morality from Science Daily carry this one out:

"It seems that in many cultures religious concepts and beliefs have become the standard way of conceptualizing moral intuitions. Although, as we discuss in our paper, this link is not a necessary one, many people have become so accustomed to using it, that criticism targeted at religion is experienced as a fundamental threat to our moral existence."

Amen, Hauser. And have a good life.

This Political Season: Just For Kicks

Which Candidate For You?

Not long ago I found this article at NPR: "Web Quiz Tells You Which Presidential Candidate Best Fits Your Worldview," which linked to I Side With. Take the test and see who your real candidate is.

You may be surprised.

No Need To Settle For Euclid

Because it's both easy and fascinating, I will now once again link to Robert Anton Wilson's erudite article on thinking about politics in a Non-Euclidean way. Read it and share it with your friends! Discuss it in a way that would've made Thomas Jefferson proud.

                                       Mikhail Bakunin, 19th c. anarchist who disagreed

                                       with Karl Marx for very prescient reasons.

                                

Mitt Agrees With You!

By the way: if you self-describe as a liberal, a moderate, or a conservative, Mitt Romney agrees with you! Don't believe me? Check this out! (They could have made this little bit easier to navigate by allowing us to un-click boxes in order to jump around a tad more.)

Religio

Finally, Richard Dawkins has warmed my heart a bit by extensionalizing (a term from General Semantics that has stuck with me) the Atheist/Agnostic/Theist POVs. He has three positions for Theists, and four for Agnostics/Atheists. 

My position doesn't appear there, as I see it. I think all the gods and goddesses "are" "real," but they're metaphors that emanate from deep within our biological-Being. When people ask me if I'm an atheist, I say no, I'm more like some sort of agnostic. If they ask for clarification, I'm delighted to get weird with them. But really: my agnosticism fits into the "model" model: I'll say I'm atheist in certain situations, agnostic in certain situations, and that I'm Buddhistic in others. Other times I'll say I'm a Discordian or a Javafarian. If you ever want to screw with a willfully ignorant Christian, tell them you're a "Jeffersonian  Christian." If they ask what's that? Then you get to tell them about what T-Jeff did to the Bible, which could lead to an interesting situation. Hey, I'm here to help, friends!

addenda: When I did the I Side With test, my candidate was Jill Stein, with Gary Johnson and Obama coming in 2nd in everything else. (Not that you asked.)

William James and the Tough and Tender-Minded

This afternoon, indolent and slothful, lax and swelling with sweet slack, after a walk in the woods, I began reading in a stack of books begotten via my maxed-out library card. In a book of quotations, Jewish Wit and Wisdom, I ran across this:

"A cartload of pasteurized milk for nurslings at four o'clock in the morning represents more service to civilization than a cartful of bullion on its way from the Sub-treasury to the vaults of a national bank five hours later."

And:

"People who want to understand democracy should spend less time in the library with Aristotle and more time on the buses and subway."
-Both quotes are attributed to Simeon Strunsky, who I had to look up.

                                          The melancholic William James, 1842-1910

This reminded me of William James's first lecture of 1906, the first of eight he gave at the Lowell Institute in Boston, and there was at least one of the eight at Columbia, in January of 1907. All the lectures were open to the public, and the crowds were overflowing with blue-collar thinkers, readers and intellectual types.

Possibly my favorite book of Philosophy of the Roaring 20th century - in the sense of James as a canonical thinker, that sort of Philosophy - all eight of the lectures can usually be found in cheap and delightfully readable editions under the title Pragmatism, although I've also seen those collected lectures titled Eight Lectures on Pragmatism. Anyway, you can download it for FREE here.

The Strunsky quotes reminded me of the first lecture, "The Dilemma In Philosophy," in which James addresses the gulf between rationalism and empiricism and says most of you people are probably a mix of both; if you think a lot about it you may be perplexed by the inconsistencies in your worldview, and what should you do?

James says rationalistic philosophers are "tender-minded" in their disposition. They're generally intellectualistic, idealistic, optimistic, religious, free-willist, monistic, and dogmatic. They insist on going by principles.

For James, the empirical ("tough-minded") philosophers like to go by facts and they're sensationalistic, materialistic, pessimistic, irreligious, fatalistic, pluralistic, and skeptical.

106 years ago, some of these terms commonly meant something slightly different than they do today, and in characterizing the tough-minded and the tender-minded, James is not choosing any term in a loaded way. When he says the tough-minded are "sensationalistic" he means they make sense of the world via their sense organs and he means to contrast this with the tender-minded person's "intellectualistic," in which he means those people know things by reading philosophy books and other textual High Kulch efflorescences filled with abstractions, "wisdom" and erudition.

Strunsky's quotes illustrate the thoroughgoing tough-minded 'tude.

There's a passage in this lecture that's become oft-quoted, but it's so good I have to be another who quotes James, on pragmatism and these two types of dispositions:

"Most of us have a hankering for the good things on both sides of the line. Facts are good, of course - give us lots of facts. Principles are good - give us plenty of principles. The world is indubitably one if you look at it one way, but as indubitably it is many, if you look at it in another. It is both one and many - let us adopt a sort of pluralistic monism. Everything of course is necessarily determined, and yet of course our wills are free: a sort of free-will determinism is the true philosophy. The evil of the parts is undeniable, but the whole can't be evil: so practical pessimism can be combined with metaphysical optimism. And so forth - your ordinary philosophic layman never being a radical, never straightening out his system, but living vaguely in one plausible compartment of it or another to suit the temptations of successive hours."

O! How cosmically hilarious I find this passage! What a heretic! Because it seems so-so-so true to me. Because it's utterly, scandalously and outrageously playing tennis with the net down, to piss of the stuffy academicians. Because James dares to talk to the rabble in such a way. Because he lets the farmers and shop-keepers know that they really ought to keep on being philosophically-minded, to keep thinking, or as Robert Anton Wilson said, "Keep the lasagna flying." Because really: for James, these are only words. And because, for some of us who were on to James and Pragmatism before reading this, we knew he was going to deconstruct just about all of the hallowed terms in Western philosophy from the previous 2500 years. (His pragmatic colleague John Dewey published a book in 1920 titled Reconstruction In Philosophy.)

                                      Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz, 1646-1716, one of the
                                      mostly stupendously brilliant nuts history has ever
                                      seen fit to throw our way.

In this same lecture, by way of discussing the extremes of tough and tender-mindeness, James uses six paragraphs to really skewer Leibnitz's extremely rationalistic tender-mindedness in a way to make even Voltaire blush.

James starts in on Leibnitz with, "Truly there is something a little ghastly in the satisfaction with which a pure but unreal system will fill a rationalistic mind." James pulls no punches: "superficiality incarnate" is Leibnitz's Theodicy. James tears it to shreds, not because he dislikes Leibnitz, but because the extremely tender-minded can be incredibly callous to actual human suffering in justifying suffering in a perfect world made by a perfect God. James quotes long passages from Leibnitz, then writes, "Leibnitz's feeble grasp of reality is too obvious to need comment from me." Then he cautions the crowd, he didn't need to go back to a "shallow wingpated age," for these kinds of minds are around now.

[I realize more information and a fleshed-out take on Leibnitz has arisen since 1906, and we know he was an incurable brown-noser with the royal and rich, but Bertrand Russell and others have shown that Leibnitz had a second, very different, much more tough-minded view of things...for which I will perhaps save for some future blog-warble. Leibnitz was one of the great minds ever, in my opinion, although I still consider James's points on the Theodicy very strong.]

James begins to contrast Leibnitz's "airy and shallow optimism" with a then-current-day anarchistic pamphleteer and vocal critic of Unistatian imperialism after the 1898 war named Morrison I. Swift, who collected atrocities committed against the poor and working class from newspapers and commented on the stories. One of the stories begins:

"After trudging through the snow from one end of the city to the other in the vain hope of securing employment, and with his wife and six children without food and ordered to leave their home in an upper east-side tenement-house because of non-payment of rent, John Corcoran, a clerk, to-day ended his life by drinking carbolic acid..."

"Such is the reaction of the empiricist mind upon the rationalist bill of fare," James writes, meaning Morrison I. Swift's mind. But James was sympathetic here: "Mr. Swift's anarchism goes a little further than mine does, but I confess that I sympathize a good deal, and some of you, I know, will sympathize heartily with his dissatisfaction with the idealistic optimisms now in vogue."

I have gone on far too long about just this one (of eight) lectures from 106 years ago, and bid adieu.

Two Ways Novelists Can View Criticism

But before I get to that, a smattering of critical takes on ideas about criticism that are by and about and surround some of my favorite artists: Ezra Pound, Mezz Mezzrow, Marshall McLuhan,William S. Burroughs, and George Carlin:

Pound
Ol' Ez had a gazillion things to say about criticism, and often it was aimed at some sort of mass pedagogy for the "man" who still wants to learn; a "man" who has found himself alienated from the Bewildered Herd and would like some guidance from a no-nonsense tough-guy aesthete. Pound was happy to play the part. Here's some advice from Pound to one of these "men":

"All the 'critic' can do for him to is knock him out of his habitual associations, to 'show him the thing in a new light' or better, put it in some place he hadn't expected to find it." - from Machine Art & Other Writings: The Lost Thought of the Italian Years, p.83

It seems there are many cognate quotes like this from Pound in his voluminous oeuvre; I liked this one because it seems to capture the experimental Pound: a writer who tried to find structures and forms that worked on the mind of the Reader on more than a few levels. A critic can break habitual associations in the reader only with some sort of ju-ju that approaches a magickal operation, it seems to me. A simple way to unpack this: when Harold Bloom used the term "strong poetry" he meant someone (scientists and political revolutionaries included) who could use metaphors so well that they make the reader see the world in a new way. No mean feat; no small shakes, that.

Any criticism that accomplished this level must, it seems to me, attain to something like "literature" itself?

                                       Mezz: not the greatest player ever, but good enough,
                                    and he loved playing stoned. His book Really The Blues
                                    was influential in many ways.


Mezz Mezzrow
"Suppose you're the critical and analytical type, always ripping things to pieces, tearing the covers off and being disgusted by what you find under the sheet. Well, under the influence of muta you don't lose your surgical touch exactly, but you don't come up evil and grimy about it. You still see what you saw before but in a different, more tolerant way." - from Really The Blues, pagination lost in my notes because I was probably stoned?

No comment here; Mezz's observations about "muta" (cannabis) seem self-evident to me.

Woody Allen is a big fan of Mezz's book.

                                                  Burroughs, El Hombre Invisible

McLuhan on Burroughs
The New York intellectual Alfred Kazin had quasi-dismissed Burroughs's writings as a "private movie theatre." Here's McLuhan:

"It is amusing to read reviews of Burroughs that try to classify his books as nonbooks or as failed science fiction. It is a little like trying to criticize the sartorial and verbal manifestations of a man who is knocking on the door to explain that flames are leaping from the roof of our home." - originally from "Notes on Burroughs," The Nation, December 28, 1964; collected in William S. Burroughs At The Front: Critical Reception, 1959-1989

Let me just say that the current way I see McLoon's meaning here is that we ought to look first at the performativity of Burroughs's bits, the way he tries to accomplish whatever he's trying for (saving Western civ), and not so much the garish content of his visuals alone.

Professor Carlin: On Film Criticism
"I'm never critical or judgmental about whether or not a movie is any good. The way I look at it, if several hundred people got together every day for a year or so - a number of them willing to put on heavy makeup, wear clothes that weren't their own and pretend to be people other than themselves - and their whole purpose for doing this was to entertain me, then I'm not gonna start worrying about whether or not they did a good job. The effort alone was enough to make me happy." - from When Will Jesus Bring The Pork Chops?, p.106

                            Bobby Campbell's portrait of RAW and burger. Campbell is easily 
                           the best artist who has ever tired to capture Wilson's vibe: he's
                           steeped in RAW's work and has a mesmerizing, psychedelic style
                                 that fits RAW's work isomorphically. When I look at this 
                          piece, I think of the Discordian admonition: "Don't just eat a 
                          hamburger...eat THE HELL out of it!"

Two Writers: Very Different Takes on Criticism
First up, my favorite writer, Robert Anton Wilson, interviewed at his home overlooking the campus at Berkeley, possibly Spring of 1981, by Dr. Jeffrey M. Eliot:

Eliot: Are you affected by the critics? Do their opinions concern you?

RAW: As William Butler Yeats said, "Was there ever a dog that loved its fleas?" Critics have been very kind to me, personally. Of all the reviews of my published books, something like 90 percent have been highly favorable, so I have no personal grudge against critics. On the other hand, in an impersonal
way, I have a strong moral objection to critics. Whenever I see a critic tearing a writer or actor or any artist to shreds in print, I feel a sense of revulsion. I write a lot of criticism myself, but I only review things I like. I don't admire the desire to tear other people apart. I can think of two unfavorable reviews I've written in my whole life, and I regret them. One was about a book in which a woman gets raped and is said to enjoy it; the other was a review of a very dogmatic book on UFOs, in which the author described those who disagreed with him as neurotics. People who like to write witty, nasty
things about other people are not generous or charitable, to put it mildly. We should all try to give out as much good energy to other human beings as we possibly can. I honestly believe that every bit of bad energy we put out has adverse effects that go on forever. This is the Buddhist doctrine of karma. The
Buddhists believe that every bit of anger, resentment, hate and so on that goes out passes from one person to another, without stopping. The same is true of good energy: every bit of good energy one puts out makes someone else feel a little bit better. I think if people were really conscious of this
psychological fact, they would try to put out nothing but good energy, no matter what happened to them. They would certainly not be so casual about passing on bad energy. All the bad energy in the world builds up like a giant snowfall, until we have a huge war. Nowadays, it can mean total nuclear
Armageddon. This is traditional Buddhism, as I say, but I think it's materialistic common sense, too. One only needs to study human behavior to realize it. I regard those people who make a career out of being nasty as emotional plague carriers.
-from an interview in Literary Voices #1, p.54

Near the end of his life, RAW saw fit to re-publish snippets of various interviews he'd given over the years in his book Email To The Universe. The above was included in that 2005 book (albeit RAW edited it using E-Prime), see p.216. RAW wrote that his wife Arlen read the interview and she guessed he was stoned at the time. On p.216 of Email, which includes this bit on Buddhism and criticism, RAW included a footnote which reads: "Yeah, Arlen got it right: I must have toked a bunch o' weed before delivering myself of that sermon."

Aside from RAW's take on criticism here, his overall view on the subject was far more complex (he was not able to remain emotionally distant from unfriendly reviews), and someday I will try to flesh it all out a bit. Moving on...

Nonetheless: let us take Robert Anton Wilson(1981) as one view of critics. I would like to contrast this with Lawrence Grobel's interview with James Ellroy, who once described himself as the "demon dog" of literature.

Grobel asks Ellroy in 1998:

LG: Kirkus Reviews called you the comic-book Dos Passos of our time.

Ellroy: I never read Dos Passos. Kirkus can suck my dick. Fuck them up the ass with a faggot pit bull with an 18-inch dick and shoot a big load of syphilitic jism up Kirkus's ass.
-from Endangered Species: Writers Talk About Their Craft, Their Visions, Their Lives

Here's Ellroy on Brit TV from not long ago. He's always creeped me out in an entertaining way. If you ever get a chance to see him do a reading, even if you're not into his stuff, CANCEL everything else and see him read. Trust me on this. Also, as disparate from Robert Anton Wilson as I find Ellroy's bearing and attitude towards...life, note they have one musical love in common. This will take about 2 minutes of your space-time:

On Lit Crit

One of my favorite academic literary critics, Stanley Edgar Hyman (who was married to Shirley Jackson, an underrated writer who wrote the famously chilling short story "The Lottery") seemed to have read everything and wrote about his reading in a provoking and engaging way. I love his book The Armed Vision. Hyman quotes an earlier critic/academic, I.A. Richards: "To set up as a critic is to set as a judge of values." (I wrote about Richards long ago HERE.)

I find Richards fascinating for many reasons, one of which was that he was influenced by both Coleridge and the early anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski. Besides Richards's scientific foray into how literature is received by bright college students (as described in Practical Criticism), he thought critical evaluation functioned largely as "social communion." He explicitly saw his work as "phatic," and I tend to wish more critics had these values in mind. (Certainly someone like Dale Peck doesn't see the role of critic like this!)

Hyman seemed to not like teaching all that much, and "Professor X," who wrote In The Basement of the Ivory Tower quotes Hyman: "I've been doing it for years, and before every class, I take a piss, I check my fly, I wish I were dead - and I go into the room and begin."

Jacob Silverman
Two months ago in Slate Silverman made a complaint about too much "niceness" in literary criticism lately, and he thought it had to do with authors using Twitter, blogs, Facebook, Yelp, and Tumblr. They create a "fan base," tweet nice things about other authors, every other author is awesome, we're all friends here, authors create an aura of good feelings around themselves, and literary criticism suffers, due to the "mutual admiration society that is today's literary culture, particularly online." The level of criticism an author receives amounts to a literary culture in which "cloying niceness and blind enthusiasm are the dominant sentiments." Silverman would rather we cultivate an environment where we care less about an author's biography and who follows them, and more on the work itself. When no voices of dissent are heard about a work, it tends to chill a "vibrant, useful literary culture." He quotes Lev Grossman of Time, who admitted he won't review a book he doesn't like. Silverman would like us to act more like adults and not mix criticism for an author's work with criticism of the person who wrote the work. The last paragraph of Silverman's article sums his stance well: we ought to think more and "enthuse less."

Chris Collin
Around a year before Silverman's article, Chris Collin wrote a piece for Wired titled, "Rate This Article: What's Wrong With the Culture of Critique." I found and read this after I read Silverman's argument. Collin objects to online lit-crit's star-rating system, its thumb's up, its plus one, the number for how many times the article had been Tweeted (or re-Tweeted?), the number of "likes," etc. I couldn't agree more: go ahead and give some article four stars out of five, but don't pretend you're adding anything to the conversation. You're certainly not thinking. Well...probably not. Maybe a little, if the piece was good. Voting/giving symbolic feedback seems - to me - more a gesture along the lines of the consumer.

Hey, I dig good feedback and kind vibes - we all do - but in our writings as in life, we want to feel like we've been heard.

Collin quotes one of my favorite culture critics, Erik Davis: "Our culture is afflicted with knowingness. We exalt in being able to know as much as possible. And that's great on many levels. But we forget the pleasure of not knowing. I'm no Luddite, but we've started replacing actual experience with someone else's already digested knowledge."

(I wrote about "knowingness" not long ago, HERE.)

Collin says that "There's an essential freedom in being alone with one's thoughts, oblivious to and unpolluted by anyone else's. Diminish our aloneness and we start to doubt our own perspective."

This reminds me of one of my favorite lines from Buckminster Fuller: "Dare to be naive." In a culture of knowingness, where everyone is always online, I can't help but think that our interiorities are suffering. It's getting to the point where the act of not looking to see what everyone else is looking at, what's viral, what's hot, what's cool...and instead just following your own path and evaluating on your own...seems a bona fide radical act. 

Roxane Gay's Answer To Silverman
Not long after Silverman's piece appeared, Roxane Gay parried in Salon. And while I think she played a tad unfair by tsk-tsking Silverman over not actually reading Emma Straub's book - that really wasn't his point - I think her rebuttal quite fine, and I present these three points of view about literary kulch in our online-world as a possible opening to a conversation itself. About the role of criticism.

I thought Gay's best point was the analogy that literary culture is like school, and serious criticism is the classroom; social networks and all the mundane trivia and phatic (How would I.A. Richards see "evaluations" of literature on Twitter?) aspects of five stars and "liking" is the cafeteria. Gay pulled up an apt quote from 1846, by Edgar Allan Poe, on writing too sweetly about someone else's book. There's nothing new under the sun, truly, Ms Gay! She also takes issue with Silverman over too much niceness regarding women, people of color and writers who'd fall under the LGBT rubric: when they are reviewed, often their personal lives are considered fair game. Gay shows that she's able to give a good review to a book while noting some perceived problems with it, and at times she might even know the author personally. She urges that we stop thinking of reviews as "positive" or "negative" as this is the "wrong conversation."

Points all well-taken...until someone's feelings get hurt. Vicious, savage reviews by the aforementioned Dale Peck and his ilk: do these people thrive on shame? Are they thinly-veiled sadists?

And I bet that it's true that males - especially white males - get reviewed more often. But I also bet they are "savaged" more often by critics, too. And sometimes it might seem the reason they're getting savaged is precisely because they're male. I cop to being a lot like Lev Grossman, but my reasons for not writing negative reviews are due to the unpleasant mental states I'm required to be in to write that stuff. It's not worth it to me. NB Roxane Gay seems to evade the question somewhat by saying that everyone who read the book would see its flaws jump out at them, so why bother writing the bad review?(However, if someone wants to pay me to review Dick Cheney's or Paul Wolfowitz's or Rupert Murdoch's memoirs...I'd take that advantage. Some things need to be said, sometimes, no matter how unpleasant.)

Intellectuals and Critics: The Mafia?
Woody Allen once said that intellectuals are like the Mafia: they only kill their own. As much as this culture of criticism chugs along, let's not pretend that a large portion of the critical class - the fine writers, the intellectuals, the "chattering classes," congenitally bookish bloggers - let's not pretend that they don't consider evaluations of a rival or a political foe's work as something akin to a blood sport.

I have never published a book to scathing criticism, but can easily imagine what it feels like, especially if one feels they've produced a fine work, filled with long hours of sweat, tears, inspiration, elation, actually getting themselves to believe that they were contributing something of value to society, that they might even inspire a handful of people not blood-related in a very deep way.

The cultivation of a Nietzschean sensibility seems in order, although 'tis probably easier said than done.

Finally, I can't help but think that most of us are taking ourselves and our evaluations far too seriously, and while I surmise that many of us give critics far too much power over our choices, this seems as virtually nothing compared to forming your opinion based on relatively faceless/nameless others' likes and thumb's ups and plus-ones and re-Tweets. Fer crissakes! Let us dare to be naive! I have tried it and found it quite invigorating. Am I preaching to the choir here? I suspect so...

Tomorrow I'll note an example of polarized approaches to the role of critics and criticism by two novelists, and I hope you'll get a nice laff then.

The "Family Jewels" and What's Contained Therein: Some Notes

I remember reading New Directions publisher James Laughlin's account of being a student of Ezra Pound's; Laughlin was looking through some of Pound's books in Ez's place in Rapallo, and took from the shelf his copy of Herodotus, which, like most of Pound's books, contained vivid marginalia. And in one place Pound had simply written "Balls!" Apparently Pound was of the (probably?) majority opinion that Herodotus, the "Father of History," and a proto-itinerant journalist/investigative reporter, was also the "Father of Lies."

I suppose it might be more accurate to just say the Father of History was gullible, and that the fine stories he was told were colorful enough to stand alone. I love Herodotus...

                     The delicate orchid. Hitler only had one testicle; a medical 
                     term for this is "monorchid." Hmmm.


The term "balls" used as an expletive, has, sadly, faded in my microsocial region of the world. Growing up I heard British people hurl "bollocks!" as invective. I'm not sure if it's still all that hot, not being "up" on my sociolinguistics.

Anyway: In this blogspew I'll touch on balls, testicles, semen, condoms, etc. It's likely either you or a loved one has these Things, so please consider the info to ensue as pertinent.

I thought of using the title "Have a Ball With Your Family Jewels," but it seemed to lack a brassy gravitas I sought.

Some Basic Physiology
Testosterone, a steroid hormone made from the most basic dietary constituents coupled with an uber-complex set of genetic instructions, is secreted in the testicles of males and the ovaries of females. It has been studied extensively and arguments over some scientific findings have made their way into academic brouhahas and various political and social science arguments, which have seeped into our newspapers and popular magazines. The rise of feminist theory has done much to make testosterone into a rockstar hormone. In the early 1970s, one might pick up a feminist rant about militarization or the Vietnam war or some stupid thing a male said, and hear or read a feminist ejaculate, "It's testosterone poisoning!"

Indeed, testosterone is also an anabolic steroid. It builds muscle and gives those muscles more endurance. It's associated with risk-taking and selfishness...and seeking to punish those who have behaved selfishly toward us. More basically, it's heavily involved in the masculinization of physical features and is very heavily linked in its effects on attention, spatial performance, and memory. Men's blood will show about seven or eight times more testosterone than a female's blood sample, but men metabolize it so often their daily production of the stuff is about 20 times that of females.

The Semantic Unconscious and "Truck Nutz"
Dig this story about a 65 year old woman who got into a legal tussle over her truck nutz. Written in requisite Gawker style, I think it begs many questions. The writer linked the imagery of testicles dangling from the bumper of one's truck to the American South, trucks filled with guns and anti-Obama stickers, the possible hypocrisy of South Carolina here and ex-Governor Mark Sanford, jerky and lottery tickets, and an overall hint at backwardness in the South. To whatever extent any of this is true, trucks and guns do seem to go with the physiological effects of testosterone, and their phenotypic signifier, testicles. What I found most funny was that a 65 year old woman is the one dangling those signifiers.

Maybe it's me, but this is one I can ponder all day (okay, maybe a third of a day): a problem for the lady was the display of something deemed by community standards as obscene due to reference to "excretory functions" "sexual acts" or "parts of the human body." We don't want to be reminded of what's true...because...sex is exciting? We ought be reminded of it by the covers in all the magazines in the Quik-E-Mart, but not by the danglers hanging from the truck parked in front of the Quik-E-Mart?

Just ponder how many men choose to hang Truck Nutz from their vehicles (I have yet to see them hanging from a Prius, by the way, just an observation) and the number of cops who look the other way. Could it be...sexism here? Perhaps the unstated rule was: if you're gonna hang truck nutz, you better have nuts for realsies? A 65 year old woman? That's...indecent! Violates community standards. And so, the local Buford Pusser strikes out for Justice.

Aside from a multitude of pregnant surmises about the paradox of guns, trucks and territorial aggression in driving, anti-Obama bumper stickers, and Lynyrd Skynyrd (or better: Charlie Daniels Band?) blasting from the truck: these truck-nut things "are" indecent! I wrote "paradox" but that implies something open. Indeed, hypocrisy seems to not fit here, either. This is why I used the term "semantic unconcious," and it's a topic of surpassing interest to me: the seen-but-not-noted everyday, right in front of you aspect of "reality." (I've written on it in other guises HERE.)

Quick side note: I actually like Lynyrd Skynyrd and the Charlie Daniels Band. It's complicated.

Bullz Ballz: the True Face of Murrrka. Why go second best when you can have 2nd Gen Brass and Chrome ones for only $49.95? Go ahead! Live a little and let your neighbors know your political attitudes. Let 'em hang out, you Bad Ass! No diplomacy, which is for pussies. So are gun permits. No wonkiness or pragmatism, or concern for the environment: Might Makes Right, and you have the premium Truck Nutz to show it! You'd like us all to think that, wouldn't you, Jethro? And, like the Murrrkin flag's colors, you won't run, either. (We'd like to think you're joking, but are afraid you're earnest. Oy!)

I know I seem like just another truck-nutz hatin' liberal, but really people: if you're gonna dangle your truck nutz? To borrow from Ben Franklin's spirit: do it proudly. Amen.

                                            Kiwi fruit, one of my favorites. 

A Joke From My Childhood
The first jokes or riddles I was exposed to stuck with me for reasons I can't understand. I remember being six or seven and immensely enjoying the riddle, "What do you do if you find Chicago, Ill?" The answer was "Find a Baltimore, MD." Does this hint at my future geeky-bookishness?

At 14 or so, using my rapidly changing brain (under the influence of testosterone and a panoply of other androgens), I was exposed to a joke in quasi-ritualistic tones:

Q: What's the very definition of "macho"?
A: When a guy jogs home from his own vasectomy.

As I headed towards physiological viability (i.e, "My boys could swim"), my friends and I were encouraged (often by our moms, who Knew Things) to buy these padded things called "nard guards" to affix to the handlebars of our bicycles. The guards fit right in the middle of the handlebars - an area roughly called "the gooseneck" - where, if you were to crash head-on into some relatively immovable object, the pads would...insure the family jewels. Small price to pay to get that bit of alloy padded. We were vaguely aware of the longterm consequences of such an injury, but more immediately: how a smash there would hurt!

Later, I pondered Michaelangelo's David. I wondered how I measured up. Then: junior high and the showers.

I was okay.

                                    David says, "Hey Goliath: my eyes are up here."

Serious But Not THAT Serious? Two Different Street Fights
So a Chinese woman in her early 40s tried to park her scooter in front of a store, but the 40-ish proprietor said no. A scuffle ensued. The woman called her husband and brother, who escalated the unpleasantness into a fistfight. Then the woman grabbed the shopkeeper by the balls, squeezed, and killed the guy. What a world we live in. Testicles Squeezed In Street Fight Causes Man's Death.

What got me about this story: the husband and brother had been called in, and yet it was the woman who went for the junk.

I imagine women and men read accounts like this and it sets off very different cascades of neurotransmitters and hormones within them. (It set off my Bullshit Detector. China? Okay...But let's take the story as is, if only for pedagogical purposes?)

While I find dying this way horrendous - especially over a parking space - other similar stories bring out the worst in me, like the cleric in Iran who saw a woman on the street who he thought was insufficiently covered up. He confronted her. And she beat the asshole to a pulp. I felt guilt over the amount of glee I felt with this one. Maybe if more priests and clerics and imams and rabbis got their asses kicked by the Faithful a bit more often, things would get a tad more Real. Maybe? Probably not...

I think some women have more testosterone coursing though their systems than maybe I do.

Ultrasonic Blasts to the Testicles in Lieu of a Male Birth Control Pill
Here's the story. It seems painless and cheap, but much more research will need to be done. We don't know if blasting your balls with the ultrasound frequency - which does lower sperm counts to "infertile" levels in test animals - is long lasting. Or if there's long-term damage. Or if it's reversible. And the most worrisome: if ball-blasting like this damages sperm, which could produce a damaged baby.

Even though this form of birth control leaves it as the male's responsibility, it still might not be available to those without insurance, so if you're thinking you can borrow your girlfriend's Joni Mitchell CDs and  attach your headphones to your sack and turn it up to 10 for a "treatment"? I'm no doctor, but I would advise waiting for better research to come in. Besides, some of us sensitive guys enjoy Joni Mitchell (I love her), and I think this self-experimentation may backfire, and you'd end up with triplets, all girls, who later grow up to be beret-wearing artistes, working in galleries and coffee shops with huge student loan debts, when all you were trying for was prophylaxis. Dude: condoms still work! (Okay, okay, if you're gonna experiment, why not just go with Dio or Anthrax? Where did Joni Mitchell come from? Oh yea: The OG just wanted to mention Joni in a blog post about testicles. Am I the first?)

Condoms still work really well. Yea, but it's like trying to take a nice soothing hot shower after a long day's work, but you're wearing a deep-sea diving suit.

I hear ya, man. O Science! Why hast Thou forsaken us?

So far?

Speaking of Condoms...
This breezy article speculates on links between a bad economy and condom use. Note that the subject matter is like catnip for writers. We can't help it with the puns. We just can't. Most of us, that is. So I'll sack up and talk turkey: rotten economy and condoms? Should you invest? Are you kidding me? We'd like to believe most people are so rational. But I have my doubts. Overpopulation being a seminal problem for those of us in the Human Condition, my preliminary diagnosis is that we have a long, long way to go here. And <ahem!> we do need to go all the way. We really do. If you're not ready for kids, use birth control. I dare ya.

There Is No God: Male Longevity and New Research
Okay, I've been beating around it all post, but the latest on Korean eunuchs was what prompted this entire blogspew. A recent study published in Current Biology got splashed all over popular science articles on the Web last week. A researcher found that records of the Korean Royal Dynasty from 1392 till around 1900 showed that, of 81 eunuchs, three lived to be 100 (which was oooooold for pre-1900 times!), and on average they lived 20 years longer than their testicalled brethren.

The idea that we could reach, say 70, go the castrati road late in the game, and it would help us make it to 100? Probably totally wrong. Because the Korean eunuchs got theirs chopped at an early age, which influenced puberty, maturity, and a bewildering complex of other hormonal interactions at an early age. They were probably old men-children and who wants that? We already have enough of those as it is, and they're often seeping with untoward testosteronal side-effects. Guys just now qualifying for Social Security and their bachelor pads reek of androgens and beer. You know the type. (I hope to be one, one day.) If it seems too easy, it's probably too good...wait a minute...WHAT AM I SAYING? I don't think "elective surgery" like castration is worth a few extra years.  And I seriously doubt I could jog home from something like that. Even the Dos Equis guy would probably hail a cab.

(Although: think of the conversation-starter your funky new lava lamp would bring!
You: Notice anything odd about my new lava lamp?
Her: I was going to ask you...those look like...are they...did you ask to keep your...? Oh wow...it's getting late, I gotta...go...I got a...thing.)

Scientists have long known that women lived longer than men, and it's long been suspected male hormones have something - perhaps a lot - to do with this. This study hammers home hard that viable nuts - dense, lively and energetic "man juice" - decrease our (male) lifespans.

It's been noted that if you're 100 you have had less children than most people, sometimes none. Fertility equals earlier death, in the most basic terms. Still believe in God? What's with this "procreation" game? It's about ego, right? Thou shalt pass on thine own DNA into the foggy future, no matter what. The Darwinian Imperative. Hell. Gimme an extra few years of doing things like dissolute sitting.

The problem is, or one of the problems, as I currently see it: how to have our sex drives, high-quality prophylaxes, and still get to 100, preferably still hitting the Farmer's Market and wearing tennis shoes while doing it. No going the eunuch route, which I will charitably describe as "overly enthusiastic." We patiently await some miracle from Science.

Okay commenters: the balls are in your court. OG: out.

Edit to Add: As soon as I finished this post on juevos, I clicked on Salon and saw this.