All in the mind

Reading Marcia Angell's piece in the latest NYRB on the treatment of mental illness (an interesting read btw), I found myself wondering if it really makes sense to speak of placebo effects in the context of mental disease. If you believe you're less depressed, aren't you, in fact, less depressed? And if a course of treatment can make you believe you're less depressed, then doesn't that make it a valid cure for your condition, even if it has no chemical or physiological benefits whatsoever?

In other words, what if the most effective treatment for depression were to create the illusion of treatment: administering what are basically sugar pills, but convincing the patient, through a combination of advertising and pseudo-scientific research that he / she is getting better? A treatment that would work just so long as the illusion lasted?

The limit to martyrdom

...is the cruelty of the human imagination.

There is a saint for every torture the pious mind can conceive.

The difference between Blogger and Facebook

is that Blogger is based on the assumption that if what you do or say is interesting, people will like you; and Facebook is based on the assumption that if people like you they will find what you do or say interesting.

***

Reading Zadie Smith's piece on Facebook in the NYRB (on which I may have more to say later), I'm struck again by how much more brilliant Smith is as an essayist than as a novelist.

And I say this as someone who quite enjoys her novels.

Maslow's Pyramid Scheme

via the NY Times' 'Idea of the Day', a call for revising Maslow's heirarchy, replacing self-actualization with parenting.

Personally, I think the idea that the apex of human desire is to be a parent is so much garbage, but I'll spare you the Nietzschian griping about the need to transcend the human, not propagate it [1], as well as the obvious criticism that parenting is already in there, two levels down, with family and belonging. And I won't even start on how using parenting as a means of self-actualization is how children end up buried under the frustrated dreams of their parents.

The larger (though perhaps subtler) problem with placing parenting on top is that it's too easy. It's always seemed to me that Maslow's heirarchy is based not so much on emotional significance as on difficulty of attainment. At any given point, the need most salient to us is the one we have the greatest hope of satisfying, so that it's only when we've satisfied an easier need do we move on to one that is more difficult. Or perhaps, given that value comes from scarcity, we value the attainment of some needs more precisely because they are harder to attain. In any case, our needs are arranged heirarchically in the increasing order of the effort required to satisfy them. Or, put another way, if a higher order need were more easily attainable than one lower down in the pyramid, why wouldn't people just leapfrog to the higher order need?

Which is why putting parenting on top doesn't work. Being a parent is too easy an accomplishment [2] to merit being at the top. It makes little sense to make the apex of human desire a state that almost anyone can achieve, and almost everyone does.

(and that almost everyone manages to feel smugly satisfied about - I'd be more willing to put parenting on top of Maslow's pyramid if more parents responded to their babies like this)

Notes

[1] Of course, Nietzsche would argue that self-actualization is a pre-requisite for parenting (see Thus Spake Zarathustra, Part I, Chapter 20)

[2] Being a good parent is exceedingly hard, but that's a whole other story.

Socialist Fantasy

"whether there's something in the form of the writing that lends itself to radical or subversive aesthetics"

- China Mieville in a decade-old interview in the International Socialism Journal (can you say desperate for content?) via SB

Or, alternately, is there something about left-wing ideology that lends itself to fantasy? After all, what sci-fi / fantasy writer has ever conceived of an alternate reality half as compelling as the socialist utopia of Marx and Engels?

Das Kapital may be the most influential work of sci-fi / fantasy ever.

P.S. No, I haven't fallen prey to the Mieville-groupiedom that seems to have overtaken the blogosphere. Never read the man. Have no immediate plans to. Life is too short.

P.P.S. Am I the only one who finds silly Marxist screeds (see the Mieville interview) against Tolkien amusingly pathetic? One could claim just as convincingly (I would argue more convincingly) that LoTR is an allegorical depiction of the inevitable decline of the aristocracy (Elves, Frodo) and the rise of the working class (Dwarves, Sam) to take over the new world. Tolkien may wax nostalgic every now and then, but his perspective on the engines of history is clear-sighted, and, unlike his critics, he is no slave to ideology. All of which is, of course, irrelevant to the magic of his work.

P.P.P.S. Ironically, one could legitimately argue that Sauron is the embodiment of the Marxist enterprise: not the triumph of the working class, but the emergence of the police state.

Fear

"what I feel when I am told that my neighborhood is dangerous is not fear but anger at the extent to which so many of us have agreed to live with a delusion - namely, that we will be spared the dangers that others suffer only if we move within the certain very restricted spheres, and that insularity is a fair price to pay for safety.

Fear is isolating for those that fear. And I have come to believe that fear is a cruelty to those who are feared."

-Eula Biss, from Notes from No Man's Land

The trouble is: fear is not invented but inherited. And the fears we are socialized into are fears we cannot empirically disprove, because there is never enough evidence, and what there is is biased by selection, and therefore self-fulfilling. And there is always, underneath that social fear, a second more private anxiety - of looking foolish, of being ashamed.

On Readings

Since there's been all this talk about poetry readings on the blogosphere lately (or at least in the derelict corner of it that I haunt), I figured I'd weigh in on the subject with my two cents, if only because it's Sunday and it's too cold outside to go out (yes, Percy, if Winter comes, Spring can be very, very far behind).

As I see it, readings as they've evolved today, generally have two distinct parts. The reading itself, and the Q&A that follows. Let's start with the Q&A. In my (admittedly limited) experience, Q&As following readings are generally snooze-fests, with questions ranging from the trivial to the inane. And I think there are good reasons for that. Nice as it would be to believe in some Athenian ideal of spontaneous public conversations giving rise to blinding insights, this is extremely unlikely to actually happen. Meaningful discussion requires a level of honesty, that the norms of politeness attendant upon a public conversation make difficult; respect for the opinions of others, which is hard to muster in a room full of unscreened strangers; shared assumptions, understanding and language, that a group of people randomly gathered are unlikely to have; a clarity of agenda that these meetings almost never have; and a quantity of time and patience that is incompatible with the format of a 15-20 minute Q&A. It's hardly surprising then, that most public Q&A's end up being exchanges of trivial platitudes. It's the same reason why having an intelligent debate on the Internet is nearly impossible.

Could moderators or discussants help raise the level of conversation? Perhaps. But aside from the practical difficulty of finding intelligent discussants, there are at least four problems with the discussant model. First, it's not clear what exactly the discussant's role is. If the discussant is expected to ask questions that are of interest to the listening audience, then a good discussant will, logically, ask more or less the same inane questions that the audience would have asked itself. After all, that's what the people really want to hear. Even if the discussant were capable of initiating a genuinely meaningful dialog with the poet, in doing so he or she risks alienating the audience, who may neither understand nor care for what is being discussed. Second, is the exchange between the poet and the discussant / moderator a conversation or an interview? If the former, then we need to ensure that the discussant is someone capable of contributing to that conversation, which suggests that he or she should be part of the reading as well; if the latter, then what, exactly, is the poet supposed to be getting out of this? Third, in either case, why is this exchange taking place at the end of the reading in front of an audience. Why not do it either in private, where both people could talk more freely, or record the conversation and broadcast it either through print or other media?

Finally, why do we believe that a verbal conversation is the best way to engage with a poet anyway? Poets aren't stand-up comics or politicians. Providing coherent, even glib answers at the drop of a hat is hardly their strong suit. If anything, what we value about a poet is often his or her ability to take an idea or an image and after long hours of contemplation, find the exactly right way to put in words. To then turn around and expect the same person to fluently respond to questions on the fly, and to judge him or her on his or her ability to do this seems irrational, if not outright cruel.

All of this suggests that Q&As as they are currently run are largely a waste of everyone's time, and makes the case for either scrapping them entirely, or, at the very least, making them an optional extra - much like discussions with the cast and crew are at film screenings or dance performances. It also suggest revisiting the format of the Q&A, perhaps switching it to a discussion or panel between multiple poets reading at the same time, though even that (and even assuming the best case) will not fix all the problems listed above.

So much for Q&A. Let's consider the reading itself next. And in doing that, let's start by accepting that as a medium of delivery the spoken word has several disadvantages over its written counterpart. First, reading a poem means that all spatial arrangement of words on the page is necessarily lost (unless the poet uses Power Point - which I've never seen or heard of a poet doing), and such arrangements (and the caesura that attend them) are an integral part of the poet's craft. Second, poetry, with its compactness, is an art of hidden meanings, of verbal and mental booby traps. There may be people who can follow a poem in a straight line from start to finish, but when I read a poem I usually end up going back and forth over the text, ferreting about among the words to catch the scent of the meaning, and that's hard (or at least harder) to do when you're hearing the poem read aloud [1]. Hearing a poem read aloud, then, may cause us to miss out on its subtler aspects.

Finally, there's the problem of interpretation. Great poems work by leaving themselves open to various readings, multiple interpretations. Hearing the poem read aloud, especially if the one reading it is the poet, can end up imposing one official interpretation over all the others. It's not unlike the feeling you get when you watch the movie version of a book you love - how either the disconnect between the images on the screen and the images in your head is so severe that you cannot take the film seriously, or you accept the onscreen depiction and are then never able to think of the characters and images in the book in any other way.

Overall then, the spoken word as a medium for poetry has several disadvantages, and all of the above is assuming at least a base level of competence in the reader. Add the possibility that the person reciting the poem may actually damage or obscure its meaning and flow and the downside is even greater.

There are, however, compensations. A truly good reading can bring a poem alive; can enrich our understanding of it, enhance our experience. What this requires, however, is something more than a vanilla reading. It requires, in the truest sense of the term, a performance. And that in turn requires both talent and preparation on the part of the one performing. The problem, of course, is that many (if not most) poets neither have the requisite talent nor are willing to put in the effort of preparation.

And why should they? If the poet's primary role is to write poems, then this requires neither a talent for public performance (reading and writing are inherently private acts - it's what draws many of us to them) nor a desire to take on the onerous distraction of prepping for such performances. This is not to suggest, of course, that poets should go unprepared for readings, or that they should not do readings at all. It is to suggest that if we start to think of reading poetry as a specialized performance, independent of the main business of writing poetry, rather than as a natural and normatively necessary extension of the fact of being 'a poet', then those poets who also happen to have the talent or desire to be performers can put in the time and effort to put together readings, while others (I suspect, but cannot prove, the majority) who have no such talent or ambition can not bother with readings all together [2].

Switching to a view of readings as performances in themselves has two further implications. First, it would mean that we could hold poetry readings to a higher standard - essentially the same standard that we hold other forms of performing art to - and this would mean that we're more likely to get exciting, adventurous readings rather than the familiar spectacle of a poet droning on from behind a lectern. And this in turn may actually increase attendance at readings; I know I'd be more willing to attend readings (which I currently tend to avoid) if I thought that poet's decision to do a reading was the signal of a deliberate and considered choice, rather than just a knee-jerk reaction to something he or she was expected to do. And greater attendance in turn would motivate those looking to perform poetry readings, thus setting up a virtuous cycle, from which everyone - audiences, poets who want to perform their work, poets who don't want to perform their work (or suck at it, and are introspective enough to know this) - would benefit.

Separating the writing of poetry from its performance also brings us to the question: why do poets read their own work? Playwrights almost never act in their plays (at least not outside of high school dram socs), scriptwriters rarely appear in their movies, composers may occasionally conduct or play the piano in their pieces, but I've never heard of a composer singing his or her own arias, and certainly there's no expectation that the composer will be the exclusive or primary performer of his or her work. Why do we insist that poets, arguably the least capable of all artists at performing in public, retain their amateur status and read their own poems? If we want to hear poetry read aloud, why not subscribe to division of labor and get professional actors / performers to do the reading? The petty vanity of poets aside [3], it's hard to see how handing poetry readings over to the professionals could do anything but improve the experience for all concerned.

Finally, once you get rid of the Q&A, and focus on the performance aspect of the reading, you're left with the question of why, in the Internet age, we persist with brick and mortar readings. There is, after all, no dearth of sites that host readings of poems, both by poets themselves and by other performers, and posting a reading on the Web means the poem is likely to reach a wider audience, and that audiences are likely to get more reliable quality. What, then, makes attending a reading a superior experience to listening to poems read on the web, and reading the text itself on the page or screen? We go to live music events because the concert experience is far more exhilarating than listening to the song or piece at home. We go to movies because staring up at the big screen has an effect that no TV or monitor can duplicate. What is it about the average reading that is so much more thrilling than hearing the poem read online? And, more to the point, if we want poetry readings to continue, what can we deliver in a physical reading that we can't over the Internet?

Notes

[1] It's interesting that readings of ghazals / other poems in Urdu (or at least depictions of them in the media - I've never actually attended one) usually involve repeating each line several times, just so the audience can fully take in its meaning

[2] The other argument that's made for readings that it helps poets reach out to an audience. I'm skeptical about this, if only because I don't know who these people are who won't read poems in books / journals, but will show up at a poetry reading of someone they wouldn't otherwise read, or why, as a poet, I would take them seriously. In any case, the idea that readings are a way for people to discover new poets and for new poets to be discovered, only makes the point about public performance not being the poet's primary expertise more salient. We need to resist the celebriti-zation of poetry - a world where the first screen by which a poet is judged is how well he or she performs in public is a world where poetry is considerably diminished.

[3] Personally, I think a lot of this reading mania is driven by the fact that there are more people out there who care about being poets than about writing poetry, which makes readings the perfect format. But that's just my (probably biased) opinion.

Unhappy Research

If you've been surfing the web lately, chances are you've come across some version of this news story about a research study that shows that New York is the unhappiest state in the country while Louisiana is the happiest. A finding that is, prima facie, ridiculous.

Before you start moving your family from Manhattan to New Orleans it's worth considering what's wrong with the story - which strikes me as being the perfect combination of dubious research wedded to journalistic misinterpretation.

As I understand it, Oswald and Wu basically construct a subjective measure of happiness by state by taking survey results on people's stated level of satisfaction and running a regression predicting these satisfaction levels as a function of a range of individual level attributes (such as income, education, employment category, etc.) plus dummies for each state (except Alabama - the omitted category). And therein lies the misinterpretation: the subjective coefficients they report are not telling us how happy people in each state are, they are telling us what the net effect of the state is after all other individual level factors are controlled for. In other words, the negative coefficient of New York means that a person with exactly the same income, education , employment, etc. would be less satisfied in New York than in Alabama.

Now, this would make sense if individual attributes that contributed to happiness were uncorrelated with state of residence, but this is clearly not the case. If states differ substantially in the average levels of happiness-causing attributes (i.e. if people in New York are likely to have higher levels of education, higher income, etc.) then the coefficients for the state dummies by themselves are not meaningful; in particular, we are likely to see a negative bias in the coefficients of states with high levels of positive attributes. What's more, this bias is going to be considerably amplified if the dependent variable of happiness / satisfaction is right-censored, that is to say if the measure of satisfaction used does not adequately capture differences in satisfaction levels at the higher end of the range (which, btw, is the case with the data used in the study - on a 1 to 4 scale the average score is 3.4).

To see this in (exceedingly) simple terms, imagine that we have only two people from two states - Louisiana (L) and New York (N); that we have only one other explanatory variable - Income (I); and that the satisfaction score for both people, on a 1 to 4 scale, is 4, i.e. they both claim to be 'Very Satisfied'. The regression would then try to solve

4=B1.Il + Bl

and

4=B1.In + Bn

where B1 is the coefficient for Income, Bl and Bn are the satisfaction coefficients for the states, and Il and In are the income levels of the person in Louisiana and the person in New York. Now, imagine that the person in New York has twice the income of the person in Louisiana. We then have

4=B1.Il + Bl = B1.In + Bn = B1.2Il + Bn

Now, if B1.Il + Bl = B1.2Il + Bn, and assuming B1>0 (more income means greater happiness), this would mean that Bl>Bn, i.e. the satisfaction coefficient of Louisiana is greater than the satisfaction coefficient of New York. Notice that this doesn't really mean anything about living in New York, it's simply an artifact of the fact that satisfaction measures top out at 4 and that New York has twice the income levels of Louisiana.

On the whole then, it's unclear that the coefficients of the state dummies actually mean anything. But even in the best case, all they mean is that moving from New York to Louisiana will increase your satisfaction, provided you can find the identical job and continue to make the same amount of money. Good luck with that.

Finally, let's think for a moment about the researcher's claim that their study shows a surprisingly strong correlation between subjective and objective measures of satisfaction. Again, let's think about what the subjective state coefficient really is. It's the average difference between the satisfaction of a person with a certain level of income (uncorrected for cost of living), education, etc. living in the focal state (New York) vs. a person with the same level of income, education, etc. living in Alabama. Now what might cause a person making the same dollar amount to be less satisfied in New York than in Alabama? Obviously, cost of living. And what is a major component of the 'objective' measure the study uses to rank states? Why, it's cost of living. Is it really surprising then that the two measures turn out to be highly correlated? I don't think so.

What would be interesting, of course, would be to see a version of the study that a) controlled for the location choices of individuals through some kind of simultaneous equation model and b) included income levels adjusted for cost of living in the regression equation to predict satisfaction levels. Then we might actually learn something.

Ironically, this is one instance where a naive application of the satisfaction scores - a simple table of the mean satisfaction scores by state - may actually be more accurate and representative than the subjective coefficients calculated by the authors. I'm not sure how the mean satisfaction score for New York compares to the mean satisfaction score for Louisiana, but I'd be amazed if New York scored lower than Louisiana, let alone if New York was the lowest of all states. Now that would be surprising.

More evidence that I'm a sociopath

"At one point, Jackson showed Gregory Exhibit No. 60—a photograph of an Iron Maiden poster that had hung in Willingham’s house—and asked the psychologist to interpret it. “This one is a picture of a skull, with a fist being punched through the skull,” Gregory said; the image displayed “violence” and “death.” Gregory looked at photographs of other music posters owned by Willingham. “There’s a hooded skull, with wings and a hatchet,” Gregory continued. “And all of these are in fire, depicting—it reminds me of something like Hell. And there’s a picture—a Led Zeppelin picture of a falling angel. . . . I see there’s an association many times with cultive-type of activities. A focus on death, dying. Many times individuals that have a lot of this type of art have interest in satanic-type activities.”

from David Grann's incredible must-read piece in this week's New Yorker.

On Facebook

"Do we want to return to the womb? Not at all.
No one really desires the impossible:
That is only the image out of our past
We practical people use when we cast
Our eyes on the future, to whom freedom is
The absence of all dualities.
Since there never can be much of that for us
In the universe of Copernicus,
Any heaven we think it decent to enter
Must be Ptolomaic with ourselves at the centre."

- W. H. Auden

And there, in a nutshell, is the rationale for Facebook.

So I'm not the only one

"I'm pretty sure I stopped growing up in my teens and have been faking ever since."

Randall Munroe nails it. Again.

Why 'Indian' poetry?

Just wanted to add my two-bits to Vivek Narayanan's piece on Indian Poetry in English and its quest for an audience (hat tip: Space Bar).

Overall, I agree with almost everything Vivek says in his piece, including his criticism of anthologies [1]. The one thing Vivek doesn't say, though, is that a "thriving, vigorous poetry community" needs not only a deep awareness of its own poetic history but also, and (I would argue) more importantly, a stronger engagement with contemporary poetry elsewhere in the world.

I may be mistaken, but it seems to me that the Indian poetry community at large is fairly limited in its reading, with a fairly sketchy awareness of what poets in the US or the UK are doing. Certainly the work I read in the few Indian journals I know of seems extremely narrow in its influences. Much of that is availability, of course; I'm keenly aware of how difficult it is to get access to contemporary poetry in Indian book stores (or, for that matter, in book stores anywhere). Still, I can't help thinking that the Indian poetry scene would be richer if a lot of the enthusiasm people seem to put into writing poetry (and trying to find an audience for it) were spent in reading more [2].

Greater engagement with *other* contemporary poetry communities is important for three reasons. First, it would help broaden the ideas and influences Indian poets bring to their writing, setting the stage for greater debate and conflict. If Indian poetry in English lacks "ferocious, voracious arguments, unending discussions, even intellectual fist fights or several rival aesthetic camps" (and I agree that it does, and I agree that this is a lack) I have to think that's in part because there aren't enough rival aesthetics to go around. Second, more links with the outside world would mean that the Indian poetry community would be less cloistered and less incestuous, and that would help set the stage for more frank and open criticism. And third, greater engagement with the international poetry scene would help keep Indian poetry more honest, because it would bring a set of external standards by which the poetry we produce would be judged, rather than just the standards we choose to establish for ourselves.

What makes this interesting and relevant is that the spread of online journals and an increase in paperless submissions provides Indian poets with an opportunity they never really had before. Ten years ago, the logistics of trying to publish in US or UK poetry journals (especially if you were just starting out) seemed staggering. Postage costs of mailing paper submissions to US journals were prohibitive, and access to leading journals was often hard to come by. Today there are dozens of exciting online journals publishing cutting edge work that are freely available to anyone with an Internet connection (some of them bookmarked in the sidebar of this blog) and most journals (even those that still print paper versions) have moved to some form of electronic submission. Which means that there's really no reason why poets living in India can't actively participate in a larger poetry community, reading the work of their peers across the world and trying to publish in a wide array of international journals. Yet somehow, I don't see very much of that happening. And I have to wonder why. If poets in India feel they don't have enough of an audience domestically, what's stopping them from reaching out to a wider audience across the globe [3]?

In his article, Vivek says that "there is no question at all that today, it is far easier to make your way in the world as an emerging poet than it was for figures like Jussawalla and Mehrotra in the 1960s and 1970s." I agree, but I can't help wondering if this is entirely a good thing. Obviously more opportunities for high quality work are always welcome, but if the greater ease of publication comes at the cost of lower standards, then the net effect is negative.

Look, publishing poetry is hard. But to an extent, the fact that it's hard is a good thing, because a) it winnows out those who are genuinely interested in poetry from those who just want to be 'poets' and b) it means that poets are constantly challenged, and therefore constantly growing. In the last 2-3 years I've collected dozens upon dozens of rejection slips. It's been brutal, depressing and frustrating. But it's also meant that I've been forced to revisit and question my own writing, and I have to believe that's made me a better poet than I was three years ago. And it's meant that when I've finally managed to get a poem accepted at a journal I value and care about, it's been a source of real satisfaction and pride.

None of which is to say that we should look exclusively elsewhere in our quest for a community. On the contrary, my point is that it's only by engaging more aggressively with contemporary poetry elsewhere that we'll be able to develop a vibrant community of our own. By focusing too much on 'Indian' poetry, we risk creating a community that is insulated, complacent and nepotistic.

As for the problem of readership - I think the problem is less the lack of an audience for Indian poetry but the lack of an audience for poetry in India. The real victims of poor readership are not, to my mind, the poets who can't get people to come to their book readings [4], but the potential readers who are missing out on all that poetry, as an art form, has to offer. But that's a whole other problem, and one that Indian poetry is a long way away from taking on. Our more immediate priority, as Vivek suggests, should be to make a more productive community available to our poets, and reaching out to a wider international audience for poetry is, I would argue, the way to get there.


[1] In general, I'm for anthologies - I think they serve a useful purpose, problems of unrepresentative selection notwithstanding, by making one aware of poets one may not otherwise know of. That said, I agree entirely that anthologies should not be the primary repository of poetry. Anthologies are good complements to individual collections, but poor substitutes for them. And the situation that Vivek describes - where anthologies become the only available source of a poet's work - is a troubling one. It's a bit like living in a world where cinema theaters show only trailers and no actual movies.

[2] Interestingly, my sense is that this was actually true for the generation of poets from the 1970's that Vivek discusses in his piece.

[3] Not that there's a massive audience for poetry anywhere else, but an audience of a few hundred, even a few thousand is better than an audience of a few dozen.

[4] Ironically, I suspect that if Indian readers did have a better understanding of poetry and were capable of closer reading, that would work against a subset of Indian poets.

A fanatic

is someone who cares more about ideology than about ideas.

Interpretation

Does it still qualify as a nightmare if it makes you sad, but not afraid?

***

In the dream I'm meeting with my analyst and we have a breakthrough. I discover that for the last 25 years I've been repressing the memory of a tragic accident I had as a child. I can't believe I've been hiding this from myself all these years. It explains so much.

When I wake up I think - what was the dream trying to tell me?

***

I don't believe in psychoanalysis. Apparently, my subconscious does.

Cheating

Not cheating when you can is stupid. And getting caught irrelevant.

All that matters is that you not lie to yourself about it.

The Basics

Writing 4,000 words of my dissertation in a single day

+ Discovering a new poet

+ Simon Rattle conducting Bruckner

+ Dark chocolate

= Happiness

Next you'll be telling me they're turned on by Bono

By now you've probably seen this Sunday's NY Times article about research into female sexual desire. A brief bout of bonobo envy [1] and some low-grade speculation about hooking all the readers of this blog up to plethysmographs (SO much better than Stat Counter numbers), the thing that really caught my attention was this bit:

"And with the women, especially the straight women, mind and genitals seemed scarcely to belong to the same person. The readings from the plethysmograph and the keypad weren’t in much accord. During shots of lesbian coupling, heterosexual women reported less excitement than their vaginas indicated; watching gay men, they reported a great deal less; and viewing heterosexual intercourse, they reported much more."

Two questions immediately suggest themselves. First, is the disconnect between mind and report or between mind and genitals? Are these women aware of being excited by what they're seeing but choosing not to report it, or are they so thoroughly conditioned to see certain forms of arousal as appropriate that they are genuinely unaware of their own physical response?

Second, and more interestingly, if it's the latter (and let's say, for the sake of the argument, that it is) then is it accurate to say that these women are aroused? How do we define sexual excitement? Is it genital or mental? If you do not consciously experience any desire but your plethysmograph shows a positive reading, are you really aroused?

[1] There's a phrase you don't get to use often

Andante con moto

Death recalibrates us.

For three days now I have watched people around me celebrate Thanksgiving and been indignant, thinking, "Don't they know that people are dying? How insensitive can they get?"

It occurs to me now that there is so much to be thankful for. This morning even the usual cliches - family, friends, poetry, health - are blessings to be treasured, blessings deeply felt. Because I am aware of how easily they could be taken away from me. Because they are so much more than I deserve.

Nothing has changed, of course, but this morning, for no reason and every reason, I am thankful to be alive.

***

So much to be thankful for.

At the concert yesterday, Andrey Boreyko conducts the Orchestra in a transcription of a Brahms Piano Quartet. Schoenberg's gorgeous orchestration leaves me laughing (silently) in my seat.

It is the first time since the attacks began I have been happy.

***

Beethoven's Fourth Piano Concerto. 2nd Movement.

The strings open with menace. Fear marches, growling, onto stage.

Faced with such opposition the piano hesitates, then, gently, finds its voice. There is no anger in its response, no haste, just the tenderness of true sympathy, of sadness in the face of evil.

Again and again the orchestra interrupts the piano, overwhelms it. The chords brandished like weapons, demanding attention.

The piano does not surrender, is not stampeded. Instead those tentative first notes grow into a sustained meditation, calm but not helpless, balanced but not unmoved.

Eventually it is the orchestra that gives way, its force fading, a storm dying out.

In the privacy of the silence that follows, the piano erupts briefly into outrage, then, the anger shaken from its heart, returns to quietness.

The movement begins in fury, ends in grace.

Beauty endures.

***

Hysteria n. Morbidly excited condition; unhealthy emotion or excitement.

I need to snap out of this.

***

We are all parents to our own grief.

We have to let it go, eventually. Even though it always feels too soon.

A course in true love

"The course of true love never did run smooth" Shakespeare tells us.

Is this an empirical observation or a theoretical one? Is it possible to conceive of a love that would both be true and run a smooth course? Or could it be that 'true'-ness of love depends upon the course being unsmooth? And not only in the sense of observability - so that it is impossible to distinguish between love true and untrue till it is put to the test - nor even in a superpositional sense with love, like Schrodinger's cat, being both true and untrue until its path roughens. No, could it be that it is only through being thwarted that love becomes true? That the translation of desire into love requires interference, the emotion not diffused but filtered, winnowed, the more exacting process generating an output more exact? Could it be that the lust, far from being perjured till action, is in fact made more truthful by being more abstract, that being never enjoyed it is never despised? Could it be, in short, that love is only true until it is achieved?

Not that true love is imaginary, you understand, but that only imagined love is true.

[Have been reading Anne Carson's brilliant Eros the Bittersweet, in case you're wondering. Oh, and see also Browning]

My Life: The Movie

Do you ever get the feeling that living your life is like making a movie?

And I don't mean just in the oh-my-god-my-life-is-straight-out-of-a-Woody-Allen-script kind of way. I mean that so much of what we call living feels like mere set-up, doesn't it? All this hectic activity, all this busy preparation - props, casting, costumes, dialog, endless planning, repeated rehearsals - all leading up to that one breathless moment when the lights go up and the noise shuts down and you finally feel like you're really, truly alive.

A moment that, if you're lucky, will be good enough to keep.