LORNA SORE

John Updike is too fucking old to write suicide bombers, erections or schoolyard pimps named Tylenol Jones. From Terrorist:

“Terry’s paintings and their fragrances of thinner and linseed oil embower Jack and his mistress. As she said, she is working bigger and brighter. When in fucking she sits on his lap, impaling herself on his erection, he feels the colors reflected from her walls flow down her sides along with his hands, her elongating, rib-filled, preening, Irish-white sides.”

Benjamin Anastas in Bookforum:

“If Claire Bloom’s lamentable memoir, Leaving a Doll’s House, is to be believed, then there was a time not too long ago, thirteen years ago to be exact, when a lukewarm review by John Updike in the pages of the New Yorker could send her then-husband, Philip Roth, straight into the arms of the adult acute-care ward at Silver Hill Psychiatric Hospital. In the intervening thirteen years (a barmitzvate, if you will, to borrow a trick from the more preening of the pair), the balance of power between the two novelists reversed; where once Roth seemed to be playing postmodern mirror games to diminishing returns while Updike subsumed the American experience, decade by decade, with his Rabbit novels, now it is Roth who has seized a claim on the collective unconscious with his eerily prescient later output, while Updike seems to be sliding into irrelevance, playing out the season like the Knicks’ fastidious but increasingly unreliable head coach, Larry Brown.”

Jacques Chirac is so open minded when it comes to ethnicity that he’s spent $296 million dollars on the Musée du Quai Branly. On the banks of the River Seine, at the foot of the Eiffel Tower, the museum is indiscriminately dedicated to non-Western arts, that is, the indigenous arts of Africa, Asia, Oceania and the Americas. The WSJ:

“What we need to do is to put the art in a universal art museum like the Louvre and not put together continents that are not at all related except for the fact that they were all colonized by Europe,’ said Giles Manceron, a historian who writes on French colonialism, in an interview.”

The museum opens today with “‘Ciwara — African Chimeras,” displaying anthropomorphic or animal headdresses from Mali’s Bamana culture; “We Have Eaten the Forest,” documenting the research of ethnologist George Condominas in Vietnam in 1948-49; and “What Is a Body?,” examining how views of the human body differ in West Africa, Western Europe, New Guinea and the Amazon basin.”

[Musée du Quai Branly]
[WSJ]

When women are on traditional 21 days on/seven days off birth control, monthly periods are artificial anyway, says reproductive endocrinologist Sheldon Segal, a longtime contraceptive researcher at New York’s Population Council and an adjunct professor of pharmacology at Cornell Medical School.

These periods are considered artificial because they’re not shedding an unfertilized egg along with the uterine lining. And monthly bleeding, says Segal, “was actually a marketing decision made decades ago when the pill was developed.

“Marketers at the manufacturing company which developed the pill,” says Segal, “felt at the time that an oral contraceptive might or might not be accepted by the public. These were very different times. Not only was this the first oral contraceptive but it was the first medication given to healthy women for any purpose at all.”

Taking away ovulation and imposing synthetic hormones was already a big change, and apparently marketers felt it might be too much to also take away monthly periods. “You have to remember also that this was a time before drugstore pregnancy tests, so that if a woman was not bleeding, having a regular menstrual period, she wouldn’t know for sure whether she was pregnant or not,” says Segal.

“Such anxiety about unintended pregnancy was another reason why marketers felt it was better to have one week off, to allow this artificial menses to occur,” he explains.

[NPR]

Identity Theory is a fantastic website, evidenced by this interview between George Saunders and Robert Birnbaum. I love unstructured interviews like this.

RB: I do wonder why there is this limiting thing about reading your stories—maybe it’s that the density of a story is as if it were a novel. And I only have so much head space available—

GS: When I am imagining it, I will have a longer description and my feeling is that I’d have the physicality in my mind, then it will kind of unpack for the reader—but only at a certain pace of reading. If it’s too fast, my experience is that the physicality doesn’t have time to unpack, but if you take a story—the story, if you read it slow enough, then you are supplying physicality to it. That’s maybe when I talk about the trilogy thing, I’d like to go back and reinvestigate that. These GQ pieces have had a lot do with it. There you have to describe physical things. And you find out that there is actually a pleasure in that and I am not actually so bad at it. Early on, as a reaction against my own bone-headed MFA early stories, I said, “No more description. How many times do we need a kitchen described? We know what a kitchen is, let’s get going.” So now I am taking a bit of a step back and saying there are pleasures of language in describing a kitchen and the type of kitchen matters and so on—
—
RB: If you have been a hard core short story writer it strikes me you become a junky for the quick satisfaction of closing down a story and the—

GS: Right.

RB: —whereas a novel—

GS: —see what I have trouble with is that I don’t have long-term faith in any one idea. I don’t mean that as a diss on myself. I love the multiplicity of saying, like this Brad Corrigan story, 79 or 80% of the time I was going, “This is a stupid ass idea. This can’t sustain a story.” Then I kept saying, “Try, try.” And finally at the end I was convinced it was, but I didn’t want to spend four years doing that. And part of the reason I could do it was I knew it wasn’t forever. It was a five month thing and then if I wanted to—which I did, I could back and react against it with something like Bohemians which is more realist. In a way being a little bit indecisive or maybe schizophrenic aesthetically you can say, “I believe in Thing A 100 percent.” Knowing that you can believe in Thing B 100 percent next week. So the idea of sustaining some aesthetic principle for 500 pages, I am not sure I have the character for it.

Traffic was heavy coming off the bridge
and I took the road to the right, the wrong one,
and got stuck in the car for hours.

Most nights I rushed out into the evening without paying attention to the trees
whose names I did not know, or the birds, which flew heedlessly on.
I couldn’t relinquish my desires
or accept them, and so I strolled along
like a tiger that wanted to spring,
but was still afraid of the wildness within.

The iron bars seemed invisible to others,
but I carried a cage around inside me.

I cared too much what other people thought
and made remarks I shouldn’t have made.
I was silent when I should have spoken,

Forgive me, philosophers,
I read the Stoics but never understood them.

I felt that I was living the wrong life,
spiritually speaking,
while halfway around the world
thousands of people were being slaughtered,
some of them by my countrymen.

So I walked on – distracted, lost in thought—
and forgot to attend to those who suffered
far away, nearby.

Forgive me, faith, for never having any.

I did not believe in God,
who eluded me.