Oh, good grief, JOB. Why didn’t you tell me about this?*

*Meaning: how the hell am I just now listening to that CD you gave me?

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You should go, perhaps en route to Wisconsin.

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The frisson between porn and lit continues…

On the face of it, this case pivots on a trivial legal distinction – to wit: “that simply viewing child porn on the Internet is not enough to prove its procurement or possession.”

But it has it’s roots in the deeply inhaled myth that pornography is just another art form – and as long as the perveyor is not directly harming another, well, we all know art has no affect on it’s audience, right?

Sed contra est, what one bloke from Rockford, Ill. has to say about it all:

Libertarians insist that these innocent fantasies do not lead to harm. After all, we know from a series of enlightened court rulings that the state has no interest in banning erotic novels if there are the slightest pretensions to literary merit – yes, an obvious reference to Lady Chatterley’s Lover. After all, moral questions can all be reduced to subjective value, can’t they?  

Libertarians put the case directly. We should enjoy the freedom to read or watch anything we like so long as no one has been demonstrably harmed. So, if a father of two little girls becomes aware that his next-door neighbor is addicted to virtual pornography depicting the rape, torture, and murder of little girls, it is none of his business. If people feed their imagination on images of sexual violence – as, by the way, so many sex offenders predictably do – this has absolutely no bearing on what kind of people they are or on the crimes they might some day be willing to commit.

What say you all?

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RIP Mike McGrady – aka one-part Penelope Ashe.

“It came after a night of reading ‘Valley of the Dolls,’ ” he later told Newsweek, “which I couldn’t put down because I was asleep.”

JOB

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But at least it’s tasty!

Stormy weather ahead…

And the hilarious part is that I wound up with a Zombie because I asked for “whatever drink comes in the Easter Island head cup,” but the bartender followed my pointing finger instead of my voice and told me I would be getting a Zombie, when what I should have been getting was a Mai Tai.  Naturally, I rectified the situation, because Easter Island.

Of course, by that point, I had exceeded my tolerance for tropical drinks to the point where I had to order a whiskey cocktail just to put my humors in order.  However, it was thought that photography would be unkind.

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First, there was Levon Helm

And now, another reason bluesmen around the globe ought to be singing, well, the blues…

See/hear why, here/here.

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Travis Naught with his game face on.

Poetry is a young thing, as we all know. Most of the poets have struck their notes between the ages of fifteen and twenty-five. That is just the time when you are in college and graduate school. It is in those ten years that you will strike your note or never. And it is very like athletic prowess in that respect. They are very close together…. The thing itself is indescribable, but it is felt like athletic form. To have form, feel form in sports — and by analogy feel form in verse. One works and waits for form in both.

[Robert Frost: Collected Poems, Prose and Plays, Library of America, p. 771.]

So what does this have to do with Travis Naught? Well, consider the fact that Travis pursued grad studies in Sports Psychology and that he worked with the Eastern Washington University basketball program for ten years before he set that aside to pursue poetry more or less full time. Consider further that Travis is limited by Spinal Muscular Atrophy to a body that will never in this life be able to throw a ball or swing a bat — and Frost’s analogy takes on an even greater significance and poignancy.

Here’s a poem from Travis’s extraordinary book, The Virgin Journals which you all should buy a copy of if you haven’t yet. The poem is called “Lack of Physicality” and I think you’ll see how it ties into what Pinsky said about what Frost said and what I just said about Travis:

Lack of Physicality

It does not matter
That my body of work
Is less physical than yours
Because the number of words
Counted on my page
Are counted like

Your number of barbell curls

Each clever rhyme
Adds up like an assist
Bodies collide in a screen
At the top of the key
Rolling down the lane
A give and go style dime

Aiming to win with each shot

Poised for action
Just like you
So take a look at my lines
See their double meaning
Forget everything about
What you thought you knew

(The Virgin Journals, p. 21)

So listen up people. Forget everything you thought you knew about poetry and check out Travis Naught.

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Mark Anderson is my second cousin and a hardworking Spokane poet guy. (Mark and I are both 23rd great-grandsons of Chaucer, by the way. Someday maybe we’ll collaborate on The Spokane-turbury Tales.) The guy in the wheelchair is Travis Naught, another Spokane poet phenomenon, whose book I blurbed and with whom I did a reading recently. The author of the article is the father of a four-year-old boy who has the hots for my four-year-old daughter. (Keeping my eye on you, son.) “Intentional facial hair” is a fine turn of phrase.

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We summer boys in this four-winded spinning,
Green of the seaweed’s iron,
Hold up the noisy sea and drop her birds,
Pick the world’s ball of wave and froth
To choke the deserts with her tides,
And comb the county gardens for a wreath. – Dylan Thomas “I See the Boys of Summer”

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Play this real loud -  and with a glass of wine/whisky/gin already in you and another on the way let the sound flood you like sunshine through a large picture window in an Italian villa. If this doesn’t get your head right, nothing will.

p.s. Can you do that in high heels?

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This is my brother’s Facebook header right now.  The Captain America shield in the background is an old trash can lid, lovingly transformed lo these many years ago.  With authentic battle damage!

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So Terry Gross interviewed Lena Dunham, the youthful creator/writer/star of the girls-in-the-city HBO show Girls.  Most of the attention has been on her response to questions about the show’s lack of diversity.  But whaddya know, they also chatted about boys who get their sexual education from pornography.

GROSS: So do you get a sense that a lot of guys your age have learned about sex through porn sites and have these unrealistic and sometimes ludicrous ideas of what sex is like or what a girl would like?

DUNHAM: I do get that sense. I get the sense that there’s a new kind of learned behavior. I had a conversation with Frank Bruni about this for The New York Times where he was asking me yeah, about the porn question it and I told that there’s certain things that you’ll experience when, you know, not like I want to make it sound like I’m all over town, you know, testing different guys’ sexual prowesses. But in my own personal limited sexual experience I’ve found that there are guys doing things where you go there’s no way that that is your own personal instinct. You learned that from somewhere and it wasn’t, you know, a birds and bees conversation with your mom and it also wasn’t taught to you by a high school girl you met in Michigan. Like that you’re your – that is something that you have, you know, learned through osmosis culturally and now A, want to try yourself, or even more insidiously, think that I will like. And I think that young people are really scared to tell each other what they actually want.

It’s funny. I mean not to get too personal but I just found a diary that I kept in college. I’ve been an intermittent diary keeper always, never a faithful one. And there’s some guy had done something. It wasn’t anything, you know, to dramatic, like he’d just been I think sort of we kissed in college and he’d been sort of rough with me and I asked him if he always acted that way. And he said no, I don’t. But with you I do because it’s clearly what you want.

(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)

GROSS: What made him say that?

DUNHAM: Which was to me – I was looking back at it. I think at the time I just felt this guilt. I was like why am I – oh my God, what kind of girl am I that I’m projecting that that’s what I want. How did I, you know, like just massive guilt? And I remember at the time thinking, oh my God, if I could just replay that and act differently then we could have had this sweet encounter and I’ve missed out on something great. And I realize now that that’s just some way for a guy to shirk responsibility for some weird embarrassing thing that they’ve done. And I mean it’s almost like your skirt was too short and you were asking for it. So I don’t – that’s the weirdest human interaction I have on record in my diary. But I was thinking that that encounter and that interaction has informed more of my work than I ever knew when I reread it.

GROSS: Do you think it’s difficult, and I don’t want to get too personal with you. I don’t want to cross a line, so I’ll ask generically.

DUNHAM: Yeah.

GROSS: Do you think it’s different – difficult for young, single women to say no to a guy who wants to try some things he’s probably learned from a porn site and say, you know, I’m not going to enjoy that. That’s not going to be pleasurable. It’s not even going to be comfortable?

DUNHAM: I do. I mean it’s difficult for me to say no to my friends who want to try a restaurant that I don’t think I’m going to like.

(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)

DUNHAM: So it’s like – so trying to say no to something that personal and specific it’s – yeah, it’s really hard. And I also think that, you know, maybe girls will rise up against me and go I don’t know what your problem is but I feel perfectly comfortable saying no. But, you know, for me, I mean, I think that for young women sex is about sex but sex is also about wanting to be liked and wanting to be appreciated. And the fear when you say no is that someone will go OK, well then see you later. Like that you will, you know, lose your loving audience.

So, yeah, I think it is really challenging and I think in the sexual relationship on the show between Hannah and Adam I wanted to show that it’s not a case of complete victimization. Hannah thinks about sex as a way to learn more about herself and she kind of feels like she needs to accept what ever opportunity to learn is offered to her. And Adam is continually testing the boundaries and also using sex as a way to experience to be close and also not to be close. And so he’s not going to have the kind of sex where you, you know, move slowly and look into each other’s eyes. He wants to be near another person but in the least intimate way possible. And as the season goes on you sort of learn more about his drives and who is and like what happens when they strip away a little bit of that role play but it’s a complicated dance.

GROSS: Well, I think you just got to something really difficult emotionally, which is when sex becomes the least intimate way of communicating.

DUNHAM: Yeah. Which I think is…

GROSS: I mean that’s, because you’re at your most exposed and vulnerable so if that’s not the most intimate and it’s the least intimate, that’s so uncomfortable, isn’t it?

DUNHAM: Yeah. I remember in high school like long before I started having sex with anyone or kissing anyone, thinking this is – I mean this sounds like a real leap, but I’ve always had like a little bit of a morbid streak, like a little bit like we’re all going to die so what’s the point.

(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)

DUNHAM: Like that – that’s where my brain goes when I’m tired. And I think I was like lying in bed and I was thinking like probably once your in love and once you’ve had sex you’re not scared of dying because you know what true connection is and you know what the world is all about. And then the minute that I had sex I understood that that was at least not yet in my experience the case and that it was not the cure to like all existential anxiety and that it’s very possible to feel – to be naked and feel quite alone, which is poetic in its own way.

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Walt knows it.

Do you?

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Has it been six months since New Orleans already?  Publish, Korrektiv, publish!

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Scientists have revealed one of the reasons why some folks are less religious than others: They think more analytically, rather than going with their gut. And thinking analytically can cause religious belief to wane — for skeptics and true believers alike.

Read the whole article at Thinking can undermine religious faith, study finds.

Here, as I understand it, is how the evaluated religiosity:

After answering three of these questions, the students were asked to rate a series of statements on belief, including, “In my life I feel the presence of the Divine,” and “I just don’t understand religion.” Students who answered the three questions correctly — and presumably did a better job of engaging their analytical skills — were more likely to score lower on the belief scales.

(snip)

In the final experiment, students in the control group read text in a clear, legible font, while those in the other group were forced to squint at a font that was hard to read, a chore that has been shown to trigger analytic thinking. Sure enough, those who read the less legible font rated their belief in supernatural agents at 10.40 on a 3-to-21 scale, compared with 12.16 for those who read the clear font.

I’m not sure I get how that’s supposed to accurately measure religiosity. Are they saying that students who were “primed” with the less legible font, or the analysis-related words (in another experiment), were more likely to say “no” to the question “In my life I feel the presence of the Divine.”? (And, speaking of thinking analytically, how should I punctuate the end of that sentence?)

This confuses me, and I do recognize the irony in an All Up In Your FACE Religious Type like myself saying “math is hard! how experiment work?” I guess I can’t conceive of my answer to that question changing based on doing a crossword or a similarly analytical exercise. It seems like it would be more beneficial to give analytical tasks to two different populations who had the same IQ but were very divided in terms of religiosity – like, some monks and some atheists, or something, and see who does better. But then, of course, you’d have the issue of people saying “this whackadoodle cult over here doesn’t share my thought patterns just because we’re both very religious,” etc.

I don’t know – what do you think about this study, commenters? I’m not so much interested in the obvious disproving of the results (HEY! HERE’S A LIST OF CATHOLIC SMART PEOPLE!”) because, really, if a person is so ignorant as to argue there aren’t super-brains over on the Churchy side of the room, then I am not interested in talking to said person about this topic. But I would like to tease out whether this is even a good measure of what they’re trying to…measure.

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On a moonlit night she’ll cook me onion soup.

Kiddies are romantic and if we don’t fight we soon will have a troupe.

We’ll help the population, it’s a duty that we owe to dear old France.

Isn’t it romance?

- From “Isn’t it Romantic?” By Hart and Rogers

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That’s Kenneth Tigar on the right, and he plays the old man who will not kneel to Loki in the following exchange:

Loki:  In the end, you will always kneel.

Old Man:  Not to men like you.

Loki:  There are no men like me!

Old Man: There are always men like you.

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I know I’ve already mentioned the Christian haunted-box-o’-porn film Harmless.  But what interests me is how many other people have done so.  A very cursory look turns up i09, Jezebel, the AV Club, Movieline…why, it’s practically buzz.  Anyway, they all make fun of the film’s ultra lo-fi production values, but they also make fun – especially in the comments -  of its central thesis:  that porn can destroy marriages and tear families apart.  What interests me here is that I don’t remember the same mocking hue and cry going up when Little Children came out in 2006.  And Little Children made the exact same point.  Why does Kate Winslet allow herself to stray?  Because she walks in on her husband in the scene pictured above.

Anyway, something something just because Christians say it doesn’t mean it isn’t true.

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It’s the birthday of philosopher Søren Kierkegaard (books by this author), born in Copenhagen (1813), the son of a wealthy wool merchant who left his son enough money to be financially independent for the rest of his life. Kierkegaard rarely left Copenhagen, but he enjoyed going to the theater, taking carriage rides out into the country, and chatting with people he met, including servants and laborers, whom wealthy people would ordinarily ignore.

Kierkegaard is widely considered the father of existential philosophy. His work touched not only philosophy, but also theology, psychology, literary criticism, and fiction. He also came up with two concepts that are commonplace to us today: One is “subjectivity,” the idea that we all perceive the world — and “truth” — differently; and the other is the “leap of faith,” that faith is not possible without doubt. One must doubt the existence of God to have faith in the existence of God. Belief without doubt is just credulity. He published several books at his own expense, including Either/Or (1843), Works of Love (1847), and The Sickness Unto Death (1849). Kierkegaard was unknown outside of Denmark until the early 20th century, when his work was discovered by European writers and philosophers. He influenced writers like Henrik Ibsen, Franz Kafka, and Albert Camus.

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And this here is the first prong of our marketing strategy:

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