Tag Archives: desire

Links: John le Carre, the writer’s temperament, condoms, slut shaming, desire, transport, and more!

May 18, 2013 By in Links Tags: , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

* John le Carre’s complete works discussed; I am most of the way through Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and am amazed at how good it is, and how taunt even repeated stories feel. I have started and sometimes completed le Carre’s novels from the last fifteen years but seldom liked them, even when I wanted to. There may be a fuller post here.

* David Brooks: “Engaged or detached?” “Writers who are at the classic engaged position believe that social change is usually initiated by political parties [. . .] the detached writer wants to be a few steps away from the partisans. [. . . ] She fears the team mentality will blinker her views.” Read the whole thing because the context is important, but as a writer I lean heavily towards the “detached” point of view.

* How ‘Slut Shaming’ Has Been Written Into School Dress Codes Across The Country, which should be obvious yet isn’t.

* “Why still so few use condoms;” spoiler: because it doesn’t feel as good.

* “What do you desire?, possibly NSFW.

* “Nobody Walks in L.A.: The Rise of Cars and the Monorails That Never Were” but should have been. L.A., Seattle, and other places have begun to recognize the obvious about the limits of car-based transport.

* “Who Killed The Deep Space Climate Observatory?” This story, along with pathetic “Superconducting Super Collider” debacle, is the sort of thing that, if the U.S. really does take an intellectual and cultural backseat to the rest of the world, will be cited by future historians as examples of how the U.S. turned away from the very traits and behaviors that made it successful in the first place. “Who Killed the Deep Space Climate Observatory?” is also an example of how the real news is very seldom the news you read in the headlines.

* “Documentary ‘Aroused’ explores what makes women turn to porn careers.”

* “[A]rtists and writers love to cast gigantic stores as misbegotten cathedrals.” I’m guilty.

* Frank Bruni on Amanda Knox and pervasive sexual double standards, with the somewhat stupid title “Sexism and the Single Murderess.”

* Why many streets are ridiculously wide.

* The role of a dictionary. People (most often students) often refer to me as a walking dictionary and say that I must not need one, and I usually say the opposite: I often use dictionaries, and in my experience most people who work with words do.

Anytime someone describes sexual behavior as “dumb,” ask: Dumb in what timeframe?

December 4, 2012 By in ideas, Links, sex Tags: , , , , , , , , , , 3 Comments

In writing about the David Petraeus non-scandal, Adam Gopnik says, correctly, that “Benghazi is a tragedy in search of a scandal; the Petraeus affair is a scandal in search of a tragedy,” and, perhaps less correctly, this:

The point of lust, not to put too fine a point on it, is that it lures us to do dumb stuff, and the fact that the dumb stuff gets done is continuing proof of its power. As Roth’s Alexander Portnoy tells us, “Ven der putz shteht, ligt der sechel in drerd”—a Yiddish saying that means, more or less, that when desire comes in the door judgment jumps out the window and cracks its skull on the pavement.

But whether lust “lures us to do dumb stuff” depends on timeframe we’re looking at: if we do “dumb stuff” that results in our genes still existing, say, 200 years from now, then what’s dumb in the context of the next month may be “smart” from the context of a couple centuries from now. We’re evolutionarily primed to propagate our genes—that’s Richard Dawkins’ point in The Selfish Gene.

We also have to ask what happens in the very short term: presumably, in the minutes to hours that Petraeus and Broadwell were doing it (or anyone is “doing it”), they were making a very smart decision for themselves over those few minutes. One might be able to look at the quality of their decision making in terms of Philip Zimbardo and John Boyd’s The Time Paradox, and as being very good for the immediate present when they were doing it, not very good in the months or years after the scandal comes to light, and, depending on conception, very good over the very long term.

Don’t read this post and the books linked, then go out and cheat on your significant other only to say that your selfish genes and hedonistic time perspective “made” you do it. But do think about the intellectual context in which Portnoy’s claim exists, and how desire can function in the very long and short run.

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