"The 'cool' space of numbered propositions"

At the New Haven Review, Stephen Burt on growing up between genders. 

The fever for bacon

Bacon as currency.  (Via GeekPress.)

"These are Enron's overhead transparency projectors"

Great interview with David Rees at The Rumpus.

And on a happier note

remote-controlled cockroaches!  (Via Tyler Cowen.)

Wolf's hubris

I don't often link to a negative review, but I must confess that I hugely enjoyed Zoe Heller's takedown of Naomi Wolf's new book about the vagina at the New York Review of Books:

After consulting many research papers and interviewing many scientists, Wolf has decided that the sex–creativity link can be “explained” by dopamine, one of the brain chemicals involved in female orgasm. Dopamine, according to Wolf, is the chemical that fosters female focus and motivation. It is what makes women leap up from the rank sweat of their enseamed beds to write novels. Modern women who complain of depression need better sex and more dopamine, but patriarchal societies, fearful of sexually empowered women, prefer to fob them off with antidepressants. “Serotonin,” Wolf writes, “literally subdues the female voice, and dopamine literally raises it.”

Wolf literally does not understand the meaning of “literally” and her grasp of the scientific research she has read is pretty shaky too. By repeatedly confusing correlates with causes, she grossly exaggerates what neuroscience can reliably tell us about the functions of individual brain chemicals. Dopamine undoubtedly has a role in female orgasm. But it also has a role in schizophrenia and, by Wolf’s own admission, a panoply of addictions. Given this, it seems foolhardy on Wolf’s part to designate it “the ultimate feminist chemical.”

26 locations

Places Jami Attenberg slept over the first six months of this year.

(Reminds me slightly of some notes of Georges Perec in my favorite Species of Spaces and Other Pieces.)

For an even bleaker account of the financial woes of the forty-year-old novelist, read Benjamin Anastas's gripping and horrifying Too Good to Be True.

Losing track

Gamblers want to get into the zone. (Via GeekPress.)

Motorcycle separation anxiety

Great interview with Deon Meyer at the FT (site registration required). I am super-excited to read Seven Days....

Either/or

The book Joyce Carol Oates wishes someone else would write (other good stuff in this interview too):

A work of such brilliant prose, such imaginative powers, such sweep, such flair, with such an irresistible story and riveting characters that simply by reading it attentively one could understand those discoveries of molecular biology, neuroscience, psycholinguistics, “philosophy of mind” and “string theory” in the way that their discoverers/creators understand them.

"I am Philip Roth"

Philip Roth's open letter to Wikipedia.

The anternet and other wonders

I had the Mondrian cake on my Facebook page the other day, but here's a much fuller account by the cake's creator Caitlin Freeman of the art cake enterprise...

If you find yourself in Chelsea, make sure to go and see Julian Hoeber's amazing and truly queasiness-inducing gravitational mystery spot!

A charming link whose tab I haven't been able to bring myself to close. (Courtesy of B.)

Taught my first class yesterday, got another first class meeting on Monday and then things are really properly underway; in the meantime I've mostly just been having a pretty quiet week and gearing up mentally for Sunday's big race.

All I could persuade myself to do over the weekend, other than exercise, was reread the selected works of Lee Child!

I have read the early ones too many times already to revisit them again now, but a mere one or two previous reads leaves pleasure still to be leached, so I devoured Without Fail, The Enemy and Bad Luck and Trouble (I especially love the installments that fill in Reacherian backstory). Then I mourned the loss of Dick Francis and the fact that there is only a finite number of books in the Francis and Child canons, and new Reacher installments cannot come fast enough to sate the monster.

Then I read Charlie Stross's The Fuller Memorandum, which I felt was the book already on my Kindle most likely to scratch the Jack Reacher itch (it did, very enjoyably so - not that they are at all similar in tone or style, but Stross's Laundry books, like the Reacher novels, represent the pinnacle of light reading!).

Then I happily realized that Gwenda Bond's Blackwood, a modern-day YA novel about the occult history of the Roanoke disappearance, was now officially published; I loved it, and it was a particular pleasure to read a novel by someone whose blog I've been reading and enjoying since the very early days of literary blogging. It definitely had something of the feel of my favorite Margaret Mahy novel The Changeover; both main characters and geographical settings are especially well rendered.

It is possible that I will revisit the Reacher barrel and dig out a couple more that I can stand to reread....

Loaves Conference Room, Layer Cake Area

Genius piece by Leon Neyfakh at Slate on visiting the Pepperidge Farm Cookie Factory!

(I have a mild obsession with that brand dating back to childhood, when my father worked for a spell at a company located near to the Pepperidge Farm outlet store. This was in the days before outlet stores were common, and the bags of stuff he brought home now and again from Pepperidge Farm were truly otherworldly - we had homemade treats at home, but as you know if you grew up on delicious homemade treats, nothing is as exciting as store-bought! Layer cakes with one corner slightly mangled, deficient crescent rolls, one-gallon cartons of goldfish; I always give a longing look to the Pepperidge Farm cakes in the freezer section at the supermarket, though I do not think my adult self would find them so delicious, and I still get a bag of Gingermen or Bordeaux cookies now and again.)

[ED. Alice has reminded me that it was the Pepperidge farm "thrift store"! Nomenclature is important.]

Secrets of style

Handbag contents of the Queen Mother and Margaret Thatcher.

The Jersey Metal Detectorists' Society

This news item reminded me of a Roald Dahl tale in a volume I read again and again as a child.

(I think the stories I read most obsessively at that age were inevitably the Sherlock Holmes ones, and certainly R. L. Stevenson and other late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century tales of the uncanny, but Dahl's children's stories and also the stories of Joan Aiken were also a major influence....)

"They paid in fish"

Gideon Lewis-Kraus on why the Internet chose cats.  (Via B., who got it here.)