Wilco - “I Am Trying to Break Your Heart”
They spent the summer days applying for jobs and writing reviews, the nights drinking bourbon at the pub under a picture of James Joyce, listening to Wilco b-sides and trying to figure out their failed relationships. - portraitoftheartistasayoungman
On Walter Benjamin’s Übersetzung Maschine (Translation Machine), formerly of Widener Library and now, ostensibly, belonging to Google.
I didn’t know what to make of this essay when I first read it many months ago: it couldn’t be real, but I so wanted it to be real. It burrowed deep in my consciousness, and as the visceral appeal of Walter Benjamin and lost objects faded in time, I kept returning to the ideas on mechanical reproduction, translation, and mechanical translation. The essay is beautifully written, and you should click on the link rather than dally anymore on Tumblr.
Beer float?
This was good! I don’t think it would’ve been as palatable with any other type of beer, though. Even with this, there’s a moment at the beginning that just tastes… wrong. But immediately after it tastes chocolaty and rich and sweet but also a little bitter and complex. Really nice.
Young’s Double Chocolate Stout! I spent all summer searching for it in England to no avail. Even the Young’s pubs didn’t have it, how perverse. Where can this be found?
Update: Trader Joe’s - TJ, my man. Thanks bryanmckay!
Dinner table. 6 people. Ethnically, two Indians, two Jews, a Pole, and me (Chinese), but we are all Americans.
It was a joke on in- and out-groups. “Well then you must be the outgroup” said one guy, pointing at me. What do you mean? I blinked, confused, at the white and brown faces around me. It look me a full second to realize that, indeed, I was the only “yellow” one.
I was stunned by how it long the realization took me. This moment in America, in college, was in stark contrast to my experiences in Europe this summer. “Where are you from?” they’d ask because it was so obvious I was a foreigner, from the way I scrutinized traffic signs to the way I carried my backpack. ”America,” I’d reply. (Or “the States,” “die USA,” or “les Etats-Unis.”) “No, but where are you actually from?”
At the Bristol bus terminal, an English lady sat down beside me and enthusiastically tried to convert me, in Chinese, to Jehovah’s Witnesses. Despite the fact that we both spoke English with a thousand times more fluency, she soldiered on in her broken Chinese. “I’ve lived in America for most of my life. I’m American,” I said, but I don’t think she believed me.
Europe hammered, nail by nail, a truth I never wanted to acknowledge. In Chinese school many years ago, my Chinese teacher — fed up with our laziness and general reluctance to learn our parent’s language— had said, “No matter what you do, Americans are going to look at you and see a Chinese person first.” I bristled at her comment. Then, and I admit even now, I prided myself on the ability to distinguish by sight an Asian and an Asian-American. That I find this distinction important is indicative of personal uneasiness.
In the artificially liberal and multicultural environment of my college, I have had very little opportunity to think critically about race. Yes there are panels and whatnot every week, but they never feel relevant or worth attending against the backdrop of general busyness. Only during my summers away — Chicago in 2008, Europe in 2009 — that matters of race have dominated my thinking.
I lived in Chicago during the height of Obama-mania, and my apartment was only blocks away from his house in Hyde Park. But it was in Chicago that my fuzzy liberal dreams of a post-racial American were hopelessly shattered.
I’m from Barcelona - “We’re from Barcelona”
It is impossible to listen to this song and not be cheered up. C’mon, bop along with me!
We’ll aim for the stars
We’ll aim for your heart when the night comes
And we’ll bring you love
You’ll be one of us when the night comes
We are all afflicted at times with the cataracts of the quotidian, where routine clouds our ability to notice what we once loved about the person we live with.
— James Wood, She’s Not Herself : The New Yorker
A steamy tidbit from Bruce Feiler’s “My Life as a Hand Model,” originally published in Gourmet and anthologized in Best Food Writing, 2004.
In the old days, photographers made steam by combining the vapors of ammonium and hydrochloric acid, but steam made that way doesn’t dissipate and it looks chemical. Later, they began hiding calcium smoke chips around the food. In recent years, they’ve tried dry ice, cappuccino makers, even theatrical foggers. Fernbach found that one surefire technique of getting steam from, say, a baked potato, is to stuff it with a moistened tampon. “The mixture of concentrated moisture and heated surroundings produces the most gorgeous steam,” he said.
By comparison with most 19th-century novels, and even with most 20th-century modernist novels of the “stream of consciousness” school, the neuronovels have in them very little of society, of different classes, of individuals interacting, of development either alongside or against historical forces and expectations…It now seems we’ve gone beyond the loss of society and religion to the loss of the self, an object whose intricacies can only be described by future science. It’s not, of course, that morality, society, and selfhood no longer exist, but they are now the property of specialists writing in the idioms of their disciplines. So the new genre of the neuronovel, which looks on the face of it to expand the writ of literature, appears as another sign of the novel’s diminishing purview.
Neuronovels — Enduring Love, Saturday, Motherless Brooklyn, Atmospheric Disturbances, The Echo Maker to name a few -- have been in vogue of late. Marco Roth’s article raises provocative points, which have been tackled, in some form, by two people I admire very much, Jonah Lehrer and Joanne McNeil.
One point I keep wrestling with is Roth’s assertion that novelists, by writing about characters with a neurological disease, are somehow ceding ground to science — admitting that science can explain human nature better than writers. Or that science will always get there first. Perhaps I’m just a fuzzy Two Cultures person, but I don’t see the binary competition— isn’t this art meeting science on its own terms? Rather than ceding, it is illuminating science (which isn’t really any closer to understanding the human condition). The neuronovels strike me as longer, fictional accounts of Oliver Sack’s essays, which are written with great warmth and humanity. While I wouldn’t go the length to say that Ian McEwan is “warm” writer, these neuronovels are not a cold litany of scientific facts either. Science can tell us symptoms, but it does not tell us how to understand or deal with them. By illuminating what happens when our brains don’t work, the novels unpack the nuances of our conscious processing and the miraculous coincidence that so often, our brains actually do work. Bringing to life an obscure medical textbook entry gives greater returns, rather than diminishing ones.
Passion Pit | “To Kingdom Come”
Somewhere between the sublime and the ridiculous: bubbly pastel cartoons and goofy mustachios. The band members play Victorian scientists.
Bonus, bonus, bonus: reciprocal transformation. Chairlift remixes Passion Pit’s “To Kingdom Come,” and Passion Pit remixes Chairlift’s “Bruises”
I’m not sure how and why but the conversation Friday night veered strangely often toward pornography. Although I was too giddy with sugar and carbonation to remember properly, a few nuggets did lodge in my brain. Brain splatter:
1. “Big Red Son” - David Foster Wallace’s essay on the porn industry
I sneaked this essay once in the Coop, but regrettably, didn’t buy the book. There is one detail from the essay that especially stands out: fluffers. In DFW’s own words,
Fluff (v) is unfilmed oral activity designed to induce, maintain or enhance a woodman’s wood (and high-end porn films used to employ what were actually called fluff girls, who were usually B-Girls in waiting).
Fluff girls are a literal manifestation of what is true in any industry: entry-level jobs are analogous to sucking dick.
2. Alt porn
I threw it out there, then it boomeranged back to me, and I wasn’t able to answer the question “What is alt porn?” Knowing that I had encountered an article about this somewhere online, I searched through Tumblr dashboard, Google Reader, and my browsing history to no avail. Even after I apprehensively but it through a Google search, I still didn’t get it. The problem is, I suppose, taking the word “alternative” as a catch-all to everything that is not mainstream. Thoughts?
Perhaps the best answer would have been the most obvious one: you know it when you see it.
3. The Pains of Being Pure at Heart
This band only got a passing mention, but “Young Adult Friction” is such an awesome song in the delicious double entendre way.
An organic chemistry student, pre- and post- exam. Also a perfect representation of how I felt yesterday. (Am I too nerdy for you?)
Rand’s particular intellectual contribution, the thing that makes her so popular and so American, is the way she managed to mass market elitism — to convince so many people, especially young people, that they could be geniuses without being in any concrete way distinguished. Or, rather, that they could distinguish themselves by the ardor of their commitment to Rand’s teaching. The very form of her novels makes the same point: they are as cartoonish and sexed-up as any best seller, yet they are constantly suggesting that the reader who appreciates them is one of the elect.
— Adam Kirsch on Ayn Rand (via portraitoftheartistasayoungman)
Natalie Angier’s latest article entered into a very timely discussion on dopamine neurons in my neurobiology class. When you’re pages deep into Nature papers about monkeys staring at computer screens to get 0.3 ml rewards of juice, it’s easy to get bogged down in details and forgot the essential question — why does dopamine matter?
Classically, dopamine has been associated with pleasure and reward, but recent research suggests that dopamine neuron firing is more closely related to drive and motivation. Is this a real difference, or as one student asked, is this just a matter of semantics? Quipped another, ” Just look at half the kids at Harvard — they’re driven but far from happy.”
(Agreed.)
