Look at what Al Gore was accused of doing. He wanted a hand job, he called for a masseuse. If Tipper wanted a hand job, she’d have just given herself one
October 4, 2013 § Leave a comment
In the 150 years Samuel Clemens has been better known as Mark Twain, journalists, scholars, and even bartenders have offered competing theories as to where America’s first signature wit acquired his nom de plume. According to Twain, his pen name once belonged to a Mississippi riverboat captain, and he merely “laid violent hands upon it.” Newspapers at the time however claimed he earned his alias drinking at a one-bit saloon in Virginia City, Nevada. Both stories fit the author’s roguish persona. Both recall his bio. But neither has stood up to scholarly investigation, and the truth has been elusive until perhaps now. In the new issue of the Mark Twain Journal, a rare book dealer presents his discovery of an 1861 magazine sketch that offers the first fact-based theory on “Mark Twain”; it suggests Clemens found his pseudonym in a popular humor journal, then invented the riverboat story to promote his Missouri roots. A slightly unromantic, yet nonetheless redolent theory, it summons a lesser-known part of Twain’s personal character: his proven cunning in respect to his brand.
Kevin Mac Donnell, a book dealer and scholar in Austin, Texas, found the potential source while searching Google Books for unknown pieces of Twain’s writing. To his astonishment, one of the hits led to a mention of “Mark Twain” in the humor journal Vanity Fair — one of the author’s early influences — two years before he adopted it. In a burlesque titled “The North Star,” the sketch reports a farcical meeting of Charleston mariners who adopt a resolution “abolishing the use of the magnetic needle, because of its constancy to the north.” These characters include a “Mr. Pine Knott,” (a pun for dense wood), “Lee Scupper” (a drain), and “Mark Twain,” (shallow depth in shipboard jargon)…
It wasn’t until 1873, when the travel book The Innocents Abroad and the Western romp Roughing It made Twain a celebrity, that a theory emerged on his nom de plume. According to the Nevada Sentinel, during his “early days” as an Enterprise reporter, Clemens spent most nights drinking at the Old Corner saloon in Virginia City, a bar that “always had an account with the balance against him” tallied in chalk marks on the wall. Twain was an old-fashioned way of saying two, a usage Clemens was supposedly fond of because the article said “mark twain” was his order to mark two more on my tab: a request he allegedly became known for and attracted as a sobriquet.
This story appeared in several Western newspapers (often with liberal embellishments) despite the fact that its author’s claim of familiarity with Clemens was always dubious. The theory even appeared in the Daily Alta California — one of Twain’s former employers — at which point he responded in the following letter:
“Mark Twain” was the nom de plume of one Captain Isaiah Sellers, who used to write river news over it for the New Orleans Picayune: he died in 1863 and as he could no longer need that signature, I laid violent hands upon it without asking permission of the proprietor’s remains. That is the history of the nom de plume I bear.
Twain also used the pen names “Josh” as in just joshing and “John Snook” as in to snooker, which bears mentioning because no record of the name “Mark Twain” exists in Times Picayune archives, nor those of any newspaper in the region. Isaiah Sellers always signed his river reports “I. Sellers.” And the captain died one year after Clemens adopted that pen name, not before.
For these reasons, scholars and schoolteachers alike tend to attribute Mark Twain directly to the riverboat call for “by the mark, twain,” — or two fathoms — a depth considered safe, if just barely, to sail steamboats on the Mississippi. This is the reference Twain intended of course, even as he lent it to Captain Sellers. It nicely recalled his short career as a Mississippi steamboat pilot and evoked his Southern roots at a time when he had just begun plotting three books set in that milieu. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Life on the Mississippi, and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn — Twain’s most celebrated works — all came in uninterrupted succession in the 12 years following his rebuttal of the Nevada saloon anecdote. The only other problem with Clemens’s version of events was that “mark twain” was an uncommon usage on the Mississippi. Mac Donnell, who also owns the largest private collection of Twain’s personal books and letters, notes that even in the author’s journals, “mark two” was used instead of “mark twain.”
And it begs little guessing why Clemens would prefer this narrative to the Vanity Fair source. In the context of the mariner sketch — set on the Atlantic coast — “Mark Twain” was terribly shallow.
And then there was the stigma of being associated with Vanity Fair: the fact that its contributors, the so-called “Phunny Phellows,” were, well, not funny. “By the time Twain became famous, they were going out of style pretty quick,” Mac Donnell said. A specialist in 19th century literature, he added that: “In 1873, when Clemens was challenged on the source of his pen name, he had already patented the Mark Twain scrapbook. He had already branded himself Mark Twain. He had signed book deals and established his name. He wasn’t about to go backwards into the Phunny Phellow mold.”
Twain would later admit some indebtedness to the style of Artemus Ward, Vanity Fair’s marquee writer and editor (as well as the author of the cover story for the issue with the mariner sketch). On his first tour as a humorist, Twain even told some of Ward’s jokes on stage, yet edited them out when the material fell flat. “By then, Phunny Phellow humor was stale. It was stilted. It depended on misspellings and dialect and bad puns,” Mac Donnell said. “Slapstick is basically what it was.”
So while pilfering a dead riverboat captain’s pen name might seem like an odd thing to lie about, it beats sourcing that name to a pun by a band of washed-up writers. read more
PHOTOGRAPH: Terry Barca
Further to my last request, I also now urgently need an expert who will say tattoos give you cancer. We can plug any relevant organisation, give copy approval and pay a fee
October 3, 2013 § 1 Comment
Method
The Macfarlane Burnet Institute for Medical Research and Public Health (Burnet Institute) based in Melbourne, employs about 140 people. The institute has eight tearooms; four are “programme linked”—that is, predominantly used by the staff of a single programme—and four are communal: two are attached to formal meeting rooms, one is a large multipurpose staff room, and one is a rather barren corridor with kitchen facilities.
Pilot study
Between 5 February 2004 and 18 June 2004 we carried out a pilot study to gain an initial impression of the manner of teaspoon loss at the institute and to refine our methods for the full study. We purchased 32 plain stainless steel teaspoons, discreetly numbered with red nail polish on the undersides of the handles, and distributed into a subset of the eight tearooms: 16 in the programme linked tearooms and 16 in the communal tearooms. We carried out a weekly audit over five months to assess any changes in the distribution of the teaspoons throughout the institute.
Main study
At the completion of the pilot study we carried out a longitudinal cohort study. We purchased and numbered a further 54 stainless steel teaspoons. In addition we purchased and discreetly numbered 16 teaspoons of higher quality. The teaspoons were distributed (stratified by spoon type) throughout the eight tearooms, with a higher proportion allocated to those tearooms with the highest teaspoon losses in the pilot study.
We carried out counts of the teaspoons weekly for two months then fortnightly for a further three months. Desktops and other immediately visible surfaces were scanned for errant spoons.
After five months we revealed our previously covert research project to the institute’s staff. They were asked to return or anonymously report any marked teaspoons that had made their way into desk drawers or homes. Two days after the revelation, staff were asked to complete a brief anonymous questionnaire, which dealt with their attitudes towards and knowledge of teaspoons and teaspoon theft.
Results
After five months, 56 (80%) of 70 teaspoons had disappeared. read more
PHOTOGRAPH: Ray Jones
his son’s own Marxist values can be seen all too clearly in his plans for state seizures of private land held by builders and for fixing energy prices by government diktat
October 2, 2013 § Leave a comment
In the case of the discourse culture of Methodism that was fostered by John Wesley there was an inherent relationship between circulating orality, manuscript culture, and print that came to define the Methodist media environment. As Warner puts it, “In a movement context that mixes printed and preached sermons with pamphlets and newspapers, performance and print were densely laminated together”. In his published Journal, for example, John Wesley not only records his extensive travels, but also details the sermons he preached – many in the open air to thousands of listeners. However, in contrast to his printed sermons which are composed and arranged specifically for publication, in the Journal Wesley usually only recounts the Scripture passage he preached on and the number of people he preached to. These mostly ex tempore public sermons were shaped by his context and his public audience, and the account of them in the printed journal thus highlights the unbounded nature of his audience and his text and the close relationship between orality and print that defined early Methodism.
However it was this unbounded nature of open air Methodist itinerant preaching that was perceived as the greatest threat to the established social norms. Anglican parish preaching was directed in mostly set language (The Book of Common Prayer and the Homilies) to a very specific and set group of people within a sanctioned public space by an ordained priest – itinerant Methodist preachers, on the other hand, openly operated outside of this established structure. Mostly un-ordained and uneducated, and thus outside of the established structure, they circulated from town to town preaching ex tempore in the open air or unsanctioned chapels. Many of their sermons were never printed, nevertheless the storm of controversy they stirred up (both for and against) clearly made its way into print and informed the national conversation on the Revival. Thus it was this “unauthorized” entrance into the public space of preaching – the claim to be able to address an unbounded audience – that caused much of the animosity towards Methodism. In other words it was the discourse not the doctrine of the revival that was at issue…
An example of this can be found in the Account of the Experience of Hester Ann Rogers. Towards the beginning of her narrative Rogers relates her reaction to the new Methodist preacher in Macclesfield, Mr. Simpson:
I heard various accounts of a clergyman whom my uncle Roe had recommended to be curate at Macclesfield, and who was said to be a Methodist. This conveyed to my mind as unpleasing an idea of him, as if he had been called a Romish priest; being fully persuaded that to be a Methodist was to be all that is vile, under a mask of piety…. I believed their teachers were the false prophets spoken of in the Scripture: that they deceived the illiterate, and were little better than common pickpockets; that they filled some of their hearers with presumption, and drove others to despair
Thus Rogers’ objection to the Methodist Mr. Simpson has very little to do with anything he actually believes or preaches (she has never even heard him) and very much to do with the way in which he disturbs the order of society. As she writes later, “When I came back to Macclesfield, the whole town was in alarm. My uncle Roe, and my cousins, seemed very fond of Mr. Simpson, and told me he was a most excellent man; but that all the rest of my relations were exasperated against him. Simply by participating in the discourse of Methodism, then, Mr. Simpson calls up the specter of unbounded enthusiasm and disruption of the social order.
More than that, though, Rogers’ account illustrates how closely intertwined orality and print were in early Methodism. Sprinkled throughout her published Account are references to sermons by Mr. Simpson, John Wesley and others. Ostensibly instances of the localized orality of popular religion, evidence of these sermons nevertheless make it into print accounts – the most famous and published of which was Rogers’. Likewise the women who wrote in to John Wesley’s Arminian Magazine participated in this conversation between orality and print – often giving accounts of revivals and sermons for the larger Methodist public. Thus early evangelical media culture worked to form a type of feedback loop within which the genres of public oral sermon and printed discourse were constantly in conversation. And it was this feedback loop of orality and print that threatened to break down the established public boundaries between private spirituality and public life.
To better illustrate how this evangelical public sphere operated and was contested I want to turn to some specific and local examples of the types of intolerance early Methodist converts faced. For, though the generally unbounded (in every sense of the word) nature of the Methodist movement and spirituality was crucial in forming attitudes towards Methodism, these attitudes were shaped and enacted according to local circumstances, customs, and mores. This is especially apparent in the case of Methodist women. Not only do these evangelical women writers illustrate how print could be used to blur gendered distinctions between public and private, they were also the locus for much of the anti-Methodist criticism and satire. In fact the role of gender within evangelical religion and the appeal of evangelicalism to women was one of the roots of the controversy the Revival engendered. Thus the reaction to Methodism was in reality an expression of deeper seeded concerns over the role of marginalized members of society – women, the poor – in organized religion. This anxiety is apparent in Leigh Hunt’s Attempt to Shew the Folly and Danger of Methodism in which he states, “We may see directly what influence the body has upon this kind of devotion [Methodism], if we examine the temperament of its professors. The female sex, for instance, are acknowledged to possess the greater bodily sensibility, and it is the women who chiefly indulge in these love-sick visions of heaven”. Thus what is really at stake in the print wars over Methodism is not so much the doctrine of justification by faith but the eroding of social boundaries via spiritual experience. read more
STILL: Ramón Königshausen
Could you explain to me which side of a gas lamp is its behind?
October 1, 2013 § Leave a comment
This is our best estimate for the number of potentially life-bearing worlds among the planets spotted by Kepler. But we’re missing much of the picture.
Kepler could spot only planets that passed between their parent stars and the telescope’s viewpoint – even a slight tilt in a planet’s orbit could make it invisible to the telescope. And the farther out a planet orbits, the more likely it was to be missed.
After extrapolating for all the missing worlds, Kepler’s field of view becomes dense with planets that may be like Earth.
Now consider this: Kepler observed just 0.28 per cent of the sky. And the telescope was able to peer out to only 3000 light years away, studying less than 5 per cent of the stars in its field of view. So how many Earths might really be out there? read more
PHOTOGRAPH: Bob Mazzer
Punk rock is a receding object: as one approaches, it disappears
September 30, 2013 § Leave a comment
Tetsuro Matsuzawa begins his working day, conventionally enough, in front of a computer. He taps in a few commands, takes a seat and waits. Within minutes, the calm of his basement laboratory is pierced by the sound of excitable primates.
On cue, two chimpanzees appear through an opening in the ceiling, flash a look of recognition at Matsuzawa, and then aim an inquisitive stare at his unfamiliar companion from the Observer.
Matsuzawa feeds them a spoonful of honey each and wipes their hands and fingers – a near-daily ritual meant to reward them for arriving on time, and to encourage them to show up again the following morning.
After all, Ai, a 36-year-old chimpanzee, and her 13-year-old son, Ayumu, are free to stay in their nearby home, a re-creation of a west African rainforest they share with 12 other chimps. That they are such willing participants in Matsuzawa’s experiment is a tribute to the bond that has built up between the professor and the chimps during many years of research.
Over the course of more than three decades, Matsuzawa, a professor at Kyoto University’s Primate Research Institute in Inuyama, a historic town in central Japan, has gained unprecedented insights into the workings of the primate mind, and by extension, our own.
In a landmark test of short-term memory conducted in public in 2007, Ayumu demonstrated astonishing powers of recall, easily beating his human competitors, who had been in training for months.
The strength of Ayumu’s cognitive functions surprised even Matsuzawa, who has studied the mental dexterity of chimps for 36 years. He makes long annual visits to Bossou in south-eastern Guinea, where he witnesses chimps display in the wild the same powers of recognition and recall that Ayumu and other young chimps demonstrate on his computer screens.
“We’ve concluded through the cognitive tests that chimps have extraordinary memories,” Matsuzawa says. “They can grasp things at a glance. As a human, you can do things to improve your memory, but you will never be a match for Ayumu.” read more
ART: Vilhelm Hammershøi
it’s entirely possible that space isn’t really a thing
September 27, 2013 § Leave a comment
To sadomasochists keen on fresh air and the country life, it must have seemed like a dream come true. A 35-year-old woman advertizing herself as a dominatrix promised strict discipline to paying clients on her farm in the northeast of Austria.
Some 15 men responded to the advert posted in the Internet, and two or three took up the offer. “They didn’t get what they bargained for,” a spokesman for the Lower Austria police told SPIEGEL ONLINE, confirming reports in the Austrian media in recent days.
Instead of savoring the sweet pleasure of pain, the men found themselves consigned to farm labor such as chopping wood in the nude and mowing the lawn while wearing black fetish masks on the farm near the town of St Pölten. In effect, they were paying for the privilege of doing farm work. read more
PHOTOGRAPH: Adam Buxton
Ob ich nicht höre? ob ich die Musik nicht höre?
September 26, 2013 § Leave a comment
Here’s a statement that I don’t think will be too contentious, across the ideological spectrum:
The American way is to draw sharp distinctions between winners and losers, in order to encourage people to hustle.
People on the political left might rephrase this in stronger, more derogatory language. People on the political right would mostly celebrate the statement. But as a description of the American status quo, I think it is fairly uncontroversial. It expresses the barely tacit rationale behind a whole panoply of American institutions that comfort the already comfortable and afflict the already afflicted. Consider the so-called corporate welfare state, or tax expenditures like the mortgage interest deduction and the deductibility of health costs (only) of the stably employed. These things come to exist for specific historical reasons, they won by particular lobbies, but they endure because of widespread hospitable ideology. It should be possible to “make it”. “Making it” should be a safe, comfortable place, while those who fail to make it should bear consequences for their deficiencies.
Suppose, as I think many people on the right would argue, this ideology or worldview has contributed to power and prosperity of the United States. Sharp distinctions between winners and losers encourage individuals to work hard rather than slack off. Some succeed, some don’t, but the net effect is to reward effort and enterprise, generating a vibrant, prosperous economy. The punishment of losers is a price that must be paid to create a nation that is collectively a winner. And the burden of that price falls on those who most deserve it, those who lose — in part due to misfortune sure, but largely because they simply failed to work as hard or as well as their competitors.
People on the political left would dispute this account for all kinds of (good) reasons. But let’s put that aside, and consider it on its own terms. This perspective on American life would, I think, be described as “rugged individualism”.
But, in the lingo of economics, consider the “social welfare function” embedded in this story. The claim is emphatically not that this system maximizes some measure of aggregate utility that could be decomposed to a sum of individual welfares. On the contrary, it celebrates as necessary large costs in individual welfare for the sake of impersonal characteristics of the aggregate: “prosperity”, or “strength”. It is an entirely collectivist justification for policies that are deeply harmful at an individual level, if you take seriously at all the idea of diminishing marginal utility. The individualist approach to maximizing welfare would be to redistribute. If we (contentiously but commonly) assume people share comparable utility functions, aggregate utility is maximized by taking from the rich and giving to the poor. At least in a methodological sense, it is socialists who are the individualists, attending to the sum of individual welfares, while unsympathetic capitalists rely upon collectivism to justify their good fortune and the policy apparatus that magnifies and sustains it. read more
PHOTOGRAPH: Paul Mason
vile pictures executed in the best style of Japanese art
September 25, 2013 § Leave a comment
Tim McDonnell of Climate Desk has put together a helpful map from the data in the study showing the 20 cities facing the highest annual average flooding costs by mid-century. read more
ART [detail]: Tameka Norris; PHOTOGRAPH: Alicia Eler
No example of a barter economy, pure and simple, has ever been described, let alone the emergence from it of money; all available ethnography suggests there has never been such a thing
September 24, 2013 § Leave a comment
What do you usually experience when you read?
Some people say that they generally hear the words of the text in their heads, either in their own voice or in the voices of narrator or characters; others say they rarely do this. Some people say they generally form visual images of the scene or ideas depicted; others say they rarely do this. Some people say that when they are deeply enough absorbed in reading, they no longer see the page, instead playing the scene like a movie before their eyes; others say that even when fully absorbed they still always visually experience the words on the page.
Some quotes:
Baars (2003): “Human beings talk to themselves every moment of the waking day. Most readers of this sentence are doing it just now.”
Jaynes (1976): “Right at this moment… as you read, you are not conscious of the letters or even of the words, or even of the syntax or the sentences, or the punctuation, but only of their meaning.”
Titchener (1909): “I instinctively arrange the facts or arguments in some visual pattern [such as] a suggestion of dull red… of angles rather than curves… pretty clearly, the picture of movement along lines, and of neatness or confusion where the moving lines come together.”
Wittgenstein (1946-1948): While reading “I have impressions, see pictures in my mind’s eye, etc. I make the story pass before me like pictures, like a cartoon story.”
Burke (1757): While reading “a very diligent examination of my own mind, and getting others to consider theirs, I do not find that one in twenty times any such picture is formed.”
Hurlburt (2007): Some people “apparently simply read, comprehending the meaning without images or speech. Melanie’s general view… is that she starts a passage in inner speech and then “takes off” into images.”
Alan and I can find no systematic studies of the issue.
We recruited 414 U.S. mechanical Turk workers to participate in a study on the experience of reading. First we asked them for their general impressions about their own experiences while reading. How often — on a 1-7 scale from “never” to “half of the time” to “always” — do they experience visual imagery? Inner speech? The words on the page? read more
PHOTOGRAPH: Mike Horne
And from that point of view it’s most improbable that anyone will ever know exactly who is enjoying the shadow of whom
September 23, 2013 § Leave a comment
JG is a sequel in technique to FILM, Tacita Dean’s 2011 project for Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall. It is inspired by her correspondence with British author J.G. Ballard (1930-2009) regarding connections between his short story “The Voices of Time” (1960) and Robert Smithson’s iconic earthwork and film Spiral Jetty (both works, 1970). The new 26½ minute work is a 35mm anamorphic film shot on location in the saline landscapes of Utah and California using Dean’s recently developed and patented system of aperture gate masking.
JG departs from her previous 16mm films in that it marks a return to voiceover and sets out to respond directly to Ballard’s challenge—posed to her in a letter shortly before he died—that she should seek to solve the mysteries of Smithson’s Spiral Jetty with her film. The connections between Ballard’s short story, which ends with its main character building a mandala in a dried saline landscape and Smithson’s earthwork in the Great Salt Lake, are unequivocal. Dean writes: “While Smithson’s jetty spiralled downward in the artist’s imagination through layers of sedimentation and prehistory, in ancient repetition of a mythical whirlpool, coiling beneath the surface of the lake to the origins of time in the core of the earth below, the mandala in ‘The Voices of Time’ is its virtual mirror, kaleidoscoping upwards into cosmic integration and the tail end of time.” read more
PHOTOGRAPH: [unattributed]
my nerves are bad to-night 