Reviews and News:
How do writers for Jeopardy! come up with all those categories and questions?
Rachel Lu reviews Mark Regnerus’s Cheap Sex: The Transformation of Men, Marriage, and Monogamy: “What do we see when we look at the sexual landscape of contemporary America? In a way, the title says it all. We live in a world where sex is cheap. The choice of an economic term is very deliberate here, because the whole book represents an effort to analyze American sexual practices through the quasi-economic lens of ‘sexual exchange.’ When he claims that sex is cheap, Regnerus isn’t pricing prostitutes. He’s assessing what a person (specifically, a man) must do to secure access to sex. Nowadays the answer is: not much. It has not always been so.”
Naomi Schaefer Riley writes about the complex history of the adoption and education of Native American children in antebellum America.
Researchers discover subglacial caves below Antarctica’s ice. Some of the caves can get up to 25 C and may be home to previously undiscovered lifeforms: “Most of the DNA, Fraser admits, is similar to that of species living on the surface. However, not all the sequences studied could be linked to a particular animal or plant group, meaning Fraser may be on the cusp of discovering new lifeforms as well.”
Who painted the first abstract painting?
Remembering Turkey’s forgotten Christian past and art.
Essay of the Day:
Thirty years ago, Pierre Michon developed a small (though faithful) following in France but was almost entirely unknown outside his home country. His work has now been translated into all the major European languages, but he is still a relatively obscure figure. Who is he, and why should we read him? Wyatt Mason explains in The New York Review of Books:
“Through the thirty-four years of his career, Michon has been formally preoccupied with the production of ‘lives’ in the Plutarchian sense, attempts at gathering what is known about a historical figure and contriving a suggestive narrative arrangement of the evidence. Many of Michon’s stories involve figures, not infrequently artists, of some renown: Van Gogh, Goya, Watteau, Piero della Francesca, Claude Lorrain, Arthur Rimbaud. And yet in each case, the focus of such stories isn’t these notable figures but rather their satellites: models who posed for them, followers, students, disciples, friends and enemies whose histories haven’t been written and indeed, absent any significant data in the historical record, cannot be. Michon adapts the Plutarchian mode to memorialize obscure figures who might, as the story revolves, offer rarer views of the planet they orbit. As a result, though Michon’s method originates in and often relies on research, the events of his texts are largely invented.
“Many writers have produced fictions inspired by history. What is notable about Michon’s use of history is how wholly he has managed to make it submit to his larger concern: how a particular kind of violence, a uniformly male violence, an animal sexual urge to seize the world and have it submit to its will, is the source of both human cruelty and artistic creativity. ‘The sex-instinct,’ as Ford Madox Ford called it in The Good Soldier, is of course a commonplace in fiction, the way in which desire complicates our social sphere. But Michon’s preoccupation with male desire, and his documentation of the male will to claim, take, and make, are unique in my reading experience. Michel Houellebecq, Michon’s immediate contemporary, has a similar preoccupation with sex and maleness, something one could say of Philip Roth, too, or, in his own way, of David Foster Wallace.
“Michon’s monomaniacal focus on the male drive, its yields and its wastes, has a nihilism more like Cormac McCarthy’s vision of male action, its routine horrors, their biological basis, their inevitability. But whereas McCarthy, particularly in his early books, doesn’t, as Guy Davenport noticed, ‘waste a single word on his characters’ thoughts…he describes what they do and records their speech,’ Michon is intimately interested in the psychology of his men. Though he does not, for the most part, exhibit similar curiosity about female psychology or experience, in Michon this always feels like a tactical choice, one that is part of the revelation of his male characters’ limitedness, and not an expression of the limit of the author’s imaginative powers (a limit one often encounters in Houellebecq’s fiction, where simplistic ideas of women predominate). As such, Michon’s stories come out as neither for nor against their depredations. Rather, like a good historian, he documents what is, to the end that we might acknowledge our antecedents, our patrimony: that we are, as a culture, descended from that violence, not merely in the obvious arenas of power where a fist wields a sword but at the culture’s so-called high end where hands manipulate paint and language.”
Photo: White frogmouth chick
Poem: James Matthew Wilson, “At the Lake House”
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