So Hot Right Now: Essentialism!

The NYT Magazine, which has officially changed its name to the Gender Pseudoscience Times Magazine, has an interesting story on single-sex education:

On that November day in Foley, Ala., William Bender pulled a stool up to a lectern and began reading to his fourth-grade boys from Gary Paulsen’s young-adult novel “Hatchet.” Bender’s voice is deep and calm, a balm to many of his students who lack father figures or else have parents who, Bender says, “don’t want to be parents. They want to be their kids’ friends.” Bender paused to ask one of his boys, who said he was feeling sick, “Are you going to make it, brother?” Then he kept reading. “ ‘The pain in his forehead seemed to be abating. . . .’ What’s abating, gentlemen?” The protagonist of “Hatchet” survives a plane crash and finds himself alone by an insect-infested lake. Bender encouraged his boys to empathize. They discussed how annoying it is, when you’re out hunting, to be swarmed by yellow flies.

Meanwhile, in Michelle Gay’s fourth-grade class, the girls sang a vigorous rendition of “Always Sisters” and then did a tidy science experiment: pouring red water, blue oil and clear syrup into a plastic cup to test which has the greatest density, then confirming their results with the firsthand knowledge that when you’re doing the dishes after your mother makes fried chicken, the oil always settles on top of the water in the sink.

First of all, shout out to my boy Gary Paulson.

Second of all, what is Enlightenment? The use of knowledge to cast off the shackles of servitude. Or, to paraphrase Kant, the use of science to confirm your dishwashing technique.

Speaking to a group of sixth graders, Sax explained his theory that girls’ hearing ability is much better than boys’, as is girls’ sense of smell. The girls, just on the edge of puberty, sat utterly rapt, seeming to want to understand why their brothers, boy cousins, cute skater-dude neighbors and fathers were so weird. A few weeks after the lecture, Sax sent me a packet of color photocopies of thank-you notes he had received from the girls. One, from a girl with two fathers, read: “Dr. Sax, Thank you so much for coming to Burkes. . . . I had a smell in my room and my Dads couldn’t smell it but I could. I thought I was going crazy. It ends up there was a dead rat in the wall. Hope you come back soon.

There you have it: already one concrete benefit to Sax's line of inquiry. Let’s keep going down this path. Frankly, I don’t see how any of its costs or reverberations could outweigh that girl getting rid of her dead rat.

I’m positive that the anecdote about the dead rat rotting in the wall is an allegory for gender essentialism, but I'm still trying to work out the ending. Maybe the rat comes to life and eats the little girl, and it turns out that her Dads smelled the rat the entire time but had been willfully repressing it in order to drive her crazy. Then an army of little girls comes over and fills the house with buckets of oil and water mixture, drowning the rat. Then they do the Dads’ dishes, and all seems to be well again! But in the last sentence we (the readers) discover that the rat is still alive in a sewer, feeding off of anti-depressants and transfats, and growing stronger than ever as it plots its revenge.

Lookout, Kafka!

TAKE HEED!

"92 year-old Irving Fields has been writing hit songs since the 1920's. He recorded over 90 albums, including his biggest LP hit, Bagels and Bongos. He was inspired to write a song about Youtube..."


He gets it!

Did you see Hillary Clinton's latest campaign video?

I find it both defeated and empowered. I guess that's women for you.

Genius of Love

If you like art that blatantly reinforces self-serving Romantic myths of artistic genius, you gotta try science that blatantly reinforces Romantic myths of artistic genius.

Click that link to see the scientific proof that all geniuses are solitary young men who just don't fit in cause no one understands.

Recently I did my own scientific study on The Spirit of History.

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I found out it displaces 14 milliliters of water. Then I burned a peanut. In conclusion my hypothesis was proven correct and Garden State is the best movie and everyone secretly wants to be me.

Data section:

Read This

From Sarah Boxer’s NYRB essay about bloggy writing:

Bloggers assume that if you're reading them, you're one of their friends, or at least in on the gossip, the joke, or the names they drop. They often begin their posts mid-thought or mid-rant—in medias craze. They don't care if they leave you in the dust. They're not responsible for your education. Bloggers, as Mark Liberman, one of the founders of the blog called Language Log, once noted, are like Plato. :-) The unspoken message is: Hey, I'm here talking with my buddies. Keep up with me or don't. It's up to you. Here is the beginning of Plato's Republic:

I went down yesterday to the Peiraeus with Glaucon, the son of Ariston, to pay my devotions to the Goddess, and also because I wished to see how they would conduct the festival since this was its inauguration.

Wait a second! Who is Ariston? What Goddess? What festival?

I like this comparison of bloggers to Plato. Personally, though, I am reminded more of this passage from the Symposium:

Socrates: Have you guys seen “Drunk History” yet? Hilarious.
Also, this totally cracked me up at work today:

One thing I’ve been thinking about a lot lately is that the Fug girls are way too hard on Zac Efron. Anyway who cares how he dresses when he is such a hottie!!!1!
Agathon: I can not refute you, Socrates.
Aristophanes: Man and Woman used to be One or something.

Endorsements, Part Two

The L.A. Times’ endorsement of Obama had me at hello, and then had me again at “experience has value only if it is accompanied by courage and leads to judgment,” and then it sealed the deal with a surprise turn to my favorite type of language:

In the language of metaphor, Clinton is an essay, solid and reasoned; Obama is a poem, lyric and filled with possibility. Clinton would be a valuable and competent executive, but Obama matches her in substance and adds something that the nation has been missing far too long -- a sense of aspiration.

I liked this metaphor so much I decided to turn it into what in literary circles is known as an “extended metaphor":

The essay that is Hillary Clinton is an essay I copied off the internet, written by a kid who also sells his Ritalin and is rich from online investing, and I could probably get a better grade if I wrote my own essay, but I’d rather just keep watching this Project Runway marathon.

The lyric poem that is Barack Obama is this:

Sing on, dearest brother—warble your reedy song;
Loud human song, with voice of uttermost woe.
O liquid, and free, and tender! O wild and loose to my soul! O wondrous singer!
You only I hear…yet the star holds me, (but will soon depart;)
Yet the lilac, with mastering odor, holds me.

That poem is by me.

Endorsements

Caroline Kennedy wrote an essay in the New York Times a few days ago endorsing Barack Obama. It was called "A President Like My Father." In it she argues that Barack Obama should be president because he reminds her of her father. I agree. That's how you should make the decision. But I'd like to amend the prescription by saying this includes the option of voting for the candidate who you understand to be least like your father, with the knowledge that with this option you reveal your secret understanding of your father even more clearly than voting for the candidate that directly reminds you of your father. Anyway, she's choosing the straight-ahead route, and, interestingly, that's also how I roll. Which is why this year I am endorsing this Cheers season 4 DVD boxed set.



How about Caroline Kennedy though? I like to think I'm sympathetic.