et cetera

In the latest issue of the Journal of the American Academy of Religion there is an article by Amy DeRogatis with the title “ “Born Again Is a Sexual Term”: Demons, STDs, and God’s Healing Sperm”, about “the intersection between sexuality and spiritfilled bodies in American Evangelicalism”. The article is oriented around a book with the title Holy Sex: God’s Purpose and Plan for Our Sexuality, which argues “that sexually transmitted diseases are, in fact, demons lodged in genetic material that can be transferred through body fluids and bloodlines”. Casting around for more information, I found the Google Books page—where it is categorised under Fiction / Erotica. Exactly.

Further searching reveals that one of the authors of the book, Terry Wier, is scientifically literate not only in molecular biology, but also in the neurobiology and cognitive science of human sexuality. Here is his technique for turning a homosexual into a heterosexual¹—

I dedicate to Wier this passage from Schiller²—

1. From Wayne R. Besen, Anything but Straight: Unmasking the Scandals and Lies Behind the Ex-Gay Myth, Routledge, London, 2003, pp. 139–140 [↩]
2. From Anna Swanwick (Trans), The Maid of Orleans, in The Works of Frederick Schiller, Bell and Daldy, London, 1872, Volume 3, Historical Dramas, p. 396. [↩]

As the plane approached the runway the Manhattan skyline was draped in pink gauze, lit by a limpid sun beneath a blanket of grey clouds. The first two sentences I overhear after landing are “How many cars did you bring” and “Can I borrow your phone? None of mine are working”. The city is dripping. The Long Island Railroad ticket woman is a gladiator with bleached blonde hair. On the subway a girl obstinately cries, making variegated demands on her father, to the collective amusement of the carriage. In the supermarket an old Jewish couple wear matching t-shirts in bold white print on black: “Prosecute Rumsfeld” and “Prosecute Bush”. One of the local homeless is having a detailed conversation with a store-boy on the varieties of milk. It is just about midnight, and the supermarket is packed full. There is no pattern to the people. They are well dressed, poorly dressed, young, old, alert, asleep, in groups, alone. Flip on the radio and WNYC has Wordless Music with a live recording of Nico Muhly followed by New Sounds and then Overnight Music. Voices are echoing out of apartment windows opened to let the air through. There are puddles pooled at the curbs. Businessmen loosening ties. People looking in at the window display of the bookstore, now well after midnight. With timezone shifts, I’ve now been up all night. This is the greatest city in the world.

Flipping through the excellent By its Cover¹ I noticed a familar cover design, credited to Alvin Lustig for the New Directions edition of Kafka’s Amerika. However I had never seen this book—instead, I own the Picador paperback of the Bret Easton Ellis collection The Informers (I would swap). A nice design quotation, probably lost on everyone besides book design aficionados and those—like me—who happen to stumble upon it².

There’s a very nice website on Lustig, which at one time was selling prints of this cover, along with some of his other New Directions designs. Unfortunately, they are all sold out…

1. Ned Drew and Paul Sternberger, By its Cover, Princeton Architectural Press, Princeton, 2005. [↩]
2. I am not the first to notice. See http://www.totalcardboard.com/book_cover_gallery.htm. [↩]

Eve Arnold, Marilyn Monroe reading Ulysses, 1955.
From a letter dated 20 July 1993 from Eve Arnold to Richard Brown, quoted in Richard Brown, “Marilyn Monroe Reading Ulysses: Goddess or Postcultural Cyborg?”, in R. B. Kershner (Ed), Joyce and Popular Culture, University Press of Florida, Gainesville, 1996, p. 174.

Monroe is reading the 1934 Random House edition, with the dust jacket removed. This is the edition that was famously set from a pirate version containing numerous errors. This defect notwithstanding, the dust-jacket artwork and typographic design by Ernst Reichl constitute one of the great works in the history of book design.

Unfortunately, Random House seems to be oblivious to this fact—in their 2002 hardcover reprint, they reproduced the artwork and design without crediting Reichl¹.

1. Ned Drew and Paul Sternberger, By its Cover, Princeton Architectural Press, Princeton, 2005, p. 16 [↩]

Michael R. Kearney, “No Sex Please, We’re Clonal”, in Trends in Ecology & Evolution, Vol. 24, No. 9, September 2009, pp. 478–479.

Sexual reproduction is a strange and complicated procedure and life would be much simpler without it. There would be no division of individuals into somatic and gametic cell lineages, or of populations into genders with conflicting interests; neither would populations be genomically united as a species through the intricate processes of meiosis and fertilization. Yet, so accustomed are we to genetic mixing and associated phenomena, such as courtship and peacock tails, that, when confronted with the much simpler idea of clonally derived organisms, our usual reaction is astonishment. The successful production of Dolly the sheep through the cloning of a somatic cell from her mother¹ made global headlines and captured the imagination of scientists and laypersons alike. What kind of world would it be if we were to give up sex and opt for the clonal life?

(For another answer, see Les Particules élémentaires).

1. I. Wilmut, A. E. Schnieke, J. McWhir, A. J. Kind and K. H. S. Campbell, “Viable Offspring Derived from Fetal and Adult Mammalian Cells”, in Nature, Vol. 385, 27 February 1997, pp. 810–813. [↩]

From Harper’s, August 1958, p. 74—

If the ends of our legs were axles and our feet were wheels, how could blood, nutrients, and nerve impulses cross the gap to nurture and direct the moving parts of our natural roller skates?

Stephen Jay Gould, “Kingdoms Without Wheels” in Natural History, Vol. 90,
No. 3, 1981, pp. 42–48. Reprinted with postscript in his Hen’s Teeth and Horse’s Toes: Further Reflections in Natural History, W. W. Norton, New York, 1983, pp. 158–165. [PDF]

James Nasmyth and James Carpenter, The Moon: Considered as a Planet, a World, and a Satellite, John Murray, London, 1874, pp. 32–34—

The consequence of too large a solid shell having to accommodate itself to a shrunken body underneath, is that the skin, so to term the outer stratum of solid matter, becomes shrivelled up into alternate ridges and depressions, or wrinkles. In its attempt to crush down and follow the contracting substratum it would have to displace the superabundant or superfluous material of its former larger surface by thrusting it (by the action of tangential force) into undulating ridges [...] A long-kept shrivelled apple affords an apt illustration of this wrinkle theory; another example may be observed in the human face and hand, when age has caused the flesh to shrink and so leave the comparatively unshrinking skin relatively too large as a covering for it [...] Whenever an outer covering has to accommodate and apply itself to an interior body that has become too small for it, wrinkles are inevitably produced. The same action that shrivels the human skin into creases and wrinkles, has also shrivelled certain regions of the igneous crust of the earth. A map of a mountainous part of our globe affords abundant evidence of such a cause having been in action; such maps are pictures of wrinkles.

Nasmyth and Carpenter.
Nasmyth and Carpenter.
Aimé Civiale, Carte des Alpes. Pour servir aux voyages photographiques, d’après ses panoramas photographiques et les Cartes des États-Majors Françoise, Suisse, Italien et Autrichien, J. Rothschild, Paris, 1880; via Jan von Brevern, “Counting on the Unexpected: Aimé Civiale’s Mountain Photography”, in Science in Context, Vol. 22, No. 3, September 2009, pp 409–437.