Kevin Lewis O’Neill, “I Want More of You: The Politics of Christian Eroticism in Postwar Guatemala”, in Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 52, No. 1, January 2010, pp. 131–156.

Jessica F. Cantlon and Elizabeth M. Brannon, “Basic Math in Monkeys and College Students”, in PLoS Biology, Vol. 5, No. 12, December 2007.

It may well be that you will observe my little doppelgänger poltergeist soul hoisting a drink in a bar in them parts.

(From Harvey Breit and Margerie Bonner Lowry (Eds), Selected Letters of Malcolm Lowry, Lippincott, Philadelphia, 1965).

In the next issue, which will be dated 28 January, Perry Anderson: Ways of Looking at China; David Trotter on phone booths; James Lever on Philip Roth. We’ve given up hope of James Wood on Lermontov.

Imagine writing a poem by assigning to every letter of the alphabet some other letter, so that they are mutually assigned—so, for example, if I were to assign E to A, I’d have to assign A to E; if I were to assign D to T, I’d have to assign T to D, and so on. Imagine enciphering the alphabet according to such a rule. There are about 8 trillion different ways of enciphering the alphabet so that the letters are mutually encoded. Pick one of those 8 trillion ciphers. Now write a poem that is beautiful, that makes sense, in such a way that if you were to swap out every single letter of that poem and replace it with its counterpart from the mutual cipher, you’d produce a new poem that still remains just as beautiful and that still makes sense.

Christian Bök interviewed by Jonathan Ball, in The Believer, Vol. 7, No. 5, June 2009. (via Harper’s).

What profit hath a man of all his labour which he taketh under the sun? One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh: but the earth abideth for ever.

(Ecclesiastes 1:3–4)

How fleeting are the wishes and efforts of man! how short his time! and consequently how poor will his products be, compared with those accumulated by nature during whole geological periods.

(Darwin, Origin, p. 84).

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.

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

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.