The Newsstand Sophisticate

Asra Q. Nomani relates a dispiriting story in the Wall Street Journal about Random House’s decision to cancel the publication of The Jewel of Medina, Sherry Jones’s “racy historical novel about Aisha, the young wife of the prophet [sic] Muhammad.” The reason for the decision is depressingly familiar:

Thomas Perry, deputy publisher at Random House Publishing Group, said that it “disturbs us that we feel we cannot publish it right now.” He said that after sending out advance copies of the novel, the company received “from credible and unrelated sources, cautionary advice not only that the publication of this book might be offensive to some in the Muslim community, but also that it could incite acts of violence by a small, radical segment.”

Well, considering the mayhem that followed the publication of Sir Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses and the Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons in Denmark, I’m sure the publication of a book describing Muhammad and Aisha’s wedding night might “incite” acts of violence (by people, it must be remembered, who are perfectly capable of deciding not to be violent in response to such “incitement”). But it’s not as if Random House’s decision not to publish will be free of nasty consequences. It will embolden that small, radical segment to threaten other publishers with violence the next time something it finds offensive is published. Perry’s statement might more accurately be rendered as, “If we’re about to publish something you don’t like, threaten us with violence and we won’t publish it.”

It’s especially shameful that this has happened at Random House, whose co-founder, Bennett Cerf, faced an obscenity trial for trying to publish James Joyce’s Ulysses. (Cerf and Random House won the case, of course, and began typesetting copies of Ulysses within ten minutes of the decision.) It’s hard to think of a more dismal way to traduce Cerf’s legacy than to cave in to the demands of religious fanatics.

It’s shameful, too, that the University of Texas, alma mater of my parents and my paternal grandfather, has a part in this. Denise Spellberg, an associate professor of history at UT, was asked to review Jones’s book by Random House and after doing so took it upon herself to mobilize Muslim opposition to the publication of The Jewel of Medina. According to Nomani’s article, Spellberg said, “I don’t have a problem with historical fiction. I do have a problem with the deliberate misinterpretation of history. You can’t play with a sacred history and turn it into soft core pornography.”

You can’t? Why not? It’s a novel, that is, a work of the imagination, not a history book. And anyway, offending religious sensibilities and titillating readers with soft-core pornography are an important part of the novelistic tradition and have been since the very beginning, as anyone who’s ever read François Rabelais or Laurence Sterne, to name only two early novelists, can tell you. I hope there is a publisher out there with a spine and an understanding of the fundamental importance of defending freedom of speech against thugs, bullies, and perpetually offended humanities professors (someone in other words more like Bennett Cerf than Thomas Perry), who will publish this book.

It’s impolite, and probably poor character, to take delight in the misfortune of others, but I can’t help but feel gleeful upon hearing that hogwash peddler Uri Geller (the man who mostly uses his fantastic “psychic powers” to solve one of mankind’s most vexing problems—how to bend spoons with your mind) has been forced to withdraw a frivolous copyright threat to people who posted video on YouTube of him failing to bend spoons on The Tonight Show. Geller’s company will also have to pay a settlement and allow use of the clip under a Creative Commons license. Well done, Electronic Frontier Foundation. (And a posthumous tip of the hat to Johnny Carson, who made sure the spoons given to Geller on that long-ago Tonight Show were normal spoons, untouched by Geller or any of his assistants, and which thus proved resistant to the psychic vibrations.)

If The Wall Street Journal keeps printing articles like this, a speculation on whether Barack Obama is too skinny to appeal to an increasingly corpulent American electorate, it could really eat into the circulation of . . .  The Onion. (Even the infographic looks suspiciously Onion-esque.)

The Economist has an article with a provocative sub-heading: “Religious diversity may be caused by disease.” The article refers to a recent scientific study suggesting that religious groups might form as a way of protecting their followers from exposure to diseases. The Economist summarizes the paper thus:

“[The] hypothesis is that in places where disease is rampant, it behoves groups not to mix with one another more than is strictly necessary, in order to reduce the risk of contagion. [The authors of the study] therefore predict that patterns of behaviour which promote group exclusivity will be stronger in disease-ridden areas. Since religious differences are certainly in that category, they specifically predict that the number of different religions in a place will vary with the disease load. Which is, as they report in the Proceedings of the Royal Society, the case.”

While there are numerous possible criticisms of this study, it could explain in part why I occasionally feel an urge to wash my hands after talking to a Southern Baptist. And as intuitively far-fetched as it sounds to propose that the development of religions might have been driven by parasites, ever since I read about Toxoplasma gondii on science writer Carl Zimmer’s blog, The Loom, I can’t put anything past parasites. (Seriously, if you’ve never heard of Toxoplasma gondii, click on that link and read. It might change the way you look at the world.)

(Via The Rough Guide to Evolution.)

I’ll admit that I haven’t found the U.S. presidential race as compelling since Hillary Clinton (finally) dropped out. I almost miss her. (But not quite.) However, John McCain has been running such a surprisingly incompetent campaign that I’m beginning to regain my sense of wonder at the stupid things politicians say. For instance, McCain apparently told the Urban League today that the successful methods used by American troops in Iraq during the recent “surge” might fruitfully be applied in our own country’s high-crime neighborhoods:

“You go into neighborhoods, you clamp down, you provide a secure environment for the people that live there, and you make sure that the known criminals are kept under control. And you provide them with a stable environment and then they cooperate with law enforcement.”

I try not to be too much of an alarmist, but talk of a military-style “clamp down” in American neighborhoods is certainly on the short list of things I’d rather not hear from a possible future president.

(Via Reason Hit & Run.)

The New Republic has an interesting article on the way cities in the past twenty years or so have found their central cores filling up with rich people, while the poor displaced by the resulting higher prices are moving out into the suburbs. (The Atlantic had a story on the same theme, “The Next Slum?” in its March 2008 issue.) The phenomenon is a bit frightening to me, as I have always preferred living in cities to living in the suburbs, and have never in my life run the risk of being described as “affluent.” I think it’s certainly a good thing to encourage density, street-level retail, public transportation and all the other New Urbanist recommendations in central cities. But I wonder if there’s not a way to do so that could also allow teachers, nurses, waiters, and artists—important but not (usually) lucrative jobs—to live there, too. (Taxing rich people at a higher rate seems an obvious solution, though my social democratic tendencies are at war with my distrust of government on this issue. I would like to see greater income equality, but I’m not comfortable with giving our federal government such a giant windfall.) All the high-rises going up in Austin, for instance, are luxury high-rises. If rich people live in them rather than in McMansions built on pristine suburban land, I suppose that’s a good thing. But if cities become playgrounds only for the rich, they will lose much of the diversity of population and activity that made them interesting in the first place. Perhaps in thirty years, children who grew up in cities will lament their sterile surroundings and seek out the gritty reality of places like Windy Ridge, North Carolina.

I’ve always found the problems raised by anthropomorphism interesting. When a dog looks at us with a seemingly quizzical expression, are we actually reading the dog’s true state of mind or are we “projecting” our own understanding of human expressions onto the dog? My own unscientific guess is that it’s probably a bit of both. We tend to think of dogs, especially, as such a part of our families that we’re shocked on the occasions they behave like the wolf-cousins they are and snap at strangers. (As Chris Rock said about the tiger that attacked Roy Horn of Siegfried and Roy, “That tiger didn’t go crazy! That tiger went tiger!”)

Nevertheless, the fact that we share, basically, a similar physiological structure with other chordates (four limbs, a dorsal nerve chord, bilateral symmetry, etc.) has always suggested to me that we have a pretty good chance of “reading” animals emotions accurately in many situations. Their brains, though not identical to ours, must work similarly to ours at least some of the time, because their bodies do.

Fortunately for me, there are people who have actually begun to study how animals’ brains work in a more rigorous fashion than me musing on whether my friend’s dog is smiling at me. National Geographic has an article online about some of these scientists’ work. It’s accompanied by a set of animal portraits that bring up the anthropomorphism question beautifully. Can we really read the expressions of these animals, or are we deceiving ourselves?

The portrait of “JB,” a Giant Pacific Octopus, is especially strange and beautiful, and perhaps the most prone to my anthropomorphizing instinct, as it’s so different from us it seems a much greater leap to imagine that we can know what it’s feeling. But maybe it’s not so different after all. It turns out, according to this article on ScientificBlogging, that octopi are among the most intelligent of the invertebrates, but their relatively large brains are structured more simply and have fewer nerve cells than ours, so they are perfect for studying how brains, even our brains, memorize and learn things.

When I first read the introduction to James Thurber’s My Life and Hard Times some fifteen years ago, I laughed out loud at the mixture of menace, melancholy, and absurdity in its concluding sentence: “As F. Hopkinson Smith long ago pointed out, the claw of the sea-puss gets us all in the end.” “The claw of the sea-puss” is pretty unbeatable as a simultaneously ridiculous and terrifying metaphor for the ravages of time and death. I imagined the sea-puss as a cute but murderous deep-sea monster, some fell hybrid of crab and Hello Kitty, perhaps betentacled and squid-beaked as well. I meant to look up “sea-puss,” and F. Hopkinson Smith, of course, at the time, but I was living a careless, profligate existence when I was in my early twenties, and I became distracted by other things (not least by laughing at other things in Thurber’s book, like the “Get Ready Man”) and I simply forgot about them.

I recently reread My Life and Hard Times, however, and I’m happy to say that the World Wide Web has the sea-puss answers I seek. According to Webster’s online dictionary, “sea puss” is an alteration of an Algonquian word for river, and means “a swirling or along shore undertow.” According to a number of sites I could find, F. Hopkinson Smith was for most of his life a marine engineer, and designed the foundations for the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor. In short, Smith was a man intimately familiar with the powers of the sea-puss. Smith didn’t begin to write until later in his life, apparently egged on by friends because he was such an engaging “after-dinner raconteur.” I found one of Smith’s novels, The Tides of Barnegat, on Google Books. Chapter XXII is entitled, “The Claw of the Sea-Puss.” The flavor of Smith’s prose, and the terrible destructive power of the sea-puss, can be found in an earlier passage, describing the weather at a beach in the fall:

The cruel north wind now wakes, and with a loud roar joins hands with the savage easter; the startled surf falls upon the beach like a scourge. Under their double lash the outer bar cowers and sinks; the frightened sand flees hither and thither. Soon the frenzied breakers throw themselves headlong, tearing with teeth and claws, burrowing deep into the hidden graves. Now the forgotten wrecks, like long-buried sins, rise and stand naked, showing every scar and stain. This is the work of the sea-puss—the revolving maniac born of close-wed wind and tide; a beast so terrible that in a single night, with its auger-like snout, it bites huge inlets out of farm lands—mouthfuls deep enough for ships to sail where but yesterday the corn grew. 

If that has whetted your appetite, you can read Smith’s entire novel online at its page on Google Books. And may you avoid the sea-puss’s awful claw for as long as you can.

The inimitable Chris Sims has used panels from Archie comics to illustrate Pulp’s magnum opus, “Common People.” 

 Please enjoy “Archie In . . . A Different Class!”

If you like old French postcards (not to be confused with old “French letters”—if that’s your thing you’ve got the wrong Web site), you will enjoy this site. The googly-eyed animal postcards are especially bizarre and amusing. It’s a French site, so naturally some of the postcards are smutty. Those of delicate sensibility beware.