Great Sexual Sarcasm Killing Unsung Kids
The Unsung Sense: How Smell Rules Your Life by Catherine De Lange (New Scientist): You smell! Well, you do! Weirdly, we humans have a much better sense of smell than we think - if pushed (and De Lange does let herself get pushed) we can follow some scents like a dog. Except it seems like our sense of smell is usually somewhat unconscious, that it affects us without us realising. [via]
Just Kids by Evan Hughes (New York Magazine): In the late 1980s in the US, there were a bunch of aspiring novelists who knew each other, who sometimes lived together, slept together - David Foster Wallace, Jeffrey Eugenides, Jonathan Franzen, Mary Karr, etc. At this point, they’d not written the pieces that got them the renown they had today, and Hughes’ piece is a good reminder that the ones who eventually get to the top are very often the ones who keep trying long after most would give up. [via]
The Killing Fields by ‘Shane’ (Memoirs of A Heroinhead): An insightful and profoundly disturbing look into the world of heroin addicts in a world where HIV/AIDS exists. It is sadly reasonably common that heroin addicts who know they have HIV deliberately try to infect other users; it is cruel, but they want someone to be going through the same stuff they are going through, to have the solace of company. And so Shane - a (recovering?) heroin addict, relates in great detail the two encounters he had where he only escaped being infected because of willpower, because he struggled against the desire for a hit. [cheers to Kerri]
Alexander: How Great? by Mary Beard (New York Review Of Books): Alexander the Great as we know him today, argues Beard, was largely an invention of the Romans; most of the accounts of his life that we have were written by Romans who were clearly trying to justify/draw parallels with contemporary Roman all-conquering generals like Pompey or Julius Caesar. As such, we may actually know surprisingly little about Alexander and his motivations. And is it really that Great to be a violent psychopath who slaughtered everyone in his way? [via]
Novelty Acts: The Sexual Revolutions Before The Sexual Revolution by Ariel Levy (New Yorker): There’s a famous Philip Larkin poem that suggested that sex was invented between the unbanning of Lady Chatterley’s Lover and the first Beatles LP, that the sixties was the sexual revolution. Nup. There were sexual revolutions in English in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries too, and they all look pretty similar in some ways.
Irony & Sarcasm Marks Parts One, Two, and Three by Keith Houston (Shady Characters): Wherein Keith Houston (who just announced he’s got a book deal) tells you about the history of attempts to introduce irony/sarcasm marks into written language. And if the history of various punctuation signs doesn’t thrill you, the fact of the book deal should suggest to you that the stories behind them can be very interesting indeed….
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empiricalmediatheory reblogged this from o-song
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ondirecting said:
Adding this to my post-dissertation reading list.
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