Steve and Baron are Step Brothers

I love those times when my irrational affection for particular athletes appears justified. I love Santa Monica pier. And I love it that Mess'rs Nash and Davis are apparently spending their offseason trying to win online comedy video contests.

Hi

Can't get myself to finish the big Silver Jews/David Berman essay; I didn't feel like going near any recent basketball discussion (especially not the Nike commercial fiasco) or anything else sports related (though let me just throw out the heretical and terrifying thought that Devin Hester has already peaked in terms of Making A Difference for Our Very Own Chicago Bears). Basically, with all the transition and moderate stressors going on in my life right now, I haven't felt like writing much of anything lately, at least not for public display (though I have been working on some poems that I'll be ready to show in a few months and lyrics for my as-of-yet-unnamed metal/shoegaze solo project). So I'll just leave off for now with a quote from a book I just finished reading:

"The point is not to undo all of modern science but to acknowledge
the value of what has been banished as irrational and infantile"--Jessica Benjamin

I love it when worlds collide

• Much cooler than when I saw Cy Young-winner Jack McDowell at the Fireside way back when, a story from FreeDarko about young Shaq at a Polvo show.


• Extended review of the new Silver Jews to come.


• I really wanted to include an image of the t-shirt/hat I saw at one of their shows a few years ago; it was the New York Jets logo but it read "Silver Jews" instead, but I can't find it.

an observation

I've always valorized the excitement I feel about thinking about a new idea, or seeing an old problem in a new way. This is why I went to grad school and why I actually want to do this dissertation; I also assume that somehow this (either through obtaining a PhD or for whatever brilliant ideas I come up with along the way) will lead to some sort of career success.

But let's say this gets me nowhere. Will this sort of excitement I see retroactively look like some sort of manic state (there are definitely episodes of productive hypomania, though these aren't the only times I'm productive), or, even worse, a delusion?

I don't think so, because a lot of the ideas that I've come across in the last few years of my life have changed my life, sometimes even for the better. Studying depression in college really helped me, and I think looking at close relationships and the development of our capacities for them might be a good thing in and of itself.

But I might want to examine my assumption that intellectualizing and wallowing in ideas is a virtue.

quick link

• Freedarko's Shoals on his Sportingnews blog, re: Elton Brand disappointing his fans by supposedly stabbing his former team in the back. The moral and psychological projections fans make on athletes is a gold mine for social analysis, I think.
• "Elton Brand #42 NBA" has dealt well with disappointed fans before, a couple of you might remember.

Coming up, some reflections on gender and emotion, or something.

New musical obsession

from my new favorite genre of music: isolated, anonymous sad bastard making melancholy lo-fi songs in a genre more typically suited to almost cartoonish extremes.
The previous title holder in this weight class was Xasthur, who, despite being from California, was the perfect soundtrack for my November trip to the Arctic:


Currently holding the belt is Burial, some anonymous person from South London or something. I don't know anything about dubstep, so, yeah. But i know good, sad music when I hear it:

This snippet of an interview with the musician felt familiar and appropriate:

9: And the drawing on the front of the new album.
Burial: I've been drawing that same one since I was little. Just some moody kid with a cup of tea sitting at the 24 hour stand in the rain in the middle of the night when you are coming back from somewhere.

Thanks to my friends who introduced me to this last weekend.

bias for action

This is what I need to work on:

“I want you to have a bias for action,” one of my basic school instructors told
our class of boot lieutenants. “When there’s not enough information to make a
great decision, I want you to make a good one. When there’s not enough for a
good one, I want you to make any decision. Indecision kills.”

Not to equate my fairly dull and priveleged life with combat, but I often get stuck at the information-gathering (or -binging, like I've posted about before) stage, to the detriment of getting anything done.

That is all.

I saw it in books, and read it on TV

In this space, I tend to do something I don’t really like—taking a secondhand look at research. Doing so can lead me to be unclear about whether I’m criticizing the research or the actual piece I’m reading. Toward this, I think when writing about mass media representation of research, I’ll focus on issues with the article that obfuscate or misrepresent (from the perspective of a researcher) the issue at hand—or illuminate it, if that ever happens. I don’t want to appear to disregard a research project just because it hasn’t considered every possible factor, when every research program necessarily has conceptual and logistical weaknesses, and useful data can often be gleaned with a less-than-ideal instrument.

With that in mind, I had to mention this essay by a Ryan Blitstein about research on speed dating out of Northwestern, which I read in the Chicago Tribune Sunday Magazine. The research, using a mix of lab methods, real-world-type observation, and self-report, aims to address what is presented as “a gaping hole in relationship research: the period between the initial spark of attraction and couplehood.” According to the article, the researchers, Dr. Eli Finkel and Paul Eastwick, set up speed-dating events so that they can find and study emerging couples, to find how initial attraction leads to enduring relationships. I’m going to momentarily put aside my complaints about how this is framed, and say this:

First, it’s exciting that this research exists, and that such a large dataset is being collected around it, despite whatever conceptual problems underlie said dataset. Recording the initial meeting of a pair (just after collecting saliva samples for information about their hormones at the time, no less; though I was unclear if this is supplemented by follow-up or other samples for the purpose of developing some sort of baseline), and following up with them periodically, is inherently interesting to me, and should lead to some good discussion. (It’s also certain to lead to a lot of painful-to-read, for me at least, bad discussion, but that’s not the researchers’ fault.)

Further, I’m happyto read something in the mass media about attraction research that isn’t another evolutionary psychology study. (An aside: I feel like I really pile on that subfield here, and worry that I present it as a monolithic whole. I don’t mean to. I like a lot of it, I really do, and find a lot of it thought-provoking. But when evolutionary explanations bark up the wrong tree, oh man…) Importantly, the article is good enough to make such research sound like it ought to be taken seriously, and has something to offer. As Blitstein points out, the speed-dating data show that, at least in one present-day environment, certain predictions from evolutionary psychology fail: men and women appear to be behaving pretty similarly in this setting, both valuing personal attraction, and both giving equal weight to personality and “earning potential.” I love knowing that a mass media audience is reading this, regardless of whatever problems I have with treating their sample as representative, or in how they operationalize attraction, personality, and perceived earning potential.

The piece itself reads as much more informed about research than most popular writing; it wouldn’t surprise me at all if the author was a social (or other, “real”) scientist. Blitstein provides a little bit of context about research on love and attraction, pointing out how difficult it is for researchers to address this domain, to receive funding and to be taken seriously. S/he gives us this 1975 quote, from a Senator William Proxmire of Wisconsin, in condemning (certainly while running for office; for all my excitement about a Black guy running for president, I already really hate this election) the awarding of a National Science Foundation grant to two relationship researchers: “I believe that 200 million Americans want to leave some things in life a mystery, and right of top of the things we don’t want to know is why a man falls in love with a woman.” (This quote nails a stupidity exacta: the casualty-of-his-era kind of ignorance, and a more eternal head-in-the-sand anti-intellectualism. Fantastic.)

Beautifully, Blitstein lets the reader know, through comments from the Northwestern researchers, that laboratory research has some huge drawbacks for looking at human psychology, and that observing what actual people actually do is a good idea.

On the other hand, the author also draws on certain saccharine tropes about love, which unfortunately, as I’ll mention below, appear to inform the research. To be fair, overall this is a good article, and most of the writing is clear and strong, but: “[Research has led to] new truths about the psychology behind what happens when boy meets girl—and how a spark of attraction leads to true romance. Eventually, they may unlock a few of the mysteries of love.” (I promise that these are the worst two sentences in the piece.)

Let me briefly explain why, conceptually, this kind of quote is a problem: it assumes that our prototype love narrative (and really, it touches on the major themes- “boy meets girl,” “spark of attraction,” and “true romance”) is a real-world phenomenon, one that is common to actual human experience. First of all, what is “true romance,” other than a Quentin Tarentino movie with a very memorably offensive monologue? Why assume that most relationships follow this love-at-first-sight quote? Why leave out same-sex couples? (I understand that most research on love will be hugely heterosexist—my nascent research completely is, at least at this stage. But it’s still worth addressing.)

This talking point in the article (and I realize that it might seem unfair to pick on a talking point) nicely represents a concern I have about the research: that the authors are trying to address a really huge question (how does couplehood emerge in human social life) with a really small phenomenon (through speed dating, hoping to catch some “love at first sight” emerge and lead to something; I’m sure this happens sometimes, but…). After reading this article, I felt like they assumed that our paradigmatic narrative for “how love blossoms” is a good representation for what happens in the real world. I just want to add that this romance narrative is a relatively new (albeit very close to an ideal commonly found in literate societies), culturally-specific (albeit recognizable in and imported around the world) trope, that I think runs counter to most peoples’ experience, and often makes people feel unnecessarily bad about their comparatively non-Hollywood lives. This doesn’t make it unworthy of study, but I think that it literally needs to be looked at critically when research is involved.

Of course, as language-using, socialized beings, any idea we have is embedded in a web of assumptions and associations, but using a fairy-tale notion like “love at first sight” as a starting point for framing a research problem (and please excuse my language here) freaks me the fuck out. Again, I don’t know if this is really what got the researchers started, but the article seems to suggest that this is indeed what they are searching for: how do people move from a love-at-first-sight reaction into “couplehood.” I don’t mean to say that this is an invalid question, but we get no sense of whether this even happens in the real world, and, if it does, to what extent this is applicable to more than a handful of lovestruck, fortunate, probably very annoying couples. Even if that’s the case, I would have no problem with using it as a research topic, but at the end of the article, we are told that Finkel and Eastwick are hoping that this agenda will have the ever-exciting “policy implications” and “profound implications in how we search for love.”

Maybe the author and/or the researchers are concerned about complaints like those of the aforementioned Senator, but I don’t want to read about how this research is going to “make dating less hellish for millions of people, or develop models to predict relationship success based on speed-dating compatibility.” Speed-dating sounds like a great area to problematize certain assumptions about how people make decisions, or communicate in certain novel situations, but research looking for “love at first sight” is not going to help you under stood why your baby done left you, why you feel compelled to date people who make you feel stupid, why you can’t [keep it in your damn pants/keep your damn legs shut], why your partner’s voice is starting to make you want to stick a knife in your ear, or any of the other more common problems in peoples’ relationships. I don’t think it will illuminate much of the realistic happy stuff either, at least not in a very efficient way.

I want to be clear about something: observing speed daters and whatever relationships follow from said speed dating is hugely interesting, fun, thought provoking, etc. But romantic relationships touch on so much more than can be accessed by self-report and a saliva sample, to say nothing of the questions around validity presented by the speed-dating setup. (I know no one who has gone on a follow-up date after speed dating. And I know a lot of people, many of whom share all kinds of potentially embarrassing information on a regular basis.)

Finkel and Eastwick sound like they have some incredibly cool, interesting, and useful research here. I’m just not convinced that they are going to get us closer to understanding how our love relationships emerge and develop, or why they do. I’m not saying that we should only look to the arts or to religion where love is concerned, but I do think we’re best served by considering cultural, material, psychological, and life event factors other than those addressable in a study like this. I know that sounds like a lot of stuff, but hear me out: I’m not saying it all has to be studied in your research, but it should really inform it. These are aspects of emotion that I wish made it into popular discourse more often, especially when potentially exciting research is involved.

A great point was brought up by one of the experts quoted in the article, who says that to do a study like this, one needs to put speed-dating in its larger context: who does it? Why do they do it? What are they trying to do with it? The essay presents Eastwick and Finkel as defending themselves from this by saying that the speed daters filled out a pre-event questionnaire indicating what they wanted out of speed dating, but this would be a very poor way of getting at what speed-dating actually means in participants’ social worlds, how they feel about it, what effect it has on their lives. Finkel notes that people “seem to have no introspective accuracy into what it is that we like,” and I wish more was made of this observation. How well do we know what we want when it comes to love, and how do we go about it? I don’t think we can assume common-sense answers to these questions.

We don’t date or love or whatever as rational and free actors, clear about our intentions, acting on them consistently. We are burdened and moved by social structures, experiences we don’t understand, flimsy ideology and poorly-conceived personal ethics, and our lives are directed by disorienting, nameless, unfathomable responses to intimate others. Pace (Latin for “suck it”) Sen. Proxmire and his pseudopopulist ilk, this doesn’t mean we shouldn’t or don’t want to understand further this often-painful, often-joyful mess. I’m hoping for love research that shows how our lives outside our relationships constrict our emotional possibilities, how our stated motivations appear to have nothing to do with our behavior, how we constantly disappoint and surprise ourselves and others. I hope Finkel and Eastwick come up with something more interesting than two doe-eyed Northwestern students developing some dull, self-deluded, Disney narrative for the rest of us to either envy or roll our eyes at.