real quickly folks

I love hockey, but next time you hear an NHL announcer or other sports knowitall talk about the higher moral standing in the world of ice hockey compared to those of football (a league which, by the way when you consider the allegedly high amount of surrounding criminality, employs almost 2000 young men to beat the shit out of one another) and basketball (thugs! rapscallions! tattooed cornrowed ragamuffins!) remember this.

A highlight?

Conboy punched and threw Kampfer to the ice and Tropp came in and struck
Kampfer across the head with his stick.

I've always enjoyed hockey fights and all that, but I am really starting to reconsider that. The game is exciting enough as it is without people endangering one another's lives.

Borat's Cousin Makes Correction

A popular researcher (and yes a relation to Sasha Baron-Cohen) corrects a major publication for overblowing and distorting his research. Great success!

I don't really have an option about Dr. Baron-Cohen's research and writing in general, but I find it thought-provoking (for example, he's made the argument that recent changes in education and labor make it easier for individuals on the spectrum to make sexy time-- dunno if I agree or disagree but I like seeing someone I think of as a lab scientist thinking about larger social patterns), and it's cool to see someone take an active role in moderating how their research is perceived in the popular press. He's already well-established and all, and I wouldn't begrudge a less-established researcher enjoying whatever attention they get, but, still.

Hey, I was hibernating the last few months. Did I miss anything?

Feel the Hate

So I had decided to stop posting anything here. Mostly because I had better things to do, and because there's already a million hand-wringy d'bags writing about their feelings on the stupid interwebs... basically, a general Fuck It.

But you know what, dear friends? There's a lot of fucking stupidity out there. Granted, I perpetuate a fair amount of it myself, but I'm shunting that thought to the side for now. I'm shunting it in the interest of scratching two major itches I'm feeling lately.

One such itch is in response to shitty so-called science. I'd posted a couple of times on here about the resurgence of phrenology, and of the psuedo-science of "love" research that basically just ends up justifying the perhaps pathetic magical views about romance held by the average jackoff, but there was a recent article in a "science" journal that I wish to snottily- snootily?- eviscerate. Now I like to think of myself as an un-PC dickwad who occasionally enjoys reveling in sexism, but when I read this stupid fucking article, I thought "what an idiotic way of writing about this pretty boring study," and then promptly said 13425254 Hail Mary's for unfairly besmirching the reputation of idiots and the boring.

Listen to this garbage:

Sexual stereotypes are not the preserve of humans. Male dolphins, it seems, are
not interested in learning how to use a sponge, but their sisters are.

Now, being An Enlightened Dude, I'm thinking: huh. "I'd better be sceptical about what's coming next. I wouldn't be surprised to read some dodgy, troubling justification of some sort of tired sexist trope. What's worse, like so many scienticians, the scienticians in charge of this study will have brilliantly thrown a dazzling array of statistics and other scietisticist devices to razzle-dazzle my fragile semi-social-constructionist mind."

But, dear reader, I need not have feared such razzle dazzle. For the whole "[s]exual stereotypes [not being] the preserve of humans" angle was most assuredly based in the most base, inane assumptions:

Janet
Mann of Georgetown University in Washington, DC, and colleagues have now
reviewed data collected during 20 years spent monitoring this group of dolphins
and found that, while mothers show both their male and female calves how to use
sponges, female calves are almost exclusively the only ones to apply this
knowledge.

The half-awake reader will assume that the sponges were used for cleaning, or for the uterine, vaginal, or intralabial insertion of some sort of spooge-blocker, or other such "feminine" projects. Why else would the "writer," a presumably be-vaginaed Catherine Brahic (whose name suggests some sort of chicago origins, rendering her irredeemably suspect, as we shall later explore, you and I), assign this to the Vast Pile Of Data What Shows That Bitches Best Stay Barefoot And Pregnant.

But no, Dear Reader. They use this sponge for-- wait for it-- HUNTING.

Yes, hunting. That practice (which is awesome, in my opinion, when accompanied with bright orange vests and chocolate coloured dogs and all kinds of North American Mini-Communitas), that a million halfwits use to explain a million so called Irrefutable Differences Between The Sexes. Except, you know, they usually attribute Hunting and Technology to those of us who rock the phallus. But not these dipshits.

Whatever, I'm bored with this garbage.

So Itch Number Two, to which I referred earlier, was a long time coming. Let me explain. The day that this guy

was subject to many news stories detailing his Cursing, his Greed, and his General Doofishness, I thought, "my, how entertaining! What a cynical asshole! I have waited for the day during which he was Served a Complaint detailing some likely criminal practices."
So it's not like I was in dude's corner, or whatever. Despite the fact that, and my family hates this, I have no regrets about not voting for Judy "Barr" "I Think These People Are Comfortable Around Me" Topinka. (And those of you who know how fond I am of presumably lesbian accordian players know how much this means.) Look, a crooked populist democrat is NEVER WORSE THAN A REPUBLICAN.
I will justify this later, but suffice it to say that it will relate to the fact that I'm less concerned about a jagoff who shaves a mill here and there to a dick who makes it their Raison D'etre (French for "dickwadness" and "really good beer") to steal from the poor to feed the rich.

But whatever. I enjoyed hearing the details, the swears, etc. I though it was pretty lame that all the late night hosts thought the funniest thing about this story was dude's name (sorry, but in the Chi, a Slavic name doesn't exactly trip us up), (even though, when I heard the story on BBC and they said "Rod Blag-oh-YAY-vich" instead of "Rod Bluh-GOY-a-vich," I thought it was funny to say "Whoa he's being charged with War Crimes now?!" [still not funny, though almost makes sense, if you say it out loud]), but I enjoyed seeing a cynical, greedy person exposed for the dick they (allegedly) are.

But then this stayed the main story in the tribune. And it stayed the main story in the tribune. And it stayed the main story in the tribune.

Even though this was going on.
And then this happened.
And, less importantly, various right-wing twats teed off on a man I respect, for something that may or may not have happened.

And it basically seemed that the right and "middle" of this country, who had first allowed the coup of and then elected a torturer, an inept lier whose lies and greed got this country into a war which has cost hundreds of thousands of lives, suddenly had a story to distract the rest of us from their (and our) complicity in recent atrocities.

Suddenly I got sick of jokes about Blago's hair.

If you've wasted time reading this shit, you can at least read this and (even more apropos) this.

new poll

yeah, I know the previous sports polls didn't exactly take off. I'm just expressing my pessimism about this upcoming Bears season, which I will write precious little about, unless there's another Tank Johnson type situation of social interest.
For the record, I'm not expecting a ton from Illinois this year. I think we're good for 7 wins, whether or not we make a bowl game-- I'd expect a loss in any good bowl, a win in any substandard bowl. And, yes, I don't expect better than 6-10 for the Bears. 5 wouldn't shock me. 7 would be a bit of a surprise, even considering our really weak division. If I were a bookie and wanted to set up a wins total prop bet for people like me, I'd set it at Illinois +.5 wins. If a bookie were sitting next to me and offered it and I wasn't totally broke, I think I'd take it.

RIP Kevin Duckworth

I don't usually feel the need to post when a famous person I like has just died, but reading about Harvey, IL native Kevin Duckworth today reminded me that I always liked him, and it sounds like he deserved his good guy reputation.

"When the curtain fell at last, it was an act of mercy."

So I've been reading, finally, the above-pictured book, Revolutionary Road. (Yes, reading a very depressing novel which relates to my research topic is my current means of relaxing. [Yes, I need to find other hobbies.]) OK, I'm about to finish it, and I'm remembering that a movie starring Leonardo "Dee" Caprio and Kate Winslett or whoever was in the works, and I'm thinking that there's no way I'm going to like the movie. Part of what I like about Yates (I'm no literature expert and have only read this and his collected short stories, so, yeah) is how brutally unromantic his characters are, and I don't know how that works in a movie, in anyway other than some sort of ham-fisted "ooh look at me I'm dark" kinda tripe. One of my favorite things about RR is how clearly it shows that the quest to be some "authentic, sophisticated, unique individual" is useless by its very premise (Yes, I'm probably projecting. I said I'm not a literature critic, so boo) , and I just don't think that contemporary movies are equipped with the tropes and symbols to convey this in an elegant manner.

My other favorite thing, as someone who likes to read critical histories of the family and all that, is how we are shown that the archetypal 50s "traditional" family was, far from the natural ordering of human life, something that resulted from very particular historical, economic, geographic, and psychological circumstances, that had to be worked at and all that. This way of life was new and strange to its participants, neither the default way of being like in so much Republican propaganda nor the Well Of Emptiness And Source Of All That's Wrong With The World that many "critical" looks back on the era present. The gender division of labor within the household, Frank's need to feel like a man, the figuring out of class and social positions in a new and growing geographic space, all took a lot of work, like all living does. It just seems like it will be so hard, through the medium of major American film, to show this. To the contemporary reader there's something surprising and remarkable about how the era that, in nostalgiast propaganda and entertainment ever since then, has been portrayed as "when things were normal," was so clearly to its participants an unusual, difficult time, with social and psychological demands that often felt novel and, to the Wheelers, excessive. I'm worried that the nuance and pain of the novel will turn into nothing but "the 50s were bad because people had to CONFORM, man," or that the Wheelers are going to come off as some romantic figures representing our quest to find our true selves, or some other common story that is boring to me.

I think I'm going to feel like I did when I saw the film version of Ask The Dust, but even worse, because Yates seems like a harder writer to put to screen then Fante, and this movie will all but certainly not feature a naked Selma Hayek.

YOU ARE AN IDIOT

No, not you, gentle reader. "You" as in:

• these "scienticians" who think that Phrenology is an exciting new idea:

"When boys reach puberty, testosterone often lengthens and enlarges their jaws and makes their brow ridges more prominent. The hormone also increases their facial width-to-height ratio, a comparison of the distance between the cheekbones to the distance between the upper lip and brows. Last year, paleontologist Eleanor Weston of the Natural History Museum in London concluded from an analysis of skulls that this ratio is larger in males and that the difference is independent of the male-female inequality in body size. Intrigued by this finding, behavioral neuroscientist Cheryl McCormick and psychologist Justin Carré of Brock University in St. Catharines, Canada, decided to see if the ratio correlated with aggressiveness, which also depends on testosterone levels....

To find out, the researchers first measured facial width-to-height ratios in 88 male and female volunteers. They then gave the subjects a test that involved pushing buttons ... 15% of the individual differences in aggressive behavior could be explained by individual differences in facial ratios, the team reports online this week in the Proceedings of the Royal Society

Moving the experiments to the real world, the researchers plotted face ratios for college and professional ice hockey players from their photos on the Internet. .. This time, the researchers found that 30% of the aggressive behavior exhibited by males could be predicted by their facial morphology.

The team concludes that this aspect of male facial structure may convey an "honest signal" of propensity for aggressive behavior."

Let's see... Facial feature A correlates with B, which is also found to correlate with socially-loaded construct C. Hey, I know, let's see if A and C correlate, without bothering to see if it's all about B!!! Since we're SCIENTISTS, we've thought of everything and haven't even thought of the fact that in doing this we're basically just resurrecting discredited racialist bullshit! This is fun!!

• Also an idiot is IOC president Jacques Rogge, who saw fit to publicly single out, Jamaican sprinter Usain Bolt, chastising him for like celebrating or something. I loved this response, even though I don't buy into the idea that the US, Europe, and Russia have any business shaking their fingers at China.
  

Donuts

All my writing, reading, and internetting time has been devoted to working on my dissertation proposal, with the occasional burst of writing poems here and there, but I wanted to make a quick comment about the play Superior Donuts, showing at the Steppenwolf. I'm far from a theater critic, but I really, really liked this play.

It's set in a donut shop in Uptown, run by an old Polish-American Vietnam war resister/stoner/etc, played by David St. Hubbins. I'm not going to summarize the play or review it or anything, but I wanted to share that I thought it was awesome.

More specifically, I was worried that it was going to traffic in overblown old Chicago nostalgia, and self-righteous commentary about gentrification in Uptown, which would be pretty rich coming from a well-established theater company. (I'm not saying that artists, even/especially middle-class ones, shouldn't address gentrification, and I'm also not saying that the play dodges the issue at all. But it does so in a much more nuanced, thoughtful, etc way than I had anticipated.) Anyway, you get your Magikist and Starbucks riffing, but not in a nauseating way at all. The sense of nostalgia and awareness of change shared by the playwright and the thoughtful characters really suits how I understand it: they use nostalgia as a way to tell their stories and express their feelings about the world around them. It's done really, really beautifully. And if you're a softie like me who thinks that realistic, unromantic human kindness and love is often underrepresented in the arts, I dare you not to cry at the end.

The play, written while playwright Tracy Letts was dealing with the attention and massic success of Ausust: Osage County, is not perfect. I generally like its sociology but found Franco a bit of a "magic Negro," and I have a hard time believing that a Black cop working an Uptown beat is gonna flinch at a Russian business owner referring to "black sons of bitch." What I'm saying is occasionally the writing shows a tiny, tiny, tiny bit of relying on easy archetypes and sight gags like eastern Euros in tracksuits and the word "douchebag," but you all know I'm not complaining, I'm just saying.

PS- When on the southside and looking for a donut, eat at Dat's. 83rd and Cottage. Open all night.

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.

OK, just two more

Just two more mentions of basketball this month. Well, I'm sure I'll have something to say leading up to or immediately following Thursday's NBA draft, but I wanted to highlight a couple articles that even readers who aren't NBA fans might find interesting:

• An article about Len Bias, the #2 pick in the 1986 draft, and someone whose name comes up a lot at this time of year. For those who don't remember, Bias was the University of Maryland power forward drafted by the Celtics, who was expected to lengthen the Bird/McHale/Parrish dynasty, only to die of a cocaine overdose the day after the draft. I don't really remember this happening; I remember knowing that it was going on, and, although I was only 7, I suppose I might have remembered him from that year's Final Four, which I always watched, even then. I definitely didn't remember that his brother died a few years later, or even really pick up on the other Bias narratives at the time, other than, aside from the obvious tragedy, that this sort of doomed the Celtics for awhile, and that this was the downfall for the idea of college athletics as pure and innocent (despite how often college hoops is lauded over the NBA with a similar valence). The author of the piece, Michael Weinreb, spends time with Bias' mother, as well as a friend of the late Jay Bias, Len's younger brother, who was incarcerated for crack possession (given a sentence that Weinreb points out was three times as long for those of most murderers). As this might suggest, Weinreb ties the Bias story to America's response to crack (Bias OD'ed on powder cocaine, but the death of a young Black man to coca fed legislators' drive to lock up crack users), as well as presenting a fascinating case study of a young athlete caught between life stages and historical eras.


• A NY Times piece about Brandon Jennings, a top high school point guard I'd only recently been hearing about, expected to spend a year playing professionally in Europe. (Here's the King Kaufman column that lead me to it.) This is of course following the, in my opinion, dodgy collusion between the NBA, NCAA, and NBA players' union, to force elite American HS basketball to spend a year working for a college program, where they can risk injury and please boosters under the nurturing, watchful eye of the US sports media. Instead, Jennings will be paid to play, and Jennings and Kaufman assume that his game will develop and he will mature unproblematically, presumably while "dating" supermodels and developing a taste for fine art. I like both these articles and love Jennings' guts and drive here, but I can't help but notice a little idealizing of Ye Olde Worlde in both articles. You think he'll be safe from leeches and hangers on in Europe? He's going to develop financial and social savvy just by walking amongst sophisticated, art-appreciating Europeans? (I don't want to accuse the Times writer, William Rhoden, about whom I know nothing, or Kaufman, who I think is a thoughtful, enjoyable read and probably has a great social conscience, of racism, but I can't help but wonder if many other Americans who think this will be great for the kid think it'll be great for him to not be around so many other Black people.) I'd also like to add, in response to the positive references to the Euro leagues in both of these articles, we're seeing a pretty steady decline since 2001 (I'm referring to the draft that brought in Tony Parker, Pau Gasol [who, at least in this years NBA finals, decided to live up every negative stereotype about European athletes], and Mehmet Okur) in the quality of players who've come from the European leagues, at least in contrast to how highly they've been coveted. European players have been getting drafted way too high ever since the Spurs and the Mavs started making huge leaps with Parker and Dirk Nowitzki, and I have to say I disagree with the notion that Jennings will be playing a higher level of game in Spain than he would at a Big East, ACC, Big Te(leve)n, etc, school. But he won't be contributing to the bogus claim that he'd be there because we all value education. (For the record, I really like college basketball, I just prefer the game itself in the League.)

Anyway, enjoy.

misc

Shaquille O'Neal is the greatest rapper alive, because "great" means "large." Him asking Kobe how it tastes was horrifying enough the first time. Maybe he should stick to policework in the offseason.

It was nice to see George Carlin's "Baseball vs Football" routine again yesterday, and driving home past The Minister's house on my way home last night I remembered his reference to, in a bit about PC language in the 90s, "the openly Black Louis Farrakhan" in one of his bits.

Isn't Team Basketball USA a little... short? And are we supposed to be happy with a coach whose last teams have recently been eliminated from tournaments by the likes of Greece and Virginia Commonwealth? I'm sorry, but when it comes to basketball, I am a freaking nationalist, and I will be very annoyed if we fail to win the gold medal again this year. Why? I have no idea. I don't care about the Olympics; the US's poor showing in international basketball just irks me for reasons I'm not interested in exploring. So there.

Oh yeah, I'm starting to feel self-conscious about how much I use semi-colons:

The semicolon has spent the last century as a fussbudget mark. Somerset Maugham and George Orwell disdained it; Kurt Vonnegut once informed a Tufts University crowd that "All [semicolons] do is show that you've been to college." New York mayor Fiorello LaGuardia's favorite put-down for egghead bureaucrats who got in his way was "semicolon boy." And though semicolons have occasionally made news—tariff bills have imploded over their misplacement, and a 1927 execution hinged on the interpretation of a
semicolon—the last writers to receive much notice for semicolon use have been a New York City Transit employee and the Son of Sam. In 1977 the NYPD speculated that "the killer could be a freelance journalist" because of his "use of a semicolon" in his taunting letters. (Decades later, columnist Jimmy Breslin still marveled that "Berkowitz is the only murderer I ever heard of who knew how to use a semicolon.")

I've been called worse than a "fussbudget," I guess.

"anything is possible!"

I haven't been writing a damn thing, paperwork excluded, for the last week, so, yeah. Whatever. I don't know why, maybe I'm just cranky, maybe I just have nothing to say. A lot of things in my life seem to be ending right now, and not many things beginning in their place. Times of transition, self-doubt, disappointment and a sense of opportunities lost, blah blah.

So I'm just going to briefly go back to last week's big story in my life, the NBA Finals; specifically, the much-discussed Kevin Garnett interview. Many cynical viewers I've talked to and read felt there was something distastefully performative in KG's display. My take was perhaps more naive; I was genuinely moved (as pointed out to me by a thoughtful observer, Garnett's accomplishment and his place in life are pretty meaningful to me right now, given my sense of transition), and felt like it was one of the more striking emotional displays I'd seen televised before. It felt like he was simultaneously emotionally regressing and growing and being pulled in a million different directions at once.

Whatever was going on with KG at the time, after hearing other peoples' more cynical takes on the interview and his season-long tendency to very publicly, before games and at key moments in front of fans and teammates, acting out exhuberantly, got me thinking the role of emotion in team sports. The friend I referred to parenthetically in the previous paragraph suggested that, from a group dynamics perspective, KG had been "holding" a lot of emotion for his team. Basically, the psychology of groups suggest that, within groups, individuals take on certain roles for the group, be they leader or scapegoat, the soother, the leader, etc. It's easier for us to notice this in other people's families, or for therapists to see it in a group, but I haven't heard it mentioned in professional sports, and I think KG this season has been a great example.

I'm often irritated by how sportswriters and fans single out athlete's behavior for analysis- I'm not talking about Kobe in Colorado or other extreme examples, just how athletes are often described as pouty or unpleasant, or "down-to-earth" and a team player. Part of what makes this irritating and stupid is how tied up in race this tends to be, but I'm not going into that here. But if we take Garnett 07-08 as a mini case study, I think we might consider how displays of intense emotion on the part of athletes can sometimes say more about the team and the moment than about the individual. One of the things that was compelling to me about this last year's Celtics team is the flip side of what a lot of people whose opinions I value dislike-- they're a little bit cobbled together and stylistically uneven. Although they played defense with an almost hive-like unity, they're players who for the most part just started playing together in the last season, which has often been reflected in their serviceable if uninspiring offensive play.

What interests me about a team like this is how difficult it must be, in a behind-the-scenes kind of way, to try to get a team like this to unite and win. Star players like Pierce, Garnett, and Allen, united in a common purpose but lacking one singular narrative to unite them. Their most compelling narratives (Pierce's long history in Boston and his 2000 brush with death, Garnett's conflicted and painful departure from Minnesota, Allen's family turmoil and uneven career) were, other than that of PP, intense, but having little or nothing to do with the grand narratives of the franchise and city for whom they played. Garnett's physically, affectively, and verbal veering and swooning in the post-game interview reflected this. I guess it enabled us-- disappointed not-so-young-anymore adults, pained Timberwolves and Lakers fans, vindicated Boston fans-- to fit it with our own narratives of what this season meant. Was it insincere? I don't think that question is useful very often at all, and it isn't for looking at KG's interview. Whether it was a display or an affectation doesn't take away from the meaningfulness of it all. I don't want to say that it had to happen, but it fit.

I used to stay up reading the Book of Revelation

(RIP Wisconsin Dells)

Did anyone read this essay by Iain McEwan, from a couple of weeks ago in the Guardian? I've just skimmed over it, but want to give it a good read sometime He seems to manage to express a very calm, thoughtful understanding of the appeal of apocalyptic thinking, locating it in a seemingly eternal place where the incomprehensibility of mortality, the fear of the unknown, and real danger meet:

In The Sense of an Ending , Frank Kermode proposes that the enduring quality,
the vitality of the Book of Revelation suggests a "consonance with our more
naive requirements of fiction". We are born, as we will die, in the middle of
things, in the "middest". To make sense of our span, we need what he calls
"fictive concords with origins and ends. 'The End', in the grand sense, as we
imagine it, will reflect our irreducibly intermediary expectations." What
could grant us more meaning against the abyss of time than to identify our own
personal demise with the purifying annihilation of all that is. Kermode quotes
with approval from Wallace Stevens - "the imagination is always at the end
of an era".

(McEwan includes a nice little methodological aside, in reference to polls about American religiosity that secular elites such as myself on both sides of the Atlantic titter over, like, as he puts it, "Atheist pornography":

It might be worth retaining a degree of scepticism about these
polling figures. For a start, they vary enormously - one poll's 90 per cent is
another's 53 per cent. From the respondent's point of view, what is to be gained
by categorically denying the existence of God to a complete stranger with a
clipboard? And those who tell pollsters they believe that the Bible is the
literal word of God from which derive all proper moral precepts, are more likely
to be thinking in general terms of love, compassion and forgiveness rather than
of the slave-owning, ethnic cleansing, infanticide, and genocide urged at
various times by the jealous God of the Old Testament.)