The Eugen-olympics
Tuesday, August 19, 2008

Once again, Slate Magazine is at the head of the pack in giving a knee-jerk, pseudo-scientific-sounding eugenicist answer to why it is that one race is going to be good at something and why another is not. On Jamaican sprinters of West African descent who, according to a Quebecois study, had "significantly higher amounts of 'fast-twitch' muscle fibers": "So far, there is no evidence that even extensive training can turn slow-twitch muscles into fast-twitch ones, though moving in the other direction is possible." Huh? Should I get my forceps out, Slate, to make sure you've calculated "fast-twitch" muscle density accurately? Or else, can you add a maybe a little more context to your bizarre-sounding claims so we don't think you're a bunch of nutjobs? Then again, according to William Saletan, perhaps we'd have to be Asian to appreciate the full dimensions of what would seem, to the naked (that is to say, Black or Caucasian) eye, to be totally slipshod reportage.

More reportage along the lines of "we're just reporting what appear to be the facts" can be found here and here. For Slate's bizarre, not entirely disinterested, eleven-part "study" of what happened to babies produced by the Repository for Germinal Choice, start here.

posted by Greg Purcell @ 11:34 AM, ,


Today's Five-Parter
Friday, August 15, 2008

A few thoughts occurring to me over the last week:

1) The Russian and Turkish bathhouse on 10th Street is my new favorite place in New York, third in line behind Roosevelt and Coney Islands. I just discovered it (and so, says Alex K., "where have you been, man?")

2) I'm a little burned out from literary activities, but it was nice to read at The Happy Ending Bar last night, and to have relatively new stuff to read from, and to declaim it in the old way.

3) I've been struggling over a little 400-word review of George Oppen's Collected Poems, soon to be released by New Directions. The problem with reading him today is that he tried to make the modernism of Ezra Pound democratic, and though that's still a legitimate problem, it's not one we even understand today. Oppen's tradition has been picked up and mauled exclusively by professional intellectuals, which is to say, people who are illegitimate both in democratic thought and in aesthetic practice. He has no tradition other than the passively theoretical, and for someone who put down his pen for twenty-five years to actively organize renter's strikes, that's a shame. That no one sees that "silence" as being parallel to and of a piece with the physical work of writing is a greater shame. Theory does not explain Oppen's life -- nor any other life that's been lived well & justly -- and I fear I'm not a big enough man enough to formulate it in another way. I need a better tradition to explain my favorite artists.

4) SCTV was a hell of a lot funnier than Saturday Night Live. I guess I knew that when I was watching them on rerun back in High School, but the new DVDs make the case very handily. I wish I could find some video of The Gerry Todd Program to post here.

5) To The Hold Steady: more Thin Lizzy, less Bruce Springsteen.

posted by Greg Purcell @ 2:07 PM, ,


New York living
Monday, August 04, 2008

I accepted the invitation to take care of Artie (Artie's a very friendly pit bull terrier kind of dog) with a minimum of delay, because Artie lives in the East Village, just a 5 minute walk from the bookshop. That cuts my Queens commute down by, oh, say, 50 minutes, give or take the five. The first couple of days were bliss. Artie took to me right away, and walking around the Village with a pit bull in the clothes that I had just rolled out of bed with made me feel like some kind of a tough guy and a real New Yorker. But a tickle has plagued my throat for days, and this morning I woke up with a hacking cough and runny eyes: I think I'm allergic to Artie, though he loves me none the less for it. The little manhattan-sized apartment now seems close, very close, and I feel significantly less sexy for living in it. The upside is, I haven't had a cigarette all day, and I may just quit...

posted by Greg Purcell @ 3:54 PM, ,