Matins

¶ At BBC News Magazine, an anecdotal report on women who choose not to have children. Friends and acquaintances continue to believe that this is their business.

But it can be the most passing of acquaintances who pass comment.

“Many people assume if you a single and child-free that you haven’t met the right man yet. But if you are in a relationship, they ask ‘when are you taking the next step?’ A woman’s fertility status is still very much considered public property. There are still assumptions about women’s role in society, about families and about family size.”

Lisa Davies, 38, says the assumption is often that she cannot have a baby. “What I’m unhappy about is people looking at me and speaking to me – very often unashamedly – as if there is something wrong with me. As with other choices that you make, the key is it’s not for everyone.”

In the United States, New Yorker Melanie Notkin, founder of the Savvy Auntie website, wants a national day to celebrate child-free women who are loving aunts or godmothers.

“It would be a chance for these women to feel whole, for everything that they are, instead of having to focus on all the things they’re not – ie mothers.”

We’re appalled by the idea that anyone would think it a good thing to have a child in order to fulfill one’s personal destiny.

Lauds

¶ Of a exhibition of paintings by the women of the Hudson River School, the museum director says,

 “The number one question we’ve been asked is ‘why hasn’t anyone done this before?’ I don’t know how to answer that,” she says.

That’s probably the most politic answer.

Though their paintings were largely left out of the story of American art, the exhibition displays work that reflects the same romantic sensibility, respect for balance, luminosity and love of picturesque landscapes as those of artists like Cole, Asher B. Durand and Frederic Church. “These paintings aren’t particularly feminine; they’re not flowery,” Jacks says. “If you walked into the show, you’d just say these are a group of Hudson River school paintings. They are part of the movement. It’s our own problem that we haven’t included them in the history of the Hudson River school.”

We hope that this show travels, in some form, to our fair city at the mouth of the Hudson. (Smithsonian)

Prime

¶ Gregor Macdonald considers California’s State of Emergency: “Collapse is a process.” What really astonishes him is the persistence of elderly economists who don’t understand the new economic order. (via Abnormal Returns)

As if to add a touch of comedy to this news, Alan Blinder and Mark Zandi are out with a Mission Accomplished paper today, which details how the FED and the Government saved the US from a depression. Perhaps a short walk through San Bernardino County (picture above) or several other California counties with their white paper in hand might be in order, as a way to augment some of those views. I would suggest that the US Dollar is probably indicating already some of what lays ahead, here. California’s broad unemployment figure at nearly 22.00% is yet another new high, and indicates the trend is still in place. While Blinder and Zandi are stuck in post-war recession-land, the US Dollar is pointing towards California.

Tierce

¶ At Replicated Typo, Hannah is reading a book about psychosis and the “social brain.” The question is, where did madness come from?

Our hominid ancestors evolved a sophisticated neural network supporting social cognition and adaptive interpersonal behaviour (in other words the social brain). This has been identified, using functional imaging, to be comprised in the fronto-temporal and fronto-parietal cortical networks. Psychosis (and schizophrenia in particular) are characterised by functional and structural deficits in these areas and hence the term ‘social brain disorders’ are fitting.

Schizophrenics display abnormalities in a wide range of social cognition tasks such as emotion recognition, theory of mind and affective responsiveness and as a result individuals with schizophrenia find themselves disadvantaged in the social arena and vulnerable to the stresses of their complex social environments.

So, since there is such evidence to support that the areas which comprise our ‘social brains’ are the same regions which contribute to the disorder of schizophrenia when functional and structural deficits are present it becomes clear that schizophrenia exists as a consequence to the complex social brain.

Sext

¶ You’d think that, if anyone, Dave Bry would be able to coax an apology from the Swastika, now that it’s no longer considered exclusively anti-Semitic. Far from it. (The Awl)

Do you feel that perhaps your best days are in the past? That you may in fact be losing some of that power by spreading yourself too thin?

Please, baby, there’s enough of me to go around! But seriously, no. Not at all. Did you see what Rabbi Abraham Cooper said, from the Simon Wiesenthal Center? “The swastika is shorthand for every racist and bigot on the planet.” That’s right! I’m worldwide now. He said that it was amazing that 70 years after the holocaust, I hadn’t lost any of my potency. That is pretty amazing, when you think about it. They’re no dummies, those Jews. I’m taking it to a whole ‘nother level.

Nones

¶ Maybe now that it has appeared in Time, it’s official: Afghanistan is a sideshow. Thanks, Joe Klein.

Are you confused yet? Let me make things more complicated: Afghanistan is really a sideshow here. Pakistan is the primary U.S. national-security concern in the region. It has a nuclear stockpile, and lives under the threat of an Islamist coup by some of the very elements in its military who created and support the Taliban. The one thing the U.S. can do to reduce that threat is to convince the Pakistanis that we will be a reliable friend for the long haul — providing aid, mediating the tensions with India; that we will help stabilize Afghanistan; that we will support the primacy of Pakistan’s civilian government. Over time, this could reduce the extremist influence in the military and Pakistan’s use of Islamist guerrillas against its neighbors. If it does not — well, the alternative is unthinkable.

Vespers

¶ Seth Colter Walls was late to the fair, but he managed to pick up a few items from David Markson’s library at the Strand, including an annotated Sartre. (“Dear Jean-Paul — how can you be sometimes so smart and sometimes so stupid?”) (Newsweek; via The Awl)

Passages like this get at the underlying tragedy of Markson’s scattered library. It’s not just about his fans’ emotional attachment to his legacy (though it’s also about that). What’s really at stake here is the chance to glean more information about his famously allusive late style. While he started out writing entertainingly pulpy crime and Western stories (one of which was turned into a movie starring Frank Sinatra), the final postmodern works for which he is best known were all built from a personal library of culled aphorisms, anecdotes from the lives of artists, and literary quotes. In The Last Novel, the unnamed narrator (called “Novelist” by Markson) quotes both Elie Wiesel and Hitler on the subject of Jewishness. Thus, Markson’s reactions to Sartre’s writing on anti-Semitism are frankly worth a hell of a lot more than the $10 I paid to acquire them.

We’re heartened to read about the Facebook group that is compiling an online catalogue of Markson’s books.

Compline

¶ It’s official: the Tower isn’t going to Lean any further. English soil engineer John Burland not only saved the Pisan campanile from toppling over but drained the water table in a way that stablizes the tower permanently. (Since 2001, there has been no movement.) Not everybody’s happy. (Telegraph; via The Morning News)

The Pisans, though, are a hard people to please. Some accuse Burland et al of sterilising their tower – for, part of its old mystique had been the possibility it might collapse at any moment, the frisson that a voyeuristic visitor might witness such a fall. ‘You can’t please all of the people all of the time,’ Burland shrugs.

He’s fascinated now by architectural advances in the UAE, where developers are striving to surpass each other with ever-taller, and ever-tiltier, buildings. Last month, the gravity-defying Capital Gate tower in Abu Dhabi – a giant, computer-concocted web of steel diagrids, which leans four times as far as Pisa’s belfry – entered the Guinness Book of Records as the world’s most inclined building.

‘It’s amazing that the Tower of Pisa should remain so fashionable, even at 800 years old,’ Burland smiles. Not bad for a building that was never meant to lean to begin with.

Have a Look

¶ two very dissimilar treats from The Best Part: Jake Hakenwerth and Trey Speegle. Both are very colorful, though!

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Thursday, July 29th, 2010 at 10:30 am.