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, ,


Questions for Batman
Saturday, July 26, 2008


Wow, Batman. Say you're the platonic soul who hasn't been to see a movie in twenty years or so, and you find yourself lining up with the millions to go see this bit of business. What to make of these batshit contortions? With the split personalities and the good-guy rich people and the excellent, unblemished public servants begging to have their faces melted off? What knowledge aren't you armed with? Isn't it likely that if you were a little behind the curve and turned to your partner and asked, of Maggie Gyllenhal's character, "oh, is that Batman's girlfriend?" or, "hey, why does she know Batman's identity when no one else does?" you'd receive a nutty non-sequiter answer like, "well, she was played by Katie Holmes in the last movie," as if that would explain her motivation for doing the things that she does. And, yes, Heath Ledger is mouldering in a box somewhere in a fair climate, which means, no Joker in the next installment -- a very important point, unless you had no idea what was going on. And is Two-Face dead? I can't tell. I mean, Batman survived the fall, so why not Two-Face? Oh, and why is this such a right-wing deal? Like, did they really have to have a scene which demonstrated the complete bankruptcy of voting on whether or not to, say, blow up a boat full of convicts? These questions will pile on in blockbuster movies in the years to come, I think.

posted by Greg Purcell @ 12:53 AM, ,


What Have I Seen?
Sunday, July 20, 2008

I've seen Iron Man, Indiana Jones, The Incredible Hulk, Hancock, Hellboy 2, and now Wall-E. The latter started with a truly insanely racist trailer featuring chihuahuas who go from Beverly Hills to Mexico and dance around a Mayan statue singing a song about how fertile and lazy they are, or something. They still dance in my mind. You could tell the girl chihuahuas from the boy chihuahuas by the way they were digitally manipulated to walk (the girl chihuahuas all walk like Marylin Monroe). Wall-E runs around picking up trash 700 years after the end of the world. He watches Hello, Dolly! on a VHS tape at night. I feel duty-bound to point out that 700 years into the future, humanity has become fat: it floats in space on a massive ship called the Axiom (why?) and drinks protein slurpees and communicates entirely through these weird floating screens, and they just generally and very broadly satirize consumerism, the little babies. Wall-E doesn't judge them, even though he's developed a Hello-Dolly!-based personality. He so identifies with the little trinkets he finds on earth -- sporks, jewelry boxes, lightbulbs -- that he actually folds himself up and shelves himself next to them. And when fatty wants to make a political change (i.e. go back to the now black-lung-y Earth and sow seeds, farm, take responsibility, etc.) he has nothing more to do than push a big, green button with a picture of the Earth on it. It's like voting for Obama! I do love to notice these things, though it makes me sick. I'm still thinking of the way Harrison Ford's pants fit him -- baggily, like an old man -- and of the way he was still able to sprint gazelle-like, pants and all, out of harm's way. Or of Tim Roth's spine as he turns into the Abomination (I still prefer the way Nick Nolte turned into The Absorbing Man in the first Hulk, by doing that Nick Nolte blustering thing while biting hard on a thick electrical cable.) So many millions of movie dollars! How can I possibly go see Batman now? I'll puke, for sure. But I will, because my eyeballs are set for maximum absorbency right now. Batman will enter into their already supersaturated state and cinematic colors will run down my cheeks. I'll watch the trailer for The watchmen, directed by that guy who directed 300, and I will be instantly critical of that and of everything else, and said criticism will plug up my ears with golden wax, and I'll have to go get antibiotics. Yay collegiate America! Hooray for bursting!

posted by Greg Purcell @ 11:15 PM, ,