The new issue of Discover features an interesting interview with Steven Pinker about his new book, The Stuff of Thought
, and what you can learn about human nature by studying things like how little kids learn verbs. Here's an excerpt:
In your latest book, The Stuff of Thought, you discuss cursing and note that, in America, "the seven words you can't say on television" have to do with sex and excretion. In other parts of the world, other types of words are more powerful, such as ones drawn from religion.
Yes, it's particularly noticeable to someone like me who comes from Quebec, where the worst thing that you can say to someone is "Goddamn chalice." That really brings it home for me. We do have a trace of that in swear words like "hell" and "damn" and "Goddamn," but they've really lost their sting, and it has to be related to the fact that religion has lost its power over many people.
I think the reason that swearing is both so offensive and so attractive is that it is a way to push people's emotional buttons, and especially their negative emotional buttons. Because words soak up emotional connotations and are processed involuntarily by the listener, you can't will yourself not to treat the word in terms of what it means. You can't hear a word and just hear it as raw sound; it always evokes an associated meaning and emotion in the brain. So I think that words give us a little probe into other people's brains. We can press someone's emotional buttons anytime we want.
And there's an additional layer, which would account for the fact that the content of swearing varies across history and from culture to culture. The common denominator is some kind of negative emotion, but the culture and time will determine which negative emotion is commonly provoked, whether it's disgust at bodily secretions, or dread of deities, or repugnance at sexual perversions. The second, additional layer is that you recognize that the other person is evoking — and is intentionally evoking — that negative emotion, and you know that he knows that you know that he is trying to evoke it. That's part of why it offends you. And that's why the choice of word matters, as well as what the word refers to — why "the F word" is obscene, but "copulate" is not, even though they refer to the same thing. But you know when someone uses "copulate," they're referring to copulation, whereas when they use the F word, they are trying to get a rise out of you. So there again you get to the pragmatics as well as the semantics.
Pinker will be speaking at my local Borders, on Westwood Blvd., on October 1 at 7 p.m. A full list of book tour engagements is on his website here.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on September 18, 2007 • Comments
Blake Gopnik's smart WaPost review of the new exhibit at the Corcoran gave me a new perspective on the Adams's work. An excerpt:
They may show nature, but the first thing I see in them is the Great American Automobile. When I look at "Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico," I see the Pontiac station wagon Adams was driving along Highway 84, at 4:49 p.m. on Nov. 1, 1941, when he caught sight of an old-time Spanish settlement in his rear-view mirror, then screeched to a halt to capture it on film. In the pueblo pictures, I see the fancy Buick that Adams drove 2,400 miles in 1927, speeding him and its wealthy owner from their homes in San Francisco to the Southwest and back. Those magical pictures of Yosemite put before me all the vehicles it took to haul the 200 hikers of the Sierra Club -- the young photographer was an assistant manager for its outings -- to the trailhead.
Of course, none of those cars are visible in Adams's photos. (Or not in most of them, at any rate. More on that below.) But they are a hidden presence that helps give his photos force and builds their meaning. Adams and his images are a product of the glory days of Machine Age America, and they speak about it.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on September 16, 2007 • Comments
Rod Dreher posts a picture of his notebook from 9/11. He was interviewing people on the Brooklyn Bridge when the towers collapsed. (Via FrontBurner.)
Posted by Virginia Postrel on September 11, 2007 • Comments
I don't have a column in the new October issue of The Atlantic, but for those of you who don't subscribe (you should--it's a bargain!), I've updated the free column archives on this site with my columns on science glamour, George Hurrell's Hollywood portraits, and neighborhood paint wars.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on September 07, 2007 • Comments
Ronald Reagan might have been in B-list films, but he was often the star. Fred Thompson may hit the A-list, but he's never the star. Robert George carries the analogy to their political careers. (Read the whole thing to get the punch line.)
Posted by Virginia Postrel on September 07, 2007 • Comments
From an excellent profile/interview by Joel Garreau
Every toy I had as a child that haunted me, I've been able to see on eBay. The soft squeezy rubber frog with red shorts that made 'eek eek' noise until that part fell out. I found Froggy after some effort on eBay, and I found out that Froggy was made in 1948 and where he was made and what he was made of. I saw his box, which I'd long forgotten. I didn't have to buy Froggy, but I saved the jpegs. So I've got Froggy in my computer.
This is new. People in really small towns can become world-class connoisseurs of something via eBay and Google. This didn't used to be possible. If you are sufficiently obsessive and diligent, you can be a little kid in some town in the backwoods of Tennessee and the world's premier info-monster about some tiny obscure area of stuff. That used to require a city. It no longer does."
Posted by Virginia Postrel on September 06, 2007 • Comments
A Prius driver with a long political memory. Much wittier than the typical anti-Bush stickers you see in these parts. (No, I was not driving when I took this photo.) Click on the photo for a larger version.
A QUERY: A couple of readers have written to say that they can't see the photo or get the link by clicking on it. But they're both there in the code and they work fine on my browser (Safari) and, as far as I can tell, on most people's computers. Any theories?
Posted by Virginia Postrel on September 04, 2007 • Comments
Driving home from Santa Barbara yesterday, Steve and I spotted a man shaving while driving (with an electric razor, but still...) and a woman curling her eyelashes while driving. We also passed this burning big-rig truck, reportedly full of flour.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on September 04, 2007 • Comments
After moving from Boston to New York, Howard Husock reflects on the "blindness" of being in a new place, and what much more dramatic moves must mean for immigrants. Having just had the opposite experience--moving back to my old city and neighborhood after seven years away--I understand what he means. Even if you don't that many neighbors, you get to know the rhythms and meanings of a place. What makes a place feel like home is more mysterious, however. L.A. felt like home from the time I got off the plane for a visit in the winter of 1986. It's good to be back.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on August 31, 2007 • Comments
Sharon Steel of the Boston Phoenix reports on a trend she finds worrisome: promotion of writers (more precisely, of literary fiction writers) based on their looks. She writes:
Literature, unlike so many other media industries, is technically a meritocracy. But that won't stop book marketers, bloggers, critics, and the literary community at large from collectively slobbering over a pretty author. No, the literary rules changed ages ago. Books no longer need to be serious in order to be published; there are fewer and fewer venues available for reviews (rendering competition more intense with every passing catalogue season), and critics aren't doing their job unless they are merciless. Perhaps as a response to all of this, publishers have begun to count on their authors to do double-duty--to act as sex symbols as well.
The trend isn't new. I included a mention, citing a couple of similar articles from the U.S. and U.K., in The Substance of Style. As long as personal profiles and TV appearances are the most efficient ways to promote books, looks will matter. But looks aren't the full story. As an unkind anonymous commenter observed, Tyler Cowen is " not particularly pretty...nor fashionably dressed." Yet he gets profiles promoting his new book, Discover Your Inner Economist
. Tyler may not look like George Clooney, but he's an interesting, quirky person who makes a good story. Good looks are only one way to attract attention. Dave Eggers would be famous even if he weren't good looking, because his personal story was compelling and he was already well known as a literary entrepreneur. (His brother Bill, an old friend of mine, doesn't get as much publicity or sell as many books--but not for lack of looks.)
Book marketing has two big problems. Books are "experience goods," which means you don't know whether you'll like one until you've actually invested in reading it. That's all the more true for fiction, where merely explaining the book's premise or setting doesn't come close to capturing what it's like to read. But there are lots of experience goods on the market, from movies to massages. The much bigger problem for book marketing is that there are so many books. Everyone who might be interested in seeing a particular movie probably knows that the movie exists. Not so potential book buyers. Simply getting potential readers to know about your book is the author's (and publisher's) biggest challenge. That's why it's an author's nightmare to be a guest on Oprah but forbidden to even mention a new book. (Chris Rose's column here is quite funny.)
The dirty little not-so-secret of book publishing is that it is a meritocracy, but one in which "merit" includes more than just writing quality. An author who will get attention--whether because of looks, connections, celebrity, or a dramatic past--is more valuable than an author who won't. Again, from Steel's article:
"We're not out there to perform. Well--most writers aren't out there to perform," says Katherine Taylor, 34, whose first book, Rules for Saying Goodbye, was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux (FSG) this June. "I think, though, that in the current publishing climate, readers--not the real readers but a certain type of reader--want more of an icon than they want the book. I think that only because I'm shocked at the coverage I've gotten. You write a book and you expect the book will get the attention. And it's surprising how a lot of the attention--even in supposedly super reputable arenas--the attention's been focused on me and not the book, really, at all."
She's right. On the strength of the Spring 2007 FSG catalogue alone--which included a page about Taylor's forthcoming book, as well as a photograph of her that was taken by her brother--the New York Observer's Spencer Morgan was assigned a profile on Taylor. When they met, she says, he told her he hadn't even read her book, but that his editor had told him to write the piece. In his "Farrar Thinks Pink," Morgan began by asking whether the catalogue ought not to have come with a warning sticker: "Va-va-va-voom!" he panted, noting that Taylor's "curvy bodice is simply straining against a clingy T-shirt" in the picture. He fake-checked himself to make sure that the catalogue was FSG, not Abercrombie & Fitch, and inquired slyly whether FSG, regarded as one of the last old-fashioned literary publishers, was pushing Taylor's book in an attempt to foster their own Marisha Pessl phenomenon. They had T.S. Eliot, Flannery O'Connor, Michael Cunningham, and a total of 22 Pulitzer Prize — winning authors. Where, Morgan pondered, did someone like Taylor fit in?
Ever hear of Susan Sontag? She was one of FSG's best-known writers, and as famous for her image as for her ideas.
I wrote about buzz marketing and experience goods here.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on August 31, 2007 • Comments