Self-Loathing for Beginners » recommended reading

fall fashion self-loathing

admin — Sun, 17 Aug 2008 14:26:16 +0000

This piece of mine ran Aug 17th in print, and can be found online here. It is unusual for The Times to do humor, let alone about neuroscience, so attempting a project like this was an invitation to a kind of filigree-style self-loathing, wherein the insatiable concerns of psychobiologists for repertorial accuracy (you just can’t convey the complexity of neurocircuitry in ten words and still have room for the graphics) and the delicate feelings of celebrities’ lawyers (note the ample use of words like “seemingly”) twist their tendrils about your waking mind and spin spiderwebs through your dreams.

Is it clear in my article that the brain doesn’t really have clearly-definable “centers” for complex functions like speech? No. Is it clear that diffusion of Botox into the upper reaches of the cranium from a shot in the forehead has (as yet) no support from experimental evidence? Not really. Was I able to suggest that the nicotine receptors that Botox blocks have never specifically been shown to occasion the release of dopamine – a neurotransmitter associated with a very different set of receptors? Barely.

So this article makes me out to be something of an idiot, neurology-wise. And that for me is the fun of it. Because really we don’t need Botox to make us into fools; the simple task of trying to write clearly will do that nicely and far less inexpensively. Alas, it also causes the brow to wrinkle.

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Yea for Neigh

admin — Sun, 03 Aug 2008 17:14:28 +0000

The brilliant Website, SarahJessicaParkerLooksLikeAHorse.com site is a revelation — an excellent lesson in how to transcend self-loathing while hanging onto it at the same time. First you laugh your ass off. Then, as you click through SJP-horse comparisons, you feel guilty for being so horribly sexist and mean, but, as you keep going, SJP’s horsiness becomes deeply moving, a strange new way to see beauty. Now and then she turns into a horse-goddess — a divinity — though the horse laughs never stop.

Thank You for Not Writing Your Memoir

admin — Sun, 13 Apr 2008 00:24:51 +0000

Bartleby & Co. by Enrique Vila Matas and translated by Jonathan Dunne, is a small masterpiece of literary self-effacement. It is presented as a series of 86 footnotes to an otherwise unwritten book devoted to writers who stop writing (Robert Walser who went mad, or Rimbaud who wandered off after his spectacular debut) and writers who never actually write at all (like Socrates—who leaves the penmanship to Plato—or Paranoid Pérez, a character created by Antonio de la Mota Ruiz, who never gets to author a book because any time he has an idea for one, another character in the story writes it first).

Vila Matas lauds writers whose humility forbids them to attempt the impossible feat of writing accurately, writers who—properly conscious of the vanity of literature and the irrelevance of acclaim—beg to be forgotten, writers who, like Melville’s Bartleby, “would prefer not to.” This most amusing and inspired meander through the history of creative self-negation is a must for the serious self-loather who wishes to go for a higher degree.