"Scent designer Sissel Tolaas and photographer Nick Knight teamed up to explore a fragrance that charts the emotional landscape of violence."

"Collecting sweat samples at cage fighting matches and analyzing the chemicals by means of gas chromatography, Tolaas and Knight evoke a provocative portrayal of aggressive dominance and sexual behavior, captured in the throes of violent action itself."

A product/art project, commented on by Anne-Marie Slaughter:

I did not want to open it. It appears that I shy away from violence even as a smell: sweat, body odor, the dankness and rankness of gyms and locker rooms, the certainty that it will make me wrinkle my nose like a packed summer subway or a urine-soaked stairwell. The thought of a smell wrung from the sweat-soaked t-shirts of cage fighters creates a ripple of distaste and even fear at the imminent prospect of inhaling, a sensory reaction before the sense in question is even engaged.

She shies away from violence, this lady named Slaughter. Yet she promotes a twee art project that taps the allure of violence.

Isn't "taps" so the right word there?

"Without private evidence, I will take a pass on the frail case of Jon Lester and the Twittered glob of something-or-other in his glove."

"Cheating was more blatant and more fun in the old days, when the Giants’ Gaylord Perry would smilingly stand with upraised arms while an ump frisked him for K-Y Jelly or other skulking lubricants. When a Phillies pitcher, Kevin Gross, allowed sandpaper to fall out of his glove, he indignantly denied that he’d been doctoring the ball. No way! A great dad, he’d been employing idle dugout moments to fashion a little birdhouse for his daughter."

The great old Roger Angell is blogging the World Series, with better words and better memories than anybody else.

He's 93!

In case you don't want to take a pass on the Twittered glob of something-or-other, here's "'Giant booger' or rosin? Jon Lester says he doesn't have a cold."

"No place on earth celebrates the loogie quite like China does."

"At any given moment in China, there are millions of people hawking enormous globs of phlegm and expelling them in great cascading arcs until they splatter on streets and sidewalks. It’s done for medicinal reasons, a way of expelling bad elements from the body. The government has observed that westerners find the habit strange and more than a little icky and so they’ve undertaken a campaign to stifle the spitting. I can only hope that they fail. Having grown up in a loogie-sensitive culture, to suddenly encounter a nation of hurling spitballs is one of those up-is-down, black-is-white experiences that periodically makes traveling so gratifying. I should note that I mean that in the broad, philosophical sense and not as an endorsement of spitballs and the like."

Said Maarten Troost in 2008 in an interview about his then-newest book "Lost on Planet China," which I'm just noticing today along with his now-newest book "Headhunters on My Doorstep: A True Treasure Island Ghost Story" and his 2006 book "Getting Stoned with Savages: A Trip Through the Islands of Fiji and Vanuatu."

As you may know, I'm addicted to listening to audiobooks to get to sleep. (I use this small under-pillow speaker so Meade doesn't have to hear it.) I have about 100 audiobooks, but only about 10 of them are really any good for falling asleep. I've listened to some of the books hundreds of times because they work so well for me, for various reasons. I need a gentle voice. Fiction never works because it's always read dramatically on these recordings and because if you drift away from the thread of the story and come back it's hard to reconnect. It needs to be interesting sentence by sentence and also out of context. One of the books that has worked — over and over — is Troost's "The Sex Lives of Cannibals: Adrift in the Equatorial Pacific."

Looking for some new sleepable books, I saw there were 3 other books — with the same narrator — and I bought them all.

The quote at the top of the post might remind you of the chapter about China in David Sedaris's new book "Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls," which I also use, in audiobook form, for sleeping, even though its usefulness for that purpose is undercut by the musical bumpers between chapters and, in at least one chapter, noise from a live audience. Unlike Troost, Sedaris isn't enigmatically bemused about phlegm:

I saw wads of phlegm glistening like freshly shucked oysters on staircases and escalators. I saw them frozen into slicks on the sidewalk and oozing down the sides of walls. It often seemed that if people weren’t spitting they were coughing without covering their mouths, or shooting wads of snot out of their noses. This was done by plugging one nostril and using the other as a blowhole. “We Chinese think it’s best just to get it out,” a woman told me over dinner one night. She said that, in her opinion, it’s disgusting that a Westerner would use a handkerchief and then put it back into his pocket.

“Well, it’s not for sentimental reasons,” I told her. “We don’t hold on to our snot forever. The handkerchief’s mainly a sanitary consideration.”

The list of the adultress, the unfair headline, the "orgasm of life," the twice-seen movie, the arcane logo, and the corporate cult.

I'm no fan of adultery, but "Google mistress more into sex than 'love' and kids," trashing 26-year-old Amanda Rosenberg (who's linked to Google co-founder Sergey Brin), is an awfully unfair headline.

The NY Post has gathered its information about what Ms. Rosenberg is "into" from a lightweight blog post of hers titled "The 10 Least Inspiring Sentences on This Lululemon Tote." Here's the blog post, which has a picture of the begging-to-be-mocked tote bag. #1 on the list is "1. Children are the orgasm of life." Calling that sentence "uninspiring" — I'd call it a lot worse — is not taking the position that one is not "into" kids. The blog post ends with Rosenberg identifying herself as "a misanthropic Brit who lives in San Francisco and works in Silicon Valley," and "She's currently struggling to come to terms with Californian optimism and cannot believe someone actually wrote the sentence 'children are the orgasm of life.'"

Sounds about right to me.
I was in a Lululemon store the other day — just throwing away time while waiting for my ride after seeing a movie. (I saw "Blue Jasmine" a second time, on the theory that a second viewing would inspire me to write a blog post in the style of this 9-point list I did on "Doubt." But I didn't have that experience of details bursting out and themes connecting up that I'd expected based on loving the movie the first time and getting over an hour's worth of conversation out of it. Instead the movie on second viewing turned out to be exactly what I thought I saw the first time. Knowing the story in advance, I admired the sharp storytelling, done through expert writing and editing, but I didn't uncover any cool listables.)

I didn't know I was in Lululemon, because I didn't see that word anywhere, and I looked. I saw the logo, which I had to look up just now to determine that I was, in fact, inside the store whose handbag Amanda Rosenberg mocked. At the time, seeing the logo on the sign over the door...



... I thought "Omega?" (Ω.) At the Lululemon website now, I see:

The lululemon name was chosen in a survey of 100 people from a list of 20 brand names and 20 logos. The logo is actually a stylized "A" that was made for the first letter in the name "athletically hip", a name which failed to make the grade.

So... it doesn't look like an "A," and the store's name doesn't begin with "A." Is it supposed to feel like a secret club, like you're hip (athletically) if you get the logo? Is it somehow connected the way yoga is (sort of) religion, so replacing the name with a seemingly unrelated symbol — like the fish that means Jesus — delivers the vibe that you're entering a cult? Is it connected to "I am the alpha and the omega"?

I Google "lululemon cult" and get 218,000 results. "Lululemon's Cult Culture: Get Fit or Die Trying""

Lululemon wants you to know it's "elevating the world from mediocrity to greatness" and "creating components for people to live long, healthy and fun lives." But, dig deeper, and you'll learn about Landmark Forum, the ultra-secretive, eerily cultish educational series, which Lululemon employees are "strongly encouraged" to attend. Before you're in line for Landmark, you're bombarded with Brian Tracy motivational CDs and a book club that culminates with Atlas Shrugged.

"12 Utterly Bizarre Facts About The Rise Of Lululemon, The Cult-Like Yoga Brand":

The founder is an Ayn Rand fan and the company takes its values from Atlas Shrugged....

Wilson believes the birth control pill and smoking are responsible for high divorce rates—and the existence of Lululemon itself....

"A rare look at the luon empire of Lululemon/The story of a Vancouver business that inspires cult-like devotion":

Part of the initiation and training in the company, known as “on-boarding,” involves setting your vision and goals, referred to as one unit, “vision-and-goals,” in company parlance....

“You’re a whole brain, a whole body, a wholehearted person. You should be focusing on all these things. When your life is firing on all cylinders – so when home’s working, personal’s working, career’s working, health is working – you’re going to be great at work. It’s just going to happen,” [said  said Margaret Wheeler, senior vice-president of Human Resources (“People Potential”)].

"Lululemon: A Cult, a Phenomenon or Just a Great Brand":

Lululemon promotes its brand, its community and its culture with local events, some quite large in scale. In New York this September, an event entitled, “The Gospel of Sweat” was staged at Riverside Church inviting people to “Come together to build community, engage spirituality, and celebrate fitness!”

It's just a brand. Do you want your comfy clothes made out of cotton or synthetic fibers? It all depends on how much you sweat. Sweating sounds lowly, and there's religion(ishness) to elevate things. The Gospel of Sweat. But it's not religion. It's not religion because they obviously don't care about heresy.

And because Ayn Rand was a big old atheist. What's that "A" for again?

Which reminds me...



... do not commit adultery. It will expose all your old blog posts — and all your new movie scripts — to unsympathetic reinterpretation.

"I was suddenly intrigued: What could sensory deprivation do for me?"

"There are only a few places to float in New York City. I first tried La Casa, a day spa near Union Square, which features a tank in large part because co-owner Jane Goldman loves to float."

On a weekday morning, I climbed the stairs to La Casa, took off all my clothes, and, after showering, stepped into a large tub inside an enclosed chamber.

Reading between the lines: The water is reused. Sorry, even though you took a shower, this is icky. I'm not getting the luxury of this at all. Why not take a bath at home with the lights off until you are beyond bored?

The water and air in the float chamber are skin temperature, the darkness is identical with eyes open or closed, and there is no sound—thus there is no external input. In turn, my brain decelerated until its output also slowed, and then stopped. I was suspended in a place with no space, or time, or purpose. Once in a while, some quotidian thought would begin to surface at the edges—did I respond to that email?—and then bounce around in the lonely void of my skull for a moment or two. But it would soon melt away as my brain realized it didn’t care. Back to the void.

The author, Seth Stevenson — I just noticed I wasn't reading an article written by a woman — fails to mention the thought I know what it's like to be dead.

Here's the Wall Street Journal article that inspired Stevenson. The Journal offers some more info on the ickiness factor:

Many tanks today have robust sanitation and filtration systems that use ultraviolet light and hydrogen peroxide, and the centers test the solution regularly. The volume of clients determines how often the fluid is changed. Floaters are required to shower before entering the tanks, and have the option of wearing a bathing suit, though the centers recommend not wearing anything at all.

I just want to say I hope no one masturbates. When you're in the tank, does that idea bounce around in the lonely void of your skull for a moment and then melt away as your brain realizes it doesn't care?

But this is the Wall Street Journal, and the really important thought is: What kind of business is a "float center"? The tanks cost $10,000 and floaters pay something like $75 as session. A float-center owner is quoted saying: "It's not a super-profitable business, but you get a lot of hugs."

How do you feel about running a business where you "get a lot of hugs"? Is that alternative compensation or is that another negative (along with the need for robust sanitation and the changing of fluids)? Here's Stevenson's description of himself post-tanking: "I emerged in a profound daze. I spoke slowly and quietly, like a smooth-jazz DJ." That's what will be hugging you.... speaking of things one might like to be sensorily deprived of.

"[I]nfants whose parents sucked on their pacifiers to clean them developed fewer allergies..."

"... than children whose parents typically rinsed or boiled them. They also had lower rates of eczema, fewer signs of asthma and smaller amounts of a type of white blood cell that rises in response to allergies and other disorders."

ADDED: Saliva is underrated. From the chapter about spit in Mary Roach's "Gulp":

We are large, mobile vessels of the very substances we find most repulsive. Provided they stay within the boundaries of the self, we feel no disgust. They’re part of the whole, the thing we cherish most.

[University of Pennsylvania psychologist] Paul Rozin has given a lot of thought to what he calls the psychological microanatomy of the mouth: Where, precisely, is the boundary between self and nonself? If you stick your tongue out of your mouth while eating and then withdraw it, does the ensalivated food now disgust you? It does not. The border of the self extends the distance of the tongue’s reach. The lips too are considered an extension of the mouth’s interior, and thus are part of the self. Though culture shifts the boundaries. Among religious Brahmin Indians, writes Edward Harper, even the saliva on one’s own lips is considered “extremely defiling,” to the extent that if one “inadvertently touches his fingers to his lips, he should bathe or at the least change his clothes.”

The boundaries of the self are routinely extended to include the bodily substances of those we love. I’m going to let Rozin say this: “Saliva and vaginal secretions or semen can achieve positive value among lovers, and some parents do not find their young children’s body products disgusting.”

"Before he became the anti-junk-food mayor of New York City, Michael Bloomberg was a pioneer in the corporate provision of junk food."

"For decades, Bloomberg has made available to employees—at no charge—the entire contents of a convenience store. What started as coffee, chips, and cookies (snacks, not meals), quickly expanded to things that were like meals (fresh fruit, cereal and oatmeal for breakfast, cans of tuna fish, soup, and noodle packets for lunch)."

Writes Daniel Gross, in part of an argument that the IRS shouldn't add the value of food provided to employees to their taxable income. This food is "an instrument of social control."

Companies use people’s basic needs and desire to consume calories as a way of channeling their efforts toward the greater corporate good.

Does that really make food different from money, which is also used to energize and appease workers? One difference is that people eat different amounts of food and some — such as vegetarians — eat less expensive items. How would you calculate the value of the free food?

Notice that this issue heated up because of the high quality of the food in Silicon Valley workplaces:

A Gourmet magazine article last year raved about the "mouthwatering free food" at Google's headquarters in Mountain View, Calif. The article cited dishes such as porcini-encrusted grass-fed beef and noted that nearly half the produce was organic....

Facebook's headquarters in nearby Menlo Park, Calif., has two main cafes, plus a barbecue shack, a pizza shop, a burrito bar, and a 50s-style burger joint. Recent menu options at Facebook's Café Epic, which dishes up free food from morning until night, included spicy she-crab soup and grilled steak with chimichurri sauce.

By the way, how did "mouth-watering" ever come to be a standard way to describe something appetizing? It's an internally inconsistent word. It's not "mouth-watering" to picture a mouth watering. It's stomach-turning. Looking at the (unlinkable) OED, I see the word originally described the person who was slavering:

1779   H. Downman Lucius Junius Brutus v. iv. 124   Conscientious, babbling, sniveling, Mouth-watering knaves, who envy every man The dainty morsel they can't eat themselves.
1845   R. Ford Hand-bk. Travellers in Spain I. i. 67   The mouth-watering bystanders sigh, as they see and smell the rich freight steaming away from them.

In the early use as a description of the object of the drooler's desire, there is a connotation of disgust and disapproval: "1900   Speakers 3 Jan. 338/2   The White Star shareholders have made a most mouth-watering bargain."

I've changed the topic, and I'd like to go on in this vein (duct?). Bodily fluids are a bit of a theme on the blog today, and the language of saliva is truly interesting. Drool and slaver. Did you know that drool is derived from drivel? And slaver and slobber are basically the same word. Drool and slobber — the words with the letter o — convey a childishness or mental incompetence, while the o-less drivel and slaver seem better for criticizing a competent adult who's wasting our time or is dangerously greedy.

So if you don't like the direction this post has taken, call it drool, slobber, slaver, drivel.

1852   J. S. Blackie On Stud. Lang. 2   As it begins with dreams, so it must end in drivel.

Ah, that reminds me. We were talking about the government. The mouth-watering government.

"Eating boogers may actually be good for your health."

"Scott Napper came up with the idea during a lecture on molecules in mucus....The scientist says that exposing the body to the germs caught inside mucus might help build immunity."

"It might serve as almost a natural vaccination, if you will,” Napper told CTV. "Simply picking your nose and wiping it away, or blowing your nose, you might be robbing it of that opportunity."

I blogged about this topic years ago, but it's hard to find the old post because I avoided using any of the key words that would allow me to search for it now. Anyway, I'm surprised to see this presented as a new idea. I guess it's an idea that is continually contemplated and repressed. Plus it's hard to study. It's easy to come up with the hypothesis. But design the study and carry it out.

A rape case that went cold in 1978 is solved using the national DNA database.

The possessor of the DNA, now 64 years old, gets life in prison.

Solidarity Singers seek recognition as "Longest continuously running singing political protest."

"If the category sounds a little weird... The Guinness website features such idiosyncratic categories as: Longest singing marathon (by an individual): 105 hours."

This is a singing group — documented on this blog a few times — that assembles, sings for a while, then goes home, and comes back again another time. That's nothing like one person singing for 105 hours. That's just a singing group that meets regularly. I'll bet there's a singing group somewhere that has met regularly for half a century. The SS only go back to the Wisconsin protests of 2011.

This group is hungry for publicity, seeking publicity for applying to Guinness with a ludicrous proposal of a new category consisting of the particular thing that they have done and plumping up the category name with a silly misuse of the word "continuously."

The (unlinkable) OED defines "continuous" to mean "Characterized by continuity; extending in space without interruption of substance; having no interstices or breaks; having its parts in immediate connection; connected, unbroken."

ADDED: Here's my video from March 14, 2011, showing the singers, with shots of the songbook and real-time critique by me.



As I said at the time, this was "edited to heighten the absurdity of appropriating the civil rights song 'We Shall Overcome' (about not being free) and that 'Stickin' to the Union' song (about facing union-busting violence). ... The protests have been on behalf of well-paid people with excellent jobs — better jobs than the average Wisconsinite's....  I know they have their complaints, but they are not even the bottom sector of the Wisconsin economy."

What are mystery clouds?

In the tradition of "What’s a crash blossom?," I present this clipping from the Christian Science Monitor's front page:



The photograph with ominous clouds directs the mind to see "clouds" as a noun, but the story has nothing at all to do with clouds.

"If you'll take thunder and lightening, and a steamboat and a buzz-saw, and mix 'em up, and put 'em into a woman, that's jasm."

Wrote J.G. Holland in "Miss Gilbert's Career," published in 1860, the oldest historical use of the U.S. slang word "jasm," which means "Energy, spirit, ‘pep,'" according to the Oxford English Dictionary (which, unfortunately, I can't link to). I clicked on "jasm," because I was reading about the origin of the word "jazz," for an earlier post, where I noted that I had believed that the word "jazz" originally referred to sexual intercourse. That chronology is unlikely, according to the OED, and in fact, the word "jazz" first appeared in baseball.

But this "jasm" definition gives the etymology: "Apparently a variant of jism." Now, come on. That has to be sexual. But jism originally meant "energy, strength," going back to 1842:

1842   Spirit of Times 29 Oct. 409/3   At the drawgate Spicer tried it on again, but his horse was knocked up—‘the gism’ and the starch was effectively taken out of him by the long and desperate struggles he had been obliged to maintain.

1886   Harper's Mag. Sept. 579/2   The most shif'less creeter I ever see. Willin', but hain't no more jas'm than a dead corn-stalk.

But the second meaning is "semen, sperm," as old as 1899 ("Often regarded as a taboo-word"):

1899   B. W. Green Word-bk. Virginia Folk-speech 85   Chism, chissum, seminal fluid.

If it's a taboo word, with that meaning, it would be less likely to appear in print. In fact, the OED doesn't have another example of the semen meaning until 1959 when — speaking of taboo — William S. Burroughs had the nerve to write: "The Moslems must have blood and jissom... See, see where Christ's blood streams in the spermament."

Anyway, speaking of jasm/jism, "spunk" is a similar word. It could be used to describe a Mary-Tyler-Moore-style woman, referring to "Spirit, mettle; courage, pluck," which the OED traces back to 1773 in Oliver Goldsmith's  "She Stoops to Conquer." ("The 'Squire has got spunk in him.")  And it can mean "Seminal fluid," going back to 1890's "My Secret Life." ("It seemed to me scarcely possible, that the sweet, well dressed, smooth-spoken ladies..could let men put the spunk up their cunts.")

The OED informs us that this use of "spunk" is "coarse slang," and adds, enticingly, "For the sense development, compare the obs. slang mettle, which had the same meaning.." Mettle!

"Mettle" goes way back, meaning "A person's character, disposition, or temperament; the ‘stuff’ of which one is made, regarded as an indication of one's character" or "A person's spirit; courage, strength of character; vigour, spiritedness, vivacity." Shakespeare used "mettle" in "Twelfth Night": "I am one, that had rather go with sir Priest, then sir knight: I care not who knowes so much of my mettle." But when did the semen meaning kick in? Was Shakespeare making a jism joke? Ah, but in fact, the OED has led me into a blind alley, because no semen meaning for "mettle" even appears.

There's also the word "jizz," which the OED defines only as "The characteristic impression given by an animal or plant," as in:

1922   T. A. Coward Bird Haunts & Nature Memories 141   A West Coast Irishman was familiar with the wild creatures which dwelt on or visited his rocks and shores; at a glance he could name them, usually correctly, but if asked how he knew them would reply ‘By their “jizz”.’ What is jizz?..We have not coined it, but how wide its use in Ireland is we cannot say... Jizz may be applied to or possessed by any animate and some inanimate objects, yet we cannot clearly define it. A single character may supply it, or it may be the combination of many....
1950   Brit. Birds XLIII. 29   Miss Quick obviously looks at her birds more than once and does so with an artist's eye for those peculiarities of shape, outline and stance which give a species its ‘jizz’....
1966   D. McClintock Compan. Flowers ix. 117,   I know only too well the problem of trying to express what there is in a plant that enables me, or you, to tell it from another at sight. The word I use for these intangible characteristics, that defy being put into words, is jizz.

A useful word, and yet you can't use it like that in the United States.

***

In case you want to read more, here's the William S. Burroughs's book quoted above, "Naked Lunch." That's "The Restored Text," which, oddly enough, is #25 on Amazon's list "Books > Humor & Entertainment > Humor > Self-Help & Psychology." What?! Somehow "Naked Lunch" makes it onto a list that includes Mitch Albom's "The Five People You Meet in Heaven" and "He's Just Not That Into You: The No-Excuses Truth to Understanding Guys." Well, I'm interested in understanding guys. But I'm only buying "Naked Lunch." As long as I'm ending with a few Amazon links, though, and the subject of William S. Burroughs has come up, let me recommend an audio recording I've played 100s of times: "Dead City Radio."

"That's how you laughed in the middle of the night."

Said Meade, and I said: "Then Chip Ahoy must have been in my dream."

Because I was just reading his comment: "Melody and Rose broke up the Sweedish contractors and threw change in the tip jar and put on her warm magic apron."

And I laughed not because that is nonsense, but because it's a quite brilliant contribution to a conversation that was pretty far along at that point, including betamax3000's extended interpretation of "The White Album." Beta had said:

Like the White Album perhaps Althouse is telling us there are secret messages to be found, backwards.

"Sweetly up broke voice, her rose melody."

"Upon magic human warm her of little."

"Out tipped change."

It all began with a sentence from "The Great Gatsby," which was about — not a woman laughing — a woman singing. But women laugh all the time in "The Great Gatsby." For example: "She looked at me and laughed pointlessly."

"These 'Gatsby' posts are becoming the new café around here" — "café" posts are open threads  — I say as I drink my coffee and contemplate today's Gatsby sentence, which I'd said will be "I knew the other clerks and young bond-salesmen by their first names, and lunched with them in dark, crowded restaurants on little pig sausages and mashed potatoes and coffee."

I picked that sentence after searching my Kindle copy of "Gatsby" for "potato" after betamax3000 said:

Yesterday was "gulp down the incomparable milk of wonder," today is "tipped out a little of her warm human magic." Is it getting hot in here or is it just me?

And that was funny, because — before getting out of bed this morning — I'd been toying with the idea of saying: In that "Melody rose" sentence, Fitzgerald intended us to think of semen when we read about "warm human magic" that tipped out of the vessel that is the woman.
 
And betamax added:

My God: if we get to the sentence involving Daisy, the potato and the gardener I just don't know what is going to happen.

Which is what had me looking for "potato" in "Gatsby," not finding it, and suspecting that betamax was making a canny reference to "Lady Chatterly's Lover." I buy "Lady Chatterly's Lover" in Kindle just so I can search for "potato"! My literary pursuits are a tad — a tot — bizarre. I find:

"No; my heart's as numb as a potato, my penis droops and never lifts its head up, I dare rather cut him clean off than say 'shit!' in front of my mother or my aunt... they are real ladies, mind you; and I'm not really intelligent, I'm only a 'mental-lifer.'"

And:

"I don't want to fuck you at all. My heart's as cold as cold potatoes just now."

"Craigslist sperm donor forced to pay child support to lesbian couple - despite giving up parental rights to the baby BEFORE she was born."

How sympathetic are you to this man's argument?

Why should the father of a child ever be allowed to contract out of responsibility for it? If he is, why shouldn't the state control the extent to which this is permitted? Whatever you think of the mother, what about the child?