Scrotum
Tightening
Just in
time for Bloomsday, the British publisher Picador has issued a new
"reader-friendly" edition of Ulysses in Europe, and scholars are
declaring it a travesty. The 10,000 alleged improvements include punctuating
Molly Bloom's famous monologue and rewriting knotty sentences. Some of editor
Danis Rose's changes may seem merely cosmetic--the famous evocation of the
"scrotumtightening sea," for example, appears as "scrotum-tightening." But, as
a reviewer in the Irish Times noted, adding that hyphen "loses the contractive
effect on the male appendages of an early-morning dip." Indignant Joyceans also
quarrel with Rose for fiddling with Joyce's use of dialect (substituting "Cor
blimey" for "God blimey") and slicing the "Oxen of the Sun" chapter into 11
separate sections. Perhaps the most vocal critic has been Boston University's
John Kidd, who in 1988 also exposed legions of errors in Hans Walter Gabler's
so-called "Corrected Text" of Ulysses . Kidd's own seven-volume Norton
edition of Ulysses is due out next year.
Nabokov's
Blues
Vladimir
Nabokov's taxonomies of Latin American butterflies, long disparaged as armchair
entomology, turn out to be top-drawer science, according to a recent article in
the New York Times . In the 1940s, the émigré novelist held a part-time
job at Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology and published the first
attempted classification of an obscure group of blue butterflies known as
Polyommatini . For years, Nabokov's study attracted more attention from
literary critics than from scientists. But in 1993, lepidopterists Kurt Johnson
and Zsolt Balint embarked on a new study of the butterflies, and then compared
their results with Nabokov's. The duo's findings are published in "Nabokov as
Lepidopterist: An Informed Appraisal," in the current issue of Nabokov
Studies . Of the seven generic names established by Nabokov, five were
deemed still valid, and the two mistakes could be attributed to his not having
had enough samples. In recognition of this achievement, the lepidopterists have
christened some recently discovered specimens of the Polyommatini with
Nabokovian names, such as Madeleinea lolita .
Suicidal
Tendencies
Using the
same data, the nation's two leading medical journals have reached opposite
conclusions on the consequences of legalizing assisted suicide. Last winter,
the New England Journal of Medicine surveyed more than 5,000 doctors in
the Netherlands and found that, despite euthanasia-friendly laws, the country
had experienced no significant upswing in doctor-assisted deaths. An
accompanying editorial argued that the Dutch experience should alleviate
fears that legalizing assisted suicide would lead to "widespread involuntary
euthanasia" performed on society's weakest members. A new report in the
Journal of the American Medical Association, however, looks
at the same questionnaires and claims that doctor-assisted deaths in the
Netherlands have in fact skyrocketed--by 27 percent over the past five years.
The questionnaires also revealed, JAMA says, that an alarming number of
physicians had administered fatal doses of painkillers to "fully competent"
patients without their approval. Now each journal is accusing the other of
masking political commentary as science. For more on the assisted-suicide
issue, see Slate's "Dialogue."
The
Showalter Fan Club
Princeton
English Professor Elaine Showalter's recent polemic, Hystories: Hysterical
Epidemics and Modern Media , argues that such supposedly organic illnesses
as Chronic Fatigue and Gulf War syndromes are simply psychological disorders.
The claim has so angered Chronic Fatigue Syndrome sufferers that they've turned
out in large numbers to heckle Showalter on her book tour. They've also erected
a Web
Site devoted to debunking Showalter's arguments. One section, called
"Handling
Showalter," suggests questions for sufferers to ask the author when she
swings by their local bookshop, such as: "Is Elaine projecting? Isn't it true
that those who have emotional problems often project their problems onto
others? And so, aren't you yourself doing this?" Other recommended questions
include: "Are you psychiatric?" and "How well is Elaine?" On another page,
which features testimonies from people who've had run-ins with Showalter, one
Washington, D.C., contributor recounts asking the professor to sign his copy of
the book--with an apology.
Baby
Talk
A recent
article in Science
claimed to rebut Noam Chomsky's theory that our capacity for language is
hard-wired in a particular--and uniquely human--module of the brain. Last
December, three cognitive psychologists at the University of Rochester played
two-minute audiotapes consisting of short nonsense words (such as "bidakupado")
for a group of 8-month-old babies. The infants, they found, listened longer to
subsequent tapes that didn't contain these words than to those that
did--suggesting the babies had "learned" the words. According to the Rochester
team, the findings suggest that our language-learning abilities may have to do
with our general cognitive prowess, not with any particular language "module."
But a gallery of letters published in the May 23 issue of Science says this finding hardly undermines Chomskyan linguistics.
MIT's Steven Pinker argues that the Rochester researchers fail to comprehend
that "learning words and learning grammar are ... different computational
problems." In other words, it's not our vocabularies but our ability to string
words together that is a distinctively human evolutionary adaptation.
Veritas
Last week, Harvard University
owned up to some embarrassing real-estate deals. Over the past eight years, the
school acquired over $88 million of real estate in the Allston section of
Boston without revealing its identity to prospective sellers. At first, Harvard
officials excused the ploy by saying that if community members had known they
were dealing with an institution worth $9 billion, they would have demanded
exorbitant premiums. After the Boston Globe and Boston Mayor Tommy
Menino raised a ruckus, however, Harvard's communications director admitted
that the school had committed a "breach of trust," and promised to be more "up
front" in future maneuvers.
--Compiled by the editors of Lingua Franca, The Review of Academic
Life . Click here
to visit their site or to subscribe.
