Kinsey's
Kinky Stuff
Indiana
University Press is publishing The Art of Desire: Erotic Treasures From the
Kinsey Institute , an exhibition catalog accompanying the first survey of
the erotica collected by the institute over the past 50 years. The book,
complete with 49 illustrations, follows closely on the heels of James H. Jones'
hostile biography of Alfred Kinsey and seems designed, in part, to counter the
bad impression left by that book. While the catalog does contain some
potentially controversial material, such as Hungarian artist Rezso Merényi's
Mouse Kiss , a 1922 etching of "a grand-scale vagina juxtaposed with two
mice," the selection, made by the Kinsey Institute itself, mostly highlights
the highbrow elements of the collection, such as a Chagall lithograph
displaying some mild buttock fondling. In order to "sustain a celebratory
tone," write the curators, "representations of certain sexual practices or
fantasies (those judged by common consensus pathological) were ruled
inappropriate for our overarching agenda." The truly weird stuff can be seen
only by appointment. (Here's the Kinsey Institute's Web site.)
It Isn't
All Relative
Recent
discoveries prove that Albert Einstein was indeed the first to explicate the
general theory of relativity. Historians of science have long questioned
whether Einstein truly discovered the idea, or whether the honor goes to
Göttingen mathematician David Hilbert, who submitted a paper on the subject
five days before Einstein turned in his work. Though Einstein's paper was
published first, Hilbert maintained that he was the first to have solved some
key field equations. Einstein, furious, charged Hilbert with plagiarism.
Einstein was right. Hilbert's proofs, found this July at the Max Planck Institute in
Berlin, reveal that crucial steps were missing at the time of his submission,
which were filled in only after Einstein's paper came out. In an article in
Science , the research team that scrutinized the drafts concludes that
Hilbert "revised his paper in response to Einstein's work." It's the second big
blow to Hilbert's legacy: His audacious attempt to ground all mathematics in a
finite number of axioms was upended by Gödel's incompleteness theorem in
1931.
Mine
Kampf
A British
mining concern has discovered that 1.5 million tons of coal lie buried beneath
Newstead Abbey, the family estate of Lord Byron. The company is poised to begin
digging on the dilapidated Nottinghamshire property. Byron scholars are
concerned that the fragile 800-year-old structure (purchased by the Byron
family from Henry VIII in 1540) might collapse if the excavation proceeds. The
strongest protests come not from British scholars, however, but from Greek
ones. Byron, who led the Greek armed forces in their fight for independence
against the Ottoman Turks in 1824, is considered a national hero in Greece.
Scholars at the University of Athens are leading the campaign to protect the
abbey's romantic ruins. In response, Midlands Mining promises that no harm will
come to the abbey, which provided a moody backdrop to both Childe Harold
and Don Juan .
Body
Conscious
The hot
topic at the Modern Language Association meeting this year will be Disability
Studies. Scholars in the field decode and debunk the literary tropes that
rhetorically separate "normal" from "abnormal" bodies. Essays to be delivered
at the conference, which will take place this December in Toronto, include
"Oliver Sacks: The P.T. Barnum of the Postmodern World" and "Of Angels and
Pig-Faced Ladies: Disordering Victorian Desire." Much as feminists champion
The Awakening and lesbian-studies scholars vaunt The Well of
Loneliness , disability-studies scholars promise to uncover a slew of
founding texts written by the differently abled. One such work is the
long-forgotten 1841 memoir A Narrative of the Experience and Sufferings of
William Dodd, a Factory Cripple, Written By Himself . A graduate student
from the University of California at Irvine will present an analysis of the
Londoner's autobiography at the conference.
Early
Music
An
approximately 50,000-year-old fragment of bear bone, found at an excavated
Neanderthal hunting camp in present-day Slovenia in 1995, may be the oldest
known musical instrument. It contains four circular punctures that eerily evoke
a flute. Paleontologist Ivan Turk, who discovered the bone, recently told
Scientific American that the four holes are "really well rounded and
just about the right separation for humans to put their finger on." And Bob
Fink, a Canadian musicologist, thinks the hole spacing proves that the
bone-flute was "inescapably diatonic," suggesting that the eight-tone "Western
scale" may be much older than we thought. (His analysis
is posted on the Web.) Based on the fragment, Fink speculates that the original
flute contained at least six holes and was close to 16 inches long. Not all
anthropologists agree. T. Temple Tuttle, an ethnomusicologist at Cleveland
State University, feels the holes conform to "a number of scales," including
the South Indian system.
The
Empire Strikes Back
A
book-review editor at Science says she was pressured to retire this past
summer after she published a negative review of a book that claimed to defend
science from postmodern critiques. The review was of Higher Superstition:
The Academic Left and Its Quarrels With Science , written by biologist Paul
Gross and mathematician Norman Levitt. The article's author, Smithsonian
curator Paul Forman, accused Gross and Levitt of trying to place "science back
on its pre-postmodern pedestal." After the review was published, Science
received a flood of angry telephone calls and letters, according to the editor
in question, Katherine Livingston. (George Mason University's James Trefil, for
instance, complained that Forman "gets into material he does not appear to
understand. ... You couldn't possibly have published a better parody of what
passes for scholarship in the postmodern world.") In an interview with the
Chronicle for Higher Education , Levitt took credit for launching the
letter-writing campaign: "I was mad as hell that such an irresponsible review
had run in Science ," he said. After reading the complaints,
Science editor in chief Floyd Bloom formally reprimanded Livingston and
took away control of the book-review section.
Earth
Loses Its Balance
Geologists say that the
concept of continental drift may need to be revised to account for some sudden
reshufflings that took place in Earth's past. Basing their theories on evidence
found in magnetite grains in Australian bedrock, researchers at Caltech posit
that 550 million years ago, continents at the poles scooted toward the equator
while equatorial continents shimmied to the poles, all within a mere 15 million
years. (Typically, a continental shift takes much longer to complete.) What
caused the flip-flop? The stability lent by two opposing supercontinents,
Gondwanaland and Rodinia, was disrupted when Rodinia began to fracture. Earth's
balance was thrown off, and a massive migration was required to regain
planetary equanimity. Joseph Kirschvink, a Caltech geophysicist, suggests that
this upheaval may have enhanced the workings of evolution. "Each time you
disrupt an ecosystem, you break it into small communities, where evolution
works fastest," Kirschvink told Discover .
