Method-ology
As a miffed scientist, I wish to register my
protestations about Timothy Noah's "." Your Intdis Index is an accounting
system; it has nothing to do with the scientific method. The scientific method
is about hypothesis testing and experimentation. Simply giving things numerical
values is not science.
I can understand your
wanting to shame the Wall Street Journal with some semblance of
mathematical rigor, but Lord knows we poor scientists have to defend ourselves
against enough nonsense posing as science ("Mister Chairman, how can that 10
year study show us anything about bears when my cousin told me he never saw a
bear in his life?").
--Kate Wing
Washington
Personal Non
Grata
"" wonders if the
principal investigator for the research project on the effect of women's work
on young children and the journalist who reported the story in the Washington Post , themselves, have
young children and worked outside the home. But the Los Angeles Times
lead story was about another research finding (air pollution in Southern
California), and we did not learn whether the researchers and journalists
involved live in L.A. Newspapers continually report on cancer research or heart
disease without telling us if the reporters ever had those diseases, or if they
or any member of their immediate family is an albino lab rat, and so on.
--John Haaga
Bethesda, Md.
Does He or Doesn't
She?
If Tinky Winky (see "")
has no explicit gender, how do you know that the handbag, tutu, and so on
aren't veiled signals that Tinky is female?
-- Pete Wright
Akron, Ohio
Jacob Weisberg
replies: I didn't say the Teletubbies have no gender, because they do. Two are
ostensibly male (Tinky Winky and Dipsy), and two are ostensibly female (Laa Laa
and Po). I said they have no intended sexual orientation.
Choose and
Lose
I adore intellectual parlor games as much as the
next girl. But Jacob Weisberg's "" seems to be offered up as genuine critical
insight rather than as the "cocktail chatter" it is. Like all dichotomies,
Apollonian vs. Dionysian is limited as a means of ordering the world. It's like
putting a filter over a camera lens: Some colors are heightened, but others are
completely obscured, and the final result may bear no resemblance to reality.
Labeling Matisse a "cool, calm, Northern European" and Picasso as a "hot,
temperamental Spaniard" is that kind of distortion (not to mention ethnic
stereotyping of the most trivial and annoying sort). Do Picasso's "blue period"
paintings really strike one as "hot" and "temperamental"?
Do the terms apply to a work's form or its content?
I was especially amused by the Dickinson/Whitman dichotomy. Dickinson's poetry
is simply too weird, and yes, sexual (talk about images of "ecstatic release"),
to fit comfortably into a category whose hallmarks are deemed to be "measure,
reason, and control." Yes, you can sing just about every one of Dickinson's
poems to the tune of "I'd Like To Teach the World To Sing" (try it, it's fun),
but that kind of surface-level orderliness is undermined by the speaker's
disconcerting propensity to topple into the abyss, whether prompted by union
with God, union with the beloved, or union with death. If a work is "about"
"abandon, irrationality, and ecstatic release," but its execution displays
"measure, reason, and control" --one might place any number of baroque operas
in this category, for instance, or Nathaniel Hawthorne, for that matter.
Equally annoying is the
assertion that we are all either Matisse or Picasso people, or Stones or
Beatles people. Many of my older acquaintances have little tolerance for
any of them, while I would never be able to make a "desert island"
choice between them--really. Besides, "Sympathy for the Devil" only seems
darker and more subterranean than "Girl."
--Kathleen R.
O'Connell
New York City
