My Life in the LHC (Large Hadron Collider)

In the Belly of the Beast is Jack Abbott’s confessional about the life of crime that eventually earned him an all-expenses-paid return trip to prison, where he  finally committed suicide. My Life in the LHC recounts a similarly turbulent narrative. It starts with the collision of two protons in the Large Hadron Collider operated by CERN under the Swiss-French border. Told from the point of view of a Higgs boson, a particle that may, in fact, not even exist, My Life in the LHC introduces the reader to a new kind of underworld that is a far cry from the violent one represented by artistic criminals like Abbott and criminal artists like Norman Mailer. Mailer and Abbott shared an affinity for stabbing. Mailer stabbed his wife after announcing his candidacy for the mayoralty of New York, while Abbott’s return to prison was precipitated by an altercation with a waiter in an East Village establishment called the Binibon on the eve of receiving a laudatory review in The Times for In the Belly of the Beast. Book publishing and politics are both tough rackets, and perhaps the real moral of the story lies in the question of publicity. How far will an author or politician go when it comes to publicizing himself?

   

Of course, the author of My Life in the LHC didn’t have the kind of opportunities open to sociopaths like Mailer and Abbott in that it was only a subatomic particle whose non-existent mass meant that it would have relatively little pull—or gravitas. But My Life in the LHC is still a riveting story in the way that it plays upon Warhol’s idea that everyone has 15 minutes of fame. Here our hero’s fame lasts only a millionth of a second, but within that time, the narrator lives a life that is one of the great thrill rides of the century, something that makes the Coney Island Cyclone seem pathetic by comparison.  My life in the LHC reads like an accelerated On the Road. My Life in the LHC is, in this regard, a quintessentially American tale, told by an idiot and signifying nothing. Its great truth lies in the interstices, in the little turns in the tunnel, in the feats of engineering, and in the big magnets, which martyr themselves for the sake of science. 

Annals of Phallocentrism: Volume XXV, Number 2 (Spring/Summer 2010)

If you go to your local search engine and enter “plastic surgery to lengthen penis,” you will learn that there is a procedure performed by a Canadian surgeon named Robert H. Stubbs, who is a descendent of the famous British painter George Stubbs. Dr. Stubbs’s work is based on a procedure discovered by a Chinese surgeon, Dr. Long, who first applied it in l984 to deal with a young man whose penis had been bitten by a dog. Phalloplasty, as it is called, is also performed by a urologist named Dr. Whitehead at Mr. Sinai.  A Dr. Giunta, from an outfit called Aesthetic Plastic Surgery International of Alexandria Virginia, provides a series of before-and-after images of men who have undergone a similar procedure. (Dr. Giunta’s practice also performs gynecomastias, which is surgery for men with overdeveloped breasts.) The site is very graphic and, shockingly, the “after” shots don’t seem that much better than the “before." Bigger is usually, but not always, better. A Wikipedia article on the subject mentions microphalli (small penises) and several non-surgical techniques used for penis enhancement. Some of these techniques are: jelqing, a form of muscular exercise, clamping (cock ring or related device), stretching, and hanging.

   

What is the significance of penile enlargement as a subject? On the most basic level, it is something that many men consider regardless of their endowment. Chekhov reputedly said, “Dissatisfaction lies at the heart of every great talent.” It also is quite simply la condition humaine. People are never satisfied with what they have. Another reason for putting penile enhancement on the table is the passage of President Obama’s health plan. It is unlikely that cosmetic surgery will ever be part of any universal health care plan. Norway is one of the wealthiest countries on the planet, and certainly a hot spot for medical tourists, but let’s take the hypothetical case of Sven Wayne Bobbit getting his penis cut off by an angry Oslo lover; it’s unlikely that his cure would be covered by the socialized medicine offered to citizens of that country.

Reality Bites

What if someone took David Shields's Reality Hunger, a nonfiction screed about appropriation made up entirely of other authors’ sentences, and simply appropriated it? But doesn’t reality sometimes trump the best fictional offerings? For instance, Saturday’s Times reported the case of a 16-year-old New Jersey boy who was arrested for "activating a public-address system in a Wal-Mart store … and ordering 'all black people' to leave.” What is one to do with a piece of news like this? Is it a failure of education, a litmus test about in-grown racism and prejudice in our society, or does the incident merely illustrate the weaknesses of the store’s intercom, as some Wal-Mart executives apparently believe? “The store’s parent company … issued a statement saying it had modified its intercom system at the store to prevent such breaches,” the Times piece said. 

On Tuesday, the Times reported on the death of Wolfgang Wagner, the longtime director of the Bayreuth Festival. Katharina Wagner was Wolfgang’s daughter by his second wife, Gudrun. She had produced a partially nude Meistersinger at Bayreuth, which was booed by audiences. Along with half-sister Eva—the Times reported the two as not having "spoken to each other in many years”—Katharina was appointed to run the festival in 2008. The festival has long bent over backwards to distance itself from implications of Nazi leanings, due to Hitler’s renowned love for Wagner. (The Times reported in the same obit that Wolfgang's mother Winifred Wagner, “an ardent anti-Semite,” gave Hitler “the writing paper on which he composed ‘Mein Kampf.’”) Maybe Katharina should produce an opera at Bayreuth based on a genocidal 16-year-old let loose in an American discount store. After all, we’ve already had an opera about Jerry Springer, and a forthcoming opera about Enron is in the works. What better way for Bayreuth to finally expiate the sins of the past!

The Human Scale

Lawrence Wright is a writer for The New Yorker who recently performed his piece, The Human Scale, at Joe’s Pub. Based on Wright’s November 9 New Yorker article “Captives,” The Human Scale deals with the aftermath of the kidnapping of the Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit. (Wright is also the author of a book about Al Queda called The Looming Tower.) Bertholt Brecht, whose plays have been a signature of the Public Theater over the years (Meryl Streep starred in Mother Courage back in 2006), epitomized the conjunction of politics and theater. What is unusual about Wright’s approach is that it’s the conjunction of journalism and theater, replete with a video backdrop and Wright’s attempts to capture the accents of Palestinian and Israeli subjects. Magazine articles sometimes become the subjects of movies, but they are rarely developed as monologues. What is also unusual about Wright’s screed is that it’s an impassioned plea for equanimity. Passion usually tends to be one-sided. Twenty years ago, Gazans were living and working in Israel; there were tensions, but there was also a de facto reciprocity between the two societies. Now, in the aftermath of the Shalit hostage-taking, the firing of missiles into Israel by Hamas, and the Israeli army’s response, Gaza has been reduced to rubble, its citizens taken hostage by an act of hostage-taking. There could have been other solutions, Wright maintains, but the kidnapping served a perverse purpose, in that it facilitated the kind of polarization that nourishes extremism. 

The Lives of our Leaders: Why Does Obama Smoke?

If you are the President of the United States, you want to set an example, especially for the nation’s school children, who often see your face in the very classrooms in which they learn.  No president since Teddy Roosevelt has been more aware of his responsibility to the nation’s children than Barack Obama, just as no president was less aware than Bill Clinton, particularly in his attitude towards cigars. But Obama has been torn between his desire to do good and his desire to be cool. As must be plain by this point in his presidency, Obama is a bit of a Francophile. For starters, it's obvious that we can add his name to the list of Carla Bruni idolators. How do we know this? Because of the fact that ever since the Obamas started to socialize with the Sarkozys, Barack has been trying to make Michelle in Carla’s image. Michelle’s inauguration gown is only one case in point, her J. Crew outfits notwithstanding. Of course underneath this veneer of polite emulation is a seething desire to serve croque monsieur, pommes frites, salade lyonnaise, steak au poivre, and fromage at state dinners. It is understandable Obama would prefer baguettes to Wonder bread, though it took a dose of wonder and a ton of bread to get his health care plan passed in congress. But recent interviews with those who knew Obama during his years as a Columbia undergraduate recall an impassioned lover of early French cinema, in particular JeanVigo’s L’Atalante and Zéro de conduite and Jean Renoir’s La Grande Illusion and La Règle du jeu. Obama reputedly walked down Broadway from Columbia to see these flicks at a famous art-house cinema called the Thalia. In these films, all the major characters have Gauloises, the popular French cigarette, dangling from their mouths. It has even been rumored that Obama had the famous picture of Albert Camus, the author of L’Etranger, with a cigarette hanging from the side of his mouth, in his dorm room. Obama has definitely tried to control his smoking for the sake of America’s youth, but once he finishes his second term, he will undoubtedly be found wearing a beret on the Quai d’Orsay, cigarette smoke rising in curls from his Gauloise. Maybe Obama will even use the proceeds from his biographies to set up a book stall along the Seine, as generations of French smokers with berets have done. They say when Obama was a young man, André Malraux, author of Man’s Fate and Hope, and a statesman and lover in his own right, was another of his heroes. There must be plenty of pictures of Malraux with a cigarette hanging from the side of his mouth.

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Perfect Nonsense

Mark Mitton is a meta-magician, a sorcerer’s apprentice. He is interested in how the mind makes patterns in a pre-conscious way. Magic is like mimesis—a revolution in the history of thinking. The magician, Mitton points out, must always understand what his subject is thinking. In this sense, his theme is epistemology. He teaches cause and effect to scientists and artists alike, and he is a figure in Manhattan’s nightlife, being a regular at Serge Becker’s exclusive club, The Box. Mitton wears a bow tie and suit and slicks his hair across his forehead like an English don. He’s a Haverford graduate who was born in Canada.

In one trick, he convinces the spectator a wine glass is falling through another, when it’s just a matter of timing and lowering. But is this a theory of mind, or a theory of the autonomic central nervous system? Consider the hypno-disk. During a recent performance at a Soho loft, he asked everyone to stare at an object that looks like one of the dream sequences designed by Salavador Dali for Spellbound, the classic Hitchcock film that also deals with illusion and reality. After staring into the twirling disc for thirty seconds, the audience was asked to turn their attention to Stuart Firestein, a biologist from Columbia who specializes in olfaction and has worked with Mitton in other performances that combine science and prestidigitation. Those in the audience who had never taken mushrooms or LSD experienced what seemed like a hallucination out of Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, as their contracted eye muscles unwound and Firestein’s head appeared to explode—an unforgettable moment that would inevitably make its way into dreams.

There was another trick.  Mitton is very democratic and freely gives away selected secrets. Everyone got a bag. The sound of an imaginary ball falling, he revealed, can be created snapping fingers against the side of the bag. Mitton does for magic what Derrida did for literature. He deconstructs while remaining one step ahead of his patient, so that despite all reason, a large element of irrationality, and hence awe, still prevail. “It’s got to make perfect nonsense,” he said, invoking the famous quote about the structure of comedy. 

Peyronie's in the Sky

On March 16, The New York Times reported on FDA approval of Xiaflex, a medicine that combats Dupuytren’s contracture, in which gnarled fingers cannot be flexed. According to the Times, a host of celebrated talents, including Ronald Reagan and Samuel Beckett, were not able to straighten their fingers. It’s too bad they were born too soon to enjoy the benefits of Xiaflex. But Xiaflex also has other uses, to wit the treatment of Peyronie’s disease, which causes an abnormal curvature of the penis.

Viagra was originally a treatment for angina, but it went on to offer succor to an oft-underserved female organ that happens to rhyme with angina. Similarly, the successful treatment of Peyronie’s, a condition that may have led to Bill Clinton’s impeachment proceedings, was a byproduct of trying to help those who were too crippled to effectively give the finger. Can you imagine getting mad at a New York City cab driver and only being able to give him the curlicue? Actually, Peyronie’s is a bane to some and a badge of honor to others. There are women who look for Peyronie sufferers in sex boutiques, since the Peyronie’s patient (known by connoisseurs as a Pyromaniac) possesses talents that only the most refined of dildos have been crafted to duplicate. The Times article pointed out that Xiaflex will not be cheap, at an estimated $5400 a throw. However, the effects can be life changing, particularly if you are the president of a superpower. Many women who might otherwise have been fodder for the indiscretions of the executive branch have been forced to disagree with Sigmund Freud's “sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.” Now, much to everyone’s relief, cigars can be cigars, and penises don’t have to go to rehab to get straightened out.