Love does not consist in gazing at each other, but in looking together in the same direction.
Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Proustian nostalgia.

Jo reminded me of the potency of places when she posted a a photograph of this Brocktonian bar we visited. Evocative? Yes. Ornery? Absolutely. I'll be back...

New Year's resolutions.

Emma Taylor and Lorlei Sharkley, advice columnists for Nerve, suggest the following resolutions for the new year.
1. Resolve to tell him you love the size, shape, and personality of his member, because there's nothing he can do to change it. (If you give it a name, we don't need to know, thanks.)
2. If you say you'll call, then call. And don't wait more than four days to do it. (By the way, if they don't call, chances are they didn't lose your number, and they probably didn't hit their head and end up in the hospital with amnesia either. So just let it go.)
3. Don't cheat. We're never going to give you advice on how to get away with it.
4. Educate yourself about STDs, because whatever you think you know, it's not enough. Get tested for STDs regularly. Fess up if you've got one. And don't freak out if a potential partner fesses up to one: More than one in three people in this country will get some kind of STD during their lifetime, so it's not that big a deal. Be grateful that they're probably just more honest and more informed than most of your luvvers.
5. Just ask them out already. Who cares if they say no? Go for it. We promise, when you're on your deathbed, asking out Sandy from Accounting will not be one of the big regrets of your life.
6. If you're not in the mood, explain why, as gently as possible, so they don't develop an inferiority complex.
7. If you asked the person out, you pay for the date. Otherwise, assume you're going dutch.
8. If you're not sure how your partner is feeling, open up your mouth and ASK THEM. If you're not sure how your partner likes their sex, open up your mouth and ASK THEM. If you want your partner to know how you're feeling or how you like your sex, open up your mouth and TELL THEM (nicely, please).
9. Don't discount the short guys. Or the nice guys. Or the plump girls. Or the lawyers.
10. Visit our wishlist.



I, for one, resolve to do the following:
1. Quit smoking.
2. Learn to tango very, very well.
3. Think with my senses; preface each noun with "succulent".
4. Read less and live more.
5. Listen to more Alan Berg.

Kenneth Carroll's "elaborate signings"


"women are the sweetness of life."


poets can build galaxies from pebbles
& breathe the word of life into brief glances,
but one must be careful with the power of creation
so i scribble an obligatory, struggling to keep from
staining the page with the exaggeration of new passion,
unsure if i am simply the writer who lives downstairs,
plays his coltrane too loud & likes thunderstorms


i take a trip one flight up
where your eyes escort me to another country,
your touch becomes a wet kiss on the horizon
of a birthday in a warm july
i travel to your smile to hear stories of
wrecked trains parked in your dining room


but the past is a vulgar thief
it steals the laughter from your eyes,
tosses the broken edges of yesterday's heartache
into this remembrance
i dream of erasing painful memories with lingering
caresses from a steady hand


i rearrange the jagged stars of your past
i am the young boy smiling at you with love letter eyes
i carve your name into the soul of graying trees

i am your first slow dance, a trembling hand teetering on your waist
i replace the melancholy prayers on your lips with urgent kisses
i swear an oath to your beauty, become holy in your embrace


traveling tall miles through years of distance,
i arrive, wet from your tears,
my only tool—a poet’s skill
i mend your smile,
emancipate your eyes,
& together
we ride that wrecked train from your dining room
to the horizon of your birthday in another country.

How should we speak about sex?


Cathy Young's 1999 article for Reason magazine, "Sex and Sensibility", examines sexual differences, sexual identity, and evolutionary biology in an attempt to explain continuing controversies over sex and gender roles. Youngs bemoans the "social gene brouhaha" typifying current discussions about sex differences-- discussions where biology is either all or nothing. What begins as rational discussion is undermined by the almost-religious dogmatism brought to the table in the form of feminist and/or scientific assumptions. Youngs explains:
Many feminists absolutely refuse to allow that some of the gender-based inequalities they deplore may be due in part to innate differences. Many conservatives just as dogmatically invoke sex differences, often distorted or magnified beyond recognition, to condemn any departures from traditional roles. Neither side has much patience for the complexities of real life or for the variety of real people."

For example, in an August 1995 New York Times op-ed piece, conservative writer Danielle Crittenden argued that men's "genetic wiring" makes them immune to "the mental strain of walking out the door" that working mothers suffer. Irate readers dismissed this as absurd and asserted that any such feelings arise from "cultural conditioning."

It is hardly absurd to think that the parent who gives birth may have a biological predisposition to be more attached to the baby. On the other hand, a biological predisposition is not a universal imperative. Men thrust into a "Mr. Mom" role because they are out of work when the baby arrives often feel heartbroken when they have to walk out the door.

In recent years, even feminism has embraced gender differences and "female values" such as cooperation, nurturance, and pacifism. Although antipathy to "male" individualism and competition was part of the women's movement in the 1970s, "difference feminism" became ascendant after the publication of the 1982 book, In a Different Voice, by Harvard psychologist Carol Gilligan. Gilligan contrasted women's "ethic of care," based on human needs and relationships, with "male" moral reasoning based on rights, justice, and abstract principles.

"Difference feminists" usually skirt the question of where the difference originates, though Gilligan dances on the edge of arguing that childbearing gives women "easier access...to the fact of human connection." This evasiveness has earned them some ridicule: Journalist Robert Wright pokes fun at Deborah Tannen, author of the 1990 best-seller You Just Don't Understand: Men and Women in Conversation, for arguing that boys "learn" to jockey for status in their more hierarchical networks, without explaining "why the boys' groups are always more hierarchical in the first place." (That always, as we shall see, is quite an overstatement.)

Youngs describes evolutionary psychology as rooted in works likef Matt Ridley's The Red Queen, Robert Wright's 1994 book The Moral Animal, and Steven Pinker's How the Mind Works. According to the school of evolutionary psychology, difference is a product of reproductive strategies that have evolved to ensure genetic survival.

The male, who can increase his progeny by having many mates, is "programmed" to wander and to seek dominance. The female, for whom parenthood is time-consuming, saves her favors for males who have good genes or who are willing and able to "invest" in her and her young. He looks for youth and attractiveness in a mate (signs of fertility); she looks for status and resources. Even if these patterns aren't relevant in an industrial society, they are "hard-wired" into our brains by millennia of evolution.


The political implications of this theory can cut both ways. Wright and Ridley invoke it to support affirmative action: Since men's advancement is propelled by their greater lust for power, often unrelated to merit, women must be favored "not to redress prejudice but to redress human nature." Others, such as Wayne State University law professor Kingsley Browne, argue that in the light of the new Darwinian science, male dominance in the public sphere is natural. And some evolutionary psychologists take issue with the view of women as less power-hungry. Primatologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy points out that female apes compete for status quite aggressively, if less flamboyantly than males.

Our genetic heritage may shed light on many things about men and women. But we should heed philosopher Thomas Nagel's warning against "the ludicrous overuse of evolutionary biology to explain everything about life, including everything about the human mind," particularly since scientific knowledge of how evolution shapes the human mind is not just incomplete but highly speculative.