MITPressLog

"The long and curious history of arousal"

It's Sex Week over at at Slate: The online magazine is featuring two days worth of articles on "the unavoidable presence of sex in science and culture." Included in the mashup is a review of In Praise of the Whip, a recent Zone title by Niklaus Largier. The review is by Thomas Laqueur, himself the author of the Zone title Solitary Sex: A Cultural History of Masturbation.

Laqueur's review focuses on Largier's contention that the history of flagellation is a story not only of religious or erotic arousal, but of human subjectivity more broadly:

Largier's central insight is that both before and after 1700, the purpose of the lash, and of reading about the experiences of others being beaten, has been to excite passion, desire, and fantasy—to arouse the imagination. It is a challenge to the confines of flesh, a mobilization of the body in the interests of transcending ordinary space and time, whether it is God or a more sensual self that the flagellant finds there. After Largier, the lash can no longer be identified as merely a tool of either piety or pornography.

Read the whole of "The Allure of the Whip" here.

Wednesday Blog Watch - NY Art Book Fair

The NY Art Book Fair is this weekend - and the MIT Press hopes to see you there.

This second annual fair (admission is free!), sponsored by Printed Matter Inc., has contemporary art books, art catalogues, artists' books, art periodicals, and 'zines offered for sale by over 120 international publishers, booksellers, and antiquarian dealers. It's located at 548 West 22nd St.  See the map here for directions. 

Here's what The Book By Its Cover blog has to say about it:
I was at last year’s event which was really great and this year’s going to have more than 120 exhibitors. There’s a great curated section called Friendly Fire- which is small independent publishers and individual artists who make books, zines, comics, etc. There’s also book signings (rumor has it the handsome superstar skateboarder and artist Ed Templeton will be signing his new book at the ANP Quarterly table), performances and even a silkscreening station producing customized bookbags by artist J. Morrison. Make sure to bring plenty of cash although some of the vendors take credit card but you are also encouraged to just browse.
Modern Art Obsession blog also discusses art collectors' options at the fair in this blog post.
Stop by the MIT Press booth for your I am a Beautiful Monster postcard (while supplies last)!

Jean Painlevé and Yo La Tengo

Starting in the late 1920's, the beautiful underwater films of Jean Painlevé (1902 - 1989) captured the throes of a male seahorse giving birth, the geometric choreography of crystal formation, and the mating habits of hermaphrodite mollusks.

The story of the pioneering documentary filmmaker is captured in the book Science is Fiction, but some of the actual film footage can be seen tonight performing behind the band Yo La Tengo, who will provide live accompaniment at the Coolidge Corner Theatre in Brookline, Massachusetts. 

According to the Boston Globe interview with Yo La Tengo:

The band has periodically performed with the film since the San Francisco Film Festival in 2001 and even released an aptly named soundtrack, "The Sounds of the Sounds of Science" the following year. (Yo La Tengo also performed it at the Somerville Theatre that same year.) The "Sounds of Science" performance and screening is part of the third annual three-day Muddy River Environmental Film Series...

For more information about the concert, see http://www.coolidge.org/node/1170.

Indie Press Series

Veronica Gonzalez, author of Twin Time
Masha Tupitsyn, author of Beauty Talk & Monsters

Two of Semiotext(e)’s debut authors read from radical new novels this evening at McNally Robinson books in New York tonight at 7:00 pm.

Mexico City native Veronica Gonzalez’s debut novel Twin Time spans the dusty hills of Los Angeles and the glittering nightlife of Mexico City in a sensuous tale of an orphaned woman’s quest to discover her long-lost twin brother. New Yorker Masha Tupitsyn’s Beauty Talk & Monsters is a debut series of stories as told through the movies; her narrator, a female loner and traveler, confronts a lineage of familiar icons, myths, and on and off-screen cinematic excess in order to challenge the silver screen’s century of power over our dreams and ideals.

If you are in New York, we hope you can attend this evening of rising forces in the Semiotext(e) challenge to the mainstream.  More information and directions can be found here. 

Wednesday Blog Watch - DNA Databases

The UK is home to the world's largest DNA database - four million samples.  And just last week, a senior judge, Lord Justice Sedley,proposed to expand this database to include all residents of and visitors to the UK.  A similar proposal is apparently already underway in Portugal.
There have been different reactions to these kinds of DNA databases: see this report on "In the News",a forensic psychology, criminology, and psychology-law blog.  The blog cites DNA and the Criminal Justice System by David Lazer.  Lazer and his colleagues are currently in the process of launching a website forum for exploring the issues of DNA and criminal justice.  The idea of this forum is meant to facilitate discussion and information exchange among people involved in the study of DNA and Criminal Justice Systems.  Also, interestingly enough, the forum itself is "meant to produce data for a research study of how the web might enable public deliberation".  So the website will use itself for its own research.  The DNA and the Criminal Justice System forum can be found at http://www.dnapolicy.net.

Take a Walking Tour of Boston's Made Land

Nancy Seasholes , author of Walking Tours of Boston's Made Land, presents a guided tour that's perfect for a crisp, fall New England day.   

Listen as she guides you on fascinating walks that trace where and why Boston's man-made land was created.  Along the way, she uncovers fascinating and little-known pieces of Boston history showing us how Boston's past is always just below the surface of its present.

The podcast corresponds to the first walk: Central Waterfront and is read by the author. 

Get the tour via Podcast, RSS feed, or direct link!  Don't forget your walking stick or your copy of the book to follow along. 

Wednesday Blog Watch - Decision Making

How do experts make decisions under duress?  And can these fast, expert decisions be modeled?  In the blogging world this week, cognitive psychologist Gary Klein is the guest blogger at Cognitive Edge.  Klein presented an alternative view of decision making called naturalistic decision making in his book Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions. 

Firefighters are a good example of naturalistic decision makers.  This post in Zugunruhe Coaching Blog explains how Klein examined the instantaneous decision making of firefighters:

Klein tells of a fire fighter  who ordered his men out of a burning building without really knowing why he was giving the order; seconds later, the floor they’d been standing on collapsed.

As a researcher, Klein wanted to be able to model this way of making fast decisions, but the firefighters that Klein interviewed seemed to possess an intuitive skill that could not be mapped.  An August 2000 article in Fast Company explains how Klein came to understand where this intuitive knowledge  comes from:

After many more interviews with veteran firefighters, Klein developed a radically different understanding of how intuition might work. Over time, as firefighters accumulate a storehouse of experiences, they subconsciously categorize fires according to how they should react to them. They create one mental catalog for fires that call for a search and rescue and another one for fires that require an interior attack. Then they race through their memories in a hyperdrive search to find a prototypical fire that resembles the fire that they are confronting. As soon as they recognize the right match, they swing into action.

Thought of this way, intuition is really a matter of learning how to see -- of looking for cues or patterns that ultimately show you what to do. The commander who saved his crew didn't have ESP, he simply had "SP." His sensory perception detected subtle details -- small-but-stubborn fire, extreme heat, eerie quiet -- that would have been invisible to less-experienced firefighters. "Experienced decision makers see a different world than novices do," concludes Klein. "And what they see tells them what they should do. Ultimately, intuition is all about perception. The formal rules of decision making are almost incidental."

This type of decision making can be mapped using what Klein refers to as the Recognition-Primed Decision Model.  Further discussion about modeling naturalistic decision making is found on Visual Business Intelligence blog.

Introducing The MIT Press Podcast series!

We're pleased to announce a new way to catch up with your favorite MIT Press authors. The MIT Press Podcast series is a monthly interview program hosted by Chris Gondek of Heron & Crane Productions.

Each monthly episode will feature two MIT Press authors discussing his or her latest work.  The first podcast features Sherry Turkle talking about Evocative Objects: Things We Think With and Tarleton Gillespie discussing Wired Shut: Copyright and the Shape of Digital Culture. 

Watch for new episodes the first  week of each month - don't worry, we'll remind you.  Happy listening!