aether

At the beginning the memoir he published a few years ago, the great neuroscientist Erik Kandel gives an account of his first sexual experience. His partner was “an attractive, sensual young woman,” named Mitzi, who worked as a servant in his parents house. Mitzi was twenty-five. Kandel was eight. His memory of the encounter is intense and bittersweet. On the one hand, he felt great pleasure and interest. On the other hand, Mitzi told him they would have to stop, because if they didn’t he could become pregnant.

Kandel remembers being dubious. He knew full well that only women could have babies. But at the same time he felt a certain anxiety. What would his mother think if he became pregnant?

That worry and Mitzi’s change of mood ended my first sexual encounter. But Mitzi continued thereafter to speak freely to me about her sexual yearnings and said that she might have realized them with me were I older.

Mitzi did not, as it turned out, remain celibate until I reached her age qualifications. Several weeks after our brief rendezvous in my bed, she took up with a gas repairman who came by to fix our stove. A month or two later, she ran off with him to Czechoslovakia. For many years thereafter, I thought that running off to Czechoslovakia was the equivalent of devoting one’s life to the happy pursuit of sensuality.

Kandel describes this lucky moment as one of his fondest early memories, and he also describes it as typically Viennese.

That erotic experience was right out of one of Arthur Schnitzler’s short stories, wherein a young, middle-class Viennese adolescent is introduced to sexuality by ein susses Madchen, a sweet young maiden, either a servant in the house or a working girl outside the house. Andrea Lee, writing in The New Yorker, has said that one of the criteria bourgeois families in Austria-Hungary used in selecting girls for housework was that they be suitable to relieve the family’s adolescent boys of their virginity, in part to entice them away from any possible attraction to homosexuality.

I just got around to reading Kandel’s memoir recently, and this anecdote caught my attention and refused to release it. Vienna is a city I know only from books. But this was a Vienna I did not know, even from books. The repression and ambivalence, the neurosis and hypocrisy detailed by Freud and his biographers (for instance, and with special relish, by Peter Gay), the self-conscious amorality of the rakes in Schnitzler’s stories, and the terrible fear of venereal disease that Stefan Zweig describes in The World of Yesterday, his own memoir of a Viennese childhood two generations earlier, is here replaced by an innocent and even rational sexuality, in which the libido – at least of a male child – is influenced by a sweet girl who, though she tells fairy tales, is paid to be gentle and accessible.

Of course Kandel was only 8 years old; he was not an adolescent. The catastrophe of the Anschluss caused his family to flee Vienna in 1938. This prevented him from growing up into that rich, contradictory Jewish Viennese culture that the Nazis erased so brutally that the preservation of its myths – even an idiosyncratic and personal one like the one Kandel gives here – is inherently interesting.

Still, one might ask: is it true? Since Kandel offers a reference to a New Yorker article by Andrea Lee, I decided to read it. The story is called La Ragazza, and it appeared in the issue for February 16, 2004. It is a beautiful story. It is not a piece of journalism or a biographical sketch, but a work of fiction, and it takes place, not in Austria-Hungary but in Turin. Narrated in the third person, it sticks closely to the point of view of an unreliable rake from Padua named Orso who likes to irritate his girlfriends with the story of the “the first cunt he ever saw.” The cunt in question belonged to a housemaid named Ida. Orso was twelve at the time:

Ida, without underpants, perched precariously, legs askew, on the edge of the kitchen table, as Orso’s brother, Remo, a year older, declaimed in a pompous, pedagogic tone: “Questa, caro mio, è la fica”—“This, Orso, my boy, is the pussy.” Remo couldn’t actually have had a schoolmaster’s pointer, yet he was indicating with enough formality to suggest one: labia majora, labia minora, mons pubis, clitoris. Was he consulting a medical dictionary at the same time? It was possible. And leaning back on her elbows, giggling shameless encouragement in her singsong Friulano accent, was beautiful, brainless Ida, tall and blond and long-necked, with a head that looked as small as a goose’s.

Describing the scene to his lovers over the years, Orso has romanticized what he saw between Ida’s legs as a rose, pink-lipped and crimson in its depths, and has added a swirling frame of old-fashioned petticoats—when in fact the girl wore a coverall of postwar cut that squashed her thighs grotesquely when pulled up. What he really thought it looked like was a sea creature—edged with pale moss or cilia and exuding a mollusk’s imperturbable smugness. An impression that was hardly dispelled a few evenings later when, much to Remo’s chagrin, Orso was the one pulled down onto Ida’s small hard bed, after she had invited him to her room to deliver some old copies of Corriere dei Piccoli, the children’s weekly she used to read with her lips moving after washing the dinner dishes.

This scene, with its mixture of sex, science, sibling rivalry, and class condescension, is presented with somewhat more irony than in Kandel’s recollection. Orso’s attempt to irritate women by recounting it is invariably successful:

“Poor thing.” This was the comment of Anne, Orso’s American second wife, the mother of his children, who was quick to take up the cause of any woman against him.

“What do you mean, ‘poor thing’? It was all Ida’s idea to start with. She was eighteen or nineteen—and no virgin. A good housekeeper and a great cook, too. Nobody could make knoederli like hers. And she ended up fine. Married a carabiniere and came to my mother’s funeral in a mink coat.”

“Poor thing.” This was Bettina, Orso’s great love, who, throughout their six-year affair, stayed married to his business partner, Grellio. “I bet she didn’t really have petticoats like a cancan dancer. Sounds too much like Belle Epoque pornography to me. And why did your mother hire a slut like that?”

“She was a brilliant laundress. Could get through my mother’s entire trousseau of linen and hemp sheets and my father’s shirts in a single day. And I think they expected her to relieve Remo and me of our virginity. That’s what bourgeois families did in those days. So we wouldn’t end up homosexual.”

“Poor thing.” This was Sveva, the twenty-two-year-old assistant accountant in Orso’s office, with whom he occasionally sneaks off for a weekend. “So typical of men of your generation. You’ve all got a proto-Fascist nineteenth-century patriarchal mind-set. You’ve made the victim into an accomplice to quiet your sense of guilt.”

Now, indeed, we are back in the world of Schnitzler. Not the charming, anecdotal Schnitzler, but the Schnitzler of self-interested rationalization, rascality, even cruelty, all wrapped in thin blanket of cultural knowingness that does not conceal its crude outline. Some of the depth of Andrea Lee’s story comes from these echoes – conscious or unconscious, though I suspect the former – of Schnitzler, even to the point of “poor thing.” This is a phrase used in the most condescending way in Schnitzler’s famous play, The Affairs of Anatol. Anatol is here talking with is friend Max about the women he has had sex with:

ANATOL: I had a fine idea of myself in those days. I used to catch myself thinking . . . Poor child, poor child!

MAX. Poor . . . ?

ANATOL. When I was very young indeed I saw myself as one of the world’s great heroes of romance. These women, I thought . . . I pluck them, crush the sweetness from them . . . it’s the law of nature . . . then I throw them aside as I pass on.

Behind Schnitzler’s Anatol, behind Andrea Lee’s Orso, there is the great icon of sexual narcissism, unnamed but unmistakable. Casanova also had his first sex as a child. It was also in Padua, and also with an older girl. She was fourteen, Casanova was eleven. She had the duty of dressing his hair.

One morning she came to me as I was in bed and brought me a pair of white stockings of her own knitting. After dressing my hair, she asked my permission to try the stockings on herself, in order to correct any deficiency in the other pairs she intended to knit for me. The doctor had gone out to say his mass. As she was putting on the stocking, she remarked that my legs were not clean, and without any more ado she immediately began to wash them. I would have been ashamed to let her see my bashfulness; I let her do as she liked, not foreseeing what would happen. Bettina, seated on my bed, carried too far her love for cleanliness, and her curiosity caused me such intense voluptuousness that the feeling did not stop until it could be carried no further. Having recovered my calm, I bethought myself that I was guilty and begged her forgiveness. She did not expect this, and, after considering for a few moments, she told me kindly that the fault was entirely her own, but that she never would again be guilty of it. And she went out of the room, leaving me to my own thoughts.

But where Orso is a creep, and Anatol is ridiculous, Casanova in his memoirs is a realist, nearly a psychologist by temperament, who respects self-interest when he finds it expressed openly and deals with hypocrites poetically by deceiving them. Casanova displays a guiltless sexual curiosity that can only viewed by a Jewish Viennese doctor – which is what Schnitzler was, before he dropped medicine for fiction – with a kind of amazement. Schnitzler wrote a long story about Casanova in 1918, a tale in which the hero commits horrible acts with a bravado and savoir-faire available only to those incapable of remorse. After compelling a man to sell his mistress and then stabbing him to death in a duel, Casanova sleeps for days, bothered by little more than a vague feeling of bitterness and pronounced physical exhaustion.

How can this be possible? Shouldn’t inner contradictions – between Casanova’s sense of personal honor, say, and the memory that he has abused a woman who did nothing to him except wound his vanity – result in an uncontrollable anxiety? But Casanova is a master of oblivion. He does not erase the content of past incidents from his consciousness – his recollections are vivid – but instead he artfully preserves elements consistent with his self-esteem while softening what would cause him too much pain.

Willful forgetting, intentional non-knowing; these remain topics of controversy in philosophy and psychology. Usually, forgetting the past is understood as weakness, especially in old Vienna:

Dormant unconscious conflicts, revived by aroused appetites, make the course of sexual conquest, like that of true love, anything but smooth. Even the middle-class adolescent’s first fumbling experiments – his initiation by a complaisant servant at home or a venal waitress in town – is, in real life, a nest of ambivalences and rationalizations, of confused arousals and bouts of panic.”

–Peter Gay, Education of the Senses: The Bourgeois Experience, Victoria to Freud

If there’s one thing Casanova is spared, it’s panic.

Erik Kandel, among his many interesting research topics, has studied panic. Panic is an easy thing to induce in a mouse: you turn on a bright light, remove all routes of escape, and give it repeated shocks. Soon the creature will be frozen in a corner. A few years ago, Kandel and his colleagues decided to try and understand the mechanism by which learned panic occurs, using the mouse as a model animal. They succeeded. Learned panic occurs through circuits that link the thalamus and the amygdala, and Kandel and his colleagues traced these circuits and described the biochemical processes at work there. They also discovered that the flip side of learned fear – learned safety – implicates a distinct region of the brain, called the striatum, that plays no role at all in learned fear. These discoveries, and parallel ones in other labs, hold out the hope for better drugs to replace the addictive benzodiazepines like Valium. And there’s another benefit. When learned fear is understood biologically, an entire mythical structure of morality becomes, if not untrue exactly, at least obsolete. The outsized neuroses of the sensitive Viennese youth, an echo chamber of past punishments and undeserved shocks, can be cured directly, without having to be brought laboriously into consciousness. We can all be Casanovas, then.

But wasn’t Casanova a monster? The snobbish rake of the Viennese tradition, the Orso or the Anatol, is at best an ass, and at worst a fiend. But the predatory side of his character is linked to the deficits of his prey; to their poverty, insecurity, naiveté, their fear. A world of Casanovas cannot be a world of victims. The morality of Casanova is utopian; in its ethic of guiltless curiosity and implicit equality it resembles science.

Published on February 25, 2010

I’m researching a story about Black Hat SEO. This is interesting in and of itself, but it is especially interesting in the context of The Quantified Self, as health care web sites keenly eye pharmaceutical revenue as a source of income, and pharma is a key target of black hat SEO. This is a sort of obscure topic to post about here, but I’m doing it because I hope somebody can help enlighten me about Qoogle. I am easy to reach at gary@aether.com.

Do you know anything about Qoogle? I am not linking to the site directly, because I don’t know what they are up to, and though I suspect it is just a link-farming scheme, it could be something more nefarious. But here are some screenshots.

I searched this morning to check the online commentary about Ryan Sorba, who made some news with his anti-gay rant at the recent CPAC conference.(Andrew Sullivan has an account here.) Here is a screenshot of the first page of results on Google. The text on this image is hard to read, but the third link (pretty good, Mr. Black Hat!) is a web page called Ryan Sorba, and below it is a snippet that contains some “word salad”: Feb 19, 2010 … This brueghel is an ryan sorba of the gipsywort disentangled by jawless oxidization sardinian in the solon, cryogen, and dreaming of …

I’ve been getting this sort of thing quite often when searching on names. If you click on the link, you get to a fake Google page at Qooglesearch.com, showing results for Ryan Sorba that appear to be scrapped from Google, along with two “sponsored links” from “flashbuzz.net” at the top. I assumed that these sponsored links were the payload, but on subsequent clicks they have disappeared. Another link associated with Qoogle appears to be imasion-corp.com. There is an intermediate link that appears also: tdss… – but it is hard to catch and I didn’t get it.

Below is an image of the Qooglesearch page.

Sort of convincing as a Google page, if you aren’t paying too much attention.

But the best image comes from clicking on the “cached” link under the Qoogle “Ryan Sorba” entry on the original Google search page. That shows you what Qoogle is showing the Google Bot as it surfs the web. Colorful!

Well, it may be just another case of “pissing in the pool” as Craigslist CEO Jim Buckmaster calls it. But I’d like to know more about Qoogle, and if you have any tips, please send them along.

Published on February 24, 2010

Two years ago I traveled to Costa Rica and met two amazing scientists: Daniel Janzen and Willie Hallwachs. Janzen and Hallwachs and their many colleagues – professional scientists, students, and an important group of “parataxonomist” collectors – work the Area de Conservación de Guanacaste, where they catalog and study the organisms that live there, while trying to protect and expand the park.

Automeris zugana?

A few weeks later I went to Ontario to meet Paul Hebert, a geneticist at the University of Guelph and the inventor of a novel method for identifying species using very short snippets of DNA. Hebert was using material – moths and wasps, mainly – collected in Guanacaste to prove that his idea was valid.

When I wrote about it, this method was highly controversial. Could you really take part of the job of the expert taxonomist – the identification of species – and routinize it, reduce the cost, and provide identifications of even very hard to tell apart animals as a kind of standard technical service? Or, as Dan Janzen liked to ask: could we build a species tricorder?

A couple of months ago I found out that my story, A Simple Plan to ID Every Creature on Earth, is going to be awarded the 2009 AAAS Kavli Science Journalism Award for the best science story published in a magazine during the preceding year. I’m very proud of this award, and grateful to Dan, Winnie, Paul, and their colleagues for having been willing to answer endless questions about their work. Critics of barcoding – also eminent scientists, including the Director of the Jepson Herbarium Brent Mishler - were equally open and helpful.

I took many photos on my trip, and I thought I would post a few of them along with some updated barcoding material before I head down to San Diego for the AAAS meeting.

Here is a photo of Dan at his desk. Below it is the description of him working that opened my piece for Wired.

The utopian lepidopterist holds a pin in each hand. His style is ambidextrous and probably unique. He catches two forewings of a dead moth simultaneously and pins them to his drying board, and then, in a continuous sweep, he does the same with the hind wings. He repeats these motions again and again, like a conductor with tiny batons. Outside, it is hot and bright. Inside, it is hot and dark. The lepidopterist, whose name is Dan Janzen, has been working here in this Costa Rican forest for more than 40 years. He is married to his research partner, Winnie Hallwachs, and the two of them occupy a small house with a roof of corrugated metal whose eaves cast deep shade. During the day they work under artificial light. At night bats flit through the gaps at the top of the wall, do hairpin turns in the air, and exit again without slowing. The utopian lepidopterist’s aim is to put names on all the moths and butterflies in the forest. He wants to know more than just the names, of course; he wants to know who lives where and who eats whom and to unravel the mysteries of the ecosystem. But his first question is always the most basic one. This moth, here on the drying board: What is it called?

Here is one of the rearing stations Janzen and his colleagues operate. Each bag contains a caterpillar and some of the leaves of the plant it was found on.

[The area is...] strung with ropes. Beneath the ropes hang hundreds of plastic bags full of leaves, and inside every bag there is a caterpillar, a pupa, a moth, or some flies or wasps that have managed to parasitize the caterpillar, eat the pupa, and emerge into the middle of this scientific experiment. Like the insects in the neighboring bags, the destiny of these parasites is to be frozen, dried, identified, barcoded, and shipped to a museum for reference. Here, and in 10 other caterpillar-rearing stations in the forest, Janzen, Hallwachs, and their many local collaborators have solved taxonomic mysteries that go back hundreds of years. “Some of these moths have had names forever, and their caterpillars, too, and they’ve never been recognized as the same species,” Janzen says.

Janzen is 71. I enjoyed grabbing this picture of him on the road the rearing station.

There was electricity available at the rearing station, so I got to sit outside and catch up on my notes….

What has happened after the story appeared? Was the controversy resolved? Over the last two years, the advocates of barcoding appear to have won the day. I keep up with ongoing news via Mark Stoeckle’s detailed posts on The Barcoding Life Blog. Recently, reported on a project to use barcoding to determine the species of fly larvae that are important in forensics; although the larvae which feed on corpses can be telling evidence of the time of death, figuring out what species you have can be hard when all you can see is a tiny wriggling worm, with virtually no distinguishing features.

Barcoding also made news recently in Science, with a report by Elizabeth Pennisi on the recent completion of a barcoding analysis of a collection of more than 2500 parasitoid wasps. (The image below is from Dan and Winnie’s collection of material, it shows the actual wasp larvae (Euplectrus walteri) emerging from the caterpillar – yum!)

Pennisi, in her story, The Little Wasp That Could, (full text behind a subscription wall, unfortunately) gives an excellent description of why figuring out what wasp you have on your hands is interesting, important, and – before barcoding – very hard:

The British geneticist J. B. S. Haldane once famously quipped that God seems to have had an inordinate fondness for beetles, given their numbers and diversity. If so, then he must have been besotted by parasitoid wasps. Tinkerbells of the animal kingdom, many of these insects are no bigger than fleas, yet they may well outnumber beetles.

Unlike beetles, however, parasitoid wasps aren’t exactly charismatic. “You get one in your eye and pull it out with your finger and think it’s a piece of dust,” says Daniel Janzen, an ecologist at the University of Pennsylvania. “There’s millions of individuals out there, and you don’t even know they exist.” Yet these inconspicuous insects play a crucial role in natural ecosystems and in agriculture. They destroy the eggs, larvae, or cocoons of countless species of insects and arthropods, sometimes with hugely beneficial effects: The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) estimates that parasitic wasps save the United States at least $20 billion annually by controlling invasive species. “I think very few people realize what a force they are in the biology of our planet,” says Michael Strand, an entomologist at the University of Georgia, Athens.

A 2008 DNA bar-coding analysis of 2597 parasitoid wasps from his collection turned up 313 species, not the 171 researchers had previously thought. M. Alex Smith of the University of Guelph in Canada and Josephine Rodriguez of UC Santa Barbara discovered that what was believed to be a single species—a 2-millimeter-long wasp called Apanteles leucostigmus with a black body and a white rhomboid patch on its wing—proved to be 36. And there were many more examples of previously unrecognized species, Janzen, Rodriguez, Smith, and their colleagues reported in the 26 August 2008 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Alex Smith, mentioned in the above passage, was on one of the trips I made to Costa Rica. I enjoyed his company tremendously. Here is a picture of him with a beetle on his head. He did not put it there. We were collecting moths at night, and just saw a nice spot and decided to land.

Finally, here a couple of good videos that capture some of the interesting stuff going on in this line of work. The first is a short video about parasitoid wasps; it is very well explained and there are a few great images.

But this one, a Google talk by Dan Janzen and Paul Hebert, is more informative and inspirational. Here Janzen and Hebert lay out the whole picture of what it would mean to be able to identify species on the planet, and how we could get there.

There is an excellent collection of links here, at the Ontario Genomics Institute, with more information about the relationship between DNA barcoding, species identification, and environmental conservation.

Published on February 17, 2010

Stumbled upon the chanterelle motherload yesterday – one day late. They were waterlogged and hopeless after a solid night of rain. These are California chanterelles, which got proper acknowledgment as a distinct species only in 2008,when David Arora and Susie Dunham published an article in Economic Botany giving it a name of its own: Cantherellus californicus.

I have always wanted to write a long profile of Arora, one of the most independent thinkers I have ever met. His analysis of the relationship between ecology, conservation, and commercial use of natural resources changed my way of thinking about nature.

In a story I wrote about the commercial mushroom harvest in the Yukon territory, I had a chance to spend a week with him in the far north. I got a few paragraphs about him into the story, but most of what we talked about is still sitting in notebooks, waiting for the opportunity to become part of a story. His house in Northern California is very inspiring and strange, with a pond on the inside where he grows algae, and a forest outside that he manages to encourage the appearance of hundreds of fat Porcini when the time is right.

Arora’s giant book, Mushrooms Demystified, is used by everybody on the west coast with an interest in mushrooms. My copy is falling apart and indispensable. He has never updated it. The reasons are complicated, and related to his shifting views of the relationship between wild nature and the humans who are part of it.

But that’s a story for another day…

Published on February 06, 2010