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	Thursday, October 7, 2004

I was inspired by this post at Crooked Timber, which celebrates the UK's National Poetry Day with one of Shakespeare's lesser-known but most beautiful sonnets, to post the one and only sonnet I've ever written (so far).

It was genned up in a hurry one day in response to a challenge in the auld (late 90s) Salon Table Talk "Books" section. One of the irascible regulars was complaining (soon after I posted a quite different offering in the "Post Your Poams" thread, if I remember right) that nobody even knew what the meter of a classic sonnet was, much less how to write one anymore. To him, it was (I'm paraphrasing here) all free verse and other foolishness these days. Young whippersnappers! Get offa my lawn!

So of course I had to prove him wrong. Not terribly wrong, mind you, since it isn't a good sonnet, but I proved to the old coot that I could imitate the Shakespearean FORM (which is the easiest of all the old sonnet forms, truth be told).



There are additional poetical celebrations in the comments thread over at CT. Go look.



5:45:13 PM    comments [] trackback []
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From Reuters:

New research findings suggest that the sound of a person's voice may predict his or her level of sexual activity. ...

In the study, 149 men and women listened to recorded voices of anonymous individuals and rated the voices on a five-point scale, from "very unattractive" to "very attractive." ...

When the researchers compared voice ratings with sexual histories, they found that men and women whose voices were considered more attractive by opposite sex raters reported younger ages at first sexual intercourse, more sex partners and more sexual affairs than did those with less attractive voices.

Voice attractiveness predicted promiscuity in women better than did their waist-to-hip ratio, Hughes and her colleagues report in the September issue of Evolution and Human Behavior. Among men, however, the shoulder-to-hip ratio was a better predictor of promiscuity.

That said, not all women with attractive voices are promiscuous, but "promiscuous females tend to have more attractive voices," co-author Dr. Gordon G. Gallup Jr., of the University at Albany, State University of New York, told Reuters Health. ...

During human evolutionary history, voice may have also played a role in how men and women made reproductive-related decisions, particularly at nighttime, the report indicates.

"The sound of a person's voice could have become an important indicator of other biologically relevant information," Gallup Jr. said.

(I was alerted to this by George's fascinating "backed up aggregate" listing.)

4:41:43 PM    comments [] trackback []
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It's about time I got around to discussing Passionate Marriage, the book I've left in the "What I'm Reading" sidebar for more than a month. I'm not going to be discussing it because I think it is so perfect and wonderful (in fact, I have a lot of problems with it, which I'll get into as I go along) but because it offers the most scope FOR discussion. It's just jam-packed with interesting stuff.

The major problem I have with the book for our purposes here is that it isn't exactly ideal for a guy who's struggling ALONE with his marital problems, trying to work out what to do in relation to an uncooperative wife. The situations in Schnarch's book tend to be those in which couples have -- at least outwardly -- agreed to approach their sexual problems together, and I've taken it as a given in this blog that you aren't in that position. So a lot of the stuff in it, particularly the center section which offers some activities to do together, might prove depressing or frustrating from your initial point of view.

But its central premises and some of the case studies are very valuable, so I decided I could recommend it.
 
When I first started reading the book, I was put off by the fact that Schnarch's theme seemed to be grounded in selfishness. If you only read the first couple of pages, as I did when I first picked it up at Barnes & Noble, you'll think he's going to advise you to confront your spouse with your demands and insist that it's your way or the highway. But that's not where he's headed at all. It's a lot more complicated than that.

He starts with a story from his own life that has nothing to do with marriage, per se: the pressurized moment when he had to decide whether to throw away years of research on his master's thesis or knuckle under to a "charismatic" professor who insisted that he publish a dishonest interpretation of his results. In the end Schnarch decided to pitch the whole project and start over with another thesis advisor. This very difficult decision, he says, is where he first learned the crucial importance of differentiation.

Other reviewers have complained, and I agree with them to an extent, that Schnarch never strictly and completely defines what he means by this term, and seems to want the reader to absorb its full meaning by the accumulation of examples as the book goes along. But right there in the introduction he does offer a brief outline of the concept:


That's the part that had me a bit worried in the beginning. I thought that it would be too easy for an angry man, a man worn down from years of not getting what he wanted, to go nuts with this concept and start being an arrogant, demanding pain in the ass. And since his wife was likely to be just as angry and disappointed with her life, the results of such a strategy would be completely disastrous. But as I said before, and as we'll see as we go along, making yourself an insistent, insensitive jerk is not the counsel of this book.

To me the real heart of Schnarch's thesis is not so much the differentiation theory -- as essential as that is -- but his concept that marriage is a "people-growing machine." Schnarch sees committed, long-term sexual relationship as THE engine of personal growth in adult life. It raises emotional challenges by its very nature, as -- in Schnarch's terms -- a "crucible" of the two basic human needs, intimacy and autonomy. That furnace, he holds, is where we are refined into the best people we can be -- IF we are able to see the natural anxieties, disapppointments and conflicts of marriage as opportunities for increasing our personal maturity (or as I choose to put it, for becoming more and more your own kind of Hero).

In keeping with the "growth" concept, one of Schnarch's more interesting ideas -- which I'll discuss in greater detail later -- is that people don't actually reach their "sexual peak" until very late in life --  their 40s, 50s or even 60s.

But in the next WYW post, I'll talk about my irritation with Schnarch's organization and case studies, especially the first couple's story he presents.

2:11:54 PM    comments [] trackback []
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