"A Norwegian artist cooked and ate his own hip and claimed it tasted of 'wild sheep.'"

"Alexander Selvik Wengshoel said he served the hip bone with potato gratin and a glass of wine. He decided to eat a part of his own body on 'a whim.'"

The hip bone, removed by doctors, has gone on display as part of an exhibition. The operation to remove the bone was filmed and forms part of the exhibition also....

He had some kind of physical problem that required the surgery, so it's not as if a body part were needlessly excised and repurposed for food.

In other news of art and flesh: Kim Kardashian and Kanye West got married.

Invisible fence = invisible jerks.

I don't see a fence and I don't see you, owners of property encircled by invisible fencing. You, like your fence, are invisible. You are not around to apologize to me when your dog comes charging out to the sidewalk, barking as if he's about to spring on me. You are not around to — what? — laugh at how I jump with fright, because — look! — there's a sign: Invisible Fence. Yeah, well, fortunately I can read English, not that everyone can. I'm thinking of the little kids. And the fact is, even though I see the sign, when the rampaging dog suddenly appears, at some animal level, my body startles. The fact that I know and I understand the concept doesn't block the lightning bolt that strikes my nervous system. And speaking of lightning, why are you attempting to control your dog with electric shocks? Who the hell are you?

"Why do we so seldom see people smiling in painted portraits?"

"Nicholas Jeeves explores the history of the smile through the ages of portraiture, from Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa to Alexander Gardner’s photographs of Abraham Lincoln."

A walk around any art gallery will reveal that the image of the open smile has, for a very long time, been deeply unfashionable....

Smiling... has a large number of discrete cultural and historical significances, few of them in line with our modern perceptions of it being a physical signal of warmth, enjoyment, or indeed of happiness. By the 17th century in Europe it was a well-established fact that the only people who smiled broadly, in life and in art, were the poor, the lewd, the drunk, the innocent, and the entertainment....

Spring grass.

This morning, in Owen Park.

"For the last eight years of my life, ever since I hit puberty, I’ve been forced to endure an existence of loneliness, rejection and unfulfilled desires, all because girls have never been attracted to me."

"In those years I’ve had to rot in loneliness. It’s not fair. You girls have never been attracted to me. I don’t know why you girls have never been attracted to me, but I will punish you for it."

MORE: The L.A. Times has more material from the murderer's transcript. 

Camille Paglia talks about Hillary Clinton in 1994.

I'm assuming this 1994, because she's promoting her book "Vamps and Tramps" which came out in 1994. I've excerpted this 2-minute bit about Hillary Clinton (but the whole show is excellent, and if you think you hate Bill Maher, you may change your mind):



The section of "Vamp and Tramps" she refers to is a transcript of a CNN "Crossfire" episode, where she's on with Michael Kinsley and Pat Buchanan, talking about the Whitewater scandal in 1994. I couldn't find video of it on line, but I've got the text, and Kinsley starts of the discussion by saying there's "extraordinary antagonism towards Hillary Clinton, far beyond anything that could be explained by Whitewater or health care or anything like that," and suggesting that it's really "old-fashioned resentment of a successful, powerful woman."

Paglia vehemently disagrees, saying she'd "loved Hillary during the campaign" and "is judging her not as a woman but as a person in public life."

I feel that she has no idea how to maintain herself in that high position. She just hides from accountability. I find her arrogant. I find her cold.

There's more and Paglia has to fight off the accusation of sexism (mostly for daring to judge the expression on Hillary's face). Ah, here's the transcript (minus 2 pages, Google Books style).

Bob Dylan in Madison.

"In honor Dylan's 73rd birthday on May 24, here's an audio piece about his brief Madison period, including my discovery of the place where he hung out back then."

Myrmecochory.

It's the word of the day here at Althouse. Used here, by Meade, in the comments to "Bloodroot":

The plant colonizes in an interesting process known as myrmecochory.

The link goes to Wikipedia:

Myrmecochory... is seed dispersal by ants, an ecologically significant ant-plant interaction with worldwide distribution. Myrmecochorous plants produce seeds with elaiosomes, a term encompassing various external appendages or "food bodies" rich in lipids, amino acid, or other nutrients that are attractive to ants. The seed with its attached elaiosome is collectively known as a diaspore. Seed dispersal by ants is typically accomplished when foraging workers carry diaspores back to the ant colony after which the elaiosome is removed or fed directly to ant larvae. Once the elaiosome is consumed the seed is usually discarded in underground middens or ejected from the nest....

Myrmecochory, elaiosomes, diaspores....

Bloodroot... putting the "ant" in "plant."

This is a good metaphor for... something! I hope it's politics, because one of the big themes here at Althouse is insect politics.

"The 2016 presidential candidate we need."

That's the headline for George Will's new column which begins with a great paragraph:

All modern presidents of both parties have been too much with us. Talking incessantly, they have put politics unhealthily at the center of America’s consciousness. Promising promiscuously, they have exaggerated government’s proper scope and actual competence, making the public perpetually disappointed and surly. Inflating executive power, they have severed it from constitutional constraints. So, sensible voters might embrace someone who announced his 2016 candidacy this way....

The rest of the column is the candidate's announcement. See if it sounds like anyone who exists.

Bloodroot.

In yesterday's afternoon sun.

"Many of the op-eds and articles on trigger warnings published this week have argued on behalf of the sanctity of the relationship between the reader and the text."

"For the most part, I have agreed with them," writes Jay Caspian Kang in The New Yorker.

A trigger warning reduces a work of art down to what amounts to plot points. If a novel like José Saramago’s “Blindness” succeeds because it sews up small yet essential pockets of human normalcy against a horrific backdrop, a preëmptive label like “Trigger Warning: Violence and internment” strips it down to one idea.

I relayed these thoughts to [Alexandra Brodsky, an editor at the Web site Feministing], along with the anecdote about my professor and “Lolita.” 

His professor had proclaimed: "When you read ‘Lolita,’ keep in mind that what you’re reading about is the systematic rape of a young girl."

“What a delight it must be to read a book full of graphic accounts of sexual violence and still have the book not be about sexual violence to you!” she said. “Why is the depersonalized, apolitical reading the one we should fight for?” I admit, this was an angle I had not yet considered, and I recalled the severe annoyance I’d felt in college seminars and coffeehouse conversations whenever a white person would say a bit too ringingly that a book written by a person of color somehow “transcended race,” as if that was the highest compliment that could be paid to a work written by one of us poor, striving minorities. Every reliable figure, whether from academic study or from the Obama Administration, says that somewhere between one in four and one in five women are sexually assaulted during their time in college....

Every reliable figure?! That sentence really undercut Kang's credibility for me. I note that he says "sexually assaulted" and not "rape" (a word that appears 7 times in his article), and depending on what the meaning of sexually assaulted is — does it include getting grabbed? — the number is up for grabs. But we're seeing that notoriously spurious statistic in a paragraph that's in the middle of Kang's essay. It's a sop to the feminists, a place on his narrative arc before he ultimately delivers us back where he started and agrees with his own original orientation against trigger warnings.

In his final paragraph, he announces that "In a good novel... every word matters." So: "Any excess language—in the form of a trigger warning—amounts to a preëmptive defacement." The author should control the roll-out of shocks — lulling and luring you into a dark alley where — if it's his way — he can rape you mentally assault you.

Sentimentality/tenderness and the gas chamber.

Yesterday, I linked to "'Empathetically Correct' Is the New Politically Correct/The movement for 'trigger warnings' in college classrooms is part of a troubling trend toward protecting people from their own individual sensitivities," an Atlantic article by Karen Swallow Prior, who paraphrased Flannery O’Connor as "famously" saying "that sentimentality always leads to the gas chamber." Always?! I thought that was interesting though puzzling and used it in my headline.

Tamara Tabo emailed: 

I am not sure whether this will make you smile, cringe, roll your eyes, or simply click delete . . . .

I have worn my affection for Flannery O'Connor on my sleeve, so to speak, for about 13 years. This version of the quote comes from Walker Percy who lovingly purloined it from Flannery for use in his novel The Thanatos Syndrome.

Here's her photo:



Wow. Great picture. I can't imagine putting the words "gas chambers" on my body, but I wouldn't get any tattoo, and perhaps — given the use of tattoos by the Nazis — an argument against what they represent is the first or only acceptable tattoo. 

But why is opposition to tenderness an argument against what Nazis represent? And what's with the 2 versions of the aphorism? What meaning is there in the shift from sentimentality to tenderness? And how closely do the thoughts of Flannery O'Connor and Walker Percy connect to present-day debates about empathy and trigger warnings?

MORE: In fact, O'Connor, like Percy, used the word "tenderness." She wrote:

"Thomas Piketty, the Lena Dunham of economics in 2014, is finally getting to his backlash phase."

"According to the Financial Times, Piketty’s world-rattling best seller on growing inequality, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, is based on data that may 'contain a series of errors that skew his findings,' including 'mistakes and unexplained entries in his spreadsheets,' which the business paper compares to the humiliating screw-ups found last year in an austerity study by Harvard professors Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff. Except Piketty is much more famous."

"Politically Incorrect was an American late-night, half-hour political talk show hosted by Bill Maher that ran from 1993 to 2002..."

"... first on Comedy Central and then on ABC. Four guests (usually including at least one comedian) would debate topics across the political spectrum in what Maher once described as 'The McLaughlin Group on acid.' Of the 1300+ episodes produced, 190 can be viewed on YouTube."

At the link (to Metafilter) there are links to those 190 videos, with the date of the show and the names of the guests. What a great resource! What did Bryan Cranston and Little Richard talk about on June 14, 2002? Don't you want to know what Phil Hartman brought to the table on March 14, 1997? Ray Davies (with Suzanne Somers!) on April 29, 1998. Way too many crazy match-ups to mention them all in this little post, so I'll leave you with this:

Politically Incorrect was cancelled by ABC in 2002, thanks to an incident that happened six days after 9/11. Maher and political conservative Dinesh D'Souza had this conversation on the show:

Pinkness.

Trillium:



Allium:



Tulips:



Tulips:




All seen today, on my late afternoon walk. The trillium and the allium grown within the realm of Meadhouse. The tulips graced a nearby landscape.

"In an era when most people eat at the kitchen island or in front of the TV, the dining room has become perhaps the least-used room of the house."

"Now, some luxury home owners are eliminating their dining rooms altogether, instead using the space for libraries, dens and 'living pavilions' — in which dinner may sometimes be served."

How often do you eat a meal in your dining room? If you don't have a dining room, do you wish you had one (or do you realize that if you had one, you wouldn't use it much)?

Have you ever thought of converting your dining room into some other function room (or have you already done that)? To what specific function for which you don't currently have a room would you devote the room that is now your dining room if you decided to abolish the dining room in your house?