I always liked the idea of Mickey Kaus’s Assignment Desk, although I doubt anyone ever handed in an assignment. Mickey, however, only gave homework to mainstream journalists. There are a lot more bloggers, with a lot more time on their hands, and in the hope that my luck will be better, I hereby inaugurate Blogger Assignment Desk.

Assignment: What Is Race? I’m a willing Jensenist, if only because race and IQ is a topic guaranteed to annoy people who ought to be annoyed. Yet I can’t bring myself to treat race as a real, scientific category, and blogged a few jejune reflections on the subject when even fewer people read me than read me now. Scholars who discuss race refer to genetic similarities, and of course they exist, as one can see by the distribution of certain diseases like sickle-cell anemia and Tay-Sachs, but I remain unpersuaded that race is an immutable category or even a useful one. This article should, at a minimum, answer the following questions. How many races are there? How can genetic similarity be the basis for race when genetic differences are greater within what are called races than between them? Why are certain characteristics, like skin pigment, considered racial, while others, like height or eye color, are not? Convince me.

Bonus: Most race studies claim that self-identification is an adequate marker for actual genetic differences, which raises an interesting legal point. Suppose someone of no use in a Benetton ad declared himself African-American and was admitted to college on that basis. What recourse would the college have, if any? Is there a race test? There is a dreadful Hollywood movie, Soul Man, with a similar premise, in which the “black” student goes around in blackface and winds up groveling before the “genuinely” black Dean of Students, James Earl Jones of course, for making a travesty of the black experience. That’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about checking the black box on your college application and not saying another word about it.

Assigned to: Gene Expression (in thanks for adding me to their blogroll), Steve Sailer. B-Team: G Factor, Jon Jay Ray.

Still-Life

Through the open French window the warm sun
lights up the polished breakfast-table, laid
round a bowl of crimson roses, for one—
a service of Worcester porcelain, arrayed
near it a melon, peaches, figs, small hot
rolls in a napkin, fairy rack of toast,
butter in ice, high silver coffee-pot,
and, heaped on a salver, the morning’s post.

She comes over the lawn, the young heiress,
from her early walk in her garden-wood,
feeling that life’s a table set to bless
her delicate desires with all that’s good,

that even the unopened future lies
like a love-letter, full of sweet surprise.

—Elizabeth Daryush

This poem has the most intense sense of foreboding, of impending disaster, of any I know. It reminds me of those photographs of people taken seconds before they are vaporized by bombs or tanks. Yet this feeling is conveyed almost entirely by the shift in rhythm in the ninth and tenth lines. Sound in poetry does not merely emphasize sense; sometimes, as here, it undercuts it.

Andrea Harris and Colby Cosh have noted this story about Brighton’s West Pier concert hall, which could not lawfully be demolished but fell into the English Channel notwithstanding. In its mid-70s heyday National Lampoon used to publish authentic news items as found humor, and one of them concerned environmentalists cleaning off animals after an oil spill. Many birds and animals were shampooed, at some astronomical cost per beastie, and finally the first otter was ready to be rereleased into the sea. There was a big party for it on shore, with reporters from the local papers and a band. The otter was set free, and swam out to the crest of the first wave, where a killer whale appeared and ate it.

I have no New Year’s Resolutions for myself, because I am perfect just the way I am. But I have a few for my blogroll.

The 2 Blowhards should resolve to lose the epistolary format, as the English novel managed to do about 200 years ago.

Colby Cosh should resolve to write less well, and less frequently, to make me less envious. (He demurs.)

Cinderella must resolve to stop reading The Guardian.

Sasha Castel should resolve to get married, and merge her blog, and move to England.

Steven Den Beste should resolve to heed Pascal, and make his articles shorter because he has time. (Floyd McWilliams makes the same point, but longer.)

AC Douglas should resolve to be more peremptory and superior.

Gene Expression should resolve not to shy away from controversial topics.

Mark Riebling should resolve to stop changing the picture of himself. You look mahvelous. Really. I mean that. (He has disregarded me already, a mere week into ought-three.)

The Man Without Qualities should resolve to stop mixing italics with bold and bold italics, seemingly at random.

Eugene Volokh should resolve to keep his nasty temper in check.

Those of you I missed, there’s still plenty of room for improvement, believe me. And thanks to all of you for all the great reading this year.

Better in theory than in practice, but intermittently amusing. Through Colby Cosh from Richard Ames, whose name anagrams a lot better than Colby’s does.