POWER PLANT
Californian purchasers of Dr. Stephen Meloy's new female orgasm device will doubtlessly want to know whether his invention will require batteries or whether will it draw power from the already overwhelmed electrical grid. To not be able to rely on a man (or a woman) is one thing; to know that you can't count on electrical power might be quite another. Jeanette Winterson and other feminists have expressed their dismay at Meloy's machine, comparing it to the fantastical Orgasmatron in Roger Vadim's movie Barbarella. Writing in the Guardian, Winterson says: "I am all for pleasure. I love sex. Sex is about being aroused by someone else and being happy in your own body. If neither applies to you, it's time for a change. All the gadgetry in the world won't make you pleased with yourself or attracted to another person. Electronic sex is another way of faking it. So much for the moral high ground. What about the practical problems? Electrical pulses are sensitive to their environment. At the moment of ecstasy, will you set the car alarm off? Will the car alarm set you off?" Professor Elaine Scarry of Harvard University, who believes that electromagnetic interference from military installations has brought down several commercial airlines, could well have a view on such matters, Jeanette. She might suggest that anyone wearing the device should stay well clear of Long Island on Wednesdays, especially between 8.20 p.m. and 8.40 p.m., when Meloy's invention, like airplanes, may be vulnerable to EMI emanating from Aegis class destroyers, black hawk helicopters, nuclear submarines, and other toys belonging to the military industrial complex.

POWER CUTS
Erin Brokovich's reaction to the Californian power crisis has not, as far as I know, become public knowledge, though one can only assume that the plight of Pacific and Gas Electric, the dreadful, greedy company you will know about from seeing the movie directed by Steven Soderbergh, has brought some sort of twinkle to her eye. PGE, along with another power generating firm, Edison, is now nearly $13 billion in debt. According to the Economist, the power crisis is symbolic of much wider state malaise—failing dot-coms, a looming writers' strike in Hollywood, even the collapse of the Cruise-Kidman marriage. "Power cuts, with the threat of worse to come when the summer heat brings on the air conditioning, have embarrassed the state at a time when Silicon Valley and Hollywood are going through troubled patches, and when familiar doubts about California's creaking infrastructure are re-emerging. … The toll on morale has been [high]. Half the population of the state, according to a recent Field poll, is pessimistic about the way it is heading. The popularity of Gray Davis, the governor, has taken a hammering." The Amish, according to the Boston Globe, have been a beneficiary of the power crisis. Their gas lamps are in much demand.

ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT
Private Eye, the biweekly satirical magazine, invites readers to send in the most pretentious or absurd articles they've seen. The best examples then appear in a column titled " Pseuds Corner," and currently on display is Neville Hoad's correction to an article he wrote for the July 2000 issue Postcolonial Studies (scroll down). "Arrested development or the queerness of savages: Resisting evolutionary narratives of difference." "The following text was printed incorrectly: The narrative hierarchizes difference, doing violence by a priori constituted by progress through its various others, which are then posited as vestigial, arrested, anachronistic or degenerate. It should have read: The narrative hierarchizes difference, doing violence, by a priori incorporation, to the others in the constitution of the subject. The subject is constituted by progress through its various others, which are then posited as vestigial, arrested, anachronistic or degenerate."

AGE OF PARADOX
In the New Criterion, John Gross writes: "Someone once wrote a book—about the mid-nineteenth century, I think—called The Age of Paradox. It is not a very revealing title. Every age since the Old Stone Age has been an Age of Paradox, just as every age has been an Age of Transition. But at least we can fairly claim that no age has bristled with more paradoxes than our own." The Internet can claim to be the home of several paradoxes, and as Kurt Andersen says, one of them is that many non-paying-every-man-and-woman-for-themselves Web sites, such as Plastic.com, are dependent on sites such as Inside that hope to make a profit. "In order to be economically sustainable, Web content may resemble talk radio and Who Wants to Be A Millionaire more than The New Yorker or Playhouse 90, at least for a while. But consider what the user-generated content sites and sub-sites all have in common: their bottomless reservoirs of free content would not exist without professionally produced music, movies, television and prose for the hordes of interested amateurs to praise and slag and emulate. These packets of user-generated content are remoras, the helpful parasites that attach by means of a clever sucking disk to the backs of whales and sharks for a free ride. It is one way to survive."

ENGLISH PATIENTS
While students of Columbia's journalism school absorb the lessons of their first off-the-record audience with Al Gore, over at the university's English department professors and students alike await the arrival of Jonathan Arac from Pittsburgh, who, as Elisabeth Franck reports in the New York Observer, has been charged with task of bringing some relief to a department that "has been suffering from a host of maladies, not the least of which are understaffing and high turnover. The result has been a department so unnerved, it has a difficult time holding faculty meetings, let alone making such crucial decisions as who to name as its department chair. Paralyzed by internal strife, and shaken by the cultural winds of gender and ethnic studies, as well as contemporary theories like deconstructionism, the department has been locked in inertia. … 'What has happened at Columbia represents an acute form of what has happened in the field as whole,' said George Stade, a veteran of the department who retired last year. 'There are those people who see literature in traditional ways, which includes historical circumstances, and there is a school that wants to see literature as a symptom of all the evils of society.' "

SEX ON THE SMALL SCREEN
The Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation has released a report on the amount of sex broadcast on American TV over the last two years—there's more of it and it's more vivid than ever, though the authors are curiously reluctant to offer an explanation for the rise. As the Washington Post  reports: "The study did not suggest reasons for the increase in sexual content, but participants at a conference titled 'Sex on TV' in Beverly Hills today speculated that in response to the harsh criticism leveled at violence in the media in the past couple of years, TV writers have focused more on human relationships and sexual activity." Really? Can we therefore conclude that the congressional publication of Kenneth Starr's report on President Clinton affair with Monica Lewinsky had absolutely no impact at all on the content of TV shows? For the New York Post's report on the Kaiser findings, click here.

VIRTUAL PORNOGRAPHY
If a pornographer with an interest in children generates images of boys and girls on a computer, can he or she be prosecuted under the terms of the Child Pornography Prevention Act? As Ron Scherer of the Christian Science Monitor writes: "When the Department of Justice tries cases today in the Western part of the US—where the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled part of the Child Pornography Prevention Act unconstitutional—it must prove the pornographic images are of real victims. That adds what prosecutors say is a monumentally difficult task to an already heart-breaking job. … 'A greater burden shifts to law enforcement to prove these are actual victims,' says a US Customs spokesman. 'It may force us to change the way we investigate our cases,' adds Angela Bell, a spokeswoman for the FBI. … Next month, the US Supreme Court will begin weighing whether the … act can constitutionally bar such images."

THE NEW PARANOIA
The world is awash with scandal and corruption, and not just of the political variety, Salman Rushdie writes in the Guardian. "Is there anything out there that is not fixed? Reality-TV contests? Literary prizes? University entrance examinations? Your upcoming job interview? Or is it just that we haven't found out how the fixing is being done? Welcome to the third millennium. The American novelist Thomas Pynchon's redefinition of paranoia has never seemed more firmly on the money: paranoia usefully seen as the crazy-making but utterly sane realization that our times have secret meanings, that those meanings are dreadful, immoral and corrupt beyond our wildest imaginings, and that the surface of things is a fraud, an artifact designed to hide the awful truth from us ordinary deluded suckers, who keep wanting to believe that things might actually—you know?—be beginning to improve."

PUTTING UP RESISTANCE
Despite its rigorously enforced immigration laws, Britain is a favored nation for asylum seekers from Eastern Europe and the Middle East, according to Oliver Craske   of the Central Europe Review, though perhaps it's because a British work permit is so hard to get that this destination, rather than Germany or France, is so desirable. If this true for refugees, then the opposite appears to be the case for many British journalists, academics, and intellectuals who it often seems just can't wait to begin a life in exile almost anywhere on Earth, though preferably in Manhattan. (Click here for some gloating from one who made it.) Others consider exile more of an intellectual condition. Though they have no experience of exile or of being a refugee, they nevertheless consider themselves refugees in their own country and are therefore the intellectual vanguard for those who truly know exile—namely, the real refugee. Not that this is a peculiarly British condition. Theories of resistance and notions of the intellectual as exile are familiar to many American campuses. As Ian Buruma writes in the New Republic, this is not to say "that intellectuals should not stand up for society's victims. They can and they should. But they must not do this by pretending to be victims themselves. For that is a false identification. To don the bloody mantle of real victims is not just in bad taste, it also trivializes actual suffering. It transforms victimhood into a fashion accessory. The soi-disant exile status might attach a certain glamour to the writer in London or New York, but it does nothing for the poor Tamil trying to get some sleep in Frankfurt station."

THE NEW NEW PANDAEMONIUM
In retrospect, much of the early enthusiasm for the Internet seems more naive than Utopian, though in its more elevated moments the enthusiasm often strived to match the Utopian ideals one comes across in the 19^th-century writing of Charles Fourier or Robert Owen. In the mid-1990s, if you believed what you read, life as we knew was about to change forever and for the better now that everyone was about to join the information superhighway. On the other hand, when has the arrival of one form of technology or another not been treated as the best (or worst) thing since (or before) the invention of canned tomatoes? In this respect, the advent of Internet resembles many of the technological and industrial advances delineated by the filmmaker Humphrey Jennings in his undervalued book Pandaemonium: The Coming of the Machine as Seen by Contemporary Observers, which was described by the anthropologist Jacob Bronowski as offering "a sulphurous, splendid furnace picture of the greatest days of industry—their poverty and their exhaltation, the garish flames and the sense of creation, the squalor and the confidence and the powerful sense of self-sufficiency, the sense of a new culture which did not give a damn for anyone else and for anything that had happened before."