Elaine Showalter and Christopher Benfey
Dear Elaine,
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StumbleUpon"Too old to renovate?" Now that has a sad ring. You're giving in to the Nostradamus temptation. With new medical discoveries, we're all going to live past 130. I forgot to tell you about the big news in the "Science Times" today: "Evidence Puts Dolphins in New Light, As Killers: Smiling Mammals Possess Unexplained Darker Side." The London sportswriter you mention, who called Lindsay Davenport "an all-American long-legged smiler," had better take note. Those smiling mammals have sharp teeth.
I thought that drinking Diet Coke was a "mass sociogenic illness." Now you tell me that not drinking it is regarded as one. I've always suffered from a mild Coke phobia. By the way, the Times reports some new research on the alien-abduction front ("Alien Abduction? Science Calls It Sleep Paralysis"), but this is probably old news to you. The idea is that many people, hovering between sleep and waking, experience peculiar sensations of leaving their bodies or entering long tunnels or having ghosts or giants step on them. "A growing number of scholars," according to the Times, "believe that sleep paralysis may help explain many ... modern claims of abduction by space aliens." Alien-abduction stories, as you point out in your book Hystories, are "largely an American phenomenon." But the sleep paralysis article is datelined Tokyo. "Research in Japan," according to Times reporter Nicholas D. Kristof, "has had a head start because sleep paralysis is well-known to most Japanese, who call it kanashibari, while it is little-known and less studied in the West." You'll be happy to know that John Mack, the Harvard ufologist, isn't buying this East-West connection of UFOs and sleep disorders, since many abduction reports (in Kristof's paraphrase of Mack) "happen in daylight and involve people who seem to have been awake and alert."
The Times reports that sleep paralysis often occurs "after jet lag." I suffered from a pretty nasty jet lag last month, in Tokyo no less, but nothing mysterious pressed down on my chest. How about you, in London?
When you send your next message, I'll be asleep, or hovering between sleeping and waking.
Chris
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