D.D. Guttenplan plays Proust to his childhood memories of comic books in The Nation.

For a long time I used to go to bed early. Unbidden by my parents I'd hurry up the stairs to my room, turn out the light, burrow beneath the covers, reach under the bed for the flashlight and then, safe where I'd left it the night before, the latest issue of Superman or Batman. Proust can keep his madeleines. For me, nothing brings back that childhood sensation of safety, or the inky smell of clandestine pleasure, quite like Batman No. 166, "Two-Way Deathtrap!" in which the caped crime fighter, confiding the details of a nightmare to Robin, is overheard by a villain who proceeds to turn Batman's fevered dream into deadly reality. Or the next issue, No. 167, with "Zero Hour for Earth"--a "book-length spy-thriller" in which Batman jets off to fight the criminal organization Hydra.

Via Bookslut, the L.A. Times has an excerpt from the new book Proust Was a Neuroscientist, about literary representations of scientific knowledge. First up: Walt Whitman on mind/body dualism.

And yet, for all its incomprehensible originality, Whitman's verse also bears the scars of his time. His love of political unions and physical unity, the holding together of antimonies: these themes find their source in America's inexorable slide into the Civil War. "My book and the war are one," Whitman once said. His notebook breaks into free verse for the first time in lines that try to unite the decade's irreconcilables, the antagonisms of North and South, master and slave, body and soul. Only in his poetry could Whitman find the whole he was so desperately looking for:

I am the poet of the body
And I am the poet of the soul
I go with the slaves of the earth equally with the masters
And I will stand between the masters and the slaves,
Entering into both so that both shall understand me alike.

In other science news, unnamed officials have determined that aliens have been causing those unexplained fires in Sicily.

Why Davide Foster Wallace isn't Proust, at Black Garterbelt. It's Dan Leo at newcritics who really hits it out of the park:

If David Foster Wallace, another author infamous for his verbosity, is (to me!) like a smart guy who sits next to you on the plane to Europe who at first seems really witty and brilliant but after an hour or two you just wish he would put a lid on it for a while and let you read your Richard Stark thriller, Proust is the guy who might shyly start to talk to you, asking questions about yourself and your family and job, what books and movies and music you like, and then he’ll start talking about anything at all and he’s so brilliant that you don’t want him to stop talking, even though he’ll keep saying, “Oh, but I should shut up, I’m boring you, you talk for a bit!”