Special Boy With Freakishly Large Brain Wins Spelling Bee

Making lists of the world’s most impressive monuments is an irrational and ultimately pointless enterprise: Who has seen all the wonders of the world? And what would the criteria be? Yet scribblers have been at it since the second century B.C., when a Greek poet named Antipater of Sidon came up with his canonical seven, now all gone or reduced to rubble except the pyramids of Giza. If Antipater had lived a millennium later, he would surely have put Borobudur, the astonishing stone mountain of exquisitely wrought sculpture in Central Java, on his list. No construction of the preindustrial era makes a more wondrous impression. Alfred Russel Wallace, one of the most well-traveled men of his day, wrote of Borobudur in 1869, in “The Malay Archipelago” (a book usually cited minus its melodious subtitle, “The Land of the Orang-Utan and the Bird of Paradise”): “The amount of human labor and skill expended on the Great Pyramids of Egypt sinks into insignificance compared with that required to complete this sculptured hill-temple in the interior of Java.”

more from the WSJ here.

Round the back of Waterloo station in London is a graffitied and bolted blue wooden door you wouldn’t look twice at, behind which are derelict railway tunnels and rooms most recently used as storage space. But visitors entering the door this week will discover an other-wordly art and performance space that is part disconcerting, part frightening and part thrilling. The art project, opening today, is ­entitled Tunnel 228 and is a collaboration between the Old Vic and one of the UK’s most innovative performance companies, Punchdrunk. About 20 artists have work displayed, and it is essentially a Metropolis-inspired weird dream with a mixture of art and live performance by actors. One of the most astonishing things about it is how those involved have ­managed to keep it secret with word of mouth only getting going in the last few days. It is free to get in but only via the website, and organisers fear it will be fully booked up by the end of today.

more from The Guardian here.

From The Boston Globe:

In recent years, cognitive scientists have turned in increasing numbers to the study of human happiness, and one of their central findings is that we are not very good at predicting how happy or unhappy something will make us. Given time, survivors of tragedies and traumas report themselves nearly as happy as they were before, and people who win the lottery or achieve lifelong dreams don't see any long-term increase in happiness. By contrast, annoyances like noise or chronic pain bring down our happiness more than you'd think, and having friends or an extra hour of sleep every night can raise it dramatically.

These findings have fed the growth of a burgeoning “positive psychology” movement focused on helping people enrich their own lives. But now some scholars are starting to ask a bigger question: shouldn't this new understanding affect policy, too? A huge range of social systems, from tort law to urban planning to medical care, are built on assumptions about what makes people happy. Now, for the first time, researchers are claiming to be actually measuring happiness, to actually know what causes it. In a society whose founding document asserts a basic right to the pursuit of happiness, that new knowledge could have far-reaching implications.

More here.

From Salon:

Funny things happen when moms meet Gmail, not just because they get tripped up by technology (plenty do not) but because moms — in their earnestness, their frankness, their goofiness — are simply funny. Anyone looking for further evidence need only flip through “Love, Mom,” a collection of maternal missives to adult children that are as endearing and cringe-inducing and skewed as mothers themselves. Like this little gem: “My computer has software transmitted diseases (STDs) from all the software I had to download for a class… I hate computer STDs. ☹ “

Or this terse slapdown: “Michael, I think you do too many drugs and say too many disparaging things about women on your blog. Love, Mom. “

The book “Love, Mom” originated in a charming website called PostcardsFromYoMomma, started by Doree Shafrir and Jessica Grose after joking about their own maternal correspondence. What began as an experiment — asking friends to send in their own forehead-slapping letters from home — quickly ballooned. “There was no way we could've anticipated the absolute deluge of emails we started to get as soon as the site went up,” Shafrir and Grose write in the introduction to “Love, Mom.” Go figure: When it comes to mothers, people like to vent. But more than mere mockery, the letters are a tribute to the adorable and exasperating quirkiness that make moms, well, moms. As one classic exchange on the Postcards website puts it, “You were welcome to stay in my uterus for nine months, and then my house for 17 years. But I understand, a week at your apartment might be a bit … much.”

More here.

John Gross in the Wall Street Journal:

In the annals of British literature and the British theater, the 1950s have gone down as the era of the Angry Young Men — of a change in the cultural climate signaled above all by Kingsley Amis's novel “Lucky Jim” (1954) and John Osborne's play “Look Back in Anger” (1956). The phrase “Angry Young Men” itself was devised by a theater publicist at the time, and in a rough fashion it indicates what the fuss was about: a scornful rejection of Establishment values, a truculent individualism. But it was never more than a loose journalistic label, and over the years it has lost most of such resonance as it once had.

David Castronovo, who teaches at Pace University in New York, has set out to find a more satisfactory collective term for the writers of the Amis/Osborne generation and their successors. He has come up, as his title proclaims, with “blokes.” In a long introductory chapter he explains that a bloke is “a male who believes in his own spirit and is willing to do almost anything to see that it doesn't die.” Unlike a gentleman, who lives by rituals and codes, a bloke has no time for traditional social disciplines. The qualities that distinguish him include self-assertion, the pursuit of pleasure and “transgressive humor.”

More here.

There are a lot of shocking things about Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones, a novel about the destruction of the European Jews that is narrated by a matricidal SS officer named Max Aue, whose greatest joy is having anal sex with his twin sister; but the one that shocks deepest, and longest, is how easily the novel draws you in. I read the book in French (Littell was born in America in 1967, but grew up in France; he wrote The Kindly Ones in French) a couple of years ago and again this winter in Charlotte Mandell’s adroit English translation. Both times, I found myself looking forward to the moment when I was done with other business and could get back to reading about Max Aue and his grisly travels. I am not the only one: the book has sold well over a million copies in Europe, and won the Prix Goncourt, France’s biggest literary prize. As I write this essay, it’s too soon to say if The Kindly Ones will be a big seller in the United States, but some omens are good. When the English translation was published in March of this year, Michael Korda wrote in the Daily Beast, “I guarantee you, if you read this book to the end, and if you have any kind of taste at all, you won’t be able to put it down for a moment—lay in snacks and drinks!” Yes, by all means, if you can keep them down. Reading The Kindly Ones isn’t a comfortable experience, or an ennobling one, but it’s certainly compelling, at least for some readers. The question I want to ask is, why?

more from The Believer here.

Forest Park is one of the largest patches of urban wilderness in the United States, and the Victorian homes and gardens nearby create an air of Tolkienesque enchantment. Right around here in fact, one of Tolkien’s heirs labors in a century-old house. “I agree with Tolstoy that the best way to tell a story is invisibly,” Ursula K. Le Guin says. “But I also hear what I write, and I think if you can’t read it out loud, there’s something wrong with it.” It’s hard to find a literary career as varied as Le Guin’s. At 79, she’s worked for half a century on the ever-shifting frontier between literary and genre writing, a line she has helped redraw with her elegant prose.

more from the LA Times here.

Sixty years ago, at another fraught historical moment, the world and all its troubles seemed to be bound up in the relationship of two men. Between Alger Hiss and Whittaker Chambers was a story so deep in political significance that it has remained a historical touchstone ever since; so personal in its mundane details — did Mrs. Hiss give Mrs. Chambers a lovely old linen towel to use as a diaper? — that thousands have labored to find the answer, as if the truth about the towel held the secret of the world. But I wax lyrical. Susan Jacoby, in her vigorously argumentative new book about the Hiss-­Chambers case, is interested in the towels and the men only as they are reflected in the partisan passions with which the story has been told. For her own part, Jacoby, the author of “The Age of American ­Unreason” and other books, believes ­Alger Hiss was guilty of the perjury for which he was convicted; she is almost, but not entirely, persuaded that Hiss was also a Soviet spy. This strikes me as an odd quibble, but I see that it positions her outside the two camps of scholars who, she says, have used and often misused the tale to further a political agenda. “Indeed,” Jacoby writes, “the conspicuous trait uniting Hiss’s dogged ex post facto bloodhounds with his die-hard defenders is the need to be 100 percent right in order to vindicate not only their verdict on American history but the governmental policies they espouse today.”

more from the NY Times here.

Making Lists
Imtiaz Dharker

The best way to put
things in order is
to make a list.
The result of this
efficiency is that everything
is named, and given
an allotted place.

But I find, when I begin,
there are too many things,
starting from black holes
all the way to safety pins.

And of course the whole
of history is still there.
Just the fact that it has
already happened doesn’t mean
it has gone elsewhere.
It is sitting hunched
on people’s backs,
wedged in corners
and in cracks,
and has to be accounted for.
The future too.

But I must admit
the bigger issues interest
me less and less.

My list, as I move down in,
becomes domestic,
a litany of laundry
and of groceries.
These are the things
that preoccupy me.

The woman’s blouse is torn.
It is held together
with a safety pin.

from: Postcards from God;
Viking Penguin, New Delhi, 1994

Forty years ago, I was enraptured by Israel's courageous sense of mission. For me today, as for many, that idealism has palled.

Max Hastings in The Guardian:

I first visited Israel in 1969. It was a time when much of the western world was still passionately enthused about the country's triumph in the 1967 six-day war. President Nasser had for years promised to sweep the Israelis into the sea. Instead, the tiny Jewish state, less than 20 years old, had engaged the armies of three Arab nations, and crushingly defeated them all. The Israelis successively smashed through Nasser's divisions on the western front, scaled and seized the Golan Heights, and snatched east Jerusalem and the West Bank in the face of Hussein's highly capable Jordanian army. Sinai was left strewn with the boots of fleeing Egyptians. The Israeli victory was an awesome display of command boldness, operational competence and human endeavour.

There was a euphoria in Israel in those days, which many visitors shared. We watched Jews from all over the world gathering to pray at the Wailing Wall for the first time in almost 2,000 years; Israelis of all ages revelling in the sensation of being able to work the kibbutzim of the north free from Syrian shells. From inhabiting one of the most claustrophobic places in the world, suddenly they found themselves free to roam miles across Sinai on a weekend. The soldiers of the Israeli army, careerists, conscripts and reservists alike, walked 10ft tall – the image of an exulting soldier made it on to the cover of Life magazine. They had shown themselves one of the greatest fighting forces of history, expunging almost at a stroke the memory of Jewish impotence in the face of centuries of persecution, of six million being herded helpless into cattle trucks for the death camps.

More here.

From The Guardian:

When John Updike died in January, Ian McEwan lamented his passing in these pages as the “end of the golden age of the American novel”. In an article for the Times, headed “Who will fly the flag for the great American novel now?”, Stephen Amidon asked whether Updike would have any successors who “possess the ability to engage with the culture at large, to create works that become part of the fabric of their era”. Amidon could only think of only one woman, Jhumpa Lahiri, to include in his list of six contenders. Most of Updike's eulogists excluded women completely.

I'm disappointed but not surprised. “Writers can write about anything they want, any sex they want, any place they want,” Annie Proulx has declared. But being free to write doesn't mean that American women are equal in a literary marketplace still dominated by male precedents, male literary juries and male standards of greatness. As Joyce Carol Oates has ruefully noted, “the woman who writes is a writer by her own definition, but a woman writer by others' definitions”. She cannot transcend readers' assumptions about her gender “unless she writes under a male pseudonym and keeps her identity secret”. Yet unlike their 19th-century British and European female precursors, American women novelists have very rarely used male pseudonyms, believing that democratic principles would win them respect. If Uncle Tom's Cabin had been signed by “Harry Beecher Stowe”, women's standing in American literary history might look very different.

More here.

MARTIN FILLER in The New York Times:

When architects cannot erect they write, and thus we can expect an imminent increase in publications by underemployed practitioners of the building art. However, good times or bad, producing books has been mandatory for architects ever since the modernist masters (and masterly self-publicists) Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier committed their ideas as well as their plans to print.

Frank Gehry, the most acclaimed American architect since Wright, is not a ­natural-born writer. To satisfy the considerable demand for personal explications of his work, Gehry, who turned 80 in February, has avoided the agony of authorship and cooperated with several interviewers on transcribed texts during the past decade. The best of them — the architectural historian Kurt Forster’s “Frank O. Gehry/Kurt W. Forster” and the curator Mildred Friedman’s “Gehry Talks” (both released in 1999) — contain valuable insights into the subject’s idiosyncratic approach to a profession he has recast as an experimental art form and advanced as a technical discipline. Barbara Isenberg’s “Conversations With Frank Gehry” is the latest attempt to elicit the essence of his creative method in his own words. Isenberg, a Los Angeles-based writer on the arts, exhibits neither Forster’s intellectual sheen nor Friedman’s comprehensive expertise, but nonetheless offers worthwhile new information for architecture devotees and an engaging introduction for general readers.

More here.

I Hear It Was Charged Against Me
Walt Whitman

I hear it was charged against me that I sought to destroy
institutions,
But really I am neither for nor against institutions,
(What indeed have I in common with them? or what with
the destruction of them?)
Only I will establish in this Mannahatta and in every city of
these States inland and seaboard,
And in the fields and woods, and above every keel little or
large that dents the water,
Without edifices or rules or trustees or any argument
The institution of the dear love of comrades.

It all began with the pleasing features of Gary Cooper… In the run-up to the election on 4 June 1989, posters with the red Solidarity symbol and the caption “High Noon” were displayed throughout the People’s Republic of Poland. They showed a solitary, small-town sheriff on his way to the ballot-box to cast his vote for the Citizen’s Committee. The fact that – despite the ultimate triumph of good over evil – the American 1952 western carried an underlying and very bitter message probably passed unnoticed. The population of the small town in the movie demonstrated no inclination at all to take a risk. They preferred passively to watch the events that were taking place. The inhabitants seemed all but indifferent to whether order would be restored by a group of unshaven thugs or their obsessively high-minded sheriff. Similarly, in the celebrated Polish election that was to “overturn communism”, almost 40 per cent of the electorate failed to vote. More than 10 million of the 27 million people entitled to vote[1] simply waited to see who would take charge.

more from Eurozine here.