Month: December 2012

Robin Hemley ponders their persistence:

Curses most often belong to the dispossessed, their last and ultimate defense. The best curses come from those who have a history of oppression. Think of the Roma in Europe, Haitians, Afro-Cubans, "Can curses pierce the clouds and enter heaven?" Queen Margaret asks in Richard the Third. A curse is a last resort, when earthly justice fails, an act of desperate rage that requires no surefire answer from God as to its efficacy. The curser curses first and takes credit later. 

One of Hemley's favorites comes from the Algiers section of New Orleans, recorded by Zora Neale Hurston:

"That the South wind shall scorch their bodies and make them wither and shall not be tempered to them," it reads in part. "That the North wind shall freeze their blood and numb their muscles and that it shall not be tempered to them. That the West wind shall blow away their life’s breath and will not leave their hair grow, and that their finger nails shall fall off and their bones shall crumble. That the East wind shall make their minds grow dark, their sight shall fail and their seed dry up so that they shall not multiply." This is only a fraction of the text of the curse, which ends despairingly, "O Man God, I ask you for all these things because they have dragged me in the dust and destroyed my good name; broken my heart and caused me to curse the day I was born. So be it."

Linda Holmes reflects:

PBS Digital Studios started its "Icons Remixed" series with a charming Fred Rogers video that was hugely successful this summer, and followed it with "Happy Little Clouds" from Bob Ross and "Keep On Cooking" with Julia Child. Now, they're back with "In Your Imagination," a remixed Reading Rainbow video that not only highlights great little phrases that are both funny and profound (I will never get tired of Levar Burton saying "I love maps," I don't think) but also reminds you just how long Burton has been working on this project — which went off the air in 2009 after 23 years and 155 episodes, but which has been relaunched, thus far as an app, by Burton himself.

In a review that Gawker declared "The Best Hatchet Job of 2012," Zoë Heller eviscerates Salmon Rushdie's new memoir, Joseph Anton:

A man living under threat of death for nine years is not to be blamed for occasionally characterizing his plight in grandiloquent terms. But one would hope that when recollecting his emotions in freedom and safety, he might bring some ironic detachment to bear on his own bombast. Hindsight, alas, has had no sobering effect on Rushdie’s magisterial amour propre. An unembarrassed sense of what he is owed as an embattled, literary immortal-in-waiting pervades his book. He wants us to sympathize with the irritation he felt when the men in his protection team abbreviated his grand, Conradian-Chekhovian alias to “Joe.” He wants us to appreciate his outrage at being given orders by jumped-up Scotland Yard officers. (“It was a shaming aspect of his life that policemen felt able to talk to him like this.”) He wants us to understand the affront he felt when diplomatic efforts on his behalf were held up by negotiations to bring back British hostages from Iran: “Terry Waite’s human rights had to be given precedence over his own.” Above all, he wants us to share his aggrieved sense that he was a prophet without nearly enough honor in his own country.

Danny Olda spotlights an unsettling series of portraits:

Artist Maja Ruznic paints what she remembers.  Ruznic acts in a literal way on the idea that remembering is a creative process. Painting from experience and filling in the unknown, her paintings feel like their plucked directly from the middle of a narrative. Speaking of the way past experience plays into her creative process Ruznic says: "Sometimes I am drawn to someone’s hands, to one’s rhythm of speech, to one’s constant checking of their cell phone.  This interest usually serves as an incentive to begin a painting."

After reading Vonnegut's Letters, Lydia Kiesling concludes that "Kurt Vonnegut’s biggest obstacle to happiness was Kurt Vonnegut":

It shouldn’t surprise me, because I am pretty sure it’s some kind of trope, but I am nonetheless surprised that a successful, vital, and by most accounts delightful man, who was always coming out with important books and fine statements, should have so often felt the need to convince other people of his worth — and particularly, that he would engage people from the three demographics least likely to budge from a position about one’s merits or lack thereof: critics, philistines, and one’s own children.

More Dish on Vonnegut's letters here. Read a fascinating excerpt here. Meanwhile, in another letter to his wife, Kurt recommended An ABZ of Love, a 1963 Danish "dictionary of romance and sexual relationships." Maria Popova excerpts and explains:

The book is presented with the disclaimer that rather than an ABC textbook for beginners, it is a "personal and subjective supplement to the many other outstanding scientific books on sexual enlightenment already in existence," setting out to describe "in lexical form a few aspects of sexual relationships seen from a slightly different standpoint." Indeed, the book was in many ways ahead of its time and of the era’s mainstream, pushing hard against bigotry and advocating for racial, gender, and LGBT equality with equal parts earnestness and wry wit.

Thomas Beller recalls the memoir of photojournalist Tim Page, who wrote using his own contact sheets as prompts:

Having contact sheets for all sorts of episodes in your life seemed to me intriguing and desirable. So much of my own history is beclouded by time, but a few sharp rays, in the form of pictures, falling upon a given day would resuscitate whole contexts. And from this archipelago of moments, scenes, episodes, you could see the larger tectonic movements of your life forming and unforming. You would be reminded of who you are. Or at least of who you were.

In 1996, this condition was the luxury of professional photographers. We are now all Tim Page. Or, we have contact sheets. At least, those of us who snap streams of images as though they were jelly beans being scooped into a hand. But a jelly bean in a hand makes sense as long as you eat it. What would you say about a person who collected jelly beans? Whose home was filled with glass jar after glass jar of them? One could ask such a person, What are you planning on doing with all those jelly beans?

He concludes:

It’s an era of controlled deprivations and detoxification, of fasts and cleanses. Perhaps everyone should make a weekly ritual of twenty-four hours of undocumented life. Periods of time in which memory must do all the heavy lifting, or none of it, as it chooses, the consequences being what they may be. No phone, no eclipse glasses to mitigate the intensity of what lies before you. The only options are appetite, experience, memory, and later, if so inclined, writing it down.

(From the series Nude by Shinichi Maruyama via Kyle VanHemert)

Tina Rosenberg's D For Deception tells the true story of Dennis Wheatley, a British spy novelist hired to deceive Hitler. Rosenberg recounts part of the amazing tale to Scott Horton:

Deception worked like this: First, Wheatley and his colleagues drew up a cover story ("story" is actually the term of art) for each operation — what they wanted Hitler to believe. Then they began to scatter crumbs for the Nazis to find. Wheatley created enormous charts detailing what lies to tell on what date, and through what channel.  Diplomatic gossip? False reports by double agents?  Physical means such as "losing" a rucksack or a dead body? Nothing too direct or it wouldn’t be believable — the Germans had to gradually construct the story themselves.

That is how to write a deception plan. It’s also how to write a novel.  The biggest difference was that instead of writing for millions of readers, Wheatley was writing for just one. 

And, as Rosenberg notes, "the deception plans he wrote to trick Hitler were in many ways echoes of his Gregory Sallust stories, which were all set against the backdrop of real events." While on staff, Wheatley worked with a young intelligence officer named Ian Fleming, the author of the James Bond series, which premiered in 1953.

Rachel R. White reports on the rise of women from conservative communities who decide to carry children for gay couples:

As gay unions become more common in America, some surrogacy firms have seen a spike in affluent urban gay couples seeking IVF and surrogacy. In 2010, the first year the U.S. Census counted gay couples and their children, one quarter of same-sex households were found to be raising children. Intended parents who work with New York Fertility Services live primarily in New York, Los Angeles, London, and Hong Kong.

Surrogate carriers, however, are more likely to be middle class and from conservative backgrounds — according to NYFS medical director Joel Batzofin, most surrogates are from rural areas in the Midwest and the South. Parents tend to be affluent; using both a surrogate and an egg donor costs between $150,000 and $175,000. Earnings for surrogates like Melissa, meanwhile, start at $25,000. The result is one of modern medicine's strangest bedfellows: Devout Christian women who lend their wombs to gay fathers.

Many are ostracized for doing so:

Texas law does not allow two same-sex parents on a birth certificate. So Melissa ended up carrying for a single gay man from L.A. It was the first time either she or Shane had actually met a gay person, but they hit it off on the first meeting. When Melissa told the intended father their story about being kicked out of the community, they all started crying.

"Our intended father’s response was that I had received more homophobia than he had in his life as an out gay man," says Melissa. Of course, he wondered if it would be safe for her to carry his baby and asked if they would receive backlash. Melissa told him yes, there would be backlash. But people were starting to come around.

Meanwhile, check out another endearing surrogate story concerning Norway's Princess Mette-Marit.

In October, Bill spoke to Marlene Spoerri of the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs about his views on nuclear power:

I don’t foresee, especially post-Fukushima, a kind of political system in most of the world that would let it happen. Even before Fukushima, it wasn’t happening. The reason basically had to do with cost. Environmentalists helped shut down nuclear power, but really it was Wall Street that pulled the plug on it. It’s too expensive. It’s like burning $20 bills to generate electricity. It requires, if you’re going to do it, massive government subsidy. If you’re going to apply that subsidy, you’re better off doing it with other things that will generate more kilowatt hours per buck.

Now, that said, we should keep trying to figure out if there are some ways to do it that are more acceptable than the ones we’ve got now. You read about developments on the fringes, Thorium reactors and so on and so forth. But my guess is that in the timeframe we’ve got this is not going to be the place we go.

Bill’s previous videos are here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.