Angela Evancie reviews Andrew Shaffer’s Literary Rogues, which covers the mundane internships, grunt jobs and general kicking around that preceded the rise of literary giants:
[W]hat is most remarkable about Shaffer’s history is the way in which it colors that liminal space between writers’ obscurity and their eventual fame – not just with tales of weeklong benders, but also with portraits of sacrifice and stubbornness. Literary Rogues is far from a how-to, but it’s strangely reassuring: Success isn’t always instantaneous, and the antics don’t really have anything to do with it. After all, Hemingway wasn’t famous because he drank – he was famous because he wrote.
Related Dish thread on “achievement anxiety” here.
Essie Mae Washington-Williams, the child Strom Thurmond had with a black maid, passed away on Monday. Jelani Cobb reflects on the racial realities her life presented:
James Baldwin once remarked that segregationists weren’t truly driven by the cliché concern of preventing black men from marrying their daughters. Rather, he said, “You don’t want us to marry your wives’ daughters—we’ve been marrying your daughters since the days of slavery.” This is a truth that is forgotten among whites and rarely spoken among blacks. Revelations of the type Washington-Williams made in 2003 were shocking only to those privileged enough to not have this knowledge inflicted upon them personally or etched into their lineage and shaded—literally—into their family history.
In 2003, when the hazy borders between current events and reality TV were still intact, we processed Washington-Williams story as a political scandal, albeit a posthumous one. But in truth this was an affair of an altogether different genus than the family-values pol caught in a brothel or the homophobic pastor found to be conducting a same-sex affair. Hypocrisy may be the price we pay for having our biases catered to in public, but Thurmond’s actions weren’t so much hypocritical as they were surreptitious: not uncommon, just unspoken.
(Photo: Essie Mae Washington-Williams (2nd R), during a news conference Wednesday December 17, 2003 in Columbia, South Carolina, says that Senator Strom Thurmond acknowledged her privately as his daughter and provided financial support for her starting in 1941. Flanking Williams are her daughter, Wanda Terry, son Jason Terry and her attorney Frank Wheaton (R). By Stephen Morton/Getty Images)
Madeleine Schwartz tallies the cost to the federal coffers:
In 2002, the Bush administration diverted over $100 million dollars from existing welfare programs to create the Healthy Marriage Initiative, a national program to disseminate the importance of matrimony. Displaced funds included $14 million from child welfare, $6.1 million from a child support enforcement program, $9 million worth of support for refugees, and $40 million from a development strategies program focusing on Native Americans. Three years later, the US government sanctioned up to $150 million more per year to support “healthy marriage and responsible programs.”
A change of political parties has not tempered the flow: in the last fiscal year, Congress approved $75 million in spending on marriage promotion activities and $75 million for responsible fatherhood initiatives. This, of course, does not include the cost of marriage to individuals themselves (the average American wedding costs over $27,000, according to Reuters). That’s a lot to spend on an institution with a known failure rate of about 50 percent.
We recently covered one artist’s mission to create counter-surveillance fashion. Asher Kohn imagines Shura City, as “an architectural defense against drone warfare”:
Though its outer shell is fixed, Shura City’s inner walls can be moved to provide for growing families, heated feuds, or just for the change of it when Farah Abla decides she wants to be an interior designer. Its windows are protected by computerized mashrabiyas that blink and recombine into various QR codes to jam leering cameras. Its expansive courtyard is protected by latticework with backlit (by color-changing LED) windows that allow for sunshine for children and stars for young lovers, but also make face detection tricky with color blocks and changing shadows. Badgirs and minarets do their part to provide wild fluctuations of temperature (so that individual bodies are difficult to identify with infrared) and to provide high-wattage radio towers to interfere with wireless communication.
Drones exploit patterns–a worker’s daily walk to and from the fields, a child’s playful front-yard romp or, increasignly, a suspected militant groups’ late night caravan. Disrupt or confuse these pattern-seeking capabilites, the thinking goes, and you’re on your way to architectural cloaking. If you can’t rid the world of invasive aerial spy ware (because let’s be real), in other words, why not flip “technology, reorder, and arrogance”–the combination of which Kohn considers the empire’s greatest, most troublesome power–against the man?
“It is at best expensive and at worst impossible to build armor that can deflect any American bomb,” Kohn writes. “Shura City instead uses inscrutability as its armor.”
“Filing effectively”, in Allen’s sense, means a system with three parts: an archive, where you store stuff you might need one day (and can forget until then), a current task list in which everything is stored as an action, and a “tickler file” of 43 folders in which you organise reminders of things to do (43 folders because that’s one for the next thirty-one days plus the next 12 months). …
Rather than remove things from our sight by doing them, Allen, and the research, suggest we merely need to have a good plan of when and how to do them. The mere act of planning how to finish something satisfies the itch that keeps uncompleted tasks in our memory.
A.N. Devers notes that this year’s Super Bowl winner is “America’s only football team named after a poem”:
There are many layers to the Ravens’ literary allusion. There’s the fact that the team’s mascot is a collective of three black ravens respectively named Edgar, Allan and Poe. There’s the fact that the Ravens play less than a mile down the street from where Edgar Allan Poe is buried at Westminster Burial Ground. Then there’s the uncomfortable knowledge that the Ravens’ star player, Ray Lewis, was implicated in a double murder. Not to make light of murder, but on a team named after America’s first star horror writer, in a city where they peddle little Eddie Poe dolls next to Ravens’ jerseys in gift shops, it seems apro-Poe.
But Devers explains how poorly the city of Baltimore – and by extension its football franchise – has treated the legendary poet’s former house, which now serves as a Poe museum:
The Ravens’ lack of interest thus far in supporting the city’s literary legacy is a travesty. But the City of Baltimore’s privatization of the Poe House is even more so, particularly when considering the investment it made in bringing a national football team to town. The city afforded the Ravens, but it can’t seem to afford to properly staff and run a small house that draws several thousand new tourists to Baltimore a year? While I wish all those involved in trying to save the Poe house from closure all the success in the world, this debacle should serve as a warning bell for those of us who care about our American cities’ arts and cultural assets.
(Photo: The Baltimore Ravens mascot celebrates after the Ravens won 34-31 against the San Francisco 49ers during Super Bowl XLVII at the Mercedes-Benz Superdome on February 3, 2013 in New Orleans, Louisiana. By Harry How/Getty Images)
A recent District Court ruling draws attention to the problematic designation of “career offender” in the case of Lori Ann Newhouse, “a low-level pill smurfer, ‘[a] person who busily goes from store to store acquiring pseudoephedrine pills for a meth cook, usually in exchange for finished product'”:
[Newhouse] is truly a “one day” Career Offender because her two prior drug predicate offenses arose out of a single police raid of a Motel 6 room over a decade ago, on February 26, 2002, in Altoona, Iowa, when Newhouse was just 22 years old. … For reasons unknown, but likely random, the local prosecutor filed the two charges on separate days. Ironically, if the two charges had been filed in the same charging document — or the defense lawyer, the prosecutor, the judge or the court administer had scheduled the two sentencings for the same day — Newhouse would not be a Career Offender. Because of Newhouse’s Career Offender status, her U.S. Sentencing Guideline range was enhanced from 70-87 months to a staggering and mind-numbing 262 to 327 months.
Douglas Berman notices an appropriate parallel to the children’s cartoon:
As folks around my age may remember well from Saturday mornings long ago, one key distinguishing features of Smurf Village — beyond, of course, a disturbing gender imbalance and a communist social structure (with Papa Smurf as general secretary) — was the ability for every inhabitant to use the word “smurf” to mean whatever Smurfs wanted the word to mean. This ruling by Judge Bennett provides a useful window into just how smurfed-up the guidelines lingo can be, as one prior minor crime a decade earlier can turn a low-level, non-violent drug defendant into a “Career Offender.”
Today on the Dish, Andrew shamed the president for betraying his promise of a transparent, constitutional fight against al-Qaeda, and searched for a smarter approach worthy of our country. He voiced hope that Americans will once again overcome their fear of fresh immigration and observed the realization of equality in Britain’s parliament and the country at large. Elsewhere, Andrew repeated his call for a Catholic burial for King Richard and answered some barbed reader feedback dismissing the Dishhead society.
In political coverage, we clarified the necessity of the BDS debate while acknowledging the group’s extreme goals, witnessed a growing wariness of Christianism in America, and said goodbye to Dick Morris as Fox News fraudster par-excellence. Seth Baum worried that we could exacerbate global warming by trying to stop it while Carrie La Seur provided a new take on climate change regulations from the inner West.
Waldman ranked Election 2012 as a standard year for turnout as Alan Abramowitz took the country’s temperature for the 2014 midterms. We also imagined a world without the USPS, at least on Saturdays. Mujib Mashal explained the Taliban’s new Freudian recruiting tactics as we brainstormed some names for Tim Geithner’s publisher, and a member of the repulsive Westboro Baptist Church left her family cult and earned an Yglesias award.
In assorted coverage, we nibbled on some snacks from NASA’s cafeteria, explored the possibility of universal robo-labor, and remembered that we live by the sun and (probably) will die by the sun. While Timothy Taylor predicted the end of the era of junk email, Michael Chabon sought the key to self-expression and we closed our ears for a spoiler on spoilers. As we bundled up for the east coast’s imminent snowfall, we served a scoop of solid blues for the MHB, caught a glimpse of desperate rage in the Face of the Day, and surveyed La Ventana, Mexico during the VFYW.
According to a new poll, a plurality of Americans think killing American citizens abroad is illegal. The poll’s main finding charted:
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Adam Serwer notes that the poll did find “majority approval for the use of drone attacks against ‘people and other targets deemed to be a threat to the US’ whether carried out by the CIA or the military, as long as those targets are not American citizens.” But:
The poll’s findings seem to be at odds with another survey published last year by the Washington Post, which found that an overwhelming majority of Americans, 89 percent, approve of the use of drones to kill terror suspects abroad, and of those who approve 79 percent also believe it is legal to kill those terror suspects if they are American citizens.
He admits that question phrasing may explain at least part of the disparity. Drum thinks the distinction between Americans and non-Americans is beside the point:
If we’re at war, and if targeted killings of enemy combatants are legal, then U.S. citizenship is irrelevant. If you’ve joined up with enemy forces, you’re fair game. Conversely, if the justification in the memo is inadequate, that means the justification for targeted killings in general is inadequate. Either the entire program is justified, or none of it is.
In those days after his father died, she came to learn that
when she could no longer hear what he was doing,
when she stopped hearing the turn of a page or typing in the other room
that he could only be weeping to himself. Sometimes she would wake in the
middle of the night and see the kitchen light on
and infer. Many years later, he sees a picture of himself:
so young and old and penitent that he feels a strange fondness for this other
person. He wonders half-humorously if he had grown wise through grief
(he is not wise now) though if anyone had asked, he would
have said, ‘I guess I was depressed. I don’t think I learned anything.’
They are in the bedroom. He passes
her a glass of bourbon and asks her what he was like then.
She says, ‘What, seriously?’
She sees from the whimsical look in his eye
that he no longer needed to be defended.
She takes a cold sip. ‘You crawled into yourself.
I was lonely sometimes.
You snapped at me a lot.’
The Dish 
