Roy Miller's Blog, page 207
April 26, 2017
That Wasn’t Mark Twain: How a Misquotation Is Born
This content was originally published by NIRAJ CHOKSHI on 26 April 2017 | 11:35 am.
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In the book, Mr. Sullivan offers 10 common “mechanisms” that he says lead to misquotation and incorrect attribution.
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Through one such process, which he labels “textual proximity,” a famous person mistakenly gets credit for a quotation merely by having their name or likeness published close to the words. In another, “ventriloquy,” a statement about an individual’s work is perceived to be so apt that it is eventually confused for their own words.
Both may explain how Anton Chekhov, the Russian writer, became associated with the saying: “Any idiot can face a crisis, it’s the day-to-day living that wears you out,” as outlined on Mr. Sullivan’s website and, now, in his book.
In May 2013, Mr. Sullivan heard from a reader who, after a fruitless attempt to prove Chekhov’s authorship of those words, wanted help uncovering the true history of the quotation.
Mr. Sullivan accepted the challenge.
Google Books led him to “The Tradition of the Theatre,” a textbook published in 1971 and edited by Peter Bauland and William Ingram. Only snippets were available online, so he visited a university library to review the book in full. In it, he found the following, written by Mr. Bauland and Mr. Ingram:
A character in a Hollywood film of the 1950s casually drops this line: “Any idiot can face a crisis; it’s this day-to-day living that wears you out.” The screenplay was by Clifford Odets, America’s chief inheritor of the dramatic tradition of Anton Chekhov, and in that one line, he epitomized the lesson of his master.
Though Mr. Sullivan was unable to confirm Mr. Odets’s authorship of the sentence, he theorized that Mr. Odets wrote something similar, which was then misquoted in the 1971 textbook. The earliest citation Mr. Sullivan could find crediting the saying to Chekhov was from 1981.
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That final attribution could have been the result of: textual proximity, in which an oblivious reader saw Chekhov’s name and blindly attributed the quotation to him; ventriloquy, in which a reader found the line so resonated with Chekhov’s style that these words were mistaken for his; or some combination.
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Mr. Sullivan published his analysis in June 2013, but more than two years later, a reader came forward with a new lead, referring him to the 1954 movie “The Country Girl,” based on a play by Mr. Odets.
Mr. Sullivan watched the movie and discovered these words uttered by Bing Crosby:
I faced a crisis up there in Boston, and I got away with it. Just about anybody can face a crisis. It’s that everyday living that’s rough.
The movie was based on a play by Mr. Odets, but, after failing to find the line in a 1951 edition of the script, Mr. Sullivan believes that yet another man most likely coined the phrase. Ultimately, he would credit the “any idiot” line to George Seaton, who wrote the screenplay.
The other mechanisms Mr. Sullivan identified include:
• Synthesis and streamlining, a process in which a quotation is simplified over time;
• Proverbial wisdom, in which a quotation is elevated to the status of a proverb because its source is unknown;
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• Real-world proximity, when an individual wrongly gets credit for a quotation because they share a real-world connection to the true author;
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• Similar names, the mistaken attribution of a quotation to someone whose name resembles that of the true author;
• Concoctions, which are pure fabrications, intentional or otherwise;
• Historical fiction, when an individual gets credit for words uttered by a character portraying them in a movie, novel or other work of fiction;
• Capture, when a famous person gets credit for echoing the words of someone less well-known;
• Host, in which an individual, simply by being famous, attracts credit for quotations they never delivered, with Mr. Twain and Albert Einstein being popular examples.
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An Artist Fears She’s a Fraud in ‘A Line Made by Walking’
This content was originally published by DWIGHT GARNER on 25 April 2017 | 8:59 pm.
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Another sort of writer might send Frankie up, might make of her an object of aspirational satire. (Samuel Beckett described tears as “liquefied brain.”) But Baume takes her seriously indeed, and we follow her down a rabbit hole of elegiac quarter-life distress.
Frankie is shocked to find how easily wounded she is. As a child she was a sort of spiky warrior princess. “I was grubby and scab-kneed with a bedroom full of caged animals,” she says, “and in college I learned to use all the big electric drills and wood-saws in the sculpture department and to weld.”
But now her art is not going well; there are no emails in her inbox; a boy she liked is with someone else; she is avoiding the few friends she has. “I am not,” she frets, “remotely impressive.” She feels like a canceled postage stamp.
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author of “A Line Made by Walking.”" data-mediaviewer-credit="Patrick Bolger" itemprop="url" itemid="https://static01.nyt.com/images/2017/... Baume, the author of “A Line Made by Walking.”
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Patrick Bolger
Worse than being unimpressive, she senses she’s a fraud. Referring to her family, whose members not only put up with but love her, she declares: “I feel guilty that I am granted the immunity of the artistically gifted, having never actually achieved anything to prove myself worthy.”
If you’ve ever looked inside yourself and disliked what you saw, you will respond to Frankie. She decides she must get out of Dublin. Some rustication is in order. She flees to a rural house once owned by her grandmother, and settles in.
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At this point “A Line Made by Walking” becomes a wallow, a trunk of oozing funk, a narrative in which very little happens. I’m a fan of a good wallow, in fiction. But by its midpoint, Baume’s novel begins to stall. Rot and claustrophobia set in. It’s a major event in this novel when the doorbell rings.
Frankie stumbles onto a new art project. She begins to photograph dead animals, sometimes scaring the locals while doing so. She angers the locals, too, by being a sarcastic gut-shot mammal.
“Do you get up every morning,” she asks the woman who is cutting her hair, “and do that to your hair? Do you undo it at night and then, the next morning, do you get up and do it all over again?”
The woman does not answer. “Doesn’t that leach at your soul?” Frankie whispers. “Even a little bit, even at all?” Do not anger the person with sharp scissors near your skull, even if you can weld. The woman gets revenge by giving Frankie a gruesome haircut.
Frankie’s sunny side is rarely up. “People don’t like it,” she realizes, “when you say real things.” Yet you may wish more real things were said in “A Line Made by Walking.” It’s the work of an intelligent writer who strands her character in the intellectual and moral horse latitudes.
Frankie begins to speak for the reader, by thinking things like “How could I have known that peace could become so boring?” Also: “I lie down and think about how this whole long, strange summer ought to end in a substantial event.”
To keep her mind sharp, Frankie tests herself by calling to mind artworks on a variety of subjects: birds, stars, sky, hair, penises. These interludes fill a lot of space in this volume, and they quickly come to seem like filler.
Toward the end, there’s a sense that Baume has begun to vamp in order to fill space. “I can’t believe there are so many types of floss,” Frankie thinks while at the drugstore. Outside, she asks: “How do the flowers know it’s nighttime? Why is the moon everywhere?”
You can be an admirer of what Anthony Burgess called “the poetry of digression” and still ask yourself: Why does this talented author sometimes seem to be writing for children’s board books?
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Baume has a rare sort of feeling for outcasts. Her first novel, “Spill Simmer Falter Wither” (2015), about a shunned man and his one-eyed dog, had a strange and stark emotional potency. So does, at its best, “A Line Made by Walking.”
Frankie admits to a friend her fear that “all this stupid sadness is chewing at my intellect.” Her friend replies that it may be time to let her art go.
“She meant: It’s time to postpone — if not entirely abandon — my burden of unrealistic ambition. To start churning the intellect I have left into simply feeling better; to make this my highest goal. It’s time to accept that I am average, and to stop making this acceptance of my averageness into a bereavement.”
In interviews, Baume has said that this novel is vaguely autobiographical. Maybe Frankie will grow up to be a writer as well, the reader thinks, and churn her despair into something prickly and profound, a line to walk out of pain and loss.
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Benjamin R. Barber, Author of ‘Jihad vs. McWorld,’ Dies at 77
This content was originally published by WILLIAM GRIMES on 25 April 2017 | 9:42 pm.
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“If we export capitalism without democracy, we breed anarchy and terrorism,” Mr. Barber told The Washington Post after the Sept. 11 attacks, an event that seemed to confer prophetic status on “Jihad vs. McWorld: How Globalism and Tribalism Are Reshaping the World” and propelled it onto best-seller lists.
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“I said precisely that the war of Jihad versus McWorld, if it was not alleviated by global democracy, an international civic infrastructure, was likely to explode,” he told The Post. “These two sets of forces could not avoid clashing and exploding; they were going to create nothing but death and explosion unless we did this third thing, and we didn’t.”
Benjamin Reynolds Barber was born Aug. 2, 1939, in Manhattan. His father, Philip, succeeded Elmer Rice as the director of the New York unit of the Federal Theater Project. His mother, Doris Frankel, was a playwright who wrote for the radio soap opera “Ma Perkins” and later for the television soap operas “All My Children” and “General Hospital.”
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Mr. Barber’s 1995 book. “I said precisely that the war of Jihad versus McWorld, if it was not alleviated by global democracy, an international civic infrastructure, was likely to explode,” he told The Washington Post in 2001.
He grew up in Greenwich Village and attended the Stockbridge School, a progressive boarding school in Massachusetts founded in the late 1940s by Hans Maeder, a German socialist refugee. After a year studying at the Albert Schweitzer College in Churwalden, Switzerland, he enrolled at Grinnell College in Iowa. On his way to earning a bachelor’s degree in political science in 1960, he studied for a year at the London School of Economics.
At Harvard, he was awarded a master’s degree in government in 1963 and a doctorate in 1966. In 1969, he began teaching political science at Rutgers, where for many years he was the director of the Walt Whitman Center for the Culture and Politics of Democracy. In 2001, he joined the University of Maryland as the Kekst Professor of Civil Society.
Mr. Barber juggled his academic appointments with a variety of posts at think tanks and public-policy organizations, notably at the Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society of the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, and at Demos, a research and policy organization promoting participatory democracy and an enlightened public sector. In 1974, he helped found the journal Political Theory, which he edited for the next decade.
“I went into the academic world under the illusion that it was a place where people cared passionately about ideas, about teaching, about discourse and about reflecting critically,” he told The Post. “What I discovered was a world of small-minded, partisan professionals, many of whom were there because they couldn’t figure out what else to do. So I created a life inside the academy that reflected the life I wanted to lead.”
He served as an informal adviser to President Bill Clinton, a less than satisfying experience that he wrote about in “The Truth of Power: Intellectual Affairs in the Clinton White House” (2001).
After the Sept. 11 attacks, he returned to the subject of the West and its enemies in “Fear’s Empire: War, Terrorism and Democracy” (2003), arguing that the current crisis presented only two options: “to overpower the malevolent interdependence that is terrorism by somehow imposing a global pax rooted in force; or to forge a benevolent interdependence by democratizing the world.”
Mr. Barber’s first marriage ended in divorce. In addition to his son, he is survived by his wife, the former Leah Kreutzer; two daughters, Cornelia Witte Barber and Rebecca Barber; a brother, Willson; two half brothers, Charles and Hilary; and six grandchildren.
Mr. Barber, in his later writing, promoted cities as solution generators for pressing world problems, their size and flexibility allowing them to generate and implement ideas more creatively than national governments. Acting on one of his own suggestions in “If Mayors Ruled the World: Dysfunctional Nations, Rising Cities” (2014), he founded the Global Parliament of Mayors, which convened for the first time last year in The Hague. It was attended by mayors from 60 cities around the world.
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His book “Cool Cities: Urban Sovereignty and the Fix for Global Warming” was published last week by Yale University Press.
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April 25, 2017
Prepare, Participate, Win: How to Use the Writer’s Digest Pitch Slam & Other Conference Events as Career Opportunities
This content was originally published by Guest Column on 25 April 2017 | 9:00 pm.
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I arrived at my first writer’s conference to learn about the industry and plan a strategy strategy for my unfinished book. I am a proponent of the reverse-engineering process—seeing the big picture of what I want to achieve, then creating a strategy to get there.
This guest post is by Anna Sabino . Sabino is the designer behind the jewelry brand Lucid New York , which she started over a decade ago after leaving her Wall Street career path. Her jewelry collections are sold in over 100 stores worldwide and have been featured by the editors of People StyleWatch, Vogue, Cosmopolitan, the NY Times blog the Moment, and more. Anna is a contributor to Huffington Post, Thrive Global on Medium , and a certified, co-active career and life coach. She speaks, coaches, and leads workshops focusing on growing your creative business, creating multiple streams of income, and working remotely. She walks the talk running her New York based business remotely from Hawaii. She shares valuable business advice for artists and other creatives at AnnaSabino.com . Her book, Your Creative Career, will be published by Career Press in January 2018.
It was August 2015 and I was at the Writer’s Digest Conference in New York City, ready to soak in all the information I could about the publishing business. I had a nonfiction book idea and over 20,000 words written. My answer to the staple question of what my book was as general and vague as you could get: I wanted to write about change, entrepreneurship, and mindfulness.
After a few days of going to every workshop and panel I could, I decided to attend my first pitch slam session. I wasn’t ready, but I knew that the refined concept of the book wouldn’t just reveal itself to me overnight. I wanted it to be based on feedback and potential alterations. I wanted to hear first impressions and reactions from agents.
The format of the pitch session was similar to a speed-networking event. I had an opportunity to pitch however many agents I could within an hour. Each pitch was three minutes long. I had some nods, interest, and valuable feedback during each pitch. However, I noticed agents asked for clarification, which might have meant that I needed to present in a more focused way.
Another thing I realized was that if I wanted to sell a book, I needed to write a robust proposal. It was necessary, and no one was going to do it for me unless I hired an editor, which I didn’t want to do this early in the process.
This is a must-attend event for writers. Click here to register now!
After the conference, I had a lot of energy and motivation, but it wasn’t enough to take action. I lacked self-discipline and that important push to start. There was no one imposing a deadline and I was dreading that proposal. I found excuses and justified why I didn’t need to write it.
“I started a few successful businesses and never needed a business plan,” I said to my friend, looking for reassurance.
“Do you want to sell this book or write it for yourself?” he asked. This question was the spark that ignited my strong desire to start my journey to getting traditionally published.
In February 2016, I decided to go to the Writer’s Conference in San Francisco. My goal was to use these few days to clarify my concept. Writers had the opportunity to sign up for 8-minute consultations with an editor, coach, agent, or publicist. I signed up for every session I could.
After three days of testing, brainstorming, and researching at night in my hotel room, I was ready to pitch my new concept. The morning of the pitch session day, I shared my pitch with a random conference attendee to practice. I expected feedback, and she said “I need it. I need this book.”
This unexpected reaction was the best feedback an author could ask for. I was ecstatic and ready to pitch. I chose to approach five agents. I projected confidence and clarity, declaring that the book was a strong, call-to-action for anyone wanting to design a creative career on their own terms. I drafted a robust marketing plan focused on preorders and long-term audience building. I pitched five agents and their reactions showed me that I was on to something. After I got home, I spent the next 4 months writing a sixty-page proposal.
Fast-forward to August 2016 and I once again attended the Writer’s Digest Conference in New York City. This time, though, I arrived with a strong, tested book concept, accompanied with the proposal. I leisurely attended the sessions during the conference, and when the pitch slam session time came, I was more ready than ever.
After my three minute pitches, every agent’s enthusiasm matched mine. Four of them asked to see the proposal. I sent it to them within hours. The next day, I had two offers of representations so I scheduled a phone call with both agents. Discussing goals, strategy, and long-term plans, I discovered an immediate match with John Willig from Literary Services, Inc., whom I signed an exclusive representation agreement with.
We spent the rest of the summer polishing the proposal and getting ready to pitch editors in the fall. What I appreciate most about working with John is how professional and encouraging he has been. With over 750 book deals closed, he does know how to seamlessly collaborate and act as an invaluable liaison between author and publisher.
[10 Meaningful Practices for Every Writer]
Within just a few months, John found the perfect publish for my book, Your Creative Career: Career Press. The book will be published in January 2018.
There are many ways to seek representation for your book, and you may favor one instead of the other. What I liked about attending conferences and pitching agents in person was the immediate feedback. I was able to act right away. When you send your pitch to multiple agents via email, it’s rare that you get detailed feedback, so it’s hard to know if you should keep pitching or move on and revise the concept.
If you plan accordingly, attending a writer’s conference can catalyze your career. It’ll give you answers, inspire, and motivate you to take a step in the right direction. There are so many manuscripts out there that we will never read because they’re either unfinished or the author has run out of energy to persevere. Conferences and other writing events can infuse writers with the perseverance, and passion with a touch of obsession, that are necessary to relentlessly pursue the writer’s journey.
If you’re an agent looking to update your information or an author interested in contributing to the GLA blog or the next edition of the book, contact Writer’s Digest Books Managing Editor Cris Freese at cris.freese@fwmedia.com.
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A Brilliant, Incendiary Joan of Arc Story for a Ravaged Earth
This content was originally published by JEFF VANDERMEER on 25 April 2017 | 9:00 am.
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The sublimely heightened prose in the novel’s opening sections introduces the stark futuristic details of Pizan’s world: “My head is white and waxen. No eyebrows or eyelashes or full lips or anything but jutting bones at the cheeks and shoulders and collarbones and data points, the parts on our bodies where we interact with technology.… My skin is … Siberian. Bleak and stinging.”
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If storytelling is, in Pizan’s hands, a form of resistance, in those of de Men it has become a form of control. Having first found fame as a self-help guru, he now uses propaganda and mythologizing — what Yuknavitch calls “narrative grafts” — to deploy information as a weapon. Like our era’s current tyrants, he’s both terrifying and buffoonish. And if he also calls to mind the pre-Enlightenment world, so too do the novel’s heroic characters, whose names invoke Joan of Arc and the medieval feminist Christine de Pizan. (It’s less clear why Pizan’s partner is called Trinculo. Maybe his parents just liked “The Tempest”?)
As it unfolds, Joan’s story — including her early life and her discovery of “otherworldly combat techniques” like the temporary raising of the dead — is absorbing. These sections are written in an unadorned prose that nicely contrasts with the intense rhetoric of Pizan’s own narration. Key to Joan’s spiritual perspective is science, with its specialized vocabulary: “Xenotransplantation. … Sometimes Joan would spin around alone in a circle saying the beautiful word out loud to no one but her body, hands clasped over her heart, eyes closed, like praying.” Yet we read such passages in the certain knowledge that it will be Joan’s fate to live on a dying planet.
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Adding yet another layer, “The Book of Joan” pays welcome attention to the surviving flora and fauna of the Earth — focusing in particular on the underground burrows that provide refuge from ecological catastrophe. It is a world the author makes vividly present as Joan hides in caves with ribbon eels below and “long-eared rabbit bats thriving overhead.” Here Yuknavitch skillfully draws on the work of climate-change philosophers like Timothy Morton, on the idea of life at “Earth magnitude,” a scale beyond the human.
Animals have a direct impact on both Joan’s rebellion and her sense of self. “They made their lives — chose their world order,” we are told of oilbirds, one of the few birds that use echolocation to navigate. “Surely an evolutionary process, but to Joan, it was more an act of perfect imagination. They reminded her of her own warrior-child self.” Creatures like the olms, blind salamanders with electrical receptors “sunk deep into their epidermis,” emerge as a potent tool for the resistance against de Men. Other “wet-wired” organisms, “tens of thousands” of spiders, worms, salamanders and more, have also been deployed to combat the Skylines that threaten to deprive the planet of sustenance.
Events on Earth and CIEL — in the book of Joan and in the book of Pizan — will eventually converge with a startlingly cathartic sense of both tragedy and hope. Joan must face heart-wrenching truths, while de Men is revealed as even more repugnant than he initially seemed. In scenes reminiscent of Frank Herbert’s “Dune Messiah,” Joan must grapple with her destiny as an “engenderine,” poised between the human and the inanimate.
Herbert’s hero, as emperor of Dune, was a godlike figure with uncanny abilities who embodied both immense capacity for destruction and a chance for renewal, if only he could overcome the temptations inherent in his powers. Although de Men in some ways exemplifies the same struggle, Joan must confront the implications of her powers as well, a reminder that our ecosystems can suffer even from the acts of those with good intentions. But while Herbert’s writing, especially in the later Dune books, was marked by an airless abstraction, Yuknavitch’s prose is passionate and lyrical, very much in the moment. Fusing grand themes and the visceral details of daily life, she offers a revisionist corrective that shows the influence of writers like Clarice Lispector and Angela Carter. Like Carter, Yuknavitch writes about the body with an easy intimacy.
From her early experimental novels to her 2011 memoir, “The Chronology of Water,” and her previous novel, “The Small Backs of Children,” published in 2015 and partly set in war-torn Eastern Europe, Yuknavitch has exhibited a rare gift for writing that concedes little in its quest to be authentic, meaningful and relevant. By adding speculative elements to “The Book of Joan,” she reaches new heights with even higher stakes: the death or life of our planet.
Telling the truth with precision and rage and a visionary’s eye, using both realism and fabulism, is one way to break through the white noise of a consumerist culture that tries to commodify post-apocalyptic fiction, to render it safe. But in Yuknavitch’s work there’s no quick cauterizing of the wound, nothing to allow us to engage in escapism. The result is a rich, heady concoction, rippling with provocative ideas. There is nothing in “The Book of Joan” that is not a great gift to Yuknavitch’s readers, if only they are ready to receive it.
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HMH Makes Another Round of Layoffs
This content was originally published by on 1 January 1970 | 12:00 am.
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Houghton Mifflin Harcourt ramped up its cost cutting initiatives yesterday, laying off approximately 20 people in its trade division. The company would not comment on the number of job cuts, but admitted that “organizational changes” had been made.
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The Truth Is Out There, and the Feds Paid to Find It
This content was originally published by DICK TERESI on 25 April 2017 | 9:00 am.
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Devotees of the unseen world will be familiar with the cast of characters: Uri Geller, the spoon bender; Edgar Mitchell, the Apollo astronaut who did ESP experiments on his way to the moon; Cleve Backster, who gave polygraph tests to plants; Ingo Swann, a pioneer of remote viewing; Karlis Osis, an expert on deathbed visions; J. B. Rhine, of Duke University’s Parapsychology Laboratory; Jacques Vallée, the U.F.O. astronomer; Hal Puthoff and Russell Targ, of the weird Stanford Research Institute; Charles Tart, the altered states aficionado. They’re all here, a Who’s Who of the things-that-go-bump-in-the-night world for true believers to enjoy.
Much of the information presented is already known, but Jacobsen has accomplished the gargantuan feat of bulldozing it all into one place, with additional details gleaned via searches under the Freedom of Information Act, followed up with recent interviews of sundry paranormalists involved. She has a keen eye for amusing anecdotes, and writes them up with convincing detail. More than that, Jacobsen has arranged her story in a kind of nonfiction picaresque novel. Her marginal real-life characters appear, disappear, then reappear episodically, wisely sticking to the shadows of the bureaucracy, often paid secretly, accomplishing nothing.
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Andrija Puharich is the pioneer of the book, the man who monetized and institutionalized psychic phenomenology. He worked his way through medical school as a tree surgeon, and came to the epiphany that the human nervous system works like the roots of a tree. (Note to reader: This is not true.) Puharich persuaded rich people, mostly heiresses, to spend the hard-earned (by others) money they had inherited on his Round Table Foundation, which studied ESP, telepathy and other psychic phenomena. The foundation conducted experiments in an opulent seaside mansion in Maine designed by Stanford White.
Then Puharich found still deeper pockets, organizations even more willing to spend other people’s money: the United States military and intelligence services. Jacobsen describes the multidecades-long effort to lavish oodles of taxpayer funds on techniques that never worked.
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After Puharich, every psychic and crystal-ball reader piled on. The C.I.A., for example, funded efforts to produce a drug that would turn off ESP even before ESP itself was discovered. Our Army (“Be all you can be”) conducted classified experiments to detect ESP in cats. How the Army planned to weaponize ESP cats is not explained. When Uri Geller met Wernher von Braun, he used psychokinesis to bend the rocket scientist’s gold wedding band, then fixed his pocket calculator via mind control. Analysts in the Pentagon decided Geller could be used as an antiballistic missile system, altering the electrical circuits of incoming ICBMs. In the Pentagon’s words, imagining the utility of psychokinesis for this task “would not be conceptually difficult.”
None of the experiments described in “Phenomena” struck me as scientific. The psychics were tested by other believers, as it was maintained that any negative attitudes would foil the experimental results. There was no legitimate peer review or efforts to replicate results. Management overseers — the people who got the money — were philosophically onboard. One of them, Maj. Gen. Albert Stubblebine, admitted that his goal in meditation was to learn how to levitate.
What the psychic researchers were best at was finding success where none existed. When, in 1988, Marine Lieut. Col. William Richard Higgins was abducted in Lebanon by Hezbollah, one of our nation’s top remote viewers, Angela Dellafiora, was asked to find him by psychic means. She announced that he was still alive, being moved from place to place, and was “on water.” In fact, he was long dead. The terrorists had kept his body on ice to preserve it. Dellafiora’s supervisor declared success. After all, she had said he was “on water,” and ice is frozen water.
Jacobsen does not come up with a dollar total for how much has been spent by the government on psychic phenomena, but the Stanford Research Institute, where some of this work was conducted, had a yearly budget of $70 million. Jacobsen’s admirable deadpan style made me first believe that her book is an exposé of government foolishness. In the final chapters, however, she appears sympathetic to the field.
Kenneth Kress, a C.I.A. analyst, wrote that belief is a binary issue with regard to the paranormal. There are “two types of reactions… positive and negative, with little in between.” Jacobsen’s sources should have used mind control to get her a more receptive Times reviewer. I was a bust in catechism class, never getting behind the Jesus stuff. The miracle of feeding the 5,000 with five loaves and two fishes mystified me. With such powers, I would go, “Hey, filet mignon for everybody!” Same deal, Uri Geller. With mental metal-bending skills, why not form sheet metal panels for General Motors rather than ruin people’s silverware?
In the late 1970s I constructed the editorial format for a science magazine called Omni. The owner asked me to include some coverage of paranormal science. During a 10-year period, looking for just one legitimate event, I spent hundreds of thousands of dollars of this man’s money, not to mention suffering through tedious lunches with lunatics. (Have you ever tried eating crème brûlée with a bent spoon?) Then there were meetings with the psychics’ equally creepy codependents, the debunkers. Every psychic phenomenon our staff looked at was quickly discredited, or duplicated easily by magicians.
“Phenomena” winds down as a picaresque novel should. It goes nowhere, and there is no character development. The people end up as shallow as they began. Jacobsen finds Geller filthy rich but still willing to bend spoons for people in restaurants. In 1995, suffering from dementia, kidney failure and gangrene in one leg, Andrija Puharich, surrounded by feral cats (sans ESP), fell down a flight of stairs to his death.
Most sad, perhaps, is Edgar Mitchell, the ESP astronaut. He opens a safe for Jacobsen and extracts a bent spoon. Mitchell did not bend the spoon with his mind. He did not see it get bent. It was mailed to him by a woman who claimed it was bent by her son while watching Geller on television. He tells Jacobsen that the bent spoon inspires him.
“Everyone has heroes,” Jacobsen writes. “Ed Mitchell is one of mine.”
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Rebecca Swift obituary | Books
This content was originally published by Melanie Silgardo on 25 April 2017 | 2:02 pm.
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Rebecca Swift, who has died aged 53 of cancer, believed that anyone who writes and wishes to be edited and advised constructively and professionally should have the opportunity to do so. To this end, in 1996 she founded The Literary Consultancy (TLC) with Hannah Griffiths. It was the first of its kind – a manuscript assessment agency offering detailed editorial feedback to anyone writing in English anywhere in the world. Set up in Becky’s north London flat on a capital sum of £600, TLC never borrowed another penny.
From 1989 to 1995, Becky was a junior editor at Virago Press. At the time, the “slush pile” – that mountain of unsolicited manuscripts – was one of the first casualties of the editorial department: publishers no longer had the resources to read unsolicited manuscripts, which were returned to the writer with a standard note.
Becky test ran the idea of TLC while she was at Virago, unknown to her bosses, writing her first report under an assumed name and even charging a small fee. Her enduring belief in the link between the act of writing and the therapeutic process led her to an MA in psychoanalytic studies at the Tavistock Clinic in 1999. Her thesis Are You Reading Me? explored the relationship between unpublished writers and readers in the publishing industry. In her words: “TLC was born, perhaps to mop up some of that ‘toxicity’ that lay between production of a work and the apparently negligent ‘reality’ of the publishing world.” Through TLC she tirelessly sought to fill that gap.
On panels and platforms at literary festivals Becky talked about the work of TLC, and promoted her vision for it. It grew into a service that offered a mentoring scheme as well as a free reads programme aimed at low-income and marginalised writers and backed by Arts Council funding.
The Free Word Centre in Clerkenwell, central London, where TLC was a founding resident from 2009 onwards, became a crucible for the literary events and annual conferences that Becky programmed. The first, Writing in a Digital Age (2012), brought together writers, technology experts, literary agents, publishers and digital media gurus for the first time to discuss an increasingly complex publishing landscape which included the growing phenomenon of “indie” or self-publishing.
Born in Highbury, north London, and brought up in Hampstead, Becky was the daughter of the writer Margaret Drabble and the actor Clive Swift. They divorced in 1975, and in 1982 her mother married the writer and biographer Michael Holroyd. Becky grew up surrounded by writers – AS Byatt was an aunt – and one particularly, Doris Lessing, would influence her greatly. They first met when Becky was a teenager reading Susan Howatch’s sprawling saga Penmarric – which much to her delight turned out also to be a favourite of the great Doris. This was the start of a lifelong friendship.
From her father, Becky inherited her love of music and musicals. She was never far from a song - at her last public appearance in November 2016 celebrating TLC’s 20th birthday, she picked up her guitar, accompanied by the jazz trio who had been performing all evening, and sang Suzanne in memory of Leonard Cohen, who had died that day.
From Camden School for Girls, she went on a scholarship to study English at New College, Oxford (1983-86). She returned to London and took her first job in publishing, at Lokamaya Press, which published translations from Urdu and Hindi, before joining Virago.
Her publications include Letters from Margaret: The Fascinating Story of Two Babies Swapped at Birth (1992), a correspondence between George Bernard Shaw and Margaret Wheeler, and Imagining Characters (1995), a book of conversations between AS Byatt and the psychoanalyst Ignês Sodré. Her biography of Emily Dickinson was published in 2011 by Hesperus in their Poetic Lives series.
Becky’s own poems were published in numerous anthologies and she had been putting together a manuscript of poems which she hoped to publish. She leaves a vast body of writing in the form of diaries she wrote daily for much of her life, fulfilling her need for introspection through this unflinching therapeutic ritual.
Becky experienced three periods of clinical depression, which informed her commitment to bettering mental health provision. This she pursued as a trustee of the Maya Centre, a charity based in north London providing free counselling to vulnerable women.
She will be remembered by friends, family and colleagues for her wit, warmth and wonderful storytelling. Noisy, confident and pioneering, she was curious about people, always wanting to push the boundaries in life and work. She has left publishing in a better place than where she found it.
Becky leaves her partner of many years, Helen Cosis Brown, her parents, her stepfather, her brothers, Adam Swift, a political philosopher, and Joe Swift, a garden designer and TV presenter, and her two nieces and two nephews.
• Rebecca Margaret Swift, literary consultant and writer, born 10 January 1964; died 18 April 2017
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Robert M. Pirsig, Author of ‘Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,’ Dies at 88
This content was originally published by on 1 January 1970 | 12:00 am.
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Robert M. Pirsig, the philosopher and author of two books, including the bestseller Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values, died at his home in South Berwick, Me., on April 24. He was 88.
Born in Minneapolis to a University of Minnesota law professor, Pirsig's rough start to his college years led to his enlistment in the United States Army shortly after the end of World War II. He was stationed in Korea, where he was influenced by East Asian culture and philosophy; upon his return, he enrolled at UM and, after graduating in 1950 with a degree in philosophy, left for India.
In India, Pirsig traveled and studied Hindu philosophy at Benares Hindu University. He returned to UM to complete graduate studies in journalism, and worked for a time as a technical writer before a brief stint in academia.
In 1968, Pirsig took a motorcycle trip across the American West with his eldest son, Christopher. That trip formed the narrative core of his first book, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, which traced a father-son motorcycle trip and flashbacks to a period in which the author was diagnosed as schizophrenic.
After being rejected by 121 publishers, the book was finally accepted by William Morrow; it was released in 1974, and became a phenomenon and, according to William Morrow, is often described as one of the most influential books of popular philosophy.
“It lodges in the mind as few recent novels have,” George Steiner wrote in The New Yorker in 1974, “deepening the grip, compelling the landscape into unexpected planes of order and menace.... This is indeed a book about the art of motorcycle maintenance, about the cerebral concentration, about the scruple and delicacy of both hand and ear required to keep an engine musical and safe across heat or cold tarmac or red dust. It is a book about the diverse orders of relation—wasteful, obtuse, amateurish, peremptory, utilitarian, insightful—which connect modern man to his mechanical environment.”
Pirsig's second book, Lila: An Inquiry into Morals, was published in 1991. Pirsig spent 17 years working on the book, before it was released. During that time, he helped found the Minnesota Zen Meditation Center and continued to perform repairs in his home workshop as an amateur—but skilled—mechanic.
Pirsig was the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and a 1979 award from the the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. He is survived by his wife, Wendy; his son, Ted, of Volcano, Hawaii; his daughter, Nell Peiken, and son-in-law, Matthew Peiken, of Middleton, Mass.; his grandson Lionel Pirsig and his wife, Kazue Yamada; and grandchildren Lily and Jasper Peiken. His son Christopher died in 1979.
A private memorial service will be held. In lieu of flowers, the family requests donations to be made to the academic institution or other charitable organization of one’s choice.
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In Search of New Memoirs That Go Light on Catastrophe
This content was originally published by on 25 April 2017 | 9:50 am.
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Joon Mo Kang
Dear Match Book,
I am a writer of memoir, and I am always looking for memoirs that are not entirely about dysfunction or disease. They are hard to find.
I’m currently reading “The Point of Vanishing,” by Howard Axelrod, and although it is based somewhat on a physical accident, the book is more about the life of solitude in nature as a way to move on from trauma. For more examples of what I like, think Annie Dillard’s “An American Childhood ”; Abigail Thomas’s “Safekeeping ”; even “Walden,” by Henry David Thoreau. I’ve also read “The Solace of Open Spaces,” by Gretel Ehrlich, which I loved. But I can’t keep going back to the same authors. I’m looking for new choices without the catastrophes of many memoirs.
DAVID W. BERNER
CHICAGO
Dear David,
I’m sure I don’t have to suggest “Into the Wild,” by Jon Krakauer to you, but I will mention it just in case you haven’t read it. Krakauer’s 1996 book, a cornerstone of loner lit, is not a memoir, but it is the book that Howard Axelrod’s well-meaning brother describes in order to spook him before the author left to spend two years alone in the woods of Vermont, the experience that he chronicles in “The Point of Vanishing.”
You’ve probably also heard of the best-selling memoir “Wild,” by Cheryl Strayed, which includes, in flashbacks, what could be a third “d” in your disaster triptych — drugs — but Strayed’s journey, though physically harrowing, is meditative and bookish, not sensationalistic. It is also a book that readers feel compelled to share; I gave it to my mother, a favorite babysitter and two close friends as soon as I finished it.
The death of Strayed’s mother is the emotional heart of “Wild.” In “H Is for Hawk,” it is Helen Macdonald’s grief for her father — compounded, she wonders early in the book, by the loss of her twin just after they were born — that pushes Macdonald, an experienced falconer, to adopt and train a ferocious species of bird called a goshawk, which she named Mabel. Although a true obsession can shut people out, Macdonald’s passion for birds — including the beguiling language of falconry — draws readers in.
For tamer nature memoirs that are also marked by fierce attention to language, you could turn to the nonfiction of two eminent American poets. I think you would enjoy the memoirs of the former United States poet laureate Donald Hall, especially the cleareyed essays that resemble journal entries in “Life Work,” published in 1993. Hall’s account of his days at his ancestral home in New Hampshire, Eagle Pond Farm, links the work of making a living with the satisfaction of making a life.
“Something is wrong, I know it, if I don’t keep my attention on eternity,” Mary Oliver writes at the beginning of “Upstream.” It’s easier said than done for most of us, but Oliver’s essays offer detailed instructions — pay attention to nature with every sense you have — about how to connect to something larger than our everyday selves.
Another poet, a Scottish one, Kathleen Jamie, has built a writing life around paying attention. The 14 personal essays in “Sightlines” include explorations — methodically reported and lyrically written — of secluded places like a cave in Spain whose walls are covered with prehistoric art, and the remote island of Rona in northern Scotland. In one brief, exquisite essay Jamie rescues a moth. And it’s suspenseful. Once you have read “Sightlines” you’ll want to pick up Jamie’s “Findings,” a slim book in which the serious illness of her husband and the search for a rare bird provide just two of many prompts to observe and record both the ordinary and the unusual details in the world around her.
Rebecca Solnit’s “A Field Guide to Getting Lost” — a collection of essays on becoming untethered, literally and metaphorically, in the natural world — is both disorienting and grounding. Solnit recommends getting lost writing, “touching the edge of the unknown that sharpens the senses.” Reading about Lewis and Clark and Sacagawea and the color blue through Solnit’s lens of lostness makes them new. And memoirs like Solnit’s give readers the rare, strange pleasure of looking through a window into another person’s mind.
Yours truly,
Match Book
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