James Frey's Blog, page 36
March 20, 2023
Go Sumo!
from RealClear Books & Culture
The Work of SumoJapan’s National Sport Distills Competition to Its Essence
Sumo — a Japanese word (相撲) that literally means “striking one another” — is a sport that is almost wholly alien to the American experience. I write almost here because the one point of familiarity is that all of the athletes (who average 366 pounds, up from 276 pounds in 1969), like most American football players, are obese, morbidly so in most cases. But everything else is different: it is formal, excessively so, and the record-keeping — which began in earnest in the mid-to-late 19th century — puts the best efforts of the Society for American Baseball Research (the efforts of which are insanely, absurdly good!) to shame.
We Americans and Western Europeans simply have no sport that is an analog for sumo, which has 82 recognized kimarite, or winning techniques, and decides in mere seconds which one resulted in the victory, thanks to the efforts of an eminent judge, usually a former sumo (illegal techniques, such as striking an opponent with a closed fist, hair-pulling, finger-bending, and strangulation, are called kinjite). And setting aside the scandals that plagued the sport in terms of opponents gifting each other wins — a bit of trivia shared widely via the lame, undercooked pop-statistics bestseller Freakonomics — no other combat sport in the entire world has a more carefully ranked hierarchy: six ranked divisions comprising hundreds of athletes, which are further subdivided in the makuuchi, or top division, into the lesser maegashira (ranked in descending numerical order by performance) and then the san’yaku, or champions, who comprise the ranks of komusubi, sekiwake, ōzeki, and most illustrious of all, the yokozuna.
March 19, 2023
Go Navajo!
from The LA Times via Yahoo! News
Supreme Court may keep alive Navajo Nation water rights claim in Arizonaby David G. Savage
The Colorado River cuts through Marble Canyon in the Navajo Nation en route to the Grand Canyon. This segment of the river joins two vast reservoirs: Lake Powell in Utah and Lake Mead in Nevada. (Luis Sinco / Los Angeles Times)A divided Supreme Court confronted on Monday the question of whether the government must do more to provide water for the Navajo Nation in northern Arizona.
And the answer, by the narrowest majority, appeared to be yes.
Most of the justices said they were wary of even considering plans to take more water from the mainstream of the drought-stricken Colorado River. But five of them, led by Justices Neil M. Gorsuch and Elena Kagan, mostly agreed with a lawyer who said there was a 150-year history of broken promises to the Navajo Nation.
A treaty signed in 1868 promised a “permanent home” where Navajo Nation residents could farm and raise animals.
March 18, 2023
GenOffense
He discusses millennials, violence and Kanye West
BY BRET EASTON ELLIS AND JACOB FUREDI
Jacob Furedi: Bret, you’ve spoken before about the struggle you had writing this book. You first tried in 1981, and then again a number of times in the decades since. What changed that meant you could write it now?
Bret Easton Ellis: I’m old. That’s really why I ended up writing this book. I was 16 or 17 when I started writing Less Than Zero. I was in high school at Buckley, Los Angeles, and something happened in my senior year. The writer in me suddenly got a little out of control. I started to embellish a lot. I started to make up things. I was a fabulist. I believed things were happening that really weren’t happening.
I had a girlfriend, one of the most popular girls in our senior class at Buckley, but I was gay, and only pretending to be a boyfriend. I was having a secret affair with a closeted football player, and that was a whole other drama. (Unfortunately, I told a good friend of mine about it, and he confronted the football player.) I made up stories about an English teacher. I was making up stories about my family. And everything kind of collapsed. Becoming a writer had spilled over into my real life. And it was like an origin story: how do you control this superpower? How do you make it work, and not wreck your life and wreck the lives of others?
This was in my senior year, in 1981 and 1982, and I realised I had to pull back. And that was the moment when I moved from being a teenager to being a man, when the corruption of adulthood happened and moved me into the world of adults.
March 16, 2023
Wherefore Art Web3
Companies developing Web3 games will have to focus more on entertainment and less on monetization to reach global audiences.
By Rachyl Jones
Game on. AFP via Getty ImagesVideo games that incorporate blockchain technology—called Web3 games—have gained popularity in Asia, but Western gamers are proving skeptical. Some experts think it’s only a matter of time before the new model of gaming takes root in the U.S., but it’s clear game developers will have to make some adjustments before the games will appeal to a U.S. audience.
While Web3 has been called the future of the internet, crypto and NFTs have been besieged lately. Over a period of nine months last year, the monthly trading volume of NFTs decreased by 97 percent. In May, cryptocurrencies Terra and Luna collapsed and took half-a-trillion dollars of crypto market cap with them. While Western countries debate the value of Web3, blockchain gaming has already taken off in Asia, which has 1.47 billion gamers, or nearly half of the world’s video game players.
[ click to read complete article at Observer ]
March 15, 2023
The Lonelyverse
from New York Magazine Intelligencer
Who Is Still Inside the Metaverse?Searching for friends in Mark Zuckerberg’s deserted fantasyland.
By Paul Murray
The church. Photo: Paul MurrayIn September, my family and I move from our home in Dublin to a fancy East Coast college town, where I’ll be teaching for the semester. I grew up in Dublin, which means I have a wide circle of friends to draw on whenever I’m let out of the house. The street where I live is friendly: If I want to borrow a spatula or I need someone to look after my cat, I have only to ask.
Life is different for us in the U.S. We have, for the first time, a basement. But we have no friends. It seems as if none of the permanent faculty can afford to live in the suburb where the university has placed us. We technically have neighbors, but we never see them; they manifest only in the form of their gardeners, who are at work every day with their leaf blowers.
It’s in this strange scenario — alone on a continent, cut off from everyone I know — that I decide to try the metaverse for the first time. A whole galaxy of pals brought right to your living room? I think. Why not?
The first thing that strikes me when I enter the metaverse is the people, the avatars, their — Where are their fucking legs?
March 13, 2023
The Bookstealer
A manuscript thief who stole unpublished works from authors like Sally Rooney, Margaret Atwood and Ian McEwan claims he wanted to cherish the books before anyone else.
By Alexandra Tremayne-Pengelly
Margaret Atwood was among the authors targeted by Filippo Bernardini. TOLGA AKMEN/AFP via Getty ImagesThe man behind a years-long scheme involving more than 1,000 stolen unpublished manuscripts claims his theft was motivated by a love for reading and desire to read books before anyone else.
Filippo Bernardini, an Italian citizen, apologized for stealing works by authors such as Sally Rooney, Margaret Atwood and Ian McEwan in court papers published Jan. 10 in Manhattan federal court, as reported by The Bookseller. He was first arrested in 2022 and pled guilty to one count of wire fraud in January.
“I have always loved books,” said Bernardini in a letter to U.S. District Judge Colleen McMahon. “I remember that when I started reading as a child, it was to create my own world, have my own space and even make new friends.”
Bernardini, who worked as a rights coordinator at Simon & Schuster U.K. from 2019 until his arrest, allegedly solicited unpublished manuscripts through more than 160 fraudulent email addresses impersonating individuals in the publishing industry.
March 10, 2023
“God spoke to me in the subwoofers”
by Zachary Woolfe
BERLIN — In 2018, after a visit to Berghain, the storied techno club here, the saxophonist and curator Ryan Muncy called the composer Ash Fure, a friend and collaborator.
“God spoke to me in the subwoofers,” Muncy told her. “‘Bring me Ash Fure.’”
Soon Fure, at the time a fellow at the American Academy in Rome, boarded a plane to Berlin. She and Muncy went straight to Berghain. “I remember so vividly every single detail,” Fure said in a video interview. She recalled watching as the other club-goers shed their coats and donned futuristic outfits. She explored the labyrinthine architecture, discovering vantage points from which to watch and listen. She got close to the famous Funktion-One sound system, which engulfed her with its volume but never hurt her ears. She stayed for 14 hours.
“It all had this wild warping effect,” Fure said.
March 6, 2023
Spank The Monkey Tonight
By LUKE ANDREWS
jennifer aniston and brad pitt’s full “spicy” scene as linda barrett and brad hamilton on “fast times at ridgemont high”s virtual table read.
— thay (@beingamaguire) September 18, 2020
THIS WAS WAY TOO FUNNY 😂#FastTimesLive pic.twitter.com/BuxXh6Co42
Participating in ‘NoFap’ techniques may lead to devastating mental health issues, a study suggests.
Born out of groups on Reddit, the ‘NoFap’ movement urges men to avoid masturbation to boost confidence, focus and even cure erectile dysfunction. Those who abide by the practice even call themselves ‘Fapstronauts’.
Researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) surveyed 587 men who had taken part in the abstinence practice.
March 5, 2023
What Happened To Auden?
One stanza of poetry captures the pleasure of holding another person.
W. H. Auden at Oxford University in 1972. (Alamy)One of the odd things about poetry is that people head to it in times of crisis or unusually heightened emotion.
Poetry is not especially useful when describing the state of the traffic heading downtown. It is not required for summing up the pleasures of shopping. But there are moments when only poetry will do—as the most distilled form of communication possible. Consider how people not just read but often try to write poetry upon the death of someone they love. Or when they are falling in love—especially for the first time.
There seems something important about the fact that even people who don’t know they care for poetry instinctively know it is somewhere they can go to in extremis. Other art forms—music, in particular—may do similar work, but sometimes only poetry will do.
Which brings me to the only other person, apart from Eliot and Shakespeare, who will crop up here more than once over the next year: W. H. Auden.
February 9, 2023
Guardians of the Saguaro
Members of the Crested Saguaro Society guard the location of rare specimens in the Sonoran Desert, a task made more urgent by population growth
Members of the Crested Saguaro Society checking a crested saguaro cactus in Sahuarita, Ariz. PHOTO: ASH PONDERS FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNALPIMA COUNTY, Ariz.—Millions of saguaro cactuses grow in the Sonoran Desert, yet only an estimated one in 200,000 exhibits the spectacular crown of the crested saguaro.
Its rare beauty spawned the needle-in-a-haystack mission of Arizona’s secretive Crested Saguaro Society. With the zeal of birders, the society’s 10 members are out to find as many of the crested saguaro as time and energy allow. They hunt in a desert that stretches across 100,000 or so square miles.
“It becomes a little bit of an obsession,” said Pat Hammes, a 77-year-old retired courtroom clerk from Tucson, Ariz. She estimated that she and her late partner, Bob Cardell, spent eight hours a day, two days a week for more than six years to locate some 2,200 of the rare cactuses.
The saguaro, the largest cactus in the U.S., often grow to 40 feet, according to the National Park Service, and one 78-footer set the record. When they reach the age of 60 to 80 years old, a rare few grow the scalloped crest that sets them apart. Biologists have yet to discover exactly why. The widest crest recorded by the society was 17 feet, though members still argue over whether the measurement was logged accurately.
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