I don’t watch television and stopped reading the news regularly years ago. (What news I do read, I usually find via the books and arts pages of magazines and culture websites, which suits me just fine.) So I was surprised to learn at church yesterday that a hurricane is headed for the East Coast. It looks like we’ll miss a direct hit here in Hampton Roads. Still, it’s good to be prepared. I spent the afternoon trying to find back-up batteries for the sump pump, filling empty bottles with water, and making a mental list of a few other supplies. I even bought a generator from a neighbor who stopped by to check on us. Why am I telling you this? No reason, I guess, though it did remind me of an article a few weeks ago about bookstores in Houston following Hurricane Harvey: “The neighborhood surrounding Houston’s Blue Willow Bookstore saw more than 600 homes flooded. Owner Valerie Kohler noted that her customers have largely returned, though she said that she lost several older and elderly customers who had been regulars. ‘I think they just gave up on the city and moved away to be with family elsewhere,’ she said. Cathy Berner, children’s/young adult specialist and events coordinator at the store, said that while ‘Harvey was certainly no fun, it brought out the best in many people and we remain grateful for that.’ Among the store’s heroes was children’s book author and illustrator Bob Shea, who when Hurricane Harvey hit last year offered a hand-drawn unicorn to people who donated money to rebuild flooded school and classroom libraries.” Bookstores are wonderful, aren’t they?
Dumb science: Three physicists did statistical research to prove what most literary scholars already knew: That The Odyssey contains characters based on real people.
Dumb pseudoscience: Katharine Cook Briggs and Isabel Briggs Myers had almost no psychiatric training and little interest in empirical truth when they developed a test based on a superficial reading of Carl Jung’s controversial Psychological Types. “The Myers-Briggs categories have been a pillar of half-witted human resources executives’ presentations ever since.”
Do yourself a favor and read about (and listen to) this collaboration between poet Dana Gioia and jazz musician Helen Sung.
A new British Library film and Booker Prize online archive highlights the behind-the-scenes battles between judges and the arbitrary way that at least one winner was chosen: “The winner of the 1976 Booker prize was decided on a coin toss, the prize’s former administrator Martyn Goff has revealed. The winner that year was David Storey’s tale of a Yorkshire mining community, Saville. But according to an interview with the late Goff, made public in a new film from the British Library drawing on hundreds of hours of audio interviews about the prize’s history, Storey only won because the judges – novelists Walter Allen and Francis King, and poet Mary Wilson (who was married to PM Harold) – couldn’t agree on a winner…Along with the unusual way in which 1976’s winner was chosen, the archive also reveals the scorn with which Rebecca West, who judged the prize in 1969 and 1970, regarded the contenders. In one letter, West dismisses John le Carré as writing ‘according to formula’, Kingsley Amis as ‘curiously disappointing’, Wendy Owen as ‘a half-wit’ and Melvyn Bragg as ‘grossly over written’.”
Was Nabokov’s Lolita inspired by a real-life kidnapping? In a new book, Sarah Weinman argues it was, but Katrina Gulliver is not so sure: “Even if Nabokov did draw on Sally’s experience, he had only slight knowledge of the basic facts. He did have a notecard—he wrote everything on notecards—on which he had jotted down some details from a newspaper account. But the case wasn’t widely covered in the press (Sally’s rescue, Weinman acknowledges, wasn’t even reported in the New York Times), so it’s hard to see how it could have been a major inspiration.”
A friend of Beethoven finally gets his due? “Until recently, the place you’d be most likely to encounter the name Anton Reicha was in the footnotes of books about Beethoven. The two met as teenagers when they played in the same orchestra in Bonn, Germany: Reicha as second flute, Beethoven on viola. Reicha’s name also pops up in the biographies of composers who studied counterpoint with him at the Paris Conservatory: Berlioz, Liszt, Franck, Gounod. But an ambitious recording project by the American-Serbian pianist Ivan Ilic suggests it’s time to finally give Reicha’s music a listen.”
Swiss-style internships come to America: “A first-of-its-kind youth-apprenticeship program in Colorado aims to prepare students for the industries of the future by mirroring a successful model in Europe.”
Essay of the Day:
In The Chronicle of Higher Education, Jack Stripling and Megan Zahneis write about a Colorado State University professor who forged a job offer letter from another university to get a raise:
“The chemistry professor and his wife argued often in those days, as their marriage was coming to an end and a custody battle brewed over their two young children. Then, one summer night, things got so heated that the police were called to intervene.
“Brian and Stacey McNaughton had bought their single-family home in Fort Collins, Colo., six years earlier for $525,000. It was the sort of place, situated on an oversize corner lot in a neighborhood filled with doctors and lawyers, that projected the kind of solid middle-class status that the couple had achieved after years of study. Brian McNaughton, once a first-generation college student, was on the tenure track at Colorado State University, and his wife was a nurse anesthetist.
“But all of that risked being torn asunder because of the big lie — a lie that they shared, and that Stacey McNaughton was now threatening to expose. She would recount to the police how she had signaled plans to call her husband’s boss, reveal his deception, and derail his career. The couple struggled for control of a phone, and the professor pleaded with his wife to reconsider, before Stacey McNaughton ran out the back door screaming for help. She jumped a fence and took refuge with some neighbors who were having a backyard campfire.
“On that night and many thereafter, Brian McNaughton feared that his wife would tell people at Colorado State how he had fabricated a job offer from another university. It was a simple scheme, one designed to earn him the kind of money and respect that is often so elusive for early-career professors. As McNaughton had hoped, the fake letter spurred a counteroffer, forcing his dean and department chair to reconsider what he might be worth.
“Not long before, Stacey McNaughton had started secretly recording all of the couple’s conversations. In audio from that summer night, which she shared with an officer, she can be heard saying, ‘You wrote that letter, Brian — that lie. I told you don’t submit it.’ But he had done it, and there was no turning back.”
Read the rest. (Latest: Professor agrees to plea deal)
Photo: LEGO Chiron
Poem: C. Day Lewis, “Walking Away”
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