cardiff de alejo garcia

May 24

“But verbing nouns has a long pedigree in English wordplay, as the greatest verber of all testifies. Shakespeare nouned verbs as freely as Pele goaled footballs: “It out-Herods Herod”: Hamlet. “Grace me no grace, nor uncle me no uncle”: Richard II. Clever and audacious at the time, these usages are still striking and evocative today. But Shakespeare also verbed “dog”, “channel” and “season”, all now routine as verbs. A well-verbified word soon becomes fashionable, then unexceptional.” Robert Lane Greene

May 21

“Most of the people you are descended from are no more genetically related to you than strangers are. Or to put it another way, your genealogical family tree, which includes all the history of your family going back thousands of years, is much larger than your genetic family tree—the people whom genome sequencing would pinpoint as related to you. 99.9 percent of your genome is the same as that of every other human being (apart from the x and y chromosomes), and that .1 percent of variation in each person gets thinned out pretty quickly across the generations, as each child gets half of each of her parents’ genomes, passes on half to each of her children, and so on. Geneticist Luke Jostins did a nice mathematical analysis and estimated that you have only about a 12 percent chance of being genetically related to an ancestor 10 generations ago; by the time you get to a 14-generation ancestor, the probability is nearly zero.” Facts So Romantic

May 16

“I admire the indefatigable columnists, and yet I take a malicious pleasure in watching them struggle to get 800 words out of two bald facts and one unoriginal opinion.” Hilary Mantel: By the Book

“Then, there is the matter of Julie Delpy, a stern reminder that the first duty of a film critic — the sole qualification, to be honest — is to fall regularly, and pointlessly, in love with the people onscreen. Once this stops happening, you may as well give up and get a proper job.”

From Anthony Lane’s review of Before Sunrise in Nobody’s Perfect. I remember having a similar reaction to the character of Celine.

Anyways, Before Midnight is out next week. Should be fun.

May 15

“

The Oregon team persisted with therapeutic cloning research and eventually succeeded. Coffee is an essential feature of lab life – and the vital ingredient in their procedure turned out to be caffeine.

“It is remarkable that adding caffeine was the key that resulted in embryonic stem cell lines from all three [egg] donors,” commented Alison Murdoch, professor of reproductive medicine at Newcastle University in the UK where scientists have carried out similar research.

” “Scientists in human cloning breakthrough”

May 12

John Jeremiah Sullivan on David Foster Wallace

An excerpt from Wallace’s The Pale King:

Suffice it that Meredith Rand makes the […] males self-conscious. They thus tend to become either nervous and uncomfortably quiet, as though they were involved in a game whose stakes have suddenly become terribly high, or else they become more voluble and conversationally dominant and begin to tell a great many jokes, and in general appear deliberately unself-conscious, whereas before Meredith Rand had arrived and pulled up a chair and joined the group there was no real sense of deliberateness or even self-consciousness among them. Female examiners, in turn, react to these changes in a variety of ways, some receding and becoming visually smaller (like Enid Welch and Rachel Robbie Towne), others regarding Meredith Rand’s effect on men with a sort of dark amusement, still others becoming narrow-eyed and prone to hostile sighs or even pointed departures. […] Some of the male examiners are, by the second round of pitchers, performing for Meredith Rand, even if the performance’s core consists of making a complex show of the fact that they are not performing for Meredith Rand or even especially aware that she’s at the table. Bob McKenzie, in particular, becomes almost manic, addressing nearly every comment or quip to the person on either the right or left side of Meredith Rand[….]

John Jeremiah Sullivan discussing the passage above in GQ:

Imagine flat being able to dissect us like that, with that grain of detail—as primates, if you like—and worse, being unable to stop. A person would have to maintain tremendous stores of sympathy to keep the world from turning into a constant onslaught of Swiftian grotesquerie. Wallace didn’t seek to escape it, either—he cultivated it, as his art demanded. It ought to remind us of the psychic risk involved in writing at the level he sought. Like all good citizens, I’m with those who wish to resist romanticizing his suicide, but there remains a sense in which artists do expose themselves to the torrents of their time, in a way that can’t help but do damage, and there’s nothing wrong with calling it noble, if they’ve done it in the service of something beautiful. Wallace paid a price for traveling so deep into himself, for keeping his eye unaverted as long as it takes to write passages like the one just quoted, for finding other people interesting enough to pay attention to them long enough to write scenes like that. It’s the reason most of us can’t write great or even good fiction. You have to let a lot of other consciousnesses into your own. That’s bad for equilibrium.

A trailer for the 1974 version of Gatsby made in the style of the 2013 version.

May 7

“

Clive James: Wilson looked up to Fitzgerald’s natural talents but looked down on him as a mind, which was an unreal division, in my view. And anyway, Fitzgerald was never really as unscholarly as it suited Wilson to make out. In his maturity, Fitzgerald read a great deal. When he told his daughter that had hundreds of books about Napoleon in his library, he wasn’t kidding. But in Wilson’s mind Fitzgerald was a bad student because Fitzgerald had been a bad student when they were in college at Princeton.

Nichola Deane: You get an image of what a person is like when they are young and you can’t let go of it.

Clive James: Yes, and this is why you have to get away from your friends. At some stage you have to leave, or the people that know you will trap you in an image, and as far as Wilson is concerned, Fitzgerald was the talented goof-off, and of course he was, compared with Wilson. At Princeton they were both students of Christian Gauss, the great teacher. Certainly in Wilson’s eyes, Fitzgerald was the brain that could have been fine but never applied itself. Well, Fitzgerald never stopped applying himself all his life, and luckily he got away from Wilson. All the writers were lucky if they got away from Wilson because he would trap them in his impression of them, which was very, very sharply defined and very well done and everybody listened. Hemingway got lucky with Wilson, for example, but Nabokov eventually rebelled against him. It’s the Dr Johnson role. Wilson did treasure the Fitzgerald masterpieces. I think he called them two diamonds, Gatsby and Tender. I think he said that Gatsby was the perfectly cut one and Tender was the half-cut one, which is about right. Certainly he valued Fitzgerald as a prose writer, but he always gave the impression that he thought that with Fitzgerald it was a kind of fluke. It’s the way the Australian sports reporters used to talk about the swimmer Dawn Fraser. They would dismiss her genius on the grounds that she was a natural swimmer.

” For those reading or re-reading Gatsby ahead of the movie, and even for those who already came across it and hated it, Clive James on Fitzgerald is pretty great.

Mar 31

“Inevitably, all investigators of the mysterious cloth, even if they are well-qualified scientists, bring personal sensibilities to bear. After years of studying the Shroud, Hoare, who was a liberal Anglican, concluded that the man wrapped in it could not have died; within a short time of death, the liquids oozing from the traumatised body would have obscured the markings that are now visible. This thought prompted him to posit a revised version of the Resurrection story. Gleb Kaleda, a Soviet scientist who was also a secret Orthodox priest, argued that only one thing could have skewed the carbon-dating readings completely: a matter-changing flash comparable to a thermonuclear explosion. But there is of course no peer-reviewed literature on the thermonuclear implications of a miraculous resurrection.” Erasmus

Mar 30

“Did you say paranoid? Is it paranoid to wonder why an editor hasn’t returned your calls for two weeks, even though she has been sitting on your piece for four? Did you say egomaniacal? What self-respecting egomaniac would put up with the enraging powerlessness of the freelance writer, totally dependent on the whims of half-literate editors for a pathetic drip-drip-drip of income. Oh, for a regular paycheck and health care, so you wouldn’t have to suck up to some jerk of an editor for the next mortgage payment. (“Yes, I see. You want it to be iambic pentameter with internal rhymes. I’ve never read an analysis of the political situation in Pakistan done that way before. What a good idea!”)”

Michael Kinsley, “Writers Vs. Editors”