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New Orleans, Louisiana, United States
Admire John McPhee, Bill Bryson, David Remnick, Thomas Merton, Richard Rohr and James Martin (and most open and curious minds)

30.11.15

What Is It About Adele?

What Is It About Adele? - The New York Times



Enough of aid – let’s talk reparations

Enough of aid – let’s talk reparations | Global Development Professionals Network | The Guardian



A mosaic in Cajamarca shows an encounter in 1532 between the conquistador Pizarro and the Inca Atahuallpa.

35 great quotes about Scotland & the Scots - Books

35 great quotes about Scotland & the Scots - Books

Bill Murray

7 Steps to Living a Bill Murray Life, by Bill Murray

By 
TORONTO, ON - SEPTEMBER 06:  Actor Bill Murray attends the "Men, Women & Children" Premiere during the 2014 Toronto International Film Festival at Ryerson Theatre on September 6, 2014 in Toronto, Canada.  (Photo by Karl Walter/Getty Images)
Photo: Karl Walter/2014 Getty Images
Step one to being more like Bill Murray: Sing. And really be into it. Murray is not his ironic Saturday Night Live lounge singer and he is not his Lost in Translation actor abroad, singing a half-asleep version of “More Than This.” He sings when the mood strikes him, and when it does, he means it. As he walked out onstage on Friday night at the Toronto Film Festival to the sounds of Prince’s “Raspberry Beret,” Murray grabbed a microphone and sang a few verses of the song. He would repeat the performance (sans mike) at an after-party later that night, where he would also lead a dance party, as he has been known to do in the past.
Friday was “Bill Murray Day” at the festival, and it consisted of screenings of Murray classics StripesGhostbusters, and Groundhog Day, and the world premiere of his new film, St. Vincent, in which he plays a grumpy old man tasked with watching the child of his neighbor, played by Melissa McCarthy. During the Q&A, moderated by Scrooged screenwriter Mitch Glazer, and featuring Ghostbusters director Ivan Reitman, Murray dropped so many pieces of life wisdom that it seemed only right to gather it into a Bill Murray Guide to Life. (Copyright: us.)
Step two to being more like Bill Murray: Just be honest. The St. Vincent role came about, said Murray, “because they couldn’t get Jack Nicholson.” After the audience roared in laughter, he continued, “No really. It’s well-documented.”
Step three: Always make time for your friends. On a day when all of Toronto was celebrating him, and he had a full slate of press for St. Vincent, Murray still carved out time to see Welcome To Me, an audaciously wacko comedy about a woman with bipolar disorder (Kristen Wiig), who’s obsessed with Oprah, wins the lottery, and buys herself a talk show on a failing cable network. It’s the first film by Shira Piven, wife of Anchorman director Adam McKay, and Will Ferrell is one of the producers. “It’s one of the strangest movies I’ve ever seen,” he said. “The bravery to make this movie is pretty impressive. It’s quite a piece of work. I mean, the funny stuff is maybe bolder than anything we’ve seen in a very, very long time. And it’s not just a funny movie. There’s a lot going on. I’m still thinking about what happened.”
Step four: Be spontaneous. Many people are aware of Murray’s penchant for popping in on random karaoke nights, or doing dishes at other people’s house parties, or crashing wedding photo shoots. But this is not a new thing. According to Reitman, Murray has always been that way. Back in the day, before he was ever on SNL, Murray used to go up to people on the streets of New York and yell, “Watch out, there’s a lobster loose, hot butter’s the only way to get it!” in the voice he’d later use inCaddyshack. “He’s going up to strangers in Manhattan and they’re laughing. They don’t know who this guy is, but he’s making them laugh, and he’s totally spontaneous and they just have to go with it.”
Step five: Leave yourself open to magical moments. It’s unclear how long ago this was, but Murray told a tale of being in a cab in Oakland and finding out his cab driver was a saxophone player. The driver, however, never got to practice because he drove 14 hours a day. So when Murray also found out the guy’s sax was in the trunk, he had him pull over, get out his horn, sit in the back, and play while Murray drove. “You know, that’s like two and two. It makes four,” Murray said. “Not only did he play all the way to Sausalito, which is a long ways, but we stopped and got barbecue. He was playing at what people would call a sketchy rib place in Oakland at like 2:15 in the morning. It’s like, ‘Relax, man. You’ve got the fucking horn. We’re cool here.’ He’s blowing the horn and the crowd’s like, ‘What the hell’s that crazy white dude playing that thing?’ And it was great. It made for a beautiful night. I think we’d all do that, if you saw that moment and you’re, as we say, available, you’d make the connection and you’d do it right.”
Step six: Stay relaxed and success will follow. “Someone told me some secrets early on about living. You have to remind yourself that you can do the very best you can when you’re very, very relaxed. No matter what it is, no matter what your job is, the more relaxed you are, the better you are. That’s sort of why I got into acting. I realized that the more fun I had, the better I did it, and I thought, Well, that’s a job I can be proud of. I’d be proud to have that job, if I had to go to work and say, ‘No matter what my condition or what my mood is, no matter how I feel about what’s going on in my life, if I can relax myself and enjoy what I’m doing and have fun with it, then I can do my job really well.’ And it’s changed my life, learning that. And it’s made me better at what I do. I’m not the greatest or anything. But I really enjoy what I do.”
Step seven: Remember that you are you and no one else is. The night’s final question was “What’s it like being you?” Murray responded with a guru-level reminder about the importance of being present, which we’ll reprint in full and embed in audio form below.
I think if I’m gonna answer that question, because it is a hard question, I’d like to suggest that we all answer that question right now, while I’m talking. I’ll continue. Believe me, I won’t shut up. I have a microphone. But let’s all ask ourselves that question right now. What does it feel like to be you? What does it feel like to be you? Yeah. It feels good to be you, doesn’t it? It feels good, because there’s one thing that you are — you’re the only one that’s you, right?. So you’re the only one that’s you, and we get confused sometimes — or I do, I think everyone does — you try to compete. You think, Dammit, someone else is trying to be me. Someone else is trying to be me. But I don’t have to armor myself against those people; I don’t have to armor myself against that idea if I can really just relax and feel content in this way and this regard. If I can just feel, just think now: How much do you weigh? This is a thing I like to do with myself when I get lost and I get feeling funny. How much do you weigh? Think about how much each person here weighs and try to feel that weight in your seat right now, in your bottom right now. Parts in your feet and parts in your bum. Just try to feel your own weight, in your own seat, in your own feet. Okay? So if you can feel that weight in your body, if you can come back into the most personal identification, a very personal identification, which is: I am. This is me now. Here I am, right now. This is me now. Then you don’t feel like you have to leave, and be over there, or look over there. You don’t feel like you have to rush off and be somewhere. There’s just a wonderful sense of well-being that begins to circulate up and down, from your top to your bottom. Up and down from your top to your spine. And you feel something that makes you almost want to smile, that makes you want to feel good, that makes you want to feel like you could embrace yourself.
So what’s it like to be me? You can ask yourself, What’s it like to be me? You know, the only way we’ll ever know what it’s like to be you is if you work your best at being you as often as you can, and keep reminding yourself: That’s where home is.

​Inside The New Yorker magazine - CBS News

​Inside The New Yorker magazine - CBS News



david-remnick-620.jpg

Clive James

The Lightning Before Death: A Tribute to Clive James by Morten Høi Jensen

November 28th, 2015RESET-+
There will always be young men coming up who will find his achievement a clear light.
— Clive James on Edmund Wilson

I MET CLIVE JAMES by accident, about five years ago, while navigating the literary nonfiction stacks at the Strand bookstore in New York. I had an old collection of James’s essays in my hand when I suddenly, and improbably, stumbled on the author himself a few feet ahead of me. I hesitantly introduced myself and we spent some time book-browsing together. James told me almost immediately that he had been admitted to the hospital for leukemia as soon as he arrived in New York, and that the doctor had forbidden him to leave his hotel room. Despite the doctor’s precaution, however, James was not only out of his room but alarmingly scaling the shelves for hard-to-reach books. At one point, he caught sight of Van Wyck Brooks’ The Times of Melville and Whitman, wedged atop a particularly menacing shelf. I nervously held a rickety stepladder as he climbed to retrieve it while arguing a point about Brooks’ relationship to Edmund Wilson. When he came back down he fell silent and handed me the book. “Take it,” he said, “I already have several copies at home.”
Nothing about this encounter surprises me now. To his readers, James always sounds as if he is writing from the back of a dust-strewn bookstore somewhere, making an impassioned case for a forgotten poet or little-read critic. One of the many joys of reading him as a young writer is feeling the textures of life in his prose. He doesn’t just tell you about a book he’s read — he tells you where he bought it, what year it was published, and what condition it was in. Despite now being in his late 70s, he still has the air of the student about him, and often happily evokes his undergraduate days in Sydney or early years as a book reviewer on Grub Street in London. He is in perpetual harangue with these younger selves, sometimes modifying their opinions or even challenging them. But the true lover’s protective instinct has never waned, and the student in James can be mercilessly (and sometimes wearily) impatient with his more dutiful elders (usually literary academics and theorists). “You can’t help wondering why it is thought to be good that the study of literature should so tax the patience,” he once wrote in an essay on the literary scholar Wayne C. Booth. “After all, literature doesn’t. Boring you rigid is just what literature sets out not to do.”
In his native Australia, and certainly in his adopted England, James may be better known as a TV broadcaster and memoirist (and, more recently, as a vivid translator of Dante), but it is his stature as a literary journalist and cultural critic that ought to endure. In his breakthrough literary essay — “The Metropolitan Critic,” a tribute to Edmund Wilson published in the Times Literary Supplement in 1971 — he emerged with the enviable erudition and irresistible charm that have characterized all his essays since. Clearly he had not just read, but reread, all of Wilson’s books. He even had the nerve to refer to Benedetto Croce, the Italian philosopher-historian, without using his first name (casually assuming the reader’s familiarity). Yet he wrote in a style that was anything but highbrow. Of Wilson’s memoir Upstate (1957), James wrote, “[it] shivers with the portent of an advancing ice-cap.” In a later essay, he wrote that Nabokov’s translation of Eugene Onegin “makes Pushkin sound like a Scrabble buff.” Later still, in an essay on Ezra Pound, he observed, “Whether The Cantos is, or are, a singular or a plural, is a question that I believe answers itself eventually, but only in the way that a heap of rubble gradually becomes part of the landscape.”
One of the distinguishing features of James’s essays is his comedic vigilance — his readiness to make you bark with laughter before stunning you with some insight about literature or film or politics. He is an entertainer at heart, and perhaps it is his anti-elitism and omnivorous cultural tastes that keep him from sounding curmudgeonly or old-fashioned. If it is taken for granted today that critics should also be conversant in TV, fashion, or film, then no doubt this owes a good deal to James’s example. He writes about Coco Chanel and Louis Armstrong with the same wit and brilliance that characterize his essays on Tacitus and Alexander Solzhenitsyn, and as early as the 1980s he transformed television reviewing into an art of its own. This cultural promiscuity, this defiant lack of centrality, may recall William Hazlitt, who claimed to have spent his life “reading books, looking at pictures, going to plays, hearing, thinking, writing on what pleased me best.”
James’s prose fuses two styles that might, at first glance, appear incompatible. On the one hand there’s the swagger and peacockery of 1970s London, where James competed for column space with literary pals like Ian Hamilton and Martin Amis. This is the reason his prose plumes with hyperbole: “Here is a book so dull,” he wrote in a famous drubbing of an official Soviet biography of Brezhnev, “that a whirling dervish could read himself to sleep with it. If you were to recite even a single page in the open air, birds would fall out of the sky and dogs drop dead.” On the other hand, even though James is so steeped in British literary tradition, the cadences of his writing often bring to mind German and Austrian writers of the early 20th century. He is a close and appreciative reader of Alfred Polgar, Peter Altenberg, and Golo Mann, whose prose, James once said, “approaches the ideal of the continuous aphorism: you find yourself learning it like poetry.” If he were less modest he might have added that the same applies to the languid music of his own writing. James has a wonderful ability to say important things in a memorable way:
“[Randall] Jarrell was against knowingness, and he possessed the antidote: knowledge” (from “Poetry’s Ideal Critic: Randall Jarrell”)
“To understand Auden fully, we need to understand how a man with the capacity to say anything should want to escape from the oppression of meaning too much” (from “Farewelling Auden)
“The wretched of the earth get no help from witch doctors, and when academic language gets beyond shouting range of ordinary speech, voodoo is all it is” (from Cultural Amnesia)
The American writer Tom Bissell once told me during an interview that he had made a point of carefully studying the way James’s writing moves on the page. This passage from an essay on Solzhenitsyn, written for The New Review in 1974, is a good example of what Bissell might have had in mind:
Solzhenitsyn can imagine what pain is like when it happens to strangers. Even more remarkably, he is not disabled by imagining what pain is like when it happens to a million strangers — he can think about individuals even when the subject is the obliteration of masses, which makes his the exact reverse of the ideological mentality, which can think only about masses even when the subject is the obliteration of individuals.
There you have it: Solzhenitsyn’s massive achievement and the inherent failure of ideology expressed in two sentences. Notice how James forms his entire argument simply by teasing out the implications of his initial statement; each point is contained in the previous one, like a Russian nesting doll. How memorably it is expressed, how artfully he makes his case simply by repeating a few words. As James remarked of Randall Jarrell, he makes being simple look easy. 
¤
Since his diagnosis five years ago, James has been writing against time, churning out books at the rate of a one-man literary factory, leaving the rest of us looking achingly geriatric by comparison. He followed his grand, humanistic opus Cultural Amnesia (2007) with three books of poetry, a fifth volume of memoirs, three essay collections, and, as if that weren’t enough, a translation of The Divine Comedy. Now there’s Latest Readings, published by Yale University Press, a slim assortment of short, appreciative essays in which James revisits some of his favorite books and authors, and makes about a library’s-worth of new discoveries to boot.
The opportunity for these second (and sometimes third, fourth, or fifth) readings arose when James moved from London to Cambridge to be nearer the hospital where he goes for treatment several times a month. He was joined there by his immense library, whose presence is like some benevolent occupying force: “Upstairs there is a whole floor of the house which has similarly not only been taken over, but where the taking over is being taken over.” Not that he would want it any other way. “If you don’t know the exact moment when the lights will go out,” James muses in the introduction, “you might as well read until they do.”
Though Latest Readings is modestly sized, James’s reading list is as gargantuan as ever. Anatole France’s irresistible quip about In Search of Lost Time — “Life is too short, and Proust is too long” — is obviously not for James. On the contrary, he plows through a whole shelf of Joseph Conrad novels without even breaking a sweat. Then he goes straight for Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour trilogy (“Sword of Honour has the broadness of concept that makes Waugh’s other novels look as if pennies are being pinched”), devours Olivia Manning’s “magisterial” Balkan trilogy and the Levant trilogy — followed, naturally, by Deirdre David’s biography of Manning — and lounges late in the afternoon with Albert Speer’s diaries and Anthony Powell’s novel sequence A Dance to the Music of Time. For James, you feel, Proust is hardly long enough.
There is a subtle and touching comedy to all this eleventh-hour reading. In the introduction, James explains that he sold half his library to make space for more useless objects, like furniture, and vows that his book-buying days are over. Until, that is, he meets Hugh, proprietor of Hugh’s bookstall on Market Square in Cambridge, “known to its devotees both literary and academic as one of the great bookstalls on earth.” Hugh is James’s accomplice and enabler; it only takes about a page and a half for the reader to imagine James walking down Academy Street under a heap of books:
[…] it was madness to start making small piles of books on Hugh’s stall that I wanted to take home. But the madness was divine. Even if I already had the book, he might have a handier edition, and often they were titles that I had once owned but lost along the way; and most often of all they were books that I had never owned before but now realized I ought to possess.
Clive James eventually runs out of shelf space and must resort to “nonshelf shelving”:
I had already read the whole Jack Aubrey saga, but when I spotted a bunch of the individual volumes on Hugh’s bookstall I thought I had better start my own collection. Madness. Horizontally on the footlocker are also arranged some biographical books about Hemingway. Double Madness: they don’t look as if they are standing on a shelf. They just look as if they are lying around.
How is it possible to retain such youthful passion and enthusiasm, such unseemly levels of energy and vigor, in the midst of a protracted, fatal disease? The sheer range of James’s interests is enough to make even Susan Sontag seem parochial. I would have expected, for instance, that the inside dramas of Hollywood would be one of the least important subjects to read up on before kicking the bucket, and yet here is an entire chapter on “Women in Hollywood.” James has not only read many of these memoirs, but even formed judicious opinions of them: Producer Linda Obst’s Hello, He Lied gives us “a lesson in what intelligence and sensitivity can do when combined with the near-military practical sense needed to organize a movie”. Obst however, is not as funny as Julia Phillips, author of You’ll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again, whom James characterized as “Nora Ephron and Elaine May rolled into one.” Needless to say, James has read both these books at least twice.      
Though Latest Readings is perhaps not expansive enough to display James at his metropolitan best (it is a province to the richly populated cities of his longer essays), the book still displays all of his usual talent for jokes and zingers, splendid metaphors and delicious aphorisms. Hemingway’s later work, he writes, was ruined by the fact that he “overstated even the understatements.” In a short piece on Richard Wilbur, we are reminded that “any overview of the cultural world, like any system of mathematics, can’t be complete without being false.” And surely there is nothing better than James’s description of his youthful and debauched 70s-era self: “I drank too much, smoked cigarettes and cigars like an idiot, and at one period I was the kind of pothead who looked like a small cloud being propelled by a pair of legs.”
Latest Readings brims with a zest for life and learning, and yet, it is stoically conscious of the certainty of death. James writes early on, “The childish urge to understand everything doesn’t necessarily fade when the time approaches for you to do the most adult thing of all: vanish.” In a beautiful gesture, the book is dedicated to the doctors and staff of Addenbrooke’s hospital in Cambridge, with special attention paid to the nurses. In an essay on Mark Bostridge’s biography of Florence Nightingale, James confesses, “Nurses are on my mind of late. At Addenbrooke’s I see them all the time, and I expect the day will soon come when I see almost nobody else. Bless them, of all colors and creeds.” The incident that prompts this sudden tribute is painfully moving:
Just after I first got ill, and while I was waiting for my prostate operation, I was wearing my urinary tract externally, in an arrangement featuring a catheter plus a hefty bag taped to my leg. Or anyway it was hefty when it was full. One night the bag broke and suddenly the floor was awash with amber piss. I signaled the night nurse, who told me to stop apologizing. (In such circumstances, I have found, one tends to apologize for one’s mere existence.) She set about mopping it up. She had a deformed body, with limbs all the wrong lengths. Life could not have been easy for her. But now she was making the end of life easier for me. It was a night to remember, and I haven’t forgotten it for a second. I can only hope that the sum total of my writings has been as useful to the world as her kindness, but I doubt that this is so.
James wrote of Edmund Wilson that “there will always be young men coming up who will find his achievement a clear light,” and this is no less true of himself (and, since we mercifully no longer live in the 1970s, can we please extend “young men” to include young women?). For me, there is no clearer light than Cultural Amnesia, that large and generous paean to liberal humanism, worthy of being stood alongside Lionel Trilling’s The Liberal Imagination and Albert Camus’s L’Homme révolté. In a recent profile in The Financial Times, James spoke to Caroline Daniel about the frailty of civilization when it is faced with totalitarian threats: “The problem with the virtues of civilization is they sound uncertain. It’s a civilization if it leaves room for doubt [and] it’s uncivilized if it doesn’t. This gives the tremendous advantage to the other side.”
There will always be a need for advocates of complexity over simplicity, of doubt over certainty. For the last half-century, James has been among the best of them, and whether he lives another few months or many more years, his absence will be keenly felt. I sometimes wish I had thanked him when I met him, or simply explained how much his writing has meant to me, but there is always between reader and author an insurmountable body of work — the true object of gratitude. Latest Readings is itself an affecting and nimble work of gratitude — a tribute to the reading life, certainly, but equally one that pays tribute to the life beyond it, and, inevitably, the long life that lies behind it.
¤

27.11.15

White America’s Willy Loman crisis: Inside the suicide epidemic raging in the bastions of middle-class privilege - Salon.com

White America’s Willy Loman crisis: Inside the suicide epidemic raging in the bastions of middle-class privilege - Salon.com



White America's Willy Loman crisis: Inside the suicide epidemic raging in the bastions of middle-class privilege

Scientists just caught a black hole swallowing a star — and burping a bit back out - The Washington Post

Scientists just caught a black hole swallowing a star — and burping a bit back out - The Washington Post



Frank Sinatra and the Scandalous but Scholarly Biography - The New Yorker

Frank Sinatra and the Scandalous but Scholarly Biography - The New Yorker



Frank Sinatra’s character flaw isn’t hard to name. He lived in daily fear of humiliation.

The Birth of “The New Yorker Story” - The New Yorker

The Birth of “The New Yorker Story” - The New Yorker



“The New Yorker story” emerged as a distinct literary genre in the nineteen-fifties, thanks in part to John Cheever.

‘You Stink,’ He Explained | commentary

‘You Stink,’ He Explained | commentary

‘Self and Soul’: Mark Edmundson’s biting critique of modern complacency - The Washington Post

‘Self and Soul’: Mark Edmundson’s biting critique of modern complacency - The Washington Post



Lazy or genius? Programmer writes code to send automatic texts to wife and make himself lattes | Tech | Lifestyle | The Independent

Lazy or genius? Programmer writes code to send automatic texts to wife and make himself lattes | Tech | Lifestyle | The Independent



Costco

"Still Life of a Rotisserie Chicken, a Ham and Olives on Pewter Plates with a Bread Roll, an Orange, Wineglasses and a Rose on a Wooden Table" (after Oslas Beer)

25.11.15

How the rivalry between Russians and Turks shaped the world - The Washington Post

How the rivalry between Russians and Turks shaped the world - The Washington Post

Richard Scarry books changed a lot over 30 years | Fusion

Richard Scarry books changed a lot over 30 years | Fusion







Richard Scarry’s Best Word Book Ever is a a classic of children’s literature, having sold millions of copies to parents looking for a fun way to teach their children simple vocabulary.
The book was first published in 1963 and then updated in 1991. Interestingly, one of the reasons for the update was to show a more progressive attitude toward gender roles and race. Looking at the images side-by-side, the transformation is pretty neat to witness.
A post on Socialogical Images, republished on Mental Floss, brings to our attention a Flickr set by Alan Taylor that compares and contrasts the two editons of Scarry’s work, spotlighting the changes the author made over time to update his work.
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Flickr
The simple change of showing “Father” cooking implants a subtle lesson for children that cooking isn’t inherently feminine.
Or check out how this scene was updated, as the canoe and its passenger no longer read “Native American stereotype.”
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Here we see a reference to Hanukkah added to what was previously blank space.
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Women who are bears can have jobs that were traditionally reserved for men. And men who are bears can wear ribbons in their hair.
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Here a “beautiful screaming lady” becomes the more relevant “cat in danger.”
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The cover of the book is one of the starkest examples of the changes that were made.
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There are a number of other subtle changes like this throughout the updated edition, such as a “pretty stewardess” that becomes a “flight attendant,” and you can see them all on Flickr.
Scarry’s changes were so important due to the scope of his work: After its release in 1963, Best Word Book Ever sold over 7 million copies, and Scarry’s work has been translated into over 20 languages. At one pointScarry was a more popular children’s author than Dr. Seuss, according to a biography.
In 2002, Dallas DiLeo, head librarian of the Children’s Department at Carnegie Library, in Oakland, spoke at the Carnegie Science Center about Scarry for an exhibit examining the writer’s career and legacy. A portion of DiLeo’s speech focused on the ways that Scarry addressed gender bias.
While noting that Scarry’s work did get “kids asking questions,” DiLeo also said that parents of the 1970s thought the book was admirable, if problematic. This spurred the changes.
“He was showing a very 50s type of life,” says DiLeo. “The moms were in dresses, and the construction workers were always men. In the early 70s people were stomping their feet and making a big to-do over this. Parents were saying, ‘How will we change the world if the lady cats are always in dresses?'”
DiLeo was quick to point out that Scarry wasn’t a monster, or misogynist, but rather that his work was eventually revealed to be “behind the times.” The author genuinely responded to the criticism that his book used too many stereotypes and made changes to the book a number of times throughout the years, culminating in the 1991 edition.
Scarry died in 1994, but in accepting criticism and changing his book taught an important lesson about how we interact with art.