eCRUSH – “Got a secret crush? Find out if your crush likes you back without the risk of rejection.”

Tardigrade appreciation headquarters.

“A personality cult …has made Joyce what he never

was, in the name of a cause that is dubious in the

first place: the sustaining of the Joyce industry itself in its own attempt to refashion the modern novel

along the lines of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. The

problem is that, to turn Joyce into a totem, the

industry has had to tell a lot of lies.

The lies began after the war, when the so-called New

Critics needed a modern novelist to represent their

art-for-art’s- sake views that made the pleasure-pain

of complexity and contradiction the height of

aesthetic experience.” New Statesman

“The

unique kind of hurt resulting from the rejection of ( an author’s) submitted

manuscript” is weighed by Canadian psychiatrist Vivian Rakoff. ‘Examples of writerly narcissism abound: It is the rare

author who does not flip first to his entry in the journal or newspaper,

or who does not stop to pause obsessively inside every bookstore,

anxiously searching for his book on display.

It has long been known that writers suffer from a much higher incidence

of mood disorders, including depression and mania, than other people.

The precise medical reason for this has never been adequately

explained. But Rakoff believes it is because writing is less a true

expression of the artist’s life (except in the case of the daily diarist)

than it is a “form of compensation and redress for denied satisfactions.” ‘

A story purportedly written by Gabriel García Márquez on how he is dying of cancer, published in an Italian magazine, prompted this reply from the author’s agent Carmen Balcells to a request for British publishing rights: “García Márquez is ashamed that this rubbish might be

considered as a text written by him. It has gone around the world and I

have no means of righting this usurpation of his name. It seems to proceed

from a Colombian actor whom I hope I will never run into or I will insult

him as he deserves.”

Assessment: Thabo Mbeki – Why has South Africa’s excellent president gone loco?  by David Plotz

Mbeki faces a health catastrophe of

unimaginable proportions. The West keeps

haranguing him to buy drugs that he can’t afford,

without trying to find a solution that he can. For 58

years, he has never succumbed to desperation or

folly, no matter how dire the situation. If South

Africa has become so troubled that even the

unflappable Mbeki is coming unhinged, the world

should worry.

Slate

Circuses’ survival a tightrope act. Here’s more on the controversy over misuse of circus animals, which has reached the level of House Judiciary Committee hearings. It also seems that far fewer people are running away to join the circus and spend long, low-paid hours on the road. Milwaukee Journal Sentinel