Moreintelligentlife.com is the website of Intelligent Life magazine. Articles about Arts, Lifestyle, Travels, and Ideas

THE FEED: MAR 18TH

What we're reading:

Against beauty (New Republic)

Adam Kirsch on Zadie Smith's concerns about her own fiction

Colour blind, pitch perfect (Discovery News)

Children choose friends according to similar speech patters rather than skin colour

Not for children (San Francisco Chronicle)

A violent and bleak "Little Mermaid" ballet

Museums: the new guard (New York Times)

A special section on the next generation of museum curators

Today's quote:

"There's not been much wit and not much joy, there's a lot of grimness out there... There are a lot of books about Asian sisters. There are a lot of books that start with a rape. Pleasure seems to have become a rather neglected element in publishing."  read more »

LONELY LONDON NIGHTS

 Sunday nights are a time of regrouping, of wandering, of staring into the abyss. The fundamental loneliness of a Sunday night, particularly one in winter, is beautifully captured by Peter Kindersley in our brand new slideshow. These are images of poetic desolation.

THE SCHOOL PROM: A BATTLEGROUND

The high-school prom is an essential rite of passage in America, whereby all of the traumas and triumphs of youth boil over in a night of excess. The point, illustrated best by the late John Hughes, is to drink illegally, dance stupidly, discover the jock loved you all along but the dork is more lovable, and then, perhaps, lose your virginity. The idea is to experience some premature nostalgia for mis-spent youth, while generating revenue for the rental-tux business.

Given how hard it is already for American teenagers to find a date and a suitable ensemble for this dramatic evening, it was good for a Mississippi high school to make explicit provisions in a memorandum to students:

1. Dates must be of the opposite sex;

2. Only male students are allowed to wear tuxedos.

The problem is that an 18-year-old student named Constance McMillen wants to bring her girlfriend to the prom and wear a tuxedo. She, with back-up from the American Civil Liberties Union, demanded that the school change this prom policy; the school decided to cancel it altogether, reports CNN.

"I never thought the school would try to cancel the prom and hurt everyone just to keep me and my girlfriend from going together," McMillen said in an ACLU news release.  read more »

MORE DREARY NEWS FOR ACADEMICS

Over at the Chronicle of Higher Education, a humanities professor has been on a crusade to reveal the many ways that graduate school is a bad idea. There are too few academic jobs for the training to be anything other than a crap-shoot. This is a problem, particularly because the hurdles to becoming a professor in America include slaving away for years on a PhD and submitting yourself to the low-wage exploitation of adjunct teaching.

Louis Menand addresses this in his new book, "The Marketplace of Ideas" (reviewed by The Economist here). He notes that whereas you can become a lawyer in three years and a medical doctor in four, the median time to a doctoral degree in the humanities is nine years. And then good luck finding a job.

Given all the bad news, I was initially heartened to see that the Chronicle has published a response to the original story, called "Neither a Trap Nor a Lie". Surely James Mulholland, an English professor at Wheaton College in Massachusetts, would offer evidence that secondary degrees in history and English aren't a fool's errand. Surely he would suggest that the economics of academia isn't so dire.  read more »

THE Q&A: PATTIE BOYD, MUSE, PHOTOGRAPHER

She married one of the Beatles, divorced him, married Eric Clapton, hung out with the Rolling Stones, drank with the Who, toured with Cream. Pattie Boyd has some stories. Like other Beatles plus-ones early on, she kept to the background. She occupied herself by taking Polaroid pictures, serendipitously documenting one of the most important eras of music history (her photos can be seen on her website).

After years of struggling with her past—the broken marriages and knock-on effects of a rock‘n’roll lifestyle—Boyd was able to write about her experiences. Her biography, "Wonderful Today", which debuted at the top of the New York Times best-seller list in 2007, begins in Kenya, where she spent her early childhood. She then recounts her modelling career in London, her time with the Beatles and her role in inspiring such songs as “Something”, “Layla” and “Wonderful Tonight”. Lately Boyd has devoted herself to photography. "Through the Eyes of a Muse", a collection of personal photos from her years with George Harrison and Clapton, recently finished making a grand multi-year tour through America, Canada, Britain and Australia.

In a conversation with More Intelligent Life, Pattie Boyd spoke about her past and the way photography helped her heal.

More Intelligent Life: What convinced you to dig up the past and sort through your memories to put together "Through the Eyes of a Muse"?  read more »

DAVID BYRNE [HEARTS] THE ECONOMIST

A man of good taste, we always knew. (See the third photo down on his journal.) Mr Byrne, the feeling is mutual.

THE FEED: MAR 16TH

What we're reading:

Tales of the unread (Second Pass): This literary website turns one, and celebrates with reviews of out-of-print books

Everybody have fun (New Yorker): Lessons policymakers can learn from happiness research

Historic preservation (AP): Federal grants to American projects are under threat

Academic elitism (In Character): Snobbery, exploitation and silliness in the ivory tower

Today's quote:

"'Lloyd Webber' has become a kind of synonym for 'naff'. Ask yourself, dear reader, how many of your friends are big Lloyd Webber fans? Probably not many. That isn't a coincidence. Judgements about art and culture are impossible to separate from the judgement about social status."

~ Tim Lott, "Are Vettriano, Lloyd Webber and Dan Brown really so naff?" (Independent)

(Via The Economist) Picture credit: Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com

THE NOT-SO-SECRET DIARIES OF A DOMINATRIX

Many things come easy in life to smart, beautiful women. Melissa Febos, the author of "Whip Smart", understands this. It is what allows her to nail job interviews and collect boyfriends with ease. But Febos also has gifts as a writer, including a knack for self-deflation. "Whip Smart" is a memoir about the author's four-year career as a dominatrix in a dungeon in midtown Manhattan. "An hour alone with a naked man with whom you do not intend to have sex can be a very long time," she recalls thinking on the day of her first session. Already we like her.

Now a writing instructor at SUNY Purchase College and the Gotham Writers' Workshop, Febos begins her story with her search for a job that pays better than her gigs in publishing. She was then a recent graduate of the New School university in New York, with a minor heroin habit, an inborn curiosity and a petite and curvy figure. Her neighbour, whose apartment bears such signs of sophistication as an Egon Schiele print and air-conditioning, is a dominatrix who seems to enjoy her job. The two women talk: trade secrets are shared, seeds are sown.

Febos locates the Dungeon of Mistress X through an ad in the back of the Village Voice. The place is nicer than she had expected, a sprawl of spotless dungeons outfitted with hanging cages, riding crops, paddles and coffins. Coffins? "For clients into sensory deprivation," explains Febos's superior during the tour. Ah, yes. She is hired, and her asking price will be $75 for an hour-long session, plus tips. Work starts the following Monday.  read more »

THE FEED: MAR 12TH

What we're reading:

Bard to go

Will kids understand Shakespeare better if they don't have to sit still? (Guardian)

A show of letters by J.D. Salinger

Salinger's dam of silence has sprung its first leak (Wall Street Journal)

Atheists en masse

Thousands of non-believers zealously converge in Melbourne, Australia (BBC)

What's in the David Foster Wallace archive?

The Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas inherits the mess of papers he had stashed in a dark garage over-run with spiders (New Yorker)

Today's quote:

"By focusing on criminalising a government and making military intervention the top priority’, he argues, ‘[the Save Darfur Coalition] has made peace more elusive and increased the suffering of ordinary Darfuris."

~ Rob Crilly, author of "Saving Darfur: Everyone’s Favourite African War", in a review by Philip Hammond, "Darfur: every celeb’s favourite African war" (spiked review of books)  read more »

WHITNEY'S TEPID BIENNIAL

Sleet spattered over VIPs queuing outside for the opening of the Whitney Biennial on February 23rd. We suffered in silence, in darkness, our conversations drowned by the monastic groaning of an outdoor installation that cast an eerie blue hue. Dumpling trucks prowled and rogue cameramen interviewed some on a scrap of red carpet. We inched along as the storm intensified, sentries sifting us into various purgatories.

Once inside, past menacing squads of security officers and Blackberry-wielding event planners, we were rewarded with heat, light, DJed electronica, crowds, food, wine and, eventually, art. We began our tallying for our respective cost-benefit analyses: was it worth the wait?

The Biennial spans three floors—more when counting "Collecting Biennials", a nearly year-long show of permanent-collection works by artists featured in Biennials past, in celebration of the show’s 75th year. Francesco Bonami, this year’s co-curator, broke it down for us: floor four is “spectacle”, three is “video” (the first Biennial to devote an entire floor to the medium) and two is “creepy”. We are meant to choose our own path, but the most convenient approach is to take the elevator to the fourth floor and walk down.  read more »