Lee Hausner, a California-based psychologist who works with the ultrarich, has one client she calls “The Phoenix,” a real-estate developer and investor who borrowed and spent heavily. He has surged and crashed twice over the past decade, reaching a net worth of $400 million, losing it, then hitting $200 million and losing it again.

“He’s an impulsive risk-taker,” she says. “He always lays everything on the line.”

For risk-takers who want to get rich and stay rich, Ms. Hausner advises taking a step back every so often and evaluating important decisions rather than leaving them to impulse.

“Some of these people roll the dice and they get rich,” she says. “But they have to realize that if they roll it again, the result may not come out as well. They need to stop themselves before they roll again, and deliberate.”

Noting that there were reporters in the room, [the judge] read Doyle’s rap sheet into the record, including his convictions for stealing a BMW, posing as a furrier to swipe a woman’s mink coat for “cleaning,” impersonating a Secret Service agent and repeatedly violating probation.

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Doyle has [also] spent time in prison for stealing a bronze Degas sculpture by posing as a member of an art-collecting family, pilfering books from the art library at the University of Kansas, and filching jewelry from a Tennessee woman.

Cantor fled from protestors at the University of Pennsylvania, but gave the speech at UD‘s college, Northwestern. After the speech he was rapidly moved out via the back of the building by security guards (too many protestors out front).

As to the substance of the speech:

“We should want all people to be moving up and no one to be pulled down,” Cantor concludes. Well, yes, we should want that to happen, because wanting people to fail isn’t very nice. But unless we all live in Lake Wobegon (where the children are all “above average”) uniform upward mobility isn’t actually possible. The thing about mobility is that people have to move up and people have to move down.

Cantor’s income inequality solution is to elevate all of the bottom 99 percent in incomes up to the top 1 percent. That would shut up the Occupy Wall Street crowd for sure! A more practical solution–and one that doesn’t violate the laws of mathematics–would be to encourage mobility, by all means (the U.S. has actually fallen behind most of western Europe in this regard) but also to pay close attention to what happens to the people who don’t make it to the top. The bottom 99 percent contribute to prosperity too, and lately they haven’t had much to show for it. Cantor seems not in the slightest bit curious as to how that happened.

Yet another generous insider trader causes a bit of embarrassment for an institution he endowed.

His lawyer says that systematically robbing the system by taking advantage of a position of trust is “in no way indicative of [the] overall character” of Donald Johnson. But heck. I dunno.

Q: What is the overarching theme in all of your books, and philosophy about life?

A: Happiness. I can define it in a thousand different ways. I knew if I could talk about happiness, then everything else would fall into place. When I tried to write about this 10 years ago, publishers turned me down. I was so ahead of my time.

… Anna Nicole, based on the life of Anna Nicole Smith:

[Can] a piece that celebrates the vacuity of contemporary American life – and to a depressing extent, our own – …rise above vacuity itself?

A parade up the Royal Mile will mark the 300th anniversary of the birth of philosopher David Hume.

Hundreds are expected to march from the Scottish Parliament to the statue of Hume opposite St Giles’ Cathedral as part of “The March to Enlightenment” on April 23 – three days before Hume’s birthday.

… Costumed characters representing Hume and other key Enlightenment figures will lead the procession.

Edinburgh Evening News

The University Child Development School, a private elementary school, sits directly across the street from Jiggles.

The Jewish Week is unhappy with something Henry Kissinger said in 1973 to Richard Nixon — a comment now made public by the Nixon Library.

The emigration of Jews from the Soviet Union is not an objective of American foreign policy. And if they put Jews into gas chambers in the Soviet Union, it is not an American concern. Maybe a humanitarian concern.

The ADL, though, doesn’t mind.

Hitchens.

The Wall Street Journal reviews a new anthology of parodies. Here’s a nice one, a take on Sumer Is Icumen In:

Plumber is icumen in;
Bludie big tu-du.
Bloweth lampe and showeth dampe.
And dripth the wud thru.
Bludie hel, boo-hoo!

Fields was the third witness to testify that he had sex with Sypher while she was married to her second husband, Tim Sypher, Pitino’s former equipment manager who now runs the YUM! Center.

Good piece in the Guardian about the melancholy long withdrawing roar of sex from British novels. “[N]o one [is] writing much about sex any more.”

Some people blame it on the annual, hilarious Bad Sex Award, pantingly chronicled on this blog year after year. Writers live in dread of it.

Some say it’s a generational thing, with ‘sixties people (Martin Amis, for instance) still into it, but younger types bored.

I dunno. I doubt it’s even much of a trend.

But the article cites an exchange from the Lady Chatterley obscenity trial that UD very much likes. The author of the essay quotes from Kenneth Tynan’s reporting from the proceedings fifty years ago:

“[The crucial incident of the trial] occurred on the third morning during the testimony of Richard Hoggart,” [Tynan] observed, “who had called Lawrence’s novel ‘puritanical’. Mr Hoggart is a short, dark, young Midlands teacher of immense scholarship and fierce integrity. From the witness box he uttered a word that we had formerly heard only on the lips of [prosecutor] Mr Griffith-Jones; he pointed out how Lawrence had striven to cleanse it of its furtive, contemptuous and expletive connotations, and to use it ‘in the most simple, natural way: one fucks’. There was no reaction of shock in the court, so calmly was the word pronounced, and so literally employed.

“‘Does it gain anything,’ he was asked, ‘by being printed f-?’ ‘Yes,’ said Mr Hoggart, ‘it gains a dirty suggestiveness’.”

The dancer and choreographer Merce Cunningham has died, age 90. He had one of the longest, most artistically rich, lives on record.

This piece about him, marking a lecture he gave at Stanford, evokes that richness.

An excerpt:

In 1966, Cunningham collaborated with filmmaker Stan Van Der Beek to produce Variations V, the first of its kind “dance film.” What must have excited Cunningham about this venture was how the camera could work as a creative instrument, framing and structuring the look and feel of dance in a way that differed tremendously from viewing a performance in a concert hall. Variations V is also intriguing as an early and consummate example of the collage-like effect of multimedia. The dancers perform in a dark space broken up by vertical antennae, photoelectric devices, and a plant-like object. Multiple projection screens, with moving images from film and television, displayed both the sublime (man’s walk on the moon) and the mundane (a man coming home to his house in suburbia). As the dancers advance near the antennae, or cut through beams of photoelectric light, they trip sensors that emit the electronic bleeps and blips of John Cage’s musical score. Ambient sound, an occasional piano solo, and the auditory snow that one hears between radio stations contributed to the complexity of Cage’s soundscape. Movement ranges from elaborate ensembles, with dancers rolling, spinning, and somersaulting on the floor to unusual solos (Cunningham pulls off the leaves of the plant-like object, only to replace them later; a female dancer, sporting a 1960s dress fit for a go-go club, stands on her head). The hypersensory event is completed with the projection of bright spotlights and spiral patterns on the stage that are sometimes superimposed on the dancers’ bodies.

This is from an interview with Chafetz – the New York Times reporter who wrote a now much-quoted piece on the New York Syrian Jewish community – about recent events.

[The community has a] long history of having problems along these lines… [A]ll kinds of scams [go on]… I wish I could say I was surprised… Having spent some time looking into that community I truly wasn’t actually shocked… [This is a] very tightly knit community… everybody is related to everybody else… a lot of business is done on handshakes… [The] ethos is… not disconnected from the commercial traditions of the Middle East… [I assume] there are more arrests or scandals coming… that wouldn’t shock me.

Having spent 62 years being Jewish, I do not think that rabbis are ethical or moral figures in particular… [Unethical behavior among them] never surprises me…

… says smart things about creative writing programs.

Louis Menand’s New Yorker review of Mark McGurl’s The Program Era, a history of the rise of university writing programs and workshops, is subtitled, “Should creative writing be taught?” Despite itself, the review does not encourage a positive answer. Menand tells us that “by 1975, there were fifteen creative-writing M.F.A. programs in the country. Today, there are a hundred and fifty-three.” And what do we have to show for it? McGurl says that the “system-wide rise in the excellence of American literature in the postwar period” shows that the writing programs have helped, but we don’t see how this can be proven: while the rise of American aerospace engineering, say, can be connected to America’s supremacy in space, we don’t know how you connect the explosion of writing classes to advancements in literary quality. The sort of cultural product that distinguishes America around the world, such as rock songs, blockbuster movies, and potboiler novels, can hardly be attributed to Bread Loaf. There is something to be said for fine literature, but America produced enough of that to suit our needs before schools started mass-producing MFAs.

Other insights from the review are equally discouraging: for example, that “university creative-writing courses situate writers in the world that most of their readers inhabit — the world of mass higher education and the white-collar workplace.” This makes writing programs sound like a make-work schemes for aesthetically-inclined redundant laborers, and stirs suspicion that many of us currently struggling as scribes have been unfortunately discouraged from more useful lives as upholsterers or surveyors. We often think so, anyway.

Menand does supply fun anecdotes about the trade (“[John Gardner’s] preferred pedagogical venue was the cocktail party, where he would station himself in the kitchen, near the ice trays, and consume vodka by the bottle while holding forth to the gathered disciples”), and he looks back fondly on workshops, saying “I don’t think the workshops taught me too much about craft, but they did teach me about the importance of making things, not just reading things. You care about things that you make, and that makes it easier to care about things that other people make.” Maybe writing programs, then, are the information-age equivalent of shop class. If so, tuition should be adjusted to reflect this.