… again.
The Romney/Cantor argument about income inequality sweeps the nation.
… are set to start. On Monday, George Huguely goes on trial for the murder of Yeardley Love; and next month Amy Bishop will be tried for killing three, and injuring another three, of her colleagues at the University of Alabama, Huntsville.
UD suspects the Huguely trial will be straightforward, and that he will be convicted on the charge. Amy Bishop appears to be a madwoman, and that makes her sentence harder to anticipate (she will certainly be found guilty).
UD will follow both trials.
GOP HOPEFULS ON HOT SEAT
FOR KNOWING OTHER LANGUAGES
… and a man found on the scene is arrested.
Update: Much more here. The man arrested was a colleague and friend.
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Another Update: Maybe it wasn’t murder. The dead man appears to have had mental trouble recently. Perhaps the man arrested had tried to prevent his friend from committing suicide?
A scene from Japan today, taken directly from Nevil Shute’s post-nuclear war novel On the Beach.
In the novel, people waiting to die from fallout stage an ultimate car race in which Ferraris crash with abandon.
The Japanese drivers were on their way to Hiroshima.
UD could feature some new happiness study every week on this blog.
Manically, university researchers pursue the condition, the question, the mystery, the much-sought-after Thing. It’s especially much talked about in these thanksgiving days.
Most recently, a Princeton economist and psychologist teamed up to analyze data that allowed them to announce the exact most-happiness-inducing yearly salary: $75,000.
As a lifelong ‘thesdan, UD assumed this referred to personal income, but in fact family income is meant. Lower than this, you’ll be less happy; higher, you won’t be any happier.
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There’s other stuff. Consider this article about the happiest woman in America (the happiest man in the world is apparently Matthieu Ricard, a Buddhist monk). She’s in her fifties, has a meaningful job, an intact marriage, just one kid, takes long walks along the beach, has friends, is spiritual, is active in her walkable, close-to-a-city community, lives in the same smallish house she’s lived in for decades, and locks away the tv.
(Oh, and on Ricard: Here’s a hilarious article in the Independent about him – or, rather about the journalist interviewing him.)
The article about the happiest woman cites a much-cited recent statistic: One in four American women is on antidepressants or antipsychotics or something along those lines. This remarkable number has generated the sorts of headlines you’d expect (‘ONE IN FOUR WOMEN CANNOT POSSIBLY NEED MENTAL HEALTH DRUGS’), as well as the equally easy to anticipate defensive reactions from depressed people (‘MENTAL ILLNESS IS ILLNESS.’)
No one denies mental illness is illness; people are skeptical about that many American women really being mentally ill. Marcia Angell and others are skeptical about the utility and safety of all those potent, side-effect-rich drugs.
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Surely there’s too much vagueness in the matter of happy and sad for us to conclude anything with much firmness. OTOH, UD takes from years of thinking about this (she’s the daughter of a suicide, and suicide marvelously concentrates the mind) at least the following suggestion: To be happy, you have to be a human being with longings, as Ravelstein / Allan Bloom puts it in Saul Bellow’s novel: ‘A human soul devoid of longing was a soul deformed, deprived of its highest good, sick unto death.’
But the longing needs to be in the direction of love – for one other person, for humanity, for the earth, for ideas, for aesthetic experience, for God – rather than, say, money or status. Recall that $75,000 family income figure. If you’re a hedgie for whom anything less than twenty million a year is a disgrace, this model anticipates that you’re not a terribly happy person because of your, well, money worries.
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UD will venture another little point about sadness and happiness. In a review of Blue Nights, by Joan Didion – an iconically anxious and unhappy – and extremely wealthy – person – Meghan O’Rourke takes note of Didion’s regrets about how she and her husband raised their daughter.
The couple assiduously [built] a vision of Quintana as “the perfect child,” with John urging Didion to come watch their daughter — “a towhead in that Malibu sun” — descend the hill toward the glowingly blue Pacific on her way to school. “How could I not have had misconceptions?” Didion writes now…. “I had been raising her as a doll.“
Outsized fantasies – of the perfect life, the perfect child, the perfect portfolio – are real downers.
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And yet, having said all that — let’s be scrupulously fair, and remind ourselves of what shits happy people can be. Let’s do it prettily. Poetically.
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The Happy Ones are Almost Always Also Vulgar
By Patrizia Cavalli
Translated By Geoffrey Brock
———————————-
The happy ones are almost always also vulgar;
happiness has a way of thinking
that’s rushed and has no time to look
but keeps on moving, compact and manic,
with contempt in passing for the dying:
Get on with your life, come on, buck up!
Those stilled by pain don’t mix
with the cheerful, self-assured runners
but with those who walk at the same slow pace.
If one wheel locks and the other’s turning
the turning one doesn’t stop turning
but goes as far as it can, dragging the other
in a poor, skewed race until the cart
either comes to a halt or falls apart.
A neo-Nazi group will be allowed to participate in Delaware’s Adopt A HIghway program, but can’t use the word “Nazi” in the signs designating their segment of the roadway…
“[Their] request to have the words ‘Nazi Party’ displayed on a state sign was denied because DelDOT chose not to associate the state with the term and its generally understood philosophy of advocating the denial of civil rights,” DelDOT spokesman Geoff Sundstrom.”
Scathing Online Schoolmarm read Mr Sundstrom’s description of Nazism to a randomly encountered man on the street (Mr UD, at the breakfast table). He laughed when she read it. She read it again. He laughed again. Why, asked SOS, did he laugh?
Mr UD put down his bright red coffee cup and looked away from his New York Times.
“Well… One normally expects a stronger statement about Nazis. It’s the bureaucratic care he brings to the subject…”
Herman Cain goes for the dipshit vote.
23 percent of women aged 40 to 59 take antidepressants…
(From The New Yorker. Adam, a reader,
sent it to UD.
It can be found online here.)
… quickly degenerates into a disappointing article.
UD thanks MattF for sending her this.
The Nobel in literature goes to Tomas Transtromer.
UD has exchanged some emails lately with Laura Nelson, an anthropology professor at Cal State East Bay. Both UD and Laura were close friends of David Kosofsky, about whom UD wrote here.
Laura’s husband, Saul Perlmutter, just up and won a Nobel Prize.
UD had to look at excellerate for awhile… Think about it…
Since it isn’t a word, she found no definition for it. The inventive Urban Dictionary has a definition for excelerate –
To succeed at something so quickly you excelerate.
– which gets at the brilliance of the mistake. It’s actually a portmanteau – “a blend of two … words or morphemes into one new word.” To excel; and to accelerate.
Anyway, it’s a word a commenter uses after a Wall Street Journal article updates us on the wretched thing that is law school now. Very few jobs. Applications way down.
Makes UC Irvine and – even more – U Mass look terribly clever. Taxpayers in these states get to subsidize these bright new law schools.