Clarice Lispector was a woman plagued by “the hellish grandeur of life.” Throughout her career the Brazilian author and journalist showed a fascination for the mundane, as well as a desperation to quiet her mind and achieve a semblance of normalcy.
Lispector died of cancer in 1977 without ever realizing that goal, leaving behind a body of bizarre, challenging, and dazzling writing that has become a part of the literary canon within Brazil and has built a small but fierce cult following among the literary cognoscenti elsewhere. Despite this acclaim, however, the enigmatic and statuesque Lispector remains relatively unknown internationally.
The Complete Stories, released Aug. 25 by New Directions and translated into English by Katrina Dodson, gives readers access to all 86 of her short stories in one place for the first time in any language, and has been greeted with a flurry of belated and enthusiastic appreciation.
An unknown legend
With this new volume, the woman known in some circles simply as “Clarice” has another chance at the mainstream international consumer.
But back home, Lispector needs no introduction. Her fans are almost rabid in their devotion to her. In the decades following her death, her popularity has exploded, and her famously beautiful face has become iconic: She has appeared on stamps and is quoted constantly on cheesy inspirational posters. A Twitter account that posts quotes by her has a million followers. Brazilian rap star Filipe Ret has her face tattooed prominently on his bicep.
She’s a favorite of critics internationally as well: Routinely compared to Jorge Luis Borges, Vladimir Nabokov, and James Joyce, Lispector is hailed by many literati as Brazil’s greatest contemporary writer. Benjamin Moser, Lispector’s biographer and champion in the English world, as well as the editor of the new collection, is often quoted as saying she is the most important Jewish writer in the world since Kafka.
Clarice Lispector, left, with her sons.(Courtesy of New Directions)
A sphinx and a housewife
Part of Lispector’s aura of intrigue comes from her beauty, glamour, and strange public persona. Of Eastern European Jewish origin, she was transplanted to Brazil as a small child.
In his biography of Lispector, Why this World, Moser paints her as a person full of contradictions. He writes:
“She herself once wrote, ‘I am so mysterious that I don’t even understand myself.’
‘My mystery,’ she insisted elsewhere, ‘is that I have no mystery.’”
Still, he adds, “To general bemusement, she insisted that she was a simple housewife, and those who arrived expecting to encounter a Sphinx just as often found a Jewish mother offering them cake and Coca-Cola.”
“Those who arrived expecting to encounter a Sphinx just as often found a Jewish mother offering them cake and Coca-Cola.”
Lispector was in fact a housewife (though hardly a simple one). For sixteen years she was married to a Brazilian diplomat, with whom she had two sons, and she never considered herself a professional writer. (Despite that, she wrote nine novels along with her 80-plus short stories, and worked as a fashion journalist.)
Her personal style added to her mystique: Writing about her in 2005, Gregory Rabassa said, “I was flabbergasted to meet that rare person who looked like Marlene Dietrich and wrote like Virginia Woolf.”
It would be unfair to think Lispector’s association with beauty and fashion matter only because she is a female writer. In her work, they function as a kind of intentional opaqueness. As Stephanie LaCava writes for the LA Review of Books:
“Throughout her work, as Moser notes in his biography, there are moments when makeup and beauty figure as the real, the solid, in the category of knowable. These seeming superficialities are actually conduits or tools, masking—protecting—the unknowable soul; they are links to sanity.”
In her only TV interview, Lispector is visibly uncomfortable, nervously smoking, and we get a sense that her famous glamour is an armor of cool, barely concealing a clamoring anxiety.
Stuck in translation
Moser says Lispector enjoys a kind of “folk popularity” in Brazil, where her work is required reading on the national university entrance exams called Vestibular, similar to the French baccalauréat.
So why hasn’t she caught on in the rest of the world? Moser says the answer lies in the quality of previous translations, which he considers not up to snuff. He has spent the last 12 years trying to revive interest in her, leading efforts to have her works re-translated. From 2011 to 2012 he edited or translated new versions of five of her novels (blurbed by the likes of Jonathan Franzen, Orhan Pamuk, and Colm Tóibín), and he’s currently working on the last four.
Covers from Lispector’s four June 2012 releases.(Images courtesy New Directions/Collage by Quartz)
The difficulty of translating Lispector is partly due to the fact that even in her native Portuguese, she often created fake idioms and distorted normal ones, her translator, Katrina Dodson, tells Quartz. Dodson gives an example from the story “Silence,” in which Lispector uses the phrase “ponto do trigo,” or “point of wheat,” in a sentence she translates as “I never thought that the world and I would reach this point of wheat.”
“That sounds as if it’s a known expression but [it] isn’t at all,” Dodson writes in an email. “We must have asked at least six Brazilians what it meant and no one could say.” She writes in the translator’s note that appears in the new collection, “These unexpected choices often make you do a double-take or blur your reading even if you don’t stumble.”
The chaos and a contract
Hidden between the layers of Lispector’s at-times-impenetrable prose lies one story we’re all familiar with: The chaos of the everyday.
Lispector’s characters struggle deeply with seeing madness in the mundane, which threatens to consume them. In Lispector’s story “Love,” an otherwise perfectly sane character is seized with emotion upon a blind man chewing gum. “She had pacified life so well, taken such care for it not to explode,” writes Lispector. Yet one look “had plunged the world into dark voraciousness.”
In her last novel, The Hour of the Star, the narrator wonders, “Who has not asked himself at some time or other: am I a monster or is this what it means to be a person?”
The blurred lines in Lispector’s language are reflected in the themes in her work, in which she strives to temper the frisson of everyday life. As LaCava writes in the LA Review of Books:
Lispector’s work often explores the specific domestic conventions to which women are expected to adhere — and not because, as one might expect, she necessarily wishes to destroy them. In fact, Lispector seems to wish she could be one of the happy housewives satisfied by days occupied with decorative arrangements. Except, she is plagued by knowledge and a mystic talent for words.
It was predicted that New Orleans would take a decade to recover from Hurricane Katrina. On the 10th anniversary of the costliest natural disaster in US history, four residents from very different neighbourhoods — on both sides of the levees — offer very personal insights into the land, the music ... and whether that prediction has come true
Make:'s Emily Coker sits down with mixologist friend Jared Hirsch to discuss the history of craft cocktail culture and how it fits into today's Maker Movement.
Fifty Shades director Sam Taylor-Johnson exited the franchise earlier this year after enjoying the biggest opening weekend for a female director ever, and now Deadline reports that Universal may be close to choosing a new director to helm a sequel to the “saucy blockbuster.”
House of Cards director James Foley is reportedly not in negotiations yet, but is considered the studio’s top pick; Deadline says other frontrunners include “Electrick Children‘s Rebecca Thomas, Mark Pellington and Hysteria’s Tanya Wexler.”
Universal also has yet to decide whether the next two films in the franchise (Fifty Shades Darker and Fifty Shades Freed) will be made back to back or not. The scripts for both films will be written by E.L. James’ husband, Niall Leonard.
Honestly, I’m not sure how I feel about this news; Fifty Shades‘ sole redeeming quality was that it demonstrated the box office potential of an all-female creative team, so it’s depressing to think that the next films in the franchise will have all the glorified domestic abuse of the first movie, with none of the possible tangential benefits for women in Hollywood.
At the same time, I wouldn’t wish this franchise on anyone, and it’s possible that Universal approached a female director about the project who made the reasonable choice to turn the offer down.
Moral of the story is to buckle up, I guess. We’ve got two more of these sexist turd-blossoms coming our way.
Companies like Google, Apple, Intel, and Yahoo have been relatively forthright about their diversity hiring numbers, particularly in the form of reports that reveal lower representations of women and minorities in those companies' tech-specific fields. But those studies only speak to one company at a time—what about a study that pools from federal or state statistics on tech-sector employment?
Thanks to data made available by New York's Federal Reserve Bank, the Center for an Urban Future published its own state-specific report on Thursday. It's pretty broad, parsing 2014 employment numbers at all companies who use "technology as their core business strategy." In some cases, the report also compares those figures to similar data from 2004. The biggest takeaway was greater representation of women in tech in New York City than at any of the aforementioned major tech companies.
Center for an Urban Future
The total tally, according to the CUF, is 40 percent, and the report goes further than listing a "tech/non-tech" split of genders. The report's numbers have been broken down into seven discrete categories—computer manufacturing, systems design, data processing/hosting, electronic shopping, publishing/broadcasting, scientific R&D, and software publishing—and it shows women dominating the R&D category at 59 percent while lagging in the software publishing sector at only 32 percent.
Earlier this week, BuzzFeed’s Grace Spelman became the latest woman to demonstrate the risks of being online while female by tweeting screenshots of the belligerent exchanges she had with Ben Schoen, the former host of MuggleCast. After Spelman came forward with all this, Schoen defended himself vehemently, claiming his track record proves he isn’t sexist. Well, we’ve got some harsh news for you, Schoen.
so he’s creepy *and* convinced he’s a champion for women, i guess
Hugo Schwyzer is now giving him advice via twitter. That is a thing that is happening.
If Huge Shithead is tryna help you, you ALL fucked up.
This guy is an entitled creep.
i … really dont trust the advice hugo fuckshit is gonna give him. and how does this benjamin stalker fellow refuse to recognize that it aint “safe for women” when he wonttake “no” for an answer?
Minor League Baseball is about watching a bunch of underdogs play their hearts out, despite the fact that most of them won’t ever get up to the majors. That’s why Corey Feldman’s BaseballGate fiasco doesn’t make sense. Apparently a performance by Corey’s Angels didn’t live up to the State College Spikes’ standards, and they issued an apology to fans for an experience that was “so far below expectations,” ostensibly because people willing to pay $6 for a Sunday night baseball game are overly picky about free performances.
Feldman was asked about the incident by a TMZ reporter, and, according to the surviving Corey, the performance was a setup. “The manager for the Spikes never read the contract,” Feldman said, referring to a misunderstanding that his appearance was always a post-game event, and that a suitable performance area wasn’t established.
Home Depot is cashing in on the annual Burning Man festival, where 65,000 hipsters and tech glitterati flock to the Nevada desert for music, art, drugs, and a frenzy of togetherness.
Since burners have to build their own camps from scratch in the annual festival’s spirit of self-reliance (or, less self-reliantly, pay someone else to do it), many flock to Home Depot, Target, Walmart, and other retailers on the way to the desert to pick up generators, dust masks and, as it turns out, a whole lot of rubber bands.
Home Depot said its Nevada stores sell 13,000 packages of rubber bands in the days leading up to the mega party, a big jump from 450 packages the typical Nevada store sells each week. Many burners use rubber bands to keep things from flying away in the wicked desert winds (and they also come in handy for rubber band balls, tie-die clothing, and hair braiding).
Likewise, Home Depot sells more than 126,000 square feet of tarps before Burning Man, up from the 25,000 square feet of tarps it sells on an average week.
Rebar, wood, and tarps are also hot commodities for burners erecting the massive, awe-inspiring art installations that adorn the desert campground and are burned at the end of the event.
Shopping tends to be concentrated at the last stops for stocking up near the site of the festival, says Gregory Hart, the South Reno Home Depot store manager. “On their way out to the desert, people will stop in our stores in Reno, Carson City and a few near Black Rock Desert,” he said.
Stores stock up on everything from dust masks to glow-in-the-dark and florescent spray paint (take your pick of pink, yellow, orange or green).
So even though Burning Man is billed as an escape from modern-day capitalism, where people bring their own housing and food, money doesn’t change hands, and people gift things or barter with one another, the event still offers a seasonal windfall to a number of major American corporations.
Intuit chief executive Brad Smith announced the company will divest Demandforce, QuickBase, and Quicken. That will see Intuit’s revenue chopped by about $250 million, with earnings per share down by about 10 cents, for the 2016 fiscal year.
We use QuickBooks and also PayCycle. PayCycle was way more awesome and responsive when it was a stand-alone company before Inuit bought it in 2009.
Jul 23, 2009
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., Jul 23, 2009 (BUSINESS WIRE) — Intuit Inc. (Nasdaq:INTU) has completed its acquisition of PayCycle, Inc.
PayCycle, based in Palo Alto, Calif., is a leader in online payroll for small businesses, accountants and financial institutions and serves more than 85,000 small businesses. Announced June 2, the approximately $170 million acquisition expands the online capability of Intuit’s payroll offering and strengthens the company’s position as a provider of software as a service for small businesses.
If PayCycle spins out on its own it will get way better, way faster again, here’s to hoping for that!
The Mutter Museum in Philadelphia Was originally opened in the 1900s for medical students to come and see in person ;extremely rare conditions, and the effects of diseases that had been cured or eradicated. It still stands today as the best place for medical students to get “ hands on” experience . As well as a popular attraction for locals and tourists alike.I WILL go here on day.
"The world really missed out not having him play Spider Jerusalem, and this doesn't make up for that, but it's close"
well, ok then
oh hey it's Jonathan Ames's new show
Is one of the funniest things I've ever seen. I just watched the first two eps on Starz' app and laughed pretty much the whole way through. Stewart plays... Fuck. I don't quite know how to explain it. Don Quiote the mad, drug addled, cable news infotainment God barely covers it. The world really missed out not having him play Spider Jerusalem, and this doesn't make up for that, but it's close, man. It's close. It's a damn shame I don't get Starz. They're knocking these comedy things out of the park.
About an hour ago while it was broad daylight my friend and I were walking north up SE 22nd when a man across the street caught our eyes. He was walking briskly and that quickly turned into a run as a group of people started to yell "take that man's picture!".
I couldn't get my phone out fast enough to take a picture so I yelled back "did you call the cops?". When they said yes I hopped on my friend's bike to tail the dude but he was nowhere to be seen.
Cops arrived about 5 minutes later and got statements and starting looking for the guy. No clue if they found him. He was last seen running south towards the side side parking lot and ball fields.
Description of guy as follows: White male 40-50 years old 6'4"ish Short cropped brown hair, day's growth facial hair Red running shorts, no shirt with a loose fitting blue/grey jacket or hoodie.
“The next step is to get some party nominations, like the Minnesota Independence Party or the Modern Whig Party,” Olson says. “It would also be great to find a VP, preferably McCubbins because the Nuts/McCubbins ticket sounds amazing.”
The governor's office confirmed that Brown had been invited to an Aug. 18 press conference at Portland State to announce a major donation, and then later informed that the event was cancelled.
So who is this deep-pocketed donor? Why did he back out? For now, those answers remain shrouded in mystery.
In background documents provided before the planned press conference, the university described the donor as a former Portland State student, which could mean that he did not graduate. He credits Portland State as the important foundation for the success he achieved in business, the university said.
Despite his status as a non-traditional student, the school said, he was warmly welcomed by professors who encouraged his research.
"He is a perfect example that non-traditional students, given access to renowned professors and experiences can achieve tremendous success," the background documents said.
The gift was to help build a culture of philanthropy at Portland State and to provide support so the school would continue to grow and thrive well into the future. The would-be donor believed that Portland State, whose motto is, "Let knowledge serve the city," would directly benefit his native Portland in myriad ways.
The number of Portlanders and former Portland State students with that much in liquid assets is small.
Jordan Schnitzer, who attended Portland State at one point, could fit the bill. But Schnitzer, heir to a steel-company fortune, could hardly have been considered non-traditional.
Billionaire Tim Boyle, Columbia Sportswear chief executive, may have $100 million to spare. But according to the Portland State registrar, no one fitting Boyle's description attended the university. Knight and his son, Travis, also don't fit the criteria.
One man who would appear to fit the description in every respect is Portland State trustee Peter Stott, a Portland financier who has built a fortune in timber, real estate and trucking. Stott has also been an active Portland State donor. The school's athletic hall, for example, bears his name.
But Stott said he's not the guy.
"First, it's not me," he said. "Second, I don't know who it is. It's a well-kept secret. I didn't know anything about it."
Public universities have never been more dependent on philanthropy. An erosion of public funding has forced schools such as Portland State to lean on students and wealthy alumni for more of their revenue.
Administrators at Portland State are working to transcend the school's commuter campus roots to become a full-service university with national reach. They planned to use the money to boost the school's relatively paltry $57 million endowment to almost $100 million.
The school wanted to use the interest to support faculty, research and scholarships. It also intended to expand student career and internship services, help grad students and recruiting and support community college students.
But plans didn't mention addressing costs that most concern students: tuition, housing and textbooks. Protesters disrupted meetings this year in which trustees raised tuition 4.2 percent, which the school subsequently trimmed to 3.1 percent.
Living in rural England, Richard Guy was a man with a problem. Like many located in similar areas, his "broadband" internet connection was pretty narrow, with download speeds below 1Mbps. While some isolated communities are grouping together to bui...
At some point, you've probably read that the federal government makes a big pile of money every year off of student lending. But that's an oversimplification. Washington actually runs a small loss on its loans to undergraduates, who a) benefit from low interest rates and b) aren't super-reliable about paying back what they owe. In the end, the Department of Education earns its profits from two groups of borrowers: parents and graduate students.
Lately, as the Wall Street Journal reports Wednesday, budget hawks and education experts have started worrying that graduate schoolers are becoming less of a reliable cash cow. There are two major reasons why. First, they're borrowing more. Between 2008 and 2012, the fraction finishing school with at least $100,000 in debt more than doubled to 15 percent. On its face, making more high-interest loans sounds like the sort of thing that should be a good for Washington's finances. The problem is that more lawyers, doctors, MBAs, and the like have started taking advantage of income-based repayment programs, which forgive their debts after a period of time. And as more six-figure borrowers start writing off their balances, the government's profits are going to fall.
Is this something that a sane person should actually be worried about? Yes and no.
Income-based repayment is supposed to be the safety net of the federal student lending system. The most recent version, called Pay as You Earn, caps what borrowers owe each month at 10 percent of their disposable income and forgives the remainder after 20 years. The idea is to keep payments affordable and prevent people from falling into default, and then let them off the hook once they've made a good-faith effort to pay back a reasonable chunk of their obligations. The program is a godsend for young people who, for instance, go into too much debt attending a predatory for-profit college, then find themselves unable to find a decently paying job.
But it's also especially popular among graduate students—who are responsible for just south of 40 percent of all federal student lending—and the administrators whose salaries they pay. Law schools, for instance, often heavily promote income-based programs, so that aspiring J.D.s will worry less about borrowing obscene amounts to pay their tuition. As of now, the Journal reports that about half of all Grad PLUS loans are being repaid through income-based arrangements. And with a little digging, it's easy to find borrowers taking advantage of the option in ways that will make your skin crawl. Earlier this month, Bloombergturned up Laura Strong, for instance, a part-time therapist and yoga instructor who took out $245,000 for a Ph.D. in psychology, toward which she is contributing $100 dollars a month under Pay as You Earn. Two decades from now, taxpayers will likely have to eat whatever she doesn't pay off.
People like Strong are rare—in 2012, the median graduate school borrower finished school with $41,000 in debt, according to the New America Foundation. About 10 percent took out $134,000 or more for their program. But the rise of income-based repayment has already had some impact on the federal budget: The Obama administration said in February that, as a result of the option's increased popularity, the government's student loan portfolio would be $22 billion less profitable than expected.1 And as more graduate students pile in, the government stands to lose more. This isn't exactly a critical threat to America's fiscal health at the moment—again, graduate student lending remains incredibly lucrative—but policymakers don't want the money to dry up further. Plus, there's an element of basic fairness to consider: Graduate degree holders are relatively affluent, meaning there isn't a great argument for heavily subsidizing their educations.
So, what to do? It's a tough question. On the one hand, you could take an extremely straightforward approach and simply cap the amount of federal loans that grad students are allowed to borrow. That's how things worked until 2005, and returning to that old status quo might even slow down the growth of grad school tuition by tightening the amount of credit available. My guess is that won't happen, though, since the government would probably lose money in the deal. (Once again, grad school loans are still profitable on the whole. The fewer Washington disburses, the fewer dollars it earns.)
The other option is to make loan forgiveness less generous for advanced degree holders. And as of now, that seems to be the direction things are headed. At the moment, the Obama administration wants to change income-based repayment so that graduate school loans will be canceled after 25 years, rather than the current 20. It has also advocated limiting the amount of debt that borrowers can have canceled under the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program, which waves away borrowers' balances if they work in the public sector or at a nonprofit for 10 years. I'm less a fan of that second option.2 I wouldn't be surprised to hear about more dramatic changes in the near future. There will be more highly educated Americans stuck paying off their debts into their 50s, or longer. So think carefully about an art history Ph.D.
1The CBO projections in the graph up top, which are from March, seem to take those changes into account.
2Full disclosure: My wife is a government lawyer on PSLF. At some point, I will write an article about why the program gets a bad rap, I promise.
"unless you’re a power user (running demanding virtual machines, for example, or doing video editing)"
Adding more memory isn’t the performance upgrade it used to be , but how much RAM is enough? TechSpot compared application performance on a system with 4GB, 8GB, and 16GB and concludes 16GB offers little advantage over 8GB of memory—even when programs use more than 8GB of memory.
Super Opinionated.
Make:'s Emily Coker sits down with mixologist friend Jared Hirsch to discuss the history of craft cocktail culture and how it fits into today's Maker Movement.
Living in rural England, Richard Guy was a man with a problem. Like many located in similar areas, his "broadband" internet connection was pretty narrow, with download speeds below 1Mbps. While some isolated communities are grouping together to bui...
