Chekhov's Mistress
It Doesn’t Take a Nanotechnologist to be a Genius
23 ingenious folks got a call recently informing them that they were indeed a “genius.” That call came from… the MacArthur Foundation and meant that these lucky (in that make your own luck sense) people were to receive $500,000 in grant money to do with what they like.
Among the winners this year, according to the NY Times is Edward P. Jones, the novelist, and the bookstore owner “Rueben Martínez, a barber in Santa Ana, Calif., who in 1993 began [his] bookstore in his barbershop to promote reading among Hispanic people.”
A bookstore owner? One of the great things about this list is the creativity in which the foundation chooses its recipients. Yes, there is a nanotechnologist, a philologist, and a molecular biologist, but there are also businesspeople, a ragtime pianist, and as Beatrice points out, recipients also include a poet (C.D. Wright) and the short story writer Aleksandar Hemon, a 40 year old (a great age) Chicagoan who experiments “with an unusual array of forms, multiple narrative voices, and settings that shift from Sarajevo to Chicago to Kiev to Shanghai.”
I’ve met a couple of past geniuses too (actually one I met and the other I was too intimidated to speak to, despite having the opportunity.) Osvaldo Golijov, a composer, whom I met through my brother-in-choice, a musician. And I nearly met Anna Deveare Smith, whom I’ve written about before, but I was too timid. But I think she’s great at, among other things, looking at the way that we communicate with one another.
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About this Post
- Posted by: Bud Parr
- Date: September 28, 2004
- Filed Under:
Wise Men Fish Here: Literature
- Comments:0
- Links to this Post: Technorati
