Joined 6 years ago
(Does it cancel out her many unambiguously positive and praiseworthy achievements? No. People are complicated.)
Sea otters, which feed themselves through long dives to and from the ocean floor, with a blind and hurried pawing for urchins in the middle, have hands that are about as sensitive as human hands, but significantly faster. Tasked with distinguishing boards with slightly different small ridges, humans compare and re-compare before deciding; if an otter touches the correct board first, it doesn’t touch the second one at all. This is true even though a human fingertip, if inflated to the size of the earth, is sensitive enough to distinguish between cars and houses. A manatee’s face is about as good.
> Every day for a year a group of us would meet after lunch and try every recipe ever devised for Jell-O. They were all elaborate and time-consuming. Finally we happened upon a recipe for small slices of concentrated Jell-O that you could pick up with your fingers. I had all the men on the team make them with me. We figured if we could make them, anyone could. We added the idea of shapes and negotiated with Bill Cosby to advertise them. Every box in the U.S. sold off the shelves. My job at the National Endowment for the Arts is oddly similar: to understand how to take all the agency’s resources and, in addition to everything else we’re doing, come up with a few ideas that are transformative.
And more relevant to this thread:
> I would tell young poets worried about struggling to make a living at their craft to consider alternatives in business before launching an academic career. A poet always struggles. If you work in business, you have the freedom to choose the ring you struggle in. There are many jobs in which a creative person who can write excels. An N.E.A. grant can be a watershed in a writer’s career. It’s the first time some people can write full time. The grant is financial, but also validating. Honor can be even more valuable than money to artists. It gives them the right to take their artistic vocation more seriously.
