The only good thing about proctoring exams is catching up on old New Yorkers. And watching all those students in pain. That’s good, too.
I really loved Malcolm Gladwell’s article on late bloomers.
Genius, in the popular conception, is inextricably tied up with
precocity—doing something truly creative, we’re inclined to think,
requires the freshness and exuberance and energy of youth. Orson Welles
made his masterpiece, “Citizen Kane,” at twenty-five. Herman Melville
wrote a book a year through his late twenties, culminating, at age
thirty-two, with “Moby-Dick.” Mozart wrote his breakthrough Piano
Concerto No. 9 in E-Flat-Major at the age of twenty-one.
Yet, Cézanne produced his best stuff when he was older, even overcoming the inconvenience of not really being able to draw well. Tenacity, plus a dream team of supporters, meant that he produced masterpieces later in life, Gladwell explains.
I need one of the those dream teams.
Anthony Lane is an absolute hoot this week. Of course, the Richies handed him a little gift with their two terrible movies.
What vexes me most about “Filth and Wisdom” is the economics. Madonna
has been a global star for decades. She has amassed a fortune, much of
which presumably remains intact. She can’t have spent all of it
on jodhpurs and conical bras. So why, when it came to launching herself
as a film director, did she limit her budget to $365.23? Such, at any
rate, is my estimate for the funding of “Filth and Wisdom.” If the
actors were paid according to their talents, they cannot have cost more
than forty bucks. In the case of Richard E. Grant, the one sizable name
in the cast, his performance as a tweedy, sightless poet is so
embarrassing that I trust he took no payment at all. The only major
expense was the lighting: a toy flashlight, I would guess, placed
carefully in the corner of each room and angled upward—hence the
capering shadows that Andriy casts on his living-room walls. In
technical terms, more professional productions than this are filmed and
cut on iMovie, by ten-year-olds, a thousand times a day.
I have harbored a long and not too secret literary crush on Lane.
Apt. 11d 
I’ve often thought about the confound between precocity and genius (and at a lower level, between precocity and “gifted” or “highly capable”). Precocity does seem to be a facet of genius in some fields — most notably music. And it might have a real role there, because of the physical skill required for music. If you need to practice 10000 hours, but you are battling the eventual degradation of motor learning skills with age (and perhaps even with development) precocity becomes necessary for genius.
And, learning to read fluently earlier means the world of book-learning opens up to you earlier, meaning that you can always have read more books than the person next to you.
LikeLike