Bad Man Forward Bad Man Pull Up, and Other News

From Serious Things A Go Happen, a book of Jamaican dancehall flyers. Image via The New Yorker

A standardized test creates its own ineluctable logic. The test is the ultimate authority—the test has all the answers—that’s why it’s the test, and you’re merely the test taker. But there are limits to these strong-arm tactics. Asking multiple-choice questions about poetry, for instance, can be like trying to wash your car with a power sander. The poet Sara Holbrook has learned that a standardized test in Texas is asking seventh and eighth graders questions about her work that not even she knew the answers to. Ian Birnbaum writes, “Holbrook started paying attention after a Texas teacher e-mailed her looking for guidance on why she had inserted a line break in one of her poems. The questions asked about the writer’s motivations, but no test writer had ever asked Holbrook why she made her choices. ‘I just put that stanza break in there because when I read it aloud (I’m a performance poet), I pause there,’ she wrote in a Huffington Post editorial. ‘Note: That is not an option among the answers because no one ever asked me why I did it … Any test that questions the motivations of the author without asking the author is a big baloney sandwich.’ ”

Everyone remembers Casanova as the ultimate hustler—the historical record indicates he once charmed the pants off the pope, or, you know … something like that … but a new biography tells of a time when the hunter became the hunted: “In 1763, Casanova was himself fleeced in a convoluted scam by a young French-Swiss courtesan, Marie Ann Charpillon, and her mother, in London’s Soho. He was deeply shaken by the episode, and apparently on the verge of drowning himself in the Thames, when he bumped into a playboy friend, Sir Wellbore Agar, who lured him away with the promise of drink, a woman, beef and Yorkshire pudding. For revenge, Casanova had to satisfy himself with the modest prank of training a parrot to repeat, in French, ‘Miss Charpillon is more of a whore than her mother.’ ”

In Argentina, the writer Pablo Katchadjian faces ludicrous charges brought against him by Borges’s widow, María Kodama, who alleges that Katchadjian’s book The Fattened Aleph is a plagiarism of Borges’s story “The Aleph.” Kodama seems to have no purchase on the fact that her deceased husband delighted in a prankster literary spirit that attacked the very notion of authorship she now she seeks to uphold: “Katchadjian’s many supporters argue that ‘El Aleph’ is so well-known that its reworking did not require a Borges attribution and that, in any case, only a few hundreds copies of the reworked story were published. Legally, however, copyright infringement does not require evidence of profit … ‘The Fattened Aleph is not plagiarism because no plagiarism is open about its source,’ Katchadjian said. ‘Neither is it a joke that went wrong, or one that went right. It is a book I wrote based on a previous text.’ ”

Serious Things A Go Happen is a collection of Jamaican dancehall signs whose appealing tawdriness has no analog in any American nightclubs. Jamaicans are self-actualizing, the signs suggest, and the rest of us can only hope to be invited. Amanda Petrusich writes, “All the best dancehall songs are deeply lustful, and the genre routinely inspires the creation of new dance moves with evocative names: Wine and Dip, Tek Weh Yuhself, Whine Up, Boosie Bounce, Drive By, Shovel It, To Di World, Nuh Behavior, Skip to My Lou, Gully Creepa, Bad Man Forward Bad Man Pull Up, Pon Di River, Willie Bounce, Screetchie, and Daggering, to name but a handful. The combinations suggest, in literal ways, the various pleasures of the flesh … The pleasure these signs promise—and what is an advertisement if not a suggestion of self-betterment? Why does anyone go to a party or a concert if not to maybe be changed completely?—is both undeniable and spiritually edifying.”

Amia Srinivasan remembers having Derek Parfit as her academic advisor: “I don’t think it’s unfair to say that Derek didn’t see what is obvious to many others: that there are persons, non-fungible and non-interchangeable, whose immense particularity matters and is indeed the basis of, rather than a distraction from, morality. But in not seeing this, Derek was able to theorize with unusual, often breathtaking novelty, clarity and insight. He was also free to be, in some ways at least, better than the rest of us. After he retired from All Souls, Derek didn’t like to go to the college common room, so we had our last meeting in my study. While jostling his papers he knocked over a glass. He was unfazed. We sat and talked for a few hours, his feet in a pool of water and shattered glass.”

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