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Chuck Close is a hero of mine, both on a personal level and an artistic level. His massive, hyperrealistic portraits of people both famous and not are some of my favorite pieces — completed obsessively, layer by layer, on a huge scale that demands close scrutiny. After a traumatic brain incident changed his body and mind, he took up equally massive portraits done in grids of concentric circles and I marvel at them, moreso because of the contrast with his previous work. I have, in my life, gained one friend and lost one friend because of a shared love of and a passionate disagreement over Chuck Close.

Oliver Sacks’ wonderful piece on “face-blindness” in the latest New Yorker contains a worthy Chuck Close shoutout that filled my heart to the brim. (Prosopagnosia refers to the inability to commit a face to memory, resulting in forgetting people you know, especially out of the usual context of classroom or workplace.)

The artist Chuck Close, who is famous for his gigantic portraits of faces, has severe, lifelong prosopagnosia. He believes it has played a crucial role in driving his unique artistic vision. “I don’t know who anyone is and essentially have no memory at all for people in real space,” he says. “But when I flatten them out in a photograph I can commit that image to memory.”

Maybe three dimensions are too many for Close’s brain to digest, like a set of equations with too many variables to be soluble. Contrast this with Terry Gross’s recent interview with stereo-vision newcomer Sue Barry. As a cross-eyed child, Barry went through surgery after surgery to attempt to fix the way her eyes looked, but they never achieved the ability to move in seamless sync until she was well into middle age. Before, the world looked flat to her the way a depthless Magic Eye drawing looks to normal viewers. Afterward, she could finally, you know, see the sailboat.

Nytpicker pointed out a phenomenon I could never have imagined: Gender disparity in the obituaries published by the New York Times. The nytpicks quote obituaries editor Bill McDonald’s 2006 statement that because of the equality gap of the 40s, 50s, and 60s, the prominent people dying today are mostly white men. So they checked back 20 years to see if the disparity was even greater then:

Of 691 NYT obituaries published in 1990, only 92 of them were of women — almost exactly replicating the 2010 numbers.

So what’s going on? Are the world’s prominent women — the ones deserving of NYT obituaries — simply living forever? In the last two decades, has there been zero growth in the number of notable women who’ve died?

I can see both sides of this, but the numbers warrant some examination. Would it be morbid to admit I look forward to a more equal obituaries section in the future?

It’s news because it isn’t really news!

Roger Clemens was indicted for perjury last week, and I wish there were a more vibrant term for just how perjurious his perjury really was. Clemens has been accused of cheating and doping a lot of times and has denied it, fervently, in colorful terms and in a vaguely threatening way. Like if you said it to him, he’d tell you to F off, and did you wanna take it outside? Did you?

Well, no, Roger, I don’t, because I know you’re doped up and already one of the stupider public figures. On All Things Considered they re-aired some old tape of Clemens’ ridiculous denials and didn’t even have to write editorial material around it — like classic George W. Bush statements, they speak for themselves and require no embellishment. Clemens’ former teammate Andy Pettitte, who has long been a favorite player of mine for no real reason EVEN THOUGH he’s a Yankee, confessed his own drug use and made comments about Clemens’ as well. To this Clemens responded with the following soundbyte re-aired during All Things. I’d read it aloud for full effect:

CLEMENS: I think he misremembers the conversation that we had. Andy and I’s relationship was close enough to know that if I would have known that he had done HGH, which I now know, that he was knowingly knowing that I had taken HGH, we would’ve talked about the subject.

[NPR's Tom] GOLDMAN: Now, Robert, we should add that the indictment does not include charges against Roger Clemens for assaulting the English language.

[NPR's Robert] SIEGEL: Yeah, they could sentence someone to parsing that sentence.

Knowingly knowing that Clemens denied his doping for so long, I’m happy he’s in a heap of trouble.

In this week’s “Modern Love” column in the New York Times, a woman gets reacquainted with her mentally disabled brother and must help from a distance when he gets lost at a faraway airport once he returns home:

And then I thought of the only person I knew in Boston with whom I had had any contact, my senior-year prom date. Bill had been more a friend rather than a boyfriend, and he had known my mother, my sisters and [my brother] John. A few times, he and his wife had unexpectedly taken John to dinner.

“Bill,” I said, “It’s Lorna. I’m so, so sorry to wake you up. I have an emergency. I don’t know what to do. I need some help.” I explained the situation and, yes, dear reader, I asked this guy I barely knew anymore if he would get out of bed, get dressed, drive 45 minutes to the airport, pick up my brother, take him to his home and host him overnight until we could solve the problem the next day. He agreed.

Bill picked up John. By now it was 1 a.m. My brother ended up sleeping on his couch. The next day, St. Joan sorted out the baggage issues and got John safely home. I think I sent Bill a fruit basket. What I had asked was well beyond the call of anyone’s duty. Sometimes people just do the right thing, and we don’t know why. They just do.

You know, this is why we all keep going.

This New York Times story on parents postponing kindergarten for a year is the latest example of insane, one-up-oriented 21st-century parenting technique.

“I have met mom after mom who is intentionally holding her child back a year,” said Jennifer Finke, a mother of two in Englewood, Colo. “They say they don’t want their kids to be the youngest or shortest. Is that right? Is it fair?”

Or this:

Suzanne Collier, for one. Rather than send her 5-year-old son, John, to kindergarten this year, the 36-year-old mother from Brea, Calif., enrolled him in a “transitional” kindergarten “without all the rigor.” He’s an active child, Ms. Collier said, “and not quite ready to focus on a full day of classroom work.” Citing a study from “The Tipping Point” about Canadian hockey players, which found that the strongest players were the oldest, she said, “If he’s older, he’ll have the strongest chance to do the best.”

The article goes on to explain that there’s added pressure to hold children back a year since if they enter at the correct age they’ll be up to 18 months younger than other children in the same class, which can have serious effects on personal development.

I didn’t go to kindergarten and started first grade instead. Because of the genetic lottery, I always was the tallest girl in my class regardless of age, so size didn’t have any effect on me after starting school early — I can’t speak to that part and do not underestimate how children may get picked on or left out because they are smaller.

But in terms of maturity or life experience, simply being older doesn’t make a damn bit of difference. Someone just like me who had started kindergarten at age 6 would be 19 at her high-school graduation and 23 if she followed it directly with a bachelor’s degree.

She would enter the world of entry-level work two full years after I did and compete against both those who had gone to work right away and those who had spent a year doing community service or some other kind of transitional experience. By age 25 I’ll have four years of full-time work experience where this theoretical person will have two.

More importantly, Americans fall further and further behind the rest of the industrialized world in every core academic subject, and to suggest that our children aren’t capable of or couldn’t find happiness and fulfillment in starting to read or count at the same time they have for decades is the same old overindulgent American helicopter-parenting crapola.

We want our children to be bigger and stronger than other children but don’t mind that they will start their learning and organized socializing a full year later? That sounds like a formula for creating bullies.

Jonathan Franzen follows the people who covertly enforce Cyprus’s policy against trapping songbirds in a July 26 New Yorker feature. Apparently songbirds are the unofficial national delicacy of Cyprus, which I also did not know is a Communist state. The island is beginning to stand out as a bit backwards-looking in the cerebral and modern world of the E.U., hence the policy, which bans practices like using prepared sticks covered in sticky sap or electronic recordings of birds to lure others.

Looking at the picture of hundreds of tiny birds lined up ready to be eaten is pretty sickening. Listen, Cyprus, couldn’t you find a larger food animal, one you could trap without leaving it stuck to something and beating itself to death trying to escape? It’s really cruel. Everyone knows I have a natural affinity toward tiny island nations but you’re pushing it.

Franzen follows a couple of Cypriots who belong to an organization called CABS — the Committee Against Bird Slaughter. They get into some trouble when two locals assault the CABS members, and Franzen and another outsider run as fast as they can until Franzen has an absurdly lucky break:

Heyd continued to retreat, which seemed to me a good idea. When I saw him look back and go pale and break into a dead run, I panicked too. [...]

I saw Heyd running on up through a large garden, speaking to a middle-aged man, and then, looking frightened, continuing to run. I walked up to the garden’s owner and tried to explain the situation, but he spoke only Greek. Seeming at once concerned and suspicious, he fetched his daughter, who was able to tell me, in English, that I’d blundered into the yard of the district director of Greenpeace. She gave me water and two plates of cookies and told my story to her father, who responded with one angry word. “Barbarians!” the daughter translated.

The NYT’s “The Caucus” blog ran a post on Sarah Palin’s discomfort-inspiring endorsement of John McCain in a state primary where he is being brutalized from the right. I hate John McCain for bringing Palin to anyone’s attention in the first place and can never forgive him, but the photo of him standing beside (yet several feet away from) Palin is painful. She is, of course, wearing her scary structured black leather jacket that seems to come from the Dominatrix Lair line of Chanel. He looks as though he has been holding his breath for the last hour, or year and a half.

Anyway, this doesn’t draw out more than the typical level of outrage for me, but one of the reader comments explained my thoughts better than I’ve managed to before now:

Maybe as Republicans keep moving further and further into the past we’ll finally return to a time when the currency of argument was reason rather than emotion and symbolism.

Yesterday on Speaking of Faith, Krista Tippett hosted two Jesuit priests who are celebrated scientists: Brother Guy Consolmagno and Father George Coyne. They discussed extensively the gaps in our understanding of the universe, and how those gaps are something to celebrate, to pursue without ceasing.

They also quoted the Anne Lamott line that the opposite of faith is not doubt, but certainty. The certainty of today’s most abusive and relentless right-wingers is their most offensive trait among many.

In a 2001 interview with Victoria magazine, Harvard sociologist Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot had this to say about respect:

“When you accept the possibility that everyone you meet is bearing gifts, you are coming from a respectful place.”

This is one of the simplest, most lovely statements I’ve ever read. It will stick with me because of its simplicity, and hopefully will not be crowded out by the latest pop song I hear in a commercial. (Get out of my head, Miley Cyrus!)

Dr. L.-L. is not unrealistic about respect. She notes that “every generation laments the loss of respect” because “That ideal time never existed.” At the same time, her comments from almost 10 years ago on people’s attention spans highlight a sort of internet diversionism we’ve accepted too willingly as a society:

“Respectful listening is the opposite of prototypical cocktail party behavior. You’re not saying ‘How are you?’ and looking over your shoulder to see if someone more important is there. It’s genuine attention — and not necessarily silent attention — that makes the person you’re talking to feel seen and heard and listened to. [ . . . ] It comes to children so naturally, but somehow we rob ourselves of it, caught up in ‘Don’t ask, don’t touch, don’t inquire.’ I think the genuine impulse of kids to say ‘And then what happened?’ is a very respectful way of responding to people around you.”

A.O. Scott’s movie reviews for the Times are entertaining even when I couldn’t care less about the movie:

Remember “His Girl Friday”? “Bringing Up Baby”? “Holiday”? (If not, it’s never too late.) “The Bounty Hunter,” with its whirligig plot and incessant squabbling, shows some genetic connection to those sparklingly silly battles of the sexes. But it is also the latest evidence that, when it comes to romantic combat, we live in a more coddled, a less insouciant and also a more thoughtlessly brutal age than our ancestors did.

I have mixed, uncemented feelings about discrimination against obese people, having been technically obese (BMI-wise) for significant stretches of time and now only on the furthest reaches of the “overweight” range. There is an interesting piece in the New York Times about the social acceptability of fat discrimination, which some view as one of the last bastions of public prejudice. I was most moved by an assertion that the diseases and conditions we associate with obesity are exacerbated, or even caused by, chronic stress:

“Stigma and prejudice are intensely stressful,” he explained. “Stress puts the body on full alert, which gets the blood pressure up, the sugar up, everything you need to fight or flee the predator.”

Over time, such chronic stress can lead to high blood pressure, diabetes and other medical ills, many of them (surprise!) associated with obesity. In studies, Dr. Muennig has found that women who say they feel they are too heavy suffer more mental and physical illness than women who say they feel fine about their size — no matter what they weigh.

I’ve never felt stressed by my size, even when I was at my heaviest. Yes, looking at pictures of myself or realizing clothes no longer fit was embarrassing in a private way, but more than that, it became an inconvenience and made me feel unhealthy.

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