¡Bemsha SWING!: Comparative Disadvantage

20 oct 2011

Comparative Disadvantage

I wonder how the bottom 10% of the bottom 1% feel. This 0.1% of the population, tenth of the tenth, is lumped together with the other 9% of the top. But how much does a person in this group have in common with someone in the top 0.1% of the nation? Not very much. On the other hand, the bottom half of the top 2% is safe from the public outcry. Yet they are separated by a very thin line from the bottom half of the top 1%. At least the 1% of these two groups at the margins are almost indistinguishable.

4 comentarios:

Vance Maverick dijo...: I've tried to make sense of the figures here, without success. The bottom 10% of the bottom 1% is "lumped" with the "other" "9%" of the top? Wha?; 8:09 p. m.
Jonathan dijo...: Well yes, with all the anger at the top 1%, we are fogetting that this top 1% includes people not in the top 90% of that 1%. In fact, the bottom tenth of the 1% is closer to the 2nd percent than to the very top of the 1%.

What could be clearer? We should feel great empathy with the bottom part of the 1% who are closer to the rest of the 99%. ''

So suppose that the top 1% is about 3,000 people. We should feel pity for the 300 poorest people of that demographic. Or maybe not.; 10:06 p. m.
Jonathan dijo...: It was meant to be a satirical post. I'm not sure any more what I meant exactly.; 8:21 a. m.
Clarissa dijo...: I think this is a great post. Lumping together the 99% which contains a variety of economic well-being that is really significant is problematic.

Nobody seems to be willing to address the real differences between the top 1% of the high earners and the lowest percentage of that group. And those folks are not nearly as uniform as one might imagine.; 9:50 p. m.

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Blurbs & Reviews

"Jonathan Mayhew’s new work belongs to a certain class of surprising books: those so obviously necessary once they appear that it apparently required a stroke of genius to come up with the idea for them."

--Daniel Katz

"Jonathan Mayhew's Lorca is less the distinctive Spanish poet, whose murder in 1936 marked the beginning of the Civil War, than he is an American invention. From the 1940s to the end of the century, our poets have invoked Lorca-in translation, of course-as a Romantic, exotic, radical, and, in many cases, gay icon-the poet of mystery and the duende. The Lorca myth, Mayhew argues persuasively, has enriched American lyric, but it has also been an obstacle to a more adequately grounded understanding of Spanish poetry in the 20th century. Apocryphal Lorca is revisionist criticism at its most acute."

-Marjorie Perloff

"Enhanced by copious notes and an excellent bibliography, this book offers a perceptive, intriguing assessment of the Garcia Lorca created by the postwar generation of American poets." (Choice )

"Mayhew is a critic who is at the top of his game; he combines a breadth of knowlege of the field with acute analysis."

--John C. Wilcox, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

"Let me just cut through all the usual, boring book review preliminaries and say the following thing: Jonathan Mayhew has, in Apocryphal Lorca, written an amazing book. "

--Brandon Holmquest, Calque

"The great merit of Mayhew's study is his sustained effort to document and interrogate Lorca's reception, unique among American encounters with foreign literatures in its nature and extent."

--Lawrence Venuti, TLS.

"Se trata de Jonathan Mayhew y su extraordinario estudio Apocryphal Lorca. Translation, Parody, Kitsch. Esta obra se ocupa no de García Lorca sino de cómo los escritores estadounidenses han reinventado a Lorca, desde Spicer y Rothenberg hasta O’Hara y Koch. Asimismo, es una discusión de la Deep Image —¡cuánto hay que desmenuzar de ese capítulo!— y la manera en que la poética norteamericana se ha apropiado de lo lorqueano (o lorcaesco) y del concepto de lo 'otro' que éste representa. Éste es un libro repleto de sutilezas, de tesis, apuntes, datos."

--Heriberto Yépez

"Apocryphal Lorca, sin embargo, es mucho más que un estudio de las vidas posteriores de Lorca en la poesía americana entre principios de los años 50 y 70. También ofrece un acercamiento histórico a la traducción de su obra, descubriendo reseñas de prensa significativas y discurriendo acerca de reconocimientos críticos. El texto es elegante y fresco; el análisis amplio e históricamente específico."

--María Delgado, Revista de Literatura

¡Bemsha SWING!

20 oct 2011

Comparative Disadvantage

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