A Note To The MacArthur Fellows Program Committee.
For God's sake nominate me before I get evicted from my apartment!
Hi There!
Remember me?
What’s the darn holdup?
I’m too poor to even afford a human body.
But I'm still geniusing away here madly.
What’s wrong?
We don’t have any mutual friends on your ‘anonymous committee?’
You’re giving out 30-40 of these grants to geniuses each year.
That’s over 800 people so far who are so dazzling?
How many of them have wings?
Not that many.
You do remember I interpreted a message to the world from the authentic William Shakespeare?
I'm the only person in 400 years who could do it.
Don't you think there just may be a reason for that?
Einstein, Freud, Goethe and Dickens couldn't even grasp it. And they were real geniuses.
It changed world history you know. Just in case you don't..
So what exactly does a cartoon angel have to do to get your attention?
I’m not bitter.
Only disappointed.
Iconoclastic Angel.
This is what I'll look like on your extremely long list of the 800 geniuses who have already received your award:
MacArthur Fellowship Grant Award Winners 2011
LEE VIDOR
Cartoon Angel.
Discoverer of Shakespeare-X Message.
Synthesist of Shakespeare-X Proof.
Creator and Deconstructionist of The 20th Century Modernist Renaissance Theory.
Creator of Shakespeare-X Foundation for Literary Writers.
Creator of LeeVidor.com Community for the Arts.
Creator and Sponsor of The New Web Publishing Model.
Writer of Bohemians and Angels Novel Cycle in 12 Volumes.
Conceptual Artist.
Polymath.
Wit.
Very Pleasant.
Still geniusing away madly in poverty and obscurity.
Not bitter.
There, doesn't that look nice?
Well, it does to everyone else.
MacArthur Foundation Honors 23
New York Times
September 28, 2010
By Felicia R. Lee
The creator of the television series “The Wire,” about drugs, poverty and corruption in Baltimore; a historian who traced the lives of a slave family connected to Thomas Jefferson; and an economist who helped calculate the worth of a standout kindergarten teacher were among the 23 recipients of the $500,000 “genius awards” to be announced on Tuesday by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. As in years past, the list of winners was a mix of those distinguished among their peers and those who have found a bigger stage. They include David Simon, 50, a writer and producer for critically acclaimed television shows, including “The Wire,” broadcast on HBO from 2002 to 2008, and “Treme,” about a struggling post-Katrina neighborhood in New Orleans, which is currently on that same network. “Obviously, I’m very grateful but I have a vague sense of not belonging,” Mr. Simon said in a telephone interview about his grant. He said past winners had done “tangible things to improve conditions.” Still, storytellers can also make a difference, said Mr. Simon, who now splits his time between Baltimore and New Orleans. He expects the MacArthur imprimatur to help move the discussion of the ideas in his work from the “entertainment pages to the op-ed pages,” he said. “One overt argument that ‘The Wire’ was making is that the drug war is amoral and untenable,” Mr. Simon added. Twelve men and 11 women, ranging in age from 30 to 72, were named MacArthur fellows this year. All will receive $100,000 a year for five years, no strings attached. The youngest, John Dabiri, 30, is a biophysicist at the California Institute of Technology who explores the hydrodynamics of jellyfish propulsion. The oldest, Matthew Carter, 72, is a type designer in Cambridge, Mass., known for his elegant letter forms for different mediums. Mr. Carter also designed the typefaces used for headlines in The New York Times newspaper. Since the inception of the program in 1981 and including this year’s fellows, 828 people, ranging in age from 18 to 82 at the time of their selection, have been named. Besides Mr. Simon, prominent storytellers this year include Annette Gordon-Reed, 51, whose book “The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family” (W. W. Norton) won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize in History and the 2008 National Book Award for nonfiction. Ms. Gordon-Reed investigated the story of the slave family that included Sally Hemings, a slave owned by Jefferson who scholars widely believe bore his children. A New Yorker, Ms. Gordon-Reed teaches law and history at Harvard. Some of her grant will go toward travel expenses as she researches another book on the Hemings, she said. Another winner, David Cromer, 45, is a theater director and actor recognized for his work Off Broadway and for revivals of classics, including a long-running revival of “Our Town,” at the Barrow Street Theater in New York. Mr. Cromer, also a New Yorker, said the grant would allow him to take artistic risks. “It robs me of my greatest excuse for everything — I’m broke,” Mr. Cromer said of his award. Other winners in the arts were Nicholas Benson, 46, a stone carver who is expanding the tradition; Yiyun Li, 37, a fiction writer exploring a changing China; Jason Moran, 35, a genre-bending jazz pianist and composer; Jorge Pardo, 47, an installation artist breaking down boundaries between fine art and design; Sebastian Ruth, 35, a violist, violinist and music educator for urban children; and Elizabeth Turk, 48, a sculptor making intricate marble art. Thirteen of the winners this year work in the sciences, and 10 are in the arts. “The thing that strikes me is the diversity, in addition to the brilliance and promise,” Robert Gallucci, president of the MacArthur Foundation, said of the new fellows. Carol Padden, 55, who studies sign languages and how they have evolved, is the first deaf person to receive a MacArthur grant. A professor in the department of communications at the University of California, San Diego, she and her colleagues made headlines for their studies of Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language, used in a small village in the Negev desert of Israel. It represented a rare opportunity to study and identify the innate elements of a language. “It’s amazing,” Dr. Padden said of the grant in a telephone interview using an interpreter. “It’s a terrific honor.” She will probably use the money to continue her work, she said. Nergis Mavalvala, 42, a physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said she hoped the high number of grants to scientists would be inspiring to those with a scientific bent. Her work involves making instruments sensitive enough to detect gravitational waves that emanate from black holes and from the earliest moments of the beginning of the universe. While many fellows are affiliated with large research institutions, Amir Abo-Shaeer, 38, teaches physics at a public high school. He is director of the Dos Pueblos Engineering Academy in Goleta, Calif., a program that incorporates a robotics competition into the curriculum. “I want to change the whole culture of what an engineer looks like and what an engineer does,” Mr. Abo-Shaeer said in an interview, adding that he was especially proud that half of his students are female. Other winners in the sciences were Jessie Little Doe Baird, 46, who preserves the Wopanaak language of the Wampanoag Indian tribe of Massachusetts; Kelly Benoit-Bird, 34, of Oregon State University, a marine biologist using acoustic engineering technology to research ocean creatures; Drew Berry, 40, of the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research in Melbourne, Australia, who uses biomedical animation to understand biological processes and systems; and Carlos D. Bustamante, 35, a Stanford University School of Medicine population geneticist who uses DNA data to study evolution. Also honored are Shannon Lee Dawdy, 43, a University of Chicago anthropologist who uses archaeology and historical preservation techniques to study New Orleans; Michal Lipson, 40, an optical physicist at Cornell University who designs photonic circuits; Emmanuel Saez, 37, a professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley, who studied, among other things, the economic impact of outstanding kindergarten teachers; Dawn Song, 35, a computer security specialist at the University of California, Berkeley, who increases the stability of vulnerable computer systems; and Marla Spivak, 55, an entomologist at the University of Minnesota who studies and protects the honey bee.
