Word: geniuses
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...Genius comes at a price, and it's usually those around the genius who pay it. Like a dark star, genius pulls people into its orbit, or sends them spinning off in unpredictable directions, or draws them down and consumes them. We are accustomed to thinking of talent as a creative force, but two new biographies remind us just how shockingly destructive...
When Lucia Joyce was born in 1907, no one knew her father James was a genius. He was just a twentysomething layabout, an Irishman drinking away his exile in the Italian city of Trieste, scribbling unpublished manuscripts. Lucia took after her father: tall, pale and skinny. In Carol Loeb Shloss's Lucia Joyce (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 560 pages), she emerges as shy but clever, a bright, pretty girl and a witty mimic. Lucia became a dancer. Her work was by all accounts strange and fascinating--"totally subtle and barbaric," one critic wrote. But her promise was never fulfilled...
Crowe will eventually be seen as the pre-eminent actor of his era--surpassing Tom Hanks, Tom Cruise, Sean Penn and the rest. With Crowe you see a conflicted cop, a sensitive gay plumber, a fragile genius; with others, you see an actor playing a role. I respect Crowe's tenacity in staying true to himself. Because he won't play the fame game, he has been assigned a persona: arrogant bad boy. Your story unfairly perpetuated that image, leaving out instances of Crowe's generosity, loyalty and zest for life. Crowe is rugged, rebellious and tender. His complexity makes...
...Australian soldiers who hated the obscurities of modernist poetry conspired to invent Malley, a working-class genius, and fabricate his verse. Then they hoodwinked the editors of an Australian literary journal--called Angry Penguins, no less--into publishing the poems and proclaiming him an unsung master along the lines of T.S. Eliot and Dylan Thomas. But even after the prank was exposed, the poems outfoxed the pranksters. In-tended as satire of 20th century verse, they were taken up by readers as exemplary modernist beauties. Today you can find them in the Penguin Book of Modern Australian Poetry, duly credited...
...Hollywood (an Oscar for 1974's Harry and Tonto). But as Ed Norton, the "underground sanitation expert" and upstairs neighbor of Jackie Gleason's Ralph Kramden in the primal sitcom The Honeymooners, Carney proved that a second banana could be the top. His booming voice was complemented by a genius for body English. Carney's every move was an eccentric dance. He walked in a springy slouch, his thin frame forming a question mark, his gut preceding his chest by a beat or two. His hands were ever aflutter, shaking off invisible water (or sewage), conducting an imaginary silly symphony...