The
Moonstone (1868)
by Wilkie Collins is
a 19th-century British epistolary novel. It is generally considered to
be the first detective novel, and it established many of the ground rules of the
modern detective novel. The story was
originally serialised in Charles Dickens' magazine All the Year Round. The Moonstone and The Woman in White are widely
considered to be Collins' best novels, and Collins adapted The
Moonstone for the stage in 1877, although the production was performed
for only two months. The Moonstone of
the title is a diamond, not to be confused with the semi-precious moonstone gem. It
gained its name from its association with the Hindu god of the moon Chandra. It was said to be protected by hereditary
guardians on the orders of Vishnu, and
to wax and wane in brilliance along with the light of the moon. Link to the book and film, radio, and
television adaptations at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Moonstone
More even than the stories of Poe or Doyle, the early work that to T.S. Eliot served
as a model for the genre was “The Moonstone,” by Wilkie Collins, a sprawling
melodrama about the theft and recovery of an Indian diamond, which appeared in
serial installments in Charles Dickens’s All the Year Round magazine
in 1868. In his introduction to the 1928
Oxford World Classics edition of the novel, Eliot called it “the first, the
longest and the best of modern English detective novels.” In a review written in the January, 1927,
issue of The Criterion, he claimed that all good detective
fiction “tends to return and approximate to the practice of Wilkie
Collins.” Paul Grimstad https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/what-makes-great-detective-fiction-according-to-t-s-eliot
The Moonstone
by Wilkie Collins covers eight centuries and includes narratives giving eight
different viewpoints. Robert McCrum ranks it #19 in a
list of "the 100 best novels" https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/jan/27/100-best-novels-moonstone-wilkie-collins
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soon after the snows of 1977 began to thaw, the residents of Greenfield, Massachusetts,
received a strange questionnaire in the mail. “Try to recall
the number of times you became annoyed and/or angry during the past week,” the
survey instructed. “Describe the most
angry of these experiences.” One woman
knew her answer: Recently, her husband
had bought a new car. Then he had driven
it to his mistress’s house so she could admire the purchase. When the wife found out, she was livid. Furious. Her rage felt like an eruption she couldn’t
control. The survey was interested in
the particulars of respondents’ anger. In its 14 pages, it sought an almost
voyeuristic level of detail. It asked
the woman to describe the stages of her fury, which words she had shouted, whether
punches had been thrown. “In becoming
angry, did you wish to get back at, or gain revenge?” the survey inquired. Afterward, did you feel “triumphant, confident
and dominant” or “ashamed, embarrassed and guilty”? There were also questions for people like her
husband, who had been on the receiving end: “Did the other person’s anger come as a
surprise to you, or did you expect that it would occur? The author of the questionnaire was James
Averill, a psychology professor at the University of Massachusetts at
Amherst. People were eager to talk about
their daily indignations, in part because they felt angry so frequently. “Most people report becoming mildly to
moderately angry anywhere from several times a day to several times a week,”
Averill later wrote, summing up his research in American Psychologist. Anger,
Averill concluded, is one of the densest forms of communication. It conveys more information, more quickly,
than almost any other type of emotion. And
it does an excellent job of forcing us to listen to and confront problems we
might otherwise avoid. Subsequent
studies have found other benefits as well We’re more likely to perceive people who
express anger as competent, powerful, and the kinds of leaders who will
overcome challenges. Anger motivates us
to undertake difficult tasks. We’re
often more creative when we’re angry, because our outrage helps us see
solutions we’ve overlooked. “When we
look at the brains of people who are expressing anger, they look very similar
to people who are experiencing happiness,” says Dacher Keltner, the director of
the Berkeley Social Interaction Lab. “When
we become angry, we feel like we’re taking control, like we’re getting power
over something.” Watching angry
people—as viewers of reality television know—is highly entertaining, so
expressing anger is a surefire method for capturing the attention of an
otherwise indifferent crowd. In the
years after his survey, Averill watched as anger studies became the focus of
academic specialties and prestigious journals. In 1992 alone, social scientists published
almost 25,000 studies of anger. America has always been an
angry nation. We are a country born of
revolution. Combat—on battlefields, in
newspapers, at the ballot box—has been with us from the start. American history is punctuated by episodes in
which aggrieved parties have settled their differences not through
conversation, but with guns. And yet our
political system was cleverly designed to maximize the beneficial effects of
anger. The Bill of Rights guarantees
that we can argue with one another in the public square, through a free press,
and in open court. The separation of
powers forces our representatives in government to arrive at policy through
disagreement, negotiation, and accommodation.
one
reason america is so angry is that anger works. When channeled by someone like Cesar Chavez,
it can lift up the disadvantaged and reshape a nation. But its power is not reserved for the
righteous. When less scrupulous leaders
tap into our rage and use it for their own ends, the emotion can be turned
against us, in ways large and small, often without us even realizing what is
going on. Corporate America, for
example, has long sought to profit from our anger. Robert Sutton was a young professor, about to
start teaching business at Stanford, when James Averill published his study on
Greenfield. For Sutton and others, the
idea that you could examine an unruly emotion with scientific rigor was
fascinating. Soon he began seeing other
papers, with titles such as “Fear, Anger and Risk,” “Anger in the Workplace,”
and “Customer Rage.” He began to wonder:
Who’s making money on this stuff? Sutton nosed around and found a
debt-collection agency whose executives were as fascinated as he was by the new
scholarship on anger. They, too, had
read the studies—and were using the social science to get rich. Sutton persuaded the agency to let him enroll
in its training program for credit-card debt collectors and then allow him to
work the phones alongside its 200 employees, who together made 800,000 calls a
month. “The
trick they were teaching was to use anger strategically,” Sutton told me. “They
had it as a formula: when to fake anger,
when to cool down, when to give people a bit of forgiveness.” The bill collectors were hardly alone in
exploiting the new understanding of anger. Harvard Business School devoted a course to
using anger in negotiations. “There were
papers and studies explaining that the way to unite your company is by getting
them angry at a common enemy,” Sutton said. In 2009, a Tufts University
study of opinion media found that “100 percent of TV episodes and 98.8 percent
of talk radio programs contained outrage.”
Charles Duhigg This
article appears in the January/February 2019 print edition of The Atlantic with
the headline “Why Are We So Angry?” Read
extensive article at https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/01/charles-duhigg-american-anger/576424/
Thank you, Muse reader!
http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com January 3, 2019 Issue 2015
Word of the Day castle in the air (idiomatic) A desire, idea,
or plan that is unlikely to ever be realized; a visionary project or scheme; a daydream, an idle fancy, a near impossibility. [from
mid 16th c.] quotations ▼
Synonyms: air
castle, castle
in Spain, castle
in the skies, eggs in moonshine, jam tomorrow, pie in the sky, pipe dream https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/castle_in_the_air#English
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