Tuesday, September 22, 2009
Books / Film / News We Are Not a Genius (Again)
Posted by Mark Asch on Tue, Sep 22, 2009 at 4:24 PM
- An untitled recent work by Rackstraw Downes, who is now a genius.
Anyway, who is a MacArthur-certified professional genius this year? The 2009 grant recipients have been announced; the one you're most likely to have heard of, unless you're a developmental ornithologist, is Edwidge Danticat, author of several (and, soon, more) works of fiction, memoir and young-adult fiction about the Haitian and Haitian-American experience. Other recipients include, as always, scientists doin' innovative work and advocates for social justice. ("Jerry Mitchell, an investigative reporter at The Clarion-Ledger newspaper in Jackson, Miss., who focuses on cold-case murders from the civil rights era, said he would use the money to help write a book on the subject.")
One grant went to the politically active experimental filmmaker James Longley (who went to Wesleyan just like fellow low-budget director and MacArthur Genius Grant winner Michael Bay), on the strength of his 2006 film Iraq in Fragments. Reviewing the film in the L three years ago, Michael Joshua Rowin found the film in parts "incomplete due to some unnecessarily choppy editing and insufficiently provided information." Check back here next year for news of Diablo Cody's Genius Grant, evidently.
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