From a long review by William Deresiewicz in The Nation:

Into the world of Bellow’s brothers, Maurice and Sam, big in the coal business, huge in real estate, Cadillac drivers, ganse machers, figures of energy and action, not above a shady deal, men who knew the way the system worked, the traps it laid for bleeding hearts. Men like their father, a failed bootlegger and everything elser, but cynical and tough, all three of them contemptuous of little Sol the luftmensch. “My father looked, when I told him of the award,” Bellow writes an old friend at 33, having finally won himself a Guggenheim, “as he had looked at the gold star in my third-grade copybook. Yes, very fine, but there is still life with its markets, alleyways and bedrooms where such as you are conceived between a glass of schnapps and a dish of cucumbers and cream.”

Deresiewicz goes on to quote Allan Bloom talking about Bellow’s versatility:

His friend Allan Bloom said it brilliantly and best: “He has always understood that even if you are on your way from Becoming to Being, you still have to catch the train at Randolph Street.”

Understanding, for Bellow, begins in feeling—hardly an intellectual’s position or, these days, even a comprehensible one. Citrine, we read, is a man who has decided “to follow the threads of spirit he had found within himself to see where they might lead.” That is why Bellow’s memories of childhood were always his essential touchstone. “Love reclaims one for reality,” he writes here—that same love that he felt for his readers. And that is why he insisted, to Alfred Kazin, that when it comes to judging a work of literature, “The first criterion is enjoyment, and so are the second and third criteria.” Bellow was against interpretation long before another writer got there. “While our need for meanings is certainly great,” he wrote in a 1959 essay, “our need for concreteness, for particulars, is even greater.” And that is why he thought by telling stories.

More information:

The Whole Human Mess: On Saul Bellow (175.41 kB)
by William Deresiewicz, The Nation, November 23, 2010

The Obedient Bellow (160.18 kB)
by Edward Mendelson, The New York Review of Books, April 28, 2011

From a profile of the current 160lb world champion in Doghouse Boxing:

…in March of 2000, Martinez left his home of Quilmes, Argentina in search of his dream; his destiny, already written in his mind, only required him to find which road led to it. Martinez’s travels to took him to Europe, where he went by train from Italy to Madrid, Spain, only to realize he had been robbed of the most important piece of luggage he had: his list of numbers to call when he got to Spain.

“When I left Argentina, I had in my luggage a list with the phone numbers of people who lived here in Spain and could initially help me,” Martinez said in an interview with the Argentine press, years ago. “It was a crazy three-days-long trip, from Saturday February 9, 2002, until Tuesday, when I arrived at Spain. When I arrived at Avenida de America in Madrid, I searched for the list and several agendas in my bag and I could not find it. I searched and searched but it wasn’t there. It turned out that they had stolen everything. I spent two days in a hostel, sat in the bed, sat in a chair, sat in a corner, thinking, ‘What could I do?’ Without expecting it, checking a pair of pants, in a pocket near the knee, a place you barely ever check, I found a small piece of paper, with a phone number that said, ‘Pablo Sarmiento.’ It was a number I was given a year before in Argentina. From there on, my life in Spain began. I arrived at Guadalajara, ten days later, I had a job and a month later I was already training with Gabi [Sarmiento].”

…
Working odd jobs like nightclub bouncer (among others like construction worker and dishwasher with modeling jobs for Adidas and Nike thrown in here and there), while still training and fighting, Martinez got to see a side of life that may have derailed some. Martinez said watching the nightlife from an outsider’s position helped him clarify his goals and view of the world.

“I have never drank alcohol or smoked or had any vices,” said Martinez. “It was hard to tolerate, have patience and deal with people in the nightclubs, people that were completely drunk and under the influence of drugs but it taught me a lot of things what I did not want. What’s out there in the world [was] to love sports even more. Knowing night and how night is so dark, made me love sports even more, which are day. This is the black-and-white of life. The work brought me money I needed and it opened my eyes to what the world was 100%. Night can confuse and derail a lot of people. Thankfully, that did not happen to me and I continued on my chosen path.”

Fascinating case of Clark Rockefeller, erstwhile German citizen Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter.

The man with the eccentric accent, the tantalizing hints of family fortune and the impressive conversational knowledge of everything from physics to art to the stock market is actually Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter, who grew up in Germany, came to the United States as a teenage exchange student and never left, not even contacting his family back home for the last 20 years.

More information

• Long feature on Gerhartsreiter, in Vanity Fair, 2009
• How impostors like Clark Rockefeller capture our trust (187.81 kB)
  from Boston.com
  
• Video news report from 2008, NECN

Cycling along Spaniards Road, daydreaming while passing on the inside of sluggish traffic I spot a notebook, its pages indecently splayed.
I don’t stop immediately, but curiousity gets the better of me. I’m reading James Lasdun’s mystery THE HORNED MAN, but there’s sufficient inherent curiuosity to call a halt and then a back track.

The contents don’t intrigue; they’re just everyday jottings of a busy marketeer. Still, the trail leads to an interesting family, doing big things in property. The notebook belongs to Lisa Ronson, daughter of tycoon Gerald Ronson, one of the UK’s leading property developers and one of the Guinness Four, briefly jailed for his part in allegedly dodgy dealings relating to Guiness’s takeover of Distillers.

Ronson bounced back after his legal and financial travails, and he is currently building the Heron Tower in Moorgate (see below), one of the new breed of ‘signature buildings’ so beloved by former Mayor, Ken Livingstone.

Click on the images below for more information.

A courier from CDS just picked up the notebook – he’ll be back at the Heron HQ in Marylebone in 15 minutes – 2.50pm – and Lisa Ronson will be re-united with her tasks and meeting notes.

—————–
Friday 6 June 2008 pm
Lisa Ronson called and said ‘thank you’ which I appreciated.
—————–

Of course, the most interesting thing about Gerald Ronson is how he got to be so rich.

This from the Management Today column, ‘How he made his pile’:

How did he make his millions? Leaving school at 15 to join the family furniture business, Ronson began exploring other markets, introducing the self-service petrol station to the UK in the ’60s. By the ’80s, Heron, built on property and petrol, was one of the UK’s largest private companies. Work started this year on Heron Tower, 37 floors of as-yet un-let office space in the City.

The secret of his success? Perseverance. When Heron collapsed in 1995, Ronson refinanced it with the help of some of the world’s wealthiest people. He is said to treasure Calvin Coolidge’s words:
‘Persistence and domination alone are omnipotent’.

More on Gerald Ronson:

• Gerald Ronson and others attacked by Paul Foot (The Socialist Worker Review 1990)
• Gerald Ronson profile (Independent 2000)
• Gerald Ronson profile (Independent 2003)
• Gerald Ronson profile (Building Magazine 2007)
• Fluffy Gerald Ronson profile by Alex Brummer (The Daily Mail 2008)
• Gerald Ronson’s other daughter – Benita Refson, founder of the children’s charity theplace2be.org.uk
• Lisa Ronson profile in The JC, 2010

 

Gerald’s youngest, Hayley Ronson tells the Daily Mail about her experience of stammering and her involvement with the Michael Palin Centre for stammering.

Other famous Ronsons:

• DJ, Mark Ronson
• DJ, Samantha Ronson

Lucie Ceccaldi, mother of Michel Houellebecq

The reptilian left eye… I’m on your side, Michel!

From Liberation:

Dans son ouvrage, Lucie Ceccaldi reconnaît avoir délaissé son fils, qui a été élevé par sa grand-mère paternelle. «La grand-mère Houellebecq était du genre prolétaire haineux», indique la dame de 83 ans.

and

Jusqu’à présent, Michel Houellebecq n’a pas souhaité s’exprimer sur le livre de sa mère.

Hmmm, I think old Lucie has a pretty thick hide, she might well need it.

She certainly doesn’t mince her words:

Mon fils qu’il aille se faire foutre par qui il veut avec qui il veut, j’en ai rien à cirer. Mais si, par malheur, il remet mon nom sur un truc, il va se prendre un coup de canne dans la tronche, ça lui coupera toutes les dents, ça, c’est sûr!

For tronche, think bonce.

and this – an enterprising Guardian journo gets Houellebecq psychoanalysed:

The emotions laid bare in this public spat between Michel Houellebecq and his mother are surprisingly common, if somewhat unfashionably Freudian. “Much is made of the Oedipus complex, and the triadic relationship between mother, father and son,” says Dr Avi Shmueli, a psychoanalyst with the Anna Freud Centre in London. “But it is more accurate to say that each of us is born with an immature sexual identity and aggressive impulses, and these are played out with the primary care giver, usually the mother.”

A boy may explore his sexuality with his mother in his early years, discovering his own body and hers, as well as the differences between them. But eventually he has to come to terms with the fact that her body isn’t exclusively his, and that he’s in competition with others for her attention. “Usually this competition is with the father,” says psychotherapist Brett Kahr. In some cases the mother bonds with her son to the exclusion of his father, a situation that can create rivalry and sexual jealousy between father and son as well as an inability to form sexual relationships later in life, but in Houellebecq’s case, “to be a little boy, and to know that your mother has gone off to be a sexual libertarian, is to feel constantly replaced by each new sexual arrival, constantly pushed down the pecking order”.

This sense of displacement, combined with the abandonment of being left to be cared for by others, can have deep-seated psychological effects. “The adult son may feel rage, hatred and even sexual undesirability,” says Kahr. “He senses he is somehow not of sufficient interest to his mother, and rejects her lifestyle and her choices.”

For Ceccaldi, the emotional fallout will be equally complex. “Some of us find it incredibly hard to be parents, but live with a deep regret for having left our child,” says Kahr. This can turn to resentment and even anger towards the child.

“Hatred is a very instinctive emotion,” says Shmueli. “As every mother knows, a screaming baby can drive you mad, and at times you want to murder it. That doesn’t mean you’ll actually do it, or that there aren’t other aspects of you that love it, but in that moment there’s a need for self-preservation. A mother’s occasional hatred for her child preserves her sense of self and the choices she has made.”

Houellebecq’s anger may also be a form of self-preservation. “But it maintains a relationship as well,” says Shmueli. “It makes him feel closer to her. Hatred is easier to deal with than that more profound sense of loss that comes with bereavement, for example. Hating someone does not imply that you’ll never have a positive relationship with them. What it suggests is that this is a passionate relationship with extremes of emotion, both negative and positive, and there is work to be done.”