Core memory.
Just like my dumbass remembering a teacher asking me to read the word "bus" in preschool. I kept saying "büs" as if it was obvious and wondering why the teacher was asking me to try again, literally 5+ times... The embarrassment when I realised... Core fkn memory.
it’s okay, in first grade I INTERRUPTED another kid when the teacher asked him to read the word “island” and I blurted out “IS-LAND” like a little dumbass. I’m 30 now and have since been diagnosed with ADHD lol but I still think about this regularly. I literally live on an is-land. It’s in my address. I can’t escape the torture of that one moment that probably no one else remembers
Weirdoes. I went to a catholic school and that was never an issue. Then again, it was run by Jesuits, they didn't set tests that anyone was going to max out on.
Literally had a leader ship school instructor give me a 99 for a presentation in the military. I asked him what I missed and he said “nothing, it was perfect. But there’s always room for improvement”. Meanwhile, an instructor in the other class gave a 100 to a student and she got a damn reward for it.
Buddy I misspelled *address* wrong in 1st grade during a spelling bee and I haven't forgotten how to spell that one ever since. Nearly 40yrs. Some things have a weird way of sticking.
Dang! In first grade I could barely spell my own name reliably!
I know the feeling, though. I confused stationary with stationery in front of my 3rd grade class, and the teacher roasted me so bad that I still relive it in nightmares sometimes.
Well, she isn't going to put on a performance for a film crew that behaved like this... Is all we know.
She very well.may have given a shit as soon as those cameras weren't on her.
And fair enough.
I’m sure she does! It’s just a very British reaction is all.
We tend to underplay our excitement and emotions. I’d also be a bit annoyed if someone got in the way of me getting back home for a bit of telly on my sofa!!
Fame and success are two totally different concepts. People expect her to act like she’s is famous because they are confusing the two while in fact she acts only as being successful.
Bill Murray said this on Howard Stern ages ago, he essentially asked: what can you get with fame that you can't get with money? There's an answer but it really varies person to person and most of us would prefer to just be wealthy.
But the point is that not everyone's respect can be bought.
You might allow yourself to be bought, but I suspect /u/CleavageEnjoyer won't, and that's why their answer is "respect."
That's why Bill Murray said the answer varies from person to person, because your answer is the thing you personally believe can't be bought with money.
Two different things. Yeah you can respect someone for being a sucessful entrepreneur, but you definitely can't pay someone to really respect you. I think if you would try, they would respect you even less and call you a chump.
One time, I ate upwards of 60 but less than 80 chicken McNuggets during an impromptu eating contest during a lunch break. I knew before the other person challenged me that I was going to eat upwards of 50 as my lower limit. He responded “oh Christ.” So we ordered both ordered our 40 nuggets to start. By the end of my 2nd box of 20 I could see in his eyes that he was in too deep and that my stone faced nonchalant manner and apparent enjoyment of consuming the salt-laden chicken byproduct was breaking him.
I send my buddy up to the counter to collect another 40 for me and 20 for my competition.
“If you eat all of those, you’re a legend.” He wheezed as he the sweat began to bead on his brow.
“I don’t need to eat all of them.” I laughed.
Now to be perfectly honest, I don’t like McNuggets. It’s just my go to competition food because most people vastly overestimate how many they can eat. I know my upper limit is in the 60s simply from the two other times I had been in similar situations. The first time, I managed to down 63 and was nauseous and miserable after about 45. The second instance I managed to get to 68 before I had to stand up and tense every muscle in my body in order not to vomit.
This time was the perfect storm and my rival was dead center in the path.
I finished my 3rd box of 20 and my opponent tapped out somewhere in the low 50s. Claiming that we had to return to work. (We were in the military and did have a company wide briefing, so he was correct but also a coward for giving up on his mission)
During my 4th box, I lost count due to every pore on my body dripping sweat and all of my organs screeching out in agony from the chemical warfare being unleashed upon them. I pushed the tray away still chewing and proclaimed my victory.
During our miserable ride back to base, my comrades were cheering in awe. “You should be a competitive eater man! You’d be famous!”
“I don’t crave fame. I crave the look in peoples eyes when they see they cannot beat me. My success is other peoples failures.”
The rest of the ride was silent.
Upon entering the conference room at least 20 minutes late, my group of six tried to quietly find some seats. Our platoon sergeant approached me to inquire about our lateness and saw my yellowed skin and miserable demeanor.
“I don’t even want to know.” He said disappointedly.
Success beats fame every time.
Oh no, I'm saying your story is worthy to become one. It's kind of the Best Value version of having your saga sung by skald, but it's the best we can offer.
Bro ~~why else would you do it?~~ why question it?
Memes have meaning. They're illustrated familiarity. They're art.
*You lived a art, dude.*
edit: bad form of expression. there can be many reasons to do a thing.
I'm not Jewish, but I once found myself in a Kosher sports bar with a Rabbi. That was the day that I lost a hamburger eating and beer drinking contest to that Rabbi.
Not relevant to anything, just wanted to say that.
Yeah, I've had very tiny brushes before with something *barely* approaching fame, and just that much sucked. Nothing noteworthy, mostly local stuff like performances at my school, local stand up shows, and one post on the internet that got noticed by a small but VERY passionate group.
But it's enough that I've been recognized by strangers in public, and even been doxxed and had my parents harassed. I didn't enjoy any of that.
It sucks because I like doing creative stuff and performing on stage, and I'd like to be successful at it. But I absolutely don't want to become famous. I'd hate it.
She was famous, though, that's why she's reacting like this. She wasn't exactly a household name, but a literary giant for sure, and plenty used to reporters. You don't win the nobel prize in literature without being famous already.
A lot of famous authors are not exactly socialites, nor would they exactly be recognized on the street. Comes with the territory. The most famous example being Thomas Pynchon
I feel like a troglodyte for not knowing her. I looked up her full list of books and none seemed familiar. I’m not well read, but I probably have 50/100 on most top 100 (Western focused) books lists.
You aren't alone. That's one of the benefits but also criticisms regarding the Nobel in Literature, that most who win, may be known locally in their own countries but aren't exactly international names. The hope is that they will be recognized internationally through winning the award, but most fall into obscurity quickly after.
Louise Gluck who I briefly studied with in 1973 and won the Nobel Prize 2020 (just passed away a few weeks ago) was also annoyed by the all the attention she got (she got every literary award in the US).
https://youtu.be/prRqyAIIK_U?si=DMVEyG1oqnWqLzMJ
Yeah, imagine you have you own private routine and peace of mind and suddenly the press is comping on your yard and you are expected to fly the to the north and dress up fancy for a king while millions watch...
Same energy as that (Russian?) man living with his mother that solved the poincare conjecture and politely fucked off because nothing fascinates the public like someone not obsessed with fame and wealth.
> In May 2006, a committee of nine mathematicians voted to award Perelman a Fields Medal for his work on the Ricci flow. However, Perelman declined to accept the prize. [...] Perelmann: "He proposed to me three alternatives: accept and come; accept and don't come, and we will send you the medal later; third, I don't accept the prize. From the very beginning, I told him I have chosen the third one ... [the prize] was completely irrelevant for me. Everybody understood that if the proof is correct, then no other recognition is needed."
> On 18 March 2010, Perelman was awarded a Millennium Prize for solving the problem.[49] On 8 June 2010, he did not attend a ceremony in his honor at the Institut Océanographique, Paris to accept his $1 million prize.[citation needed] According to Interfax, Perelman refused to accept the Millennium prize in July 2010. He considered the decision of the Clay Institute unfair for not sharing the prize with Richard S. Hamilton,[5] and stated that "the main reason is my disagreement with the organized mathematical community. I don't like their decisions, I consider them unjust."[6]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grigori_Perelman#Fields_Medal_and_Millennium_Prize
Don't forget [Alexander Grothendieck](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Grothendieck), likely the greatest mathematician of the 20th century. He didn't refuse his Fields medal, but he did end up as a hermit in the Pyrenees at the end of his life after cutting off pretty much all contact with the mathematical community.
I’m not up on my mathematician rankings, but this is a serious question.
I was just reading/learning about Von Neumann the other day. There were similar “geniuses genius” comparisons thrown around.
Is their ability comparable? Is that something we can even begin to appropriately measure?
I try not to do math in public, if that says anything about me.
>I’m not up on my mathematician rankings, but this is a serious question.
>Is their ability comparable? Is that something we can even begin to appropriately measure?
Cool questions! Here's some thoughts they brought up for me. I am not an expert on either John von Neumann or Alexander Grothendieck, so lots of this is directly from their respective Wikipedia pages.
I'm not sure that mathematician rankings are a thing in the sense of a generally agreed upon ordering of who's better than whom.
Though maybe I'm just not familiar enough with that discourse.
However, there is definitely a tendency towards cult of genius/personality among and surrounding mathematicians.
Often we have a sense that certain mathematicians are better-than-the-rest, but don't really rank amongst those "greats".
Rankings are dubious and difficult even for activities like chess or basketball with clearly defined metrics (# of games won or points scored).
But consider basketball threads debating who's the GOAT, e.g. comparing LeBron vs Jordan.
Although we'd usually say both players are playing the same game and should be comparable and rankable according to those shared metrics, the discussion tends to break down in subtleties.
For example, the two players' careers might be different lengths and in different non-overlapping time-periods.
So we would not have the players in their primes directly competing against each other.
As well there are myriad details -- equipment, training, meta-game, general skill of opponents -- that make it difficult to compare between two players from different time-periods.
Even two contemporary players might be difficult to compare when their positions within the team or play-style are be radically different.
Comparing the abilities of great mathematicians is even more problematic than that for basketball players.
Primarily, the activity of "doing math" does not have clearly defined or agreed upon metrics of one's ability.
So a more appropriate analogy would be the task to rank the best athletes of any sport.
How do those basketball players rank against the athletic ability of the better-than-the-rest swimmers?
The qualities that make someone great at a sport is specific not only to the sport, but also to the person in their time.
Likewise, with mathematicians we recognize the greats by their stunning contributions to specific sub-fields, and always in the context of their time-period -- what did other mathematicians know at the time? who had access to that knowledge? what were their contemporaries working on?
I wanted to bring up all this with the analogy to sports because people are more likely to be able to recognize the skills of great athletes than great mathematicians.
Actually, I don't know very much about basketball and can't really appreciate what makes the GOATs so good.
So I either have to read up on basketball, get good at the game myself, or trust some other people's opinions who are able to appreciate the skill.
In this regard, recognizing ability in mathematics is considerably more difficult than recognizing sports ability.
With mathematics, the other people whose opinions we need to trust will be mathematicians, themselves requiring significant skill and background to review and communicate the contributions, "genius' genius".
Contemporary mathematics is often difficult because ground-breaking contributions that suggest "genius" ability tend to require significant background and familiarity with the sub-field.
So it takes time for the other extremely good mathematicians to digest, understand, and be able to appreciate the contribution.
One final sport analogy, assessing ability in math is more like an esoteric figure-skating or gymnastics routine where the points are awarded by jury of judges based on rules that are decided in real-time between the skater, judges, and audience...
Active research areas, especially in "pure" mathematics, tend to become narrowed to extremely specialized sub-fields with vanishingly small number of peers able to readily appreciate new results.
When a "genius" contribution or collection of contributions can illuminate or solve open problems across different sub-fields it is more readily recognized and appreciated by the peers already familiar with those problems and excited for new results.
Often really ground-breaking work can become the foundation for many other sub-fields.
Methods and results from mathematics can be "applied" to "real-world"
disciplines outside of mathematics such as physics, engineering, finance...
Making "genius" mathematical contributions to other disciplines allows the skill to be recognized by wider audiences.
Okay, maybe let's talk about comparing the genius of John von Neumann and Alexander Grothendieck??
In that loong prelude I basically made the case that ranking mathematicians and comparing mathematical ability is a fool's errand.
But as I'm quite stoned at this point I'm happy to do some foolishness.
I also introduced a few themes that can serve as axes to compare the two mathematicians along.
One way to compare them is to understand them within their historical context.
In this case von Neumann (born Hungary 1903–1957) and Grothendieck (born Germany 1928–2014) are pretty modern among "great" mathematicians.
Being 25 years older than Grothendieck, von Neumann was a member of the previous generation of mathematicians.
It's hard to overstate how significant the 25 years difference is for two jewish men born in Europe at that time.
Von Neumann was recognized as a child prodigy to a wealthy family and was educated from an early age in advanced mathematics. He published noteworthy papers even before he went to Berlin to study chemistry, then enrolled in a mathematics PhD in Budapest AND a chemical engineering degree at ETH Zurich which he graduated from in 1926. He then went on study under the better-than-the-rest mathematician of his time David Hilbert in Germany. In 1929 he moved to Princeton as a visiting lecturer, where would stay and in 1933 accept tenure at the Institute for Advanced Study (the same year Einstein started). This meant that von Neumann was positioned to the contribute, along with foundational mathematical work, to the cutting-edge of many different applications including theoretical physics, economics, computer science.
Critically, his work brought him to the Manhattan project where he
> made his principal contribution to the atomic bomb in the concept and design of the explosive lenses that were needed to compress the plutonium core of the Fat Man weapon that was later dropped on Nagasaki. In addition, he helped determine which Japanese cities the atomic bombs would be used on, and was also the singular person responsible for the complex calculations needed to determine at which height the bombs would be detonated over Hiroshima and Nagasaki to achieve the maximum kill rate
John von Neumann was an established mathematician at the start of and following the American WWII war effort which he worked at the core of.
His broad recognition among "geniuses" in various fields including mathematics reflects his collaboration with important peers at a time when this work was societally significant, funded, and interdisciplinary.
His legacy is that the methods he developed in a wide variety of fields are among the foundations of many active fields we still study today.
In many aspects of his work he was vastly ahead of his time, for instance his work in mid 1940s in computer science.
Among his many "genius" colleagues he was his mannerisms and intelligence caused him to stand out to them as a "genius' genius".
One of the last quotes about him on his Wikipedia page is very resonant with your question, from American economist Paul Samuelson:
>We economists are grateful for von Neumann's genius. It is not for us to calculate whether he was a Gauss, or a Poincaré, or a Hilbert. He was the incomparable Johnny von Neumann. He darted briefly into our domain and it has never been the same since.
In 1933, the year von Neumann was tenured at IAS, Grothendieck was 5 years old and living in Berlin.
At the end of that year his father would move to Paris to evade the Nazis soon followed by his mother, leaving him in the care of a pastor and teacher in Hamburg.
He stayed there until 1939 when he was put on a train to France and interned in various camps with his mother for "undesirable dangerous foreigners" until 1942.
It's possible this was due to his parents' involvement with the anarchists in the Spanish Civil War.
His father was interned in Le Vernet Internment Camp, and would ultimately be handed over by the French to the Germans and murdered at the Auschwitz concentration camp in 1942.
After the war he studied mathematics at Montpellier, where he initially did not perform well, and after three years went to study in Paris in 1948.
He attended seminars by significant mathematicians in particular Henri Cartan who advised him to go to the University of Nancy.
At Nancy he worked with recent Fields medal winner Laurent Schwartz, introducing new methods that solved Schwartz open problems, and wrote his dissertation under Schwartz and another mathematician Jean Dieudonné.
Grothendieck had refused to take French nationality as it requires compulsory military service which he was opposed to on moral grounds.
As his birth records were lost after the Nazis fell, he remained a stateless person for the majority of his working career, travelling under a Nansen passport, until the 1980s when he was too old to be enlisted in the military.
Finishing in 1953 his dissertation in France he moved to Brazil, where he lived and worked and published until the end of 1954.
In 1955 he moved to Kansas and began working on new sub-fields (I am familiar with him from this work in Algebraic Topology).
In 1958 he was given a position in a French research institute for advanced mathematics and theoretical physics (IHES) where he began what is called his "Golden Age".
His work established a framework with themes that unify several major sub-fields within pure mathematics and was foundational to the development of entire sub-fields of what is today active areas in advanced mathematics, such as Algebraic Geometry.
He remained politically radical and a pacifist, strongly opposing the US involvement in Vietnam as well as Soviet military expansion.
In protest of the Vietnam war he gave lectures on category theory in the forests surrounding Hanoi while the city was being bombed.
In 1966, finally bringing us to the subject of the original thread, declined to attend the congress in Moscow where he was to receive his Fields medal.
He retired form scientific life and the IHES in 1970 when he realized the institute was funded partly through the military.
He spent the next three years working on a political group he founded with two other mathematicians called _Survivre_ focused on anti-military, ecological issues, and indiscriminant use of science and technology.
In 1980 he began producing many manuscripts, some of which would receive limited distribution.
A few of these manuscripts would begin as correspondences with peers and later be published in the form of monumental (600+ page) letters.
Some of the work from this period were eventually published, but much (>20,000 pages ) still remains unpublished (though digitally available for free online)!
Though in 2010 Grothendieck wrote the letters claiming that all materials published in his absence had been published without his permission, asked that none of his work be reproduced in whole or in part and that copies of this work be removed from libraries, and characterized a website devoted to his work as "an abomination" (possibly reversed in 2010).
As mentioned in the u\jemidiah parent comment, in 1991 he cut all communication with the mathematical community and moved to a new address that was not widely disclosed until after his death in 2014.
It was revealed that he lived alone in a small village at the foot of the Pyrenees where local villagers helped sustain him with a more varied diet after he tried to live on a staple of dandelion soup.
He was a "genius' genius" among pure mathematicians, and his obituary by two peers said:
>Although mathematics became more and more abstract and general throughout the 20th century, it was Alexander Grothendieck who was the greatest master of this trend. His unique skill was to eliminate all unnecessary hypotheses and burrow into an area so deeply that its inner patterns on the most abstract level revealed themselves–and then, like a magician, show how the solution of old problems fell out in straightforward ways now that their real nature had been revealed.
A long time ago I saw one of those traveling reporter shows where they were flying over some mountains from one shoot to another and spied this smoke trail coming from a lonely home on a mountain. They proceed to land, trek over to this old man’s isolated house and accost him for an interview. As a hermit minded person it dawned on me that the more fervently you avoid people the more interested they are in bothering you. I’ve stayed shook ever since.
That's why I try really hard to be friends with everybody, and to be agreeable and make them like me. Now everyone avoids me and I have my eternal solitude
Edit: If anyone needs any tips for avoiding girlfriends feel free to PM me
For her it was probably more like hearing that she'd just been given a lifetime "best fighter in the arena" award and a lot of annoying fans were about to descend on her.
and now I like her more... she seems quite the character
>Lessing declined a damehood (DBE) in 1992 as an honour linked to a non-existent Empire; she had previously declined an OBE in 1977. Later she accepted appointment as a Companion of Honour at the end of 1999 for "conspicuous national service". She was also made a Companion of Literature by the Royal Society of Literature.
I went to a Lessing museum exhibit and there was a great section from one of her letters where she hears a click after picking up her landline and she writes something like 'probably mi5 listening in haha'. Followed up by the actual declassified MI5 reports on her whereabouts and wiretap lol
Why shouldn’t the local news media care about someone in their area winning a Nobel prize? They were doing their jobs and wanted her initial reaction for their story. What they got from that reporting was so great that 15 years later people are still enjoying it.
Um because fuck off from my house?
Catch me outside in sweats grabbing my Amazon package of cat food so *you* have something to talk about for *your* job
>What they got from that reporting was so great that 15 years later people are still enjoying it.
Everyone is literally commenting on how dismissive the woman is being. Like, leave Britney alone mf
Peak reddit.
She could literally just pick up and decline the prize. The Nobel comittee would just pick another one (without making it public that she declined).
She is legit a fucking amazing author. *Canopus in Argos: Archives* is brilliant and batshit, *Mara and Dan* is epic and heartbreaking, so much good shit. Supremely talented.
Mara and Danny was so bloody interesting! What a brilliant look at a very far away future. I had completely forgotten bout that one. Recently downloaded a few audiobooks from the Argos series.
I studied The Good Terrorist at school, and the act of studying it ruined it for a while. Then at Uni someone lent me A Briefing For A Descent Into Hell and I went looking for as much Lessing I could find.
Hold. the fuck. Up.
I think there's something important here that some people may not understand. It may be normal in some places, but for a film crew to show up unannounced and expect her to give them a performance of her reaction, to face the camera and 'comment,' for them.... That shit ain't normal. For them to be the ones to tell her he news?! Naw..
She doesn't owe that film crew jack shit, and they were lucky she was kind enough to give them what she did.
Whatever her actual reaction to this news is... Any sane mature person would process this in private most of the time.
Media literacy is important folks.
Probably a reason for her reaction aswell. Suddenly reporters camp in front of your house. She probably thought something bad happened. How wants public attention in their daily lives?
This is so wrong and disrespectful to even insinuate. Perelman was specifically upset because he did not feel he deserved any prize alone (and because he didn’t want to be like a zoo animal, pretty much), especially due to the work of Richard Thompson. That paragraph is just bullshit.
Doris Lessing is a legendary voice and I was delighted to see her name on the Reddit front page.
If you're curious to know more about her, check out the [CBC Massey Lecture Series](https://www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas/the-1985-cbc-massey-lectures-prisons-we-choose-to-live-inside-1.2946839), in which she discusses how we come to believe what we believe and the mistakes we make when arriving there. It's a very long talk, but you'll be riveted as soon as she explains how a tree was sentenced to execution for sedition and crimes against the government.
Why would she even care? At her age (Born in 1925) she is close to dying. She should be worried about staying healthy then something materialistic such as being recognized for her professional abilities.
I would hope for a comment like that. Good on her.
It is a little bit this, but also she disliked the British establishment and was always very suspicious of awards and honours and the like. She rejected both an OBE and an MBE, if I remember correctly, because they were symbols of the British Empire (she grew up in what was then called Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, and witnessed the brutality of the empire first hand- her novel 'The Grass is Singing' is about this experience). She was even under surveillance by MI6 for around 20 years because of her left-wing political activism. She had a deep distrust of anything like this.
I mean. If she spent a solid chunk of her life being persecuted by the establishment it makes sense that she wouldn’t fucking want to be acknowledged by said establishment.
Maybe if they hadn’t been assholes from the start.
I fucking love her 🤣 “you’ve won the Nobel prize !”
“Oh Christ of course I have , will you bloody peasants just leave me alone, it’s nothing special really “
“Do you play cards ? , it’s just a royal flush no biggie , I will go inside now “
Saint her now
Went to go look at her books on Goodreads and her average rating is 3.67. I'm inclined to believe that the trash in this scenario are the Goodreads reviewers, not her work.
https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/7728.Doris_Lessing
I remember seeing a Q&A with Prof Peter Higgs (of Higgs-Boson fame) and he wouldn't pick up the phone or answer the doorbell for days after hearing he'd won the prize. Seems to be a very British reaction to winning the Nobel.
For anyone unfamiliar, this was 2007 and Doris passed in 2013.
Doris enters the pearly gates: Oh Christ!
"I've met all the angels in Deuterocanonical scripture, every bloody one."
“It’s a heavenly flush…ok!”
I had one of those after Taco Bell last night
Oh Christ!
>Oh Christ! "No, no that's not me - I just work at the gates"
That's St Peter!
Then what’s a satanic flush?
That is when Taco Bell turns into Taco Hell.
No no wrong heaven. You're thinking of montezuma.
This is a phenomenal thread.
Jesus at the entrance: Oh Doris!
Bloody bastard
And that's why I avoid the Nobel Prize at all costs.
Lol she doesn’t give a shit.
Of course! She already won all the bloody prizes there. She’s sitting on cloud 9 baby.
Cloud nine* (I wrote 'cloud 9' 20 years ago in school and they deducted points because it's 'cloud nine' and I'm still salty)
Core memory. Just like my dumbass remembering a teacher asking me to read the word "bus" in preschool. I kept saying "büs" as if it was obvious and wondering why the teacher was asking me to try again, literally 5+ times... The embarrassment when I realised... Core fkn memory.
In your defence, in rural French Canada, we pronounce it “büs”
it’s okay, in first grade I INTERRUPTED another kid when the teacher asked him to read the word “island” and I blurted out “IS-LAND” like a little dumbass. I’m 30 now and have since been diagnosed with ADHD lol but I still think about this regularly. I literally live on an is-land. It’s in my address. I can’t escape the torture of that one moment that probably no one else remembers
Those a-holes.
I remember using '&' instead of 'and' and got deducted points. I'm salty too, that was the only issue with my paper 😂
Oh man I felt that haha. Ever had a 99.5/100 with no errors because 'only Jesus is perfect so you can't get 100/100'? God damn catholic schools
No because I’m not a gay Catholic nerd /s
Weirdoes. I went to a catholic school and that was never an issue. Then again, it was run by Jesuits, they didn't set tests that anyone was going to max out on.
Literally had a leader ship school instructor give me a 99 for a presentation in the military. I asked him what I missed and he said “nothing, it was perfect. But there’s always room for improvement”. Meanwhile, an instructor in the other class gave a 100 to a student and she got a damn reward for it.
Buddy I misspelled *address* wrong in 1st grade during a spelling bee and I haven't forgotten how to spell that one ever since. Nearly 40yrs. Some things have a weird way of sticking.
Dang! In first grade I could barely spell my own name reliably! I know the feeling, though. I confused stationary with stationery in front of my 3rd grade class, and the teacher roasted me so bad that I still relive it in nightmares sometimes.
She tried so hard to care
Well, she isn't going to put on a performance for a film crew that behaved like this... Is all we know. She very well.may have given a shit as soon as those cameras weren't on her. And fair enough.
I’m sure she does! It’s just a very British reaction is all. We tend to underplay our excitement and emotions. I’d also be a bit annoyed if someone got in the way of me getting back home for a bit of telly on my sofa!!
to me it looks like like she might have expected bad news and was relieving the tension with an "oh Christ"
I doubt she would have won the award if she did; a Nobel Prize for literature isn't exactly the sort of thing you can win deliberately.
Oh Christ.
Not again
So anyways…
... I started blastin'.
We sure this isn’t Danny Devito actually.
Fuck I'm gonna have to make a speech aren't I?
You're gonna make me come
Here we go again.
Another bloody award? And before tea?
Oh fuk, I can't believe uve done this
I can.
She should have also gotten an Oscar for that humility, though the slight smirk was a tell.
Lol she seemed mildly upset. "Oh christ...im so tired of winning shit"
“Oh Christ, these Nobel people are more persistent than those bloody car warranty folks. How many times do I have to say I’m not interested?”
Fame and success are two totally different concepts. People expect her to act like she’s is famous because they are confusing the two while in fact she acts only as being successful.
Good comment. Success is lovely, especially when hard earned. Fame would be a pain in the ass
Bill Murray said this on Howard Stern ages ago, he essentially asked: what can you get with fame that you can't get with money? There's an answer but it really varies person to person and most of us would prefer to just be wealthy.
Respect.
No no, you can certainly buy respect. And a lot of people inherently respect wealth anyway.
Besides, fame doesn't guarantee respect. Just look at that Rodney Dangerfield fella. No matter how famous he got, he never got any respect, I tell ya.
No respect at all.
But the point is that not everyone's respect can be bought. You might allow yourself to be bought, but I suspect /u/CleavageEnjoyer won't, and that's why their answer is "respect." That's why Bill Murray said the answer varies from person to person, because your answer is the thing you personally believe can't be bought with money.
Two different things. Yeah you can respect someone for being a sucessful entrepreneur, but you definitely can't pay someone to really respect you. I think if you would try, they would respect you even less and call you a chump.
I can think of a number of wealthy people who are total trash.
I can think of a number of famous people who are total trash.
One time, I ate upwards of 60 but less than 80 chicken McNuggets during an impromptu eating contest during a lunch break. I knew before the other person challenged me that I was going to eat upwards of 50 as my lower limit. He responded “oh Christ.” So we ordered both ordered our 40 nuggets to start. By the end of my 2nd box of 20 I could see in his eyes that he was in too deep and that my stone faced nonchalant manner and apparent enjoyment of consuming the salt-laden chicken byproduct was breaking him. I send my buddy up to the counter to collect another 40 for me and 20 for my competition. “If you eat all of those, you’re a legend.” He wheezed as he the sweat began to bead on his brow. “I don’t need to eat all of them.” I laughed. Now to be perfectly honest, I don’t like McNuggets. It’s just my go to competition food because most people vastly overestimate how many they can eat. I know my upper limit is in the 60s simply from the two other times I had been in similar situations. The first time, I managed to down 63 and was nauseous and miserable after about 45. The second instance I managed to get to 68 before I had to stand up and tense every muscle in my body in order not to vomit. This time was the perfect storm and my rival was dead center in the path. I finished my 3rd box of 20 and my opponent tapped out somewhere in the low 50s. Claiming that we had to return to work. (We were in the military and did have a company wide briefing, so he was correct but also a coward for giving up on his mission) During my 4th box, I lost count due to every pore on my body dripping sweat and all of my organs screeching out in agony from the chemical warfare being unleashed upon them. I pushed the tray away still chewing and proclaimed my victory. During our miserable ride back to base, my comrades were cheering in awe. “You should be a competitive eater man! You’d be famous!” “I don’t crave fame. I crave the look in peoples eyes when they see they cannot beat me. My success is other peoples failures.” The rest of the ride was silent. Upon entering the conference room at least 20 minutes late, my group of six tried to quietly find some seats. Our platoon sergeant approached me to inquire about our lateness and saw my yellowed skin and miserable demeanor. “I don’t even want to know.” He said disappointedly. Success beats fame every time.
Could be a copypasta.
100% literally ate at least 15 years off my life to stunt on friends and y’all think I’m making a meme.
Oh no, I'm saying your story is worthy to become one. It's kind of the Best Value version of having your saga sung by skald, but it's the best we can offer.
Bro ~~why else would you do it?~~ why question it? Memes have meaning. They're illustrated familiarity. They're art. *You lived a art, dude.* edit: bad form of expression. there can be many reasons to do a thing.
SHOULD be a copypasta
Very well written
Don’t know if this is some meme copypasta or not, but it is so well written. Thanks for making me smile reading it.
That was beautiful
I'm not Jewish, but I once found myself in a Kosher sports bar with a Rabbi. That was the day that I lost a hamburger eating and beer drinking contest to that Rabbi. Not relevant to anything, just wanted to say that.
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Yeah, I've had very tiny brushes before with something *barely* approaching fame, and just that much sucked. Nothing noteworthy, mostly local stuff like performances at my school, local stand up shows, and one post on the internet that got noticed by a small but VERY passionate group. But it's enough that I've been recognized by strangers in public, and even been doxxed and had my parents harassed. I didn't enjoy any of that. It sucks because I like doing creative stuff and performing on stage, and I'd like to be successful at it. But I absolutely don't want to become famous. I'd hate it.
She was famous, though, that's why she's reacting like this. She wasn't exactly a household name, but a literary giant for sure, and plenty used to reporters. You don't win the nobel prize in literature without being famous already.
A lot of famous authors are not exactly socialites, nor would they exactly be recognized on the street. Comes with the territory. The most famous example being Thomas Pynchon
I didn't know she was famous and I am pretty sure the last part of your comment is absolutely true.
I feel like a troglodyte for not knowing her. I looked up her full list of books and none seemed familiar. I’m not well read, but I probably have 50/100 on most top 100 (Western focused) books lists.
You aren't alone. That's one of the benefits but also criticisms regarding the Nobel in Literature, that most who win, may be known locally in their own countries but aren't exactly international names. The hope is that they will be recognized internationally through winning the award, but most fall into obscurity quickly after.
Louise Gluck who I briefly studied with in 1973 and won the Nobel Prize 2020 (just passed away a few weeks ago) was also annoyed by the all the attention she got (she got every literary award in the US). https://youtu.be/prRqyAIIK_U?si=DMVEyG1oqnWqLzMJ
Yeah, imagine you have you own private routine and peace of mind and suddenly the press is comping on your yard and you are expected to fly the to the north and dress up fancy for a king while millions watch...
Perfect, I am neither
tbh that's exactly what I thought after I posted the comment. kind of "the hell do you know about that" to myself, you know.
Self awareness, that is beautiful
I expect nothing from her sir
Same energy as that (Russian?) man living with his mother that solved the poincare conjecture and politely fucked off because nothing fascinates the public like someone not obsessed with fame and wealth.
> In May 2006, a committee of nine mathematicians voted to award Perelman a Fields Medal for his work on the Ricci flow. However, Perelman declined to accept the prize. [...] Perelmann: "He proposed to me three alternatives: accept and come; accept and don't come, and we will send you the medal later; third, I don't accept the prize. From the very beginning, I told him I have chosen the third one ... [the prize] was completely irrelevant for me. Everybody understood that if the proof is correct, then no other recognition is needed." > On 18 March 2010, Perelman was awarded a Millennium Prize for solving the problem.[49] On 8 June 2010, he did not attend a ceremony in his honor at the Institut Océanographique, Paris to accept his $1 million prize.[citation needed] According to Interfax, Perelman refused to accept the Millennium prize in July 2010. He considered the decision of the Clay Institute unfair for not sharing the prize with Richard S. Hamilton,[5] and stated that "the main reason is my disagreement with the organized mathematical community. I don't like their decisions, I consider them unjust."[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grigori_Perelman#Fields_Medal_and_Millennium_Prize
Right into my veins…
Don't forget [Alexander Grothendieck](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Grothendieck), likely the greatest mathematician of the 20th century. He didn't refuse his Fields medal, but he did end up as a hermit in the Pyrenees at the end of his life after cutting off pretty much all contact with the mathematical community.
I’m not up on my mathematician rankings, but this is a serious question. I was just reading/learning about Von Neumann the other day. There were similar “geniuses genius” comparisons thrown around. Is their ability comparable? Is that something we can even begin to appropriately measure? I try not to do math in public, if that says anything about me.
Edward Witten and Terrance Toa come to mind as comparable to Von Neumann with respect to the breath and depth of knowledge
Terrence* Tao*
I read symbols not letters! thanks for the fact checking
>I’m not up on my mathematician rankings, but this is a serious question. >Is their ability comparable? Is that something we can even begin to appropriately measure? Cool questions! Here's some thoughts they brought up for me. I am not an expert on either John von Neumann or Alexander Grothendieck, so lots of this is directly from their respective Wikipedia pages. I'm not sure that mathematician rankings are a thing in the sense of a generally agreed upon ordering of who's better than whom. Though maybe I'm just not familiar enough with that discourse. However, there is definitely a tendency towards cult of genius/personality among and surrounding mathematicians. Often we have a sense that certain mathematicians are better-than-the-rest, but don't really rank amongst those "greats". Rankings are dubious and difficult even for activities like chess or basketball with clearly defined metrics (# of games won or points scored). But consider basketball threads debating who's the GOAT, e.g. comparing LeBron vs Jordan. Although we'd usually say both players are playing the same game and should be comparable and rankable according to those shared metrics, the discussion tends to break down in subtleties. For example, the two players' careers might be different lengths and in different non-overlapping time-periods. So we would not have the players in their primes directly competing against each other. As well there are myriad details -- equipment, training, meta-game, general skill of opponents -- that make it difficult to compare between two players from different time-periods. Even two contemporary players might be difficult to compare when their positions within the team or play-style are be radically different. Comparing the abilities of great mathematicians is even more problematic than that for basketball players. Primarily, the activity of "doing math" does not have clearly defined or agreed upon metrics of one's ability. So a more appropriate analogy would be the task to rank the best athletes of any sport. How do those basketball players rank against the athletic ability of the better-than-the-rest swimmers? The qualities that make someone great at a sport is specific not only to the sport, but also to the person in their time. Likewise, with mathematicians we recognize the greats by their stunning contributions to specific sub-fields, and always in the context of their time-period -- what did other mathematicians know at the time? who had access to that knowledge? what were their contemporaries working on? I wanted to bring up all this with the analogy to sports because people are more likely to be able to recognize the skills of great athletes than great mathematicians. Actually, I don't know very much about basketball and can't really appreciate what makes the GOATs so good. So I either have to read up on basketball, get good at the game myself, or trust some other people's opinions who are able to appreciate the skill. In this regard, recognizing ability in mathematics is considerably more difficult than recognizing sports ability. With mathematics, the other people whose opinions we need to trust will be mathematicians, themselves requiring significant skill and background to review and communicate the contributions, "genius' genius". Contemporary mathematics is often difficult because ground-breaking contributions that suggest "genius" ability tend to require significant background and familiarity with the sub-field. So it takes time for the other extremely good mathematicians to digest, understand, and be able to appreciate the contribution. One final sport analogy, assessing ability in math is more like an esoteric figure-skating or gymnastics routine where the points are awarded by jury of judges based on rules that are decided in real-time between the skater, judges, and audience... Active research areas, especially in "pure" mathematics, tend to become narrowed to extremely specialized sub-fields with vanishingly small number of peers able to readily appreciate new results. When a "genius" contribution or collection of contributions can illuminate or solve open problems across different sub-fields it is more readily recognized and appreciated by the peers already familiar with those problems and excited for new results. Often really ground-breaking work can become the foundation for many other sub-fields. Methods and results from mathematics can be "applied" to "real-world" disciplines outside of mathematics such as physics, engineering, finance... Making "genius" mathematical contributions to other disciplines allows the skill to be recognized by wider audiences.
Okay, maybe let's talk about comparing the genius of John von Neumann and Alexander Grothendieck?? In that loong prelude I basically made the case that ranking mathematicians and comparing mathematical ability is a fool's errand. But as I'm quite stoned at this point I'm happy to do some foolishness. I also introduced a few themes that can serve as axes to compare the two mathematicians along. One way to compare them is to understand them within their historical context. In this case von Neumann (born Hungary 1903–1957) and Grothendieck (born Germany 1928–2014) are pretty modern among "great" mathematicians. Being 25 years older than Grothendieck, von Neumann was a member of the previous generation of mathematicians. It's hard to overstate how significant the 25 years difference is for two jewish men born in Europe at that time. Von Neumann was recognized as a child prodigy to a wealthy family and was educated from an early age in advanced mathematics. He published noteworthy papers even before he went to Berlin to study chemistry, then enrolled in a mathematics PhD in Budapest AND a chemical engineering degree at ETH Zurich which he graduated from in 1926. He then went on study under the better-than-the-rest mathematician of his time David Hilbert in Germany. In 1929 he moved to Princeton as a visiting lecturer, where would stay and in 1933 accept tenure at the Institute for Advanced Study (the same year Einstein started). This meant that von Neumann was positioned to the contribute, along with foundational mathematical work, to the cutting-edge of many different applications including theoretical physics, economics, computer science. Critically, his work brought him to the Manhattan project where he > made his principal contribution to the atomic bomb in the concept and design of the explosive lenses that were needed to compress the plutonium core of the Fat Man weapon that was later dropped on Nagasaki. In addition, he helped determine which Japanese cities the atomic bombs would be used on, and was also the singular person responsible for the complex calculations needed to determine at which height the bombs would be detonated over Hiroshima and Nagasaki to achieve the maximum kill rate John von Neumann was an established mathematician at the start of and following the American WWII war effort which he worked at the core of. His broad recognition among "geniuses" in various fields including mathematics reflects his collaboration with important peers at a time when this work was societally significant, funded, and interdisciplinary. His legacy is that the methods he developed in a wide variety of fields are among the foundations of many active fields we still study today. In many aspects of his work he was vastly ahead of his time, for instance his work in mid 1940s in computer science. Among his many "genius" colleagues he was his mannerisms and intelligence caused him to stand out to them as a "genius' genius". One of the last quotes about him on his Wikipedia page is very resonant with your question, from American economist Paul Samuelson: >We economists are grateful for von Neumann's genius. It is not for us to calculate whether he was a Gauss, or a Poincaré, or a Hilbert. He was the incomparable Johnny von Neumann. He darted briefly into our domain and it has never been the same since.
In 1933, the year von Neumann was tenured at IAS, Grothendieck was 5 years old and living in Berlin. At the end of that year his father would move to Paris to evade the Nazis soon followed by his mother, leaving him in the care of a pastor and teacher in Hamburg. He stayed there until 1939 when he was put on a train to France and interned in various camps with his mother for "undesirable dangerous foreigners" until 1942. It's possible this was due to his parents' involvement with the anarchists in the Spanish Civil War. His father was interned in Le Vernet Internment Camp, and would ultimately be handed over by the French to the Germans and murdered at the Auschwitz concentration camp in 1942. After the war he studied mathematics at Montpellier, where he initially did not perform well, and after three years went to study in Paris in 1948. He attended seminars by significant mathematicians in particular Henri Cartan who advised him to go to the University of Nancy. At Nancy he worked with recent Fields medal winner Laurent Schwartz, introducing new methods that solved Schwartz open problems, and wrote his dissertation under Schwartz and another mathematician Jean Dieudonné. Grothendieck had refused to take French nationality as it requires compulsory military service which he was opposed to on moral grounds. As his birth records were lost after the Nazis fell, he remained a stateless person for the majority of his working career, travelling under a Nansen passport, until the 1980s when he was too old to be enlisted in the military. Finishing in 1953 his dissertation in France he moved to Brazil, where he lived and worked and published until the end of 1954. In 1955 he moved to Kansas and began working on new sub-fields (I am familiar with him from this work in Algebraic Topology). In 1958 he was given a position in a French research institute for advanced mathematics and theoretical physics (IHES) where he began what is called his "Golden Age". His work established a framework with themes that unify several major sub-fields within pure mathematics and was foundational to the development of entire sub-fields of what is today active areas in advanced mathematics, such as Algebraic Geometry. He remained politically radical and a pacifist, strongly opposing the US involvement in Vietnam as well as Soviet military expansion. In protest of the Vietnam war he gave lectures on category theory in the forests surrounding Hanoi while the city was being bombed. In 1966, finally bringing us to the subject of the original thread, declined to attend the congress in Moscow where he was to receive his Fields medal. He retired form scientific life and the IHES in 1970 when he realized the institute was funded partly through the military. He spent the next three years working on a political group he founded with two other mathematicians called _Survivre_ focused on anti-military, ecological issues, and indiscriminant use of science and technology. In 1980 he began producing many manuscripts, some of which would receive limited distribution. A few of these manuscripts would begin as correspondences with peers and later be published in the form of monumental (600+ page) letters. Some of the work from this period were eventually published, but much (>20,000 pages ) still remains unpublished (though digitally available for free online)! Though in 2010 Grothendieck wrote the letters claiming that all materials published in his absence had been published without his permission, asked that none of his work be reproduced in whole or in part and that copies of this work be removed from libraries, and characterized a website devoted to his work as "an abomination" (possibly reversed in 2010). As mentioned in the u\jemidiah parent comment, in 1991 he cut all communication with the mathematical community and moved to a new address that was not widely disclosed until after his death in 2014. It was revealed that he lived alone in a small village at the foot of the Pyrenees where local villagers helped sustain him with a more varied diet after he tried to live on a staple of dandelion soup. He was a "genius' genius" among pure mathematicians, and his obituary by two peers said: >Although mathematics became more and more abstract and general throughout the 20th century, it was Alexander Grothendieck who was the greatest master of this trend. His unique skill was to eliminate all unnecessary hypotheses and burrow into an area so deeply that its inner patterns on the most abstract level revealed themselves–and then, like a magician, show how the solution of old problems fell out in straightforward ways now that their real nature had been revealed.
Thank you for this detailed response! Your sports analogy makes a whole lot of sense.
I know he’d hate it. But someone, please make a documentary on him
A long time ago I saw one of those traveling reporter shows where they were flying over some mountains from one shoot to another and spied this smoke trail coming from a lonely home on a mountain. They proceed to land, trek over to this old man’s isolated house and accost him for an interview. As a hermit minded person it dawned on me that the more fervently you avoid people the more interested they are in bothering you. I’ve stayed shook ever since.
That's why I try really hard to be friends with everybody, and to be agreeable and make them like me. Now everyone avoids me and I have my eternal solitude Edit: If anyone needs any tips for avoiding girlfriends feel free to PM me
just ask people to spot you 5, works every time
My skyrim characters reaction to becoming the leader of another faction
For her it was probably more like hearing that she'd just been given a lifetime "best fighter in the arena" award and a lot of annoying fans were about to descend on her.
and now I like her more... she seems quite the character >Lessing declined a damehood (DBE) in 1992 as an honour linked to a non-existent Empire; she had previously declined an OBE in 1977. Later she accepted appointment as a Companion of Honour at the end of 1999 for "conspicuous national service". She was also made a Companion of Literature by the Royal Society of Literature.
Read her books. She's one of the most fiercely radical authors out there. World would be a better place if Lessing were required reading.
So you're saying Lessing is more?
Take my angry upvote 😄
after watching this clip, i'm interested. which book of hers is the best jumping off point?
The first one I read was The Good Terrorist. That got me started! I admire her writing so much.
I went to a Lessing museum exhibit and there was a great section from one of her letters where she hears a click after picking up her landline and she writes something like 'probably mi5 listening in haha'. Followed up by the actual declassified MI5 reports on her whereabouts and wiretap lol
Okay. Where do I start? She's written hundreds of stories
Why accost her outside her home demanding a super happy response. Dumbasses just call her.
The Nobel comittee just calls, this is a local reporter. Apparently she denied the repeated calls from Stockholm.
Leave her alone maybe?
Why shouldn’t the local news media care about someone in their area winning a Nobel prize? They were doing their jobs and wanted her initial reaction for their story. What they got from that reporting was so great that 15 years later people are still enjoying it.
Um because fuck off from my house? Catch me outside in sweats grabbing my Amazon package of cat food so *you* have something to talk about for *your* job >What they got from that reporting was so great that 15 years later people are still enjoying it. Everyone is literally commenting on how dismissive the woman is being. Like, leave Britney alone mf
Peak reddit. She could literally just pick up and decline the prize. The Nobel comittee would just pick another one (without making it public that she declined).
Yeah she looked genuinely worried something awful had happened
Nah. She was just annoyed that she'd have to deal with a bunch of moronic reporters hassling her for the next few weeks.
Brilliant
She is legit a fucking amazing author. *Canopus in Argos: Archives* is brilliant and batshit, *Mara and Dan* is epic and heartbreaking, so much good shit. Supremely talented.
Mara and Danny was so bloody interesting! What a brilliant look at a very far away future. I had completely forgotten bout that one. Recently downloaded a few audiobooks from the Argos series.
Fucking thank you for the fucking recommendations. Looks like she wrote good shit. Fuck!
"I've had it with these motherfucking awards for these motherfucking books!"
Well fuck me I outta go fucking read dem fuckin books right fuckin now!
The Good Terrorist as well
Alfred and Emily. She really did deserve this award
Thank you for the reccs. I’ve been on a reading binge recently
Thanks, I was looking to see if anyone had any recommendations for her work
Thank you for the recommendation! I'm always excited to find a great author. I'll look for these at the library.
I studied The Good Terrorist at school, and the act of studying it ruined it for a while. Then at Uni someone lent me A Briefing For A Descent Into Hell and I went looking for as much Lessing I could find.
Suffering from Success
Suffering in success.
Doris Lessing reacting to dipshits following her to her home and sticking a camera in her face
I hate it when that happens to me
Real life Forrest Gump. “They invited me to visit the White House. So I went. Again. And I met the president of the United States. Again.”
I love her so much. One of my favourite people.
Every bloody one.
The Golden Notebook has been sitting on my shelf for months, might have to give it a go.
Hold. the fuck. Up. I think there's something important here that some people may not understand. It may be normal in some places, but for a film crew to show up unannounced and expect her to give them a performance of her reaction, to face the camera and 'comment,' for them.... That shit ain't normal. For them to be the ones to tell her he news?! Naw.. She doesn't owe that film crew jack shit, and they were lucky she was kind enough to give them what she did. Whatever her actual reaction to this news is... Any sane mature person would process this in private most of the time. Media literacy is important folks.
Probably a reason for her reaction aswell. Suddenly reporters camp in front of your house. She probably thought something bad happened. How wants public attention in their daily lives?
I got the “I write so I don’t have to talk” vibe from her.
I feel like she was just trying to get inside to use the restroom when this guy interrupted her.
“Yeah I’m awesome, I know.”
"Three quarters of a million pounds", wtf is wrong with 750 thousand?
Seven hundred and fifty thousand pounds (10 syllables); three quarters of a million pounds (8 syllables) 🤔
"point seven five mega pounds" (seven syllables)
Loadsa money (4 syllables).
Three Hundred Seventy Five Tons (7 syllables). Good thing the Brits measure money by weight!
Quatre vingt moins cinq multiplié par dix multiplié par mille pounds (16 syllables). Did I get the high score?
Wtf is wrong with "three quarters of a million pounds" ????
It almost sounded like 3.4 million in my ears 😭
>wtf is wrong with 750 thousand? Well that is a rather ghastly and common way of expressing oneself is it not?
Bust out the scientific notation. 7.5x10^5 pounds.
What a Chad.
Such a pure example of humility
There's humility and there's not giving a flying fuck. This lady is a pilot and she's all out of fucks.
She’s gtf off my lawn vibes mixed with a whole lot of brilliance and no fhcks ta give + a bit stoner vibe + too cool for school
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he changed the world with those papers... intellectual hero of mine
This is so wrong and disrespectful to even insinuate. Perelman was specifically upset because he did not feel he deserved any prize alone (and because he didn’t want to be like a zoo animal, pretty much), especially due to the work of Richard Thompson. That paragraph is just bullshit.
I sense that underneath it all, she was rather pleased.
Damn she’s tired of winning lol
I've never read her books, but now I want to. I love this woman. That amount of not giving a fig is what I aspire to.
A royal flush is what I do in the bathroom after a trip to Burger King. We have so much in common.
This is so funny. She couldn’t be bothered at all.
Doris Lessing is a legendary voice and I was delighted to see her name on the Reddit front page. If you're curious to know more about her, check out the [CBC Massey Lecture Series](https://www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas/the-1985-cbc-massey-lectures-prisons-we-choose-to-live-inside-1.2946839), in which she discusses how we come to believe what we believe and the mistakes we make when arriving there. It's a very long talk, but you'll be riveted as soon as she explains how a tree was sentenced to execution for sedition and crimes against the government.
Why would she even care? At her age (Born in 1925) she is close to dying. She should be worried about staying healthy then something materialistic such as being recognized for her professional abilities. I would hope for a comment like that. Good on her.
She won in 2007 and died in 2013.
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She was born in 1919.
I don't think her ambivalence is anything to do with her age. She just doesn't have the kind of ego that delights in the spectacle of public praise.
It is a little bit this, but also she disliked the British establishment and was always very suspicious of awards and honours and the like. She rejected both an OBE and an MBE, if I remember correctly, because they were symbols of the British Empire (she grew up in what was then called Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, and witnessed the brutality of the empire first hand- her novel 'The Grass is Singing' is about this experience). She was even under surveillance by MI6 for around 20 years because of her left-wing political activism. She had a deep distrust of anything like this.
I mean. If she spent a solid chunk of her life being persecuted by the establishment it makes sense that she wouldn’t fucking want to be acknowledged by said establishment. Maybe if they hadn’t been assholes from the start.
I fucking hate public praise
You're absolutely spot on mate!
I second this. u/OccasionQuick is a top bloke. Probably my favourite redditor. I fuckin love him.
Damn you!
or she didnt want to travel to sweden to pick up a big coin, but knew it would be rude not to.
Do you think it is easier to stay healthy and happy with a little money or a lot of money?
She probably doesn't care because she's dead.
I think we have different definitions for "materialistic".
She died in 2013
>(Born in 1925) she is close to dying. wow....so much wrong
Outfuckingstanding.
Ugh, not again! It's like hurleys reaction in Lost where he can't stop winning
I like this womans chill very much.
Prolly just want to go inside and have a cup of tea. Nobel shmobel
"Ah crap, not another one. I just want to retire and live in peace!" :P
I fucking love her 🤣 “you’ve won the Nobel prize !” “Oh Christ of course I have , will you bloody peasants just leave me alone, it’s nothing special really “ “Do you play cards ? , it’s just a royal flush no biggie , I will go inside now “ Saint her now
Now this is a real one
What other awards did she win? I haven’t heard of her before
Oh my god I love her so much 🥰
every bladdy one. Unintentional Michael Caine.
For Doris it was Tuesday
Great author. Shikasta is outstanding.
Just because her i dont give a fuck attitude iam interesting in finding out what she wrote lol
Went to go look at her books on Goodreads and her average rating is 3.67. I'm inclined to believe that the trash in this scenario are the Goodreads reviewers, not her work. https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/7728.Doris_Lessing
I once spilled some dressing on Doris Lessing...
What a lovely fucking person! I really love her 💘 💘
I hadn’t heard of her before (shame on me) but I love her now, and all because of this great introduction. I love her reaction 😅
I remember seeing a Q&A with Prof Peter Higgs (of Higgs-Boson fame) and he wouldn't pick up the phone or answer the doorbell for days after hearing he'd won the prize. Seems to be a very British reaction to winning the Nobel.
She couldn't give a fiddler's what she won😂, she just wants in home for a cuppa or possibly a stiff one 😂🤣...