More Data from the Screwball Division

I read two things today I would like to share bits of here:

1. Last weekend's New York Times Magazine featured its annual "The Lives They Lived" pieces, on people who died. Dead people. One that I found particularly surprising is about Rupert Pole, who the author of the story, Sara Corbett, names as Anais Nin's other husband. She writes the story in the second person, which is sometimes off-putting, but otherwise serves to grind in how contortionist it must be to constantly have to sort out your life by consulting something called a "lie box.":

"In a dusty little town in the Arizona desert in 1955, as quietly as you can, you marry Rupert Pole. For the next 11 years you are the wife of two men, on two coasts. You liken yourself to a trapeze artist, swinging from one husband to the other. The lies have multiplied to the point that you now keep them in a file you refer to as “the lie box.” It has two sections: one labeled New York, one Los Angeles."

Corbett says that when Nin died, the Los Angeles Times listed one man as her husband, the New York Times listed the other. Fucking hell.

2. The New Yorker has Malcolm Gladwell's 20 billion-word piece on puzzles and mysteries. I particularly like this section. (But I think I am made too easily happy by the combination of words like "Screwball Division" and "batty"):

"The mystery-solvers of the Second World War were small groups of analysts whose job was to listen to the overseas and domestic propaganda broadcasts of Japan and Germany. The British outfit had been around since shortly before the First World War and was run by the BBC. The American operation was known as the Screwball Division, the historian Stephen Mercado writes, and in the early nineteen-forties had been housed in a nondescript office building on K Street, in Washington. The analysts listened to the same speeches that anyone with a shortwave radio could listen to. They simply sat at their desks with headphones on, working their way through hours and hours of Nazi broadcasts. Then they tried to figure out how what the Nazis said publicly—about, for instance, the possibility of a renewed offensive against Russia—revealed what they felt about, say, invading Russia. One journalist at the time described the propaganda analysts as “the greatest collection of individualists, international rolling stones, and slightly batty geniuses ever gathered together in one organization.” And they had very definite thoughts about the Nazis’ secret weapon."

And here we give a shout-out to the coolest new kid in Kosovo this week. He's off to do good in the world, and this woman wishes him well (and wants him to know that his grappa is in good hands and will not survive in the world for another 11 years, so no worries there. The scotch, on the other hand, will be kindly nursed. Smokily sipped. Possibly in slippers.)