Reviews and News:
A. M. Juster on the boring and possibly dangerous conceptual poet Christian Bök: "Bök has spent 15 years and at least $150,000 of public money trying to encode his poetry into the genome of a nearly indestructible bacterium called an extremophile. That hasn't worked so far, but he claims success with experiments involving the common bacterium E. coli."
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James Joyce and Italo Svevo met in Trieste in 1907. They became life-long friends: "Joyce was scraping a living teaching English to Italian residents and Svevo came to him for lessons. Nothing in the tale, though, is as simple as that. Svevo, who was born Ettore Schmitz, was twenty years older that his teacher. He was a prominent local businessman whose family had enriched itself by making a unique kind of underwater paint, and he was not yet a writer at all. His only vice, it seems, was chain-smoking. Joyce, on the other hand, was already writing books of startling originality, was nearly always in debt and was a notorious drunkard. Yet the two, it seems, recognised the genius in each other, however latent, and were to remain friends and colleagues for life. Perhaps the anomalies in both their characters drew them together. One was an Italian Jew who had abandoned his family faith, the other a lapsed Catholic who nevertheless habitually haunted the varied churches of Trieste."
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The joys of medieval manuscripts: "Frescoes have been whitewashed, mosaics scuffed, stained-glass smashed, reliquaries melted and their gems dispersed, but illuminated manuscripts, bound between covers of oak and tanned leather, survive. They are the best record we have of the elation of colour in the art of the sixth to 16th centuries."
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Stuart Davis's precision: "As Americans, we take Stuart Davis for granted. Although he has achieved a certain canonic status, in practice that means little more than that we no longer feel that we really need to look at him. It takes an exhibition like the Whitney's 'Stuart Davis: In Full Swing' to see, with redoubled force, just how good he really was. His works are striking, original, and, in their way, perfect, allying the exuberance of a jazz musician to the precision of a jeweler."
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The Times Higher Education and The Wall Street Journal to publish U. S. college ranking in September. The ranking will focus on the quality of degree programs "with a particular emphasis on students' experiences of teaching and learning, resources available, educational outcomes and the diversity of campus communities."
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Sweeney Todd, "a morality tale for our times."
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When Richard J. Mouw met Tim LaHaye (who recently passed away) at the invitation of Father Neuhaus: "As it turned out, I really liked Tim LaHaye—certainly much more than I expected to, given our serious political and theological disagreements. He was a gracious presence, genuinely open to engaging the rest of us in thoughtful discussion. The encounter forced me, then, to look beyond our disagreements to some deeper dynamics in LaHaye's public leadership. It struck me that was there was something new going on in the combination of LaHaye's theology of cultural pessimism and his forming of a coalition for active cultural engagement."
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A comprehensive history of the Hawaiian shirt.
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Essay of the Day:
In The London Review of Books, Mark Ford reviews Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue's heavily annotated two-volume Poems of T. S. Eliot. What are we to make of Eliot's many allusions, Ford wonders, and what counts as one?
"To begin at the very beginning: is there a meaningful relationship between 'Let us go then …' (the opening words of 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock'), and the phrase 'Let us go now …' which occurs in Chapter 40 of Daniel Deronda (with 'street' and 'sky' later in the paragraph); between 'When the evening is spread out against the sky' (line 2 of 'Prufrock') and Thomas Hardy's 'forms there flung/Against the sky' ('The Abbey Mason'); between 'certain half-deserted streets' (line 4 of 'Prufrock') and 'he sought out a certain street and number' in Chapter 20 of Little Dorrit; or, moving beyond literature, between that phrase and the recording of a payment made to 'R.D. Bennett, for sprinkling a certain street' in the aforementioned Acts and Resolutions of the 29th General Assembly of Iowa; between Prufrock's 'overwhelming question' (line 10) and the observation in Chapter 23 of James Fenimore Cooper's The Pioneers that 'The whole company were a good deal astounded with this overwhelming question'?
"Certainly Eliot's mind was a vast, labyrinthine echo chamber, and perhaps more than any other canonical poet of the English language, with the possible exception of his great antagonist John Milton, he was conscious of the previous uses by other writers of the words he deployed in his poems. But what exactly is the difference, one can't help wondering while reading such notes, between an interesting allusion or echo and a mere verbal coincidence? And where should limits be set for the recording of these echoes or coincidences in the age of the internet, when it's possible to pursue any phrase ad infinitum? Should notes in a scholarly edition aspire to the condition of an entry in the OED? Anyone with an interest in Eliot will be grateful for, and marvel at, the truly extraordinary knowledge of all things Eliotic that underpins these volumes, but – to get my quibble out of the way early, so that I can praise the numerous virtues of this edition with a clear conscience – it is not always easy to discern the value of the links the editors posit between Eliot's words and the analogous phrases, drawn from a bewildering array of writers, presented for comparison in the commentary."
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Image of the Day: Venus and Mercury over Cerro Las Campanas
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Poem: Clive James, "Return of the Kogarah Kid"
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