Mysterious library tower at Cambridge University opens to the public: “At 157ft tall and 17 floors, Cambridge University Library’s tower can be seen for miles around but has largely kept its secrets to itself and its contents (approaching one million books) have given rise to much speculation. But now in a new free exhibition, ‘Tall Tales: Secrets of the Tower’, we reveal some of the truth about what the great skyscraper really holds.”
A card signed by Jack the Ripper sold at auction: “The ink-written card arrived at Ealing Police Station on October 29, 1888 – just 11 days before the serial killer’s last suspected victim Mary Kelly was disembowelled.”
We need to have a conversation about violence by men—and one that doesn’t simply assume it is unnatural, writes Daemon Fairless: “In some very important ways, I’m a successful example of what the women’s movement sought to achieve. What I’m about to say may be the most ironic form male braggadocio has ever taken, but insomuch as a single individual can represent such a thing, I am the post-patriarchal man. So, what about the fight on the train? What about my alpha-male aggression and wanting to paint my face in the dude’s blood? Those things don’t really mesh with my granola upbringing…To put it bluntly—and I know I’m stating the obvious here—there’s a part of me that craves violence. Or, if not craves it, weirdly gets off on it. The other part of me (the larger, better part, I’d like to think) always regrets it after it’s over, as soon as my logic and empathy come back online. But when I’m in the midst of it, violence feels right—appropriate, somehow, and justified. Weirder still, and embarrassing, now that I’m putting it down on paper, is how important this capacity for violence is to me. It’s part of how I define myself. Even if I were never to fight again, I’d still want to be large and powerful and to be perceived this way. It makes me feel confident, attractive, and inexplicably optimistic. It makes me whole. Take it away and it sort of feels like an amputation.”
How the Age of Reason changed the way we view feelings.
Most 20th-century energy related forecasts were wrong. The lesson? A technological “miracle” that deals with today’s supposed energy problems is nearly impossible to predict: “By century’s end, it was clear that most…energy-related forecasts had proved wrong. Among the misses: the internal-combustion engine would be ‘a thing of the past’ before the twentieth century ended; ‘shortages of natural gas’ would become severe; oil scarcity would require ‘massive research efforts to develop alternative fuels’; ‘no hands’ driving would make possible the ‘100 mile-per-hour beltway’; and the advent of ‘high-speed trains in vacuum-sealed tubes.’…Today’s energy forecasting is no longer motivated by fears of shortages of hydrocarbons but instead, ironically, by concerns about our supposedly excessive use of abundant supplies—and the resulting carbon-dioxide emissions. An ardent advocate for a different energy future, Bill Gates has called for major U.S. and global efforts to find technological ‘miracles’ in energy domains. By ‘miracle,’ Gates means something that might seem impossible now—in the same way that, in earlier times, no one imagined, say, the personal computer or the polio vaccine. Finding such miracles, Gates concedes, is inherently a ‘very uncertain process,’ for which there is no ‘predictor function.’ On that, I believe he’s wrong in one important sense: there is a kind of predictor function when it comes to the forecasts themselves—most are predictably wrong.”
Walker Percy’s Lost in the Cosmos at 35: “Percy paints a picture of human beings as essentially unstable, unable to hew to a steady course.”
Essay of the Day:
In The New Criterion, William Logan argues that the role of the critic is not to judge the past by today’s standards but to “drag poems back to the world in which they were made”:
“Poetry is written in a world that richly impinges on the words, the images, the culture of the poem. To look at what surrounded the poem’s birth does not suggest that the artist is merely an empty suit, a medium for culture. Authors rarely believe in the death of the author. Ignorance of a poem’s inner history, however, amounts to willful neglect. A poem is a historical artifact, no less an artifact than a Renaissance slipper or a marble fragment of the Acropolis. History interprets the artifact, and on occasion the artifact interprets history.
“The critic must reconcile history and poetry. A poem is a product of its time just as much—if the poem’s any good—as a triumph over its time. Many poems are so familiar we have forgotten how to read them. We see the words but we paper over the cracks in our understanding. Criticism should try to see poems from the inside, to get down into the muck of the poem’s invention—and of course into the muck of its language.”
Photos: Lava fissures
Poem: Marie Ponsot, “Hard-Shell Clams”
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