Reviews and News:
When Michel Foucault died in 1984, he was working on the fourth volume in his History of Sexuality series. It was finally published yesterday in France: “The decision to publish the book was spurred by the sale in 2013 of the Foucault archives, which contained both a handwritten version of Confessions of the Flesh and a typed manuscript that Foucault had begun to correct, to the National Library of France by his longtime partner, Daniel Defert. Once that material became available to researchers, Foucault’s family, who hold the rights to his work, decided it should be shared more widely.”
Colm Tóibín on the metaphysics of Joseph Conrad’s vague language.
A sequel to Henry James’s Portrait of a Lady fails miserably. At least it reminds us of how good the original is.
Anthony Horowitz to write James Bond prequel: “Drawing from original material left behind by Ian Fleming, Anthony Horowitz is writing a prequel to the first ever James Bond novel, Casino Royale. Forever and a Day, which is authorised by the Fleming Estate, will find Horowitz ‘exploring what might have been Bond’s first mission and imagining some of the forces that might have turned him into the iconic figure that the whole world knows’, the novelist said.”
Picasso’s stepdaughter to open museum that will house the largest collection of the artist’s works to date.
Justin Lee visits the Capuchin crypts in Rome: “The first recorded reference to the bone crypt is from the Marquis de Sade, writing of his stay in Rome during the fall of 1775: ‘In every niche and under every arch there are well-preserved skeletons placed in various poses, some recumbent, some preaching and some in prayer. All these skeletons are dressed in the Capuchin habit and some have beards. I have never seen anything more striking. To make still more of an impression, this monument should not be seen by day but in the glow of the funeral lamps burning inside of it. The need to purify the air of this cavern constantly means, however, that all the windows are kept open so that the bright sunlight always reigning there greatly diminishes the horror.’”
Essay of the Day:
In the New Yorker, Joshua Rothman explains why in an age of great technological advances (when we send cars to outer space) we still get paper jams:
“Building 111 on the Xerox engineering campus, near Rochester, New York, is vast and labyrinthine. On the social-media site Foursquare, one visitor writes that it’s ‘like Hotel California.’ Conference Room C, near the southwest corner, is small and dingy; it contains a few banged-up whiteboards and a table. On a frigid winter afternoon, a group of engineers gathered there, drawing the shades against the late-day sun. They wanted to see more clearly the screen at the front of the room, on which a computer model of a paper jam was projected.
“The jam had occurred in Asia, where the owners of a Xerox-manufactured printing press were trying to print a book. The paper they had fed into the press was unusually thin and light, of the sort found in a phone book or a Bible. This had not gone well. Midway through the printing process, the paper was supposed to cross a gap; flung from the top of a rotating belt, it needed to soar through space until it could be sucked upward by a vacuum pump onto another belt, which was positioned upside down. Unfortunately, the press was in a hot and humid place, and the paper, normally lissome, had become listless. At the apex of its trajectory, at the moment when it was supposed to connect with the conveyor belt, its back corners drooped. They dragged on the platform below, and, like a trapeze flier missing a catch, the paper sank downward. As more sheets rushed into the same space, they created a pile of loops and curlicues—what the jam engineers called a ‘flower arrangement.’
“‘It’s the worst-case scenario,’ Erwin Ruiz, the leader of the paper-jam team, said. In the study of paper jams, Ruiz has found his Fountain of Youth: he is fifty but looks almost two decades younger. Born in Brooklyn, he grew up in Puerto Rico before going to graduate school in Rochester, where he is now a fixture of the city’s wintertime indoor beach-volleyball scene. Wearing designer sneakers, hip-hugging maroon trousers, a trim plaid shirt rolled to the elbows, and elegant stubble, he began to pace in front of a whiteboard.
“Bruce Thompson, the computer modeller who sat at the head of the table, had spent days creating a simulation of the jam. ‘We’re dealing with a highly nonlinear entity moving at a very high speed,’ he said.”
Photo: Moonrise eclipse
Poem: Stephen Kampa, “God’s Mnemonic”
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