Reviews and News:
Pope Francis recently said he would request a study of Blaise Pascal’s cause for beatification. Should he be sainted? “Whatever else he may have been, he was certainly a genius. This is the prodigy who at age 11 was reputed to have discovered for himself the first 32 of Euclid’s propositions; who in his teenage years invented the first calculating machine to ease his father’s accounting chores; who in his twenties devised a series of experimental tests to confirm, against the scientific orthodoxy of his day, the existence of the vacuum; who, at the instigation of his gambling buddies and in correspondence with Fermat, laid the foundation for the modern theory of probability; who was an inspiration for the development of calculus, decision theory, and fluid mechanics; and who in the last year of his life invented the world’s first system of public transportation, designating profits to go to the poor. Surely there is something divine in such an extraordinary scientific career.”
The king of audiobooks: “Early in his career as a narrator of audiobooks, George Guidall received a note from a truck driver in Montana. The man had been so absorbed in listening to Mr. Guidall’s eloquent recording of Crime and Punishment that he drove off the road. He was writing from his hospital bed to thank Mr. Guidall because he now had time to finish listening to the book. Mr. Guidall is the undisputed king of audiobooks: more than 1,300 so far, with a stack of new prospects beside his bed awaiting his attention.”
Chinese novelist who wrote about murder arrested for committing four: “In the preface to his 2010 novel The Guilty Secret, the Chinese author Liu Yongbiao expressed his desire to write a suspense-filled detective story about an alluring female writer who dodges arrest despite committing a string of murders. ‘I came up with the idea after reading some detective novels and watching crime shows and movies,’ Mr. Liu wrote at the time. ‘The working title is: The Beautiful Writer Who Killed.’ But what was assumed to be a fictional crime story took a turn into reality last week when Mr. Liu, 53, was arrested on accusations of bludgeoning four people to death 22 years ago.”
“In 1944, at the age of twenty-two, Jonas Mekas left his small village in Lithuania, then occupied by the Nazis, in the company of his brother Adolfas. Mekas had begun his literary career as the editor of a provincial weekly paper and had published his first poems. He’d also had a hand in publishing an anti-German bulletin and had written a poem against Stalin; he was twice marked. Jonas and Adolfas set out for Vienna, aiming for Switzerland from there, but were instead pulled off a train near Hamburg and sent to a Nazi forced-labor camp. There, Mekas started keeping a diary.” That diary, originally published in 1991, will be reissued later this month by Spector Books.
Yeats family art to go on display for the first time before being auctioned at Southeby’s. Material includes letters from Yeats and art by his brother, sisters and father.
The friendship and world of the two great recorders of the Restoration period: “What Pepys and Evelyn have in common, says Margaret Willes, is their ‘great curiosity’ — an insatiable hunger for knowledge. The Curious World of Samuel Pepys and John Evelyn is not a joint biography but an exploration of their ‘mutual interests’. Both fellows of the Royal Society — Evelyn was a founding member — they shared a fascination with the arts and sciences, a love of books, of prints, of diary-keeping, beekeeping, print-collecting, astronomy, architecture, alchemy, anatomy, geometry, the English language, music and the making of musical instruments. Interests aside, historians have long enjoyed contrasting their characters.”
Essay of the Day:
Tom Stoppard is sometimes accused of being all frosting, no cake. But his plays are more than mere verbal confections argues Andrew Dickson in Prospect:
“Despite being freighted with dramatic irony about where the starry-eyed ambitions of idealists such as Mikhail Bakunin and Alexander Herzen would lead (one character observes: ‘if we can’t arrange our own happiness, it’s a conceit beyond vulgarity to arrange the happiness of those who come after us’), the play teems with spirit and youthful joie de vivre. It does what the best historical drama should do: work through arguments but let us feel their emotional heft too.
“For a writer sometimes accused of being too cold, that emotional power can take audiences by surprise. For many Arcadia (1993) is his masterpiece—one of the finest plays written in the last half-century. Set simultaneously in the 18th century and the present day, it is as fiercely intellectual as ever: part historical thriller, part disquisition on Romanticism, part exploration of mathematical biology. Yet there is genuine yearning in the love story between the precocious teenage mathematician Thomasina and her tutor as they spar over definitions of entropy. Newton’s second law of thermodynamics has rarely seemed of such human consequence.”
Photo: Lofoten Islands
Poem: James Matthew Wilson, “On a Discharged Firework”
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