Reviews and News:
In Seattle, researchers have developed a device that allows you to play an instrument by thinking. It’s called the encephalophone: “Deuel had helped invent the encephalophone with a double-edged purpose: to explore new frontiers in music technology and as a possible therapeutic tool for people who’d suffered from strokes or neurological problems…If people couldn’t use their limbs to make music anymore, maybe learning to make music in a new way, with different parts of their brains, could serve as a method of neurological rehabilitation…To play the encephalophone, a musician wears an electroencephalogram (EEG) cap fitted with electrodes that read brain waves and transmit them to a synthesizer.”
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Why did Ernest Hemingway invest in the Italian publisher Einaudi? “Einaudi, Hemingway complained, were communists looking for any excuse to withhold his overdue royalties. After 1947, he’d grown so exasperated that he refused to publish another book with them. So it’s all the more startling to discover that in the spring of 1955, he quietly agreed to convert a large part of his growing credit with the house into company stock, becoming a major shareholder overnight. Hemingway was usually very prudent with his money—and the chronically mismanaged Einaudi was hardly a safe investment. But having a stake in the publication of his own books, he hoped, would make it easier to get his hands on his growing pile of Italian cash.”
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Rowan Williams on David Jones’s faith and art: “Jones often wrote about ‘the Break’, the cultural moment somewhere around the beginning of modernity when the European world-view shifted decisively. Instead of a world where things were unique but linked by an unimaginable density of connection and cross-reference, we had created one in which things were unconnected but endlessly repeatable and where everything could be exchanged in the market for an agreed equivalent: above all, for money. Jones saw his work – both as a visual artist and as a poet – as a sustained protest against the Break and an effort to show that the older picture could, after all, be brought to life.”
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The story of the most valuable stamp in the world.
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Ayn Rand added to British A levels.
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Patti Smith, who likes to tell people how much she loves Rimbaud, has bought and is repairing the dead poet’s house in Roche. Here’s what the house looked like 7 years ago.
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Brian Martin reviews Boualem Sansal’s 2084: “Michel Houellebecq’s subtle, threatening, frightening novel Submission imagines the democratic takeover of France by Islamist politicians. 2084 follows on, and has terrifying implications for the entire world.”
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Carlos Lozada reviews Phoebe Maltz Bovy’s The Perils of “Privilege”: “Accusing people of unearned advantages does nothing to address inequality—and may only make things worse.”
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Essay of the Day:
In The New Yorker, Alexandra Schwartz writes about what it was like to be an assistant of the late NYRB editor Bob Silvers:
“There were four assistants, and Bob assumed that anything he said to one would immediately be known by all, as any given head of Cerberus’ must know what is passing through the others. Someone before my time had devised the ingenious system of the ‘F.Y.I.,’ an e-mail that would be sent out by the assistant on the day’s ‘late shift’—two-thirty in the afternoon to ten-thirty at night, if you could sneak out that early as Bob sat hunched over galleys at his desk—containing all conceivably pertinent information, questions, unsolved problems, and incomplete duties that would have to be dealt with the next day or, more likely, deferred yet again. Tell R.S. to call back so-and-so—he’s been avoiding. R.S. wants to reorder business cards from Tiffany’s. S.O.S.: Can anyone read Bob’s comment on the right margin of the galley on the windowsill?! FROM NOW ON: Remind R.S. to take his blood-thinning pills.
“Bob famously lived entirely for and at the job; the office was his home, chaotic and full of signs of life in a way that his too orderly apartment, on Sixty-eighth Street, was not. (On the rare occasions when Bob wasn’t well enough to come in, we would take turns going uptown in a taxi, carrying the ‘boards’—the page proofs for the coming issue, Scotch-taped to buckling manila sheets—like precious cargo.) The office space was a physical manifestation of the life of a capacious mind, books and papers piled everywhere in crazy teetering stacks that seemed liable to come crashing down at any moment, and often did.
“But the life of the mind must be sustained by life of other kinds. Bob was known to his assistants in the intimate, daily ways that one is usually known only to close family. He did everything in front of us: gossiped; joked; lost his temper; came up with ideas; spoke on the phone to friends, to writers, and above all to Lady Dudley, his partner of forty years, whose calls he took, with cooing delight and without exception, no matter what else he was doing. He would phone the office every morning at ten-thirty, sometimes already on his way in a taxi, to have his e-mail read to him by whichever assistant had had the ill fortune to come in first, and to dictate his replies. (We all shared the computer that connected to his e-mail address, and the gargantuan responsibility of regularly checking to see what had come in, dividing the urgent correspondence from the merely important and the altogether trivial, inevitably missing something crucial in the process. When work was slow, you could sift through the treasure trove of his past digital correspondence. Bob himself never looked at the screen, and would edit printouts of his e-mail drafts in pen or pencil, sometimes after they had been sent.)”
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Photo: South African chapel
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Poem: Christian Wiman, “The Preacher Addresses the Seminarians”
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