Reviews and News:
Book publishers return to print: “After a decade of technological upheaval and lackluster growth, executives at the top four U.S. consumer book publishers say they are done relying on newfangled formats to boost growth. It has been nearly 10 years since Amazon.com Inc. introduced its Kindle e-book reader amid the financial crisis, destabilizing publishers and challenging their well-honed business models. Now, e-book sales are on the decline, making up a fraction of publishers’ revenue, and traditional book sales are rising… Executives gathered in Frankfurt for the industry’s biggest trade fair said they are returning to fundamentals: buying and printing books that readers want to buy — and they are streamlining their businesses to get them out faster than ever before.” (H/T: Barton Swaim)
Donald Trump’s fake Renoir: “Years ago, while reporting a book about a real-estate developer and reality-TV star named Donald Trump, Tim O’Brien accompanied his subject on a private jet ride to Los Angeles. The plane, as you can imagine, was overly ornate; hanging on one wall, for instance, was a painting of two young girls—one in an orange hat, the other wearing a floral bonnet—in the impressionistic style of Renoir. Curious, O’Brien asked Trump about the painting: Was it an original Renoir? Trump replied in the affirmative. It was, he said. ‘No, it’s not Donald,’ O’Brien responded.”
A “gruesome” history of surgery: “Robert Liston, a hulking Scottish surgeon with hands so big he could reportedly use one as a tourniquet – helpful when removing limbs in under 30 seconds. Once called the “fastest knife in the West End”, Liston would operate in front of audiences, crowing: ‘Time me, gentlemen!’ before hacking off the offending body part – without ever washing his bloody hands.”
Take all the pictures you want during the day, but it’s illegal to photograph the Eiffel Tower at night for commercial use.
Visit the Swiss mountain bunker where millions of bitcoin units are stored…sort of.
Rest easy, Texas. The fajita bandit has been caught.
America’s most popular playwright is apparently one Lauren Gunderson, who mostly writes progressive morality plays: “Her plays are staged almost twice as often as anyone else’s on the list, far ahead of venerated figures like Eugene O’Neill and August Wilson, who edged her for the top spot last year. … After last fall’s Presidential election, she thought that producing it might rally people feeling despair at Donald Trump’s victory, so she licensed ‘The Taming’ for free staged readings on Inauguration Day. (There was a hashtag: #TameTrump.) More than forty readings took place around the country, many of them raising money for Planned Parenthood. ‘It is a powerful thing to come together and laugh in a scary time,’ Gunderson said, especially with ‘a feminist farce that is insane and wild and irreverent.’” Yawn.
Essay of the Day:
John Gray argues in The New Statesman that we need to remember the past in all its complexity because without it we have “no identity at all”:
“In a pervasive modern view, which seems to most people so obviously true that they can think in no other way, the past is a burden that must be shed in order that a new kind of life can come into being. Modern human beings are always in transit to another place, which seems only more distant the longer they have been travelling.”
* * *
“In this by now thoroughly conventional perspective, the values and structures of the past are seen as ‘always categories of power, where anything that is dominant is, by definition, oppressive. The only exception is the dominance of liberal ideas themselves, which can, it is assumed, never be oppressive.’ In the 18th and 19th centuries, Whig history meant history written as a story of continuing improvement. Today, it means history written as an exercise in reproach and accusation in which universal human evils are represented as being exclusively the products of Western power.
“Giving voice to oppressed and marginalised groups – ethnic and sexual minorities, subalterns of empire – may be a necessary part of historical inquiry. Yet as practised today by many historians, retrieving these occluded identities seems to require that other identities – local, national and religious, for example – be critically demolished and then consigned to the memory hole. Forgetfulness of the past must be actively cultivated, so that a future may emerge in which human beings can shape their lives as they please. As David Rieff argues in his powerful critique of commemoration, In Praise of Forgetting: Historical Memory and Its Ironies (2016), there may be times when laying the past aside is necessary for human beings to be able to live peaceably with themselves.
“The end result of a systematic devaluation of the past, however, is a condition of confusion not unlike that experienced by those who suffer from Alzheimer’s disease. As O’Gorman puts it, ‘We may be terrified of dementia because it is widespread and its effects catastrophic. But the fear arises also because we are half-conscious, as dutiful forward-facing citizens of modernity, that we figuratively have it already.’ Rather than enabling human beings to fashion new identities, a willed collective amnesia leaves them with no identity at all.”
Photos: Wildfires
Poem: Mary-Patrice Woehling, “Salome”
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