Reviews and News:
A lock of George Washington’s hair has been discovered in upstate New York.
A short history of the Biltmore Estate.
Chekhov and “the illusory nature of all labels.”
The pleasure and power of dictionaries: “In the days of my youth, for those of us who liked to read, the dictionary was a magical object of mysterious powers. In the first place, because we were told that here between the drab covers were all the words that named everything in the world that we knew and also everything in the world that we did not know, that the dictionary held the past (all those words spoken by our grandparents and great-grandparents, mumbled in the dark, which we no longer used) and the future (words to name what we might one day want to say, when a new experience would call for them). In the second place, because the dictionary, like a benevolent sibyl, answered all our questions when we stumbled over difficult words in a story).”
Did you know that over one thousand words appeared in print for the first time in Lewis and Clark’s journals?
How malls saved the suburbs.
Essay of the Day:
While he was living in the luxurious Montreux Palace Hotel in Switzerland in 1964, Vladimir Nabokov began keeping track of his dreams. Why? He thought they came from the future:
“The theory came from J. W. Dunne, a British engineer and armchair philosopher who, in 1927, published ‘An Experiment with Time,’ arguing, in part, that our dreams afforded us rare access to a higher order of time. Was it possible that we were glimpsing snatches of the future in our dreams—that what we wrote off as déjà vu was actually a leap into the metaphysical ether? Dunne himself claimed to have had no fewer than eight precognitive dreams, including one in which he foresaw a headline about a volcanic eruption.
“If all of this sounds too batty for a man of faculties, consider that Dunne’s ‘An Experiment with Time’ had gained currency among a number of other writers, including James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, and Aldous Huxley. Its path to Nabokov is unclear, but, however it came to him, in its pages he recognized a fellow-traveller. (The author had his mystical side, Barabtarlo notes, ‘and the notion of metaphysical interfusion with, even intervention into, one’s life was very close to him.’) Consider, too, that, by 1964, when he began keeping his dream diary, Nabokov was barely sleeping at all. At sixty-five, he had an enlarged prostate that exacerbated his lifelong insomnia. He described episodes of ‘hopelessness and nervous urination,’ his sleep punctured as often as nine times a night by ‘toilet interruptions.’ In extremis, he turned to powerful sedatives and hypnotics, but even with these he struggled to make it through the night. In the depths of sleeplessness, mired in a somnolent fog, who among us wouldn’t feel a little oracular?”
Photo: Tatras
Poem: David Yezzi, “Capgras”
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