Reviews and News:
Before the couch was used by Freud, it was used in hypnosis. What does reclining have to do with one’s state of mind? Benjamin Aldes Wurgaft reviews Nathan Kravis’s On the Couch: “While the term ‘couch’ (from the French coucher, to lie down) was in use in English from the 13th century, the sofa in something approximating its modern form only appeared in Europe beginning in the late 17th century, its name taken from the Arabic soffah (a cushion). Kravis explores the role of sofas and couches in the history of intimate conversation in modern Europe, not to mention all the styles of portraiture, primarily of women, in which such furniture featured. It was on painted couches that painted women were depicted as readers, as thinkers…”
Hayden Pelliccia reviews two new translations of the Iliad: “The two recent translators of the Iliad, both veteran classical scholars, have long inhabited that now largely abandoned category, Man of Letters. Barry Powell has published poems of his own; Peter Green has translated Apollonius of Rhodes, Catullus, Ovid, and Juvenal, and both are novelists. Both now bid (Green avowedly so) to seize the crown of the long-reigning king of Homer translators, Richmond Lattimore, whose Iliad of 1951 remains the standard. If either succeeds, I suspect it will be Green, though his competitor is a worthy one.”
Can legal pot make you rich? Probably not.
The Eisenhower Memorial mess.
Saudi Arabia accidentally prints a textbook showing Yoda sitting next to the country’s king: “The founding of the United Nations was a historic moment that saw leaders from across the planet join together to commit to a more peaceful world. But most historians don’t remember the Jedi master Yoda being among them.”
Jann Wenner is angry about Joe Hagan’s forthcoming biography of the Rolling Stone founder: “Sources who have seen advance copies say the book details Wenner’s creative skills but also his cocaine-fueled editing sessions, his cavalier treatment of many of the editors and executives who helped him over the years, and the tortured bisexuality that he only came to terms with publicly in the late 1990s.” Sticky Fingers will be published on October 24.
Essay of the Day:
In Prospect, Ray Monk writes about Gottlob Freg’s great intellect, narrow mind, and non-existent charisma:
“By common consent, the three founders of the modern analytic tradition of philosophy are, in chronological order, Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein. The biggest project in my professional life has been to write biographies of the second and third of these men. But of the three, it is Frege who is—100 years on from his retirement—held in the greatest esteem by the philosophers of today.
“His essay ‘On Sense and Reference’ (1892) offered a philosophical account of linguistic meaning that broke new ground in sophistication and rigour, and it is still required reading for anyone who wants to understand contemporary philosophy of language. It is scarcely an exaggeration to say that he invented modern logic: he developed the basic ideas (if not the symbols now in use) of predicate logic, considered by most analytic philosophers to be an essential tool of their trade and a required part of almost every philosophy undergraduate degree programme. His book The Foundations of Arithmetic (1884) is still hailed as a paradigm of the kind of crisp, rigorous prose to which every analytic philosopher should aspire.
“Frege’s insights have been influential outside philosophy, in areas including cognitive science, linguistics and computer science. Among the public, however, he is almost completely unknown, especially when put beside Wittgenstein and Russell. Most people have some idea who Russell was. Many have seen clips of his frequent appearances on television, can picture his bird-like features crowned with his mane of white hair, and recognise his unique voice, high-pitched, precise and aristocratic in an impossibly old-fashioned way (one imagines that no-one has spoken like that since the Regency). Even better known is Wittgenstein, the subject of a Derek Jarman movie and several poems, whose name is dropped by journalists, novelists and playwrights, confident that their audiences will have some idea who he is. But Frege? How many people know anything about him?”
Images: Stags
Poem: Michael Bazzett, “Prayer”
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