Reviews and News:
Breaking: Reality is real. “After doing some mind-bending sums, Zohar Ringel and Dmitry Kovrizhi calculated that simply storing information about a couple of hundred electrons (very, very tiny particles) would need computer memory that requires more atoms that exist in the universe.” (HT: The New Atlantis)
Andrew Motion writes about his friendship with Philip Larkin in The New Yorker: “A lot of our talk was about trivial and now forgotten university business, or about university colleagues; I think Larkin enjoyed my knowing the issues and people involved, but trusted that I stood a little away from it all. A lot of the conversation was about poetry—not so much discussions of theory and practice as enthusiastic agreements about people we admired. Sometimes, it was confiding: he talked a little about the complications of his life with Monica, and I told him something of my own circumstances. ‘Are you drinking enough?’ he asked me gently on one such occasion. ‘I find a glass of port at breakfast is very comforting.’ ‘Probably not enough,’ I told him—though slightly warily. It was clear that Larkin himself was drinking a great deal; his skin was sweaty and waxy-looking, and he often complained about the difficulties of keeping his weight down, and of the embarrassment (as he considered it) of having to buy his clothes at High and Mighty as a result.”
Mark Clemens reviews Anthony Madrid’s Try Never: “Try Never is a store of polished spheres. All but two of its seventeen poems work in an early medieval Welsh form: three- or four-line stanzas, a couple lines of unadorned nature followed by a gobbet of wisdom. Each stanza of a poem begins with the same phrase (a sort of inverted ghazal — the dominant form of Madrid’s last book). A representative example from the Welsh: ‘Mountain snow, the stag is in the grove; / very black is the raven, swift the roebuck; / the healthy and free, it is strange that he complains.’”
Tom Petty has died. CBS reported that he had died early in the day Monday, but he didn’t pass until later that evening. He was an old-school rocker who cared more about music than fame. “‘He didn’t ever get a trampoline out and do a backflip,’ Zanes said. ‘No, he goes out and plays the songs that he wrote.’ Footage of the singer’s 2008 Super Bowl halftime performance testifies to that assessment, and it’s worth watching in light of Petty’s death at the age of 66. On the largest stage anyone can play on, Petty and the Heartbreakers didn’t do much other than execute their material flawlessly.”
How can novelists write about faith in an increasing secular culture? The “further that Christianity recedes from most people’s everyday experience, the less available becomes the apparently most straightforward way of representing it. And the more important become the other ways in which the life of faith can take on fictive life.”
Mark Bould takes stock of African Science Fiction: “AFRICAFANTASTIKA continues to boom. In 2016, Nnedi Okorafor won a Hugo and a Nebula for her novella Binti (2015), and omenana, the first African SF magazine, reached its ninth issue in just three years. The African Speculative Fiction Society, an even more significant indicator of critical mass, was launched at Nigeria’s Aké Arts and Book Festival, and this November it will return there to present the first annual Nommo Awards for best African speculative novel, novella, short story, and graphic novel.”
Essay of the Day:
In The Times Literary Supplement, Michael Caines revisits the work of London’s East End artists:
“This is the East End of the capital as it was seen by artists such as Brynhild Parker, Elwin Hawthorne, the Steggles brothers Harold and Walter, and, principally, Albert Turpin (while the more conventionally feted William Coldstream puts in a cameo appearance, with a haughty view of the post-war devastation of Cripplegate, grass patches scattered among a network of shattered red walls). Some of these artists branched out to take on commercial work, for companies such as Shell and London Underground – Edward Bawden territory – while the talented Parker moved abroad and never looked back. The focus here, however, remains on their home patch – on the work that is most distinctive to them – and although they were reunited a few years ago at Abbott and Holder in Bloomsbury, this is apparently the first East London Group exhibition in situ since the 1930s.
“They first exhibited as the East London Group in 1928, in a show that included the work of thirty-five students of John Cooper, who taught the Slade School of Fine Art, but had started giving evening classes in Bethnal Green a few years earlier. Cooper’s credo encouraged them to look around them, rather than to conventional subjects and settings. Not that they had much choice in the matter. Turpin, for example, was a window cleaner who would start work early in the morning so he could paint in the afternoon. A newspaper cutting on display at the Nunnery has him talking about working from the bottom of a bomb crater in order to ‘get away from any children’. It is good news for social historians of the period that, during The Working Artist’s run, his autobiography is to be published.”
Photo: Explosion
Poem: J. T. Barbarese, “Old Friend”
Forthcoming:
Daniela Bleichmar, Visual Voyages: Images of Latin American Nature from Columbus to Darwin (Yale, October 10): “From the voyages of Christopher Columbus to those of Alexander von Humboldt and Charles Darwin, the depiction of the natural world played a central role in shaping how people on both sides of the Atlantic understood and imaged the region we now know as Latin America. Nature provided incentives for exploration, commodities for trade, specimens for scientific investigation, and manifestations of divine forces. It also yielded a rich trove of representations, created both by natives to the region and visitors, which are the subject of this lushly illustrated book. Author Daniela Bleichmar shows that these images were not only works of art but also instruments for the production of knowledge, with scientific, social, and political repercussions. Early depictions of Latin American nature introduced European audiences to native medicines and religious practices. By the 17th century, revelatory accounts of tobacco, chocolate, and cochineal reshaped science, trade, and empire around the globe. In the 18th and 19th centuries, collections and scientific expeditions produced both patriotic and imperial visions of Latin America. Through an interdisciplinary examination of more than 150 maps, illustrated manuscripts, still lifes, and landscape paintings spanning four hundred years, Visual Voyages establishes Latin America as a critical site for scientific and artistic exploration, affirming that region’s transformation and the transformation of Europe as vitally connected histories.”
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