Reviews and News:
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Russian Revolution novels may soon be available in English for the first time: “With the first volume translated by Marian Schwartz, the six upcoming books are part of the Nobel laureate’s multi-volume magnum opus about the Russian Revolution, called The Red Wheel (Krasnoe Koleso). While Solzhenitsyn came up with the idea of The Red Wheel in the 1930s, he did not begin the first part, August 1914, until 1969. While the first and second – November 1916 – have previously been translated into English, the following six volumes have never been released in English before.”
Brian Aldiss has died: “Aldiss was the author of science fiction classics including Non-Stop, Hothouse and Greybeard, as well as the Helliconia trilogy, which his agent said bridged ‘the gap between classic science fiction and contemporary literature’. His numerous short stories include Super-Toys Last All Summer Long, which was adapted into the Steven Spielberg film AI, while his Horatio Stubbs saga was based on his time during the war in Burma and the far east.”
The marvels of British realist painting.
Michael Dirda on the magic of Jules Verne.
A professor’s complaint against the modern research university: “While teaching undergraduates is normally a very large part of a professor’s job, success in our field is correlated with a professor’s ability to avoid teaching undergraduates.”
Justin Taylor reviews Michael Robbins’s book on pop and poetry: “Robbins is erudite and meticulous, widely and deeply read, an agile thinker and a swift wit — but I don’t give a critic bonus points for having the qualities that constitute (or ought to constitute) the bar for entry to the profession. What I do give Robbins credit for, the thing that makes me want to talk about him the way he talks about Kael, Willis, et al., is the intensity of his enthusiasms.”
Essay of the Day:
What’s beneath New York City? Nobody knows. Greg Milner reports:
“New York City’s daunting infrastructural labyrinth is like the ‘Here be dragons’ decorating ancient maps. Underneath the 6,000 miles of asphalt and concrete road lie thousands of miles of water, sewer, gas, telecommunications, and electrical infrastructure. And let’s not forget the 500 miles of underground subway tracks or Con Edison’s 100-mile steam delivery system. In its entirety, it’s known to no one. The individual details of the vast underground are hoarded and guarded by the various stakeholders. Con Edison has its electrical map; the Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) keeps track of water and sewer pipes; the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) could tell you where the transit tunnels are; and so on.
“Imagine the city as a living organism, a body consisting of various systems—respiratory, nervous, skeletal—that share the same space and even intertwine. Now imagine surgery performed on that body by a surgeon who knows the location of only one system, who looks at the body and sees only blood vessels or bones. This is the odd condition of New York—a body subject to what, viewed through a wide lens, looks like perpetual triage. Each year, for repairs or to facilitate construction, the streets are sliced open 200,000 times—an average of almost 550 cuts per day, or 30 per street mile every year.
“For every job, contractors are required to call in the keepers of this knowledge. Representatives from the relevant utility companies and city agencies are dispatched to sites, where they survey and mark out the location of underground infrastructure with spray paint. Walk just about any block in the city and you’ll see these urban hieroglyphics, the scar tissue that lingers long after the cuts are sealed. ‘GAS’ is one of the more obvious ones, the unambiguity a sign of how dangerous it is to miscalculate and rupture a gas line. Still, mistakes are common and inevitable. Strikes on underground infrastructure cost the city an estimated $300 million every year.”
Photos: Eclipse
Poem: P. K. Page, “Vacationists”
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