Reviews and News:
The art of making books the old-fashioned way: “Larkspur only brings out about four books a year, and they can be two years behind. If Gray Zeitz knew how to use a computer he could open the Larkspur Press home page and see the covers of 100 books he has on his shelves in inventory. Some of the prices reach $200 for special editions, but the press is best known for the books they can sell for $20 or $25.”
Stolen John Lennon items recovered: “German police recovered around 100 items that belonged to late Beatles star John Lennon that were stolen from his widow in New York, including three diaries, two pairs of his signature metal-rimmed glasses, a cigarette case and a handwritten music score.”
Milton’s sources: “We’ve long known that Homer, Lucan, Lucretius, Ovid and Virgil exercise transformative influences on the meanings of Paradise Lost; thanks to Poole we can now supplement this list with a much longer series of more obscure authorities — including Apollonius of Rhodes, Aratus, Dionysius Periegetes, Hesiod, Nicander, Quintus Smyrnaeus, and Oppian — who Milton engaged with very carefully both in his educational programme and his later poem.”
Medieval allegory revisited: “Most modern critics, following Coleridge, have associated allegory with the culture of the middle ages, with its dogmatic certainties in religion, its abstruse idealism, and its penchant for metaphysical system-building. Since the attack on scholastic philosophy by Francis Bacon, the 17th-century prophet of science, medieval thinkers and writers have been relentlessly portrayed as eager to abandon the real world for a heaven of fancied abstractions, vast webs of significance spun from besotted brains. From the modern point of view, the medieval world picture came to look like a great structure of delusions buoyed up by empty words. Scholars of early modern literature have long resisted this caricature of medieval culture, including its view of allegory, but Jason Crawford, in his new book Allegory and Enchantment: An Early Modern Poetics, has responded to the modern critique in a particularly interesting way.”
Shout it from the lecterns: “The research is unequivocal: Laptops distract from learning, both for users and for those around them. It’s not much of a leap to expect that electronics also undermine learning in high school classrooms or that they hurt productivity in meetings in all kinds of workplaces.”
A brief history of the Fabergé egg: “In 1916, in St. Petersburg, Russia, goldsmith Peter Carl Fabergé was overseeing the production of two opulent, decorative eggs. The objects were destined to be the royal Easter gifts presented to Empress Maria Feodorovna and Tsarina Alexandra Feodorovna in April of 1917. But the imperial women would never see those eggs, nor would Fabergé see them finished. As the Bolsheviks seized St. Petersburg, the three-century-long Romanov rule came to a violent and tumultuous end. The family was forced out of the city and left behind their 50 imperial Fabergé eggs, created between 1885 and 1916, small yet lavish reminders of the dynasty’s grand reign.”
Essay of the Day:
What does it mean to be French? Sudhir Hazareesingh in The Times Literary Supplement:
“One of the most influential evocations of modern French nationhood was offered by the historian and philologist Ernest Renan in a lecture in 1882. In contrast with Germanic conceptions, which were grounded in ethnic features such as race and religion, Qu’est-ce qu’une nation? defined the French idea of the nation as an ethical principle, based on shared sacrifices, common memories and erasures, and a collective will to accomplish great things together. The nation, in his celebrated and oft-quoted expression, was ‘a daily plebiscite’.
“This image captured the prevailing notion of Frenchness succinctly. Despite its homage to classic Rousseauist concepts of the general will and popular sovereignty, and to the universalism of the 1789 French Revolution, it was essentially a state-driven vision; its secular and Eurocentric qualities also fitted neatly with the Third Republic’s ideal of citizenship, which excluded France’s colonial subjects from full membership of the political community. Moreover, Qu’est-ce qu’une nation? played into established representations of France as a ‘rational’ nation, whose roots lay in René Descartes’s ‘cogito ergo sum’. This Cartesianism was a matter of substance, but also style: “what is not clear” affirmed the writer Rivarol sweepingly in his De l’universalité de la langue française (1784) ‘is not French’. Hence the French fondness for abstract notions, as the essayist Emile de Montégut observed: ‘there is no people among whom abstract ideas have played such a great role, and whose history is rife with such formidable philosophical tendencies’. Seen as typically Gallic, too, was a questioning and adversarial tendency: as Fernand Giraudeau put it in Nos moeurs politiques (1868): ‘we are French, therefore we are born to oppose’.”
Photo: Praprotno Brdo
Poem: Christian Wiman, “Doing Lines at the Cocktail Party”
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