Reviews and News:
Growing up alone in China: “I was born in 1980, the year China implemented the one-child policy: I don’t have siblings, and neither do my peers. Whenever a Westerner learns that I’m an only child, the facial expression is a give-away: ‘You must have been terribly spoiled’ or ‘You must have been terribly lonely.’ Stanley Hall, the pioneering child psychologist, referred to the condition as ‘a disease in itself’. Our generation were known as ‘little emperors’ here in China. We are the chubby (pampered) babies surrounded by parents and grandparents in posters and cartoons. Being spoiled was the least of it. The attention a couple pay to their only hope can be overwhelming.”
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92 years after his death, Vladimir Lenin’s body remains almost perfectly preserved…and costs the Russian state nearly $200,000 a year.
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Charles Dickens’s character names: “Even for minor characters who are but briefly mentioned, in the Dickensian world, knowing just their names is sometimes enough to know the most important features about them. What might you think of a Mr. Murdstone or a Mr. Pecksniff if you knew nothing else about them? Dickens was adept at linguistically manipulating a name in different memorable ways to persuade readers in one direction or another and many scholars have attempted to study the whys and wherefores of how he manages this. Elizabeth Hope Gordon, in a study of naming practices in the works of Dickens, notes ‘it is not an easy matter to say just why these names should seem to be so appropriate, but in some instances the sound of the word produces an impression similar to that caused by the character itself, and in others there is an inexplicable “eternal fitness” that baffles investigation.'”
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Springfield College in Massachusetts has eliminated the popular “Men in Literature” course because it created a “hostile environment” for women.
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Swedish children’s illustrator told to change “stereotypical depictions of other cultures” in his books: “The first title, which was published in 1966, sees a boy and his grandfather set out to steal the treasure of an evil pirate named Omar, while the second features an image of a man in a tribal costume. Lööf told Dagens Nyheter that he had been given an ultimatum – either change certain illustrations in the books or they would be pulled from sale. ‘I am 76 years old and cannot be bothered to change. It’s not about the money for me. But I probably won’t do any more picture books for children,’ he told the paper, adding that the drummer in tribal wear was modelled on an old friend. ‘I know that he would be flattered. He was a very handsome man.'”
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Does bullfighting have a future? “Looking at the programme for the feria of San Isidro in Madrid this month (bullfights are being held on 31 consecutive days), it may be hard to believe that there is any threat to the future of the spectacle — it is not a sport — of what in Spain is called la corrida (the running of the bulls). But its popularity has undeniably been declining in recent years, due to two factors: growing opposition, in the sometimes spurious name of animal welfare, and Spain’s economic crisis.”
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Essay of the Day:
Who was Casanova? According to popular culture, he was “a necromancer, a charlatan, [and] a decadent hedonist.” In reality, he was all these things as well as a Freemason, a playwright, lottery administrator, textile entrepreneur, minor philosopher, and more. David Coward reviews Histoire de ma vie, Casanova’s multi-volume autobiography, only recently available in full:
“During his travels he would meet ‘Henriette’ (arguably his greatest love) who, like ‘Teresa’, ‘MM’, ‘CC’ and others (all now identified) would resurface in the course of his wanderings. In 1750, in Lyon, he became a Freemason before moving on to Paris and Dresden where he wrote plays with only modest success. He returned to Venice where, in July 1755 for reasons unclear to him, he was arrested by the Inquisition and confined under the Leads of the roof of the Doge’s palace. He made his famous escape in November 1756 and fled Venice, to which he would not return for eighteen years.
“In Paris, strings were pulled for him and he was appointed administrator of a new national lottery. He also set up a factory for printing dyed silks which employed pretty girls who doubled up as a private harem. In 1757, he began a long and lucrative campaign to dupe the ageing Mme d’Urfé who believed he had supernatural powers and could ‘regenerate’ her as a young man. In 1759 he was implicated in a case of abortion, jailed briefly for debt, fled from France and embarked on a period of incessant travel which took him to Holland, Germany and Moscow as he tried to sell his lottery scheme to Frederick the Great, who offered him a job, and Catherine II, who sent him away. In Rome he met the new pope, Clement XIII. In Switzerland he called on the naturalist Albrecht von Haller, who was impressed by him, and twice dropped in on Voltaire, with whom he discussed literature and ideas. In 1763 he reached London with bulging pockets, a glittering wardrobe and a valet. He left eight months later broke and dunned for debt. The master charlatan had been bested by La Charpillon, an eighteen-year-old prostitute. Believing she was dead on his account, he was about to throw himself into the Thames when he saw her dancing a minuet in Ranelagh Gardens.
“He never returned to England but went almost everywhere else. In 1766 he was expelled from Poland for fighting a duel. In 1768, he failed to interest the Spanish court in both his lottery scheme and his plan for resettling the Sierra Morena and ended up in a Barcelona jail for cuckolding the city’s governor. He travelled through France and back to Italy before turning north again, gambling, swindling, hopping in and out of beds and regularly falling foul of the authorities. At various times, he was expelled from Venice, Paris, Stuttgart, Turin, London, Vienna, Florence, Poland and Spain for offences ranging from debt and fraud to outraging public morality. He financed his life with cards, deception, spying, subsidies from friends, of which he had a startlingly loyal number, and by writings which met with small success. He fought three duels and, apart from eleven separate venereal infections, displayed remarkable staying power, In September 1774, back at last in Venice, he met an actress he had known since they were both young. It was the last event recorded in his autobiography.
“By the 1780s, Casanova had outlived his welcome in his usual haunts. He sought paid employments and looked to his pen. He started periodicals, was exiled permanently from Venice for satirizing its leading lights, and published unregarded pamphlets on mathematics, science and philosophy. In 1785, he reluctantly accepted Count Waldstein’s offer of the post of librarian at Dux where, with sporadic forays to Prague or Vienna, he mouldered, consumed by impotent rage and with nothing to look at except nature – which he had never cared for. In 1788 he published an account of his flight from the Leads and Icosameron, a sprawling philosophical novel about the loss of an Eden which was not unlike the Venice from which he had been ejected, but neither made him rich. At the end of 1789, he decided to escape the hateful present by revisiting his past. Working thirteen hours a day, he completed a first draft of Histoire de ma vie by 1792 and then spent the next six years revising his text. When he died in 1798, after a long and painful illness, it had still not progressed beyond 1774.
“Casanova’s detailed recollections of half a century of restless activity is one of literature’s frankest and most honest self-portraits. He was not without vanity but in his writing he is open about his qualities and failings. He emerges as a man of many contradictions: a freethinker and staunch Catholic, a sceptical rationalist and a practising necromancer, a free spirit and establishment boot-licker, a man of principle and an opportunist, a scoundrel, a snob, both coward and hero, at ease with persons of every class, generous, mean, clever and stupid, a cheat who was gullible, a con man who was easily fooled.”
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Image of the Day: The transit of Mercury
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Poem: Anthony Lawrence, “My Darling Turns to Poetry at Night”
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