Prufrock is off this week and will return on August 8.
Reviews and News: For those enraptured by the Rubaiyat, a dual biography of Omar Khayyam and Edward FitzGerald—and what the author calls “a silk road of the mind.”
“In 1902, when he was fourteen, T S Eliot came upon a copy of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam in Edward FitzGerald’s translation, first published anonymously in 1859. As Eliot later wrote, he experienced an ‘almost overwhelming introduction to a new world of feeling … It was like a sudden conversion – the world appeared anew, painted with bright delicious and painful colors.’ Many other readers, especially in adolescence, have shared Eliot’s sense of sudden discovery. I recall picking up one of several copies of the Rubaiyat in my grandmother’s house – a floppy little volume primly bound in brown velvet – and being captivated by the quatrains at about the same age. It was not the ‘colours’ of the verse but their music that entranced me then, a melodiousness at once exotic and intimate, as though uttered by a secret friend. Of course, like all teenagers, I was attracted by the world-weary tone, the genial cynicism, of the enigmatic Khayyam. And who could resist the startling imagery of the opening quatrain, with its ‘Noose of Light’, at once radiant and sinister?
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Frolic in a pool of rainbow sprinkles at the Museum of Ice Cream.
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Turns out Friedrich Trump was a pirate too.
“As a rogue entrepreneur, however, Friedrich cast a century-long shadow over the Trump family with his passion for money and the flouting of legal niceties—such as erecting buildings on land he did not own.
“Friedrich Trump grew up in the winemaking region of southwest Germany, in the town of Kallstadt, where hard work meant a roof over one’s head, not riches. His father had died when Friedrich was only eight years old. In 1885, at the age of sixteen and facing mandatory military service, Friedrich left his mother a note and did what millions of other Europeans with few prospects at home were doing: fled Germany for the United States.”
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In an interview with Slate, Jonathan Franzen recalls Washington was “exquisitely boring” and suspects Donald Trump may have John du Pont syndrome. (Samesies, tbh.)
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The new two-part Potter play Harry Potter and the Cursed Child finds a young Albus Potter powerless, his imagination and free will stunted by overworking the same plot.
“Cursed Child, for one thing, seems fixated with chance, and the extraordinary power of twists of fate. The Harry Potter series always seemed to be a firm believer in free will—the power to change destiny by making specific and often difficult decisions. In the first book in the series, the Sorting Hat ponders whether Harry belongs in Gryffindor or Slytherin: ‘Difficult. Very difficult. Plenty of courage, I see. Not a bad mind, either. There’s talent, oh my goodness, yes—and a nice thirst to prove yourself, now that’s interesting … So where shall I put you?’
“‘Not Slytherin,’ Harry thinks, gripping his chair. The hat goes along with his request. But Albus, by contrast, is given no such choice. And as his tweaks in the space-time continuum play out, futures are similarly reshaped and lines redrawn in the blink of an eye. Good characters go bad. Terrible characters reemerge. ‘It feels like we were all tested, and we all—failed,’ says Scorpius.”
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A very binge-worthy sci-fi series.
“If it sounds like an amalgamation of The Manhattan Project, E.T., Super 8, Freaks and Geeks, and others, it is. That’s sort of the point. Stranger Things combines all of these into a gobstopper of 1980s goodness. Just when you’re done with one flavor, you’re on to the next, with a few more to go until the end.”
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What happens when we die? We wake up in an Irish novel.
On dueling translations of Máirtín Ó Cadhain: “And yet a novel in dialogue consists of characters who exist in the nowhere place between what others say about them and what they say, no more credibly, about themselves; in an important sense, the way to see them whole is to see them multiplied. As if in a graveyard, the two translations of Cré na Cille lie together side by side beneath the sod, one literary remove from the story, and they chatter and argue. This is the way it should be. If, within the Mac Con Iomaire– Robinson translation, the character called ‘Road-End Man’ should look like a different person when different people talk about him, why should he not become ‘Tim Top of the Road’—an even more different person—in the Titley version? I’m only half-joking when I say that the truest translation of this noise-and-discord novel is more than one translation, competing translations, too many translations. Yale should publish a new one every year.”
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Essay of the day: “The Stranger Guest”
Where do the frontlines of selfhood stretch furthest—at war, or in motherhood?
“Writing and reading about war while pregnant and while caring for my newborn highlighted the overlap between these experiences while exposing this gap in the literary record. I began collecting passages about motherhood as I came across them, both texts like Barbauld’s that hint at the complexity of the experience and texts that remind us of who, historically, has controlled our narratives about motherhood. Whereas philosophy should look to pregnancy, childbirth, and parenting as an opportunity to think deeply about the distinction between self and other, the relation between body and mind, the meaning of being or of life itself, most philosophers have approached the topic in tangential asides in which they try to control women’s bodies rather than understand them. While researching Kant’s ideas about education, I came across a bizarre passage in his ‘Lectures on Pedagogy’ in which he advises breastfeeding mothers to eat a lot of meat, since ‘if the mothers or wet-nurses eat only a vegetarian diet for several days, then their milk curdles just like cow’s milk.’ Though he had no children himself, Kant is quite opinionated on the subject of parenting, insisting that ‘to come immediately to the child’s assistance when it cries, to sing something to it, etc., as is the custom of wet-nurses, is very harmful. This is usually the first undoing of the child.’ The practice of swaddling newborns, Rousseau claims in Émile, is a ‘cruel bondage’ that stems from the uncaring attitude of wet nurses: ‘The woman who nurses another’s child in place of her own is a bad mother,’ he writes. ‘[H]ow can she be a good nurse?’ (Rousseau famously abandoned his own children in an orphanage.)”
Read more here.
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Poem of the Day: “After the Rally” by Rhina P. Espaillat
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Image of the Day: Ornitographies.
