Reviews and News:
Thomas De Quincey’s high low life: “De Quincey inherited a fortune and went out of his way, methodically, to waste it. His later decades (despite his toxic ‘eating’ habits, he lived to the age of 74) were a trail of bankruptcy, debt and flitting from lodgings to lodgings. He displayed total moral indifference to his half-dozen children’s being reduced to beggary while he got on with the writing posterity now reveres him for…After 20 years’ intimacy with the Wordsworth circle, De Quincey left, as Wilson puts it, the University of the Lakes for the Athens of the North, trailing a woebegone brood of motherless children behind him. In Edinburgh he installed himself in a vibrant literary world, dominated by Walter Scott, James Hogg and Blackwood’s Magazine. He hacked out a stream of brilliant articles, the pittance they yielded never quite keeping the wolf from the door or providing adequately for his offspring. His intake of opium in these years was heroic: up to 10,000 drops of laudanum a day.”
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A short history of public voting: “Today the secret ballot is assumed to be a fundamental part of democracy. But for most of America’s history voting was a highly public act.”
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A very British modernist: “Perhaps more than any other 20th-century artist, Nash successfully reinvigorated the English landscape tradition in modern terms.”
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“The painting convinced experts at the Louvre. Top French cultural officials declared it a national treasure. Dutch curators at the Mauritshuis and the Rijksmuseum joined the chorus of scholars who decided the enigmatic portrait of a man dressed in black was an undiscovered masterwork by Frans Hals. To many, ‘Portrait of a Man’ was that rare find, a truly great old master painting that had simply never surfaced. In 2011, Sotheby’s auction house in New York brokered a private sale to an art collector for about $10 million. This month, though, Sotheby’s declared the work a ‘modern forgery’.”
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All the best writing on Jack the Ripper in one Big Book: “The Big Book of Jack the Ripper runs to over 800 jumbo pages and more than 50 entries. And even those numbers don’t say it all. Harking back to the pulp magazines in which some of these tales first appeared, the text is laid out two columns to a page. The sum total of printed words is prodigious…This is the latest Big Book brought to us by the venerable Otto Penzler, who is also the proprietor of the Mysterious Bookshop in New York City. Other titles in the series include The Big Book of Sherlock Holmes Stories and The Big Book of Adventure Stories, but Jack gets special treatment. Unlike the other Bigs, which limit themselves to fiction, this one leads off with several nonfiction pieces that summarize and interpret what we know or surmise about Jack and his crimes.”
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The opioid crisis: “An investigative article in the Sunday, October 23, Washington Post detailed the Obama Justice Department’s actions to hamper the Drug Enforcement Administration’s aggressive efforts to stop the deadly diversion of pain medications. The article draws on testimony from multiple sources indicating that political and lobbying pressure sought to inhibit effective enforcement operations to shut down deadly “pill mills” and distribution networks. Dedicated, senior enforcement personnel—whom we have worked with—were pushed aside and into retirement. All this at a time when diverted opioid medications were known to be a key cause of overdose deaths. This scandal is only part of the story of the Obama opioid epidemic—and it is not the worst of it.”
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Essay of the Day:
In The New Yorker, Joan Acocella explains how Ludovik Lazarus Zamenhof, the founder of Esperanto, hoped a shared language would bring universal peace. Not all Esperantists shared his vision:
“In ‘Unua Libro,’ Zamenhof offered about nine hundred roots, and although he added some more later, Esperanto remains a language with a very small pantry of staples. This frugality, its most basic trait, is then tempered by its second most basic trait, its agglutinative nature—the construction of words by the incessant addition of prefixes and suffixes to the roots. ‘Jet lag’ is horzonozo: hor (‘time’) plus zon (‘zone’) plus ozo (‘illness’). A samideano is a fellow-Esperantist, someone who has the ‘same idea’ as you about Zamenhof’s creation. These words can now be found in Esperanto dictionaries, but you didn’t have to wait for permission: Esperantists were invited to construct words, and they did. Schor, trading improvisations with another Esperantist, comes up with elmuri—’to take something out of a wall’—for getting cash from an A.T.M.
“The compounds give Esperanto a playful, almost childlike, character. (So do some of the roots. ‘Toast’ is toasto.) Something else they call to mind is Dr. Frankenstein’s creature, stitched together from so many parts—an ear here, a nose there. Schor, a professor of English at Princeton, is the editor of The Cambridge Companion to Mary Shelley. She points out the connection, and she seems to think that Zamenhof may have experienced something like Dr. Frankenstein’s amazement when he saw what he had created. She quotes a letter in which Zamenhof tells a friend that, in using Esperanto, he eventually stopped translating in his head and began to think in the language. Suddenly, he says, it ‘received its own spirit, its own life, its own definite and clearly expressed physiognomy.’ Oh, my God, it’s alive!
“As for how it sounded, there have been some rude remarks. William Alden, the London correspondent for the Times, described it as “a sort of Italian gone wrong in company with some Slavonic tongue.” But that was in 1903, when probably no one yet spoke it confidently. If, today, you go to YouTube and listen to people who have spoken Esperanto from early childhood, you will hear something that sounds vaguely Eastern European and, though unmusical, perfectly O.K.
“But Zamenhof did not put together Esperanto in order to show that he could invent a language. He was trying to achieve world peace. As usual, he gave his project a rather naïve coloration. In ‘Unua Libro,’ he inserted a page printed with eight identical coupons—one for you and seven, presumably, to distribute to friends—on which you promised that if ten million other people agreed to learn the new language you would, too. You were supposed to sign the coupon and send it in. Zamenhof was disappointed to receive only a thousand responses.
“Within two years of the original, Russian publication of ‘Unua Libro,’ it had been republished in German, Hebrew, Yiddish, Swedish, Latvian, Danish, Bulgarian, Italian, Spanish, French, and Czech. There were two English editions. In 1908, a Universal Esperanto Association was established, but even before that Esperantists had begun holding international congresses every year. By the time of the first congress, in 1905, there were Esperantists as far afield as Argentina, Algeria, Australia, and French Indochina. For a while, there was a campaign to make Esperanto the official language of proceedings at the League of Nations and even to establish an Esperanto-speaking state, to be known as Amikejo (‘friendship place’), in Neutral Moresnet, a tiny territory that at that time was on the border of Belgium and Germany. Pioneering Esperantists began teaching the language to their children, and a first generation of native speakers sprang up. Among their number was George Soros, the son of a prominent Hungarian lawyer who had helped found an Esperantist literary journal in Budapest. Soros used the occasion of the 1947 congress, in Bern, to escape to the West.
“But the history of Esperanto has been far from smooth. The movement was divided from the start. Esperanto attracted leftists and freethinkers of various stripes—Goebbels called it ‘a language of Jews and communists,’ not entirely inaccurately—and the majority of those people, like Zamenhof, conceived of the language as an ethical program. But many others were interested in it primarily as a linguistic novelty. French intellectuals, in particular, were put off by Zamenhof’s brotherhood-of-man effusions, as became clear at the first international congress, in 1905, which was held in Boulogne-sur-Mer.”
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Image of the Day: Lago di Braies
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Poem: Jennifer Reeser, “Homeland”
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