Reviews and News:
Marc Chagall’s struggle with fatherhood: “‘Forgive me,’ Chagall would write in the early version of his autobiography, around 1921, addressing himself to his daughter, ‘for not mentioning you sooner and not coming to mother in the hospital until four days after you were born. A shame. I thought of a boy and it turned out the opposite … and at night, when you screamed for no reason, I hurled you in the bed. … It’s terrible.'”
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500-year-old Albrecht Dürer engraving found in French flea market.
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Medieval castle to be sold for the first time ever: “Castel Valer, a lavishly decorated medieval castle in northern Italy, which has been owned by the same family who obtained the estate in the fourteenth century, is set to be sold at auction on 8th September 2016.”
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Discovered in 2013, Hawaiian Sign Language may soon disappear for good: “In 2013, at a conference on endangered languages, a retired teacher named Linda Lambrecht announced the extraordinary discovery of a previously unknown language. Lambrecht—who is Chinese-Hawaiian, 71 years old, warm but no-nonsense—called it Hawaii Sign Language, or HSL. In front of a room full of linguists, she demonstrated that its core vocabulary—words such as ‘mother’, ‘pig’ and ‘small’—was distinct from that of other sign languages… But just as linguists were substantiating its existence, HSL stood on the brink of extinction, remembered by just a handful of signers. Unless the language made a miraculous recovery, Lambrecht feared that her announcement might turn out to be HSL’s obituary.”
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400-year-old sharks: “In 1620, the Mayflower set off from Plymouth, carrying hopeful pilgrims to the New World. As it sailed over the Atlantic, it passed over deep, cold waters, where baby Greenland sharks were starting out their lives. Those youngsters slowly grew into giants. And if a new study is right, some of them are still alive today.”
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The other modern American master: “Sargent and Chase, often with their older contemporary Whistler, were frequently mentioned in the same breath by late-nineteenth century critics. All three reflected the same internationalist trend in American art, albeit with important differences among them. All three were influenced by European avant-garde movements, including what came to be known as Impressionism, and by the aestheticist trend that came along with the rejection of academic art, history painting, and the like—”art for art’s sake,” as Whistler would have put it. Of the three, today Chase is perhaps the least well known. He was also the least likely of the group to have come to international prominence in the first place.”
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Essay of the Day:
In 1953 Henry Molaison received an experimental operation that “rendered him profoundly amnesiac, unable to hold on to the present moment for more than 30 seconds.” He was the subject of Suzanne Corkin’s research at M.I.T. for over 40 years. Luke Dittrich examines the complicated relationship between Corkin and Molaison:
“As the experiments piled up and the data accumulated, Henry became a boon not just to science but also to Corkin’s career. She started her own lab at M.I.T., and although she and her colleagues conducted research in a number of areas, the papers that generated the most attention were always the ones about Henry. When they first met, Corkin was a young graduate student in her 20s. She grew older. She became a renowned professor of neuroscience at one of the world’s greatest universities. Henry grew older, too, though he wasn’t exactly aware of it. In Henry’s later years, people were always asking him how old he thought he was, and he would make a series of guesses. Was he in his 30s, his 40s, his 50s? He had only the vaguest sense of the passage of time. Then someone might pass him a mirror and watch him gaze into his own elderly eyes. ‘I’m not a boy,’ he would say, finally.
“Henry died on a winter afternoon in 2008. The next morning, Corkin peered through a window into an autopsy room at Massachusetts General Hospital, watching as two men cut off the top of Henry’s skull. For 46 years, Corkin had been having her one-sided meetings with Henry, endlessly introducing herself to an old friend. Now she was having one last encounter that only she would remember. The men carefully pulled out Henry’s brain, and Corkin gazed at it through the glass, marveling at this object she had spent her career considering at one step removed.
“Later, reflecting on that moment, Corkin could think of only one word to describe her feelings. She was, she wrote, ‘ecstatic.’
“It would be reasonable to assume that the strange relationship between Suzanne Corkin and Henry Molaison ended that day, but that assumption would be wrong. As it turned out, some of the most astonishing, and troubling, episodes in the long saga of Suzanne Corkin and Henry Molaison were still to come.”
Read the rest. (M.I.T. faculty respond to the essay here)
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Image of the Day: Britain
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Poem: Maryann Corbett, “Incantation for Sprained Foot”
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