Reviews and News:
The imaginary island of O Brazil: “O Brazil, or Hy-Brasil as it was frequently was labeled, had haunted maps since the 14th century, first as a mistake, then as a mythological tribute. Its size and shape often morphed, its location wandered from Ireland to North America, and its name varied, but for five centuries it endured in Western cartography.”
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The idealism of Henry Kissinger.
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Ian McEwan’s Nutshell—a “screw you to his detractors,” perhaps, but also a “gripping” story.
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Dostoevsky and Tolstoy in Russia: “Across the street from the courtyard of the building where Raskolnikov, the main character of Crime and Punishment, was supposed to have lived is a store named Raskolnikov Grocery. Painted on its window is an ax, a reference to the murder weapon.”
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Bees and us: “The Dancing Bees is unusual in that it is a dual biography. It tells the story of Frisch, a German zoologist who learned of his Jewish ancestry well into World War II while teaching at the University of Munich. Faced with the prospect of losing his livelihood—and possibly his life—Frisch managed to rally friends and colleagues to advocate on behalf of his bee research and to insist upon his devotion to the Reich. Unlike many Jewish scientists, Frisch managed to keep his position and continued to work, largely for the Nazi government, until the war’s end. But Frisch is not the main focus. Munz seems reluctant to speculate or cast judgment on his character, challenges, or personal life. Instead, the book centers on bees—as Munz calls them, Frisch’s ‘ideal organisms.’ The Dancing Bees serves primarily as a history of the world’s changing attitude toward bees, and an examination of Frisch’s own perspective on his favorite insects.”
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A. M. Juster and reconnecting poetry with the reading public.
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Essay of the Day:
In The Fortnightly Review, Alan Wall examines Wittgenstein’s view of certainty and style:
“Wittgenstein came from the Vienna of Adolf Loos and Karl Kraus. The architect and the satirist both had something in common: the conviction that style was the expression of morality, not a mere confection that might be assembled above it. Style was the ultimate expression of identity. A confused or deceitful style meant a confused or deceitful person. Wittgenstein indicates several times in Culture and Value that good style is integral to good philosophising; he appears to be announcing how style, when well-fashioned, facilitates and exhibits thought. But he says more than that: he insists that style is a spiritual achievement, that the pellucidity of expression we call style can be distinguished from mere fashion only by the full engagement of the spirit. In writing, style is the economic alignment of linguistic resource and authorial intention. It is technical virtuosity allied to acceleration of spirit. The stylist in written form needs to be alert to language; its resonance, density and promise. And style (in its variegated protocols and requirements) precedes the author. It is then a two-way transaction, between the language and the individual, the individual and the intellectual matrix in which he is situated; it is a Janus-faced accomplishment, a negotiation between tradition and the individual talent.
“To become an accomplished stylist is most certainly not to behave unilaterally towards your linguistic environment; that might mark you out as a Dadaist, a Tristan Tzara, assaulting the language in protest at its lethal instrumentalism in coordinating the Great War. It is instead to take the full force of the historical language as it presents itself synchronically and diachronically, and learn to find your individual way inside and through it. Every stylist, whatever else he is, must be a minotaur in the linguistic labyrinth into which he has been inserted; that Dasein of which Heidegger speaks.
“Style is not an egotistical imposition on language, but rather its lucid and efficient habitation. It is a way of grasping how language and usage, the dictionary and the street hawker, express between them a ‘form of life’ that must be mentally inhabited if it is to be linguistically exploited. The achievement of style is the lucid and effective insertion of one’s individual ability into the world of linguistic possibility.”
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Image of the Day: Harvest Moon over Brno
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Poem: Jean L. Kreiling, “Six Inventions after J.S. Bach”
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