Reviews and News:
Mark Twain was a great writer but a terrible businessman: “He lost money on an engraving process, on a magnetic telegraph, on a steam pulley, on the Fredonia Watch Company, on railroad stocks. He once turned down a chance to buy into Bell Telephone even though he had one of the nation’s first residential phones. The author eventually lost so much money that in 1891 he moved the family out of their Hartford home; Twain would sell it after twenty years for about one-sixth the amount he put into it.”
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This year is the 400th anniversary of both Shakespeare’s and Cervantes’s death. Numerous events mark the bard’s passing in England. In Spain, there are a handful of readings and tours celebrating Cervantes, but he has been mostly ignored. Why?
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Michael Dirda reviews Ward Farnsworth’s entertaining and instructive compendium of metaphors.
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Damien Hirst’s work is toxic—literally. It has been discovered that his pickled animals are leaking carcinogenic fumes.
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New York’s Guggenheim Museum will install an 18-karat gold toilet made by Maurizio Cattelan in one of its bathrooms in May.
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How the French learned to stop worrying and love the police: “A record number of people have applied to join the French police force over the past year. Many new recruits say the recent attacks in Paris inspired them to sign up. It also seems that the shootings have made the country rethink its attitude towards the police.”
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Essay of the Day:
In Modern Age, R. V. Young considers what it means to say that Shakespeare and Cervantes were masters of realism:
“In order to account for the unique place held by Shakespeare and Cervantes, both early influences on the development of realism, it is necessary to reconsider what is meant by the real. At its best, literature—drama, narrative, and the various forms of lyrical and satirical writing, whether in prose or verse—mediates between an objective world, existing independently of human perception or even awareness, and our conscious experience and imaginative apprehension of that world. Both are elements of reality, but we are perennially tempted to incline toward the one or the other, to regard either the ideal realm of our own minds or the concrete fact of the material universe as the exclusive domain of the real. The movement of literary fashion reflects this dichotomy, but Shakespeare and Cervantes transcend it.”
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Image of the Day: Shakespeare in art
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Poem: Les Murray, “Growth”
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