Reviews and News:
Roald Dahl’s letters to his mother: “The whole world knows Roald Dahl as the creator of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Matilda and the unspeakably disgusting Twits. His characters are marked by a wickedly mocking view of the adult world (a sine qua non for any children’s writer of worth), an imagination that knows no rules and at times a distinct whiff of cruelly funny misanthropy.
In his letters home to his mother…we see Dahl’s talent being born.”
* *
Clive James’s verse commentary on Proust: “[W]hat is James trying to do? He jokes that he has made a good living out of dying. He has been prolific: his recent output – two books of criticism, a Collected Poems, a translation of Dante, and now this – is part of a great burst of late fruition. This book is not as slight as it looks, nor indeed as dependent on its pretext (Proust) as it appears. It is not a commentary in any but the vaguest sense, and is full of skittering side references to the world beyond Proust.”
* *
Yale English students call on faculty to replace a required course sequence on major English poets with one that focuses on “literatures relating to gender, race, sexuality, ableism, and ethnicity.” “The Major English Poets sequences creates [sic] a culture that is especially hostile to students of color,” the students claim.
* *
Study confirms that King Tut’s dagger was made from a meteorite.
* *
* *
2000-year-old tablets discovered in London: “The wooden tablets, preserving the faint marks of the words written on bees wax with a metal stylus almost 2,000 years ago, are the oldest handwritten documents ever found in the UK.”
* *
Essay of the Day:
In The Public Domain Review, Je Wilson revisits Francis van Helmont’s idea of a universal “natural” language:
“In the frontispiece to his father’s book, The Origin of Medicine, published in 1648, there’s an engraving of a young Francis van Helmont. Tucked into a bizarre overlapping portrait, he peeks out at the reader from behind his famous father’s head, his right eye entirely obscured by the elder Van Helmont’s left ear.
“Francis’ father was Jan Baptist van Helmont, the Flemish chemist, doctor, and alchemist who is credited with founding the study of gases, and who claimed to be the first to use the word ‘gas’ scientifically. After an early clash with the Inquisition, which didn’t like some of his nuttier medical ideas, Jan opted to play it safe and asked his son Francis to publish the bulk of his writing after his death. Dutifully complying, Francis squeezes into the picture. Orbited by the heraldic shields of his ancestors, he cozies up to Dad as if ready to take on this intellectual bequest: he will be the Van Helmont, his father’s true heir, for the rest of the seventeenth century.
“In some sense, this was accurate. Born in Brussels in 1614 and dying at the end of the century in 1699, Francis left his mark on the era — no less a luminary than Gottfried Leibniz wrote his epitaph — but his historical influence was slight and he is now largely forgotten. He makes an appearance, here and there, thanks mainly to his role in editing his father’s work. As late as 1911, an encyclopedia entry on Jan acknowledges that debt, but in mentioning Francis only scoffs at the ‘wilder confusion’ of ‘mystical theosophy and alchemy’ in his writings.
“And yet Francis, in his own day, was a celebrated physician, innovator, diplomat, and religious thinker, who was friends with the philosopher John Locke and the chemist Robert Boyle, and about whom Leibniz wrote: ‘If such a man had been born among the Greeks / He would now be numbered among the stars’. Leibniz actually ghostwrote Francis’ last book, Thoughts on Genesis, while Francis himself contributed to Leibniz’s metaphysical idea of the monad. Although it’s somewhat hard, after four centuries, to see the younger Van Helmont’s ‘stellar’ substance, he was the type of person whose sphere of influence is local and immediate. His ideas generated more excitement in person than they did on paper. Friends found his conversation inspiring and original, and they admired his moral fiber. One, Henry More, even wept at the thought of his ‘goodness’, saying that Francis van Helmont could ‘draw moisture from flint’. Over the centuries, his influence has seeped down without notice, only to surface unexpectedly here and there. His religious ideas and translations were, for instance, instrumental in shaping the theologian and mystic Emanuel Swedenborg, whose own writing profoundly affected people as various as Emerson, Jung, Balzac, Strindberg, and Henry James, Sr.”
* *
Image of the Day: Mount Fuji
* *
Poem: Ed Shacklee, “Burn”
Get Prufrock in your inbox every weekday morning. Subscribe here.
