Reviews and News:
Archaeologist claims to have found Aristotle’s grave. All the evidence is circumstantial.
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Helen Keller loved pit bulls. So did James Thurber and Teddy Roosevelt. How did the breed become so feared?
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How did yoga come to the West? We can thank “Indra Devi”: “Devi was born Eugenia Peterson in Riga, Latvia in 1899, the daughter of a Russian aristocrat and a Swedish banker. She first came across the word ‘yoga’ in her early teens. This was in Moscow, in 1914, when the elites of Russia’s silver age entertained a fascination with the esoteric…According to Goldberg, more than 800 occult books appeared in Russia between 1891 and 1918. Devi, browsing in the library of a friend of her mother’s, discovered a book called Fourteen Lessons in Yogi Philosophy and Oriental Occultism. The author, ‘Yogi Ramacharaka’, was in fact from Chicago – a man named William Walker Atkinson, a leader in the proto-self-help movement known as New Thought, and author of such titles as Thought Force in Business and Everyday Life.”
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The relevance of Flaubert’s Sentimental Education: “It’s not just that American politics have become unexceptional and European, with the rise of a socialist alternative on the left, blood-and-soil populism on the right, and an unheroic, complacent establishment trying to preserve the center. It’s that so much of what Flaubert dramatizes about 1848 seems relevant to our own day—not least the uneasy relationship between Parisian elites and the country’s working classes.”
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The reality of Islamic Spain: “The author of this volume—a professor of Spanish and Portuguese studies at Northwestern—wrote it with provocative intent. But whether The Myth of the Andalusian Paradise will stimulate the academic and media debate he desires cannot be predicted. Darío Fernández-Morera’s arguments are undermined by the stridency of some of them, the novelty of others, and, for close readers, his failure to resolve ambiguities in Spanish Islamic history.”
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Walt Whitman on remembering the dead.
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Essay of the Day:
In Spiked, Patrick West looks at the two Ray Bradburys – the “ethereal prophet of the future” and “the Bradbury who depicted calamity and doom”:
“Fahrenheit 451 was launched upon a world in which book burning was in living memory. It also emerged in a United States that was distressed about Communism and what its citizens were reading or watching. Fahrenheit 451 also speaks of, and to, a culture that was becoming more superficial and philistine, in which television screens cover entire walls, where, in the words of the fire-chief Beatty: ‘School is shortened, discipline relaxed, philosophies, languages dropped, English and spelling gradually neglected… Life is immediate… Why learn anything save pressing buttons, pulling switches.’ Bradbury had expressed his disquiet at ‘the great centrifuge of radio, television, pre-thought-out movies, and so forth. Give us no time to “stop and stare”.’ How prescient these words and Fahrenheit 451 sound today, in a 21st century of shrinking attention spans and the proliferation of electronic screens.”
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Image of the Day: Tellaro
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Poem: Len Krisak, “Concert at Sunrise House”
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