Jonathan Perelman
Merivale's Coogee Pavilion has been a tremendous success over the past few years
The name Coogee is taken from a local Aboriginal word koojah which means "smelly place" owing to the amount of seaweed that can collect on the beach
Like many poets, Warren is a scavenger and inheritor, and her life has been shaped by two powerful influences: the shared human legacy of classical literature—ancient Greek and Latin poetry infuse her work at an almost cellular level—and her own family history. She is the daughter of two celebrated writers: the poet and novelist Robert Penn Warren, and essayist and novelist Eleanor Clark.
Dictatorships conform to type. “We can control him,” for instance, is the perennial belief of the soon-to-be-killed collaborator... Totalitarian Psychopaths
'A Happy Nothing in the Face of Everything'
No institution open to individual citizens, public or private, is as essential as the library, and none is so undervalued and vulnerable. This judgment is personal. Without libraries, I might be nearly as aliterate (OED: “unwilling to read, although able to do so; disinclined to read”) as many of my contemporaries. Our house was almost bokeless, to use Milton’s word. Reading was not my family’s default mode. In partial defense of my parents, they too were raised by people who could but didn’t read. Books, I sense, were a reproach, a reminder that their educations had been cut short by war, work and circumstance. They prized other sorts of competence, not scholarship, not “book learning.”
A bibliophile’s paradise – the National Library of France - Vox Populi – “Before there was the internet, there was la Bibliothèque nationale de France (the National Library of France) in Paris: an ever-expanding collection of books, manuscripts, maps and other cultural artifacts that has been operating continuously since the 15th century. The documentary Toute la mémoire du monde (All the Memory in the World), made by the influential and celebrated French filmmaker Alain Resnais in 1956, is an astounding tour of the institution before digitisation, when the world’s largest well of information wasn’t at our fingertips, but fastidiously collected and sorted behind library walls. Resnais focuses not only on the imposing scope of the library’s holdings, but also explores the vast enterprise of maintaining it for centuries to come, as well as the facility’s role as a bustling home for curiosity and enquiry. Through moody black-and-white cinematography of the library’s collection, architecture and meticulous processes, the film explores a place that, like human knowledge itself, is ‘destined to be forever a work in progress’. A dramatic score by Maurice Jarre – by turns pulsing, soaring and delicate – acts as a further guide through the labyrinth of the library, and the film itself.” Director: Alain Resnais
The first happily momentous day in my life came in September 1970 when, at age seventeen, I entered for the first time the library at Bowling Green State University in Ohio. The sensation resembled the rush a glutton feels before a feast. I’m not overdramatizing when I say I trembled. For the first time I knew I could find any book I wanted, knowledge that filled me with something like Blake’s “lineaments of Gratified Desire.” In “Reading Like a Child,” Sarah Ruden, poet and translator of Virgil and St. Augustine, recalls her introduction to the Widener Library at Harvard, “that Rhodes Colossus of learning”:
“I was a raiding mouse, a tiny bat foraging in neglected aisles. You could get anything in and through Widener, only occasionally having to seek outside the university through interlibrary loan.”
Early on, my pleasure, and Ruden’s, was spiced with guilt, the product of doing something once discouraged if not forbidden. I was fortunate. Forty-nine years ago I knew how I would spend much of the rest of my life. Ruden writes:
“But I want, as far as possible, to keep reading like a child, beneath the eagle’s wings, on the son of God’s lap, a happy nothing in the face of everything. It is too wonderful for me.”
A couple of months ago, when I tweeted a link to an article in the Observer that heralded “a new wave of Italian crime writers,” I quickly received a flurry of replies insisting that, of the writers mentioned therein, Gianrico Carofiglio was the one whose work I must sample without delay. One of my correspondents went so far as to dub Guido Guerrieri, the character at the centre of Carofiglio’s series of legal thrillers, “an Italian Philip Marlowe.”
Intrigued as I was by this description, it initially struck me as unlikely, given how thoroughly a product of 1930s and 40s Los Angeles Raymond Chandler’s Marlowe seems to me to be. But even if Marlowe is rooted in his time and place, noir certainly travels. The success of Akashic Books’ marvelous noir anthologies which serve up hardboiled crime stories from every corner of the globe amply demonstrates that point. It was undoubtedly the noir quality of Carofiglio’s books which my correspondent was lauding and, having now read Involuntary Witness, the first book featuring world-weary criminal defense lawyer Guido Guerrieri, I can echo the recommendation of him as a most intriguing noir antihero.
At the beginning of the book, Guerrieri’s wife leaves him and, despite the fact that he hadn’t seemed particularly invested in his marriage, this provokes something of a breakdown. It’s an existential crisis. Guerrieri hasn’t lost his life’s purpose so much as the illusion that he had a purpose in life. Work provides no counter-balance to his unraveling personal life for, there too, he realizes he has long been deluding himself. He had not become a lawyer out of a passion for justice as he had sometimes tried to convince himself. Rather, he “had become a lawyer by sheer chance, because [he] had found nothing better to do or wasn’t up to looking for it.” He had just been marking time in practice, “waiting for [his] ideas to clarify.” His wife’s departure brings a now unwelcome clarity: “Then the lid blew off and from the pan emerged a lot of things I had never imagined and didn’t want to see. That no one would want to see.”
40 - Forty Years of the Computer Revolution | The American Spectator
And it’s the young who are the easiest audience, since one of the things we do understand is that the neural pathways in the brain are not well formed until late adolescence. No wonder Steve Jobs and a surprising number of other seminal figures in the computer revolution limited screen time for their children. They wanted to protect their own families from the devices they were becoming wealthy by producing.
After seven decades of cuttings, failures, plant enzymes, a little coaxing, and a Māori blessing, one of the world's rarest trees—which lives on a tiny island 40 miles off the northern edge of New Zealand—might lose its title. And that's a good thing
The Story of the World’s Loneliest Tree National Geographic
The Quiet Death Of A Legendary Paris Bookstore (And The Rising Rents That Are To Blame)
Inside the last days of Le Pont Traversé – and the economics of a flashy Paris encroaching on the heart of the literary city. The shop is especially known for its poetry. “A few months ago, a gang of young women came in looking for female poets like Marceline Desbordes-Valmore and Yanette Delétang-Tardif—considerably lesser known than their male contemporaries, but now revived thanks to French bloggers writing on poetry ‘Their enthusiasm is extraordinary,’ marveled Josée. ‘I feel that when young people fall in love with writers today, they fall hard.'” – Literary Hub 12.20.19
Five Historians Claim Errors In The NYTimes’ Groundbreaking “1619” Project. The Times Responds
Raising profound, unsettling questions about slavery and the nation’s past and present, as The 1619 Project does, is a praiseworthy and urgent public service. Nevertheless, we are dismayed at some of the factual errors in the project and the closed process behind it. – New York Times Magazine Read the story in New York Times Magazine
What’s Behind Historians’ Arguments Over The New York Times 1619 Project
The Changing Faces Of America’s Libraries
“If you haven’t been in a public library lately, you probably wouldn’t recognize where you were if you entered one tomorrow. This is no longer, as I wrote early on, your mother’s library. The books are still there, the readers are still there, the librarians are still there. But sharing the same space are children busy with all kinds of active—and sometimes noisy—programs, inventors in maker-spaces, historians and amateurs researching genealogy, job-seekers scouring the internet, homeless people settling in quietly for the day, women and a few men heading to the yoga space, others watching movies, young entrepreneurs grabbing lattes… – The Atlantic
