Saturday, October 15, 2022

The river of time - Milan Kundera's library

It's so easy for propaganda to work, and dissent to be mocked.

— Harold Pinter, born in 1930


Childhood days spent on the beach, or around rivers, can have significant benefits for our mental health and wellbeing in adulthood, according to a study.

Children who spend more time in blue spaces likely to have better mental health as an adult, study suggests



Have you ever turned to music when struggling with a difficult emotion, like sadness, anxiety or anger? 

Most people believe that music has some therapeutic power, and that confidence is increasingly backed by empirical evidence. However, there remains little consensus on precisely how or why music has an ability to influence our emotional, physical and mental well-being.

Dark Side of the Moon
 addresses aging, death, fear, greed, and violence. Is it the sound of StoicismSounds of The Moon »

Has there ever been a more confounding case of intellectual celebrity than Thomas Piketty Thomas Piketty »



     Milan Kundera's library 


       They've been carting away Milan Kundera's library for a while now, but now the last of it is gone from his Paris home and arrived in Brno and its Moravian Regional Library on Friday. 
       As Thomas McEnchroe and Martin Balucha report at Radio Prague International, “The flat is completely empty now”: Milan Kundera’s library moves to Brno
       They quote Kundera's wife, Věra:
The flat is completely empty now. I can prove that to you with a photograph. It’s quite terrible and hard to see, those two lives that are now gone. Those lives left together with the library, with the archive.
       See also the Czech News Agency report in Brno DailySecond Half of Milan Kundera's Library Transported To Brnoand the library press release

       Gotta feel for the old guy -- 93 now ! -- the Nobel announcement last week (he didn't win, yet again) and now all his books gone ...




       Shehan Karunatilaka Q & A 

       In The Guardian Shehan Karunatilaka has a Q & A with the author of Chinaman and the Booker Prize-shortlisted The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida, in Shehan Karunatilaka: ‘There’s a Sri Lankan gallows humour… we’ve been through a lot of catastrophes’
       Among the non-literary responses:
I had a couple of grunge bands in the 90s and will probably start a midlife crisis band soon. Over the past couple of years, I’ve played piano, bass and guitar. I’m even thinking of getting a drum kit, much to my wife’s horror. I don’t think there’s going to be an album. The Dark Side of the Seven Moons ...



       Yoshio Osakabe Q & A 

       In The Japan Times Thu-Huong Ha has a Q & A with Yoshio Osakabe: ‘There are probably a lot of old fans who actually don't want Murakami to win the Nobel’ -- himself a harukisuto, a big fan of the man who, yet again, did not win the big prize. 


What drives cultural change? Status, according to W. David Marx – the need for it and the fear of losing it  Kulture »


The movie Rebel Without a Causeopened a month after its star James Dean fatally crashed his racing car. Viewers knew they were watching a ghost. So too with MoMA’s 1972 Arbus show. A photograph may be a memento mori. Here, each photo reflected back on its maker. “She must have been a mess—no wonder she killed herself,” sniffed the dean of British fashion photographers, Sir Cecil Beaton

Surrealist ethnographer, tragic humanist, sensation-seeking existentialist: Who was Diane Arbus Arbus »


Abolish the family! The nuclear family is a terrible way to organize and fulfill our emotional and economic needs, a new book argues Nuclear Family »