Sunday, December 10, 2023

Botanical garden of ideas: One thing leads to another

      Live every day as your last, because one of these days, it will be.

— Jonathan Swift, born in 1667


Ancient redwoods recover from fire by sprouting 1000-year-old buds Science



Botanical garden of ideas


“It is the novel’s capacity, at its best, to illustrate the complexity of life that is its glory, for no other literary or artistic genre can do so. The novel is a kind of vaccine against the terribles simplificateurs who are the bane, or at least a bane, of this world, the kind of people who think that they have found the key to life as Mrs Baker Eddy thought that she had found the key to the Scriptures, or Baconians think that they have found the key to Shakespeare.”

'At Least When Practised By a Master'


 (Australian) Prime Minister's Literary Awards 

       Creative Australia has announced the winners of this year's Prime Minister's Literary Awards, "the richest literary prize in the nation". 
       Jessica Au's many-prizes-winning Cold Enough for Snowracks up another one, winning in the fiction category; prizes were also handed out in five other categories. 


       Damion Searls on translating Jon Fosse 

       I have a copy but haven't yet reviewed Nobel laureate Jon Fosse's A Shining, and at Asymptote Georgina Fooks now has a Q & A with the translator, in Casting the Spell: Damion Searls on Translating Jon Fosse's A Shining
       Well worthwhile, including for such points as:
(F)or better or for worse (mainly for worse), English is the language that matters professionally for world literature. A German publisher told me a couple of years ago that if they have a book, they can get it translated into five or six languages, but it’s not until it gets a review in the Guardian UK or in the New Yorker that they can sell it to twenty or thirty languages—and they also told me that this is increasingly the case. English really is the gateway to bigger success for every other language; it’s not going to be a worldwide, translated-everywhere success unless it goes through English first.


 

Articles of Note

The heart of the task for any poet, according to Czeslaw Milosz, is bearing what is borne by others... more »


New Books

The topic of how one’s life connects to one’s aesthetic judgments is a fraught one. Consider Sasha Frere-Jones... more »


Essays & Opinions

Flaubert was once described as a “martyr of literary style.” His letters reveal just how apt that assessment was... more »


Dec. 7, 2023

Articles of Note

Betty Friedan, the “iron mask of machismo,” the feminine mystique, and how far we have – and have not – come... more »


New Books

“We can understand a culture by what it calls monstrous; the monster stands for everything a society attempts to cast out”... more »


Essays & Opinions

The art world is full of grifters, fakers, thieves, and critics on the make. Monet knew instinctively how to play the game... more »


Dec. 6, 2023

Articles of Note

In June 1968, a who’s who of poets convened on Long Island. They ate lobster, drank vodka, and brawled... more »


New Books

Why did Janet Malcolm, late in life, confess to a prolonged extramarital affair with her New Yorker editor, decades after the fact?... more »


Essays & Opinions

Critics' lives are deskbound, confined to their thoughts and other people’s art. What drives them to it?... more »


Dec. 5, 2023

Articles of Note

John Gray: “If you think in what are called secular terms, you can’t really understand the world that we now live in”... more »


New Books

“As the centuries passed, what men of erudition had once considered ‘magic’ increasingly began to look like ‘technology’”... more »


Essays & Opinions

Ideology,” a word coined during the French Revolution, was declared dead by Daniel Bell in 1960. Now ideologies are roaring back to life... more »


Dec. 4, 2023

Articles of Note

Karl Ove Knausgård, Dag Solstad, Jon Fosse — Norway has become a literary superpower... more »


New Books

Derek Parfit believed we should live more impersonally. By ignoring his friends and family, he lived up — or, rather, down — to this principle... more »


Essays & Opinions

Objective measures are our most effective weapon against racism and sexism, says Steven Pinker: blind auditions, traffic cameras, SAT... more »


Dec. 1, 2023

Articles of Note

Beware the sensitivity read. For some publishers words like “foreign,” “God,” “nerd,” and “freshman” are off limits... more »


New Books

In 1966, Philip Rieff labeled and lambasted “therapeutic culture.” It is ever more apparent he was on to something... more »


Essays & Opinions

Are there objectively correct answers to the big philosophical questions? A meta-ethicist makes the case that there are... more »