Thursday, November 5, 2009

Potpourri (Nov. 5, 09)

This photo is from the Life Magazine archive (highly recommended for quality browsing)

Margaret Atwood, Duchess of Wit

Kermode on Golding: "Matty, as Golding himself said, was the character who binds together so many of his concerns: sanctity, the uncanny, the numinous."

'Her fascination with mysticism, math, and Spinoza' -- podcast of an interview with Clarice Lispector's biographer

A look back at Ford's Good Soldier in The Hindu: "The Good Soldier is a novel about brittle social graces that mask savage hatreds"

Someone's starting a group discussion of Gaddis' Recognitions. "The plan ... is to read between 75-100 pages per week. Each week there will be one post or open thread...."

A reminiscence of Claude Levi-Strauss

Review of The Angel of History: Rosenzweig, Benjamin, Scholem

Aussie radio posts a tribute to (and an old interview with) Sir Isaiah Berlin

Forthcoming Thomas Bernhard books

Mr. Waggish and Kleist on speech and thought

A timely study of timeless myths (Plato's myths)

Pics of Bela Lugosi as Jesus

More police blogs (and another that was shut down), and paramedic blogs, and a magistrate's blog, and a bit from The Times (UK) on career bloggers

British career bloggers seem more bitter, esp. about intrusive, nannyish bureaucracy ('creeping managerialism' is the vice du jour), and you hear a similarly resentful tone even in the musings of British philosophers

Retrospectives of the past 40-100 years in brain studies, in physics, and in psychology

Appearance (curve-ball illusion) and reality (e.g., a ribosome's relative tiny-ness)

The Wellcome Library posts 1917 footage of British shell-shock victims. (Also available on YouTube.)

No comments: