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The ‘Dramatic Picture’ of Richard Feynman by Freeman Dyson | The New York Review of Books
In the last hundred years, since radio and television created the modern worldwide mass-market entertainment industry, there have been two scientific superstars, Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking. Lesser lights such as Carl Sagan and Neil Tyson and Richard Dawkins have a big public following, but they are not in the same class as Einstein and Hawking. Sagan, Tyson, and Dawkins have fans who understand their message and are excited by their science. Einstein and Hawking have fans who understand almost nothing about science and are excited by their personalities. On the whole, the public shows good taste in its choice of idols.
C andida (pronounced Can -dih-duh) Donadio, who would become Heller’s new agent, was about 24 years old, Brooklyn-born, from a family of Italian immigrants. She rarely spoke about what she implied was a grim Sicilian Catholic upbringing. Short and plump, her black hair in a tight bun, she’d fix her brown eyes on people she’d just met and startle them with some bawdy remark, delivered in an unusually deep voice. “She had more synonyms for excrement than anyone you’d ever run across,” says Cork Smith, Thomas Pynchon’s first editor. She liked to say the primary task of a literary agent was to “polish silver.” She claimed she would have loved to have been a Carmelite nun.
The War for Catch-22 | Culture | Vanity Fair
In October of 1973, Bruce Severy — a 26-year-old English teacher at Drake High School, North Dakota — decided to use Kurt Vonnegut 's novel, Slaughterhouse-Five , as a teaching aid in his classroom. The next month, on November 7th, the head of the school board, Charles McCarthy, demanded that all 32 copies be burned in the school's furnace as a result of its "obscene language." Other books soon met with the same fate. I am writing to you in your capacity as chairman of the Drake School Board.
Letters of Note: I am very real
It would be an interesting experiment to sit someone down in a chair and present them with a copy of Edouard Levé’s Suicide from which front and back covers, promotional blurb, author bio, translator’s afterword and other such paratextual trimmings had all been removed. Such a reader, blinkered against the novel’s context, might well find it a strange and unnerving and hypnotic read, but it would, in an important sense, be a very different experience to the one that awaits every other person who picks up Levé’s final work. Ten days after he submitted the manuscript of Suicide to his editor at the age of 42, the author killed himself. And this fact, which is presented to us on the back cover (and also, naturally enough, in everything that has since been written about the book), isn’t something we can choose not to take with us into the fiction.
The Millions : Edouard Levéâs ‘Suicide’ and Edouard Levéâs Suicide
Fifty-Two Stories » 25. The Truth Is a Cave in the Black Mountains
You ask me if I can forgive myself? I can forgive myself for many things. For where I left him. For what I did. But I will not forgive myself for the year that I hated my daughter, when I believed her to have run away, perhaps to the city.
Most people know that Emily Dickinson was a great poet, but it takes a deep plunge into her collected poems to realize just how staggeringly great she was. Usually represented in classrooms by a handful of brilliant but overfamiliar lyrics (“ Because I could not stop for Death ,” “ There’s a certain Slant of light ,” etc.), she in fact wrote hundreds of poems of comparable quality, most of them within the span of just three or four years. During the years 1861–64 she produced, on average, a poem every two days, turning out masterpieces the way some people turn out diary entries. This output is as much a neurological mystery as a literary feat, and I think it deserves an anniversary celebration.
Emily Dickinson, Erotic Grief Counselor | Book Think | Big Think
Britain’s biggest teaching unions have set a collision course with the Government after voting for further industrial action including strikes which could hit schools this summer. The National Union of Teachers will seek a one-day national strike before the end of June, while the NASUWT agreed that intensifying its own campaign was “essential” in the face of a “vicious and unjustified assault on teachers”. Continued industrial action was “the best means of protecting and safeguarding the interests of teachers and state education until the next general election,” said the NASUWT. Their vote raises the prospect of strikes in the autumn term. Both unions are protesting at changes to teachers’ pensions which they say will see their members paying more, working longer and receiving less. The NASUWT is also campaigning against job losses and an erosion of working conditions.
George Bernard Shaw and the despots by Stanley Weintraub - TLS
AN UNEXPECTED ALLIANCE | More Intelligent Life
The second volume of T.S. Eliot’s letters was recently published by Yale University Press, with new materials and previously unpublished missives. This is as good a time as any to reflect on Eliot’s most fascinating correspondent. Ezra Pound? Well, no. James Joyce?
Edward Thomas, Robert Frost and the road to war | Books | The Guardian
Edward Thomas and Robert Frost were sitting on an orchard stile near Little Iddens, Frost's cottage in Gloucestershire, in 1914, when word arrived that Britain had declared war on Germany. The two men wondered idly whether they might be able to hear the guns from their corner of the county. They had no idea of the way in which this war would come between them. In six months, Frost would flee England for the safety of New Hampshire; he would take Thomas's son with him in the expectation that the rest of the Thomas family would follow. So close was the friendship that had developed between them that Thomas and Frost planned to live side by side in America, writing, teaching, farming.
On the evening of October 30, 1938, radio listeners in the greater New York area settled in for a broadcast of "Ramon Raquello" and his orchestra. Suddenly the performance was interrupted by the host, who explained that he had a special bulletin from "Intercontinental Radio News." Perhaps a few listeners scratched their heads and wondered what Intercontinental Radio News was, but apparently not many. Mysterious explosions of "incandescent gas" had been observed on Mars through various telescopes, IRN reported. Next a bulletin came in of strange aerial vehicles in various parts of the country and weird, creepy creatures popping out of them.
Rise of the Machines: why we keep coming back to H.G. Wells' visions of a dystopian future
On a December night in 1905, the New York City chapter of the Society of Illustrators managed to do something many thought impossible. With one calculated stroke they left Mark Twain, author and noted quipster, speechless. The writer had just risen to address the group. As he began to speak, a girl emerged from the back of the room. Her hair was cropped just below her ears; her face was angular but radiant. Underneath a ceremonial white robe, she wore the armor of a 15th-century French soldier.
The Riddle Of Mark Twain's Passion For Joan Of Arc | The Awl
Illustration of Christopher Hitchens by Sturt Krygsman Source: The Australian LAST year, just before he was diagnosed with advanced oesophageal cancer, Christopher Hitchens published the unexpectedly moving memoir Hitch-22. "I soon enough realised when young," he revealed in that book, "that I did not have the true 'stuff' for [writing] fiction and poetry. And I was very fortunate indeed to have, as contemporaries, several practitioners of those arts who made it obvious to me, without unduly rubbing in the point, that I would be wasting my time if I tried." As a journalist, Hitchens has done everything with his time except waste it. He has made himself the key writer of the post-9/11 age.
There's just one Hitch | The Australian
Misremembering Christopher Hitchens
Last month, I attended a memorial service for the late Christopher Hitchens, a member of this humble journal’s editorial board, who died last December after a struggle with esophageal cancer. In addition to being a world famous polemicist and author, he was a friend and mentor. Which is why it pains me to report that the service did neither Christopher nor his career justice.Dickens from first to last | TLS
Photograph: Felipe Dana/AP Photo P erhaps the magnificent reconstruction of St Pancras station in London has crept into the nation’s imagination, or possibly economic anxiety has made us feel closer to an age haunted by contrasts between wealth and grinding poverty – whatever the reason, revisiting the Victorians has become more fashionable in recent years. Millions watch television and film adaptations of favourite nineteenth-century novels. Contemporary writers (Sarah Waters, D. J. Taylor, Michel Faber, A.Orwell's narration begins in the street he called the Rue du Coq d'Or, in the 5th Arrondissement, where he once lived Some 80 years after George Orwell chronicled the lives of the hard-up and destitute in his book Down and Out in Paris and London, what has changed? Retracing the writer's footsteps, Emma Jane Kirby finds the hallmarks of poverty identified by Orwell - addiction, exhaustion and, often, a quiet dignity - are as apparent now as they were then. "Quarrels, and the desolate cries of street hawkers, and the shouts of children chasing-orange-peel over the cobbles, and at night loud singing and the sour reek of the refuse carts, made up the atmosphere of the street…. Poverty is what I'm writing about and I had my first contact with poverty in this slum." 'Tomber dans la misere' (falling into misery), is the phrase she whispers most and I notice her breath is sour like someone who diets or skips meals”