Since I spent the whole day data crunching and the rest of it studying, there isn't going to be much in the way of literary rhapsodizing here today, but here are some tidbits from the rest of the blogosphere.
Nell Freudenberger
reviewed David Leavitt's new book
The Indian Clerk for
The New York Times. It is an historical novel about the friendship between Cambridge mathematician, G. H. Hardy, and Indian mathematical genius S. Ramanujan. Freudenberger gives much useful context about Cambridge, Leavitt's writing, World War I, and the themes, both mathematical and sexual, dealt with in the book. This book is at the top of my TBR pile when my brain has the space.
The New York Sun
reviews The Stuff of Thought, Steven Pinker's new book:
Do words really represent things in the world or are they markers of ideas inside our brains? Is there a language of thought itself, or do different languages embrace and shape the world in different ways? Such questions have been asked afresh in recent years, not only by philosophers and linguists, but also by cognitive scientists and evolutionary biologists seeking the origins of human sensibility. Among the most prolific and most public of the current generation of inquirers into human understanding is the Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker.
An active member of
the Luxuriant Flowing Hair Club for Scientists, Pinker is a deft writer, so this is destined to make it to my TBR pile somtime before 2010.
Hat tip for above:
3 quarks daily.
New York Daily Photo has
a magnificent shot of Mr. Moon and a multilegged creature who showed up at the Kitchen Highline Block Party. Do you know the origins of this character, he asks?
Some wonderfully mysterious images and snatches of text
here, as always.
TED, no not me but Technology, Entertainment, Design, is a conference of the world's leading thinkers according to, well... TED, I guess. It has included speakers like physicist Barry Greene, naturalist Jane Goodall, all fields are represented -the arts, sciences, international relations. They assemble once a year and give 18 minute talks in order to spread their ideas. They now offer many high quality videos of those talks that you can view
here. Steven Pinker has two and I found one by psychologist Barry Schwartz on the relationship between freedom and choice which is rather hyperbolic. They are even rated by categories such as: most discussed, funniest, and most beautiful - seems they feel we need a lot of help around choosing ideas.
Hat tip:
PsyBlogFinally, today's
Dining In section in the Times has
a graduate level course in tea - including brewing timings, pots to use, etc... If you are a tea freak like me, check it out. I love tea - learning about it, making it, drinking it. My old favorite is Sencha Premier - a deep green tea that is a cross between a sweet, vegetal flavor mixed with a taste I can only describe as sucking on stainless steel - you just have to try it. I've heard that the Japanese consider green tea a vegetable but that may just be one of those cultural myths like the fact that Eskimo's have 40 words for snow (they don't). My current tea obsession is Snow Dragon - twisted silver leaves that look like little unicorn horns, it's a white tea that brews up sweet and not too wimpy.
Bernard MacLaverty's Cal - 150 pages that are as densely packed with passion and tension as any I've read in Dostoyevsky or Hardy. The 19-year-old title character lives in Northern Ireland. A Roman Catholic, he is hounded and physically attacked by the Protestant Orangemen. His friends have joined the IRA in response to the violence with which they are threatened. Cal finds the violence too much for him. The struggles of nations would not be important if they didn't effect the lives of individual people. This book is about the converging of conflicts political and personal - the political and religious struggles of an oppressed people, a first great passionate love, and the dilemmas of a sensitive and thoughtful teenager as he makes the moral choices that are going to shape his whole life. I felt deeply the greatness of these struggles as I read. Read my full rave here.
This book has everything - love, suspense, moral conflict, social criticism, psychological acuity, and crack writing. It is pitch-perfect on the a fast-paced, ostentatious, brutal beauty of Rome. Lambert's writing is rich with observations both interior and exterior that imbue character and place with clarity and instantaneous complexity. This novel, though entertaining to read, is an unambiguous critique of the moral hypocrisy that infects the powerful and the nature of crime which combines an abuse of power with the dehumanization of innocent people. Read my full rave here.
Molly Fox is a celebrated actress - a woman who delves deep into what makes up a 'self.' It is her profession to create characters from that knowledge through the medium of her self. Yet, when it comes to letting others truly know her, she does not. 'Can we ever know another?', this novel asks. The Irish novelist Deirdre Madden fashions a deep and beautiful book on this potentially abstract musing that is redolent with the pain of the distance we have from all others - even those we love most - and simultaneously rich with the rewards of the communion we can make through long acquaintance. She is particularly good at using the processes of the actor and writer to reflect on the ways we can inhabit the inherent contradiction of knowing another, but the mechanisms are so integrated with the events of this narrative that it is difficult to reveal them without ruining your reading of this book. This book is a powerful work of art with an undisturbable sense of wholeness. Read my full rave here.
The struggle to keep the champagne bubbling when it's gone flat is the action filling Evelyn Waugh's 1930 satire Vile Bodies. Stephen Fry's brilliant film adaptation, Bright Young Things released in 2003 captures the feel of a breathless, manic party. Jim Broadbent, Stockard Channing, Peter O'Toole, Simon Callow, Stephen Campbell Moore, Emily Mortimer, James Mcavoy, Imelda Stuanton, and Fenella Woolgar are some of the beautifully cast actors who maintain an understated hysteria, if you can imagine understated hysteria. The love that director and cast have for these characters is what impresses me the most. It would be so easy to show us how vile these people are - how silly, how louche, how fey - but instead they love them to death. Raveworthy. Read my full rave here.
Tell Me Everything by Sarah Salway . I opened this book last night and didn't stop reading it until I had finished it. The nearest voice I can think to compare Sarah Salway's to is Lorrie Moore's, and coming from me that is a big compliment. In it Molly experiences a few breaches of trust as a young woman that leave her seriously wounded. She closes down and protects herself by eating. When we meet her she has become one of life's castaways, seriously overweight without a job, a home, or any sense of herself. She meets five people - Mr. Roberts who gives her a job, Mrs. Roberts, Tim - a man of mystery, Liz - a librarian who recommends French authors, and Miranda, a hairdresser. With these relationships she begins to reclaim herself. The story is full of perfectly wrought descriptions, complex observations of human pain and fantasy, and cogent storytelling. Read my full rave here.
