Don Juan by Lord Byron Byron composed new instalments of his great mock-epic poem whenever he was inspired or angry or at a loose end without his mistress. Young Juan, his sexually irresistible adventurer, travelled from Spain to a harem in Constantinople to the court of Catherine the Great and then to England, where he [...]
Archive for February, 2010
Ten of the best unfinished literary works
Posted in Poetry on February 22, 2010 | Comments Off
Ten of the best horrid children in literature
Posted in Literature on February 22, 2010 | Comments Off
Little Father Time The eponymous hero of Hardy’s Jude the Obscure tries to lead a liberated life with his intellectual cousin, Sue Bridehead. They have a couple of children but unfortunately also have in tow little Jude, aka “Little Father Time”, the offspring of Jude’s marriage to heartless Arabella. This grim child eventually does the [...]
Poem of the week
Posted in Poetry, tagged 115 on February 22, 2010 | Comments Off
A Letter to a Brother of the Pen in Tribulation by Aphra Behn Aphra Behn by Sir Peter Lely Playwright, poet and novelist Aphra Behn was the first woman to make her living as a writer. Not much is known about her early life, but most commentators agree that she was born Aphra Johnson, some [...]
Poem of the week
Posted in Poetry, tagged 114 on February 22, 2010 | Comments Off
Twilight by Samuel Menashe In this week’s poem, a beautiful nocturne, the New York poet Samuel Menashe finds transcendence in everyday images ‘There’s only one star in the poem, but others come out faintly in the auditory imagination’. Samuel Menashe was born in New York in 1925. His parents were Russian-Jewish immigrants, and his first [...]
Poem of the week
Posted in Poetry, tagged 113 on February 22, 2010 | Comments Off
Twenty-Sixth Winter by John Dofflemyer This time, a simultaneously hardbitten and tender example of ‘cowboy poetry’ Sheraton Wild Horse resort in Arizona. If you find the term “cowboy poetry” impossibly paradoxical, you might need to think again. Last month, Elko, Nevada, saw the 26th National Cowboy Poetry Gathering, an annual event that began with a [...]
Abbey Road and the Day Studio Music Died
Posted in Arts and Entertainment on February 22, 2010 | Comments Off
‘A great room acts like an instrument. . . . It has a voice.’ Rumors abound that money-hemorrhaging music behemoth EMI may sell Abbey Road Studios, the sanctum sanctorum where the Beatles recorded most of their albums. Britain’s National Trust is entertaining the idea of bidding on it, aiming to add the famed recording studio [...]
Plotting A Revolution
Posted in Literature on February 22, 2010 | Comments Off
The novel is dead. Long live the antinovel, built from scraps.’ Good manifestoes propagate. Their seeds cling to journals and blogs and conversations, soon enough spawning sub-manifestoes of acclamation or rebuttal. After the opening call to action, a wide variety of minds turn their attention to the same problem. It’s the humanist ideal of a [...]
Climate Change and Open Science
Posted in Editorials and opinion, Energy and Environment on February 22, 2010 | Comments Off
‘Unequivocal.” That’s quite a claim in this skeptical era, so it’s been enlightening to watch the unraveling of the absolute certainty of global warming caused by man. Now even authors of the 2007 United Nations report that “warming of the climate system is unequivocal” have backed off its key assumptions and dire warnings. Science is [...]
Why Gridlock in Washington Is Good
Posted in Editorials and opinion, Politics on February 22, 2010 | Comments Off
It is hard to get things done in Congress. It’s supposed to be. Members of Congress generally give one of two reasons for quitting. Those evacuating the capital because of scandal invariably want to “spend more time” with their families. Those leaving to become a lobbyist or head home to seek election to even higher [...]
Vindicating John Yoo
Posted in Editorials and opinion, Law, Politics on February 22, 2010 | Comments Off
Bush lawyers are found to have acted ethically, unlike their accusers. So after five years of investigation, partisan accusations and unethical media leaks, the Justice Department’s senior ethicist has concluded that Bush Administration lawyers John Yoo and Jay Bybee committed no professional misconduct. The issue now is whether the protégés of Attorney General Eric Holder [...]
The Ortega-Chávez Axis
Posted in Editorials and opinion, Politics, tagged Nicaragua, Venezuela on February 22, 2010 | Comments Off
Nicaragua’s president is aligning himself with Venezuela. With Iran and Venezuela in political, economic and military cahoots, Tehran has gained a foothold in South America. Now Nicaragua is at risk of being added to the list of authoritarian governments aligned with Venezuela and by association, its Islamic ally. Whether that happens will depend heavily on [...]
Will Iraq be an Obama achievement or nightmare?
Posted in Editorials and opinion, Politics, tagged Iraq on February 22, 2010 | Comments Off
Supporters wave Iraqi flags at a campaign rally for Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki in Basra on Saturday. During the years when Iraq was at the center of U.S. foreign policy, pundits and policymakers would regularly and prematurely proclaim that the following six months would be crucial to the war’s outcome. Now, at last, that forecast [...]
Division and its Discontents
Posted in Mathematics on February 22, 2010 | Comments Off
There’s a narrative line that runs through arithmetic, but many of us missed it in the haze of long division and common denominators. It’s the story of the quest for ever-more versatile numbers. The “natural numbers” 1, 2, 3 and so on are good enough if all we want to do is count, add and [...]
Enquiring Minds
Posted in Editorials and opinion, Media, Politics on February 22, 2010 | Comments Off
This year, for the first time in its colorful history, The National Enquirer will be in the running for a Pulitzer Prize. It might even deserve to win one. Last Thursday, after weeks of hedging, the Pulitzer Committee acknowledged that the Enquirer’s extensive coverage of John Edwards’s double life — stories that were first ignored, [...]
The week ahead
Posted in The Week ahead, tagged February 21 2010 on February 21, 2010 | Comments Off
Senior diplomats restart talks between India and Pakistan • DIPLOMATIC ties between India and Pakistan, severed after the Mumbai terror attack 15 months ago, may be improved by a meeting of senior diplomats from the two countries on Thursday February 25th. India’s prime minister, Manmohan Singh, faces stiff domestic opposition to rapprochement with Pakistan, [...]
Mind Power
Posted in Living on February 21, 2010 | Comments Off
Harvard professor Ellen Langer’s research transformed psychology. Now she wants it to transform you. Ellen Langer The Kripalu Center for Yoga and Health is housed in a former Jesuit seminary built in the 1950s, on a rise with broad views of the Berkshires. The long hallways have the institutional feel of a high school, except [...]
Attack of the light drizzle!
Posted in Living on February 21, 2010 | Comments Off
How weather was taken over by the hype machine If you live anywhere around Greater Boston, you probably felt heroic about making it into work during what turned out to be the Storm That Wasn’t. You must remember it, some 11 days ago. With the nation’s capital socked in and New York shut down, we [...]
‘Real Housewives of Gomorrah!’
Posted in Arts and Entertainment on February 21, 2010 | Comments Off
Never before revealed: the deep history of reality television The phenomenon of reality television, in which ordinary people are shown in unscripted dramatic situations, is generally assumed to have begun in earnest in the late 1990s. However, a deluge of recent findings is forcing scholars in the field of Reality Studies to push their timelines [...]
Overruled
Posted in The Word, tagged 21 February 2010 on February 21, 2010 | Comments Off
What language experts don’t care about If you care about how to use language – and if you’re reading this column, it’s a safe bet that you do – then you care about language rules. There are basic rules that everyone agrees with – for example, that the word moon has exactly two o’s, no [...]
The Fat Lady Has Sung
Posted in Editorials and opinion, Politics on February 21, 2010 | Comments Off
A small news item from Tracy, Calif., caught my eye last week. Local station CBS 13 reported: “Tracy residents will now have to pay every time they call 911 for a medical emergency. But there are a couple of options. Residents can pay a $48 voluntary fee for the year, which allows them to call [...]
Love in a Hard Place
Posted in Living on February 20, 2010 | Comments Off
Invulnerable and Free as Only Youth Can Be I went to Murrow and Rianne went to Midwood. She was the prettiest girl there. She had a great big head of curly brown hair. We went out for the second half of my senior year. Her 16th birthday came, and this was my idea of a [...]
How Christian Were the Founders?
Posted in History, Politics, Religion on February 20, 2010 | Comments Off
Montage by Carin Goldberg – Original Image: “‘Declaration of Independence,” by John Trumbull/The Bridgeman Art Library LAST MONTH, A WEEK before the Senate seat of the liberal icon Edward M. Kennedy fell into Republican hands, his legacy suffered another blow that was perhaps just as damaging, if less noticed. It happened during what has [...]
Soda: A Sin We Sip Instead of Smoke?
Posted in Health on February 20, 2010 | Comments Off
Is soda the new tobacco? In their critics’ eyes, producers of sugar-sweetened drinks are acting a lot like the tobacco industry of old: marketing heavily to children, claiming their products are healthy or at worst benign, and lobbying to prevent change. The industry says there are critical differences: in moderate quantities soda isn’t harmful, nor [...]
Truth Lies Somewhere in Between
Posted in Arts and Entertainment on February 20, 2010 | Comments Off
Ariel Shulman and Yaniv Shulman, front, and Henry Joost, back, in “Catfish,” a movie about social media and deception. WHEN is a documentary not a documentary? That question hovered in the freezing air at the recent Sundance Film Festival, where documentaries are often justly celebrated, and which this year made room for a few movies [...]
Polanski’s Visions of Victimhood
Posted in Arts and Entertainment on February 20, 2010 | Comments Off
A scene from Roman Polanski’s haunting filmography: Ewan McGregor in “The Ghost Writer” (2010). “THE GHOST WRITER,” the 18th feature by Roman Polanski, opens this week, and, not for the first time in Mr. Polanski’s career, the movie itself is likely to be overshadowed by the man who made it. Critics and viewers have long [...]
Pride and Avarice
Posted in Literature on February 20, 2010 | Comments Off
When the first wave of novelists began to tackle the post-9/11 world, many critics marveled (and some jeered) that they’d done it so soon. In 2005, Jonathan Safran Foer’s “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close” and Ian McEwan’s “Saturday” were in the vanguard. Since then, new works touching on our jittery times have appeared with increasing [...]
A Different Kind of Love Triangle
Posted in Literature on February 20, 2010 | Comments Off
Once upon a time, not so very long ago, there were two sisters who lived in Manhattan. One was wildly emotional, the other smartly sensible. The sisters found love, as lovely women do, and they lost love, but no matter where love went they always worked hard and had rich lives. Now these sisters also [...]
The Life of a Death Penalty Lawyer
Posted in Literature on February 20, 2010 | Comments Off
Toward the beginning of “The Autobiography of an Execution,” David Dow relaxes after a speech with the celebrated death penalty abolitionist Sister Helen Prejean. (“It was the first time I went drinking with a nun.”) Prejean tells Dow, who has represented more than 100 death row inmates over 20 years, that “support for the death [...]
‘I Am Clinically Sane’
Posted in Arts and Entertainment on February 20, 2010 | Comments Off
Interview with Director Werner Herzog Werner Herzog addresses reporters on the opening day of the 60th Berlin International Film Festival. Werner Herzog is head of the jury at this year’s Berlin International Film Festival. He spoke with SPIEGEL ONLINE about why he agreed to judge the competition, his sanity in an insane industry and why [...]
‘Film Is Built Upon Its Own History’
Posted in Arts and Entertainment on February 20, 2010 | Comments Off
Berlinale Retrospective Curator David Thomson Renowned film critic David Thomson was faced with the daunting task of curating the Berlin Film Festival’s 60th anniversary Retrospective section. He tells SPIEGEL ONLINE how he made the almost impossible selection, why watching movies on the big screen is so important and reveals why he had never visited Berlin [...]
