I meant to link to this earlier. Britannica has coordinated a talk on whether The Internet (pause for silent reverence) is ruining our concentration. I’m willing to see this as a possibility. I know I scan a lot. I glance; I skim. I don’t blame the Internet for it.
Poet Laureate Kay Ryan
Our new poet laurate, Kay Ryan, learned at an early age that language was powerful.
Take, for example, the time when, alone with a group of adults, she described “my sixth-grade teacher’s bottom jiggling as she wrote on the blackboard.”
“I caused a woman to spit her milk across the table,” she recalls.
…
One who discovered her was the poet and critic Dana Gioia, now chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts. In a 1998 essay in the Dark Horse literary magazine, Gioia noted “the unusual compression and density of Ryan’s work.” Like Emily Dickinson, Gioia wrote, Ryan “has found a way of exploring ideas without losing either the musical impulse or imaginative intensity necessary to lyric poetry.”
Today, Gioia calls Ryan simply “one of the finest poets writing in America,” adding that she has “the gift of being simultaneously very funny and very wise.”
Here’s a Ryan poem called “Death by Fruit.“
Oxford UP End of Summer Sale
The Oxford University Press is having a sale on some interesting anthologies, studies, and books on many subjects.
Of course, there’s always sites like BookCloseouts.com for perpetual sales.
And I just found this site which collects info on library book sales and those by non-profit organizations across the country. Oh, look, the Chattanooga-Hamilton County library is having its sale at the end of the month.
Life in Suffering
The Art of Maniliness is talking about Viktor Frankl today.
Tomorrow, We’ll Have Less Zucchini
Tomorrow, August 8, is Sneak Zucchini onto Your Neighbor’s Porch Night. If you have more zucchini than you want, take time tomorrow to celebrate with friends, family, or strangers by giving it to them. Need a bit of motivation to eat zucchini? Try this yummy zucchini cobbler recipe. It really tastes close to apple cobbler. Ice cream helps as always.
If you happen to be in Vermont later this month, watch out for zucchini enthusiasts at the 11th Annual Vermont State Zucchini Festival. I’m told that if you leave your car windows down while walking around the festival, you may find someone has “blessed” you with vegetable gifts when you return.
Klavan on Psychological Crime Novels
From the Wall Street Journal.
Full disclosure: Of the books listed, I’ve only read Crime and Punishment.
Good Work, Y’all
Congratulations to Jimmy Davis for his work in the Worldview Church eReport, a newsletter from Breakpoint.org. He lists teh contents of the current issue on his blog, The Cruciform Life (which has a new address).
Sherry has managed to keep her head above water with How Right You Are, Jeeves. A natural, you might say.
And congratulations to Michael on the birth of Ransom Dunnington Lander. I saw a photo yesterday. What a cute kid. He says he’s going to name his second boy, Clive Staples Lander. Does your wife have anything to say about this?
Madame Guillotine
Delancey’s Place has an excerpt today about olden France and a certain deadly icon:
Guillotin’s motive was to introduce a more humanitarian form of capital punishment, and his success in that was evident from the very first use of the guillotine when “the crowds, accustomed to bloody bouts with the ax and sword, thundered in disappointment, ‘Bring back the block!’ ” Yet almost immediately, guillotine executions became Paris’s favorite form of entertainment, with families bringing picnic lunches and reveling in the carnival atmosphere that surrounded them.
The guillotine was used until the 1950s, and in a public execution in 1939 of a hated German criminal, the crowd acted as if they were at a coronation festival or maybe a rock concert. “[E]legant ladies, avid for souvenirs, rushed to dip their handkerchiefs in the blood” of the man whom they had just watched lose his head. This comes from Stanley Karnow’s Paris in the Fifties.
Ancient Chariot Unearthed
Here’s a bit more from our archeology desk. Archeologist Daniela Agre and her team have found a complete, well-preserved chariot in Borisovo, a village in southeast Bulgaria. Several interesting things were found in the Thracian tomb, dated 1,900 years old.
Site of first Shakespeare theater found in London
Shakespeare acted himself, and staged his first plays, at a London site which is now being excavated.
The remains of a London theatre where William Shakespeare’s early plays including “Romeo And Juliet” were first performed have been discovered by archaeologists, a museum said Wednesday.
Shakespeare appeared at The Theatre in Shoreditch, east London, as an actor with a troupe called The Lord Chamberlain’s Men, which also performed his efforts as a playwright there.
Full story here.