Books and Letters

Dr Jekyll and a not so wicked Mr Hyde

April 21, 2012
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Dr Jekyll and a not so wicked Mr Hyde: how a portrait of evil was toned down
Robert Louis Stevenson deleted “certain appetites” to make his creation Mr Hyde less sinister, an edited draft of his novella to be displayed at the British Library reveals.

Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is one of English literature’s most famous stories: the enduring classic of a man’s transformation into a monster, first published in 1886. Now the manuscript for the novella is to go on show, revealing its transformation as Stevenson toned down his more explicit ideas.

The most complete draft of the novella – Stevenson burned a first draft because his wife was so alarmed by it – is covered with corrections. Reading between its chaotic lines shows how Stevenson deleted details such as the sexual connotations of Jekyll becoming “in secret the slave of certain appetites”…..

The Guardian


Michel Houellebecq The Map and the Territory

March 16, 2012
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Ancient Curse

By Ben Jeffrey

The Map and the Territory is the fifth novel by the French misanthrope and provocateur Michel Houellebecq. At this stage in his career, there is a checklist of flaws that any balanced reviewer is more or less obliged to go through when discussing Houellebecq’s work, so let me get those out of the way. The outlook in these novels is caustic and limited; the world they represent is most often vile when it isn’t sickeningly dull; life is an ordeal of disappointment, spurious pain, and loneliness, occasionally relieved by moments of erotic joy (but joy that eventually becomes misery, because it cannot be preserved). The books take rather too much satisfaction in pandering to racial and sexual bigotry, made worse by the fact that this pandering seldom seems to serve any genuine artistic purpose and comes off instead as a rote effort to offend…..

N+1

Religion for Atheists by Alain de Botton

March 10, 2012
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Book Review: Religion for Atheists, by Alain de Botton
Reviewed by José Teodoro

“I’m an atheist,” the great Aragónian filmmaker Luis Buñuel famously declared. “Thank God.” Besides being a conspicuously agnostic, characteristically mischievous aphorism, I think Buñuel’s words have been so often quoted because we all understand that any position on spiritual belief is always going to be made in alignment with or in opposition to God. Or god. Or gods. Theism is the standard; atheism the aberration.

But it’s an aberration gaining renewed traction in the 21st century (Anno Domini). In 2007, the late Christopher Hitchens published his manifesto for the New Atheism. God Is Not Great is an incisive, on-all-fronts attack on the legacies of the world’s dominant religions, but its wholesale dismissal left even some fellow non-believers skeptical. Is there really nothing of value to be gleaned from religion? Need we throw out the baby Jesus with the holy water?….

National Post

Ebooks and literature

February 21, 2012
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Books That Are Never Done Being Written
Digital text is ushering in an era of perpetual revision and updating, for better and for worse
By NICHOLAS CARR

I recently got a glimpse into the future of books. A few months ago, I dug out a handful of old essays I’d written about innovation, combined them into a single document, and uploaded the file to Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing service. Two days later, my little e-book was on sale at Amazon’s site. The whole process couldn’t have been simpler.

Then I got the urge to tweak a couple of sentences in one of the essays. I made the edits on my computer and sent the revised file back to Amazon. The company quickly swapped out the old version for the new one. I felt a little guilty about changing a book after it had been published, knowing that different readers would see different versions of what appeared to be the same edition. But I also knew that the readers would be oblivious to the alterations…..

The Wall Street Journal

A video interview with Robert Franzen

February 21, 2012
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Meet the Writers (B&N)

Who Destroyed Classical Civilization?

February 21, 2012
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by Emmet Scott

For centuries scholars assumed that the civilization of ancient Rome, the civilization we now call “classical,” was destroyed by the barbarian tribes of Germany and central Asia who, during the fourth and fifth centuries swarmed into the Empire and destroyed the political power of the Eternal City. The migrations of the Goths, Vandals, and Huns, were held responsible for reducing Europe to an economic and cultural wasteland, and initiating the long period of backwardness we now call the “Dark Ages.”

This was the view that prevailed till the sixteenth century, at which point, in the wake of the Reformation, a new suspect was added: the Christian, or more accurately, the Catholic, Church. According to this idea (one that remains strikingly popular in the English-speaking world), Christianity was corrupted beyond recognition after the time of Constantine and from the fourth century onwards a power-hungry Church hierarchy, in cahoots with the Imperial authorities, kept the population of Europe in subservience and ignorance, effectively completing the destructive work of the Barbarians…..

New English Review

Citizen Philosophers

February 6, 2012
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Teaching Justice in Brazil

Carlos Fraenkel

Getting out of the cave and seeing things as they really are: that’s what philosophy is about, according to Almira Ribeiro. Ribeiro teaches the subject in a high school in Itapuã, a beautiful, poor, violent neighborhood on the periphery of Salvador, capital of the state of Bahia in Brazil’s northeast. She is the most philosophically passionate person I’ve ever met.

Most of the four million slaves shipped from Africa to Brazil were sold in Salvador, the first residence of Portugal’s colonial rulers. It’s still Brazil’s blackest city. In Ribeiro’s neighborhood, children play football or do capoeira, pray in Pentecostal Churches or worship African gods. Many are involved with drugs; “every year we lose students to crack,” she tells me. And they study philosophy two hours each week because of a 2008 law that mandates philosophy instruction in all Brazilian high schools. Nine million teenagers now take philosophy classes for three years…..

Boston Review

Poet Laureate compared to Mills & Boon romance writers in stinging attack by rival

January 31, 2012
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Oxford’s Poetry Professor criticises Poet Laureate’s eagerness to ‘democratise’ poetry

Carol Ann Duffy had previously argued that text messaging helps youngsters perfect poetry skills.

A remarkable literary spat has erupted with the Oxford Professor of Poetry comparing the work of the Poet Laureate to Mills & Boon.

In a lecture entitled Poetry, Policing and Public Order, Sir Geoffrey Hill launched an attack on Carol Ann Duffy for her eagerness to ‘democratise’ poetry.

Duffy has attracted the ire of traditionalists by suggesting communication by text messages and social networks were actually helping children develop poetry skills…..

Mail Online

A new book on the techniques of icon and wall painting

January 26, 2012
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Icon and fresco paintingTECHNIQUES OF ICON AND WALL PAINTING: Egg Tempera, Fresco, Secco’ by Aidan Hart 

460 pages. Over 450 colour illustrations and over 160 drawings. 227mm x 278mm. Hard cover.

This is the most comprehensive book to date on the techniques of icon and wall painting. Illustrated by over 450 colour ilustrations and over 160 drawings, it is a source of pleasure and inspiration for the general reader as well as for the practising icon painter. More than just a technical manual, it sets artistic practice in the context of the Church’s spirituality and liturgy, with chapters on the theology and history of the icon, and the reasons behind the placement of wall paintings within churches.

This is an indispensable practical book for all painters in egg tempera and of wall paintings, regardless of subject matter.

For more information see Aidan Hart’s website: Aidan Hart Icons

 

 

Rome

January 24, 2012
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The Crass, Beautiful Eternal City
DECEMBER 22, 2011
Ingrid D. Rowland

by Robert Hughes

In the spring of 1959, a twenty-one-year-old Australian architecture student named Robert Hughes made his first visit to Rome. He captures that first heady plunge into the city’s stew of chaos, sensuality, history, amber light, and sudden moments of piercing beauty by lingering over the fruits and vegetables of the market called Campo de’ Fiori, the “Field of Flowers”:

Bunches of thyme, branches of rosemary, parsley, bundled-up masses of basil filling the air with their perfume. Here, a mountain of sweet peppers: scarlet, orange, yellow, even black. There, a crate filled with the swollen purple truncheons of eggplants. Next to that, a parade of tomatoes, fairly bursting with ripeness—the red egg-shaped San Marzanos for sauce, the broad-girthed slicing tomatoes, the ribbed ones for salads, the green baby ones. Even the potato, a dull-looking growth as a rule, took on a sort of tuberous grandeur in this Mediterranean light.

The New York Review of Books