|
|
book notes
4/11/2007
First English Dictionary back in print
|
Out of print for almost 400 years, the first English dictionary, originally titled A Table Alphabeticall,
has now been republished by the University of Chicago Press with an introduction by John Simpson, chief editor of the
Oxford English Dictionary. The first English dictionary was compiled in the late 16th century by Robert Cawdrey.
"At the risk of being overly present-minded", writes Scott McLemee for Inside Higher ED, "there’s a sense in which Cawdrey was a pioneer in dealing with the effects of his era’s information explosion. Thanks to the printing press, the English language was undergoing a kind of mutation in the 16th century.
New words began to circulate in the uncharted zone between common usage and the cosmopolitan lingo of sophisticated urbanites who traveled widely. Learned gentlemen were traveling to France and Italy and coming back “to powder their talk with over-sea language,” as Cawdrey noted. Some kinds of “academicke” language (glossed by Cawdrey as “of the sect of wise and learned men”) were gaining wider usage. And readers were encountering words like “crocodile” and “akekorn” which were unfamiliar. Cawdrey’s terse definitions of them as “beast” and “fruit,” respectively, suggest he probably had seen neither.
Booksellers had offered lexicons of ancient and foreign languages. And there were handbooks explaining the meaning of specialized jargon, such as that used by lawyers. But it was Cawdrey’s bright idea that you might need to be able to translate new-fangled English into a more familiar set of “plaine English words.”"
permalink
comments
| |
Library Cart
Library Lookup
Amazon.com
|
|
|
|
|
|
book notes
3/18/2007
Susan Sontag on the moral superiority of the novel
|
Every novelist hopes to reach the widest possible audience, to pass as many borders as possible. But it is the novelist's job to keep in mind the spurious cultural geography that is being installed at the beginning of the 21st century.
On the one hand, we have, through translation and through recycling in the media, the possibility of a greater and greater diffusion of our work. On the other hand, the ideology behind these unprecedented opportunities for diff usion, for translation - the ideology now dominant in what passes for culture in modern societies - is designed to render obsolete the novelist's prophetic and critical, even subversive, task, and that is to deepen and sometimes, as needed, to oppose the common understandings of our fate.
Long live the novelist's task. -- from a previously unpublished essay, written just before Sontag's death in 2004. See the
Guardian for a longer excerpt.
permalink
comments
| |
Library Cart
Library Lookup
Amazon.com
|
|
|
|
|
|
book notes
2/25/2007
Jewish Book Week
|
London's annual Jewish Book Week has arrived, the world's leading festival of Jewish writing and ideas. There are over 50 session scheduled and over 100 contributants from around the world including such
freethinking iconoclasts as Martin Amis
and Christopher Hitchens
, philosopher Judith Butler, Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of Great Britain, Sir Jonathan Sacks
and many other prominent writers and scholars.
Graphic novelist Joann Sfar
speaks with Paul Gravett
about his books Klezmer: Tales of the Wild East, where the difficult life of musicians in Eastern Europe is portayed and The Rabbi's Cat, a book
set in Algeria at a time when Jews and Arabs lived peacefully together.
Argentinian writer Edgardo Cozarinsky
talks about life as seen from the New World, longings for the Old World, 1920s Buenos Aires, Jewish gauchos,
literature and films. His book, The Moldavian Pimp,
is about young Jewish girls from Ukraine recruited by Jewish pimps in the 1920s to go to
Argentina on the promise of a new life, only to find themselves sold into prostitution.
The historical references in the book are intended to resonate in the present with the
current influx of central European girls forced into the sex trade in countries such as France and Britain.
Cozarinsky converses with playwright and theatre director Julia Pascal
whose plays include The Holocaust Trilogy
and Crossing Jerusalem
.
Britain's chief rabbi, Sir Jonathan Sacks, reflects on the role of prayer with Leon Wieseltier, the literary editor of The New Republic.
The Dignity of Difference is Rabbi Jonathan Sacks's radical proposal for reconciling hatreds. The first major statement by a Jewish leader on the ethics of globalization, it also marks a paradigm shift in the approach to religious coexistence.
Sacks argues that we must do more than search for values common to all faiths, we must also reframe the way we see our differences.
Martin Amis talks to Christopher Hitchens about Saul Bellow
with whom he developed an intimate friendship, about the role of the writer as intellectual, the threat of political correctness to the comic novel, Islam, Israel and "horrorism". The title of their session is "No Laughing Matter".
Nora Ephron
talks about her latest book, I Feel Bad About My Neck: And Other Thoughts on Being a Woman
, which is a candid, hilarious look at women who are getting older and dealing with the tribulations of maintenance, menopause, empty nests, and life itself.
Psychoanalyst and Professor of Linguistics Julia Kristeva speaks with writer
Eva Hoffman on the idea of the foreigner or stranger. The idea provides a nexus for examining the
dynamics and tensions of differing cultures in contact and has long been associated with the Jewish people.
Polish born Eva Hoffman is the author of several books, including the widely regarded Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Language
, a portrait of the Wandering Jew as a young girl, and most recently, After Such Knowledge, A Meditation on the Aftermath of the Holocaust.
Judith Butler's book, Precarious Life: The Power of Mourning and Violence
offers a profound appraisal of the post 9/11 world and the reactions which followed, critiquing the responses which followed the attack and suggesting instead that mourning can inspire solidarity and a quest for global justice. Butler speaks with filmmaker and writer, Udi Aloni, whose latest film, Forgiveness, concerns residents of a psychiatric hospital which is built on the ruins of the Palestinian village Deir Yassin. The site elicits a dialogue of the loss felt on both sides, offering a glimpse of a world where the ghosts of the past can be heard.
This is only a small selection of the events scheduled for this years' Jewish Book Week. The festival runs from Saturday, February 24 to Sunday, March 4. For more information see Jewish Book Week 2007.
permalink
comments
| |
Library Cart
Library Lookup
Amazon.com
|
|
|
|
|
|
book notes
2/19/2007
The Grapes of Wrath sets new world record
|
A rare edition of John Steinbeck's 1939 novel The Grapes of Wrath has sold for $47,800 (£24,380), doubling the estimated price and setting what is believed to be a world record for a book by the Nobel Prize-winning author.The sale was part of an auction of first editions previously owned by Steinbeck's sister, Elizabeth Steinbeck Ainsworth, who died in 1992. Most of the books carried personal inscriptions, raising their value as sought-after "association copies" and providing valuable nuggets of information for Steinbeck scholars. A copy of
Tortilla Flat, a tale of the paisano polulation of Monterey, California, bore the inscription "For my dear sister Elizabeth, without whom I should never have known the people about whom this book is
written." -- Nick Tanner for the
Guardian Unlimited
permalink
comments
| |
Library Cart
Library Lookup
Amazon.com
|
|
|
|
|
|
book notes
2/17/2007
Janet Maslin analyses the Dan Brown formula:
|
The formula:
1 Sacred treasure
1 Secret conspiracy
1 Great artist, artifact or historical figure
Begin with bizarre killing.
Use killing as reason to investigate the past.
Reveal stunning secret of the past, "so saber-rattling that all of civilization may be changed."
"Thanks, Dan Brown," writes Janet Maslin. "Look what you started."
The Da Vinci Clones:
Steve Berry's The Alexandria Link,
Michael Gruber's The Book Of Air And Shadows,
Julia Navarro's The Brotherhood Of The Holy Shroud,
David Stone's The Echelon Vendetta,
Michael Palmer's The Fifth Vial,
Val Mcdermid's The Grave Tattoo,
Greg Taylor's The Guide To Dan Brown's The Solomon Key,
Allan Folsom's The Machiavelli Covenant,
Giulio Leoni's The Mosaic Crimes,
William Dietrich's Napoleon’s Pyramids and
D. L. Wilson's The Unholy Grail
The Alexandria Link by Steve Berry
permalink
comments
| |
Library Cart
Library Lookup
Amazon.com
|
|
|
|
|
|
book notes
2/14/2007
Arundhati Roy to return to fiction
|
Arundhati Roy is to return to fiction writing, 10 years after winning Booker prize with her first novel,
The God of Small Things. According to an exclusive interview with Reuters news agency, Roy said she would "stagnate" as a writer if she were to continue to publish only non-fiction.
"As a writer I have to go to a different place now. As a person ... I want to step off whatever this stage is that I have been given," said Roy in the agency interview. "The argument has been made, the battle remains to be fought - and that requires a different set of skills."
Following her Booker win and the monumental success of The God of Small Things, Roy has spent the last decade writing non-fiction and championing grassroots activism as a social and environmental activist; her protest against the Narmada valley dam project in 2002 saw her imprisoned for a day and fined for contempt of court.
While much of Roy's campaigning work has been focused on India, she has also been an outspoken critic of America's actions in Iraq and of Israel's attacks on Lebanon last year. Her non-fiction works include
The Algebra of Infinite Justice,
Power Politics,
War Talk and
An Ordinary Person's Guide to Empire.
Now, however, Roy says that she feels frustrated by the failure of non-violent movements to influence state actions, and the restrictions of writing political
polemics. -- Michelle Pauli for the Guardian Unlimited
The God of Small Things
permalink
comments
| |
Library Cart
Library Lookup
Amazon.com
|
|
|
|
|
|
book notes
2/2/2007
Norman Mailer's new book on Hitler, Castle in the Forest, sparks criticism
|
"One can't forbid artists from dealing with Hitler but art will never achieve an understanding of the phenomenon - it will rather serve as a distraction," said the vice president of Germany's
influential Central Council of Jews, Salomon Korn, to the ARD television channel. "Anyone tackling [this subject] artistically should carefully consider what their real intentions are."
Mailer’s "reply":
"Hitler exceeds human comprehension. For me the only answer is the existence of the devil ... Hitler is the devil's greatest feat against Jesus Christ."
Mailer takes strong exception to Hannah Arendt’s idea of the banality of evil. "To assume...that evil itself is banal strikes me as exhibiting a prodigious poverty of imagination." "If Hannah Arendt is correct and evil is banal, then that is vastly worse than the opposed possibility that evil is satanic"
Norman Mailer’s 36th book, "The Castle in the Forest," tells the story of Hitler's first 17 years through the eyes of D.T., an assistant to the devil himself.
permalink
comments
| |
Library Cart
Library Lookup
Amazon.com
|
|
|
|
|
|
book notes
2/1/2007
France to allow sequel to Victor Hugo's Les Miserables
|
After a six year battle, the highest appeals court in France says that it will allow a modern sequel to Victor Hugo's
classic novel. The author's great great grandson is bitterly disappointed in the decision.
"I am not just fighting for myself, my family and for Victor Hugo but for the descendants of all
writers, painters and composers who should be protected from people who want to use a famous name and
work just for money." But the court decision met with a "sigh of relief", writes Kim Willsher for Guardian,
"from authors, playwrights and musical producers who had feared an end to adaptations of classical works."
permalink
comments
| |
Library Cart
Library Lookup
Amazon.com
|
|
|
|
|
|
book notes
11/27/2006
Tribute to R K Narayan on his 100th birth anniversary
|
"Anyone with an interest in fiction could hardly have missed Narayan or Malgudi. One could take Narayan out of Malgudi but not Malgudi out of Narayan"
spoke Andrew Ignatieff at a gathering of prominent scholars and writers for the "Eye on India" event earlier this month in Toronto.
Malgudi is a small South Indian town which provides the setting for nearly all of Narayan's 34 novels and hundreds of short stories. But Malgudi cannot be found on the Indian map. It is a fictional place, once described by Graham Greene as a place where you could go "into those loved and shabby streets and see with excitement and a certainty
of pleasure a stranger approaching past the bank, the cinema, the haircutting saloon, a stranger who will greet us, we know, with some unexpected and revealing phrase that will open the door to yet another human existence." Graham Greene was a friend and admirer of Narayan who called him "the novelist I most admire in the English language since the death of Evelyn Waugh. Without him I could never have known what it is like to be Indian." It was Greene who was responsible
for getting Narayan's first novel Swami and Friends, published after it had been repeatedly returned by publishers. It was also Graham Greene who convinced the Indian author to shorten his original name, Rasipuram Krishnaswamy Iyer Narayanswamy, to R. K. Narayan. One might not have expected Graham Greene to respond to Narayan as he did. The violence, guilt and despair in Greene are not to be found in Narayan. "Violence seems pointless to me," Narayan would say. "I avoid all violent people, so I'm not
very sure of what they do - their motives." It was the light touch and gentle humour that sparkled throughout Narayan's comic masterpieces that probably most appealed to Greene.
The "Eye on India" event, a tribute to the 100th birth anniversary of Narayan, was organised by the World Literacy of Canada with the support of the Consulate General of India and Panorama India. R. K. Narayan, India's first and greatest novelist in English, died in Madras in 2001 at the age of 94.
permalink
comments
| |
Library Cart
Library Lookup
Amazon.com
|
|
|
|
|
|
book notes
11/17/2006
Competition for new monument to great Russian poet Osip Mandelstam in Moscow
|
Sculptors Leonid Baranov, Andrei Krasulin, Dmitry Tugarinov, Lazar Gadayev, Alexander Tarasenko and Dmitry Shakhovsky have been invited to participate in the competition. The winner will be announced in January, 2007 .
A flame is in my blood
burning dry life, to the bone.
I do not sing of stone,
now, I sing of wood.
It is light and coarse:
made of a single spar,
the oak’s deep heart,
and the fisherman’s oar.
Drive them deep, the piles:
hammer them in tight,
around wooden Paradise,
where everything is light.
Selected Poems
permalink
comments
| |
Library Cart
Library Lookup
Amazon.com
|
|
|
|
|