John Julius Norwich is an earnest and somewhat stiff-backed editor. So it’s not entirely surprising that he reveals in his introduction that he is “braced for objections” over his selections for “The Great Cities in History,” a collection of essays and images. He anticipates that readers will ask, for instance, why Timbuktu is included and not Toronto, why Meroe (an ancient Nubian city) is included and not Melbourne. It’s a dull question, and Norwich answers it dully, by pointing to the “in history” part of the book’s title. The better answer would have been that there’s not a shred of romance in Toronto and Melbourne.

James Gatz — that was really, or at least legally, his name.

One morning in the low-rent office of a mysterious small business, one employee finds a ragged old copy of The Great Gatsby in the clutter of his desk and starts to read it out loud. And doesn’t stop.

At first his coworkers hardly seem to notice, but then weird coincidences start happening in the office, one after another, until it’s no longer clear whether he’s reading the book or the book is doing something to him. . . .

6 hours long and with a cast of 13, Gatz is by far ERS’s most ambitious endeavor yet — not a stage adaptation of Fitzgerald’s novel but a verbatim reading of the entire book, accomplished by the staff of a small office in the midst of their increasingly bewildering business operations.

via Elevator Repair Service: Gatz.

What really surprised me was their reactions to two of the quasi-news opinion programs — The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, and The Glen Beck Program.

After Oprah, these two are (apparently) amongst the biggest book sellers on TV.  Like Oprah, Glenn Beck has a loyal audience, is perceived as very sincere — and moves books.

But the most intriguing “inside baseball” stuff we discussed was the impact of The Daily Show on book sales — in particular, two recent books that were the subject of big TDS segments. These were mentioned as prime examples of the power of Jon Stewart.

The first is House of Cards: A Tale of Hubris and Wretched Excess on Wall Street by William D. Cohan. After Stewart raved about the book (”Helluva book — you made finance read like a suspense novel”) when Cohan was on the show April 9th, sales of the book in stores tripled. They have been strong ever since.

The second example was the infamous James Cramer appearance on TDS on March12th. According to the people I had lunch with yesterday, the very next day, sales of Cramer’s book   Jim Cramer’s Real Money: Sane Investing in an Insane World went into free fall. They absolutely plummeted — and they haven’t recovered since.

April 16 is the 50th anniversary of the publication of a little book that is loved and admired throughout American academe. Celebrations, readings, and toasts are being held, and a commemorative edition has been released.

I won’t be celebrating.

The Elements of Style does not deserve the enormous esteem in which it is held by American college graduates. Its advice ranges from limp platitudes to inconsistent nonsense. Its enormous influence has not improved American students’ grasp of English grammar; it has significantly degraded it.

Ouch!

Dr Phillip Jensen, Anglican Dean of Sydney, told AAP on Friday he sympathised with Cardinal Pell’s views, but did not believe condoms alone had made society more promiscuous.

“In terms of adultery, in terms of divorce, in terms of grandchildren, yes we are in big trouble as a society because of the sexual revolution,” he said.

“It came out of Virginia Woolf and that crowd (in England in the early 20th century).

“It’s a century-long movement that has happened.

“In my view, it’s a disaster. It has ruined lives. It is ruining our society.”

What next? Should we burn Woolf’s books?

We don’t know who created this, but whoever it is, we’ve got a crush on them!  Some crafty classics-loving individual has created a mock Facebook page for the Aeneid.  It’s wonderful and hilarious.  You don’t have to use Facebook to appreciate it, but you do have to know a bit about the Aeneid and the Trojan War.

There’s a lot more to it than we’re showing here. Click this link and then click on the image to enlarge it. Enjoy!  And beware of Greeks bearing gifts!

via The Aeneid on Facebook at eternallycool.net.

My earliest memories of my father are permeated by books. They were an integral part of the daily rhythms of his life. Books arrived constantly in boxes or cardboard sleeves, by ship and by air to our tropical outpost [in Papua New Guinea]; they were forever being stacked or rearranged in hall cupboards as protection against the ubiquitous threats of pests and damp. During his waking hours he was happiest musing over book catalogues or perusing the literary gold within his latest acquisition. It was a highly infectious affliction that he willingly passed on to his son. [Looking for a Good Book] is his ‘tale of a gentle madness’, written by my father during his sixties and seventies, the story of a book collector thrown hither and thither by tumultuous events beyond his control. 

Read more ..

I take the belief that the best of life is life lived quietly, where change is imperceptible, where nothing happens but our calm journey through the day, where change is imperceptible and the precious life is everything.

You could hardly imagine a viewpoint more at odds with the ethos of our time. We live in a world (especially the virtual world) where people crave change, celebrate the new and try to cram as many experiences into each day as possible.

What McGahern is pointing out though, I think, is that happiness comes with the depth of the experience not the breadth of experiences and their newness.

In McGahern’s masterpiece, “That they may face the rising sun”, one of the main characters, Jamesie, has never left the part of Ireland he was born in, except to visit his son in Dublin on one occasion. McGahern emphasises Jamesie’s view that despite his lack of travel he ‘knows’ the whole world and his enthusiasm for that world: ‘it is spring again and everything is interesting’. McGahern seems to me to be arguing that just how ‘interesting’ depends on you and, paradoxically in this modern era, the depth of your familiarity with things and not their ‘newness’.

Of course, for most of us there is some balance needed here. None of us want to live out our lives in a single village, But we should never mistake the titillation of newness with genuine happiness.

Helen Keller summed up Braille’s contribution in a speech she gave at the Sorbonne to mark the centennial of his death:

On behalf of the blind people of the world, I thank you from the bottom of my heart for having generously recognized the pride and efforts of all those who refuse to succumb to their limitations. In our way, we, the blind, are as indebted to Louis Braille as mankind is to Gutenberg. It is true that the dot system is very different from ordinary print, but these raised letters are, under our fingers, precious seeds from which has grown our intellectual harvest. Without the braille dot system, how incomplete and chaotic our education would be! The dismal doors of frustration would shut us out from the untold treasures of literature, philosophy and science. But, like a magic wand, the six dots of Louis Braille have resulted in schools where embossed books, like vessels, can transport us to ports of education, libraries and all the means of expression that assure our independence.

The Braille system is based on a cell of six dots which are either raised or not:

Braille uses a system of small raised dots that are read using the fingertips and can be used to represent everything from words to math and music. The reader’s fingers gently glide over paper that has been embossed with the braille code.

Braille is a binary system, one of just several nineteenth century inventions that preview our ‘digital’ age. Braille’s system of raised dots and unraised dots is not unlike the 0s and 1s of computer language. The six dots of the Braille system generate 64 codes. Remarkably, the Braille system is also much simpler than the Morse system – another nineteenth century ‘binary’ invention.

These inventions were early examples of a new way of presenting information i.e. as simple as possible without which we wouldn’t be on this or any other website today. For more, on the history of this stuff I recommend Charles Petzold’s “Code: The hidden language of computer hardware and software”.