Saturday, February 6, 2016

A Random Assortment

~ I think this exhibit of "Art from the Holocaust" answers Adorno's question about art after the Holocaust.

~ There's always more on TSE:

Crawford records with subtle sympathy Eliot’s failed love for his Boston contemporary Emily Hale, “intelligent, vulnerable, strictly brought up and defensively ‘proper.’” Eliot was devastated when he made his feelings clear and she gave him no possibility of hope—although in fact she was secretly in love with him, and remained so all her life. Eliot seems to have addressed her, also secretly, in lines in The Waste Land that recalled his inner surrender to her: “My friend, blood shaking my heart/The awful daring of a moment’s surrender…” The notes in the new Poems of T.S. Eliot record Eliot’s correction of a French translation from “Mon ami” to “Mon amie,” triple-underlining the feminizing “e.”

~ Also TSE on detective fiction.

~ Oh no.

~ This aptly describes Trump as "a famous political performance artist." This is great, too: 
The aircraft’s thick door popped open and the candidate appeared. Trump was wearing a shiny blue tie, and from a distance his head looked like a pumpkin-colored balloon on a blue string descending to earth.
~ To remember for our next trip to London (which is only a dream, not an actual plan).

~ On getting rid of mosquitoes:

 A determined American doctor named Fred L. Soper eradicated a malaria-carrying mosquito in Brazil in the 1930s, even before the widespread use of DDT. And dengue-carrying mosquitoes were eradicated in 18 Latin American countries from 1947 to 1962, Dr. Hotez said.
But Dr. Soper was a fanatic, making sure every house was thoroughly inspected and all standing water removed. In Brazil, he was backed by the government, which made it a crime to deny entry to an inspector. According to a profile of him in The New Yorker, Dr. Soper used to say that mosquito eradication was impossible in a democracy.


1 comment:

Sonetka said...

I enjoyed the review of the Crawford book, and will have to get hold of the new Complete Poems, even if it does feel a little like looking in someone's underwear drawer to read the things they never meant to be canon, so to speak. I am wondering when Crawford is going to release the second volume of his biography -- will he wait four more years until the Hale letters become available? That's a long break, but on the other hand if he publishes in the next few years the book will become outdated almost immediately when the letters are released.