January 23rd, 2010 § 0
Two gems—
Kevin Lewis O’Neill, “I Want More of You: The Politics of Christian Eroticism in Postwar Guatemala”, in Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 52, No. 1, January 2010, pp. 131–156.
Jessica F. Cantlon and Elizabeth M. Brannon, “Basic Math in Monkeys and College Students”, in PLoS Biology, Vol. 5, No. 12, December 2007.
January 21st, 2010 § 0
Dictionary quotation of the day comes from the Oxford English Dictionary entry for doppelgänger—
It may well be that you will observe my little doppelgänger poltergeist soul hoisting a drink in a bar in them parts.
(From Harvey Breit and Margerie Bonner Lowry (Eds), Selected Letters of Malcolm Lowry, Lippincott, Philadelphia, 1965).
January 5th, 2010 § 0
Currently on the London Review of Books homepage—
In the next issue, which will be dated 28 January, Perry Anderson: Ways of Looking at China; David Trotter on phone booths; James Lever on Philip Roth. We’ve given up hope of James Wood on Lermontov.
January 5th, 2010 § 0
Imagine writing a poem by assigning to every letter of the alphabet some other letter, so that they are mutually assigned—so, for example, if I were to assign E to A, I’d have to assign A to E; if I were to assign D to T, I’d have to assign T to D, and so on. Imagine enciphering the alphabet according to such a rule. There are about 8 trillion different ways of enciphering the alphabet so that the letters are mutually encoded. Pick one of those 8 trillion ciphers. Now write a poem that is beautiful, that makes sense, in such a way that if you were to swap out every single letter of that poem and replace it with its counterpart from the mutual cipher, you’d produce a new poem that still remains just as beautiful and that still makes sense.
Christian Bök interviewed by Jonathan Ball, in The Believer, Vol. 7, No. 5, June 2009. (via Harper’s).