Reviews and News:
Salvador Dali’s body to be exhumed for a paternity test: “Maria Pilar Abel Martínez, a tarot card reader who was born in Girona in 1956, says that her mother, Antonia, had an affair with Dali in 1955.”
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Woodrow Wilson’s faith: “Wilson emerges as a formidable but deeply flawed man, who ‘lived out half his religious heritage, while betraying the other half.’ The relevant heritage in this case was southern Presbyterianism, which exerted considerable sway over Wilson’s early thinking but was gradually overtaken, in Hankins’s view, by a generic and theologically deficient liberal Protestant faith.”
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A history of the short story. It has always been a “minority interest.”
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The return of letterpress printing: “Thousands of tiny letterpress shops (and a good helping of larger ones) now crank out wedding invitations, greeting cards, business cards, and other printed ephemera, many with type printed as deep, tactile depressions in paper. Pinterest is full of pictures of bespoke letterpress cards, many of which can be purchased on Etsy. Large communities of printers have cropped up on Instagram, where designers swap tips on machine maintenance and craftsmanship.”
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A history of moonshine: “Contrary to popular legend, ‘moonshine’ does not take its name from dark Appalachian mountain hollows and a sinister time of night when the moon shines bright but from (we are told), of all things, Shakespeare’s Merry Wives of Windsor.”
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“The Broadway play 1984 is not for the average theatergoer. Adapting George Orwell’s dystopian novel — set in a future when critical thought is suppressed by a totalitarian regime, ostensibly overseen by a party leader known as Big Brother — the non-linear staging includes special effects like strobe lights, sudden blackouts and jackhammer sounds, in addition to the plot’s extreme torture scenes. Throughout the London transfer’s previews, attendees have fainted, thrown up and screamed at the actors from their seats. After one performance, some audience members were so on edge that they immediately got into a heightened argument. Cops were called; charges were pressed.”
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Essay of the Day:
In Commonweal, Jeffrey Meyers remembers novelist J.F. Powers at 100:
“In May 1981 I was invited to lecture at St. John’s University and monastery in Collegeville, seventy-five miles northwest of Minneapolis. J. F. Powers, who’d been teaching creative writing at St. John’s for many years, came to my talk that evening and asked me back to his house. We hit it off immediately, drank and talked till midnight, and eventually became good friends. Tall, thin, and severe-looking, he was a handsome man with thick wavy hair combed straight back. He smoked a pipe and wore a sweater over his shirt and tie. He had a sharp Irish nose, thin upper lip, and features of clerical cut. Though often mistaken for a priest because of his manner and books, he was married and had five children. Pondering the contrast between Jim’s conviviality and the chilly isolation of rural Minnesota, I went to sleep, for the first time in my life, in a monastic cell.
“I was rather shocked when I returned the next day to look more closely and see the primitive conditions of his hair-shirt house, a drab grey stucco dwelling that had originally been built for the workmen who served the monastery. The bookshelves were rickety, the furniture shabby, the floors were bare and there were no modern appliances. He disliked household chores but, with monk-like penitence, did his laundry, in a rusty bathtub, on his knees. In the fierce winters, with only a strand of barbed wire between him and the North Pole, the uninsulated roof and thin walls made it impossible to raise the inside temperature above sixty-two degrees, even with the furnace and fire going full blast.”
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Photo: Budapest
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Poem: Anne Stevenson, “Poem for a Daughter”
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