With all this talk of the NSA and its activities, espionage has stormed back onto the front pages. Perfect time to publish a spy novel set in China, the USA and Germany, one should think, and cometh the hour, cometh the man in the form of Olen Steinhauer. That surname suggests another Nordic star but [...]
“Non si può seguire Gesù da soli”
Who knows what this pilgrim at the International Eucharistic Congress in Dublin in mid-June was praying for? Health, perhaps. Better weather, possibly. An Italian victory in Euro 2012? Tonight, in Kiev, Italy play Spain in the final of the championship and for the Italian coach, Cesare Prandelli, the tournament has been a triumph of faith. [...]
Scenes from the Holocene
The Holocene is a geological epoch which began some 12,000 years ago and continues to the present. Asked about the song tile, Justin Vernon, front man with Bon Iver, said: “It’s partly named after the (geological) era, but it’s also the name of a bar in Portland where I had a dark night of the [...]
Reading Camille Paglia reading Yeats
After reading The Second Coming by William Butler Yeats, Camille Paglia wrote: “Yeats’s ‘The Second Coming’ has gained in prophetic power with each decade of the twentieth and now twenty-first century, from the rise of fascism and nuclear warfare to the proliferation of international terrorism. It expresses the melancholy realization that man, yearningly drawn to [...]
Waiting for the Supremes and Germany vs. Italy
While millions of Europeans worry that their money will soon be worthless and further millions are filled with fear that the Spanish style of soccer will eventually suffocate the beautiful game, the people of the United States are in a state of suspended animation as they wait for the Supreme Court to deliver its critical [...]
HHhH
Laurent Binet, son of an historian, was born in Paris and was awarded the 2010 Prix Goncourt du Premier Roman for his first novel, HHhH. The title is an acronym for Himmlers Hirn heisst Heydrich (“Himmler’s brain is called Heydrich”), a popular Nazi quip about the monstrous SS-Obergruppenführer. It is a stunningly original work. Snippet: [...]
The EU Fab Four sings the blues
Walter Russell Mead: “The ‘Fab Four’ (Spain’s Mariano Rajoy, France’s Francois Hollande, Germany’s Angela Merkel and Italy’s Mario Monti) reaffirmed a pre-existing agreement to make some mostly symbolic adjustments to European policy, whomping up an air souffle that the Club Med countries plus France can claim is a “growth” package, but it is mostly made [...]
Taking the Microsoft Surface Tablet apart
Danny Sullivan is devastatingly dismissive of the Redmond presentation in “Hands-Off: Microsoft Surface Tablet Review“: “Nice trick? No, you know what’s a nice trick? Bringing out devices that no one can actually use. I know they work. I could see that one of the Microsoft guys was all logged into his. But why not let [...]
Summiting Slievereagh on the longest day of the year
The mountain is known locally as Slievereagh. The Irish form is An Sliabh Riabhach. The summit offers a panorama of the plains of Limerick and Tipperary. Send to Kindle
Johnny Parry builds it, bubble by bubble
Drawing upon the bottomless well of clichés that the English language has stored up, the remarkable Johnny Parry adds a fistful of them to a musical collage of comic strip bubbles and creates something original, musically, lexically and visually. Can’t ask for more, can one? Send to Kindle
Keep writing, or else
Write or Die: “How the app works: Writers begin typing in the app’s window. When the typing slows to a stop, there are consequences. The writer can set how severe those consequences will be. In “gentle” mode, a notice pops up with a kind reminder that it’s time to start writing. In “normal” mode, the [...]
The telephone, the secador and the tree trunks
Giovanni Battista Rogeri (ca. 1642 — ca. 1710) was born in Bologna and was sent to Cremona to be apprenticed to Nicolo Amati. After surviving the terrible years of the Plague, he started his own workshop in Brescia and there made some of finest violins in history. All of this, and more, can be found [...]
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