By Steve Rhodes
“It’s a little-known fact that the Virgin Mary was fond of creamed spinach,” Paul Collins writes an essay titled “The Oddball Know-It-All” in the New York Times Book Review. “And did you know that sauerbraten was invented by Charlemagne? That the geneticist Gregor Mendel spent much of his time developing a recipe for fried eggs? Or that “people who use considerable red pepper in their foods are almost immune to atomic radiation”?
“If you’re nodding in recognition, you’re a lucky owner of George Leonard Herter’s farrago Bull Cook and Authentic Historical Recipes and Practices – one of the greatest oddball masterpieces in this or any other language. A surly sage, gun-toting Minnesotan and All-American crank – the kind of guy who would take his own sandwiches to Disneyland because the restaurants were No Damned Good – Herter wrote books on such disparate topics as candy making, marriage advice, African safaris and household cleaning.”
Who knew?
Well, these guys did.
I can’t even find a Wikipedia entry for him, though. I think he damn well deserves one, don’t you?
Economic Indicators
“[Th]e Baltic Dry Index, a widely used measure of shipping costs, has fallen 89 percent this year,” Paul Krugman writes in The New York Review of Books.
Loving Lolita
“It’s been fifty years since Vladimir Nabokov’s little girl first endured – and manipulated – the desire of her overaged suitor, Humbert, and yet Lolita is more present as a pop-culture reference than ever,” Meghan Pleticha writes on Nerve. “She’s been a trendy bar, a children’s bed and countless newspaper headlines referencing any sexual woman under eighteen. But a new book asserts that as a character and an idea, Lolita was not the one-dimensional notion she’s become over decades of simplification.”
Pleticha interviews the author of Chasing Lolita: How Popular Culture Corrupted Nabokov’s Little Girl All Over Again.
Happiness Is . . . Happy Friends
“We found that social networks have clusters of happy and unhappy people within them that reach out to three degrees of separation,” the authors of Social Networks and Happiness write. “A person’s happiness is related to the happiness of their friends, their friends’ friends, and their friends’ friends’ friends – that is, to people well beyond their social horizon. We found that happy people tend to be located in the center of their social networks and to be located in large clusters of other happy people. And we found that each additional happy friend increases a person’s probability of being happy by about 9%.”
Rear View
John Wilson of Books & Culture includes The Butt, by Will Self, on his year-ender list, writing that “this phantasmagoric satire, set in a fictitious land that has aspects of Australia and Iraq and other disparate places, is so bracing, so loaded with verbal energy, so inventive in its engagement with all matter of human folly, so gloriously excessive, it stands head and above the usual run of novels. Like many good satiric books, it leaves you with a strange mixture of exhilaration and bleakness.”
Trillion Dollar Treachery
The Economist includes these two books on its year-end list.
* The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict. By Joseph E. Stiglitz and Linda J. Bilmes.
“With the patience of auditors and the passion of polemicists, two academics, one a Nobel prize-winning economist and the other a public-finance expert at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, take an unflinching look at the hidden cost of invading Iraq.”
* The Trillion Dollar Meltdown: Easy Money, High Rollers, and the Great Credit Crash.By Charles R. Morris.
“The first big book on the credit crunch saw the crisis coming three years ago. Freak-out-onomics for I-told-you-sos.”
The Fake Universe
Those photos of various happenings in deep space are awe-inspiring, but they’re also phony.
“With plumes of gas and stardust reaching up like the fingers of Adam and a purple sun winking back, the ‘Pillars of Creation‘ has the high ecclesiastical wattage of a Michelangelo. But this late-20th-century masterpiece wasn’t painted by human hands. It is a digital image taken by the Hubble Space Telescope of the Eagle nebula, a celestial swarm 7,000 light-years from Earth,” George Johnson writes in the New York Times Book Review.
“Reproduced on calendars and book jackets and in coffee-table books, ‘Pillars of Creation’ belongs among the iconic images of modern times – right up there with the raising of the flag on Iwo Jima and Ansel Adams’s ‘Moon and Half Dome, Yosemite National Park.’ More than an artifact of technology, ‘Pillars of Creation’ is a work of art. As John D. Barrow, a professor of mathematical sciences at Cambridge University, writes in COSMIC IMAGERY: Key Images in the History of Science, pulling such an arresting canvas from the digital signals beamed by Hubble required aesthetic choices much like those that went into the great landscape paintings of the American West.
“There is no reason, for example, why the plumes had to be shown standing up. There are no directions in space. More important, the scientists processing the bit stream chose the color palette partly for dazzling effect.”
Is your disullisionment complete?
Besides, the Pillars have been blown apart.
Posted on December 9, 2008