March 10

A subject line for a piece of spam I received yesterday read: "Enter the world of healthy and happy people!" Must have come from someplace off-planet....

The always-stimulating Neglected Books Page, one of those websites that does its job, reveals a long-buried historical gem, Stephen Bonsal's Unfinished Business, the author's memoirs of the 1919 Versailles Peace Conference at which he served as President Woodrow Wilson's private translator:

Neglected though it may be, Unfinished Business is an exceptional book worth rediscovering by anyone interested in history and politics. There are not many writers who can cover the posturing and manoeuvring of the greatest men of the time and, a few pages later, describe the sorrows and woes of the lowest in society–and in neither case losing his sense of perspective.

http://neglectedbooks.com/?p=324

Readers interested in politics and diplomacy ("the most difficult of all arts," as the above essay reminds us) will find much to occupy them on this Foreign Policy list of "The top 10 books on grand strategy":

http://books.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2009/04/10/the_top_ten_books_on_grand_strategy

Andrew Liptak at io9 thinks that the strategies of military science fiction could use a little updating. He sees them trapped in a World War II paradigm:

http://io9.com/5481380/your-military-science-fiction-isnt-really-military-science-fiction

Ben Zimmer gives us a little background on the suddenly prominent military phrase "the hurt locker" (hat tip to 3quarksdaily):

http://www.visualthesaurus.com/cm/wordroutes/2195/

Steve Donoghue at stevereads enters The World of the Porcupine, which sounds like a completely delightful book. The post includes a nice anecdote about a pet porcupine!

http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/stevereads/2010/03/the-world-of-the-porcupine/

An interesting New York Times obituary of a long-retired classical violinist, Patricia Travers, raises larger issue about the fates of child prodigies:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/07/arts/music/07travers.html

The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston currently hosts an exhibition of beautiful Renaissance sculptures:

http://www.artdaily.org/index.asp?int_sec=11&int_new=36493

No less gorgeous are the examples of platinum print photography on display at the Philadelphia Museum of Art:

http://www.artdaily.org/index.asp?int_sec=11&int_new=36548

http://www.philamuseum.org/exhibitions/362.html

I have learned from ArchDaily that there are plenty of sensational buildings going up in Turkey, such as the Yapi Kedri Bank Academy in Istanbul:

http://www.archdaily.com/43011/yapi-kredi-bank-academy-teget/

The tine is ripe for a re-assessment of the mainstream pop music of the Sixties -- the stuff my parents liked. Take composer Jimmy Webb, for instance, who named Burt Bacharach and Stephen Sondheim as his models, and who wrote distinctive, haunting songs such as this:



I still don't understand what Webb's "MacArthur Park" is about, however.

Among notables born on this date are librettist Lorenzo da Ponte, German Romantic writer Friedrich von Schlegel, poets Joseph von Eichendorff (Germany), Samuel Ferguson (Ireland), and Boris Vian (France), language usage expert Henry Watson Fowler, composers Arthur Honegger (Switzerland) and Mykola Lysenko (Ukraine), violinist Pablo Sarasate, conductor Charles Groves, jazz trumpeter Bix Beiderbecke, film directors Gregory La Cava and Paul Haggis, and actors Barry Fitzgerald, Sam Jaffe, and Jon Hamm. Gregory La Cava is one of those Hollywood directors whose career straddles the silent and sound eras, but he's probably best known for his Thirties comedies such as My Man Godfrey. I've written enthusiastically about his 1932 Lee Tracy film The Half Naked Truth here at PMD. La Cava was also a drinking buddy of W.C. Fields, which suggests unusual stamina.