http://www.bloglingua.com/endangered-alphabets/
Scripts are on my mind as, having arrived in Korea, I am setting to work to learn the Korean "hangul" script. My fellow teachers at the academy tell me it is relatively easy to master.
Wuthering Expectations is warmly appreciative of the Clay Sanskrit Library, which published over 50 volumes of translations from a great literature neglected in the West:
All of the work – the translation and scholarship and editing – was in the service of enlarging the opportunity of theoretical readers, future readers, maybe just that one reader whose life will be completely transformed by this stuff. There’s no money here, and the potential audience is tiny. Yet it is obvious to me that the mere existence of the Clay Sanskrit books is valuable. Our cultural possibilities are greater than they were...
http://wutheringexpectations.blogspot.com/2010/05/other-peoples-sorrows-dont-hurt-us-clay.html
http://www.tnr.com/article/books/the-arrow-and-the-poem
RIP: Edoardo Sanguinetti. The Italian writer (1930-2010) was my kind of guy, an "obstinate" avant-gardist in a suit and tie:
His best-known poem, Laborintus, written in the early 1950s when he was still at university and writing his thesis on Dante, describes a journey through the modern Inferno. It uses words to express his sense of alienation from a world he views as chaotic and corrupt, assembling phrases from both high-flown and demotic Italian together with snatches of Latin and Greek and German and English quotations in a manner reminiscent of Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot. Virtually ignored by the critics when it was first published, it came to be seen as a key text of the new literature...
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/obituaries/article7139288.ece
Another recently departed writer, Robert Tralins (1936-2010), was of a very different type, a pulpmeister and perpetrator of such wildly diverse titles as How to Be a Power Closer in Selling, Invasion of the Nymphomaniacs, and Android Armageddon. (Hat tip to Bill Crider.)
http://www.tampabay.com/news/obituaries/robert-tralins-wrote-banned-and-bordello-books-as-well-as-stories-that/1097642
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Tralins
Although I have read a lot about Simon Rodia's Watts Towers, I have never seen them in person, and apparently that is too true even of many people who live in and visit Los Angeles:
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/culturemonster/2010/05/the-watts-towers-perpetual-state-of-crisis.html
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-tobar-20100528,0,4696688,full.column
I like the notion behind ArchDaily's AD Classics, to revisit great but perhaps under-sung buildings, such as Alvar Aalto's Baker House Dormitory at MIT:
http://www.archdaily.com/61752/ad-classics-mit-baker-house-dormitory-alvar-aalto/
Among notables born on this date are poets Walt Whitman, Ludwig Tieck (Germany), and Saint-John Perse (France), novelist Konstantin Paustovsky (Russia), crime novelist John Connolly, film directors Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Bert Haanstra (Netherlands), actor/director Clint Eastwood, painter Walter Sickert, countertenor Alfred Deller, soprano Shirley Verrett, singer/songwriter Johnny Paycheck, folksinger Peter Yarrow, outsider musician Wesley Willis, cartoonist W. Heath Robinson, and actors Denholm Elliott, Alida Valli, Sandrine Bonnaire, Sharon Gless, Don Ameche, and Colin Farrell. I featured a Wesley Willis tune back on March 2, but since you can never get enough, here is "My Mother Smokes Crack Rocks," with such immortal lyrics as
She jacks my brother for dope money
She does it by threatening him with a Smith & Wesson
and
They arrested my mother for possession of a controlled substance
My mother was taken to the metal clink
They locked her up for being a loser
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