Regarding our rapidly accelerating world overrun by a pandemic, climate change and inequality, a question that our generation faces is whether good will endure. In response to this question, Saklikar spins a cautionary tale called Bramah & The Beggar Boy – a three hundred page epic told in verse and the first book of a fantasy series.
When the first public sundial arrived in Rome, a trophy of war expropriated from Sicily in the third century BCE and mounted in the Forum for all to see, some Romans cursed it. “The gods damn that man who first discovered the hours, and—yes—who first set up a sundial here, who’s smashed the day into bits,” wrote Plautus. “You know, when I was a boy, my stomach was the only sundial, by far the best and truest.” People have been complaining about clocks ever since.
Plautus, a comedy writer, may have been half-kidding, but David Rooney is not. “It changed everything,” he tells us. “Romans were forced to live their lives by the clock. And this new temporal order was sweeping civilizations across the world.” In his insightful, globe-spanning new book, About Time: A History of Civilization in Twelve Clocks, he sets out to show that this ancient device is neither simple nor innocent, that clocks are designed with hidden agendas and ulterior motives, and that their influence on human societies and the human psyche has been more profound than we usually imagine.
In his new book, Beethoven’s Lives: The Biographical Tradition, Lockwood returns to the dilemma of art and life from a different point of view, offering a briskly paced tour of the history of Beethoven biography, starting in 1827, the year of the composer’s death, and continuing almost to the present. It would be impossible for such a survey to be totally comprehensive and up to date, since the flood of Beethoven books is ongoing—last year, the 250th anniversary of his birth, brought a new crop. But Beethoven’s Lives shows that our understanding of the music has always been profoundly shaped by the stories we tell about the man.
it is the thing about clouds that they look
like other things.
when I see a cloud I think of other
Becoming the raspberry stain on the pink of your cheek,
a tongue’s soft landing spot. Becoming the empty ritual,
what can’t be said. Becoming intercession, my language
becoming yours, the blessing of tongues. Becoming the river