Now I find that the processes of rereading, investigation and reflection have led me to the best time in my life. Reading memoirists raised issues in my mind about memory, truth telling and artistry. In weaving together these aspects of my own reading experiences in my thesis, I discovered parts of myself and aspects of my most intimate relationships that I had not previously explored.
Since then, probably every single major scientific discovery has used mathematics in some form, simply because it is far more powerful than any other human language. It is not surprising that this has led many people to claim that mathematics is much more: that the universe is created by a mathematician.
So could we imagine a universe in which mathematics does not work?
The movie has many lessons to teach the steep costs of attaining and retaining power, what a man gains and loses from pledging his loyalty to his family's greatness above all else.
However, as my husband showed me, even a person who doesn't live and die by Coppola's masterpiece may somehow have learned how to make Peter Clemenza's sauce.
A daughter of parents who abandoned their literary aspirations to support their family of eight, Hunt asks, “What projects don’t exist because I exist instead?” While considering German writer W.G. Sebald’s death at age 57, Hunt imagines a library filled with “all the books dead authors would never write because they had died too young.”
Hunt visits that and other made-up libraries throughout “The Unwritten Book: An Investigation,” the intense new memoir/essay collection from the novelist and short story writer behind “Mr. Splitfoot,” “The Dark Dark” and other works that search for life among the shadows. Just as Tweedy champions the music of fictional bands in his song, Hunt is fascinated by books that appear only in other books, books destroyed by authors fearful of publication and books left unfinished or unattempted by their creators.
In “Let There Be Light,” a work of biblical interpretation in comic book form, the cartoonist and illustrator Liana Finck presents us with a female God who is anything but supremely perfect. Omniscience, omnipotence? Forget about it. Visually, she’s just plain silly, if also adorable in a totally unawesome kind of way. She wears the kind of crown that a little birthday girl gets to wear on her special day. I’m guessing it’s constructed of shiny gold cardboard, an imaginative leap permitted by Finck’s minimalist black-and-white drawings. As another sign of her ontological status, Finck’s God carries a wand like the one that Glinda the Good Witch wields in “The Wizard of Oz.” Actually, Glinda’s wand is bigger, which probably makes Finck’s God feel bad about herself. She’s very prone to feeling bad about herself. No act of creation goes unpunished. The words “And God saw that it was good” never once appear. Instead, she feels disappointment, despair, an increasingly urgent desire to hide away.
In other words, Finck’s God is an artist, which is to say a being plagued with self-doubts. More significantly, she’s a female artist, which means she’s infinitely more plagued by self-doubts.
“Making History” is a survey—a monster survey—of historians from Herodotus (the father of lies, in Plutarch’s description) to Henry Louis Gates, Jr., sketching their backgrounds and personalities, summarizing their output, and identifying their agendas. Cohen’s coverage is epic. He writes about ancient historians, Islamic historians, Black historians, and women historians, from the first-century Chinese historian Ban Zhao to the Cambridge classicist Mary Beard. He discusses Japanese and Soviet revisionists who erased purged officials and wartime atrocities from their nations’ authorized histories, and analyzes visual works like the Bayeux Tapestry, which he calls “the best record of its time, pictorial or otherwise,” and Mathew Brady’s photographs of Civil War battlefields. (“In effect,” he concludes, “they were frauds.”)
to disappear in time
we collect memories
stoke the fire
half-woman half-man half-animal half-bird