Monday 2 September, 2024
Trompe-l’œil
Arles, 2022. Caused me to do a double-take.
Quote of the Day
“If reading is one of the pleasures – and necessities – of youth, rereading is one of the pleasures – and necessities – of age. You know more, you understand both life and literature better, and you have the additional interest of checking your younger self against your older self.”
Julian Barnes
Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news
John Field | Nocturne No. 1 in E Flat Major, H.24 | Elizabeth Joy Roe
I love all Field’s Nocturnes, but most of all this one.
Long Read of the Day
How Ireland became the world’s literary powerhouse
Hyperbolic headline but still an interesting journalistic investigation by Kate McCusker into why my country seems to breed good writers.
“The Irish just chat about everything. We love telling tales and yarning. There’s no other country where you could talk for an hour about the weather,” says Aisling Cunningham, 57, the owner of Ulysses Rare Books on Duke Street in Dublin.
Sure enough, I have been here for 50 minutes and we have talked at length about everything from the biblical rains of Donegal to why more people who stop into her antiquarian bookshop end up leaving with a copy of James Joyce’s Dubliners than Ulysses itself. (Cunningham reckons it’s because the former is more accessible – although there is also the small matter of the Shakespeare and Company first edition of the latter costing just short of €30,000, about £25,500.)
I am in Dublin to find out why Ireland, a country that you can drive the length of in a few hours, punches so far above its weight when it comes to literature. It has contributed four Nobel literature laureates and six Booker prize winners; its capital was the fourth Unesco City of Literature in 2010; and it’s home to a booming network of magazines, publishers, bookshops, festivals and (whisper it) decently funded libraries…
One of those libraries played a key role in the education of this blogger.
Can you judge the tech bros by their bookshelves?
Yesterday’s Observer column:
In August, a thoughtful blogger, Tanner Greer, posed an interesting question to the Silicon Valley crowd: “What are the contents of the ‘vague tech canon’? If we say it is 40 books, what are they?” He was using the term “canon” in the sense of “the collection of works considered representative of a period or genre”, but astutely qualifying it to stop Harold Bloom – the great literary critic who spent his life campaigning for a canon consisting of the great works of the past (Shakespeare, Proust, Dante, Montaigne et al) – spinning in his grave.
Greer’s challenge was immediately taken up by Patrick Collison, co-founder with his brother, John, of the fintech giant Stripe (market value $65bn) and thus among the richest Irishmen in history. Unusually among tech titans, Collison is a passionate advocate of reading, and so it was perhaps predictable that he would produce a list of 43 books – adding a caveat that it wasn’t “the list of books that I think one ought to read – it’s just the list that I think roughly covers the major ideas that are influential here”. (“Here” being Silicon Valley.)
The list included some predictable choices…
Do read the whole piece.
My commonplace booklet
I spent more time than I should have watching the main speakers at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago last week. What struck me was the level of oratory on display, particularly in speeches by Kamala Harris, Michelle and Barack Obama, Bill Clinton and Tim Walz. Even Joe Biden seemed energised and eloquent. And I was left struggling (and failing) to think of any British (or European) politician who could deliver a speech as good or as eloquent as any of these.
A knowledgeable historian friend to whom I said this afterwards observed that the prevalence of evangelical rhetoric in American public life might have something to do with it. I wonder.