I read Shah of Shahs, by Ryszard Kapuściński (1982).
Useful reminder of how and why the regime ended the way it did, but it's too bad he didn't stick around to exercise that Kapuścińskian irony on the mullahs.
(1985 translation by William R. Brand & Katarzyna Mroczkowska-Brand.)
Best birthday wishes to John McPhee (b.1931), who has been part of my reading life since high school.
(my collection isn't complete - there are yet a few titles to get.)
Stacks for two who share a birthday but are otherwise each truly 'sui generis': Kōbō Abe (b.1924) & Georges Perec (b.1936).
hmm, well it's pretty, whatever it is!
the most common garden varieties are pretty large, flower spikes to 3-4'.
Acanthus?
A great one.
And I was hoping he'd finally get his Nobel next year.
At some point Giorgio Bassani (botd in 1916) decided all his novels and stories were just one big novel, the Novel of Ferrara.
For his birthday, my Kapuściński stack...
I read 'My Morning Walk' [Spacer poranny], by Ryszard Kapuściński, whose birthday it is (1932).
Don't miss his beautiful photographs.
This was published two days after his death in 2007. Polish text, with English, German, & Spanish translations:
archive.org/details/spac...
I read Arthur Waley's translations of The Book of Songs (1937) and The Analects of Confucius (1938). Reading them concurrently over the last few weeks was rather wonderful.
Birthday regards to George Sandys (1578-1644), traveler, colonist, poet, and early English translator of Ovid's Metamorphoses, the bulk of which he worked on in the 1620s while serving as Treasurer of the Jamestown Colony.
His Ovid is out of print but available here:
This 2013 Princeton edition appends a very funny parody by John Bowle (Punch, 24 Feb 1954) that divides writers and philosophers into Owls and Pussycats.
I read The Hedgehog and the Fox: An Essay on Tolstoy's View of History, by Isaiah Berlin (1953).
A good sidedoor entry into Berlin's thought.
Also, makes me want to dive into War and Peace again.
love the cover!
I read Works & Days, the Theogony, and the Shield of Herakles, by Hesiod (tr Lattimore, 1959). The author of the last work could be pseudo-Hesiod, sub-Hesiod, off-day Hesiod, or another Boeotian also named Hesiod.
W & D makes me want to strip to a loincloth and hoe the beanrows.
George Brown Tindall (1921-2006), born on this day. I've been making my way through his America: A Narrative History (1984) and enjoying it very much.
(My great-grandfather, Rev. Charlie Friend, whose mother was a Tindall, was a fourth cousin of GBT.)
BOTD, Millicent Fenwick (1910-1992). A favorite Republican (and distant kinswoman), a congresswoman from NJ's 5th District, UN diplomat, pipe-smoking grandmother, and model for Doonesbury's Lacey Davenport, who championed gun control, campaign spending limits, and the ERA.
I was just thinking it was high time for a new Aira and, lo, there's a five-work omnibus arriving in May.
Includes:
Margarita: A Memory (2013), The Dream (1998), Musical Brushstrokes (2019), Princess Springtime (2003), & The Hormone Pill (2002).
www.ndbooks.com/book/five-by...
Do you have a favorite?
Mine are An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter, Ghosts, and The Linden Tree (aka The Lime Tree).
Happy birthday to birthday boy César Aira. He has certainly cheered his fair share of my rainy afternoons.
My Airas, in their original publication order, all but The Seamstress and the Wind and The Famous Magician, which are playing hide-and-seek at the moment.
"she abuses the privilege"
On the occasion of his birthday today (1907), a few Auden books that have stolen into my library over the years.
A few lost in the maelstrom downstairs:
The Prolific and the Devourer
Secondary Worlds (The Eliot Lectures)
Lectures on Shakespeare
WH Auden's Book of Light Verse
Wasley's Age of Auden
📷near Guangzhou, 1982
I think I'm still in the 90s, same house, same neighbors...
I read Pure Pagan: Seven Centuries of Greek Poems and Fragments (Modern Library, 2004). Translations by Burton Raffel, with an intro by Guy Davenport.
I read Pulse, by Cynan Jones (2025). Stories in the man-against-the-elements vein, beautifully done but only for those able to bear elevated cortisol levels.
Lyrics from the Old English (Smithsonian Folkways, 1964).
Burton Raffel & Robert Creed taking turns in English Old & New:
www.youtube.com/playlist?lis...
The essay by Umberto Eco, a repurposed lecture from a quarter-century earlier, is entertaining but has little of pertinence to these libraries, these images, or this photographer.
I had a look at Libraries, by photographer Candida Höfer (2005). Some spectacular libraries here, a number of which I've added to my Places to Visit, If or When I Get the Chance.
