Discoveries: Arts and Culture

Finished this book in three days, which is pretty amazing for me, with fiction, but this well written novel held my attention. I finished reading A GUIDE FOR THE PERPLEXED by Dara Horn, and do not find it recorded here.  Software Josie Ashkenazi has invented an application that records everything its users do.  When she visits the Library of Alexandria as a tech consultant, she is abducted in Egypt’s post revolutionary chaos, with only a copy of the philosopher Maimonides’ famous A GUIDE FOR THE PERPLEXED.  Led to read this book, by having read Peter Hessler’s The Buried (Egypt then and now…archaeology and the revolution), I was not disappointed but totally enhralled by her strategizing and well crafted novel. Her jealous sister takes over her husband and daughter when she has to send a death video.  One anticipates this as in the beginning, when children, Judith leaves her in a pit, into which the children have made her crawl and take away the ladder, an act ...

This has an introduction by Colin Thubron and Artemis Cooper.  I once knew Colin so his interest in Fermor makes great sense given all the travel books he has made about his journeys, though he also writes fiction. So, for anyone wanting to go this route, Here are my notes.  They need more editing, but I need to move on, just now.  Apologies.  P 89 “The only authors he had heard of were the same ones who seemed to have gained a unique foothold throughout Central Europe, in German translation or Tauchnitz: Dickens,  Wilde and H.G. Wells, then, after a gap, Galsworthy, Somerset Maugham,  Charles Morgan, and rather surprisingly, Rosamond Lehmann.  Their bugbear, because of  Arms and the Man was Bernard Shaw .”  P 69  She was as pale as a water sprite or an etiolated  Rossetti  heroine.  P 59 rose bushes, hundreds of thousands of them, …Kazanlik is one of the chief places in the world for attar of ...

The theme was "just one" in all observations and thought and living...I think this was published on Amazon.com.  .  REFRACTIONS AND REFLEXIONS (2012) did not go into publication.  

Having had the privilege of attending the author's portion of the International Scandinavian Studies conference held in San Francisco, I spent a wonderful day absorbed in the readings of important Scandinavian writers.  On two occasions, a young scholar was seated near me in the vast audience, and asked very pertinent questions.  Included was the writer, from Iceland, and a poet from Norway, and other notable writers, some in English, but most still only known in their native tongue. The young scholar, when I told her about my stay at the Karen Blixen housemuseum as a guest of the director, and my own exploration of the life and works of Karen Blixen(Isak Dinesen), she gave me a copy of her dissertation published as "Texts at Play", a very intriguing title, which encapsulated and reminded me of the axiom by Buckminister Fuller, "Play is the highest form of human activity"  The book focusses, of course, on intertextuality, but also on the creative process and ...