The Real Life Inspiration Behind Bond Girls

Polish spy Krystyna Skarbek.

From a piece in the Guardian...

She was described as having a mesmeric power over men which helped her argue with the Gestapo to secure the release of three British colleagues. Captured in Hungary, she bit her tongue so hard that it bled, and convinced her interrogators to free her because she had tuberculosis.

She made many trips to occupied Poland, once getting there by persuading a former Olympic skier to help her cross the snow-covered mountains in the dead of winter, served in the Special Operations Executive, and was parachuted into occupied France.

After the war she was paid off with £100, and ended her working life as a cleaner on cruise ships.

10 Best Books for Mother's Day

The list, care of the Christian Science Monitor.

Light Speaking

The Poetry Foundation discusses the ties between photography and poetry.

From the post...

Since the invention of the light-reactive photographic plate in 1839, poets have been tantalized by the camera’s images. This dawned on me almost two decades ago, when I’d begun reading about photographic history. Concurrently, as if sensitized by the new subject, I began noticing that almost every poet I picked up seemed to have something to say about photographs. I’d open Donald Justice, maybe, and there would be a poem responding to an image of a Depression-era mule team. Walker Evans’s stately documentary shot is captured in Justice’s lines, which conclude as a shadow:

         the last shade perhaps in all of Alabama — 
Stretches beneath the wagon, crookedly,
         like a great scythe laid down there and forgotten.
                   — From Mule Team and Poster

Or I’d be reading Wislawa Szymoborska and come upon a poem using a baby picture as occasion to note the banality of evil:

And who’s this little fellow in his itty-bitty robe?
That’s tiny baby Adolf, the Hitlers’ little boy!
 ........................................................................
Where will those tootsy-wootsies finally wander?
                         — From Hitler’s First Photograph

Or I’d find poets using photographs figuratively, as in “Epilogue,” where Robert Lowell mourns that

      sometimes everything I write
with the threadbare art of my eye
seems a snapshot,
lurid, rapid, garish, grouped,
heightened from life,
yet paralyzed by fact.

Autographed Uncle Tom's Cabin Found

Found in a coal cellar.

From a story in the Scotsman...

The copy of Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe, signed by the author, was authenticated after it was found in a vast cellar full of donations. The book, with a price tag of about £1,500, is expected to be one of the biggest draw at this year’s event in Edinburgh.

“This came up from the coal cellars that we keep the stuff in all year, and it came out of a box yesterday. We have got a true attribution. It’s a book that changed history,” said the American book expert Reid Zulager, who flies in annually to sort rare items from tens of thousands of books on offer at the Christian Aid book sale.

The book by the abolitionist writer, a Connecticut teacher, set out to depict the true nature of slavery in human terms. Its author was once greeted by US president Abraham Lincoln, it is claimed, as “the little woman who wrote the book that made this great war”.

10 Things about Dante

The Guardian lists some tidbits about the author of The Divine Comedy.

From the piece...

3. Dante is still incredibly influential
For someone who was writing mainly in the early part of the 14th century, Dante's shadow is long. He was a major influence on the modernists and their followers, especially TS Eliot – "The Waste Land" is stuffed full of references to the Inferno – and Samuel Beckett, whose entire oeuvre could be said to be a reworking of themes and images from Dante. When asked what he wanted to do with his life, Beckett replied: "All I want to do is sit on my arse and fart and think about Dante," but luckily for us he also did a bit of writing as well. Meanwhile, a new translation of the Inferno comes out pretty much every year. More on this in a moment.

4. He was still very much the product of his time
Be prepared, when you read the Inferno, for a lot of stuff about 13th-century Florentine politics. All editions have, or should have, decent notes to get you through this. But a lot of the poem is Dante doing some score‑settling. He loathed some people so much – those who had behaved treacherously to guests – that he couldn't even wait for them to die. Their souls were in Hell while their bodies were alive. Theologically tricky, but Dante sure knew how to bear a grudge.

Jeff Bridges' Best Behind-The-Scenes Photographs

Enjoy, care of Flavorwire.

23 Words That Have Survived Since the Ice Age

The list, care of Neatorama.

Kirsty Mitchell's 'Wonderland'

Enjoy, care of Book Patrol.

The Idiot's Guide to Writing a Baseball Book

The Daily Beast offers some tips.

From the story...

Let’s say you’re a young baseball beat writer itching to land a book contract. You cover a team that few book editors in New York care about—the White Sox (not the Cubs) or the Twins (no explanation necessary)—and have never fit in among the trendy sabermetrics crowd. Ghostwriting is not your thing, and you find that all the great dynasties have already been exhaustively dissected by brand-name authors. What’s an ambitious writer to do?

Never fear, there’s still a surefire path for securing a book deal. Simply pick a year—any year, really—and make a case for why that baseball season stands out from all others. Follow one of the templates below and you’ll ink a deal in no time.

Declare Your Chosen Year the Best in Baseball History

Does your chosen year include any combination of the following: record-breaking performances, tight pennant races, controversy, a World Series that went the distance, a slew of future Hall of Famers in their prime? If so, then your year was not merely great; it was the best ever—an assertion that you must trumpet in your book’s subtitle and defend vigorously in the opening chapter. (You can drop it entirely afterward.)

Colbert Starts a Book Club

The Great Gatsby in the Real Estate Market

The New York Times discusses real estate as it relates to the classic novel.

From the piece...

It is also a story full of money. So perhaps it is fitting that the novel and its author have long been popular among developers as well. 

There are the Gatsby ondominiums on the Upper East Side of Manhattan and the Fitzgerald apartment building on the other side of Central Park. There is a Gatsby Lane carved out of a subdivision in Montgomery, Ala., where Mr. Fitzgerald’s wife, Zelda, was raised. And there is a 50-year-old company created by the real estate titan Peter Sharp and his longtime partner, Norman Peck, that still exists today.

American Spoken Language

A Tumblr in which Gertrude Stein poems are created by cutting up rap lyrics.

Writing about Dreams

Margaret Atwood does it for the New York Review of Books.

From the piece...

Dreams have always fascinated us. They feature in the Bible, in the Greek myths, and in the traditional lore of almost every culture on earth. They’ve also baffled us: What do they mean? How do we know? Why do we care? Because we do care about our dreams, from time to time: a happy one can lift the spirits for a day, a sad one can depress. 

The allegorical dream vision was a staple of the high middle ages, and dream visitations are common in folksong, but characters in the developing novel form didn’t dream frequently—or such is my impression—in the eighteenth century. Nor do they, much, in the early nineteenth century: Jane Austen’s folks don’t dream. Poets do, from the Romantics on, but that was seen as poetic. The realistic novel stuck to what people did and thought while awake. 

But in addition to its industrial revolution and its build-out of capitalism, the nineteenth century was obsessed with hidden aspects of the self—mesmerism, somnambulism, multiple personalities, trance, possession, mind-altering drugs and hallucinatory experiences, hypnotism, spiritualism, Swedenborgianism, and more. Pre-Freudian medical investigators of the mind and brain: where do we go when we sleep?

Rodin's "The Gates of Hell"

Auguste Rodin: The Gates of Hell
Une vidéo du Canal Educatif à la Demande

How F. Scott Fitzgerald's Saturday Evening Post Success Helped "Gatsby" Vision Come to Life

Which Shakespeare Character Are You?

Take the quiz and find out.

The Poetry of a New York Cabbie

It's a thing.

From a story in the New York Times...

Tip the waitress or barman well,” one verse began, “’cause you’re going to need their toilet.” 

These are the bards of gridlock, a group of New York City’s yellow taxi drivers coached in recent weeks to produce a series of poems about their jobs, to be presented as part of the PEN World Voices Festival. On Saturday, inside a darkened theater on Lafayette Street, the drivers recited their work as a roomful of the city’s literary class observed. “The idea is to take the creative writing workshop out into the community of workers,” said Mark Nowak, the group’s instructor and the director of the master’s program in creative writing at Manhattanville College. Mr. Nowak said he had in the past organized similar workshops for Ford autoworkers in Minnesota, Somali nurses, and electricians from Chicago. 

Organizers turned to the taxi for this year’s event. “What could be more New York City than the yellow cab?” Mr. Nowak said.

What's It Like to Go a Year Without the Internet?

Paul Miller knows. He did it.

From a piece in the Verge...

One year ago I left the internet. I thought it was making me unproductive. I thought it lacked meaning. I thought it was "corrupting my soul."

It's a been a year now since I "surfed the web" or "checked my email" or "liked" anything with a figurative rather than literal thumbs up. I've managed to stay disconnected, just like I planned. I'm internet free.

And now I'm supposed to tell you how it solved all my problems. I'm supposed to be enlightened. I'm supposed to be more "real," now. More perfect.

But instead it's 8PM and I just woke up. I slept all day, woke with eight voicemails on my phone from friends and coworkers. I went to my coffee shop to consume dinner, the Knicks game, my two newspapers, and a copy of The New Yorker. And now I'm watching Toy Story while I glance occasionally at the blinking cursor in this text document, willing it to write itself, willing it to generate the epiphanies my life has failed to produce.

Collecting Fore-Edge Paintings

ILAB gives a brief tutorial.

From the piece...

The Italian Renaissance is, as with many things, where it all really started (although medieval examples exist). Often quite simple, floral decorations, heraldic designs or motifs, these were generally painted directly onto the fore-edge rather than later ‘fanned’ edge, sometimes with a gold background. These were not uncommon in 15th and 16th century Italy. But the term is now largely used to refer to the British examples of this art. Disappearing pictures start to appear, as it were, on mid 17th century English bibles and common prayer books. By the latter part of the 17th century, very fine works were being produced.

However, the pinnacle of this art was in the late 18th century revival and popularisation of the art by the bookbinders and booksellers Edwards of Halifax. They produced exquisite paintings on the edges, as well as beautiful ‘Etruscan calf’ and painted vellum bindings. London Society was wowed by the beautiful volumes, and the Edwards And Sons shop in Pall Mall is mentioned by Fanny Burney (also known as Madame d'Arblay), the 18th century London socialite who wrote an extensive diary as well as various novels.

The practice of fore-edge painting became widespread, and continued through the 19th and into the 20th century. Demand has always outstripped supply, and this meant that decorating the fore-edge continues to this day.

Coping the King James Bible By Hand

That's what a man in New York did. It took him awhile.

From a story on Jacket Copy...

In 2007, Patterson's longtime partner, Mohammed, told him about the Islamic tradition of writing out the Koran by hand. When Patterson said that the Bible was too long for Christianity to have a similar tradition, Mohammed said, well, he should start it. 

"I hadn't counted on the fact that it would be so beautiful," Patterson told the AP. "Or that it would be so exhilarating. And so long."

Although counts disagree, according to most sources, the King James Bible has 788,000 words or more. 

Patterson uses sheets of 19-by-13-inch watercolor paper for his task, which he rules by hand with pencil lines. Sitting at a desk by his bed, he tracks the page of his hardcover Bible with one hand, and writes, using felt-tip pens, with the other. When the page is finished, he erases the pencil lines, leaving black ink on a clear white page.

At first, Patterson used to work 14-hour days on the project, and he still works until he can no longer stay awake, usually about six to eight hours a day.