tag:www.laphamsquarterly.org,2009-05-03://1 2011-10-25T15:46:55Z A Magazine of History and Ideas Movable Type Commercial 4.23-en tag:www.laphamsquarterly.org,2011://1.1812 2011-10-25T00:03:43Z 2011-10-25T15:46:55Z

Michelle Legro The second half of LQ editor Aidan Flax-Clark's conversation with novelist John Crowley. They discuss Crowley's novel, Little, Big, on the 30th anniversary of its publication.. The second half of LQ editor Aidan Flax-Clark's conversation with novelist John Crowley. They discuss Crowley's novel, Little, Big, on the 30th anniversary of its publication. (For Part 1 tag:www.laphamsquarterly.org,2011://1.1800 2011-10-10T16:16:09Z 2011-10-11T10:18:41Z

Michelle Legro During a recent trip to Mountain View, CA, Lewis Lapham spoke with Google's Richard Gingras about the magazine, the media, and the future.. Last month Lewis Lapham visited the Googleplex in Mountain View, California to discuss The Future with Richard Gingras, Head of News Products. The interview was part of the Authors@Google tag:www.laphamsquarterly.org,2011://1.1794 2011-09-22T19:36:08Z 2011-10-25T15:48:54Z

Michelle Legro Novelist John Crowley talks with LQ editor Aidan Flax-Clark about why the future is disappearing from people's imaginations and why it's being replaced by the past.. Novelist John Crowley talks with LQ editor Aidan Flax-Clark about why the future is disappearing from people's imaginations and why it's being replaced by the past. (For Part 2 click tag:www.laphamsquarterly.org,2011://1.1776 2011-09-08T18:48:27Z 2011-10-06T22:54:08Z

Lewis H. Lapham is the editor of Lapham's Quarterly.

Michelle Legro by Lewis H. Lapham. “…Of comfort no man speak: Let’s talk of graves, of worms, and epitaphs; Make dust our paper, and with rainy eyes Write sorrow on the bosom of the earth. tag:www.laphamsquarterly.org,2011://1.1683 2011-09-07T13:38:32Z 2011-09-14T21:55:47Z

James Boswell, from Life of Johnson. Arriving in London from Edinburgh in 1762, Boswell, then in his early twenties, soon met and befriended Samuel Johnson, who was a prominent essayist, poet, and lexicographer in his fifties. Boswell’s account of Johnson and his own journals, the latter only rediscovered in the twentieth century, form his unique contribution to the world of letters. His Life was published in two volumes in 1791, seven years after its subject had died at the age of seventy-five.

Michelle Legro 1778 / London. Boswell: We must be contented to acknowledge that death is a terrible thing. Johnson: Yes, sir. I have made no approaches to a state which can look on it tag:www.laphamsquarterly.org,2011://1.1685 2011-09-06T16:58:49Z 2011-09-06T17:22:11Z

C. P. Cavafy, “Waiting for the Barbarians.” Cavafy was a self-proclaimed “poet of old age” and published around two hundred poems in his life, the first English edition of his work appearing eighteen years after his death in 1933. He worked as a clerk in Alexandria’s Third Circle of the Irrigation of Public Works from 1892 until 1922. His sparse and sensual poetry influenced many writers, among them E. M. Forster, W. H. Auden, Lawrence Durrell, and Leonard Cohen.

Michelle Legro 1904 / Alexandria. tag:www.laphamsquarterly.org,2011://1.1686 2011-09-05T17:47:53Z 2011-09-14T22:00:33Z

Charles Mackay, from Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions. Claiming this book saved him millions, American financier Bernard Baruch wrote a foreword to an edition in 1932 in which he quoted Friedrich Schiller: “Anyone taken as an individual is tolerably sensible and reasonable—as a member of a crowd he at once becomes a blockhead.” Mackay in the early 1840s was an assistant editor at The Morning Chronicle, working alongside Charles Dickens and William Hazlitt.

Michelle Legro c. 1635 / Holland. The tulip—so named, it is said, from a Turkish word, signifying a turban—was introduced into western Europe about the middle of the sixteenth century. Conrad Gesner, who claims the tag:www.laphamsquarterly.org,2011://1.1687 2011-09-03T18:05:56Z 2011-09-08T16:44:30Z

Alexis de Tocqueville, from Democracy in America. At the age of twenty-five on April 2, 1831, Tocqueville boarded the schooner Le Havre with his friend Gustave de Beaumont for a nine-month trip to examine American prisons. Their travels resulted in a coauthored study on penitentiary systems in 1833, Beaumont’s Marie; or, Slavery in the United States in 1835, and Tocqueville’s four-volume magnum opus, appearing between 1835 and 1840.

Michelle Legro 1840 / Paris . In ages of faith, the final aim of life is placed beyond life. The men of such ages are therefore used naturally and, as it were, involuntarily, to fix tag:www.laphamsquarterly.org,2011://1.1688 2011-09-03T14:00:00Z 2011-09-08T16:57:37Z

Aeschylus, from Agamemnon. Aeschylus is believed to have written at least eighty plays and placed first at the dramatic festivals thirteen times during his life. Only seven of his tragedies are extant, among them The Oresteia trilogy and Seven Against Thebes. His epitaph states, “The grove of Marathon with its glories can speak of his valor in battle. The long-haired Persian remembers and can speak of it too.”

Michelle Legro c. 1190 BC / Argos. Clytemnestra: Cassandra, you may go within the house, since Zeus in no unkindness has ordained that you must share our lustral water, stand with the great throng of slaves tag:www.laphamsquarterly.org,2011://1.1689 2011-09-02T19:17:26Z 2011-09-08T16:55:34Z

Plato, from “Phaedrus.” Socrates did not write any of his teachings down; what we know of his beliefs are mostly contained in the extensive works of Plato. The latter wrote in his “Letter VII,” however, that there is some knowledge which cannot be recorded but rather, “After long-continued intercourse between teacher and pupil, in joint pursuit of the subject, suddenly, like light flashing forth when a fire is kindled, it is born in the soul and straightway nourishes itself.”

Michelle Legro c. 370 BC / Athens. Socrates: Among the ancient gods of Naucratis in Egypt there was one to whom the bird called the ibis is sacred. The name of that divinity was Thoth, and tag:www.laphamsquarterly.org,2011://1.1690 2011-09-01T19:25:33Z 2011-10-06T22:57:12Z

W. B. Yeats, “The Second Coming.” Furnishing titles for books by writers as diverse as Chinua Achebe and Joan Didion, this poem was written in the aftermath of World War I and at the beginning of the Irish War of Independence. Yeats became a senator in the new Irish Free State in 1922, receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature one year later. “What instruments we have agree,” elegized W. H. Auden, “The day of his death was a dark cold day.” Yeats died on January 28, 1939, at the age of seventy-four.

Michelle Legro 1919 / Oxford. Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the center cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide tag:www.laphamsquarterly.org,2011://1.1732 2011-09-01T14:00:00Z 2011-09-14T22:04:48Z

Snorri Sturluson, from The Prose Edda. Descended from Egill Skallagrímsson, a tenth-century poet and hero of the Egils Saga, Snorri began amassing power and land after marrying an heiress in 1199, serving as the “lawspeaker” of the high Icelandic court intermittenly from 1215 to 1232. The Edda is among Scandinavia’s best-known literary works and is a vast source for Norse mythology, its influence evident in J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings and Richard Wagner’s Ring cycle.

Michelle Legro c. 1220 / Iceland. Ganglieri, speaking to three men named High, Just-as-High, and Third, asked, “What is to be said about Ragnarok? I have not heard it spoken of before.” High replied, “There tag:www.laphamsquarterly.org,2011://1.1691 2011-08-31T19:32:28Z 2011-09-08T17:09:31Z

Thomas Paine, from Common Sense. Born to a Quaker father and an Anglican mother in England in 1737, Paine in 1774 met Benjamin Franklin, who convinced the twice-divorced and recently dismissed officer of the excise to move to America. Nine months after the Battle of Concord and Lexington, Paine published this fifty-page pamphlet, selling 500,000 copies within a matter of months. He published his defense of the French Revolution, Rights of Man, in two parts between 1791 and 1792.

Michelle Legro 1776 / Philadelphia. We ought to reflect that there are three different ways by which an independency may hereafter be effected, and that one of those three will, one day or other, tag:www.laphamsquarterly.org,2011://1.1682 2011-08-30T20:51:42Z 2011-09-01T20:57:21Z

Michelle Legro From what I hear it's supposed to be pretty nice. Lewis Lapham talks with author Brook Wilensky-Lanford about the search for Adam and Eve's hometown. . Paradise Lust: Searching for the Garden of Eden by Brook Wilensky-Lanford Grove Press (August 2, 2011) From what I hear it's supposed to be pretty nice. Lewis Lapham talks with tag:www.laphamsquarterly.org,2011://1.1731 2011-08-30T20:42:00Z 2011-09-14T22:12:11Z

William Shakespeare, from Julius Ceasar. For this play’s plotting, Shakespeare relied on Thomas North’s 1579 translation of Plutarch’s Lives, although he added in the emperor’s dying lines, “Et tu, Brute?” In the five years between 1599 and 1604, the playwright produced four tragedies, three comedies, and one history play: Henry V, Julius Caesar, Hamlet, Twelfth Night, Troilus and Cressida, All’s Well That Ends Well, Measure for Measure, and Othello.

Michelle Legro 44 BC / Rome. [Thunder and lightning. Enter Caesar, in his nightgown.] Caesar: Nor heaven nor earth have been at peace tonight: Thrice hath Calpurnia in her sleep cried out, “Help, ho! They murder tag:www.laphamsquarterly.org,2011://1.1693 2011-08-29T20:01:40Z 2011-09-08T17:12:39Z

Feng Guifen, from Protests from the Study of Jiaobin. Among the first reformist thinkers in nineteenth-century China, Feng published this work after Western influences had become further entrenched in the country with the conclusion of the Second Opium War in 1860. About China’s traditions, he wrote, “When methods are faulty, we should reject them even though they are of ancient origins; when methods are good, we should benefit from them even though they are those of the barbarians.”

Michelle Legro 1861 / Shanghai. Western books on mathematics, mechanics, optics, light, and chemistry contain the best principles of the natural sciences. In the books on geography, the mountains, rivers, strategic points, customs, and tag:www.laphamsquarterly.org,2011://1.1694 2011-08-28T20:12:18Z 2011-09-14T22:20:28Z

Mohandas K. Gandhi, from Hind Swaraj. Gandhi wrote this conversation aboard the S.S. Kildonan Castle, returning to South Africa from London. In the 1900s Gandhi invented his technique of nonviolent resistance known as satyagraha (“devotion to truth”); in the 1920s he reformed the Indian National Congress into an effective political body. In the 1930s he led a march to the sea to obtain salt in protest of a British monopoly, and in 1947 India won its independence. A year later at the age of seventy-eight, Gandhi was shot and killed by a Hindu fanatic.

Michelle Legro 1909 / Atlantic Ocean. Reader: When you speak of driving out Western civilization, I suppose you will say that we want no machinery. Editor: By raising this question, you have opened the wound tag:www.laphamsquarterly.org,2011://1.1695 2011-08-27T20:19:48Z 2011-09-08T17:19:54Z

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, from a letter. Montagu lived in Turkey during her husband’s two-year ambassadorial stint. In the 1720s she introduced and popularized an early form of smallpox inoculation known as variolation, wherein someone is exposed to the substance from the pustules of an infected person, inducing a weaker strain of the disease (variola minor). Her fifty-two Turkish letters were published to wide acclaim in 1763, one year after her death.

Michelle Legro 1718 / Adrianople. Dear Mrs. S.C., Apropos of distempers, I am going to tell you a thing that will make you wish yourself here. The smallpox, so fatal and so general among tag:www.laphamsquarterly.org,2011://1.1681 2011-08-26T20:39:04Z 2011-10-06T22:48:53Z

Michelle Legro Marc Maron, standup comedian and host of the WTF podcast, talks with LQ editor Aidan Flax-Clark about reading, why his books might be bullying him, and why you can't go wrong with a good mac-and-cheese recipe.. Marc Maron, standup comedian and host of the popular WTF Podcast, talks with LQ editor Aidan Flax-Clark about reading, why his books might be bullying him, and why you can't tag:www.laphamsquarterly.org,2011://1.1696 2011-08-26T20:31:26Z 2011-09-08T17:30:46Z

Booker T. Washington, from The Future of the American Negro. In 1881 at the age of twenty-five, Washington became head of the upstart Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute; when he died thirty-four years later, the school boasted an endowment of approxiametly two million dollars. Emphasizing the importance for blacks to first gain financial security, he said: “In all things that are purely social we can be separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress.”

Michelle Legro 1899 / Tuskegee, AL. There is a great lack of money with which to carry on the educational work in the South. I was in a county in a Southern state not long tag:www.laphamsquarterly.org,2011://1.1697 2011-08-25T14:43:49Z 2011-09-14T22:56:32Z

Ivan Turgenev, from Fathers and Sons. Born to a philandering father and a wealthy mother with a penchant for beating her sons, Turgenev in his twenties studied classics, history, and the philosophy of G. W. F. Hegel at the University of Berlin, which he attended between 1838 and 1841. He published an obituary of Nikolai Gogol—“Gogol is dead! What Russian heart is not shaken by those three words?”—in 1852, the same year he received wide acclaim for his collection A Sportsman’s Sketches.

Michelle Legro 1862 / Russia. “The motive force behind our actions is that which we recognize to be useful,” pronounced Dr. Bazarov. “At the present time the most useful thing is negation—so we deny—” tag:www.laphamsquarterly.org,2011://1.1698 2011-08-24T15:01:22Z 2011-09-08T18:40:58Z

Ada Lovelace, from a letter. The daughter of Lord Byron, Lovelace in 1833 met Charles Babbage, inventor of the first automatic digital computer, who helped her to learn mathematics. In 1843 she published an extensively annotated translation of an Italian engineer’s seventeen-page explication of Babbage’s Analytical Engine. In “Note G,” she presented the world’s first computer program, showing how the machine could calculate a series of values known as Bernoulli numbers.

Michelle Legro 1841 / Ockham. Dearest Mama, I must tell you what my opinion of my own mind and powers is exactly—the result of a most accurate study of myself with a view to tag:www.laphamsquarterly.org,2011://1.1728 2011-08-23T20:25:33Z 2011-09-14T22:27:08Z

Sophocles, from Oedipus the King. Known for his good looks, grace, and musical skill, Sophocles as a teenager led the choral chant to celebrate the Greek victory against the Persians at the Battle of Salamis in 480 bc. Over the course of his career as a playwright, he received at least eighteen first prizes at the dramatic festivals, beginning in 468 bc with his debut play, Triptolemus. His tragedies include Oedipus at Colonus, Antigone, and Electra.

Michelle Legro c. 429 BC / Thebes. tag:www.laphamsquarterly.org,2011://1.1676 2011-08-23T15:24:24Z 2011-08-23T16:37:07Z

Michelle Legro . This Fall, Lapham's Quarterly will open the seventh seal and stake our fate in prophecies, oracles, utopias, dystopias, new technologies, and new worlds with our latest issue, The Future, tag:www.laphamsquarterly.org,2011://1.1733 2011-08-22T20:53:26Z 2011-09-08T20:17:58Z

Mark Twain, from “A Page from a California Almanac.” Samuel Clemens signed his first newspaper article “Mark Twain” in 1863, publishing two years later this light piece and “Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog”—the latter bringing him national recognition. Around the same time he observed that he had a “‘call’ to literature of a low order—i.e., humorous.” Twain published Innocents Abroad in 1869, Tom Sawyer in 1876, and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in 1885.

Michelle Legro 1865 / San Francisco. At the instance of several friends who feel a boding anxiety to know beforehand what sort of phenomena we may expect the elements to exhibit during the next month tag:www.laphamsquarterly.org,2011://1.1734 2011-08-21T16:16:52Z 2011-09-14T22:30:47Z

From the Book of Revelations. This final book of the New Testament was purportedly written by a “servant” of Jesus Christ named John. Thomas Jefferson once wrote that it was “merely the ravings of a maniac, no more worthy, nor capable of explanation than the incoherences of our own nightly dreams.”

Michelle Legro c. 95 / Patmos. I saw the Lamb open one of the seven seals, and I heard one of the four living creatures call out, as with a voice of thunder, “Come!” I tag:www.laphamsquarterly.org,2011://1.1735 2011-08-20T16:20:14Z 2011-09-14T22:32:50Z

Heinrich Heine, from On the History of Religion and Philosophy in Germany. This work was the second of two studies of German culture’s past, present, and future written primarily for the reading public in France, where Heine had moved in 1831 after the July Revolution and remained for the rest of his life. Born in Düsseldorf in 1797, he became widely appreciated for his collection of Romantic poems, The Book of Songs, published in 1827.

Michelle Legro 1835 / Paris. Christianity—and this is its fairest merit—subdued to a certain extent the brutal warrior ardor of the Germans, but it could not entirely quench it; and when the cross, that tag:www.laphamsquarterly.org,2011://1.1678 2011-08-19T17:42:07Z 2011-08-22T19:30:18Z

Michelle Legro And it only took 300 million cubic yards of concrete. Lewis Lapham talks with Earl Swift about the roads that connect America.. The Big Roads: The Untold Story of the Engineers, Visionaries, and Trailblazers Who Created the American Superhighways by Earl Swift Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (June 9, 2011) And it only tag:www.laphamsquarterly.org,2011://1.1677 2011-08-19T17:20:30Z 2011-08-30T14:16:46Z

Michelle Legro The papacy, despite ups and downs, has enjoyed nearly 2000 years of uninterrupted rule. Lewis Lapham talks with historian John Julius Norwich about one of the most successful institutions the world has ever known.. Absolute Monarchs: A History of the Papacy by John Julius Norwich Random House (July 12, 2011) The papacy, despite ups and downs, has enjoyed nearly 2000 years of uninterrupted tag:www.laphamsquarterly.org,2011://1.1736 2011-08-19T16:42:15Z 2011-09-15T15:56:16Z

From The Time Machine. Receiving a spotty education in the 1880s, Wells served as a draper’s apprentice and a chemist’s assistant before winning at the age of eighteen a scholarship allowing him to study with T. H. Huxley. He published in 1893 his first book, Textbook of Biology, and in 1895 his first novel, The Time Machine. In a radio broadcast in 1938, Orson Welles adapted Wells’ War of the Worlds, convincing some Americans that Martians had landed in New Jersey.

Michelle Legro 802701 / London. We were standing face to face, I and this fragile thing out of futurity. He came straight up to me and laughed into my eyes. The absence of any