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Please, Mr. W.H.: In the new book So Long as Men Can Breathe, Dylanologist Clinton Heylin speculates that Shakespeare's immortal sonnets were the Basement Tapes of their day, poems not meant for public consumption that were unscrupulously bootlegged into publication. (Not sure what this post makes me want to do more: read Sonnet CXXV or listen to "Apple Suckling Tree". Or both!) [Via Jacket Copy]
Say it ain't so, W.H.: On to less immortal verse: researchers in the British Film Archives have unearthed previously unknown poems by W.H. Auden from the mid-'30s. To call them Auden poems seems a bit of a stretch, since they were only hired-gun translations of film titles for a screening of Three Songs of Lenin, a piece of Stalin-era Soviet propaganda (by cine-legend Dziga Vertov). David Collard in the TLS searches for signs of ambivalence in the work, but lines like "our life is become / sturdy and joyful "“ / true is our Lenin / path" seem unredeemable. [Via Daily Beast]
Six for the Sam: The BBC's Samuel Johnson Prize shortlist, for one of the most prominent and intriguingly cross-disciplinary nonfiction prizes, is science-heavy this year, and includes two US bestsellers from the first months of this year, Lords of Finance and The Lost City of Z:
- Lords of Finance by Liaquat Ahamed
- Bad Science by Ben Goldacre
- The Lost City of Z by David Grann
- Leviathan by Philip Hoare
- The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science by Richard Holmes
- Quantum: Einstein, Bohr and the Great Debate about the Nature of Reality by Manjit Kumar
"P.S. Please don't sue me": In the unauthorized, but culturally inevitable, Shatnerquake, Jeff Burk gives readers the Star Trek franchise extension they've been waiting for, pitting William Shatner against the ... greatest ... foe ... imaginable: William Shatner. [Via Daily Beast]
--Tom
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