Twilight roundup …

… Courtesy of Dave Lull:





… Person of intelligence: The Neglected Books Page — Philosopher’s Holiday, by Irwin Edman.



Edman is a delight to meet on the page. I loved Philosopher's Holiday.



… From spiders to bombers: The Deadly Web of 'Black Widows'.



… Miss Emily online: Dickinson: Raw or Cooked?

…  those readers who wish to supplement the Harvard archive with more adventurous approaches can consult Werner’s own Radical Scatters website, or the extensive Dickinson Electronic Archives long maintained by the energetic scholar Martha Nell Smith, which include Werner’s updated analysis of the Lord fragments (“Ravished Slates”), discussions of a recently discovered 1859 daguerreotype that might possibly be the only known image of Dickinson as an adult, in the company of a woman who may have been her lover, and manuscripts of Dickinson family members, notably including poems and letters by Susan Dickinson, believed by Smith and other scholars to be the main love of Dickinson’s life.

… Deservedly so: Spectator cartoon to win an Oscar.



… In Search of Nancy: A first trip to the Evelyn Waugh Archive.

Loved as she was, Nancy was not spared Evelyn’s caustic pen. He was as cruel to her as he was to everyone else, and their friendship prevailed largely because Nancy frequently refused to take offence and forgave quickly when offence was inevitable. She was not a sulker, but instead argued her corner against Evelyn when she had to.

… Inspiration: David Hockney: the poets that make me paint.

 … the first writer to appear in his art was Walt Whitman. He read him in the summer of 1960, between terms at the Royal College of Art. And in the 1961 etching Myself and My Heroes, Whitman appears as one of the two haloed figures standing beside the young Hockney (the other is Gandhi), along with the words "For the dear love of comrades" from Whitman's poem "I Hear It Was Charged Against Me".

… Hmm: America The Philosophical by Carlin Romano.

Lively as his exposition can be, it is spoilt by a pervasive belittlement directed at those who have taken philosophy on as a technical speciality – starting as far back as Socrates, but now represented for Romano mainly by the academics who belong to the American Philosophical Association – that “eleven-thousand-member black hole in American media and public life known as the ‘philosophy profession’” (p.184), who practise a “metaphorical scam of desiccated, moribund, yet still breathing Socratic philosophy” (p.8). (At the same time he is a paid-up member of the APA. Make of that what you will.)

Well, as Erwin Edman put it, “A professor of philosophy studies philosophy; a philosopher studies life.”