While reading about Lotte Lanya in Wikipedia, they used the term Diseuse: “French for “teller”, also called talkers, storytellers, dramatic-singers or dramatic-talkers is a term, at least as used on the English-speaking stage, that appears to date to the last decade of the 19th century. ” Lotte Lanya as Rosa Klebb in From Russia With … [Read more…]
en·sor·cell [enˈsôrsəl] verb archaic enchant; fascinate: “he was a child when the power of a mythic image first ensorcelled him” Similar: captivate charm delight dazzle enrapture entrance The above link shows an etymology from Old French: ensorceler (“to cast a spell, enchant; to captivate”) Found in this phrase in a review by Namwali Serpell of … [Read more…]
Irredentism – (Italian: irredentismo)[1] is one state’s desire to annex the territory of another state. I’m surprised I haven’t seen this term used in the context of the Ukraine war by Russia. I found in at the end of chapter 14 of V. by Pynchon: “Rumor had it that a week or so later the … [Read more…]
theodicy – something, something god and evil can co-exist: stumbled across this during a rereading of V. by Pynchon, where Fausto Magistral debates the Bad Priest as Malta is pounded to rubble by Italian and German bombings. Obviously not a long-time Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal reader!
Schizophrenia is not a single disease, it is a very consuming one, taking up large numbers of both medical resources, research, and of course, millions of shattered lives. In the April 25, 2025 New Yorker, Rachel Aviv (Mary Had Schizophrenia—Then Suddenly She Didn’t) follows the trajectory of a woman with a 20 year history of … [Read more…]
From a book review by Martin Filler in the August 10, 2025 New York Review of Books Empire of the Elite: Inside Condé Nast, the Media Dynasty That Reshaped America by Michael M. Grynbaum, he drops this term which is news to me: poshlost: But the best of them all at capturing Condé Nast’s sickly … [Read more…]
Mary K. Gaillard NYT obituary on August 1, 2025 tells a tale of sexism in the sciences. No Nobel for you young lady, wrong gender. Overcoming discrimination in a mostly male preserve, she did groundbreaking work that showed experimentalist physicists where and how to look for new particles.
John Martin, devoted publisher of literary rebels, dies in Santa Rosa at 94 In 1966, John Martin founded Black Sparrow Press, a shoestring operation that he ran out of his home for years with the help of part-time assistants and Barbara Martin, who designed the books. John Martin, an adventurous independent publisher who brought out … [Read more…]
Ed Park is a very entertaining writer, very well executed, I keep being reminded of a combination of Lilla and Pynchon, light and dark, light and heavy. If you are in the mood for something dense, well written, this novel is great, full of wit as well. The author is Korean-American and tells the story … [Read more…]
Considered Teffi’s single greatest work, Memories: From Moscow to the Black Sea is a deeply personal account of the author’s last months in Russia and Ukraine, suffused with her acute awareness of the political currents churning around her, many of which have now resurfaced. In 1918, in the immediate aftermath of the Russian Revolution, Teffi, … [Read more…]