In what The New York Times‘ Patricia Cohen writes is “the Great Train Robbery of French intellectual life: thousands of treasured documents[...] vanished from the Institut de France in the mid-1800s, stolen by an Italian mathematician.” Before the publication of his famed Meditations on First Philosophy, Descartes was documented writing numerous correspondences, amounting to precisely 72 letters. Those letters were among the stolen documents.

Now, Descartes, “the founding genius of modern philosophy and analytic geometry,” is riding an astounding historical comeback, for a letter – penned by the philosopher  himself – blipped up on the radar of mathematical historians everywhere when it was recently discovered at Haverford College in Pennsylvania.

D.A. Powell wrote – a few years ago now – a column for The Poetry Foundation in which he dabbles with the idea of street poetry (think along the lines of the tape poetry of Elvis Christ).

Powell’s article was called “Conceptual Poetics: A Practicum.” In it he writes: …more

Rumpus contributor Craig Fehrman has an article running over at The Hartford Advocate about the controversy surrounding Brain McDonald’s In The Middle of the Night. McDonald’s book is a true crime novel about a terrible murder that occurred in the town of Cheshire, Connecticut.

Apparently, the town librarian ordered the book for the library, and that didn’t bode well with a large portion of the townies. Fehrman writes an in-depth account of the diverse and conflicting opinions – delving into the political, constitutional, societal, and more.

At 106 years old, Alice Herz-Sommer is profiled in Haaretz. She is a musician, Holocaust survivor, and is also said to be the last living acquaintance of Kafka. …more

Our chums over at HTMLGIANT have blown the soot off an interview with Andy Warhol conducted by the Bay Times in 1965. In it, they discuss the difference between cutting one or two mushrooms (and the time the cuts take), the color of the interviewers eyes, and the non-definition of pop art.

The next time you crack an egg, either over the presumably safe stove in your cozy sublet kitchen, or with one of the (most-likely three) prongs of your smudged fork into the bubbled yoke of some over-easy-eggs at the neighborhood diner, you should think about H1N1 (swine flu, ya’ll) and how its vaccine is created. Not that there’s H1N1 in the eggs, because (most-likely) there is none.

Though, if you want to read about how the H1N1 vaccine is created, click here to read all about the fascinating process. It has to do with eggs.

“There’s been a paradigm shift,” Ms. Levent continued. “People are starting to accept the fact that art and imagery are mental and not visual” and that “the heart of the creative work has nothing to do with sight. Artists’ choices are internal.”

The New York Times has an article about a gallery show consisting of work done only by the legally blind. The argument and consequential proof that art comes from within and can be produced without a visual is at once insightful and provocative when thought of regarding the obvious implications and parallels of the term ‘visual art.’

(An interesting topic to look at in conjunction with the blind artist is the anomaly of the blind gallery owner. My previous employer was one of those, a great poet/novelist/man by the name of Steve Cannon who runs the Tribes Gallery in Manhattan Lower East Side. Check out this video if you want to learn more about that.)

In the New York Times Sunday Book Review, Stephen King has written a review of Raymond Carver: A Writer’s Life by Carol Sklenicka.

King begins with a summation of Carver’s semi-amazing alcoholism and then moves on to a dissection of Carver’s relationship with his editor Gordon Lish.

It’s moving, the way King writes about Lish’s treatment of Carver and his work as if he’s mourning the ‘what could have been.’ Read more here.

“People want peace, and when given a voice, they’ll work tirelessly for it,” said Wired Editor-in-Chief Chris Anderson. “In the short term, a Twitter account may be no match for an AK-47, but in the long term the keyboard is mightier than the sword.”

Following this rationale, Wired has created a petition working to nominate the internet for the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize.

To read up on their argument and to sign the petition, click here.

Joyland, the literary magazine/website that’s “a hub for short fiction,” has opened up a new tab on their website for San Francisco.

So for all you SF based writer types: keep in mind that Joyland is looking for submissions.

The Guardian has a pleasant, long profile of Maya Angelou running in which she proclaims such niceties as “I’m fine as wine in summertime.”

The profile covers many topics: giving a brief history of her career, the whole Hilary versus Barack debacle, poetry, and many many other ‘fine as wine’ subjects.

Want more? Click here.

The Wall Street Journal’s John Jurgensen has a wonderful interview with Cormac McCarthy up on their website. In it, they gab about the difference between movies and books, which pertains to the new movie adaptation of McCarthy’s book The Road, God, children, and a whole lot of other literature-ish topics.

There is a simplicity to the way Cormac answers Jurgensen’s questions that comes across as refreshingly honest. He has this almost sage-like subtle comprehension of… everything. Well, that was a bit much, but it’s a good read.

Click here for more.

San Franciscan essayist and poet W.S. Di Piero has written an poetical rhythmic essay about his jaunts throughout this mounded metropolis a great many of us call home.

In it, he writes: …more

Rutgers University Press has published the book Dedicated To The People of Darfur: Writings on Fear, Risk, and Hope which includes a smattering of notable authors such as the late Frank McCourt, Jane Smiley and frequent Rumpus contributor Steve Almond.

Participants have written essays on “taking risks, breaking past boundaries in all areas and avenues of their personal lives in society and culture in larger ways.”

All the royalties from the book will go to The Save Darfur Coalition.

Shya Scanlon has written an essay for The Faster Times entitled “Stay Tuned: on the Future of Web Serialization.” The essay is about the different types of literary serialization Scalon has noticed on the net. Though Scalon admits that it might’ve been there before but he didn’t see it, he tells us that once he did notice it, it was everywhere (he explains this phenomenon with his ‘Le Car’ theory).

In his two part essay, Scalon delves into a history of the serialized narrative and advocates a revival of the form on the Internet. Whether or not you agree with him, it’s an interesting essay. Click here for more.

At the website for the PEN American Center they’ve posted the audio and a transcription of Jonathan Ames reading FBI emails from Guantanamo Bay.

There is something strangely enlightening about Ames’ drone. It’s almost judgement-less, allowing the listener to listen to the emails and receive them in a personal, individual, way—as if they were sent to you from someone you knew. In this world most of us live in, where the atrocities committed at Guantanamo are known and acknowledged for the outrages that they are, it’s disarming.

(via @maudnewton)

Over at FLATMANCROOKED, Aaron Davidson writes about his pleasing experience using Stanza: an iPhone application used primarily for reading books.

Specifically, Davidson muses upon his reading of H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine, and comments upon how strangely succinct of a choice it was, writing: “The narrative describes a mythic technology and the exploration of the futurescape, and I often feel my iPhone achieves the fantastical sorts of progress and indulgence fictionalized by early sci-fi authors.”

Over at The Millions, C. Max Magee has written an article about what being awarded the Nobel Prize does for a book and its publisher from an American perspective.

Being that American literature is rarely rewarded the prestigious prize, Magee writes, “Sometimes the Nobel plays this role – a validator of critical opinion – but, for the American audience, it often does something different. And this is where the grumbling comes in. We don’t like to be told that an author we’ve never heard of is one of the greatest ever. But in cases like Müller and Kertész and Le Clézio, the Nobel serves as a reminder that in certain corners of the publishing industry, there are presses shepherding the work of these writers into print and keeping it available until such time as the rest of us are able to take notice.”

Want more? Click here.

Stephen Marche has an article in the Wall Street Journal about how, as of now, “the Kindle 2 will become the first e-reader available globally. The only other events as important to the history of the book are the birth of print and the shift from the scroll to bound pages.” Marche follows his bold statement with a brief, though quite informative, history of print (he also notes that “so far the new technology has been called the ‘e-reader,’ a term obviously picked by engineers, not poets”).

Read Marche’s defense of the Kindle, “The Book That Contains All Books,” and then please join our discussion on e-books here.

Over at Mind Hacks they’ve got a post running called “A brain signature for literacy.” It’s covering a neuroscience study done that shows “how the structure of the brain changes as illiterate adults learn to read and write.”

What’s fascinating is who participated in the study, which were mostly “ex-members of guerilla forces in Colombia that had recently put down their weapons to re-integrate into society.”

Over at NPR is an interview with Chinua Achebe, author of Things Fall Apart. In the article, which is accompanied by an audio interview with Achebe, he talks about his relationship with Joseph Conrad’s 1902 novella Heart of Darkness.

According to NPR, “Though Achebe was attracted to Conrad’s books as a child, he excoriated it in the 1970s, and he continues to dismiss it today.”

Want to know more? Click here.

Over at Riku Writes, Richard Hourula has posted “Movies For Your Inner Leftist, That Are Suitable For All Political Persuasions.” In the piece Hourula offers little write ups on left leaning movies, some historically, some not. I mean, did you know about Hitler’s fondness for Gary Cooper?

So, if you like movies that feed that inner communist sharing within us all, give it a go.

Over at Open, the British writer Sebastian Horsley, who claims to have slept with 1,300 prostitutes, writes an article explaining his reasoning.

Horsley dabbles on a plethora of topics pertaining to his love of prostitution and he implores us all to keep it illegal. For him, the illegality of it is a major part of its allure. According to Horsley: …more

The folks at Greencine posted an interview with Michael Stulhbarg, the star of the new Coen Brothers movie A Serious Man.

In the interview, Greencine and Stulbarg gab about how the movie is being labeled as a ’starless’ film, Stulbarg’s strange 9-month auditioning process, the Coen’s process on set, and other interesting cinema tidbits. Check it out.

The guys over at largehearted boy are running a contest inspired by the many films based on Nick Hornby’s novels. All you need to do to enter is let them know your favorite book to film adaptation.

The winner of the contest get’s the new Hornby book, Juliet, Naked, in which Hornby “again paints a perfect picture of the nerdy fortysomething male” as well as an assortment of CDs.

Want to take a shot at it? Enter here.

In an article for The New Yorker, Caleb Crain writes about the art that arose from overwhelming suffering and poverty of The Great Depression.

From the invention of the screwball comedy to the self-conscious prose of James Agree, Crain explores the various—and at times conflicting—efforts artists used to deal with the realities of the era.

Of this, Crain explains, “The classic Depression argument about art was between those who regretted its compromise by politics and those who regretted its failure to take politics into account—between those who cried ‘agitprop’ and those who cried ‘escapism.’”

Interested? Click here for more.

The New York Times has an article running about “vooks”: a book that has videos incorporated within.

The article strives to illuminate the argument that in a technology-oriented world, books—for the first time—are going to have to adapt as a medium in order to successfully compete and survive in this changing world.

Judith Curr, publisher of Atria Books, an imprint of Simon & Shuster that specializes in the publication of vooks, is quoted saying: “You can’t just be linear anymore with your texts.”

Author Walter Mosley points out that the two mediums are oppositional in nature, saying: “Reading is one of the few experiences we have outside of relationships in which our cognitive abilities grow. And our cognitive abilities actually go backwards when we’re watching television or doing stuff on computers.”

So the question is: where you stand on vooks?

On the cover of Rob Riemen’s Nobility of Spirit: A Forgotten Ideal, a blurb from Mark Sarvos of the blog The Elegant Variation graces its bottom left corner.

On his website, Brian Sholis (writer and former editor of Artforum) asks the question: do blog blurbs belong on books? Over yonder at The Elegant Variation, Sarvos responds.

I love magic. Be it imagining myself wandering the hills of Narnia or riding a rickety boat on Earthsea’s fog ridden waters—I just want it so bad. I want to be in the club, know the secret, feel sorry for all the clueless muggles, but not really, because I’d be magical and therefore have magical business to attend to. There’s just something about having the power to transform a muffin into goldfish that I don’t think I’ll ever stop yearning for.

In The Magicians, Lev Grossman places magic in the real world—not Narnia or Hogwarts or Earthsea, but a world where fantasy books about magic exist and depression isn’t cured by an owl dropping a letter in your lap. …more