Judith Hoffberg (1934-2009)
Judith Hoffberg (1934-2009)
Reply
Monthly Archives: January 2009
Erica Jong – Language matters
“Language matters because whoever controls the words controls the conversation, because whoever controls the conversation controls the outcome, because whoever frames the debate has already won it; because telling the truth has become harder and harder to achieve in an America drowning in Orwellian Newspeak.” Erica Jong Seducing the Demon
John Updike
Prolific US author John Updike dead at 76
41 mins ago AFP/File – Pulitzer Prize-winning author
NEW YORK (AFP) – Prolific Pulitzer Prize-winning US novelist John Updike, whose books and short stories chronicled small-town American life, has died at age 76, his publisher Knopf said.
“It is with great sadness that I report that John Updike died this morning at the age of 76, after a battle with lung cancer,” Knopf publicity director Nicholas Latimer said in a statement.
Over a career spanning more than half a century, Updike published at least a dozen short story collections and 25 novels.
His most famous books were in the Rabbit series, including “Rabbit, Run” and “Rabbit Redux.” He also wrote hundreds of short stories, poetry, literary criticism and reviews in The New Yorker magazine.
“He was one of our greatest writers and he will be sorely missed,” Latimer said.
The Washington-based Academy of Achievement described Updike as “one of America’s premier men of letters.”
Updike recounted how a sickly childhood on a farm in Pennsylvania prepared him for a cerebral life.
“He suffered from psoriasis and a stammer, ailments that set him apart from his peers. He found solace in writing, and won a scholarship to Harvard,” the Academy of Achievement noted.
Updike went on to edit the famous Lampoon humor magazine at Harvard and then published a poem and fiction in the New Yorker soon after graduating.
“My mother had dreams of being a writer and I used to see her type in the front room. The front room is also where I would go when I was sick so I would sit there and watch her,” Updike said.
Barack Obama’s favorite painting
“Hope” 1886 by George Frederic Watts (1817-1904)
“Hope” is one of a series of visionary paintings hastening peace and justice. A pluck of her harp string sends a quavering vibration throughout the Earth, and a tremor into the Universe.
See more visionary art
Art Obits – Fukuda, Yoshida
Andrew Wyeth dies
American painter Andrew Wyeth dies at 91
Geo-archeological quiz
WHERE ON EARTH AM I?The mysterious people who created this as part of a much larger ‘sculpture’ must have made such desperate pleas as their ecology changed and religion grew more brutally violent; trying no doubt, to sway or otherwise coerce their star speckled dieties.
If you know the answer, leave a comment. There is no prize, although I may leave your name (but not your answer) for others to see if you are correct. Here is a hint ...
Natural disasters doomed early civilization
WASHINGTON – Nature turned against one of America’s early civilizations 3,600 years ago, when researchers say earthquakes and floods, followed by blowing sand, drove away residents of an area that is now in Peru. “This maritime farming community had been successful for over 2,000 years, they had no incentive to change, and then all of a sudden, boom, they just got the props knocked out from under them,” anthropologist Mike Moseley of the University of Florida said in a statement.
Moseley and colleagues were studying civilization of the Supe Valley along the Peruvian coast, which was established up to 5,800 years ago.
The people thrived on land adjacent to productive bays and estuaries, the researchers report in Tuesday’s edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The Supe fished with nets, irrigated fruit orchards and grew cotton and a variety of vegetables, according to evidence found by research co-author Ruth Shady, a Peruvian archaeologist. They also built stone pyramids thousands of years before the better known Mayans.
But the Supe disappeared about 3,600 years ago and, after studying the region, the researchers think they know what happened.
They found that a massive earthquake, or series of quakes, struck the seismically active region, collapsing walls and floors and launching landslides from barren mountain ranges surrounding the valley.
In addition, layers of silt indicate massive flooding followed.
Then came El Nino, a periodic change in the winds and currents in the Pacific Ocean, which brought heavy rains that damaged irrigation systems and washed debris into the streams and down to the ocean, where the sand and silt settled into a large ridge, sealing off the previously rich coastal bays.
In the end, land where the Supe had lived for centuries became uninhabitable and their society collapsed, the researchers concluded.
The study was funded by the University of Florida and the Heyerdahl Exploration Fund, University of Maine.
___
On the Net:
PNAS: http://www.pnas.org
