Jack Kennedy wasn’t the only one to die 50 years ago today. C.S. Lewis and Aldous Huxley passed away too. Here’s my Guardian piece about Huxley.

On 22 November 1963 the world was too preoccupied with the Kennedy assassination to pay much attention to the passing of two writers from the other side of the Atlantic: CS Lewis and Aldous Huxley. Fifty years on, Lewis is being honoured with a plaque in Poets’ Corner at Westminster Abbey, to be unveiled in a ceremony on Friday. The fanfare for Huxley has been more muted.

There are various reasons for this: The Chronicles of Narnia propelled their author into the Tolkien league; Shadowlands, the film about his life starring Anthony Hopkins, moved millions; and his writings on religious topics made him a global figure in more spiritual circles. There is a CS Lewis Society of California, for example; plus a CS Lewis Review and a Centre for the Study of CS Lewis & Friends at a university in Indiana.

Aldous Huxley never attracted that kind of attention. And yet there are good reasons for regarding him as the more visionary of the two…

The Texas School Book Depository building as it is today.

(Via Michael Beschloss.)

… in 1863, Abraham Lincoln delivered the Gettysburg Address as he dedicated a national cemetery at the site of the Civil War battlefield in Pennsylvania.

The text reads:

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate — we can not consecrate — we can not hallow — this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us — that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion — that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain — that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

Oh, and if you ever want to explain to someone why they should never, ever again use PowerPoint, point them at Peter Norvig’s wonderful translation of the Address into .ppt format.

LATER: Via Kottke I find one of Lincoln’s handwritten copies of the text, which now hangs in the White House.

I came to this via a discussion of the Leveson inquiry into the conduct of the British press. I was arguing that one of the main reasons why there is such disgraceful behaviour in the tabloid media is because bad behaviour is invariably rewarded by higher circulation and increased public attention. The reason: British newspaper buyers don’t seem to make ethical judgements when choosing their newspapers, and for as long as that remains true, tabloid excesses will continue.

Listening to this, Tony Blair’s former Press Secretary, Alastair Campbell, suggested that I should look for this clip on YouTube. So I did.

Section of a Proust page proof — from the Bibliotheque Nationale.

Today is the centenary of the publication of Du côté de chez Swann, the first volume of Marcel Proust’s sprawling masterpiece, À la recherche du temps perdu. There’s a lovely post about it by Adrian Tahourdin in the TLS Blog.

On the eve of publication Proust set out his artistic credo in Le Temps: “Je ne publie qu’un volume, Du côté de chez Swann, d’un roman qui aura pour titre général A la recherche du temps perdu. J’aurais voulu publier le tout ensemble; mais on n’édite plus d’ouvrages en plusieurs volumes. Je suis comme quelqu’un qui a une tapisserie trop grande pour les appartements actuels et qui a été obligé de la couper” (“ . . . I would have liked to have published the whole thing together, but works are no longer published several volumes at a time. I am like somebody who has a wall hanging too big for the intended rooms and who has been obliged to cut it up”). He points out that his novel “is dominated by the distinction between involuntary and voluntary memory” and goes on to stress that the “Je”, i.e. the Narrator, of the novel is not him, before concluding “The pleasure that an artist gives us, is to introduce us to another universe” – “Le plaisir que nous donne un artiste, c’est de nous faire connaître un univers de plus”. He must have known these words could be fully applied to his own forthcoming work.

The first English translation was by Scott Montcrieff, who was a journalist on the Times. One of my early mentors was a wonderful journalist, Claude Cockburn, whose first job was on the Times and who used to invite me and my girlfriend (later my wife) to his house outside Youghal in Co. Cork. In his memoirs he recalls being assigned first to the paper’s Foreign department. On entering the room, he found a long table at which sat various sub-editors poring over galley proofs and papers. At the end sat a chap who had barricaded himself behind great piles of books. “That’s Montcrieff”, explained one of the hacks. “He likes to get on with his work undisturbed”. The ‘work’, needless to say, was the translation. Those were the days.

The second English translation was by Terry (Terence) Kilmartin, who was the Literary Editor of the Observer, and the man who brought me onto the paper. But he never did any translating in the office.

Michael Wolff, biographer of Rupert Murdoch, has an amusing story in USA Today about recent developments the Digger’s private and public lives.

Try as he might, for the 15 years he’s been married to Wendi Deng, 39 years his junior, he has never wholly managed to effect a rapprochement between her and his adult children, who are, for Murdoch, the tent poles of his life. At the same time, he has found it hard to admit that his marriage was in difficulty, even as he and Deng increasingly lived apart.

It was Deng’s telling moment in the sun — stepping between Murdoch and a pie wielder when he was called, two years ago, to testify about hacking before Parliament — that he has told friends crystallized his anger. He realized he did not want her protecting him now — making him look old, he felt, and weak — or his legacy later.

So, according to Wolff, with the encouragement of his children, the Digger began planning his exit — his resolve aided by his closer monitoring of her personal life. In June, acting on new reports about her “involvement” with Google’s executive chairman, Eric Schmidt, he abruptly ended his marriage — to no one’s greater surprise than his wife’s.

Wolff reports that Murdoch is now a very happy bunny. He has a new business to run — the News Corp newspaper empire, which has been hived off and has $3B in the bank. He has bought a vineyard in California — everyone needs a hobby. But the really intriguing thing is that his “hurt feelings have been soothed by a new romantic interest, a younger woman who has been traveling with him — his massage therapist — who, he has told friends, has made him very happy”.

Wow! Who knew that the Digger had “feelings”? And, while we’re on the subject, one wonders how that “closer monitoring” of Ms Deng was accomplished. I’m sure that no phone hacking was involved. Perish the thought.

I hate to mention it, but the last dictator I recall being, er, soothed by a masseuse was the late Colonel Gadafi, who had a statuesque Ukrainian ‘nurse’ who went everywhere with him (but who also legged it the minute things got hot in Tripoli.)

I also hear, from an authoritative source, that Ms Deng’s new friend has bought a tasteful Georgian house in Clerkenwell.

Lovely piece of work by six de Montford University students. I remember the first time I went to Pudding Lane, where the Great Fire started, and stood, trying — and failing — to imagine what the street might have been like.

This is what it’s like now:

The students Joe Dempsey, Dominic Bell, Luc Fontenoy, Daniel Hargreaves, Daniel Peacock and Chelsea Lindsey, used Crytek’s CryEngine and historic maps and engravings from the British Library to recreate 17th Century London in stunning virtual detail.

Tom Harper, panel judge and curator of cartographic materials at the British Library, said:

“Some of these vistas would not look at all out of place as special effects in a Hollywood studio production.

“The haze effect lying over the city is brilliant, and great attention has been given to key features of London Bridge, the wooden structure of Queenshithe on the river, even the glittering window casements.

“I’m really pleased that the Pudding Lane team was able to repurpose some of the maps from the British Library’s amazing map collection – a storehouse of virtual worlds – in such a considered way.”

Source

Next month marks the 100th anniversary of the publication of a book I’m reading at the moment — Swann’s Way, the first volume of Marcel Proust’s six-volume masterpiece In Search of Lost Time . “The novel”, writes Professor Andre Aciman in a nice WSJ essay, “is about a man compelled by a sudden surge of memory to revisit his past and, in the process, to draw meaning out of his seemingly uneventful life. Its unfolding is prompted, famously, by the narrator’s dunking of a madeleine in a cup of herbal tea.

Untold universities have planned at least one reading or roundtable dedicated to Proust. Every self-respecting bookstore will hold its own Proustathon, with authors, actors and book lovers reading snippets from his epic novel. The Center for Fiction in New York has scheduled a Proust evening, and the French embassy is organizing its own Proust occasion. There are Proust T-shirts, Proust coffee mugs, Proust watches, Proust comic series, Proust tote bags, Proust fountain pens, and Proust paraphernalia of all stripes.

Still, for all the brouhaha, many modern readers still find themselves in agreement with the two French publishers who turned down Proust’s manuscript in 1912. A third agreed to publish it, provided that Proust himself cover the expenses. As one early reader declared: “At the end of this 712-page manuscript…one has no notion of…what it is about. What is it all for? What does it all mean? Where is it all leading to?”

Where indeed?

We now have plenty of ways to easily document the sights and sounds of our everyday lives, whether for social networking or posterity. But what about smells — a perfume that might remind you of a lover, say, or the aroma of roast dinner in your grandparents’ home?

What if we had a way to capture these fleeting olfactory memories before they disappear into thin air? Amy Radcliffe, a designer at Central St Martin’s art school in London came up with the idea of a device that could capture and reproduce odours accurately. She called it — what else? — the Madeleine. It is, she writes

to all intents and purposes, an analogue odour camera. Based on current perfumery technology, Headspace Capture, The Madeleine works in much the same way as a 35mm camera. Just as the camera records the light information of a visual in order to create a replica The Madeleine records the molecular information of a smell.

Lovely idea.

I’ve always thought that the best description of Google is that it’s humanity’s memory prosthesis. But for me a more important augmentation aid is an electronic diary. Since iOS7, however, my iPhone has started ‘reading’ my diary and trying to make sense of it. Here’s what it’s just told me:

“It looks like you have a busy day tomorrow. There are six events scheduled, and the first one starts at 09:00.”

Yeah, I know. I know.

From Wikipedia

The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which unskilled individuals suffer from illusory superiority, mistakenly rating their ability much higher than average. This bias is attributed to a metacognitive inability of the unskilled to recognize their mistakes.

Now why does this remind of the England football team under Sven-Gøren Eriksson?