#literature

In a Word

polyhistor n. a person of great and varied learning edacious adj. greedy, eager perlegate v. to read through defatigate v. to tire out, exhaust, fatigue In his Recollections of the Last Days of Shelley and Byron, Edward John Trelawny describes Shelley’s thirst for knowledge as “unquenchable”: I called on him one morning at ten, he was in his study with a German folio open, resting on the broad marble mantel-piece, over an old-fashioned fire-place, and with a dictionary in his hand. He always read standing if possible. He had promised over night to go with me, but now begged me...

Futility Closet · EN

How Balzac’s Extreme Coffee Habit Fueled His Productive Writing Routine

Even now, in this age when the very reading of literature is endangered — or so the articles tell us — Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850) retains a notable ability to pick up new admirers. But even though he may have a decent readership by the standards of French novelists who died in the middle of […]

Open Culture · EN

Surreal Pinscreen Animations Bring Kafka, Gogol & Mussorgsky to Life (1933–1972)

What do Franz Kafka, Nikolai Gogol, and Modest Mussorgsky have in common? They stand alone among their peers for their darkly humorous sensibilities, fascination with the grotesque, imaginative takes on cultural traditions, and a predisposition for the proto-surreal. Like the odd figure lurching through the first movement of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition, they are […]

Open Culture · EN

300 Years Before ChatGPT, Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels Imagined Machines Writing Books and Producing Knowledge (1726)

The printing press was invented in the middle of the fifteenth century, and it’s been downhill for the written word ever since. Even before then, arguments that the volume of writing being done far outstripped the value of that writing surely weren’t unheard of. Whatever the era, the most incisive remarks on the apparent victory […]

Open Culture Tech · EN