Monday, May 24, 2010

WEB BOHEMIAN (Monday, May 24, 2010)
(1)- BLIND VISIONARY -- Onetime filmmaker and painter Hugues de Montalembert was blinded in 1978. He creates detailed visions from memory, as a painter might fill a blank canvas. To him, the exercise is a way of survival.

(2)- WHAT BEAT NAPOLEON? -- If Napoleon failed in his bid for European domination, Lieven argues in this article, the credit goes first and foremost to Tsar Alexander I, and to the generals and administrators who served him.

(3)- BOOK REVIEW -- A Winter on the Nile: Florence Nightingale, Gustave Flaubert and the Temptations of Egypt. The best biographies, like some of the best novels, are packed with subjunctives. They are alive with a persistent, muted sense of what might have been.

(4)- DISCLOSURE -- Pavel Stroilov, a Russian exile in London, has on his computer 50,000 unpublished, untranslated, top-secret Kremlin documents, mostly dating from the close of the Cold War. He stole them in 2003 and fled Russia.

(5)- BAT DISEASE -- White nose syndrome, a deadly condition affecting bats, originally found in caves in New York, is now found in two Canadian provinces and about a dozen states from New Hampshire south to Tennessee.

(6)- PRISON TENNIS -- About 20 inmates — lifers and 'three strikers' — play for the Inside Tennis Team at San Quentin, created by recreation director Don DeNevi, 72. It's serious business. The only rule: Resolve all arguments on the court.

(7)- WHAT HAPPENED - Ralph Ellison is most famous for two things: writing the classic Invisible Man and never publishing another novel during his lifetime. The story of his supposed writer's block is examined and questioned.

(8)- AGE IS HAPPY -- Life looks a little rosier after 50, a new study finds. Older people in their mid- to late-50s are generally happier, and experience less stress and worry than young adults in their 20s, the researchers say.

(9)- NEW JOURNALISM -- Here was the true, humble, and all-but-forgotten beginning to the modern age of Journalism as Literature. This book was the first in modern times to successfully and powerfully bring a true story the qualities of fiction.

POLITICAL COMMENTARY

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