Reading Rat - March 2017

Articles, Essays, Reviews

This Interview of Kenneth Rexroth, by David Meltzer, Summer 1969, has been added to the Kenneth Rexroth Archive at Bureau of Public Secrets

A summary of Plato's Republic (Shorey translation 1930), by Trevor Newton, Notes on Money, Markets, and Economics

"...Jonathan Barnes considers how we should read science fiction in these apparently science-fictional times" in 'Fantasias of possibility;, a review essay in the Times Literary Supplement

'The Sober Wisdom of Joseph Sobran', review by Yvonne Lorenzo, of Subtracting Christianity, by Joseph Sobran, at Lew Rockwell (via Fitzgerald Griffin Foundation)

The 48 Laws of Power (Animated), by illacertus, YouTube

Simple Book Jacket Makeovers: How to Clean, Repair and Protect Book Dust Jackets and Covers, by Bern Marcowitz and Margot Rosenberg, at Biblio blog

"Use your own document to search for articles and books" with Text Analyzer (beta) at JSTOR Labs (via Dr. Sebastain Mahfood)

Events

Arcadia (1993) by Tom Stoppard is the subject of the next Great Books Roundtable Discussion, April 26th at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

J.D. Vance, author of Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis, will be the featured speaker at the October 17th annual dinner of the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute

Three stop shopping

There is an email.com, a website.com, and a weblog.com. Surprising they aren't combined so these could be marketed together to individuals and small businesses: YourName@email.com, YourName.website.com, and YourName.weblog.com

Diamond in our rough

"A report from De Beers’s new diamond mine" in The Economist included this bit of history.

"Speculation that diamonds might be found in Canada dates from the 19th century, when gems were found studded through the American Midwest. In 1888, the year Cecil Rhodes founded De Beers in South Africa, a 22-carat stone was unearthed near Milwaukee. Glaciers, it was posited in 1899, might have carried the diamonds south. It was decades before exploration took off. De Beers began quietly scouring Canada in the 1960s, but it was not until 1991 that BHP, one of its rivals, found kimberlite, an igneous rock, with enough diamonds to merit a mine."

That local find was news to me, and led me to a quick search as a result of which I learned of the Eagle Diamond.

There's a bit more on it at the Wisconsin Historical Society.