Thursday, March 19, 2015

Dai Sijie was born in China in 1954.  He grew up working in his father's tailor shop and he himself became a skilled tailor.  The Maoist government sent him to a reeducation camp in rural Sichuan from 1971 to 1974, during the Cultural Revolution.  After his return, he was able to complete high school and university, where he studied art history.  In 1984, he left China for France on a scholarship.  There, he acquired a passion for movies and became a director.  Before turning to writing, he made three critically acclaimed feature-length films:   China, My Sorrow (1989) (original title: Chine, ma douleur), Le mangeur de lune and Tang, le onzième.  He also wrote and directed an adaptation of Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, released in 2002.  He lives in Paris and writes in French.  See a list of his books at http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/5836922.Dai_Sijie

Fu Lei got his given name due to his thunderous cry when he was born in 1908 as Lei means “thunder” in Chinese, which might have preordained his outspoken character.  One year after he entered Shanghai Chizhi University, he went to France for a four-year further study (1928 to 1932), listening to literature and art courses at Paris University and Louvre Academy of Fine Arts History.  In order to learn and master French, he began to translate the short stories by Alphonse Daudet and Carmen by Prosper Mérimée.  This is the very beginning of his translation practice.  Influenced by Romain Rolland, Fu fell in love with music and art.  Invited by the Italian Royal Society of Geography, he toured Italy and delivered a famous speech in Rome, eulogizing the military revolution against the warlords at home.  During his stay by Lake Léman, he translated a local legend from the old calendar of his landlord.  In Paris he began to translate the first chapter of Lectures on Art by Hippolyte Adolphe Taine.  He also rendered four prose poems by Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev.   See "Fu Lei’s translation activity and legacy", an 183-page research paper by  Chuanmao Tian at http://www.academicjournals.org/article/article1379500893_Tian.pdf

A Complete Collection of genteel and ingenious Conversation, according to the most polite mode and method now used at Court, and in the best Companies of England, commonly known as A Complete Collection of Genteel and Ingenious Conversation, or more simply as Polite Conversation is a book by Jonathan Swift offering an ironic and satirical commentary on the perceived banality of conversation among the upper classes in early-18th century Great Britain written in the form of a reference guide for those lacking in conversational skill.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Complete_Collection_of_Genteel_and_Ingenious_Conversation  One theory about A Complete Collection of Genteel and Ingenious Conversation is that the phrase It's Raining Cats and Dogs came from it. 

The Battle of the Books is the name of a short satire written by Jonathan Swift and published as part of the prolegomena to his A Tale of a Tub in 1704.  It depicts a literal battle between books in the King's Library (housed in St. James's Palace at the time of the writing), as ideas and authors struggle for supremacy.  Because of the satire, "The Battle of the Books" has become a term for the Quarrel of the Ancients and the Modernshttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Battle_of_the_Books

The metaphor of dwarfs standing on the shoulders of giants (Latin:  nanos gigantum humeris insidentes) expresses the meaning of "discovering truth by building on previous discoveries".  While it can be traced to at least the 12th century, attributed to Bernard of Chartres, its most familiar expression in English is found in a 1676 letter of Isaac Newton:  If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standing_on_the_shoulders_of_giants

noia  suffix meaning "(condition of the) mind or will":  aponoia, hypernoia, hyponoia.
Mosby's Medical Dictionary, 8th edition. © 2009, Elsevier.

Long-running book series (numbers as of March 2015)
The Railway Series, v. 1-26 written by Wilbert Awdry, v. 27-42 written by Christopher Awdry
Maigret series, 75 v. by Simenon
Perry Mason series, 86 v. by Erle Stanley Gardner 
87th Precinct series, 86 v. by Ed McBain

Ed McBain (1926–2005) was an American author and screenwriter.  Born Salvatore Albert Lombino, he legally changed his name to Evan Hunter in May 1952, after an editor told him that a novel he wrote would sell more copies if credited to Evan Hunter than it would if it were credited to S.A. Lombino.  Thereafter, he used the name Evan Hunter both personally and professionally.  As Evan Hunter, he gained notice with his 1954 novel Blackboard Jungle.   Dealing with juvenile crime and the New York City public school system, the film version followed in 1955.  During this era, Hunter also wrote a great deal of genre fiction.  He was advised by his agents that publishing too much fiction under the Hunter byline, or publishing any crime fiction as Evan Hunter, might weaken his literary reputation.  As a consequence, during the 1950s Hunter used the pseudonyms Curt Cannon, Hunt Collins, and Richard Marsten for much of his crime fiction . A prolific author in several genres, Hunter also published approximately two dozen science fiction stories and four SF novels between 1951 and 1956 under the names S.A. Lombino, Evan Hunter, Richard Marsten, D.A. Addams and Ted Taine.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ed_McBain

H. Richard Hornberger, who wrote the novel ''M*A*S*H,'' the inspiration for the film and long-running television series of the same name,  spent most of his life as a thoracic surgeon in small towns on the Maine coast, but his experiences as a captain in the Army Medical Corps during the Korean War led him to write three novels after returning from combat.  He worked for 12 years on the first, ''M*A*S*H,'' which was rejected by many publishers before William Morrow issued the book in 1968.  The 1970 movie, directed by Robert Altman from a screenplay by Ring Lardner Jr., was the third-highest grossing film that year and spawned the CBS series, which ran from 1972 until 1983 and was one of the most popular shows in television history.  Dr. Hornberger modeled the character of Capt. Benjamin Franklin (Hawkeye) Pierce after himself.  Dr. Hornberger used the pseudonym Richard Hooker in his writing.  After ''M*A*S*H'' -- an acronym for Mobile Army Surgical Hospital -- came ''M*A*S*H Goes to Maine'' and ''M*A*S*H Mania.''  Both concerned the adventures of doctors who had been together in Korea and then came home to work in coastal Maine--in thinly disguised fictional towns.  Lawrie Mifflin  http://www.nytimes.com/1997/11/07/arts/h-richard-hornberger-73-surgeon-behind-m-a-s-h.html


http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 1272  March 19, 2015  On this date in 1895, Auguste and Louis Lumière recorded their first footage using their newly patented cinematograph.  On this date in 1918, Congress established time zones and approved daylight saving time.

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