The Three Christs of Ypsilanti in the London Review of Books

Jenny Diski wrote a review of The Three Christs of Ypsilanti for the London Review of Books. Not only is the book a fascinating look at a unique way to expose patients's delusions--by putting three men who believe they were Christ in a room together Milton Rokeach hoped they would return to 'normalcy' because of the apparent contradiction in their beliefs--but also a document showing psychiatry's difficulties when doctor's beliefs are set up as correct and opposite from the patients. Here Diski's conclusion to her article (shouldn't be behind a pay-wall):

Bruce Duffy, and fictionalizing real people

Bruce Duffy's new book Disaster Was My God about Arthur Rimbaud has been getting a lot of attention recently. It was reviewed in The New York Times, and independently a new translation by John Ashbery of Rimbaud's famous collection Illuminations was published this year as well (the poem Under the Flood was also published in our cousin publication The New York Review of Books). 

We wanted to remind everyone, therefore, of Duffy's first novel The World As I Found It, originally published in 1987, republished by us last year. Hailed by critics as a masterpiece of historical and biographical fiction (Joyce Carol Oates called it "one of the five great nonfiction novels" and "one of the most ambitious first novels ever published"), the book is a study of the intersecting lives of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Betrand Russell, and G.E. Moore as they meet and become friends in Cambridge, and are then broken apart by World War I. 

Several years after publishing, Bruce Duffy gave a lecture on The World As I Found It at Stiching John Adams Institut, Amsterdam, and is included in our edition. Here the first few paragraphs:

"Wittgenstein found facts and pictures of facts, immensely mysterious. I must say I do too. Like him, I'm puzzled by how facts and words refer to actual things in the world. And I'm equally puzzled by facts, or statements of fact, that do not refer to reality--by this I mean fictions.

Consider the phrase 'the present king of France.' France, of course, has no present king. The words make sense, but they conjure a nonexistent person, a linguistic unicorn. Yet how strange when you think about it, that we can talk about this royal personage, can even play with his nonexistence, For instance, we can s

Happy Birthday Ray Bradbury (sorry we're late)

Yes, we know Ray Bradbury's birthday was yesterday. But still, this is one of our favorite introductions in the series, from John Collier's Fancies and Goodnights: 

Bad Poetry Day

Today is the official Bad Poetry Day, and what better way to celebrate that with a poem from The Stuffed Verse: An Anthology of Bad Verse. There are plenty to choose from, but we thought we might share the title piece, written by one of favorites poets, William Wordsworth:

Happy Birthday, E. Nesbit!

Today in 1858 E. (Edith) Nesbit was born. Here's how Gore Vidal described her in an article written in The New York Review of Books in 1965:

"Born in 1858, Edith Nesbit was the daughter of the head of a British agricultural college. In 1880 she married Hubert Bland, a journalist. They had a good deal in common. Both were socialists, active in the Fabian Society. Yet the marriage was unhappy. Bland was a philanderer; worse, he had no gift for making a living. As a result, simply to support her five children, Nesbit began to write books about children."

We have recently republished The House of Arden, which Vidal considers one of her best works: "In The House of Arden a contemporary boy, Edred, must be tested before he can become Lord Arden and restore the family fortunes. He meets the Mouldiwarp (a mole who appears on the family coat-of-arms). This magic creature can be summoned only be poetry, freshly composed in its honor--a considerable strain on Edred and his sister Elfrida who have not the gift."

But Nesbit has never had the recognition in the U.S. that she had in the UK. Here's Vidal again on the subject:

"I do not think it is putting the case too strongly to say that much of the poverty of our society's intellectual life is directly due to the sort of books children are encouraged to read. Practical books with facts in them may be necessary, but they are not everything. They do not serve the imagination in the same way that high invention does when it allows the mind to investigate every possibility, to free itself from the ordinary, to enter a world where paradox reigns and nothing is what it seems to be; properly engaged, the intelligent child begins to question all presuppositions, and thinks on its own....As it is, the absence of imagination is cruelly noticeable at every level of the American Society, and though a reading of E. Nesbit is hardly going to change the pattern of a nation, there is some evidence that the child who reads her will never be quite the same again, and that is probably a good thing."