Long-listed books for 2020 National Book Awards, the recovery of lost languages and other important things in the world’s oldest library, and Dappled Things editors build Châteaux in the air.
The 2020 National Book Awards Longlist: Fiction
Katy Carl, Dappled Things Editor-in-Chief, recommended this link to a New Yorker article on the top ten contenders (the long list) for the 2020 National Book Award for Fiction. If you have don’t have access to the New Yorker, you can go to the source, “The ten contenders for the National Book Award for Fiction” at the National Book Foundation website. On October 6, the foundation will reveal the five finalists.
The Lost Languages Discovered in One of the World’s Oldest Continuously Run Libraries
Associate Editor, Josh Nadeau, recommended this link with the comment, “Librarian monks for the win.”
At POCKET WORTHY at the Smithsonian Magazine, Brigit Katz writes about a remarkable collection of ancient texts preserved, and sometimes erased and then written over, by monks at isolated Saint Catherine’s Monastery at Mount Sinai in Egypt and about the work being done to uncover the original texts. The monastery is the oldest continuously inhabited monastery in the world, and it is also known as the “Sacred Monastery of the God-Trodden Mount Sinai.” On the grounds is a living bush believed to be the actual “burning bush” from which God talked to Moses. The monastery houses the oldest library in the world.
Among the newly revealed texts, which date from the 4th to the 12th century, are 108 pages of previously unknown Greek poems and the oldest-known recipe attributed to the Greek physician Hippocrates.
“But perhaps the most intriguing finds are the manuscripts written in obscure languages that fell out of use many centuries ago.”
Doing It Ourselves
An initial link from Dappled Things Fiction Editor Natalie Morrill to an episode in the “Doing It Ourselves” vlog series—which is about an English family buying and restoring an old French château—led to a lot of wishful daydreaming by other editors and contributors about how great it be would to buy a Dappled Things Château.
Chateau featured on the “Doing It Ourselves” show
Historic Château with a chapel for sale in South West France SOLD
Hmm. I hope I remember never to consider contributing to DT, those people who want to buy 650,000(E) chateaus in the South of France.
— Dena, who lives in a $100,000 house in the South of Georgia.
DT is a volunteer run organization, and the editors were day-dreaming. Sorry to have given the wrong impression. Any donations are used to pay the bills of publishing the magazine and keeping the website going.
I was just kidding. Sorry if that wasn’t as obvious as I thought it would be.
Whew!
Hi Dena! Yeah, it’s just wishful day dreaming, though if it ever did happen, it would be a great place for hosting an international artists’ retreat, a new base of operations for growing the Catholic literary and artistic renaissance. The deal would be that you could stay for free, so long as you produced a significant piece of art during your tenure. How about it?
Hey, Bernardo. I used to live in Winter Park, Florida, when I was in grad school. It’s a very expensive artsy little town surrounded by Orlando and beset by a siege mentality. There was a big house on a lake there, owned by some wealthy person and it operated just as you describe–a place for artists, writers, etc., rent-free. I didn’t live there, but I had a friend who did, Varteni Arman, an expressionist painter. Years ago, I wrote a post about this place on the St Austin Review blog, The Ink Desk, titled “Skinny-Dipping in Winter Park”(something which occurred frequently there). The occupants never had to worry about money.
The thing is, they were so free to do their art, they couldn’t produce any. This place existed many years–it might still be there–but nothing significant was ever produced. Art needs adversity, a certain friction is required; freedom bequeaths paralysis.
In that case, we will make sure they spend some time in the castle dungeons. This is where castles have an advantage over fancy houses.