Spring Reading, Javier Marias + Others
Javier Marias has a new book Your Face Tomorrow. – Stephanie Merritt welcomes the third and final part of an extraordinary work by a great novelist of our age
Marias talking here on video.
3quarksdaily –
Marías’ writing creed “I progress as I digress” underlines the importance of literary speculation in understanding the world around us. The urgency that drives Marías’ large novel in the absence of dramatic incidents flows from these often poignant meditations on history and ethics. They can be summed up in the words of another anglophone Spaniard George Santayana who said “those who forget the lessons of history are doomed to repeat it.” (Via)
Javier Marias (previous post)
Problems of Life – Wittgenstein from Beyond the Pale (Tom Clark’s blog)
The human gaze has a power of conferring value on things; but it makes them cost more, too.
(1929)
Don’t play with what lies deep in another person!The face is the soul of the body.
(circa 1932-1934)
Call Him Andean Jones
Adventurer, pilot, senator—and the man who found Machu Picchu –Hiram Bingham III
Hiram Bingham III 
Hilberg 
Hanna Arendt never did the research, she popularized the idea that Nazis were primarily bureaucrats. Here is a book about the man whose research Hanna used without attribution.
Hilberg was not happy either. After toiling for thirteen years on his book, he was being eclipsed by someone who had worked for little more than two years on hers. “Who was I, after all?” Hilberg asked bitterly in his autobiography. “She, the thinker, and I, the laborer who wrote only a simple report, albeit one which was indispensable once she had exploited it.” (From the Nation)
Thrill of the Chase the Truth about Gandhi’s sex life
With religious chastity under scrutiny, a new book throws light on Gandhi’s practice of sleeping next to naked girls. In fact, he was sex-mad, writes biographer Jad Adams
Father and Son (previous post) 
April 16 update:
1178 BC; The calculated date of the Greek king Odysseus’ return home from the Trojan War.
Odysseus by Arnold Böcklin
Odyssues by Max Beckmann
Coen brothers claimed never to have read Homer’s poem. “O Brother Where are Thou”