Latest news with #AndrewLang
The Guardian
28-03-2025
- General
- The Guardian
Cynthia Ozick: ‘Alice in Wonderland seems calculatedly cruel'
My earliest reading memory Andrew Lang's Fairy books – the blue, yellow and violet ones. And the unadulteratedly grim Brothers Grimm, evocative phrases like 'avenue of trees', the now and then alluring English archaisms, the always expected three sisters or sons, the youngest first despised and then victorious. The book that changed me as a teenager A late teenager, at 17, and it was two books nearly simultaneously, both histories. One was Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, in dazzling prose. The other was Heinrich Graetz's 19th-century History of the Jews, translated from the German, far out of date but distinctly not dated. (It was revelatory to learn much later that Kafka was immersed in this multivolume work.) Together they gave me a sense of the long and intertwined corridors of the past, and a conviction that a mind shorn of history is vacuous. The author I came back to My aversion to Dostoevsky was once enduring. His lurching from one extremist position to its opposite, his stubborn bigotries and fanaticisms, the untamed wilderness of his sentences, the freakishness of his protagonists, even, or especially, their feverish moral assertions, were all repellent – in contrast to Tolstoy, his contemporary, whose characters, however askew in temperament, are always instances of recognisable human truth. Joseph Frank's Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time turned me around. Through this masterly biography, I came to see that it is only by means of Dostoevsky's anguished, surreal and delirious art that he can hope to rebuke the devil himself. The book that made me want to be a writer I somehow already felt this inkling from early childhood, even before I could read. That one of my uncles was a Hebrew poet may have been the siren's song. But the book that formulated not so much the why of writing, but the actual how, was (as for so many others, generation after generation) Little Women, which I read compulsively, worshipfully, and reread again and again. Jo in her 'vortex' could do anything! Words, in addition to the bliss of their conjuring, can enter and alter reality! The book I came back to I first read Nabokov's Lolita in 1958 and, despite its literary ingenuity, was put off by its premise: an adult male obsessed by a 12-year-old girl. But after reading, in 2003, Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi, it came to me that if a group of women living under repression could meet in secret, throw off their headscarves and feel themselves liberated by this novel, they must see what I hadn't seen. The book I rereadThe Longest Journey. For many successive years I was drawn to reread this early novel by EM Forster, and after a hiatus of perhaps two decades I read it again only two months ago. Forster's judgment of his characters – veiled, and by implication – is what leads me repeatedly to be carried away. The book I could never read againAlice in Wonderland, read over and over again in childhood. What seemed both mysterious and delightful and comical and obscurely perplexing then, today, strikes me as calculatedly cruel. In Lewis Carroll's fanciful dance of verses and antics and morphings there is a kind of abstract design, distant and cold. 'Sentence first, verdict afterwards' is a joke steeped in horror. The book I discovered later in lifeWalden by Henry David Thoreau. I can't say I discovered it; it was always eminently there. But I didn't actually open its pages until recently, and in this sense caught up with – and belatedly (and shamefacedly) recouped – a major figure in American literature. The book I am currently reading Not a book, and nothing new: a return to the sublimely unequalled short stories that always inspirit and renew the visceral itch to write. Henry James: The Pupil, The Real Thing, The Figure in the Carpet; Agnon: Two Tales: Betrothed and Edo and Enam; Borges: The Aleph; Lampedusa: Lighea; Tolstoy: The Death of Ivan Ilyich; Chaim Grade: My Quarrel With Hersh Rasseyner; Isaac Babel: My First Goose. Sign up to Inside Saturday The only way to get a look behind the scenes of the Saturday magazine. Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers as well as all the must-read articles and columns, delivered to your inbox every weekend. after newsletter promotion My comfort read Jane Austen chick lit: Persuasion. In a Yellow Wood by Cynthia Ozick is published by Everyman (£20). To support the Guardian and the Observer, buy a copy for £18 at Delivery charges may apply.
Yahoo
06-02-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Beets by they: Funding for PFAS alternative considered
The Brief Lawmakers have proposed $10 million in grants to build businesses offering alternatives to the forever chemicals known as PFAS. FOX 9 has investigated the impacts and origins of PFAS for several years and Minnesota lawmakers made it illegal to use in a large number of products, effective this year. A company hopes to start a business in Renville, Minn., making a water-resistant coating -- like those made with PFAS -- using beet waste. They're asking the state for startup funding. ST. PAUL, Minn. (FOX 9) - An entire industry could grow in Minnesota to replace the dangerous chemicals known as PFAS. Crunching numbers A bipartisan idea would kickstart a business building an alternative, but a budget crunch makes it no sure thing. Lawmakers agree this is probably a worthwhile idea, but they're not sure whether now is the right time for an investment from the state. Minnesota-made The health and environmental consequences from PFAS forever chemicals spread from Minnesota around the globe. A safer alternative may also come out of the state. "I think that we all know that PFAS is something we're dealing with and we definitely want it removed from our packaging," said Sen. Susan Pha, (DFL-Brooklyn Park.) Beets by they Legislators proposed $10 million in grants to companies that can produce safer alternatives, but right now they only know of one making moves in western Minnesota. And they saw it in action during a Senate jobs committee hearing. "It is the plastic-y coating," said the bill's chief author, Sen. Andrew Lang, (R-Olivia). "It's not plastic. They actually told me it's edible. I don't know if it tastes very good." Cellucomp is the company making a water-resistant coating out of beet waste, which is abundant in the Renville area where they'd build a manufacturing facility if they get a $5 million grant. They'd initially create about 20 jobs, but with hopes of expansion. "We'd like to commit to that," said Christian Kemp-Griffin of Cellucomp. "Of course, to scale and to make it really successful, that's, getting the product the cost we need it to sell it at scale, then we need some help." State competitions? Some lawmakers pointed out it's a big taxpayer investment for just a few jobs. But Minnesota will compete with the Dakotas to get the facility started and potentially build an entire industry. And the environmental groups that got PFAS products banned are excited at the prospect. "Minnesota has an opportunity to be a leader in manufacturing safe products for global sale and this also means growth of jobs in multiple sectors," said Avonna Starck of Clean Water Action. All or nothing? The bill got unanimous approval in committee, but it has a few more stops and because of the budget situation, it may end up with less funding or none at all.
