Albert Smith escribe (Illustrated London News (1848), vía Futility Closet, otro gran emporio de serendipias): El medio de instrucción será los hilos del telégrafo eléctrico. En estos, siendo cinco, las notas se fijarán con materiales no conductores, y los alumnos las tocarán ya viajando. Los movimientos andante se tocarán cerca de las estaciones, donde el…
One of Spain’s greatest 20th century plagiarists intertextualisers was the novelist Valle-Inclán. His gypsies are substantially borrowed from George of that name, but as far as I know it is only in the following passage from La corte de los milagros, a novel set in the period when Borrow was in Spain, that he refers…
Sylvain Gouguenheim’s ‘“Aristote au Mont Saint-Michel” (Editions du Seuil), while not contending there is an ongoing clash of civilizations, makes the case that Islam was impermeable to much of Greek thought, that the Arab world’s initial translations of it to Latin were not so much the work of “Islam” but of Aramaeans and Christian Arabs,…
Sci-fi author Neal Stephenson (Enowning > a Slashdot interview): [A] while back, I went to a writers’ conference. I was making chitchat with another writer, a critically acclaimed literary novelist who taught at a university. She had never heard of me. After we’d exchanged a bit of of small talk, she asked me “And where…
