Lapham’s Quarterly Summer 2014: Youth – preview

[CATEGORIES: Literature, Lapham’s Quarterly, Reading, Book Review]
[Click HERE or HERE to see my previous posts reviewing or referencing Lapham’s Quarterly.]
[Some of LQ’s contents are available free.  See Archives on that page for back issues.]

My latest issue arrived on time this quarter.  I’m over halfway through Winter 2014: Revolutions and I trust I will be getting to this in my own timely manner soon.

As I’ve said before:
1. ‘Lapham’s Quarterly is the finest publication I read.  One could spend a decent college semester studying a mere handful of the 75+ literary extracts and authors in each issue.’
2. ‘Each quarter per annum editor Lewis H. Lapham and his staff collect thoughts on a particular theme from the span of written history.’

L.Q. is rapidly becoming my number one reading priority.  It is so varied and diverse I don’t feel I’m missing out on anything.  I do read plenty of other things too.

At a glance who is in this issue?

Ovid, Hermann Hesse, Freud, R.L. Stevenson, J. Edgar Hoover (!), Dostoevsky (enjoyed him in Revolutions), Oscar Wilde, Teddy Roosevelt, Tolstoy, Sartre, Kafka, Mary Wollstonecraft (mother of Mary Shelley, who is the author of Frankenstein and wife of Percy Bysshe Shelley), Queen Victoria, Osama Bin Laden (!), Phil Ochs (60’s protest folk singer, we attended the same military school at different times, committed suicide by hanging in the 70’s, has a documentary which I think is the one I’ve seen on TV), James Joyce, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Aristophanes, and Joseph Conrad, to name but a very few.

Lewis Lapham’s Preamble is titled Fortune’s Child.  The graphic/map is Rites of Passage at different places around the world.  The three sections of Voices in Time are Salad Days, Growing Pains, and Coming of Age.

A few randomly selected side quotes:

“If you want to see what children can do, you must stop giving them things.” – Norman Douglas, 1916

“I was born at a very early age.  Before I had time to regret it, I was four and a half years old.” – Groucho Marx, 1959

“Beauty like a shadow flies,
And our youth before us dies.” – Edmund Waller, 1645

This issue looks thought provoking as usual.  Can it ever be otherwise when you extract 75 or so of the greatest writers and thinkers of history?

Speaking of that college semester of study I just stumbled upon lesson plans for L.Q.:

http://www.laphamsquarterly.org/educational-outreach/

They can probably be adapted for other issues too.

Stay tuned.  Keep reading.  (Some people posit and worry about the distraction and obsession with the Internet.  Aren’t we still reading?  Only if picture sites like Instagram and Pinterest replace reading will I start to worry.)

T.B.C. (To be continued…)