Dudely lulls

The literary critic, theorist and Shakespeare scholar Stephen Greenblatt’s new book, “The Swerve: How the World Became Modern,” is partly about an obsessive book collector, and it begins, appropriately enough, with a book purchase of the author’s own.

In the mid-1960s, when he was a student at Yale and searching for summer reading, Mr. Greenblatt came upon a prose translation of Lucretius’ 2,000-year-old poem “On the Nature of Things” (“De Rerum Natura”). He plucked it from a Yale Co-op bargain bin for 10 cents, partly because he liked its sexy cover, a pair of disembodied legs floating above the Earth in an apparent act of “celestial coition.” —Dwight Garner, NYT

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There were other goodies in yesterday's art section. Ben Ratliff's review of the Foo Fighters show had a line that made me laugh: "Mr. Grohl and his tastes may be the only carbon-based link between the Boredoms and Tom Petty, whose 'Breakdown' the Foo Fighters played during a dudely lull." Dudely lull!

And Dave Itzkoff's piece on Dylan's Asia paintings, some of which appear to be based on famous photos, mentioned the Confessions of a Yakuza controversy...which reminded me of this lyric:

I dreamed I saw St. Augustine alive as you or me
Then in the year I turned 16, a man who came to recruit laborers for the Ashio copper mines asked me if I cared to work there.

—PTSNBN