From the 1909 Esperanto Congress.

• In 1969, Life ran a photo essay called “What it takes to be a lady author anymore,” with predictably outmoded advice: “swim a little,” for starters, “exercise in a bikini,” and be “photographed in bed.” The magazine photographed Jeanne Rejaunier—who was promoting a new novel called, ironically enough, The Beauty Trap—in various titillating poses, and also raking leaves in a Victorian dress. “Just possibly because she smiles so prettily on the book jacket (the back andthe front of the book),” Life wrote, “The Beauty Trapis now in its fourth printing.”
• Today in obscure centennials: “Last week the 100th Universal Congress of Esperanto was held in Lille. The public program included a traditional dance workshop in the Place du Théâtre, an ecumenical service in the Eglise Saint-Maurice and concerts by Esperanto singers. There were also introductory lessons in Esperanto, and an international football match between Esperanto and Western Sahara. (The match was abandoned at half-time with Western Sahara 4–0 up.)”
• Rock music and fiction haven’t blended terribly well over the years—there’s a Great Jones Street here, a Goon Squad there, and not much between. But 2014 saw no fewer than five entrants in the ongoing contest for Great American Rock Novel, and “interestingly, none of these 2014 titles concerns itself with conveying the over-the-top elements of rock on the page. Rather, they focus on characters dabbling in rock within the larger context of their more domestic pursuits: growing up, falling in love, finding a path, having a family; in short, the arcs that have been part of the novel’s scope since at least Austen. Much of the trouble for these characters comes when their more universal journeys collide with their need to make music, play in band, tour in an airbrushed bus.”
• Salvador Dalí’s childhood diaries remain untranslated, which is a shame, because they find him witnessing the unrest in the lead up to the Spanish Civil War: “At this point in the journal, the illustrations by Dalí … have become morbid. An old man hangs from a noose with his tongue lolling out. On the facing page, a warrior with sword in hand extends the severed head of a long-haired man toward the viewer.”
• On the literary scene in Ukraine, which has a strange emphasis on finality: “Ukrainian literature—or Ukrainian culture more broadly—employs the words lastquite often: last territory, last bastion, the last issue of a magazine, the last books of a bankrupt publisher, the last Ukrainian-speaking readers, writers, translators. There is a well-known contemporary classic, a collection of essays by one of Ukraine’s best-known authors, Yuri Andrukhovych, called My Last Territory; there is an art management agency called Last Bastion.”