Brooklyn Book Festival schedule released, memorizing poems, Jean-Étienne Liotard in Edinburgh, Between the Pages looks at language, Reading makes you smarter, Henry VIII was a true baddie: Cultural Digest September 5

Liotard exhibition in Edinburgh

• Brooklyn Book Fair opens on September 20 and its schedule is now available. I've never managed to make it to this Festival nor will I this year. It's been a year of traveling and several more trips coming up so I took a pass from Brooklyn though several people I know will be there. I'd love to see this panel with Mario Bellatin (who was slated to be at our Festival in 2015 but couldn't get a visa in the end) and this one with Guadalupe Nettel and Alejandro Zambra (both of whom we've been trying to get for a few years now). Also on their schedule is Pico Iyer, Edwidge Danticatt, Andres Neumann (another dream writer we'd love to have), Francine Prose, and many others. OK I've got to put Brooklyn on my list for next year...
• Slate considers the benefits and beauty of memorizing poems. Personally, I've several poems that constantly float around in my brain that I memorized when I was much younger. I don't know if it has benefitted me but I sure love that lines of poetry occasionally play in my head at random times during my life.
• NYRB writes about an exhibition in Edinburgh on the work of Jean-Étienne Liotard.
• The literature video series Between the Pages looks at language writers including Julie Barlow, Jean-Benoit Nadeau and Gazette columnist Celine Cooper. Barlow and Nadeau wrote The Story of Spanish which I found to be fascinating. The conversation is a brilliant one.
• It's official: Henry VIII was the worst monarch according to the Historical Writers Association. Beheading wives is not looked fondly upon by historians today, go figure.
• Science of Us asks if reading literature really makes you smarter, better or more empathetic. 

Henry VIII: it's official

Tony Judt in Ukraine, Richard Blanco in Cuba, Jean-Michel Basquiat in Brooklyn, Patti Smith on Showtime: Cultural Digest, August 13

Basquiat at the Brooklyn Museum 

• A medieval sword contains a mysterious engraving that has been stumping experts and historians for years. 
• Reading Tony Judt in war-torn Ukraine. Tony Judt was one of our most important thinkers and when he died in 2010, it was a major loss for contemporary thinking, particularly on Europe and history.
• Jean-Michel Basquiat died on this day 27 years ago. The Brooklyn Museum is currently exhibiting some of his notebooks until August 23.
• Showtime will adapt Patti Smith's 2010 memoir, Just Kids, into a mini-series. 
• Cuba Through the Eyes of American poet Richard Blanco. Blanco reads a poem on the occasion of the opening of the US Embassy there, a first for an openly gay poet of Cuban dissent.

Watermelon, Dickinson's coconut cake, #TenThingsNotToSayToAWriter, Slovenian novel, American paintings: Cultural digest for July 31

Can you spot the differences?

• This 17th century painting by Giovanni Stanchi shows the extent to which selective breeding has transformed the watermelon. This apparently isn't a novel approach: horticulturists often look at Renaissance-era paintings of fruit or veg to determine the precise ways that breeding has changed them.
• Want to cook a favorite recipe of Emily Dickinson's? This hand-written recipe for coconut cake (it looks quite simple to bake) contains starting lines to the poem "The things that can never come back, are several - " on the other side. It seems Dickinson used cooking to find inspiration.
• CBC Books picks up a Twitter hashtag trend on the things writers hate hearing people say about their chosen profession. "That's a cool hobby."?? Seriously?! Other gems include "I'm not really interested in books but I like your work on Twitter" and "Have you met J.K. Rowling?" #TenThingsNotToSayToAWriter
• Really enjoying this Dalkey Archive book Minuet for Guitar by Slovenian writer Vitomil Zupan. Written and published in 1975, the book recounts the experience of Slovenian guerillas fighting against the Germans and Italians in WWII. The semi-autobiographical novel is moving, funny and, at times, terrifying. "War was cruel and innocent at the same time...It is a dance, accompanied by a 25-shot guitar."
• Gorgeous paintings by American painter Charmagne Coe. That's it.

Minuet for Guitar by Vitomil Zupan