Reviews and News:
How Chopin died: “Scientists diagnose rare complication of tuberculosis following analysis of heart stored in jar of cognac for 170 years.”
There’s a dead grasshopper—a real one—in Vincent van Gogh’s Olive Trees.
The importance of music in pre-modern China: “In Confucianism, music is regarded as one of two cruxes for living a civilized life. The other crux is rites. These are seen as theoretically divergent: rites separate people by creating social distinctions, while music harmonizes a community to bring people together; rites keep people civil but risk alienating them from one another, while music unites people but risks turning them loose and dissolute. Both are seen as fulfilling important roles in maintaining the social order, and the Confucian ideal is a perfect balance of the two.”
Quiet, unsentimental rural Britain: “In 1970 I wandered around an unfamiliar part of West Devon. Down a grassy lane I came across a farmyard in which stood three circular hay stacks, each beautifully thatched. It resembled a picture by the 18th-century painter George Morland. There was nobody about and the yard had a haunted air. In a pub a few miles away, I discovered that the settlement was called Riddlecombe.”
The first volume of Sylvia Plath’s letters, most of them published for the first time, reveals the poet’s sunny side: “In one letter to her mother, written in December 1950, Plath confides that she is worried about a suicidal classmate who has been ‘saving sleeping pills and razor blades’. But the letters betray few hints of the depression and breakdown she herself would suffer in 1953. The photograph on the cover of the British edition shows her smiling on a beach in a two-piece white bathing suit, with platinum-blonde hair, an image that has outraged some feminists (the cover of the American edition portrays her more soberly as a brunette in a black winter coat). Yet that happy, extroverted personality was one she was deliberately trying out in her formative years. In the letters to her mother that dominate the book, Plath stresses her studious, disciplined, respectable side. Over the course of this volume, the roster of correspondents expands as the many young men she was dating start to appear. Through her letters to them we can trace the evolution of her early romantic relationships, from friendship to flirtation and, in a few cases, especially Gordon Lameyer and Richard Sassoon, hyped-up protestations of love. To Lameyer in June 1954, she writes theatrically, ‘I love you more than the alphabet and Roget’s thesaurus combined.’”
The very individual Chaïm Soutine: “In the Paris of the 1920s and 1930s Chaïm Soutine was an oddity. He stood out not because he was an émigré — there were any number of those, from Chagall and Modigliani to Picasso and Brancusi — and not because he was poor, the common artistic predicament. He went against the grain because he was an Expressionist in a city of Cubists and Dadaists. His thickly impasted and violently worked paint surfaces have always been read as manifestations of a troubled soul, a sort of automatic painting that bypassed the cerebral and went straight for the guts. His disciple, the Abstract Expressionist Willem de Kooning, said that Soutine ‘builds up a surface that looks like a material, like a substance. There’s a kind of transfiguration, a certain fleshiness in his work.’ Soutine’s pictures, he thought, ‘had a glow that came from within the paintings — it was another kind of light’.”
Essay of the Day:
Daniel C. Dennett has been trying to explain consciousness in purely biological terms for years. His failure is instructive. David Bentley Hart on his latest attempt in the New Atlantis:
“It seems to me that we have come this way before. Some of the signposts are new, perhaps — ‘Bacteria,’ ‘Bach,’ and so on — but the scenery looks very familiar, if now somewhat overgrown, and it is hard not to feel that the path is the same one that Daniel Dennett has been treading for five decades. I suppose it would be foolish to expect anything else. As often as not, it is the questions we fail to ask — and so the presuppositions we leave intact — that determine the courses our arguments take; and Dennett has been studiously avoiding the same set of questions for most of his career.
“In a sense, the entire logic of From Bacteria to Bach and Back (though not, of course, all the repetitious details) could be predicted simply from Dennett’s implicit admission on page 364 that no philosopher of mind before Descartes is of any consequence to his thinking. The whole pre-modern tradition of speculation on the matter — Aristotle, Plotinus, the Schoolmen, Ficino, and so on — scarcely qualifies as prologue. And this means that, no matter how many times he sets out, all his journeys can traverse only the same small stretch of intellectual territory. After all, Descartes was remarkable not because, as Dennett claims, his vision was especially ‘vivid and compelling’ — in comparison to the subtleties of earlier theories, it was crude, bizarre, and banal — but simply because no one before him had attempted systematically to situate mental phenomena within a universe otherwise understood as a mindless machine. It was only thus that the ‘problem’ of the mental was born.”
Photo: Beskids
Poem: Aaron Poochigian, “Turf”
Forthcoming:
Konstantin Batyushkov, Writings from the Golden Age of Russian Poetry (Columbia, November 28): “Konstantin Batyushkov was one of the great poets of the Golden Age of Russian literature in the early nineteenth century. His verses, famous for their musicality, earned him the admiration of Alexander Pushkin and generations of Russian poets to come. In Writings from the Golden Age of Russian Poetry, Peter France interweaves Batyushkov’s life and writings, presenting masterful new translations of his work with the compelling story of Batyushkov’s career as a soldier, diplomat, and poet and his tragic decline into mental illness at the age of thirty-four. Little known among non-Russian readers, Batyushkov left a varied body of writing, both in verse and in prose, as well as memorable letters to friends. France nests a substantial selection of his sprightly epistles on love, friendship, and social life, his often tragic elegies, and extracts from his essays and letters within episodes of his remarkable life―particularly appropriate for a poet whose motto was “write as you live, and live as you write.” Batyushkov’s writing reflects the transition from the urbane sociability of the Enlightenment to the rebellious sensibility of Pushkin and Lermontov; it spans the Napoleonic Wars and the rapid social and literary change from Catherine the Great to Nicholas I. Presenting Batyushkov’s poetry of feeling and wit alongside his troubled life, Writings from the Golden Age of Russian Poetry makes his verse accessible to English-speaking readers in a necessary exploration of this transitional moment for Russian literature.”
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