The culture of the front porch: The New York Times takes a look at “how the simple architectural fixture has played a role in African-American culture.”
A history of Anglo-Saxon London: “Anglo-Saxon London suffers from an image problem, or more precisely from the problem that we have no image of it at all. In contrast to the showy glamour of Roman Britain, with its amphitheatres, temples and abundance of literature, or the vibrant cultural melting pot of the Tudor era, the Anglo-Saxon metropolis has almost no remaining visible architecture, a dearth of written sources and a patchy archaeological presence. It is an arena from which historians have, perhaps wisely, shied away, but Rory Naismith’s Citadel of the Saxons manages to turn the slim pickings of the surviving evidence into something like a consistent narrative of the early days of London. It is a fascinating account of a period when it was more an overgrown village than a global city (or even a national capital).”
John Podhoretz recommends Netflix’s The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, directed by the Cohen brothers, on the big screen (if you can find a theatre that’s showing it).
An “endlessly interesting” account of 20 languages: “Trying to write about every single language would be a fool’s errand, of course, so in Babel, Dorren sets out to describe the 20 languages with the most speakers worldwide. There are the usual suspects — Arabic, Mandarin, English — as well as some possibly unfamiliar to English speakers in America, like Tamil and Javanese. Dorren confesses that he considered ‘having a go’ at learning all of them, but contents himself with the six languages he already speaks and the nine he reads… Babel is an endlessly interesting book, and you don’t have to have any linguistic training to enjoy it. Dorren has a talent for explaining even the most difficult linguistic concepts in a way that’s easy to understand, and he includes helpful charts at the beginning of each chapter, listing notable facts about the language he’s about to write about. (Who knew, for example, that we get the word ‘mango’ from Tamil, or the word ‘tulip’ from Turkish?)”
David Havird reviews David Bottom’s latest collection of poetry: “Otherworld, Underworld, Prayer Porch, the poet’s tenth collection, is divided into five sections, each of which has a thematic coherence. Neat epigraphs by R. S. Thomas, Louise Glück, W. S. Merwin, D. H. Lawrence, and James Baldwin and Sylvia Plath clue us in on the themes: the habit of faith despite the apparent absence of God; the look of the world as remembered from childhood (whose presiding spirit is the poet’s grandfather); the presence of the past (as personified by the poet’s father, whose death is fresh in his mind); the ‘autumn’ of life (as personified by the poet’s mother, whose mind and body are failing); and, again, the habit of faith as enacted through prayer…The collection, which amounts to a lyric montage of childhood remembered from the vantage of age and spoken in an even, seemingly unexcitable, ruminative voice, has a coherent wholeness that makes Otherworld, Underworld, Prayer Porch a satisfying work of craftsmanship as well as a haunting collection.”
How philosophy gave up on piety: “For two thousand years philosophy oriented itself to God. Today there is not even a pretense of such orientation. How then does philosophy give an account of itself? Inquiring into piety may be far more than exhuming a musty old word. Lewis Fallis’s Socrates and Divine Revelation is neither reverential nor irreverent. His writing is clear. His arguments are lucid. He sees his subject as important and he explains why it is important. Fallis begins by sketching out two obstacles to our taking piety seriously today: relativism and scientism. The first claims that all values—all moral claims—are historical constructs. Piety does not say anything ‘true’ about the divine; it reflects only its all-too-human creators. The second claims that science has disproven the existence of God and so the relevance (to science) of piety. Proponents of the first claim are ‘Ironists’; the latter are boasters. (‘Ironists’ are really sophisticated boasters.) Both stances are theoretical and require a reply grounded in theory, hence Fallis’s turn to two Platonic dialogues, the Euthyphro and Ion, that deal with piety.”
Essay of the Day:
In the New Criterion, Andrew L. Shea revisits the work of Edwin Dickinson:
“Ask an art historian what he thinks of the painter Edwin Dickinson. If he recognizes the name at all, you’ll likely hear ‘eccentric’ within the first sentence or two, and perhaps a tired word about symbolism, or landscapes, or maybe self-portraits. But ask a painter who’s familiar with his work, and chances are good you’ll get a different, and more enthusiastic, response. In some studios, praise for Dickinson (1891–1978) can be downright hagiographic, or at least seem so, given his relative obscurity within the typical story of twentieth-century American art.
“Dickinson has, it turns out, been ‘underrated’ from the start. In 1927, in the catalogue of the artist’s first solo exhibition (at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo), William Hekking wrote that ‘among contemporary American artists few of our younger men are more gifted and their ability less appreciated, than is Edwin Dickinson.’ Over the next four decades Dickinson would become, as one critic called him, ‘perhaps America’s best-known underknown artist.’”
Photo: Rocket launch between mountains
Poem: R. Nemo Hill, “Eleventh Reverie of Magellan”
Get Prufrock in your inbox every weekday morning. Subscribe here.
