Reviews and News:
How good was Evelyn Waugh? “Probably the major question in critically appraising Waugh’s fiction is how to weigh the earlier part of it as compared with the later.”
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The three cities of Istanbul: “Legend has it that the town of Byzantion was founded by King Byzas, who was blessed with strong touch of the divine: his father was the sea god Poseidon. His grandfather was none other than Zeus himself, whose cavorting with a priestess named Io got him into trouble with his wife. Io was turned into a cow that was so afflicted by a gadfly sent to torment her that she crossed the straits that became known as Ox-ford – or, rather, the Bosphorus. Byzas chose a fine site for his city, one with natural harbours, a plentiful water supply, a rich hinterland for agriculture – and fishing waters that were famous in the ancient world. They were so plentiful, in fact, that Agamemnon offered them to Achilles when trying to spring him from his famous sulk during the Trojan war. The natural wealth made Byzantion’s inhabitants rich – and made others jealous. Visitors to the city would sink ‘utterly into corrupt luxury’ wrote one sour author over two thousand years ago, setting the tone that many others would follow for centuries. Life was easy if you lived in the city; it seemed too easy if you didn’t.”
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The Spartan way of life: “Spartans were ‘a great puzzle’ to the other Greeks. At the same time, they were “almost universally regarded with awe, just as they are now.” Doggedly isolationist, they turned foreigners away at the border and were known for their distrust of flowery speech (hence the term ‘laconic,’ from Sparta’s original name, Lacedaemon). Thucydides depicts their King Archidamus as stressing the Spartans’ trust in collective discipline and distrust of innovation and individual talent in contrast with the bustling, argumentative, and ambitious Athenians. Although always ready for war, they avoided foreign entanglements because they knew that war could destabilize their internal constitution by sparking a slave rebellion or enabling individual Spartans to gain through military glory abroad a personal pre-eminence rigorously suppressed at home.”
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In praise of literary conservatives. (Hat tip: Adam Keiper)
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A history of pasta: Pasta “flourished in regions of Italy, particularly in 18th-century Naples and Sicily. Pasta was sold in special shops where men kneaded dough with their feet. Bakers wanted to sell pasta, but the vermicellari, or pasta-makers, formed guilds to protect their turf. Commedia dell’arte actors used bowls of macaroni in characters’ acts, and at this time, the food was eaten with the fingers. Of course, waves of Italian immigrants brought their cuisine to America, where Shelke points out that regional habits emerged, such as the peculiarity of East Coast Italian Americans calling tomato sauce ‘gravy.'”
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A year of old-fashioned farming in England: John Lewis-Stempel “chronicles the year, from the field’s acquisition in January on a two-year lease, through the first harvest, and on through to the end of the calendar year. Along the way, in addition to documenting the agricultural happenings, he provides interesting bits of local lore and history, memories of his rural childhood, and perceptive literary references.”
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Essay of the Day:
In Religions, James Matthew Wilson considers the Christian appeal of Elizabeth Bishop’s poetry:
“Over the last few years, I have noticed that a number of Christian poets and scholars of Christianity seem to harbor a particular affection for the work of Elizabeth Bishop, and that they do so for reasons evidently tied to their religious beliefs. I do not mean by this the oft-cited admiration of Dana Gioia for Bishop. Although Gioia may now be America’s best-known living Catholic poet, his work in prose and verse has, until recently, shied away from any such title, and indeed he has written that Bishop influenced him chiefly in her unwavering commitment to the self-effacement of the artist engaged in craft, in making a good poem. I think rather of essays and books, such as those by Cheryl Walker, Laurel Snow Corelle, and Elisa New, which, although never seeking to baptize Bishop by the force of interpretative will, take the poet’s Calvinist childhood and anguished agnosticism alongside her poems as material for serious theological and devotional meditation.
“Given the trajectory of Bishop’s life, which proceeds at a slow, grinding pace down a slope of uncontrolled, addictive, and self-destructive appetites, this has always surprised me, though perhaps it should not. Bishop’s contemporaries to whom she is often likened, Robert Lowell and John Berryman, lived at least equally unhappy lives; and yet, through the work of sensitive critics, including New, and their biographer, the Catholic poet Paul Mariani, they have taken their places among the more riveting dramas of the Catholic intellectual revival that occupies a central place in Twentieth-Century American literary history. Furthermore, in deliberate contrast with Lowell, Bishop’s poems eschew anguished and sometimes vitriolic expressions of personal apostasy—indeed, they programmatically if inconsistently avoid the personal, in the sense of ‘confessional.’ The restraint, the austerity, the third-person objectivity that characterize the majority of Bishop’s poems not only eliminates this likely obstacle for her Christian readers; these very hallmarks—developing an approach to poetry and manners she found and admired in her mentor, Marianne Moore—are what give her work its distinctive place in the poetry of the last century.
“Is there any other modern poet whose discipline in verse so absolutely dominates, conceals, and yet also responds to an unruliness in everyday life? I can think of a few comparable examples, but Bishop nonetheless stands out for her peculiar achievement in this regard. I would like to propose Bishop as one of the consummate modern practitioners of one of the leading traditions of lyric poetry in English—the poetry of meditation. And I suggest that her work adds a notable, if limited, new dimension to it; it is a dimension that Bishop herself may not have appreciated and whose implications she may well have denied, but it is also one which, I propose, helps explain the abiding interest Christian readers, scholars, and poets have taken in her work.”
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Photo: Cañete de las Torres
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Poem: Kevin Cutrer, “The Lesser Light”
