Reviews and News:
Remembering England’s forgotten WWII poet: “Being in a tank brought both ‘mobility,’ the only element Douglas considered different from the battle experience of the Great War soldiers, and the point of view of ‘a camera obscura or a silent film — in that since the engine drowns all other noises except explosions, the whole world moves silently.’ And silence, as he put it, “is a strange thing to us who live: we desire it, we fear it, we worship it, we hate it.” Set against our memory of descriptions of the Great War terrain in France — the mud; the wetness; the louse- and rat-ridden, shell-shattered landscape; the farm land turned to trenches and tunnels — Douglas’s descriptions of the desert suddenly bursting with flora are shockingly decorative.”
* *
Jazz and New York: “Great jazz artists often don’t come from Manhattan, but they struggle to build a reputation and gain career traction if they don’t come to Manhattan.”
* *
The architect who made a career of saving New York’s landmarks: “John Belle…, the retired founding partner of Beyer Blinder Belle, an architectural and planning firm that has specialized in preservation, restoration and contextual design, died last week at 84. With his death, the city has lost an architect who conveyed a genial joy in resuscitating the masterworks of his predecessors.”
* *
Inequality and the myth of unearned success.
* *
In Case You MIssed It:
New evidence disproves Chomsky’s theory of universal grammar: “The idea that we have brains hardwired with a mental template for learning grammar—famously espoused by Noam Chomsky of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology—has dominated linguistics for almost half a century. Recently, though, cognitive scientists and linguists have abandoned Chomsky’s ‘universal grammar’ theory in droves because of new research examining many different languages—and the way young children learn to understand and speak the tongues of their communities. That work fails to support Chomsky’s assertions.”
* *
Statue of Liberty green: “As might be expected, when the Statue of Liberty turned green people in positions of authority wondered what to do. The Army was in charge of the Statue then, because it had been erected on Bedloe’s Island, which was an active military base. In 1906, New York newspapers printed stories saying that the Statue was soon to be painted. The public did not like the idea. The officer in charge of the base, Captain George C. Burnell, told the Times, ‘I wish the newspapers had never mentioned that. I am in receipt of bushels of letters on the subject, and most of them protest vigorously against the proposed plan. I can’t say now just what we will do, but we will have to do something.’ The Times reporter then went to the country’s largest bronze and copper manufacturer, on West Twenty-sixth Street, and asked if the Statue should be painted. The company V.P. said that painting it would be vandalism, and completely unnecessary because of the protective quality of the patina. The executive went on: ‘You may be surprised to know that for years we have been trying to imitate the color effect of the Statue of Liberty by artificial means in our copper work. By architects and artists generally this color effect is considered the type of perfection for this kind of metal. I remember once asking the late Stanford White [White had been murdered just the month before] how he wished us to finish the decorative metal work on a noted building that he was putting up. “Go down to Bedloe’s Island,” he said, “and study the Statue of Liberty. You will find the most beautiful example of metal coloring in existence in the world today.'”
* *
Venice without Venetians: “On any given day, tourists outnumber actual Venetians by 140 to 1.”
* *
Allan Massie reviews Ron Rash’s new novel, The Risen: “I’ve long thought Ron Rash as good as any contemporary American novelist I’ve read. This lovely and disturbing book confirms that opinion.”
* *
Classic Essay: Walter Berns, “On Patriotism.” Read more by Walter Berns at Contemporary Thinkers.
* *
Interview: Bill Kristol talks with Charles Murray about guaranteed basic income and the decline of American civic life.
Get Prufrock in your inbox every weekday morning. Subscribe here.
