Reviews and News:
Multispectral imaging is truly amazing: “The library at Saint Catherine’s Monastery is the oldest continually operating library in the world. Among its thousands of ancient parchments are at least 160 palimpsests—manuscripts that bear faint scratches and flecks of ink beneath more recent writing. These illegible marks are the only clues to words that were scraped away by the monastery’s monks between the 8th and 12th centuries to reuse the parchments. Some were written in long-lost languages that have almost entirely vanished from the historical record. But now these erased passages are reemerging from the past. In an unlikely collaboration between an Orthodox wing of the Christian faith and cutting-edge science, a small group of international researchers are using specialized imaging techniques that photograph the parchments with different colors of light from multiple angles. This technology allows the researchers to read the original texts for the first time since they were wiped away, revealing lost ancient poems and early religious texts and doubling the known vocabulary of languages that have not been used for more than 1,000 years.”
John Singer Sargent’s watercolors—more than “simple travel souvenirs.”
Thomas Gainsborough’s dazzling vision: “During his time in Bath, Gainsborough established himself as a rival to the great Sir Joshua Reynolds, and was decidedly more amusing company. His painting developed from a doll-like provincial manner to the fluid flurries of his mature style. By the time he moved to London, in 1774, he was immensely famous. Unlike Reynolds, he saw his portrait practice as embedded in contemporary life. His element of fantasy did not depend on getting his sitters to pose sacrificing to the Graces, or asking their children to dress up as Henry VIII, as Reynolds did. In a famous letter to a dissatisfied client, he writes: ‘Nothing can be more absurd than the foolish custom of painters dressing people like scaramouches, and expecting the likeness to appear.’ Gainsborough painted his people as they dreamt of appearing, without meaningless flattery.”
Donald Barthelme’s Houston: In 1987, two years before his death at the age of 58, the writer Donald Barthelme outlined a plan for a 3.5 pedestrian loop around Houston. It was never built, of course, but Robert Cremins imagines what it would have been like to walk it. “We can begin the 3.5-mile tour at the Museum of Fine Arts, specifically the older building’s great steel-and-glass curving extension, designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. And at this starting point we are also at one of the writer’s starting points; Barthelme’s architect father, Donald Sr., was an evangelist of the modern aesthetic gospel. He built what his son described as ‘a very beautiful house, somewhat similar to Mies’s Tugendhat house’ for what was eventually a family of seven.”
Avoid the Edinburgh Festival (“the NHS with a lyre in its hands”). Try the Fringe: “The festival proper (now the Edinburgh International Festival or EIF) embodies the lordly style of spoonful-of-medicine art from the Soviet era. Works are chosen and approved by remote commissars who hand them down to a grateful and quiescent populace. The fringe is just the reverse. It’s a free-market bonanza, a riot of unfettered and unregulated individualism, a giant supra-national bourse where buyers and sellers come from all over the world to exchange artistic goods for money.”
Hollywood’s mid-century crisis: “Hard-Boiled Hollywood is, in the author’s own description, ‘a book about dead bodies left by the side of the road in post-war Los Angeles’. It tells an alternative history of Hollywood’s awkward adolescence. In the 1940s and 50s, millions flocked to LA to partake in a golden age that was already over. This disjunction is central to Lewis’s thesis: between 1940 and 1960, LA’s population more than doubled from 3.2 million to 7.8 million; in the same period, output from the film studios halved. That left a lot of new arrivals at a loose end.”
Essay of the Day:
In the latest issue of The Standard (available now online), Andrew Ferguson explains what the Summer of Love was all about:
“If you ever wonder why the sixties cultural revolution was necessary, listen to a hit album by the Ray Conniff Singers, watch a Bob Hope variety special from NBC, try on a pair of Sansabelt polyester slacks, or choke down a Wonder Bread sandwich made with Welch’s grape jelly and Skippy creamy peanut butter spread. The hippies had a point.
“And they never seemed to doubt that their antinomianism was the surest way out of this cul-de-sac. But there was a puritan streak in them, too, these children of the middle and upper-middle classes, the spawn of the greatest generation. They went to San Francisco to start a party, but the party had to stand for something other than self-indulgence. A high-minded justification was wanting. There were plenty of brainy, publicity-minded shamans around—the Harvard professor and LSD evangelist Timothy Leary or the pantheist philosopher Alan Watts—to provide it.
“And so LSD wasn’t just an enjoyable if risky intoxicant, it had to be a gateway to a new reality or, if you were really lucky, God Itself. Sex, no matter how overworked, was a means of achieving personal authenticity and throwing off bourgeois shackles. The avoidance of work was a noble attempt to end-run the soul-deadening mechanisms of capitalism and create a new economy without money. Toying with half-baked, Americanized versions of Eastern mysticism was a way of transcending the limits imposed by Judaism and Christianity, leading to new realms of the spirit.
“Historians of the SOL keep this tradition alive. Most of them are evangelists rather than historians, in fact. You will read that hippies ‘experimented with sexual liberation,’ as though they were dressed in lab coats like Masters and Johnson, when all it really means is that they were having a lot of sex. When you read the hippies were ‘exploring the frontiers of consciousness’ you know they’re getting high. An ‘experimental college,’ like one in the Haight, means a college where nobody studies or has to take a test. ‘Alternative commerce’ is bartering or, in many instances, thievery.”
Photoa: The Voyager at 40
Poem: Ernest Hilbert, “Seasonal Drinking”
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