Reviews and News:
How French Impressionism began on the banks of the River Thames: “Monet didn’t stay long in England, leaving for the Netherlands in the spring of 1871, but the succour that London had given him, the sight of the river at Westminster, the London fogs and the paintings of Constable and Turner that he saw here stayed with him. Decades later, he returned. For three successive winters, from 1899 to 1901, he took rooms at the Savoy Hotel and painted the Thames in all weathers. At one point, he was working on around 100 canvases simultaneously. In 1904, 30 years after the Paris exhibition that launched the Impressionists as a group, Durand-Ruel showed 37 of Monet’s pictures in a successful exhibition called Views of the Thames.”
“A manuscript of an early work by John Donne, a scurrilous academic joke that could have cost the poet his reputation – and maybe his head – if it had fallen into the wrong hands, has been discovered in a trunk in the archives of Westminster Abbey.”
William McKinley reconsidered: “Merry notes that historians…have been reluctant to credit McKinley as a proactive president, ranking him below even the mediocre Grover Cleveland and Benjamin Harrison. In most surveys, McKinley does not make it into the top fifteen presidents. But…beginning in the 1950s, this low opinion of McKinley has been challenged by several historians, and though Merry does not say so, his biography marks the culmination of the revisionists’ efforts to solve the McKinley mystery, as he deems it: how this apparently unassuming man, in his first term, presided over victory in Cuba, the annexation of Hawaii, and the acquisition of the Philippines and Puerto Rico, catapulting America into competition with imperial Britain, Germany, and Japan.”
The two John Banvilles and Henry James: “In Banville’s other writing life as the detective novelist ‘Benjamin Black’—there have been ten books since 2006—he is free to indulge in action and create fictions that trip along at a pace that John Banville would no doubt regard as vulgar. But once he casts Black to one side he is able to return to his contemplative meandering. The high literary performance of Beckett or Nabokov clearly represents a guiding light for Banville, but the same self-conscious elegance informs the work of another in his firmament of masters: Henry James. However, James’s grace seldom mitigates against his desire to keep the story moving forward. Banville’s decision to write Mrs. Osmond—a sequel to James’s The Portrait of a Lady—suggests a comfortable meeting of literary temperaments in a shared affinity for decorative language, but raises some questions as to their compatibility with regard to narrative architecture.”
Meet the “aggressive humanists” of the Center for Political Beauty in Germany: “The most compelling political performance artists in Germany do not like to be called ‘artists.’ Nor do they prefer the label of ‘activists’—a term they reserve for gradualists, clicktivists, and the letter-writers of Amnesty International. Founded in 2009 by the philosopher Philipp Ruch, the Center for Political Beauty makes its base of ‘operations’ (Aktionen in German) in Berlin, with changing groups of volunteers and partners throughout Europe. Its members, who wear suits and charcoal war paint, are organized into ‘assault teams’ aiming to establish ‘moral beauty, political poetry and human greatness [Großgesinntheit].’ They call themselves ‘aggressive humanists.’”
Essay of the Day:
In The Hudson Review, A. E. Stallings examines our fascination with shipwrecks:
“Storm and the threat of shipwreck, or actual shipwreck, turn out to be the embarkation point for many narratives, and maybe one of the starting points of literature itself. The Odyssey (circa seventh-century BC) begins with Odysseus already a castaway and sole survivor of his whole armada, the Aeneid (19 BC) with Aeneas, a refugee fleeing the devastation of Troy, in a tempest with his flotilla off the coast of Carthage. The first words spoken by a mortal in Virgil’s poem are Aeneas’ in terror of the storm and in dread of a watery grave. Lifting his palms to heaven he exclaims: ‘Three times, four times luckier were those / Who died before their parents’ eyes / Under Troy’s high walls!’
Aeneas is uttering nearly the same words (if in a different language) that Odysseus says in Odyssey 5.306, 5.307 when his raft is destroyed and he is swimming for his life. A blast of wind from the North strikes the sail as Aeneas speaks: ‘. . . Waves shot to the stars. / The oars shattered. The prow swung around, / Exposing the side to the waves, and then / A mountain of water broke over the fleet. / The crew of some ships bobbed high on the crest, / While the wave’s deep trough revealed to others / The deep seafloor churning with sand.’
“Many are drowned, at least one ship wrecked, but Aeneas and his own ship make nearest land, the coast of Libya. There Aeneas utters some of the poem’s most famous words,’forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit’: ‘Some day, perhaps / It will help to remember these troubles as well.’
“It turns out there is something mirror-like about the sea (‘the sea-like sea’ as Alice Oswald describes it), not just its reflective surface in fair weather: it has the effect of doubling current experience as premonition or nostalgia. At sea, Aeneas wishes himself onshore (if dead and buried), and onshore, he casts his mind back to the struggle at sea, as well as forward into a future time when thinking about it will bring pleasure. Iuvabitin the Latin, here translated as ‘will help’ can also be translated as ‘will gratify or please.’
“This counterintuitive association of a ship in distress at sea and pleasure onshore is not coincidence. The Roman poet Virgil throughout the Aeneid is engaged in conversation with, or maybe rebuttal of, one of his strongest influences, Lucretius and his didactic Epicurean epic, De Rerum Natura, ‘On the Nature of Things’ (circa 50 BC). Epicurean philosophy, with its emphasis on Pleasure as the greatest good, and its belief in a purely material universe of atoms drifting through the void, looked to nautical metaphor to describe the serene state of mind that philosophy aimed at: ataraxia—‘untroubledness’ or ‘smooth sailing’ as it were. And when Lucretius wants to describe the philosophical man looking upon the troubles of others in Book 2, he describes a spectator onshore watching a ship in a tempest: ‘How sweet it is to watch from dry land when the storm-winds roil / A mighty ocean’s waters, and see another’s bitter toil— / Not because you relish someone else’s misery— / Rather it’s sweet to know from what misfortunes you are free.’ Aeneas is both the sailor in difficulties and the philosophical observer onshore who can find pleasure in being out of harm’s way.
“For us, Lucretius’ formulation of the sweetness of watching a ship in a storm, and the possible shipwreck, might seem shocking, or callous. But traditionally, shipwreck to those onshore was potentially both entertainment and enrichment (especially when cargo washes ashore—one man’s wreck is another man’s salvage).”
Photo: Salzburg
Poem: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, “Above the Mountains”
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