Reviews and News:
The legend of Lou Gehrig: “Some 15,000 rain-drenched soldiers and sailors cheered as Gary Cooper took the stage in Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea, on the first leg of a 24,000-mile USO tour in 1943. Cooper, then Hollywood’s biggest star, couldn’t sing or dance, so he launched into a monologue of jokes that his pal Jack Benny had sent him. But halfway through the show, a voice cried out, ‘Hey, Coop! How about Lou Gehrig’s farewell speech to the Yankees?’”
The novel that inspired Dune: “Frank Herbert’s Dune (1965) is a science-fiction classic in part because it’s such brilliant pastiche. Drawing inspiration from the midcentury United States’s nascent environmental movement, European feudalism, Middle Eastern oil politics, and Zen Buddhism, Herbert created a universe that is at once exotic and familiar…but part of Herbert’s genius lay in his willingness to reach for more idiosyncratic sources of inspiration. The Sabres of Paradise (1960) served as one of those sources, a half-forgotten masterpiece of narrative history recounting a mid-19th century Islamic holy war against Russian imperialism in the Caucasus.”
Patrick Kurp reviews the first biography of poet Richard Wilbur: “In an age when poets have jettisoned prosody and much verse is indistinguishable from prose, Wilbur has ‘remained true to his own poetic identity, refusing to develop fashionable, and usually transitory, styles,’ in the words of his biographers. He has written precisely one poem in free verse, today’s lingua franca.”
Jim Campbell on cultural appropriation: “It is hard to think of a well-read, disinterested person breaking off from Anna Karenina or Heart of Darkness or A Passage to India or The Sound and the Fury or The Grass Is Singing, to pen a letter of outrage to author or publisher. If the art is good, it justifies its own creation. If bad, it predicts its own oblivion… Cultural appropriation is culture. The rest is philistinism.” (h/t: Barton Swaim)
Were some Renaissance painters influenced by hallucinogenic fungi? “Some art historians, such as Bosch scholar Laurinda S. Dixon, have proffered for decades that the symptoms of ergotism influenced painters like Jheronimus (aka Hieronymus) Bosch and Matthias Grünewald. In looking further at depictions of Saint Anthony — from medieval folk art, a plethora of Renaissance work, to a series of paintings by surrealist artists, such as Max Ernst’s 1945 The Temptation of Saint Anthony — a pattern begins to develop in which a mimesis of visual hallucinations associated with ergotism is clearly present.”
Technology in Amish country: “The Amish have not given up on horse-drawn buggies. Their rigid abstinence from many kinds of technology has left parts of their lifestyle frozen since the 19th century: no cars, TVs or connections to electric utilities, for example. But computers and cellphones are making their way into some Amish communities, pushing them — sometimes willingly, often not — into the 21st century.”
Essay of the Day:
In First Things, Peter Hitchens writes in praise of borders:
“Borders are a substitute used by less fortunate lands for the sea and the mountains behind which happier countries shelter. No great civilization has grown and endured except behind the shield of ocean, mountain, or desert.
“How different Poland’s history would be if it had a few dozen miles of deep salt water between it and its neighbors. How much trouble might be saved if Israel were an island. Countries with cliffs and churning, white-flecked seas for borders tend not to be partitioned or carted off into captivity, especially if they have the sense to build navies.
“It is considered impolite to mention it these days, but Britain’s defiance of Hitler in 1940 owed more to the Channel and the North Sea than it did to the RAF. Salt water was our ultimate weapon, and our sensible respect for it made us hesitate, to Stalin’s fury, to launch any invasion against Hitler’s coastline. D-Day was a very near thing, even with the vast resources, the careful preparation, the brilliant deception. If the weather forecasters had gotten it wrong, the invasion fleet would have been scattered and the Red Army would have liberated Paris sometime in 1946, before driving on to the English Channel to ponder the future. At least it would have stopped there.
“People in free countries should be more in love with the sea, more sympathetic to those who don’t have it. I grew up in a Britain where every road ended at the sea. In fact, the sea lay just beyond the bottom of our garden in the Portsmouth suburb where we lived, endlessly reassuring especially when (as was usually so) it was rough or hidden by fog. As a naval family, we always remembered Lord St. Vincent’s witty promise to Parliament while Napoleon Bonaparte’s Grand Army gazed out toward England from the hills above Boulogne in France: ‘I do not say they cannot come,’ St. Vincent creaked. ‘I only say they cannot come by sea.’ Honorable members obediently laughed. For the British Navy controlled every square inch of those gray waters, and gaze as they might toward the coast of England from the parade grounds of Boulogne, the French could not cross them.
“If a country has no sea, it must come up with a substitute. And that substitute is the guarded border. As a safe Englishman, I have never resented or decried these odd and often expensive structures. I can quite see why people want them. I can, alas, even envisage borders growing up in our own islands, where old nations are seeking to be reborn. There are worse things we might face. I have always thought that the French Maginot Line, now a derided ruin like the Great Wall of China, was rather sensible, its only fault being that it was unfinished, a major failing in any wall. I have helicoptered above much of the length of Israel’s frontier with the ‘occupied territories,’ and indeed climbed through a rather feeble section of it in the Jerusalem suburbs, and I see the sense in it. No doubt it is often unjust, and it was much better for everyone when there was friendliness across the line and thousands of Arabs used to travel peacefully and easily to work in Israel. But the barrier is a reasonable response to the nasty tactic of sending suicide bombers into Israeli towns, as is shown by the fact that it has much diminished these horrible attacks. My only worry is that it cannot possibly be sustained. Walls, unlike oceans, require ceaseless maintenance and repair, and must be manned night and day by alert and disciplined guardians. Otherwise they become relics.”
Photos: The trees of Central Park
Poem: Shana Powlus Wheeler, “Academic Dishonesty Policy”
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