Reviews and News:
Remembering Vincent Joseph Scully and the buildings he loved: “It is no tragedy to die at the age of ninety-seven, as Vincent Scully did last November, certainly not after a life as full and accomplished as his. He was America’s most significant historian of architecture, and surely the only one who could have claimed to have changed the course of American architecture. During his half-century at Yale University, he left his mark on generations of consequential architects, from Norman Foster, Richard Rogers, and Robert A. M. Stern down to Maya Lin, Andrés Duany, and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk. And yet there is a note of melancholy in Scully’s elegies, and not just because there is no understudy waiting in the wings to take his place. It is rather that the qualities that he sought in buildings—the heroic, the humanistic, the tragic—hold little relevance to today’s incurious culture.”
Fred Bass, owner of the Strand bookstore in New York, has died. William Grimes writes his obituary for the New York Times: “‘It’s a disease,’ he told New York Magazine in 1977. ‘I get an attack, something like a panic, of book-buying. I simply must keep fresh used books flowing over my shelves. And every day the clerks weed out the unsalable stuff from the shelves and bins and we throw it out. Tons of dead books go out nightly. And I bought ’em. But I just have to make room for fresh stock to keep the shelves lively.’”
Steve Bannon calls the Trump team meeting with Russian officials “treasonous” in a forthcoming book.
English publisher John Murry has started a new non-fiction prize: “Entrants, who must be previously unpublished in book form, are invited to submit an essay of up to 4,000 words on the theme of ‘Origin’ (to be interpreted as each writer chooses), together with a proposal for how it might be turned into a book. The winning entry will be published in The Spectator (in print and online), and its author awarded a £20,000 publishing contract with John Murray to produce a book based on their proposal.”
A short history of anesthesiology: “Anesthesiologists (anesthetists in the British idiom) are the unsung heroes and heroines of modern medicine. It would be impossible without them. Their duty is to keep us unconscious and pain free, while the more conspicuously heroic surgeons do their work. Patients, therefore, see very little of them and probably do not realize that during surgery their lives depend much more on the skills of the anesthesiologist than on the surgeon’s.”
The Washington Post will add two newsletters to the over 200 it already publishes—one on technology and another on cybersecurity and defense.
Fiona Sampson goes “in search” of Mary Shelley.
Essay of the Day:
There are several literary anniversaries in 2018. It is the 200th anniversary of the birth of Emily Brontë and the publication of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. It’s also the 100th birthday of the late Scottish poet W. S. Graham. In Poetry, Rachael Boast and Andy Ching take stock of his accomplishment and influence:
“For those unfamiliar with W.S. Graham, you’re not alone. While he is widely admired among poets, he is not as well-known as he ought to be. William Sydney Graham was born on November 19, 1918 in Greenock, a close-knit community situated on the south bank of the River Clyde which, at that time, was home to a number of shipbuilding companies. The Greenock accent is particularly soft. One might say it’s confluent with the surrounding land- and waterscapes of Inverclyde, while remaining particular to the small town. The earliest known photograph of Graham, a family portrait showing the future author at about ten years old, reveals a similarly close and happy positioning of the kin. At that stage in his life, Graham wasn’t to know he’d spend most of his life away from family, at the opposite end of the UK, in west Cornwall, a coastal area where ancient moors are dotted with tin mines, which no doubt provided a distant echo of the Scotland of his formative years — both Clydeside and Cornwall feature memorably in his writing. Nor could he know he would be published by T.S. Eliot and would, in time, become one of the most influential Scottish poets of the twentieth century.”
Photo: Horse and rider
Poem: Asadullah Khan Ghalib, “Enough” (translated by Tony Barnstone and Bilal Shaw)
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