If you haven’t read Wuthering Heights, don’t bother, Kathryn Hughes argues. It’s a mess of a novel: “The reviews, when they appeared following publication in December 1847, comprised the sort of chorus of disapproval that would send most debut authors into a funk. While several reviewers acknowledged that the book had a strange sort of ‘power’, all of them proceeded to shred it to pieces. ‘The incidents are too coarse and disagreeable to be attractive,’ said the man from the Spectator. ‘It is wild, confused, disjointed, and improbable,’ said someone else. ‘In Wuthering Heights the reader is shocked, disgusted, almost sickened,’ complained Douglas Jerrold’s Weekly Newspaper. ‘How a human being could have attempted such a book as the present without committing suicide before he had finished a dozen chapters, is a mystery,’ shuddered Graham’s Lady’s Magazine from the US. This was also the publication that wondered if the author, at this time still known as Ellis Bell, had simply been eating too much cheese.”
Jeff Sypeck explains how the American inventor of baking powder became convinced that the Vikings had established a thriving city in Massachusetts: “Only one man in American history can claim to have been both a baking-powder revolutionary and a passionate medievalist, and nobody else is going to note this anniversary, so let me do the unasked-for honors: This week marks the 200th birthday of Eben Norton Horsford, the chemist and engineer who spent his golden years trying to convince a highly skeptical world that he had discovered hard, undeniable, multidisciplinary evidence of a thriving Viking city—in Massachusetts.”
It is sometimes argued that slavery made America rich. It didn’t, writes Deirdre McCloskey in Reason: “Slavery made a few Southerners rich; a few Northerners, too. But it was ingenuity and innovation that enriched Americans generally, including at last the descendants of the slaves.”
“A New York art dealer who bought the contents of a New Jersey storage locker for $15,000 says he has found six paintings he believes are by Willem de Kooning.” He also thinks he may have found a Paul Klee.
The real Lorax: “Researchers believe Dr. Seuss based The Lorax on the plight of the patas monkeys, a species that depends on the Seussian-looking whistling thorn acacia trees for sustenance.”
A little bit of publishing news for you on this rainy (at least in southeastern Virginia) Tuesday: The Man Booker longlist has been announced, and it includes a graphic novel. Who in the Trump administration has already written a book, is writing a book, may write a book, and probably will never write a book about Trump’s presidency? Publisher’s Weekly reports.
“Hacking” your trip to the museum is apparently becoming a thing: “On a recent Monday afternoon, Sarah Dunnavant, a 27-year-old actress and guide with the tour company Museum Hack, gathered her group of eight at the entrance of the Art Institute of Chicago, promising to reveal the ‘salacious, sexy and scary’ parts of the museum in an animated two-hour ‘un-highlights’ trip through the museum. She led the way to American folk art whirligigs, a fake Caravaggio and the arsenic-laced green paint favored by Vincent van Gogh. She passed out candy to keep spirits from flagging, discussed Beyoncé’s references in video and photography to the Yoruba goddess Osun in the African gallery, and photographed the group posing as the characters in Georges Seurat’s A Sunday on La Grande Jatte in front of the pointillist masterpiece.” Pointing people to a museum’s small treasures or the odd stories behind works of art is a good idea, but I think I’d rather be clubbed in public than pose in front of a painting. And do you know what I really enjoy about going to museums? Looking at art and people not talking.
Anthony Daniels on books by dictators: “I am no enthusiast for the concept of the banality of evil, but if it has application anywhere, it is here, in books by dictators, especially totalitarian dictators.”
Essay of the Day:
In GQ, Doug Bock Clark tells the story of Otto Warmbier’s arrest by North Korean officials, imprisonment, release, and death. Most notably, he states that there was no evidence that Warmbier was tortured:
“The day after the Warmbiers went on national television to declare that Otto had been ‘systematically tortured and intentionally injured,’ a coroner who had examined Otto, Dr. Lakshmi Kode Sammarco, unexpectedly called a press conference. She explained that she hadn’t previously done so out of respect for the Warmbiers. But her findings, and those of the doctors who had attended Otto, contradicted the Warmbiers’ assertions.
“Fred had described Otto’s teeth as having been ‘re-arranged’ with pliers, but Sammarco reiterated that the postmortem exam found that ‘the teeth [were] natural and in good repair.’ She discovered no significant scars, dismissing the one on his foot as not definitively indicative of anything. Other signs of physical trauma were also lacking. Both sides of Otto’s brain had suffered simultaneously, meaning it had been starved of oxygen. (Blows to the head would have likely resulted in asymmetrical, rather than universal, damage.) Though the Warmbiers declined a surgical autopsy, non-invasive scans found no hairline bone fractures or other evidence of prior trauma. ‘His body was in excellent condition,’ Sammarco said. ‘I’m sure he had to have round-the-clock care to be able to maintain the skin in the condition it was in.’ When asked about the Warmbiers’ claims, Sammarco answered, ‘They’re grieving parents. I can’t really make comments on what they said or their perceptions. But here in this office, we depend on science for our conclusions.’ Three other individuals who had close contact with Otto on his return also did not notice any physical signs consistent with torture.
“The origin of Otto’s injury remained a mystery. ‘We’re never going to know,’ Sammarco said, ‘unless the people who were there at the time it happened would come forward and say, “This is what happened.”’
Read the rest. (HT: Andrew Egger)
Photo: Abbaye de Sénanque
Poem: Ange Mlinko, “Epic”
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