Reviews and News:
Suzi Feay has read Paul Theroux’s latest novel and has a few suggestions: “As I ploughed through this semi-autobiographical behemoth about an author and travel writer obsessed with his siblings and mother, I tried to imagine what a hapless editor might have had to say about the manuscript. ‘I like the way you, I mean Jay the narrator, makes the point that your, sorry his, mother is just like a scheming medieval queen, but I think you can assume readers willing to tackle 500-page literary novels will remember, so you don’t need to keep saying it, especially since the idea’s implied in the title,’ such a person might begin. ‘Likewise, the idea that the siblings interact like members of cannibal tribes that Jay encounters on his travels. So funny and apt, but just the one mention will do. Going forward, there’s a lot of telling rather than showing. Perhaps you could actually dramatise some of this? And regarding the length, I love the Mr Bones flashback bit, where Jay’s timid father briefly comes alive while acting in a minstrel show, but apart from that, do we even need the first 200 pages?”
Atlas Shrugged at 60: “Rand is a more interesting and worthy writer and thinker than she is generally given credit for by liberals and conservatives alike—but I have my doubts about Atlas Shrugged as a good pathway to pro-freedom ideas.”
Cormac McCarthy returns to the problem of the origin of language: “My brother Dennis has brought me a fat stack of comments on ‘The Kekulé Problem’ as published in Nautilus. A few of these I thought might be commented on in turn…Children raised in a feral state do not learn to speak. Do they learn to draw?”
A. N. Wilson reviews Hilary Spurling’s biography of Anthony Powell: “Hilary Spurling, a long-time friend of Powell, was long ago anointed by the great man to be his biographer. Feeling shy at the prospect of asking him about his private life, she wriggled out of the assignment, then regretted it. Eventually, she took up the challenge again, and she has produced a richly enjoyable book, though it is not quite what some of us were expecting. You might say that it is a biography of A Dance to the Music of Time rather than of its author.”
“It has been just over a year since the Italian novelist behind My Brilliant Friend and the rest of the highly acclaimed Neapolitan series was outed by an investigative journalist who claimed to have discovered her true identity…In interviews over the years, Ferrante suggested that her anonymity was a vital component of her work. Being unknown, she said, gave her the space and liberty to focus on her writing, free from the ‘anxiety of notoriety’ or the temptation to censor herself.” Turns out it’s not so vital after all. Apparently, she #iswriting again.
Amazon launches new imprint: “Amazon Original Stories…will release short fiction and nonfiction works that can be read in a single sitting. The essays and reported pieces, available in the Kindle Singles store, will be free to Prime and Kindle Unlimited members. The pieces will be $1.99 for all other customers. The imprint’s first titles are The Sign of the Beast by Joyce Carol Oates and Crown Heights by Colin Warner and Carl King. Forthcoming 2018 titles from the imprint include works by W. Kamau Bell, Jade Chang, Eddie Huang, Janice Y.K. Lee, Walter Kirn, Dean Koontz, Wednesday Martin, Nick McDonell, Harold Schechter, Dan Slater, Dodai Stewart, and Susan Straight.”
The future of magazines and newspapers is subscription, Derek Thompson argues, not advertising.
Play and win: End of Semester Bingo
Essay of the Day:
In this week’s magazine, Charlotte Allen writes about Richard Hansen, the archeologist who discovered evidence of the preclassic Mayan civilization:
“Richard D. Hansen is the director of what is probably the largest archaeological excavation in the world, the Mirador Basin Project, some 51 ancient Mayan cities connected by raised causeways along an 840-square-mile elevated trough in the middle of the dense and swampy rainforest of the northern Guatemalan lowlands. Hansen’s annual excavation budget for the project is in the range of $2.5 million, dwarfing the $200,000 to $500,000 a year that most archaeologists are able to scrape together from grants for their more modest digs. The ancient Mayan structures in the Mirador Basin, uncovered by Hansen’s team of archaeologists, conservators, soil scientists, students from 66 different research universities and institutions, and up to 400 local Guatemalan workmen, are startlingly massive in both height and volume. When the jungle vegetation was peeled back, the ruins of the El Mirador complex were revealed to be four times the size of the sculpture-studded complex at Tikal, a once-powerful Mayan city-state and a popular Guatemalan tourist destination that is the crown jewel of Mayan architecture. At 230 feet, the highest of Tikal’s soaring ziggurat-shaped temple-pyramids was once considered the tallest Mayan structure. But the temple-pyramid of La Danta unearthed by Hansen at El Mirador and similarly ornamented with intricate carvings is a shade higher, at 236 feet.”
* * *
“But the sheer size of the Mirador Basin settlement isn’t what made Richard Hansen famous. It was the discovery he made at El Mirador, as a lowly graduate student in 1979, that utterly changed the way scholars of pre-Columbian American history looked at Mayan history. Before then, it was believed that nearly all the great monuments of Mayan civilization—the pyramids, the brilliantly painted murals, the elaborate stone carvings—dated no earlier than what is known as the ‘classic’ Mayan period that ran from about 250 to 900 a.d., roughly corresponding to the early Middle Ages in Europe. After 900, that civilization appears to have collapsed, and the inhabitants of its impressive cities abandoned them precipitously. The Mayan ruins at Tikal, as well as those at such well-traveled tourist destinations as Uxmal and Palenque in southern Mexico and Copán in Honduras, all represent glorious architectural phases of the classic Mayan period. There was something of a resurgence of grand Mayan architecture in what is known as the ‘postclassic’ period that lasted until the arrival of the Spanish conquistadors in the 1520s—although the post-classic style, best represented by the pyramid complex of Chichén Itzá on Mexico’s Yucatán peninsula that flourished until around 1250, was heavily influenced by the cultures of the Toltec and Aztec Indians of central Mexico, who might even have invaded and subjected the Mayan territories. “Archaeologists were long aware that there had also been a ‘preclassic’ Mayan period dating from roughly 1,800 b.c. to 150 a.d., but it was believed to have consisted of primitive village-settlements of hunters and maize-farmers practicing slash-and-burn agriculture in the densely forested Mayan lowlands. Their art? Some polished-looking but unadorned pottery, usually red but sometimes cream-colored or black, which contrasted starkly with the richly figurative creamware of the classic period. The most sophisticated pre-Columbian civilization of that early period was believed to have been that of the Olmec of southern Mexico (1,400-400 b.c.), famous for colossal stone sculptures of human heads and other carvings and ceramics. The best that the preclassic Maya could do, it was thought, was to erect a modest eight-meter pyramid at Uaxactún, a settlement about 12 miles north of Tikal. That low-slung structure was regarded as a precursor to the classic-era Mayan structures—much in the way that the small step-pyramids of Saqqara, Dashur, and elsewhere in pharaonic Egypt preceded the Great Pyramid of Cheops.”
Photo: Mont Saint-Michel
Poem: Catherine Wing, “Seconds before Landing”
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