Reviews and News:
What made George Washington different from Benedict Arnold? “Both were dynamic men of action with unquestioned personal courage; both were driven by passionate ambition from an early age; both were capable of inspiring the men they commanded to acts of extraordinary sacrifice and endurance; both were hot-tempered by nature. Yet, despite all of these superficial similarities, one of them ended up a traitor, the other Father of His Country. It all boiled down to character, a case of honor versus glory.”
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Wynn Wheldon reviews Sana Krasikov’s novel The Patriots: “The murderous confidence trick of Communism was played not only on millions of Russians, not only on Chechens and Georgians and countless other minorities of the Russian empire, but also on thousands of Americans who moved to the false utopia. Their story is colorfully documented in British author Tim Tzouliadis’s The Forsaken: An American Tragedy in Stalin’s Russia (2008), which Krasikov credits in her acknowledgements. The Patriots tells the fictional story of one such victim, an American Jewess lured to the USSR by a combination of lust, curiosity, and optimism”
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Daily Mail is reporting that Donald Trump has asked Sylvester Stallone to head the National Endowment for the Arts.
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Viktor Shklovsky’s cinematic life and diverse achievement.
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Gary Saul Morson on what Russian literature can teach us today: “Western intellectuals, in his view, increasingly resemble the pre-Revolutionary Russian intelligentsia. Considering the totalitarianism that resulted when these men and women finally took power, this is not a reassuring observation. Morson warns: ‘Let me lay my cards on the table. To the extent that a group of intellectuals comes to resemble an intelligentsia, to that extent is totalitarianism on the horizon—should that group gain power. That, not Swedish style social democracy, is what I see happening here. I foresee in years rather than decades first a Putin style managed democracy, and soon after a Stalinist state, or rather one beyond Stalinism since Stalin did not have access to today’s monitoring technology.'”
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Picasso’s self-portraits from the age of 15 to 90.
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The self-referential presidency: “His effort to improve relations with the Muslim world, for instance, was premised on the notion that his personal story could make a difference. In his speech at Cairo University in June 2009, the president said that a ‘new beginning’ was possible in the troubled relationship. ‘Part of this conviction is rooted in my own experience,’ he explained. He invoked his Kenyan family, with its generations of Muslims; recalled his childhood in Indonesia; and cited his work with Muslim communities in Chicago. His story was supposed to dispel foreign stereotypes of a self-interested, imperial United States and show that not all Americans shared apocalyptic visions of Islam. Obama’s personal narrative is so flexible that he has cited it as proof of his empathy for Israel, too. As the president told the Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg, he once interrupted Benjamin Netanyahu when he felt the Israeli prime minister was being condescending, lecturing him about the dangers Israel faced. ‘Bibi, you have to understand something,’ the president said. ‘I’m the African American son of a single mother, and I live here, in this house. I live in the White House. I managed to get elected president of the United States. You think I don’t understand what you’re talking about, but I do.'”
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Taxpayer-funded play imagines going back in time to assassinate Christopher Columbus.
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Essay of the Day:
In Able Muse, Gerry Cambridge writes about founding the poetry magazine, Dark Horse:
“In the summer of 1994 I was awarded a Scottish Arts Council writing bursary. With some of the money I decided to set up my own magazine. I had caught the little magazine publishing virus. I enjoyed the buzz. I enjoyed receiving mail in my relatively isolated caravan. I enjoyed the idea that I, a self-taught Irish peasant one step removed, could take part in that bigger conversation as well as writing my own poetry. My own, doubtless romantic, view is that if one engages in it truly, the world of poetry is like a marvelous island where people of all backgrounds and economic levels and skill sets meet. Or, at least, this is so for those with a broadly shared aesthetic. All that matters on that island is the quality of the work. It is analogous to a quote I have been unable to corroborate but fondly think attributable to Robert Frost (riffing off Tennyson) in response to a lady attending one of his readings: ‘I may look like a pauper, madam, but my poems occupy the palace of art.’ In those days I looked like a pauper, but I had pride where my own poetry was concerned.
“I wrote to Dana Gioia, the American poet-critic, already widely noted on the US literary scene for his 1991 essay in the Atlantic Monthly ‘Can Poetry Matter?’—an indictment, among other things, of the creative writing industry in the United States. I’d become aware of Dana through a special issue about the American New Formalism movement in the poetry magazine Verse. My letter mentioned in passing that I was starting up a new magazine of my own. Around ten days later, which was more or less ‘by return’ in those transatlantic pre-email days, his reply said he’d be willing to be a ‘conduit’ for work from America provided I made the new magazine ‘of more than local interest.’ It was a characteristically astute proposition on Dana’s part. It provided this US poetry movement with a potential outlet in the United Kingdom, however small, both in terms of critical prose and poetry. But it also worked to the—still unnamed—new magazine’s advantage. For one, it helped lift the magazine clear of what is often a problem in any small country’s literature—parochialism of the worst kind (there is a best kind), nepotism, lack of self-criticism and self-evaluation. And, in its early loose alliance with New Formalism, it helped give the magazine an identity.”
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“Naming a new poetry magazine is a significant matter. What will the journal stand for? What, as Ian Hamilton, that doyen of poet-editors, once put it, is its ‘project’? Its identity? Its intention? Its aesthetic? People have often asked me where The Dark Horse‘s name came from. Sometimes I say it was the name of a pub in Kilmarnock (now called The Hunting Lodge). Back in Spectrum days, Mick Higgins, the resource center worker who gave us access to computers, perhaps sensed the slight abrasion between Stuart Paterson and me. One afternoon, prompted by the former’s enthusiasm and understandable nerviness about access to the equipment, he tried to wind him up by saying, suddenly, ‘What was the name of that magazine you were talking about starting, Gerry?’ I had been talking about no such thing.
“‘The Dark Horse,‘ I said, without thinking. Somehow this name remained in the offing when the magazine was being born. Briefly, The Corncrake was also a possibility; I liked it, as a lifelong bird person, for its unfashionable unexpectedness and its pastoral note. Then I began thinking that calling a poetry journal after a rapidly declining and reclusive land rail likely to become extinct in Britain might not be the most auspicious idea. The Dark Horse—the outsider, the unknown quantity, the unexpected winner—gradually asserted itself in my mind.”
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Image of the Day: Chameleon
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Poem: Liz Ahl, “At the Pool Hall”
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