Reviews and News:
The odd appeal of Shirley Jackson: “Shirley Jackson was a middling writer of the 1950s—and the fact that she was so damn good at what she did must tell us something about writers and their times. Perhaps what it says is that Jackson has been unfairly ignored by the literary establishment, dismissed as a mere horror writer before her death in 1965 at age 48, and nearly forgotten for years after. Or perhaps what it says is that, although she was good, the era of American literature in which she lived was so rich, so thick with talented writers, that being good just wasn’t good enough.”
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Arthur Koestler’s accomplishment: “That Darkness at Noon, in this seventy-fifth anniversary year of its publication in the United States, continues to be read and admired is indeed an impressive feat. One is tempted to think that a novel so seemingly rooted in a signal event of the twentieth century—the Moscow show trials of the 1930s—would be regarded, if at all, as an interesting historical marker. Yet Arthur Koestler’s novel has endured precisely because of its literary achievement and its philosophical depth.”
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WIlliam Logan reviews Marie Ponsot’s Collected Poems: “Most of Marie Ponsot’s career has been belated. Her first book was published in the City Lights Pocket Poets series in 1956, when she was already 35 — late, but not as late as Frost or Stevens. Her next, not until she was 60. Now 95, she has continued to publish a book every decade or so, as if she had all the time in the world. Collected Poems is the model for every poet who worships procrastination.”
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David Hockney and Martin Gayford talk about art. Clive James reviews: “Gayford is the more knowledgeable about the history of painting but Hockney gets beyond scholarly knowledge into the realm of the streaming sparks. Not that he is short of proper learning. From the day of his first money, he started hitting galleries all over the world. He was the first passenger on Air Hockney, and by now there is nowhere he hasn’t been and no picture he hasn’t seen. That was what the Japanese billionaire was doing who tried to get cremated with his Van Gogh. He was trying to get it away from Hockney. The poor bastard of a plutocrat wanted to preserve the illusion that his Van Gogh belonged to him, but had guessed, correctly, that by the time Hockney had finished explaining it, it would belong to the world. Apart from the sumptuous avalanche of reproductions, the book consists of paragraphs in which the two proprietors speak alternately. It’s a measure of Hockney’s vividness of perception that he can always put a cap on Gayford’s knowledge.”
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In Case You MIssed It:
J. M. W. Turner was ambitious and talented. He was also difficult: “A barber’s son, he rose through the class-bound ranks of late 18th- and early 19th-century Britain to become the nation’s most celebrated and controversial painter. And yet he ended life in scandal, living with a secret mistress under the assumed identity of a sea captain.”
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A life of Ulysses S. Grant: “The Ohio-born son of a tanner, he survived West Point, did well at war in Mexico, then resigned from the Army amid rumors of heavy drinking. He failed in business, failed in farming and finally fell into his father’s leather shop in Galena, Ill. The Civil War slid him back into uniform. When he fought, he rose. However high his rank, though, he remained a nobody from nowhere, and he knew it. Grant hardened the membrane of contact between himself and “the world” into awkward armor plate, stiff layers of silence.”
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In Auden’s late prose, he was “especially fascinated by artists and writers who were more or less monstrous or obsessive, who exemplified intellectual temptations that he himself had experienced and refused.”
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Wittenberg today: “Wittenberg has become a city-sized shrine to Luther—and to his colleagues Melanchthon, Johannes Bugenhagen, and a few others. But mostly to Luther. It wasn’t always this way, though. Travelers of the 19th century lamented that Luther’s house was a dump, the university had moved to neighboring Halle, and the whole town was rather miserable. It’s clearly not what the likes of Harriet Beecher Stowe expected to find when in the 1850s she visited what she and others deemed the ‘Protestant Mecca.’ For a long time Wittenberg lay forgotten, pieces of the true door notwithstanding. It never had been a great city like Rome or even nearby Leipzig or Erfurt. The only real fame it ever had came from Luther, from the fact that for a little while in the 16th century it was the center of the Reformation. In the past few decades the city, now renamed Lutherstadt Wittenberg after its patron, has been completely cleaned up, renovated, and readied for the throngs of visitors streaming in to honor Germany’s most famous figure.”
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Classic Essay: R. V. Young, “The Gay Invention”
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Interview: Sam Leith of The Spectator talks with Rebecca Asher and Tim Samuels about the masculinity problem.
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