Reviews and News:
Freedom and art at the turn of the century: “To mark the centenary of Lenin’s revolution, the Royal Academy in London mounted an exhibition, Revolution: Russian Art 1917–1932—probably the largest of its kind ever mounted in a foreign country. It overlapped for a time with another exhibition in the same institution that, in a way, took up the baton: America After the Fall: Painting in the 1930s. Whether intended or not, the juxtaposition was instructive, for it allowed a comparison of the artistic production of two fateful nations during some of their most turbulent years.”
“[Reinhold] Niebuhr’s greatest legacy may be the extent which he’s been appropriated by so many factions, even those deeply at odds with one another, perhaps precisely because he was so good at taking what seemed like contradictory claims and showing how they could both be true—or at least true together.” This is because he was a realist.
David Ferry’s new translation of The Aeneid is “an outstanding achievement.”
The costly grace in the fiction of D’J Pancake: “Pancake had a zealous, if complicated, relationship with Christianity. He converted to Catholicism in his mid-twenties and became active in UVA’s parish church, exhibiting an often off-putting zeal for the faith. John Casey noted that his role as Pancake’s godfather soon ‘turned upside down,’ with the convert lecturing him on his lackluster commitment to the Mass, the sacrament of confession, and raising his kids Catholic. ‘He took in his faith with intensity, almost as if he had a different, deeper measure of time,’ Casey said…It is thus not surprising that Pancake donated to the church the $750 he received from The Atlantic for his short story ‘Trilobites.’ But despite these demonstrations of piety, he wrestled with submitting his flesh to his newfound faith. Friends at UVA remembered his inclination towards violence, exemplified in his bragging about scars he received from fights in lower-class bars outside the more genteel confines of Charlottesville. He was serially promiscuous, a vice made worse by his vocal condemnations of women he viewed as too willing to offer him their bodies. He also wrote to friends of a desire to end his life, telling one that if he weren’t such a good Catholic, he would kill himself.”
A cache of an ancient herb, worth its weight in gold, was kept in Julius Caesar’s treasury. What was it?
The inept crusades of the Knights Templar: “They were the most famous military order in the world, says Dan Jones. But their tactics were suicidally stupid.”
Essay of the Day:
In The Atavist, Jessica Hatcher-Moore writes about Bill Brookman, who travelled to some of the world’s most violent places to clown around:
“As a young man, alongside his artistic talents, Brookman nurtured a deep interest in war—one might even say he romanticized it. He devoured military-history books and films in his free time. A line from Lawrence of Arabia stuck with him: He remembered Prince Faisal, based on the real-life king of Greater Syria and Iraq, saying, ‘Young men make wars.… Then old men make the peace.’ The generations of British men immediately preceding Brookman’s had fought in two world wars. He expected to be recruited if a third broke out. But that never happened. His youth passed with no supreme ordeal in which a man, in the old-fashioned sense of the word, could test his mettle and mortality.
“So Brookman went looking for one, courting life-and-death scenarios other people were desperate to escape. By the time he started hopping from one international hot zone to another—Kosovo, Sierra Leone, Haiti—he was middle-aged. Making peace, not war, was his mission, and entertainment his favored weapon. All the while, the question of whether he was living up to the legend of Alfred Lancelot Wykes burned in the back of his mind.”
Photo: Lake Pehoé
Poem: Maryann Corbett, “Haircut, with a Vision of My Father’s Ashes”
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