Reviews and News:
The booming business of literary representation in India: “Though a relatively recent phenomenon in the country, agents have already started making giant strides, their turnovers surpassing those of highly reputed medium-sized publishing houses. India has a growing reader base. With the establishment of local divisions of big multinational publishers such as Hachette and Bloomsbury and the advent of mass-market best-sellers, sales, and subsequently advances, have increased manifold.”
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Secrecy and the Royal Archives: “Established by King George V in 1914, the archives are a private collection, with no public right of access. Their records are exempt from freedom of information laws and the rules covering Britain’s National Archives that have traditionally allowed for the release of most government documents after 30 years. Even for highly qualified scholars, it is difficult to gain entry to the Royal Archives, which cover two and a half centuries and hold roughly two million documents…I have great respect for the archival librarians, who are careful, rigorous and exacting, and I was very grateful for the opportunity to study there. But after a senior archivist read my final manuscript to check any references to material in the Windsor collection — a precondition of entry — I was asked to remove information for which I had uncovered evidence outside the archives. This concerned Victoria’s burial instructions and other evidence of her loving intimacy with John Brown, her personal servant in the Scottish Highlands. My reference to an episode of postpartum depression was also queried.”
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How has English changed international writing? “When published in 2008, The Fall of Language in the Age of English created a sensation in Japan, winning awards, becoming a bestseller, and igniting a furious online debate between its detractors and defenders. This first book of nonfiction by Minae Mizumura, whose four novels have all won national awards, was published last year in a superbly readable English translation. This powerful, insightful work analyzes the predicament of world languages and literatures in an age when English has become the universal language of science and the default language of the internet. Even for creative writers, it is the virtually inescapable medium for those desiring to be taken seriously in an age of globalized discourse. Mizumura’s wish that her work reach readers of English implicitly acknowledges the hegemony of English among world languages, all but certain to increase in coming years. That problem, in her view, relates to a second, the debasement of Japan’s language and literature. Mizumura offers a scathing critique of the official simplification of written Japanese, the decreasing language and literature instruction in Japan’s schools since 1945, and, partly as a result of both, the impoverishment of contemporary Japanese literature.”
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The art of Hollywood backdrop paintings.
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Wynn Wheldon reviews Simon Schama’s “weighty and opulent” The Face of Britain: “Its author’s insatiable curiosity makes this book glitter. Much of it is what might be called High Gossip. Schama vivifies artists and their subjects, drawing portraits with words. Nearly all of his books have been hefty and sumptuous, but all are leavened by a superb narrative touch. His style is chummy, elastic, allowing for humor, for enthusiasm and, when necessary, for scholarship. There are few fiction writers alive who tell stories so well or know so well how to use them. Schama’s books tend to be illustrated, because what marks him out as a historian, and makes him a first-rate television performer, is his delight in showing rather than telling.”
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Orson Welles’s second act: “Aided by critical comparisons between his own research and accounts by Higham and Leaming, Callow revealed Welles’s near-primal recourse to self-drama, particularly his need to engage with a mundane or tragic turn of events through reinvention, which became absolutely necessary following the deterioration of his post-Kane reputation.
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Is morality rational?
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Quit social media, save your career?
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Essay of the Day:
Matthew Schmitz goes to a party:
“When I go to parties in Brooklyn, meet people at bars in Midtown, or visit Washington, the people I meet invariably ask what I do. Their second question is always ‘Where are you based?’ Not ‘Where do you live?’ (too creepy, perhaps) or ‘Where are you from?’ (what is this, the census of Tiberius?), but ‘Where are you based?’
“It is an odd question. I am not part of a bomber squadron deployed over the Pacific or a British colonial officer mixing bitters and gin. I do not hop globes. I hardly ever leave the few blocks around my workplace and home. When I do, I meet people who politely assume that anyone they meet would disdain anything so pedestrian as having a settled home. After all, aren’t peasants the only people tied to the land?
“It makes sense for people with houses on three continents to speak of being ‘based’ somewhere. They are the people who have benefited most fabulously from globalization, and who embody its ethic. They are committed not to a place or a nation but to transnational ideals that align with their own self-interest. Like the royals of old, they may be identified with one country or another, but they are bound to each other by shared habits and manners. They mix among themselves and intermarry.
“The people at this party are only notionally of that class, occupying, at best, its bottom rung. Bushwick is a hipster milieu—and while its denizens exhibit many elite affectations, they are distinct from the businessmen, upper-echelon professionals, and nonprofit heads who jet from Davos to Aspen. These young professionals affect a cosmopolitanism they do not really possess. They work in just a few fields (publishing, television, the arts) and are tied to certain cities (New York, Washington). They profess universal values of human rights and decorate their apartments in International Style knockoffs.
“It is in this context—ostensibly free of the idiocies of rural life or the nation’s bloody demands—that my peers feel most at home. The Colombian writer Nicolás Gómez Dávila once wrote, ‘The problem of intellectual servitude, of impoverished tradition, of subaltern spirituality, of inauthentic civilization, of obligatory and shameful imitation—has been resolved for me with supreme simplicity: Catholicism is my native land.’ Substitute the overlapping dictates of identity politics and high finance for those of the Catholic faith, and anyone here could say the same.
“These are the members of a new courtier class. They adopt the linguistic habits of the better-off even as they curry their favor. They lack the absolute security enjoyed by the global elites—they are unable to sink money into a Mayfair home in London—but they understand that they will be rewarded for flattering the wealthy with glossy magazine profiles and for excoriating bigotry, fecundity, and other gross errors of the poor.”
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Image of the Day: Sunset
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Poem: Louis MacNeice, “Meeting Point”
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