Reviews and News:
British student Madeleine Kearns writes about her first year at New York University. It was apparently like living in a George Orwell or Joseph Heller novel: “As a child in Glasgow, I learned that sticks and stones might break my bones but words didn’t really hurt. I’m now at New York University studying journalism, where a different mantra seems to apply. Words, it turns out, might cause life-ruining emotional trauma. During my ‘Welcome Week’, for example, I was presented with a choice of badges indicating my preferred gender pronouns: ‘he’, ‘she’, ‘they’ or ‘ze’? The student in front of me, an Australian, found this hilarious: ‘Last time I checked, I was a girl.’ Her joke was met with stony silence. Later I realised why: expressing bewilderment at the obsession with pronouns might count as a ‘micro-aggression’. Next stop, ‘transphobia’.”
In praise of Barbara Pym: “She is a shrewd observer of a certain kind of middle-class woman, no longer young and not quite beautiful, whom society finds it easy to overlook. And she is just as shrewd an observer of the people (fatuous romantic idols, doddering priests, love-struck bed-sitters) that these women, vigilant and perceptive, themselves observe.”
Smart phones have changed the museum experience, Carolyn Stewart argues over at The American Interest, and not for the better: “A selfie can be more than just a selfie. In the gallery setting, selfie-taking subverts a pact that has existed between museums and visitors since the Enlightenment Era. Museums offer a transformational experience and communion with creative genius in exchange for the focused attention of its visitors. But when we walk through a gallery today, we are accompanied by our invisible audience and the lure of self-presentation in the digital era. The average museum visitor spends seven seconds in front of an artwork—how you choose to spend each second counts.”
Stanford puts English translations of obscure medieval texts online: “The recently launched Global Medieval Sourcebook (GMS), curated by Stanford University faculty and students, offers English versions of previously untranslated Middle Ages literature.”
What was Edgar Degas like? After his death in 1917, critics and friends thought of him “as a totally unprecedented original genius.” His model, a woman named Pauline, had a different view: The artist is “no stoic devotee of the Muses but a curmudgeon subject to sudden bouts of theatrical self-pity, always on the verge of collapsing into melancholy ruminations over his failing sight, his oncoming death. The artist famous for his deft public quips becomes, in private, a mealymouthed, repetitious prattler, retailing twenty-year-old anecdotes for the two-hundredth time. Instead of zingers (e.g., Gustave Moreau is ‘a hermit who knows what time the trains leave’), the model is obliged to de-escalate incoherent rants about Jewish conspiracies and feign interest in foggy reminiscences of trips to Italy and bouts of pubic lice. This Degas is not only tedious company but a volatile and occasionally violent taskmaster, liable to punch Pauline in the back or threaten her with a hammer when the session isn’t going as well as the artist would like, and perfectly capable of firing her for reading a book or—virulently anti-Semitic as he was—posing for a Jew.”
Tom Shippey reviews Tolkien’s Beren and Lúthien.
Essay of the Day:
Heligoland, a small island off the coast of Germany, belonged to the Danes, then the British, then the Germans. Surprisingly, it played no role in the First World War. In the Second, it was bombed by the British, who reacquired it after the war. They didn’t know what to do with it:
“Britain had, in effect, regained possession of Heligoland. But, still obsessed with its supposed symbolism, the British were in no mood to repeat their old tolerance. Instead, exactly two years later, they returned to the place to prepare the ‘Big Bang’, an explosion billed as the biggest non-nuclear blast in history, which would remove all traces of the fortifications, tear the island to pieces and render it for all time unfit for human use. ‘Blow the bloody place up’ was not a new idea. It had been one of three options considered by Arthur Balfour in 1919 when deciding how the (imaginary) menace of Heligoland could be struck out of the hands of defeated Germany for ever. The other two were ‘re-annexation’ and ‘neutralisation’ under a League of Nations mandate. Balfour fancied the last idea, as long as Britain could acquire the mandate – in effect, re-annexation without obvious imperial hubris. But in the end he was pushed into a compromise: returning Heligoland to Germany on condition that all of its fortifications were demolished.
“As usual, nobody in 1919 had asked the islanders what they wanted. Nobody except – as usual – Fleet Street’s finest, who gave big space to an appeal by Heligolanders to return to British sovereignty, to islanders singing ‘God Save the King’ and to refusals to hoist the German flag. The German government allowed the Berlin press to shout about ‘treason’ and licking English boots, but in fact they were nervous: exposing the ‘disloyal’ feelings of Heligolanders could undermine efforts to rally the patriotism of German or ‘Germanic’ frontier populations in Alsace or Upper Silesia. Back then, demolishing the colossal bunkers and casemates had taken two and half years, filmed by German newsreel to illustrate the nation’s humiliation at Allied hands. But in 1945, the victors had no mind to waste time. This was to be a naval operation, with British film cameras to record it, and on that grim anniversary, 18 April 1947, ‘on the fourth pip of the BBC’s one o’clock time signal’, nearly 7000 tons of assorted explosives were detonated. The shock was easily felt on the mainland: seismographs over in Britain jumped and scribbled.
“To the delight of Germany, the scarred island itself survived. ‘Der rote Felsen steht noch’ – ‘the red rock is still standing’ – was one headline.”
Photo: These drone photos over Georgia are amazing.
Poem: Li Po, “Home”
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