Reviews and News:
The only thing harder than living in a Frank Lloyd Wright house is trying to sell one: “For brokers like Mr. Milne, marketing these houses offers unique challenges, including the need to become a Wright expert, to devise a strategy for separating potential buyers from sightseers, and to develop a convincing argument for why someone should pay a premium to live in a house with small bedrooms and a snug kitchen, cinder-block walls, cement floors, narrow doorways, a carport instead of a garage and, quite likely, no air-conditioning.”
Big Ben was sounded for the last time for four years today. It will be the longest the bell will be silent since 1859.
Painting solar eclipses: “When that 1918 eclipse passed over the United States, a team of astronomers invited the artist Howard Russell Butler to join them at an observatory in Oregon, and to document what will appear in untold millions of blurry Instagrams on Monday afternoon. It was the first of four eclipses that he saw, and his paintings of lunar transits and other celestial phenomena are on view in ‘Transient Effects: The Solar Eclipses and Celestial Landscapes of Howard Russell Butler,’ a small, lovely show at the Princeton University Art Museum.”
John Milton travelled to Italy in the late 1630s, where he met an elderly Galileo. The poet would pay tribute to the astronomer 30 years later, including him in several passages in his epic poem Paradise Lost. In one, “the Angel Raphael is granted a clear view through the heavens, ‘As when by night the glass of Galileo, less assured, observes imagined lands and regions in the moon’.”
Jerry Lewis has died.
“In the 72 years since the end of World War II, the wreckage of the USS Indianapolis has lain undiscovered at the bottom of the North Pacific Ocean, the only evidence of its horrific ending the memories recounted by its 316 survivors. Its discovery this weekend solves a decades-long mystery that researchers hope will bring closure to the men and their families.”
Sofia Khvoshchinskaya’s timely City Folk and Country Folk: “You could easily be forgiven for never having heard of City Folk and Country Folk…It’s only seeing the light of day in the English-speaking world this year, thanks to a translation by Nora Seligman Favorov, having first been published in the 1860s under a male pseudonym. Still, the timing of its arrival in translation…seems felicitous.”
The Times Literary Supplement relaunches its poetry competition.
Essay of the Day:
Writing a biography can be both exhilarating and overwhelming. James Atlas remembers studying the life of Delmore Schwartz in The New Yorker:
“On a late afternoon on Christmas Eve, 1974, I sat alone at a long wooden table in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscripts Library, at Yale. On the table were six large cardboard storage boxes. I took the top off of one and peered inside: chaos.
“Manuscripts, letters, loose papers, and manila envelopes, all jumbled together as if they’d been tossed in the box by movers in a hurry—which, as it happened, they had. The boxes contained the accumulated detritus of the poet Delmore Schwartz, who died, of a heart attack, at the Columbia Hotel, in Times Square, on the night of July 11, 1966, while taking out the garbage. His body lay unclaimed in the morgue at Bellevue for two days until a reporter noticed his name on a list of the dead. The next morning, a lengthy obituary, accompanied by a photograph of a tormented-looking Schwartz, appeared in the Times. He was fifty-two.
“It was his old friend Dwight Macdonald, one of the great critics of that era, who salvaged the papers that had been strewn about Schwartz’s hotel room at the time of his death. They would have vanished forever if it hadn’t been for a chance encounter in a bar between Macdonald’s son Michael and the owner of a moving company in Greenwich Village.
“Macdonald took on the role of Schwartz’s literary executor—no one else had volunteered—and for years afterward the papers were stored at Hofstra University, on Long Island, where Macdonald was teaching at the time. But three months before my visit, in the fall of 1974, he arranged for them to be transferred to his own alma mater, Yale. I would be the first person to examine what Macdonald had rescued—barely—from oblivion.”
* * *
“Delmore’s journals (yes, for me, he was now Delmore; I was pouring my own life into the resurrection of his, and felt free to be on first-name terms with him) were written both for posterity and to keep himself company… I found the meticulous record he kept of his daily alcoholic and pharmacological intake unsettling. By the time Delmore hit thirty, he was already in trouble, drinking too much (‘rum at 4’; ‘two glasses of Zinfandel before noon’) to counter the effects of his truly alarming consumption of Dexedrine, gobbled at the rate of up to twenty a day.
“That Delmore was aware of what was happening to him (‘This lifelong sickness which robs me of myself, which takes away my power’) didn’t mean he could do anything about it. ‘How many years have I shortened my life / By barbiturates and alcohol?’ he wrote. Quite a few, as he must have known—and as I knew for certain, reading these prescient words two decades after he wrote them in his journal.”
Photo: White moose
Poem: Jed Myers, “Pull of the Moon”
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