Reviews and News:
Norman Lebrecht is done with Debussy: “I may be half-French, but I’ll never be a Frenchman because I cannot love Debussy. Mostly, I cannot abide him. A great composer by the definition that his music is unmistakably his own, inventor of ‘musical impressionism’ and the strongest influence on French music from his day to ours (no Debussy, no Boulez), Debussy fails to stir fever in my veins or conflict in my brain. His music has the intellectual nutrition of a Montparnasse meringue, easily bought, consumed on the spot.”
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Zola in England: After he denounced the French government’s case against Alfred Dreyfus as a fraud, Emile Zola was charged with libel, which came with a 3,000 francs fine and a year in prison. “Self-imposed exile seemed a more sensible option than this kind of martyrdom, but he boarded the Calais boat train with the bitterest sense of his country’s ingratitude. Michael Rosen’s lively and thoughtful analysis of the whole episode emphasises the novelist’s anguished bewilderment at the way in which France, by the very act of persecuting him for truth-telling, seemed ready to betray its finest traditions of rational discourse and civilised dissent. ‘To think’, he exclaimed, ‘that after a lifetime of work, I would be forced to leave Paris, the city which I’ve loved and celebrated in my writings, in such a way!’ Once across the Channel, however, Zola generally avoided attempts by British journalists to glamorise his victimhood. Inspiration for his new novel, Fécondité, came more easily to him in the anodyne dullness of a Surrey suburb than in the Grosvenor Hotel. First of all he rented Penn, a house in Weybridge, at five guineas a week, then shifted quarters to the Queen’s Hotel in Upper Norwood, maintaining a variety of incognitos as he went. Surprisingly, that summer of 1898 turned into something of an idyll. Zola bought a bicycle and rode it among the trim little villas and clipped holly hedges of Walton and Chertsey, taking his camera with him to snap anything from a busy high street or a herd of cows to road sweepers and bobbies on the beat.”
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How did Pearl Harbor happen? “After 75 years, nine formal investigations, innumerable books, stories and endless speculation, no one has properly concluded why America was caught defenseless and totally off guard when a mob of Japanese Zeros zoomed in and nearly obliterated the entire U.S. Pacific fleet in Pearl Harbor that sleepy Sunday morning.” According to Steve Twomey’s “exhaustive and unflinching” Countdown To Pearl Harbor: The Twelve Days To The Attack it can be chalked up to an “astonishing lack of communication between Washington and the military thousands of miles away in Hawaii,” “delayed and incoherent instructions within the military itself,” and “gross misjudgments, wrong assumptions and a multitude of missed opportunities.”
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François Fillon and France’s zombie Catholics (HT: Rod Dreher)
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Former Bloomberg editor starts The Outline, an online publication billed as a next-generation New Yorker. That’s why it’ll use “smart aggregation” and “Snapchat-inspired navigation,” and be “highly visual and graphics-rich,” I guess. Joshua Topolsky, the site’s founder and editor, has apparently raised $5 million in venture capital and lined up three major sponsors.
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Artwork installed in Georgetown neighborhood to honor Hillary Clinton as a “beacon of dignity and guiding light.”
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Essay of the Day:
If you’ve followed the news at all, you are aware of how ISIS has ravaged Palmyra’s ancient ruins and artefacts. The city was recaptured from ISIS in May 2016. In Lapham’s Quarterly, the French scholar Paul Veyne retells its unique history:
“It is unlikely an exaggeration to say that this Aramaean city, with its networks of clans, of clientele and lineages, was unlike any other Syrian city. It resembled less a city of the empire than it did other merchant cities like Mecca or Medina in the time of Muhammad (who in his youth took part in caravans). Like those Arabian cities, Palmyra was not structured around a civic body but around a group of tribes, and it was dominated by a few families of merchant princes. The magnates of Palmyra, proud of an authority that gave them license to pursue bold undertakings, knew the wider world and profited from it.”
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Image of the Day: Dubai fog
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Poem: Devin Johnston, “Poem for the New Year”
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