Hannah Long writes about the literary faithfulness of Christopher Tolkien to his father’s work: “It is work that has spanned Christopher Tolkien’s life. He started editing at just 5 years of age, catching inconsistencies in the stories his father told at bedtime. When those stories became The Hobbit, Christopher’s father promised him tuppence for every mistake he noticed in the text. A few years later, Christopher was typing up manuscripts and drawing maps of Middle-earth. ‘As strange as it may seem, I grew up in the world he created,’ said Christopher in a rare 2012 interview with Le Monde. ‘For me, the cities of The Silmarillion are more real than Babylon.’”
The drama behind the first publication of Emily Dickinson’s poems.
Stephen M. Klugewicz on R. J. Stove’s performance of Baroque organ music from the Habsburg Empire: “If the album’s title thus strikes a note of familiarity with potential listeners, the names of the composers whose music is included here likely will not: Sebastian Anton Scherer, Gérard Scronx, Georg Muffat, Johann Kaspar Kerll, Johann Jakob Froberger, Lambert Chaumont, Jacob La Fosse, Joseph-Hector Fiocco, František Ignác Antonín Tůma, Jan Zach . . . and everyone’s favorite composer of old organ music, Anonymous. The present reviewer was familiar, and that only vaguely, with the Czech composer Zach. The others listed here were minor French, Flemish, Hungarian, and German composers—and another Czech, Tůma—of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. What of their music? Stove writes in the booklet accompanying the CD: ‘If one can speak of an overriding international idiom which The Gates of Vienna’s selection of organ works exhibits, one would need to characterise that idiom as broadly conservative. . . . Yet within such fundamental conservatism can be found substantial variety of mood and approach.’ Indeed, each piece here is no less than interesting and leaves one wanting to hear more compositions by these little-known masters, who also composed works in other genres, few of which have been recorded. Stove wisely varies his program so as to highlight the range of the organ and avoid boring the listener.”
Lisa Ampleman writes about a project to “illuminate” every verse in the King James Bible by 2030: “The way it works is this: Patrons contribute funding and have a chance to mark with a ‘spark’ particular verses they would like to see “echoed” by an artist, writer or musician. Then, the program commissions—and pays for—an original work based on those verses. Curators with backgrounds in the arts help find the right fit, and there is even an artist-in-residence program for more in-depth projects.”
Frank Furedi on the culture war following the Great War: “As we mark the hundredth anniversary of the end of the First World War, it is clear that the moral wounds it inflicted on Western culture have not healed. Recent incidents, such as the rejection of Remembrance Day poppies by Cambridge University Students’ Union (CUSU), or Southampton University Students’ Union’s (SUSU) threat to paint over a mural dedicated to war heroes, are symptomatic of the sense of malaise and confusion regarding the memorialisation of the First World War. In a sense, however, this hostility towards the memorialisation of the war, as an expression of antagonism towards a cultural legacy, has its roots in the First World War itself. Because although it was principally a military conflict, it also served as a catalyst for the emergence of a powerful mood of alienation from the values and cultural practices of the past.”
John Wilson on the problem with an otherwise excellent account of 1968: “For me, the greatest weakness of Vinen’s valuable book is his failure to give adequate attention to religion, a failure all the more maddening because—good historian that he is—he conscientiously includes, in passing, observations that might have prompted him to think more about this. (See his brief comments on pages 86-87 about the religious convictions shared by some members of the American left.) In fact he should have devoted a thematic chapter to religion and 68, which would have started with the rapid secularization of Western Europe in the sixties and contrasted this with the American experience. (On the first point see, for example, Hugh McLeod’s concluding essay, ‘Reflections and New Perspectives,’ in The Sixties and Beyond: Dechristianization in North America and Western Europe, 1945-2000, edited by Nancy Christie and Michael Gauvreau.) Of course this is a blind spot Vinen shares with many scholars of the sixties.”
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Essay of the Day
David Freedman used Duolingo every day for almost a year. In The Atlantic, he writes about what it does well and what it does poorly when it comes to learning a foreign language:
“A week before we were to leave for Rome, my wife, Laurie, put me to the test. You’re at the airport outside Rome, she said, and you want to get downtown; how would you ask? I gaped like a fish. Words and phrases swam through my mind, but they didn’t add up to anything useful. Laurie switched to a restaurant scenario: ‘Do you have a table for four?’ ‘I’d like two glasses of red wine.’ I knew I had seen all the pieces in Duolingo’s sentences. But I was utterly unable to recall them and pull them together.
“Panicking, I fired up Duolingo and almost instantly saw the problem. The app had made me a master of multiple-choice Italian. Given a bunch of words to choose from, I could correctly assemble impressive communiqués. But without a prompt, I was as speechless in even the most basic situations as any boorish American tourist. And this in spite of 70-plus hours of study.
“But I still had a week. I got my hands on a self-study book, a travel phrase book, and a pocket dictionary, and started cramming. A funny thing happened: I started easily picking up what I hadn’t been able to get from Duolingo—grammar, vocabulary, and, most important, an ability to engage in simple conversations in typical situations. It seemed I had been getting something useful from my hours with Duolingo. The app had exposed me to a considerable vocabulary; I needed only minimal drilling with books to remember the words. Learning the verb conjugations was a breeze, too.”
Photos: Dutch forest
Poem: Robert Morgan, “Echo”
