Reviews and News:
Danny Heitman revisits Truman Capote’s holiday stories: “Capote was a stylist, though not merely for show. His exacting description seemed consumed by a desire to fix in memory those things that quickly pass. As a youngster whose own troubled and transient childhood informs his holiday stories, Capote knew all too well that what we assume to be permanent seldom is.”
John Lukacs writes about his library and a life of reading: “In this house and in its library, I have now lived a third of a century, from my early 60’s on. Each morning, trying to catch my breath, I stumble down from my bedroom to the library. There shuffling, I sit now at a narrow desk tapping at keys with my trembling fingers. Sometimes on late afternoons I go out to sit on my terrace, breathing in the view of a greensward; and yes, thanking God for having allowed me this. Then, soused with a stiff drink, I return to my surroundings until dinner. The ‘Blessings of Old Age’? Oh, not at all. How very soon I shall be dead. In a year? In a few months? In a few weeks? I hope that I will not be constrained to move from here to a communal nursing home. I hope; but I cannot know. What I know is that, after my death, this library, this house, will instantly be changed. They are my inheritance for my children and my stepson. My house will be sold at once. My books will go to the library of the University of Notre Dame, thanks to the excellent Rev. Wilson D. (Bill) Miscamble, C.S.C. My furniture and the decorations, chests, vitrines, armoires, antique clocks, paintings, and etchings on the walls will be dispersed among my children or sold. They are still my surroundings, which in this country I assembled from an older America, England, France, Austria, and even one or two pieces from my family in Hungary, miraculously regained almost 70 years ago. Perhaps I have been not much more than an ephemeral owner of an outdated museum. I am not a survivor. I am a crumbling remnant. A remnant of the very end of the Bourgeois Age and a remnant of the Age of Books. Ave atque vale.”
Cave art reveals that dogs were used to hunt over 8,000 years ago: “There are lots of questions around the origin of dog domestication, such as when, where, and how it happened. But a newly analyzed set of panels depicts scenes of leashed dogs hunting alongside humans. Not only would this be the ‘earliest evidence of dogs on the Arabian Peninsula,’ according to the study published recently in the Journal of Anthropological Archaeology, but it’s also the ‘earliest evidence of leashes.’”
Belgium isn’t really a country; it’s more like a divided—but successful—city-state: “One of the many myths of Belgium is that it is bilingual. That is misleading. Many Flemings of a certain age can speak French but refuse to do so – even when asked simple directions. Their grandchildren simply don’t bother learning it: it’s not necessary and, frankly, they find English far more useful as a second language. The Walloons have never bothered much with Flemish – usually regarded as just debased Dutch – or English either… Belgians have up to half a dozen [loyalties]: to Europe, to their country, to their linguistic grouping, to their social “pillar” – liberal, Catholic, socialist, whatever – to their commune and perhaps to their village. And Belgium, which went 589 days in 2010-11 without a fully-formed government, is a long way from being loyalty No 1. It might even be the least important. One former British prime minister, when irritated by the Belgians who are often so prominent in the EU high command, snorted: ‘Belgium! It’s not even a country!’ (And Donald Trump once called it ‘a beautiful city’.) One might put it more politely: it is the world’s first developed post-nation state.”
Thief walks out of Paris gallery with Botero’s Maternity sculpture.
Want to teach English at the university? Good luck: “Job ads published with the Modern Language Association declined for a fifth straight year in 2016-17, reaching another new low, according to a preliminary report from the MLA.”
Essay of the Day:
In Slate, Will Oremus explains why online media companies are suddenly struggling:
“BuzzFeed and Vice, two of digital media’s brightest stars, both missed revenue targets by a wide margin last year, the Wall Street Journal reported last week, and investors are calling for costs to be reined in. The social media–focused tech and culture site Mashable, valued at $250 million last year amid a high-profile “pivot to video,” was sold to trade publisher Ziff Davis last week for just $50 million. Univision is reportedly shopping a stake in the Fusion Media Group, which includes the remnants of both Fusion and the defunct Gawker Media. Last Friday, CNN Money’s Dylan Byers reported that the Daily Beast is on the block, too. And earlier this month, one of the pioneers in online local journalism—the DNAinfo/Gothamist network—stunned the industry and its own employees by shutting down entirely—just after its New York staffers had formed a union. The list goes on.
“Turbulence in online media is to be expected, of course. And some analysts think this latest convulsion is merely the latest bump in the flight path—‘more of a correction than an upheaval,’ as Digiday’s Lucia Moses put it. Big bets were placed on the ‘pivot to video’ over the past couple years; now, Moses writes, we’re seeing a ‘pivot to reality.’ Mashable and Vice in particular had been valued at levels disproportionate to their revenues, partly on the hope that online video ads would prove lucrative for publishers in a way that online display ads have not. That hope appears to have been misplaced.”
Photo: Fireball Meteor
Poem: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, “The Harvest Moon”
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