Reviews and News:
What you learn when you learn a poem by heart.
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The ugly story behind The Sun Also Rises: There’s an old saying that the less you know about how sausages and legislation are made the better. After reading journalist Lesley Blume’s vivid character- and fact-filled book, it would seem that we might have to add literary masterpieces to that unsavory club. At least, that appears to be the case with Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises…Ms. Blume spares us none of the gory details…”
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Giving Charles-François Daubigny his due: “Daubigny (1817-1878) was the son of a classical landscape artist and worked initially in the academic tradition, but came under the influence of the Barbizon school and turned towards plein air painting and direct observation. In 1839 he tried to create a Salon-type painting, ‘Saint Jerome in the Desert’, outdoors in the French Alps, but as Lynne Ambrosini notes in the exhibition catalogue, ‘A stiff wind thwarted this plan.’ In his working practice, his looser, less finished style and his choice of subjects, he helped nudge Impressionism along…”
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The tyranny of tenderness: “Walker Percy and Flannery O’Connor agreed that ‘tenderness leads to the gas chambers,’ and what they were trying to get through our thick heads is that tenderness without truth is tyranny.”
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Jerry Walls reviews Donald Ray Pollock’s new novel The Heavenly Table: “I had not heard from Pollock since high school until he emailed me out of the blue in 2008, telling me that he had heard I had written some books and he thought I might be interested to know that he had written a book of short stories titled Knockemstiff. I admit I was utterly surprised to hear it…I looked the book up and discovered that it was published by Doubleday and had an enthusiastic endorsement from Chuck Palahniuk, the author of Fight Club,and that Pollock was being compared to writers like Flannery O’Connor. The unlikely story of how Pollock went from high-school dropout and truck driver to critically acclaimed author is one that has been told several times, and I will not repeat it here. But it is worth noting that after his second book,The Devil all the Time, a novel that garnered numerous awards, he received a Guggenheim Fellowship to help support the writing of his new one, The Heavenly Table…As someone who has written two books on heaven, I was particularly intrigued by the title of the new novel, and the theme of ‘the heavenly table’ that runs through it. And the fact is, the predominant picture we get is that the hope of heaven is a vain illusion for hopeless people who are eager to grasp onto anything that will make this life a little more tolerable.
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Dispatch from the Alt-Right: “Julian Langness likes the outdoors, J.R.R. Tolkien and is proud of his Norwegian roots. He worries about the future of Western civilization, Europe especially, and encourages young men who read his website to get control of their finances, spend less time on social media and stop looking at pornography. He exhorts his fellows to wake up early, get in shape, learn self-defense, adopt an attitude of self-reliance and become writers and poets…There’s just one problem. Langness is afflicted with mobilizing passions that vaulted Hitler, Mussolini, and Franco into power in Europe during the 1920s and 30s…They include a sense of crisis, a belief in the primacy of the group (in this case White Europeans and their descendents in the West), and the sense that this group is being victimized and in decline. These passions (and more) are all on display in his book Fistfighting Muslims in Europe: One Man’s Journey Through Modernity, which sells for 99 cents on Amazon Kindle.”
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Essay of the Day:
Cynthia Ozick discusses the “metaphysical ingenuity” of Mark Podwal’s drawings in Tablet:
“Mark Podwal is one of those startling souls—they are very few—who can imagine, through the power of a unifying eye, connections so new that they shake the brain into fresh juxtapositions of understanding. He can turn a book into a city. He can form limbs of a man out of letters of the alphabet. A menorah, inverted, is all at once shocked into the shape of railroad tracks. A child’s noisemaker can become a gallows for the wicked.
“It would be possible to say (and many have said it) that Mark Podwal is himself an unexpected juxtaposition. At his work table, he is an artist; in his office, he is a physician. He is, it is tempting to declare, a living oxymoron, scientist and dreamer both—but such a pronouncement would mislead. Podwal attends to his two professions—call them his two lines of work—fully, devotedly, each one to the hilt, and there is no contradiction between them. The doctor observes and interprets. So does the artist. Both are scrupulous witnesses. Both hope to enlighten. Both measure the task with honest passion. The doctor is circumscribed by the limits of scientific knowledge. The artist is circumscribed by the limits of the line.
“Yet here the artist does depart from the doctor. We have some notion of what we mean when we speak of ‘scientific knowledge.’ But can anyone tell what a line is?
“A line can be an eternity: Geometry defines it as a moving point that can stretch on and on. A line curled up on itself can be a loop: a hole to fall through, or a cheering sun, or a cold moon, or the mouth of a pit, or of a helmet. A line can be wriggled into an A or a Q or a cuneiform wedge or a Chinese character. A line can be a wound, a wand, a button, a baton, a trundle, a truncheon. A line can be a bridge from like to like, or from unlike to unlike. A line can be a rope to save you from drowning or a rope to hang you with. A line can be an ascent or a descent.
“A line is, in fact, the very path of human thought itself: exactly what we experienced when we first learned that the shortest route from one point to another is a straight line. For the artist, though, the shortest—the most direct—route in the line of thinking may be the crookedest, the curliest, the most cunning. The artist’s line is a flight into the inmost chamber of metaphysical ingenuity: the power not so much to invent as to transform—because for the artist as for the physician, the components of the task are already there, an existential given.”
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Image of the Day: World Nomad Games
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Poem: Ned Balbo, “The Underground Tour”
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