Prufrock: ‘Black Panther’ Axed and the Return of Patronage

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Would you mind imprisoning my wife? “In the late 1970s Michel Foucault took a break from writing his History of Sexuality to work on an edition of the intriguing set of letters he had come upon while researching in the Bastille archives. The letters, dating from the first half of the eighteenth century, were addressed to the lieutenant of police (and indirectly to the king) by people who requested imprisonment for some member of their own family by means of a lettre de cachet, the special royal order that bypassed normal legal procedures.”

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J.D. Vance reviews Amy Goldstein’s Janesville: An American Story: “It is the book’s positive qualities that actually make it depressing as well. I devoured Janesville, but in part because I kept on hoping to feast on some piece of enduring hope. Her subjects are flawed, as real people always are. Some of them cheat on their spouses and some of them possess too naive a belief in the return to the glory days. Yet their goodness shines through: They’re hard-working and devoted to their families. They’re proud of their struggling hometown and doing everything to enable its survival. Yet the successes are fleeting, and the entire book leaves you with a gnawing feeling: None of us has any idea what the hell we’re supposed to do now.”

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Revisiting an Old English translation of Orosius’s Historia adversus paganos, or History against the Pagans: “Orosius’s work was written shortly after the sack of Rome by the Goths in 410. This seemed to mark, and in fact probably did mark the end of the Roman Empire in the West. Something especially ominous about it was that it happened only thirty years after Christianity was made the state religion of the Empire. Clearly there were people who thought this was cause and effect. As long as Romans worshipped the goddess Victory at her temple on the Palatine Hill, they were victorious. When they ceased to do so and became Christians—well, look what happened next! This was the view which Orosius set himself to combat, and it was clearly relevant once more in 9th-century England, when Christian Anglo-Saxons seemed for long periods to be losing badly to pagan Vikings.”

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Church history in parish newspapers: “One great and sudden change in Catholic life concerned regulations for fasting and abstinence. A 1959 issue of Catholic Action of the South, the archdiocesan newspaper for New Orleans, outlines the rules for 1959-1960, which seem stringent to most Catholics today: They include abstinence from meat on all Fridays of the year and certain other occasions, and fasting on all weekdays of Lent and certain other days. In 1966, the U.S. bishops released a pastoral statement on penance and abstinence that terminated the traditional law of abstinence from meat on Fridays. On the front page of the February 23, 1968 issue of The Voice, the newspaper for the diocese of Miami, one sees a small box outlining the simplified regulations: fasting and abstinence on Ash Wednesday and Good Friday. Abstinence on the other Fridays of Lent is ‘recommended’; attending weekday Mass or performing other personal acts of penance is ‘urged.'”

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Have you flown KLM any time in the past 21 years? If so, your pilot may have been the king of the Netherlands.

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Essay of the Day:

In The New York Times, Jennifer Miller writes about the return of patronage in modern arts and letters:

“In 2013, the editors of The Toast, an online magazine of feminist humor and commentary, asked Alexis Coe to write a regular column. Ms. Coe, a historian, was eager to accept, but couldn’t. ‘It was early in my career,’ she said. ‘I couldn’t do it for the nominal fee they were offering early writers.’

“Then the editors called with some unexpected news. They had found a woman (a lawyer in her early 30s) who liked Ms. Coe’s work and had offered to subsidize the column, provided she could remain anonymous to the public. Suddenly, Ms. Coe had something she had never considered herself worthy of — something that she didn’t realize actually existed in the modern world.

“She had a patron.

“Ms. Coe wrote 15 columns, for which she received checks exceeding the standard pay rate. She said she and her patron did not meet and only briefly ‘exchanged pleasantries’ over email. And yet the relationship, she said, ‘really did feel significant to me — not necessarily in monetary value, but in the knowledge that the work that I was doing wasn’t insular, and the people who were reading it weren’t just librarians in New England.’

“It may seem incredible that a benefactor would simply drop from the sky like this. But Ms. Coe’s experience is emblematic of a shift in how some arts enthusiasts, from wealthy individuals to grant-making foundations, are relating to creators. They are moving away from merely collecting and consuming art and toward a model reminiscent of the Renaissance, when royal houses provided room, board, materials and important professional connections to talented artists of the day.

“Patrons of the 21st century are far less politically motivated than the Medici family and their ilk, and they generally don’t house artists in their lavish estates or command them to paint frescos. But just like the patrons of old, they are giving creators a pathway to success and economic stability, providing living expenses, supplies, pep talks and more.”

Read the rest.

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Photos: Corfe Castle

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Poem: Edmund Keeley, “The Village Called Kolonaki”

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