Reviews and News:
The complete Edmund Burke: “With excellent timing, as Oxford University Press’s nine-volume edition of Edmund Burke’s writings and speeches reaches completion after 34 years, Jesse Norman, an academic and member of Parliament for Britain’s Conservative Party, has presented an updated and considerably expanded selection of Burke’s writings for the famous Everyman’s Library. This volume, with its sharply focused introduction and impressively thorough chronology, notes, and index, weighs in at a little over one thousand pages, and it is as weighty in conception and scholarship, providing a valuable measure of the strides made in Burke studies over recent decades.”
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The problem with the National Book Award: “This year, not a single book from an independent press made the fiction long list. By contrast, the Booker prize winners this year and last were published in Britain by a small press. The glut of nominated books can lead to vagaries of omission as well as predictable mediocrity.”
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Othello in an age of microaggression: “Predictably, a student production of Othello was scrapped last week at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario—because a white girl was to play the lead. Othello the Moor, the ill-fated hero of Shakespeare’s tragedy, is a black man in the text and, since the middle of the last century at least, on the stage as well. Director Maggie Purdon, a student, told the Canadian National Post her intention was a feminist adaptation of sorts, ‘It would be more of an issue of sexuality, and the issue would be that Othello’s sexuality makes him an outsider.’ But in a Facebook post on Thursday, just four weeks from her opening night, Purdon called the whole thing off and broadly apologized for her casting choice, ‘a problematic decision that caused people within this community to feel oppressed, and for that we are greatly sorry.'”
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“I beg you vote for C. Julius Polybius for aedile. He makes good bread,” and other ancient Roman political graffiti.
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“Dogs are obedient, eager to please and highly trainable, which is why they do all kinds of jobs for us.” But cats? “In comparison, the cat presents an enigma worthy of the wonder and awe that is the theme of Abigail Tucker’s The Lion in the Living Room. What do cats do for us? They sit pretty, purr when petted and seem to use us instead of us using them. How come we like them so much? One possible answer is Konrad Lorenz’s so-called Kindchenschema (infant-appeal) according to which we fall for signals of vulnerability in the young of our own and other species. With its relatively large frontal eyes and rounded features, the house cat sends many of these signals. They arouse human care and protectiveness even for a species that massacres songbirds and poses other environmental threats.”
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A. E. Stallings: “Why bother with poetry?”
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Essay of the Day:
In The New Yorker, Jiayang Fan profiles Liu Yiqian, a Chinese billionaire who wants to increase China’s cultural prestige. He has opened two museums in Shanghai, with a third planned for 2018:
“The Long Museum West (long means ‘dragon’ in Chinese) opened in 2014, on a scenic stretch of land on the western shore of the Huangpu River. The Shanghai government had offered a generous discount on the property, in an area that was once a manufacturing hub but is being transformed into a ‘cultural corridor’ intended to rival New York’s Museum Mile and London’s South Bank. The building is impressive, designed, in an industrial international style, by the young Chinese firm Atelier Deshaus. Inside, a series of colossal half-arches in rough concrete interlock, as if in an M. C. Escher print, giving the space an unfixed, exploratory feel. The Modigliani—a dark-haired reclining nude seen against a flame-colored background, finished in 1918—will be the museum’s centerpiece, but the bulk of its collection is contemporary art from around the world. The museum is Liu’s second; the first, the Long Museum East, a ten-thousand-square-metre granite monolith east of the river, opened in 2012 and contains Chinese antiquities and works by prominent contemporary Chinese artists. A third location opened in Chongqing earlier this year, and the Wuhan branch will open in 2018. Together, the museums, which are run by Liu’s wife, Wang Wei, house China’s largest private art collection.
“Liu is the forty-seventh-richest person in China, with an estimated fortune of $1.35 billion. An early investor in China’s nascent stock market, in the early nineties, he has since diversified into construction, real estate, and pharmaceuticals. He is fifty-three and has bristly, slightly graying hair, watchful eyes, and a paunch that suggests the banquet diet of beer and grain liquor that is an inextricable part of Chinese business culture. Liu speaks in a raspy voice, and his demeanor is brusque. He almost never makes eye contact. Often, he seems barely to hear questions, and his answers, when they come, are less like responses than like peepholes into some fleeting train of thought. Occasionally, when an idea interests him, he cocks his head, and his mouth forms a lopsided grin.
“Powerful Chinese businessmen tend to be circumspect and wary of attention, because their success depends on not attracting government disfavor. Liu, however, is known for a brash, flamboyant style. After the Modigliani purchase—which exceeded by a hundred million dollars the record paid for a work by the artist—there was a flurry of international news stories in which Liu, who was little known outside China, spoke with outrageous casualness about the painting, noting that it was ‘relatively nice,’ at least compared with other Modiglianis. Now, however, he talked as if he’d found the attention unsettling, and seemed unsure whether Western fascination with his humble origins—he started out as a market vender, and later drove a taxi—connoted respect or something else. Before our meeting, his assistant warned me on no account to mention an article in which Liu called himself a tuhao, a term meaning ‘uncouth and wealthy,’ and applied derisively to those who have risen from nothing in China’s hyperkinetic economy. But among Chinese Liu takes a certain pride in playing the equivalent of the Beverly Hillbillies—an Everyman who has suddenly got wise to the cultural cachet of art.
“Liu began collecting as early as 1993, but he first drew notice in 2009, when he paid more than eleven million dollars for a wooden Qing-dynasty throne carved with dragons. Since then, he has acquired a reputation for paying record-breaking amounts—forty-five million dollars for a six-hundred-year-old Tibetan silk tapestry, nearly fifteen million for a Song-dynasty vase, and thirty-five million for an ink landscape by the twentieth-century artist Zhang Daqian.”
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Image of the Day: Southwest
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Poem: Yi Tal, “River Journey,” translated by Ian Haight and T’ae-yong Hŏ
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