Reviews and News
The real Mr. Darcy? “A dispiriting portrait of the ‘real’ Mr. Darcy, showing Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice hero as a pale, slope-shouldered, weedy character, thin of mouth and chin with his hair powdered white, has been created by a panel of experts through studying contemporary fashions and social history.”
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Why no one takes protest art seriously? Because it’s not about protesting, it’s about virtue signaling. “The irrelevance of art owes partly to the ascendant populist mood, and partly to protest art being so reliably liberal, so soothingly safe. Artists may claim they’re nailing ‘redneck racists,’ but how many of those attended the gallery opening? Politics in the arts often looks more like group bonding than anything that might effect change.”
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Should libraries get rid of late fines?
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Pushkin’s stories: “While the verbal music of Pushkin’s verse-novel Eugene Onegin is said to be untranslatable — despite impressive attempts in English by Charles Johnston and James E. Falen — his stories are typically set down in a plain, direct style that almost recalls Hemingway.”
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Why are Christian novels so bad, and what can be done about it?
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Hemingway the spy? “Still, what is Hemingway alleged to have done as a spy? We know that, in 1937, at another hotel in Madrid, he had a drink – vodka and Spanish brandy – with that ‘representative of the diabolical Russia’, the NKVD chief Alexander Orlov. (Politics didn’t come up but they talked about their shared interest in guns.) Other evidence? That during the Second World War he set up a counterintelligence bureau in Havana. The American diplomat Robert Joyce told Hemingway’s biographer Carlos Baker that Hemingway was willing to pay for it himself. It is further alleged that he set up the Crook Factory, to keep an eye on enemy aliens in Cuba, and put his beloved, 38-foot fishing vessel Pilar out to sea as a scout for German U-boats. In a letter to Malcolm Cowley, Hemingway wrote that he aimed to be ‘a secret agent of my government’ but when it comes to the Soviets, there’s a lot of ‘reaching out’ and alleged meetings, but facts about him actually engaging in operations are thin on the ground. He disliked the Truman Doctrine. He thought Joseph McCarthy was a s**t. But he was nothing to the Rosenbergs, nothing to Whittaker Chambers, and among his many awards in those years he was never handed a subpoena. As for Castro: the great novelist and he met only once, when Hemingway handed him a cup for catching the biggest fish.”
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Essay of the Day: Clive Thompson argues in Wired that the next big “blue collar” job is coding:
“When I ask people to picture a coder, they usually imagine someone like Mark Zuckerberg: a hoodied college dropout who builds an app in a feverish 72-hour programming jag—with the goal of getting insanely rich and, as they say, ‘changing the world.’
“But this Silicon Valley stereotype isn’t even geographically accurate. The Valley employs only 8 percent of the nation’s coders. All the other millions? They’re more like Devon, a programmer I met who helps maintain a security-software service in Portland, Oregon. He isn’t going to get fabulously rich, but his job is stable and rewarding: It’s 40 hours a week, well paid, and intellectually challenging. ‘My dad was a blue-collar guy,’ he tells me—and in many ways, Devon is too.
“Politicians routinely bemoan the loss of good blue-collar jobs. Work like that is correctly seen as a pillar of civil middle-class society. And it may yet be again. What if the next big blue-collar job category is already here—and it’s programming? What if we regarded code not as a high-stakes, sexy affair, but the equivalent of skilled work at a Chrysler plant?”
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Photo: Duke Humfrey’s Library
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Poem: Claudia Gary, “Comfort Food”
