Reviews and News:
A history of exhaustion: “Those who imagine that life in the past was simpler, slower and better are wrong. The experience of exhaustion, and anxieties about exhaustion epidemics in the wider population, are not bound to a particular time and place. On the contrary: exhaustion and its effects have preoccupied thinkers since classical antiquity.”
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Blood Meridian is not Cormac McCarthy’s masterpiece. It’s Suttree.
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Sam Sacks on the American side of Yves Bonnefoy: “In 1985, on an invitation from Williams College, Bonnefoy spent an autumn and winter in western Massachusetts, a brief stay that helped inspire the collections In the Shadow’s Light and Beginning and End of the Snow. In the great tradition of Frenchmen who travel to the United States and describe the place with fresh eyes, he recorded his impressions of the forests, their colors, and the changes of light against the snow.”
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Vatican digitizes a 1,600-year-old fragment of the Aeneid—the world’s oldest version of the epic poem.
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David Skinner visits the One World Trade Center with its official biographer: “Over sandwiches at the esplanade, Dupré tells me how she became the ‘official biographer.’ The obstacles to writing about the World Trade Center from the point of view of its owners, designers, and builders were formidable. The Port Authority of New York & New Jersey not only controlled the land but also the information. And surrounding its bureaucratic fortress was a defensive line of nondisclosure agreements signed by the project’s many contractors.”
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Stephen Eide on how a century-old zoning law shaped Manhattan: “This month marks the 100th anniversary of New York’s 1916 zoning law, a landmark event in the history of American urbanism and architecture. The law imposed regulations on the use and height of buildings, responding to widespread concern that early 20th-century New York was becoming too dense too quickly. During the preceding decades, skyscrapers had proliferated, creating “canyons” of darkness in lower Manhattan. The solution was the setback: After a skyscraper rose to a certain point, its façade had to be pushed back, to let in the sun and keep height in a certain proportion with street width. Though the motivations behind it were civic, not aesthetic, the noble setback would revolutionize skyscraper design. It became an essential feature of Art Deco architecture by giving a new answer to the question how should a building rise?
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Not sure this needed a study, but: “A new study reports self-regard, self-promotion, and plain old bragging are far more prominent in pop music than they were a quarter-century ago.”
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Essay of the Day:
In the Times Literary Supplement, Osman Durrani takes stock of Goethe’s accomplishment:
“Access to Goethe can be arduous; tools to facilitate our approach are always welcome. This year they come in the contrasting formats of a 1,000-page-volume of “essential” translations and a paperback addition to Oxford’s Very Short Introductions series. Together they reduce a prolific life’s work to manageable proportions, bearing in mind that the first complete edition of Goethe in German ran to 143 volumes and was put together over a period of thirty-two years.
“The dimensions of Goethe’s legacy are less of a hindrance than its diversity. This multi-talented individual was active, over a lifespan of eighty-two years, as a poet, novelist, dramatist, essayist, librettist, translator, biographer, diarist, conversationalist, critic, theatre director, collector, painter, sculptor and in many other capacities. He was no less committed to the sciences, conducting experiments and extending the frontiers of knowledge in botany, optics, colour theory, climatology and all aspects of human and animal biology. As a Minister and Privy Councillor, he served in the government of the semi-independent state of Saxony-Weimar, and participated as an observer in military campaigns in the wake of the French Revolution.
“Neither Matthew Bell’s edition nor Ritchie Robertson’s commentary can pretend to give us the whole Goethe. He himself believed that his scientific studies would eventually be seen as more significant than his literary output. Today, most would agree that the essence of his work will be found in his poetry and plays, but the search for the centre is complicated by seismic shifts in style and attitude. The over-wrought rococo verse of his youth was soon abandoned in favour of the turbulent ‘Storm and Stress’, a ‘new wave’ movement that began around 1770 and produced the defiant hymns ‘Prometheus’, ‘Mahomet’, ‘Ganymede’ and the groundbreaking novel The Sorrows of Young Werther. For many German readers the true Goethe is the young genius who, in those heady days, took the literary world by storm with what looked like the outpourings of a frenzied iconoclast. Yet within little more than a year of creating the hugely successful Werther (1774), he had become the tutor and companion of a Duke and was rapidly being absorbed by the ruling elite. The same process has been observed in our own times with Günter Grass, the sometime enfant terrible turned praeceptor Germaniae. This might explain why many are put off by what Robertson calls the image of the ‘distant, unexciting Victorian sage’ who in fact departed this world five years before the young Queen ascended her throne. The dramatic works of his middle period, Iphigenia in Tauris and Torquato Tasso, may seem to proclaim the virtues of moderation, but the tranquil mood was not to last. Not content to continue as a princeling’s client, he surreptitiously turned his back on courtly life and absconded to Italy. Two years later he reappeared in Weimar a changed, and, as he put it, a ‘reborn’ man.
“His forte, and the theme of many of his works, was metamorphosis.”
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Image of the Day: Glencoe Lochan
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Poem: Geoffrey Hill, “Two Poems”
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