Reviews and News:
The Village Voice stops its print edition: “The iconic alt-weekly, co-founded by Norman Mailer in 1955, will continue as a ‘brand’ online — where all the classified ads that once funded the paper have now gone, owner Peter Barbey said.”
The New Yorker likes to present itself as the preeminent authority on great prose, but its house style is a mix of anachronistic, inconsistent, and self-mythologizing rules.
The lost pleasure of reading aloud: “Sharing of books and communal reading staved off the boredom of long, dark winter nights while at the same time providing opportunities for self-improvement. (The Margate circulating library, we discover, had 600 sermons in its collection.) Reading out loud was also encouraged as a defence against the ‘seductive, enervating dangers’ of sentimental novels, and the ‘indelicacy’ of certain plays.”
1500-year-old Latin commentary on the Gospels made available in English for the first time.” (HT: David Davis)
Barcelona terrorist cell responsible for last week’s vehicle attack had planned to bomb the Sagrada Familia: “According to court testimony given by one of the suspects in last week’s attacks, the cell had originally planned to detonate vans filled with explosives at three crowded sites, including Gaudí’s spectacular church.”
Thomas Meehan, author of Annie and Hairspray, has died.
The achievement of Loren Eiseley: “The new Library of America edition of Loren Eiseley’s essays contains much, though not all, of his best writing: his fine early books on Francis Bacon and Charles Darwin’s predecessors are missing, as is his autobiography All the Strange Hours. Moreover, not everything here is in fact an essay: The Firmament of Time (1964) originated as a series of lectures, but is meant to tell a single historical narrative. But anyone reading these two volumes will be treated to a feast of beautiful writing, shrewd observation, and deeply melancholy meditation by a man who always felt himself to be lost in time.”
Quiz: Can you name these famous poems translated into emojis?
Essay of the Day:
Why do people hike? Charles Petersen considers two new books on the topic in The New York Review of Books:
“To the uninitiated it can be hard to understand why anyone would go hiking. Today’s fleece- and Gore-Tex–clad masses may take for granted the attraction of spending weekends doing what, for most of human history, qualified as grunt work: trudging through the wilderness, surrounded by dangerous animals, a heavy pack on your back. Earlier advocates had to be more candid. ‘This is very hard work for a young man to follow daily for any length of time,’ wrote John Meade Gould in a popular guide in 1877. ‘Although it may sound romantic, yet let no party of young people think they can find pleasure in it for many days.’
Henry David Thoreau offered similar advice. ‘If you are ready to leave father and mother, and brother and sister, and wife and child and friends,’ he wrote in ‘Walking,’ his classic hiking treatise, ‘and never see them again…then you are ready for a walk.’ When I was a child my parents had already been indoctrinated into modern hiking culture; my sister and I knew better. I would only go for a hike if promised M&Ms at every stop. My sister, cannier than I, demanded a new CD before each trip, which she then listened to on headphones while the great outdoors passed by.
“Why do people hike? Surprisingly little has been written on the origins of so unnatural an activity. Silas Chamberlin, an official at a Pennsylvania-based hiking advocacy organization and a recent Ph.D. who studies environmental history, has written the first comprehensive account of the pastime, On the Trail: A History of American Hiking. Looking back it can seem easy to draw a direct line from men like Thoreau and John Muir to hikers today. We climb the same mountains: Thoreau, in The Maine Woods, writes about his struggle to ascend Mount Katahdin, the endpoint of the modern Appalachian Trail; Muir, in The Mountains of California, describes much of the landscape passed through by the path that now bears his name, the 211-mile John Muir Trail that runs from Mount Whitney to Yosemite. We also share many of the same goals. Thoreau preferred to hike ‘absolutely free from all worldly engagements’; Muir spent days by himself in the wilderness, with nothing but the animals in the forest for company.”
Photos: St. Bartholomew’s. “An annual pilgrimage to St. Bartholomew’s is held on the Saturday after 24 August, starting from the Austrian municipality of Maria Alm and crossing the Berchtesgaden Alps.” More here.
Poem: Ned Balbo, “Stray Crow”
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