Reviews and News:
Matthew Walther remembers Evelyn Waugh fifty years after his death: “How do things look half a century on? What is there to assess?…There is the work, of course: the undergraduate journalism and belles lettres, including, rather astonishingly, a persuasive defense of artistic modernism; the early, somewhat spotty short stories; the squib on Rossetti (the anonymous reviewer in the TLS praised the efforts of “Miss Waugh”); then, suddenly, like some great primeval conjuring, Decline and Fall, one of the most astonishing debut novels in our language, its sudden appearance comparable to the publication of The Pickwick Papers; followed by Vile Bodies, that collage of decay, and the brilliant farce and elegant satire of the long middle period that begins with Black Mischief and ends with Love Among the Ruins… At least as engaging as the work is the life…”
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What was Rasputin like? In a 1924 essay, the Russian writer Teffi recalls a series of bizarre encounters with the trusted friend of the Russian Tsar: “”What’s he saying?’ whispered Rozanov on my left. ‘Make him talk louder. Ask him again, to make him talk louder. Otherwise I can’t hear.’ ‘But it’s nothing interesting. He’s just trying to get me to drink.’ ‘Get him to talk about matters erotic. God Almighty! Do you really not know how to get a man to talk?'”
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Jean-Paul Clébert’s classic account of Paris after WWII: “So many books about Paris are concerned with the rich, matronly capital city, but this one, originally published in French in 1952, is about the postwar Paris of the poor and their not always successful efforts to eat, drink and stay warm.”
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The new immersive theatre: “Suddenly, the theatrical scene is rife with works that ask the audience to wander from room to room, to talk, touch, and otherwise commune with performers, to become a part of the performance in a way that would have been unusual even a decade ago. The phenomenon began in London and New York and is now spreading to other locations.”
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In Case You Missed It:
Frank Gehry is the worst: “At a 2014 press conference in Oviedo, Spain, a reporter asked him how he would respond to ‘charges that his buildings were more in the line of dazzling spectacles than functional architecture.’ This, understandably, hit a nerve. Gehry scowled and flipped the bird to the reporter who had asked what was, after all, a very reasonable question. He then, disjointedly, added that ’98 percent of everything that is built and constructed today is pure shit,’ and that ‘Once in a while, however, a group of people do something special. Very few, but God, leave us alone.’ Gehry told the reporter not to ask ‘questions as stupid as that one.'”
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The crisis of English prose: “English prose is now in direr straits: not only are examples of clear and attractive writing few and far between, they are also depressingly hard to unearth. To what institutions or individuals should one turn nowadays for lucid and cogent discussion? Political discourse is more obfuscatory and bet-hedging than ever; newspapers are adopting an increasingly pared-down, smart-phone-friendly register; TV newscasters are finding more banal ways to convey complex information to the viewer; documentaries shrink from documenting and discussing the difficult for fear of taxing their dwindling audiences; much of the public sector and business world has moved beyond meaningful verbal communication: clients and customers are less trouble when bemused than when engaged.”
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The great Robert Hughes: “The most manifest virtue of these essays is their language, marked by an uncommon command of vocabulary and (in our day) a far rarer mastery of syntax, allied to a thoroughly antiquated respect for the rules of grammar. Open this anthology anywhere and you will be hard put to find a sentence that is not as memorable for its very phrasing as it is for its thought.”
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The Selected Letters of Laura Ingalls Wilder shows the artful simplicity of her prose and her gift for narrative and description. It is “the valedictory volume” of her work.
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Classic Essay: Andrew Ferguson, “The New Phrenology”
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Interview: Ben Domenech talks with the poet Dana Gioia
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