Reviews and News:
Pablo Neruda did not die of cancer: “Dr. Aurelio Luna told a press conference the experts were ‘100% convinced’ that the death certificate ‘does not reflect the reality of the death’.”
Caligulan coffee table: “The ceremonial ships that the Roman Emperor Caligula built to host decadent festivities on Lake Nemi were ornate floating palaces, with pink marble columns and brightly colored mosaic floors. Adorned with gold and gems and bronze friezes of animals, they were the sites of mega-parties that sometimes lasted days, according to historical accounts. But for much of the past five decades, a four-by-four piece of mosaic flooring from one of the ships has been sitting in a somewhat more prosaic setting, the Park Avenue apartment of an antiques dealer, where it was used as a coffee table, often to hold a vase of flowers and, occasionally, someone’s drinking glass.”
Last week, I linked to Phillip Magness’s blog post on Nancy MacLean’s use of secondary sources in her controversial book Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America. “Is a 2017 National Book Award finalist built upon a simple typo?” Magness asked. In the latest issue of Modern Age, he examines some of the book’s other problems.
Dan Brown is a very bad writer: “Whatever else you want to say about Brown, he is certainly a memorable writer. He takes what might be charitably described as a loose view of the relations between nouns and verbs, subjects and predicates, between words in general. He prefers his metaphors shaken and stirred, sluiced, juiced, and served as a teeming froth of impossibilities.”
Rand Richards Cooper remembers Richard Wilbur. Was Wilbur a happy poet?
John Grisham’s latest novel, The Rooster Bar, is a book “that lawyers can read”: “Not only is it free of any major legal gaffes, but it also addresses a problem within the legal profession that deserves attention: the deceptive practices of for-profit law schools.”
The problem with America’s obsession with the baccalaureate degree: “For decades American higher education has fixated so much on the benefits of baccalaureate degrees that it has barely noticed that two-year degrees and even less-taxing one-year certificates have come to provide many kinds of students with better pathways to good jobs and pay.”
Dispatch from the font front: “People know not to use Comic Sans and maybe Papyrus ― those are things you just shouldn’t do. But very rarely do people understand why they should use a typeface.”
Essay of the Day:
In First Things, Mark Helprin considers how America’s founding was shaped by the landscape:
“No deterministic school of thought can wholly explain why Virginia well into the eighteenth century was as English as Banbury, but then produced a violent and almost reflexive rejection of England; or how it was that a hundred years later Henry Adams could write, ‘One might stay in no end of country houses without forgetting that one was a total stranger and could never be anything else. One might bow to half the Dukes and Duchesses in England, and feel only the more strange.’
“Yet another century on, I found myself the graduate student of Oxford’s Hugh Trevor-Roper, trying to make a connection through the impenetrable layers of my ignorance and his contempt. I might speak earnestly for ten or fifteen minutes—to my amazement, he made the subject of my tutorial Hermetic mysticism—but after my discourse he would announce, with sadistic pleasure, ‘I’m terribly sorry, but I was unable to understand a single word you said,’ as if I were not speaking English.
“Only once did he let his feigned inability to find me intelligible slip, and that was as I spoke of my love for the beauties and vastness of the American landscape, and of how I missed the forests and ice-covered rivers of my youth. There I had enjoyed, at least in recollection, perfect tranquility in a seeming infinity of terrain and in the harshness of climate, in surprise encounters with wild animals, in the rushing of waters and the clarity of the air. This moved him beyond the game he was playing at my expense, and seemed to please him. ‘Yes,’ he said, with some admiration, ‘I see.’ And then, in a contributory spirit, ‘I love a landscape that is well manured’ (in the sense of cultivated). For the first time, he had not treated me as an inferior. At least at that moment, he had understood that I was not lacking in civilization but that we were of different branches of the same civilization. I had unintentionally forced him to that by my spontaneous declaration of an American glory that matched or surpassed anything British.
“This episode suggested to me that in regard to the origins and development of nations, some natural realities are not credited as perhaps they should be. And it is thus with our own country.”
Photos: Red rainbow over Slovakia
Poem: John Clare, “An Invite to Eternity”
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