Well, the Pulitzer Prize winners have been announced, and I am not surprised to see that Jerry Saltz, art critic for New York Magazine, has won for criticism. He does write with great “daring.” Insight? Not so much—which, of course, makes him the obvious choice. Ronan Farrow certainly deserves one for his New Yorker article on Harvey Weinstein. The New York Times also won for its reporting on Weinstein, though their handling of a report on Weinstein a decade ago should have tempered any praise for the paper today.
Remember that First Things article defending the kidnapping of a Jewish boy by the Catholic church? The piece was keyed to the English translation of Edgardo Mortara’s own account of the episode. It turns out that the account may have been altered significantly by Vittorio Messori, who translated Mortara’s original Spanish into Italian. It was Messori’s Italian version that was translated into English. David Kertzer reports in The Atlantic: “In Messori’s version of the memoir, the reader is treated to a heartwarming story of a six-year-old child who is overjoyed to be taken from his parents so that he can become a Catholic—a child who would later have an uncannily accurate memory of what had happened to him. But this is not the narrative Edgardo actually wrote. The happy version instead emerges from numerous changes to the original, including the addition and deletion of entire paragraphs—changes that are common to both published versions of the Edgardo Mortara memoir in Italian and English.”
Midge Goldberg reviews William Baer’s a new murder mystery series featuring Jack Colt.
Eve Tushnet considers the lessons of a new book on addiction and devotion in early modern England. The book “is a creative, vivacious exploration of characterization in early modern English drama and poetry. It’s also a hint that if we want to escape modern isolation, purposelessness, and distraction, the central question is not, ‘How can I earn success?’ but, ‘Where do I surrender?’”
Why is the West suicidal? Daniel McCarthy offers an answer by looking back at the work of James Burnham.
Was France’s most famous rock singer an American? A judge will decide if Johnny Hallyday should be considered an American or a French resident in response to a dispute of his will. More here.
Essay of the Day:
In 1928, Kay Boyle moved to Paris. She was a single mother and lived in a commune, working at two gift shops to make ends meet. She left the commune later that year but remained in Paris until 1941. Much of her writing was influenced by that time:
“Boyle had little patience with the legend of the ‘Lost Generation’ of American expatriate artists and writers who gathered in Paris in the 1920s. ‘I think all this glorification of that wonderful Camelot period is absurd,’ Boyle declared in a 1984 New York Times Book Review interview headlined ‘Paris Wasn’t Like That.’
“‘I never understood what the Lost Generation meant,’ Boyle told NBC television correspondent Pat Mitchell in a 1988 interview for the Today Show. ‘It was not a community thing at all. It’s been misrepresented…It was characterized by real desperation, there were suicides. And if you sat down at a table at night with some people you knew were writers, if you would mention anything you were doing, everyone would get up and leave the table. You didn’t talk about your work.’
“Yet even if she debunked the myth, Boyle most certainly was there. Her early poems and short stories appeared in the avant-garde ‘little magazines’ published in Paris, alongside the works of Ezra Pound, James Joyce, William Carlos Williams, Gertrude Stein, and Ernest Hemingway. Nor did she deny that something momentous was taking place in Paris…”
Photos: China from above
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