Reviews and News:
Karen Swallow Prior reviews Flannery O’Connor’s college journal: “The journal—published for the first time in the current issue of Image, an arts and faith quarterly—covers just 40 days from December 1943 through February 1944, and was written during O’Connor’s sophomore year at what was then Georgia State College for Women. Despite its brevity, the diary is an illuminating document that offers a glimpse into the mind of the artist as a young woman.”
How the City of Light became the City of Food: “A Taste of Paris: A History of the Parisian Love Affair with Food is a gastronomic jaunt through the city that tells how Paris distinguished itself as a world capital of eating.”
An unusual supernova has been discovered: “Astronomers have spotted something truly baffling: a new light 500 million light years away that looked exactly like a supernova…but acted like no supernova observed before. The new discovery and its spectral lines (the colors of light it sent our way) allowed scientists to classify it as a typical Type IIa supernova, the kind from large exploding stars. But this one remained bright for six times as long, with no sign of its ejected matter slowing down. And it sits in exactly the same spot as another supernova. All of this demonstrates just how little we know about the eventual fate of very massive stars.”
Can biography diminish rather than expand our understanding of writers and their works? Perhaps, argues Alice Spawls in the London Review of Books: “We know a good deal about writers one way or another anyhow, and it might be risky to pry: what is at best a ‘benign literary parasitism’, to quote Tim Parks, could ruin a good novel or poem for ever. It’s not just a question of revelation, of sordid details. I never thought about the reasons I didn’t read biographies, I just didn’t, and now I see that I distrusted them (and still do), that I thought them incapable of dealing in what’s most interesting about people, and I believed that novels were the best renditions of consciousness, of human lives and relationships, and also the most pleasurable. ‘Biography,’ as Hermione Lee says, ‘has so much to do with blame.’ Biographers deal in the back and forth of accusations. I could sniff the mud clinging to them, and if I somehow knew they might bore or disgust me, it may be that I feared they might excite me too. But most of all I felt, still feel, instinctively nervous about putting words into people’s mouths where they have spoken so forcefully for themselves, and perhaps especially where they haven’t. Both things are true of Charlotte Brontë.”
The Atlantic hires a music director: “The renowned jazz musician and The Late Show with Stephen Colbert bandleader…will collaborate with the editors on a range of projects, from writing, to video, to live events.”
A note so high it has never been sung at the Metropolitan Opera…until now: “It lasts just a split second, almost imperceptible in a two-hour score. It’s over too quickly to summon the dogs of the Upper West Side or to break any nearby windows. But brief as it is, the A above high C that the soprano Audrey Luna reaches in Thomas Adès’s new opera, The Exterminating Angel, is so high, it has never been sung in the 137-year history of the Metropolitan Opera.” (HT: Barton Swaim)
Essay of the Day:
In The New York Review of Books, Benjamin Nathans reviews Yuri Slezkine’s history of the Russian Revolution:
“When it comes to actually explaining the October revolution, however, or Stalin’s revolution from above, or the Great Terror (aka the Flood, the Second Coming, and the Last Judgment), the saga seems to offer little beyond the claim that the Bolsheviks were millenarians, and this is what millenarians do.
“Nor does it account for the radically different outcomes of various millenarian movements—why some died as sects, others managed to routinize themselves into churches, but the Bolsheviks alone ‘found themselves firmly in charge of Babylon while still expecting the millennium in their lifetimes.’ Not all instances of political fervor, even utopian fervor, qualify as millenarian, and there’s an important difference between believing in the possibility of progress and believing in its inevitability or necessity. Liberalism, communism, and fascism may indeed have certain millenarian instincts in common, but like a haircut and a beheading, the outcome is hardly ‘the same.’
“One aspect of the Russian Revolution for which The House of Government does offer an explicit explanation is its demise. Most histories of the Soviet Union emphasize the failure of the command economy to keep up with its capitalist rivals. Slezkine, however, is not terribly interested in economics. In his account, the Soviet experiment failed, half a century before the country’s actual collapse, because it neglected to drain the oldest, most persistent swamp of all—the family.
“In between their epic labors at the great construction site of socialism, residents of the House of Government ‘were settling into their new apartments and setting up house in familiar ways,’ unable to transcend the ‘hen-and-rooster problems’ of marriage and domestic life. Many of them expressed unease at the prospect of sinking into the traditional bonds of kinship and procreation. ‘I am afraid I might turn into a bourgeois,’ worried the writer Aleksandr Serafimovich (Apt. 82) to a friend. ‘In order to resist such a transformation, I have been spitting into all the corners and onto the floor, blowing my nose, and lying in bed with my shoes on and hair uncombed. It seems to be helping.’
“But it wasn’t. No one really knew what a communist family should be, or how to transform relations between parents and children, or how to harness erotic attachments to the requirements of revolution. Bolsheviks were known to give their children names such as ‘Vladlen’ (Vladimir Lenin), ‘Mezhenda’ (International Women’s Day), and ‘Vsemir’ (worldwide revolution). But naming was easy compared to living. The Soviet state went to great lengths to inculcate revolutionary values in schools and workplaces, but not at home. It never devised resonant communist rituals to mark birth, marriage, and death. The party ideologist Aron Solts (Apt. 393) claimed that ‘the family of a Communist must be a prototype of a small Communist cell…, a collectivity of comrades in which one lives in the family the same way as outside the family.’
“In that case, why bother with families at all? Neither Solts nor anyone else had a convincing answer. Sects, Slezkine notes, ‘are about brotherhood (and, as an afterthought, sisterhood), not about parents and children. This is why most end-of-the-world scenarios promise ‘all these things’ within one generation…, and all millenarian sects, in their militant phase, attempt to reform marriage or abolish it altogether (by decreeing celibacy or promiscuity).’
“Unable or unwilling to abolish the family, Bolsheviks proved incapable of reproducing themselves. For Slezkine, this is cause for celebrating the resilience of family ties under the onslaught of Stalin’s social engineering. It’s worth asking, though, why the same Bolsheviks who willingly deported or exterminated millions of class enemies as remnants of capitalism balked at similarly radical measures against the bourgeois institution of the family. Could it be that they, especially the men among them, realized that by doing so they stood to lose much more than their chains?”
Photo: Rising Earth
Poem: Timothy Murphy, “Fire Up a Candle”
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