Reviews and News:
What’s it like to record a reading of your entire book? “There’s nothing like reading your own work aloud to show you how imperfect your sense of rhythm is—or, rather, how imperfectly it applies to sentences you hear with your actual, not your inner, ear.”
* *
Kyle Smith: Dylan bows to his betters.
* *
What was Wagner like? “No one who knew him was left untouched; many wrote about the experience. For some he was ‘bewitching, positively hypnotic’; for others, including those close to him, he was ‘unnerving, dangerous, overwhelming, almost life-threatening’. Wagner could not keep quiet. He ‘had an enormous gift of the gab’, Robert Schumann noted in his diary, but was full of oppressive ideas and ‘impossible to listen to for any length of time’.”
* *
A new theory of how the moon formed.
* *
In Case You Missed It:
In The New Criterion, Andrew Stuttaford revisits one of the strangest movements of the twentieth century: the cult of Kibbo Kift.
* *
Kenneth Rexroth once remarked that the poet Weldon Kees “lived in a permanent and hopeless apocalypse.” He committed suicide in 1955 and is rarely studied seriously today. He should be.
* *
Was Benjamin Franklin a “thorough deist”? Not exactly, says Thomas S. Kidd.
* *
A history of Mary’s visit to Elizabeth in art: “Falling between the artistically more popular scenes of the Annunciation (Angel Gabriel, ray of divine light, holy dove, bashful, slender Virgin) and the Adoration (shepherds, magi, stars, tumbledown stable, ox, ass, newborn baby), the Visitation is less often chosen as a subject. The artists who did choose it invest their Visitations with quiet grace.”
* *
Interview: Sam Leith talks to Michael Wood about the life of critic William Empson
* *
Classic Essay: Roger Scruton, “T.S. Eliot as Conservative Mentor”
Get Prufrock in your inbox every weekday morning. Subscribe here.
