Reviews and News:
21st-Century Fox is one of the largest media companies in the world, but the man after which it is named is mostly forgotten. Who was William Fox?
Leave it to Harper Lee to write a will that further muddies how her estate is to be handled: “When the novelist Harper Lee died in her sleep two years ago, at 89, she left a trail of lingering questions about her life and work. Why had she decided, in her final years, to publish a second novel, 55 years after her breakout success, To Kill a Mockingbird? Were there other unknown works? Who would inherit her literary papers, sought by many universities, as well as her estate, estimated to be worth tens of millions of dollars? On Tuesday, an Alabama court unsealed Ms. Lee’s will, but the mystery surrounding one of American literature’s most cherished authors only deepened.”
In 1905, the poet George Sterling moved to Carmel, a small town two hours south of San Francisco, to start an artist colony. He told Jack London it would be a bohemian utopia, attracting people who were radicals “in their outlook on art and life.” It also attracted scandal: “Death was a common topic, with persistent talk of a suicide pact involving vials of cyanide. A disturbing darkness lurked beneath the seaside picnics, abalone roasts, and swims in the surf. In the end, it would overcome many of the colony’s members, including Sterling himself.”
Watch the trailer of HBO’s adaptation of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451.
Modern poetry and the problem of joy.
A. M. Juster writes about the talent and depth of Britain’s most popular poet: “Despite her obvious talent and Oxford education, Cope had to overcome many obstacles. She was a woman in a literary world dominated by males. She worked as an elementary school teacher, not as a professor or editor. She wrote primarily formal poetry at the highpoint of its disfavor within the academy. Perhaps the greatest obstacle to her literary acceptance was that her poems were humorous at a time when the establishment assumed that light verse had altogether died. Opinion leaders may have given Cope short shrift, but Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis stunned them by selling almost 200,000 copies, an extraordinary number for a British poetry book. Nonetheless, critics only rarely credited Cope for anything other than simply being funny; they passed over her range of styles and subjects, her ideas, her concision, her erudition, her unpredictability, and her mastery of form.”
Michael Dirda on the new Wrinkle in Time adaptation: “Let’s hope the movie is better than the book.”
The rise of woke capitalism.
Rod Dreher’s The Benedict Option wins the Paolucci Book Award.
Essay of the Day:
In The Weekly Standard, Joseph Epstein writes about his hometown of Chicago at its best and worst:
“The big news out of Chicago, city of my birth and upbringing, is murder. According to a reliable website called HeyJackass!, during 2017, someone in Chicago was shot every 2 hours and 27 minutes and murdered every 12 hours and 59 minutes. There were 679 murders and 2,936 people shot in the city. This, for those who like their deviancy defined down, is an improvement over 2016, when 722 people were murdered and 3,658 shot. The overwhelming preponderance of these people, victims and murderers both, are black, and the crimes committed chiefly in black neighborhoods on the city’s south and west sides. Many of the murders were among the sorts of gangs long familiar in Chicago, which over the years has seen the Egyptian Cobras, the Blackstone Rangers, the Disciples, and the Conservative Vice Lords, among many others. According to a 2008 Department of Justice report, something like 100,000 members of up to 75 gangs were operating in the city. Gang involvement in drug trafficking has upped the stakes and intensified the violence in many of the city’s black neighborhoods.
“Who to blame for this wretched, hideous, and genuinely barbarous situation? The city’s police, its politicians, its schools, its black leadership, contemporary black culture—all have come in for their share of accusations. But then Chicago has a rich tradition of murder. As early as 1910, the city led the nation in homicides and was known as the murder capital of the country. Much of the violence then and through the years of Prohibition was committed by organized crime. As late as the 1950s, when you told people you were from Chicago, they not uncommonly pretended to hoist a tommy gun and rat-a-tat-tatted away in reference to the bloody days of Al Capone and Co.
“Chicagoans long took a certain pride in this criminal tradition. Never called the Mafia, organized crime in Chicago was generally referred to as the Syndicate or the Mob or the Outfit, and sometimes just the Boys. So big was the Syndicate presence in Chicago that at least one of the local television news channels kept a special correspondent, a man named John Drummond, to cover Mob news. Organized crime often led off a news broadcast or garnered a front-page headline, as when Allen Dorfman, an adviser to the Teamsters’ Jimmy Hoffa and an all-around fixer, was gunned down in the parking lot of the Lincolnwood Hyatt. Mob figures—Tony ‘Big Tuna’ Accardo, Sam Giancana, Joseph Lombardo—were celebrities, known throughout the city. A juicy bit of gossip was when Mob guys showed up to play golf at the Tam O’Shanter Country Club. Best, sound advice had it, to let them play through.
“I myself, in the early 1970s, ran into a few of the Mob figures at the Riviera Club, where I sometimes played racquetball. Gus Alex, said to have been head of Mob gambling and prostitution in Chicago, was among them, and I remember locker-room discussions in which they expressed amazement at America’s dithering in Vietnam. The strong should never take any crap from the weak; ‘blow the bastards to hell’ was their view. The Mob influence reached all the way down to high schools, where football parlay cards—beat the spread on three college games and win $6 on a $1 bet—were always available. An Italian customer of my father’s told him that if he ever had a cash-flow problem, the Boys were ready to help out.”
Photos: Snow in Rome
Poem: Timothy Murphy, “Return to Rosebud”
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