Reviews and News:
The story of Steven Bannon, honey badger: “If there’s a lesson to draw from Devil’s Bargain, Joshua Green’s deeply reported and compulsively readable account of Bannon’s fateful political partnership with Trump, it is not to underestimate the honey badger. ‘If I didn’t come along, the Republican Party had zero chance of winning the presidency,’ Trump told Green, a senior national correspondent for Bloomberg Businessweek, in May 2016, and he was probably right. Only someone with his and Bannon’s transgressive instincts, along with their seeming incapacity for moral and intellectual embarrassment, could have defeated the well-oiled if soulless machine that was Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign.”
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How to read a Gutenberg Bible.
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A new book on boxing’s most accomplished but least celebrated figures.
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Is linguistics a science?
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The Royal Shakespeare Company introduces “chilled performances”: “It will stage its first ‘chilled performance’, of Shakespeare poem Venus and Adonis, on August 1 in the Swan Theatre. The performance will be characterised by a more casual approach to noise and movement in the auditorium.”
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Girl taking a selfie at a Los Angeles art show knocks down 16 crowns.
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Nick Ripatrazone on dystopian fiction after Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.
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Revisiting Antonio di Benedetto’s Zama: “During the military dictatorships of the 1970s, exile for many Latin American writers was not so much a state of being as a vocation. Some were given early warning of what might befall them if they stayed…Other writers were not so lucky. Antonio di Benedetto was rounded up in the first wave of arrests in 1976 and sent to prison, where he was tortured over a period of 18 months. On four occasions he was made to face mock firing squads; yet his real torment resulted from not being told what his true crime was — this was reality as written by Kafka. Exile in Europe, which was furthered by a series of PEN International appeals, was followed by Di Benedetto’s return to a democratic Argentina in 1984. He died in his homeland two years later; though for those who knew him well he had started to die a decade before. He left behind a body of work, much praised by fellow writers but, as is often the case, overlooked by the reading public.”
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Essay of the Day:
In First Things, Garrick Davis remembers studying under Derek Walcott:
“The great poet of the Caribbean, Derek Walcott, passed away at home on his native island of St. Lucia on March 17. It is hard to summarize his achievement. He wrote more than twenty books of poetry, most notably Omeros (1990), which transplants the Trojan War to the Caribbean fishing world and helped deliver him the Nobel Prize in 1992. He wrote dozens of plays, too, often directing them himself, and he composed important essays about colonialism and identity before these became trendy subjects. He founded theater companies and taught poetry at Columbia, Yale, Rutgers, and, for many years, Boston University.
“I attended his classes at BU for a semester in 2001. A few months before, he had given a poetry reading at a college in Monterey, California, and I dared to introduce myself afterward. We talked for a few minutes and discovered we shared some contrarian views on the state of American poetry. He suggested I sit in on his classes back east, and I immediately took up the invitation. And so I found myself commuting from California to the Charles River that year, excited to savor the wisdom of a distinguished master.
“The first day of class was a surprise. I found my way across campus to the room listed in the schedule, expecting a studious lecture hall with fifty students who shared my eagerness. But the room turned out to be a tiny, nondescript space with only nine students waiting inside. Professor Walcott ambled in without ceremony, set down his papers, smiled, and began reading a poem by Edward Thomas. In a lilting St. Lucian accent, Walcott spoke:
The glory of the beauty of the morning, –
The cuckoo crying over the untouched dew; The blackbird that has found it, and the dove That tempts me on to something sweeter than love . . . “He read the entire poem (‘The Glory’). I enjoyed every syllable (you can hear his mesmerizing cadences as he reads the opening lines of Omeros in a recording posted on YouTube). When he finished, he paused, but didn’t commence a discussion. Instead, he reread the first line, and then again several times more with rising exaltation: ‘The glory of the beauty of the morning!’ He scanned the students’ faces for agreement. They must have looked quizzical (I might have, too), because he pressed, ‘Well, isn’t it an extraordinary line? Isn’t it a line that any poet would be proud to write?’ He waited for us to concur. Several cleared their throats and looked embarrassed. More silence, until one of us finally replied: ‘No, I wouldn’t be proud to write such a line—it’s old-fashioned somehow.’ Walcott stared, and a look of dismay passed over his face. He did not argue with the student, but waited patiently for others to disagree with this view. More moments passed in awkward quiet.
“That was my first class experience. It was clear that Walcott was astonished. ‘No one here would be proud to write such a line?’ he continued. ‘No one here would like to write like Edward Thomas?’ His broad bronze face and sea-green eyes registered a mix of disbelief and weariness. I could imagine his inner thoughts. Here he was in one of the most prestigious writing programs in America, teaching students who had been rigorously selected for their talents, and yet there was a chasm of taste between them that was impossible to overcome.”
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Photo: Thunder moon over Pisa
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Poem: Roy Bentley, “1975”
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