Reviews and News:
A couple of items from the German desk here at Prufrock: Why are Germans so successful? They complain. A lot. Jonathan Kay traces the invasion of German board games. And last: Germans used to love diesel. Not anymore.
On Friday, I reported that Elena Ferrante would be writing a regular column for The Guardian. Here’s her first, and it’s about love, running under the cliché “I loved that boy to the point where I felt close to fainting.” Her failure at cleverness throughout is all the worse since it is so obviously her only goal. All columnists write to be thought of as clever, of course. The key is to not seem to do so.
In defense of the Western tradition: “For Wilson, the Western tradition is the Christian Platonist one, in which the two basic facts about existence are that the universe is ordered and that its order is intelligible to the human mind. These two facts are augmented by Christian belief in a personal God who loves us unconditionally and desires that we love him. This tradition, argues Wilson, has been overshadowed by the Enlightenment and the philosophies descended from it. The problem with the Enlightenment is that while it begins as an attempt to understand the universe, it has devolved into a crude materialism that denies objective reality.”
William Melvin Kelley published four novels and a collection of short stories between 1962 and 1970. Over the next 47 years, he didn’t publish another book. Kathryn Schulz revisits his life and work.
Joseph Bottum considers whether bad people can make good art in a review of Daniel Swift’s account of Ezra Pound’s treason and supposed insanity.
Huffington Post tries to get rid of its fake news: “Since its founding nearly 13 years ago, The Huffington Post has relied heavily on unpaid contributors, whose ranks included aspiring writers, citizen journalists and celebrities from the Rolodex of the site’s co-founder Arianna Huffington…But the site’s days of encouraging everyday citizens to report on the news are over. On Thursday, it said it was immediately dissolving its self-publishing contributors platform — which has mushroomed to include 100,000 writers — in what is perhaps the most significant break from the past under its editor in chief, Lydia Polgreen, who joined the news site, which is now called HuffPost, a year ago.”
Essay of the Day:
In The New York Review of Books, Gary Saul Morson writes about Isaac Babel’s short life and grim wit:
“On January 17, 1940, Stalin approved the sentences of 346 prominent people, including the dramaturge Vsevolod Meyerhold, the former NKVD (secret police) chief Nikolai Yezhov, and the writer Isaac Babel. All were shot. Babel had been arrested on May 15, 1939, in the middle of the night, and, the story goes, he remarked to an NKVD officer: ‘So, I guess you don’t get much sleep, do you?’
“Grim wit was Babel’s trademark. He is best known for a cycle of short stories entitled Red Cavalry, a fictionalized account of his experiences as a Bolshevik war correspondent with a Cossack regiment during the Soviet invasion of Poland in 1920. Lionel Trilling, who introduced Babel to the English-speaking world, recognized these stories as the masterpiece of Soviet literature. Some of Babel’s other stories, especially his Odessa tales, also impressed Trilling and have remained favorites. They offer a tragicomic portrait of Odessa’s large Jewish community, with its rabbis, sensitive schoolboys, and, improbably, a Jewish gangster whose adventures combine epic heroism with a trickster’s ingenuity.
“How did a young man ‘with spectacles on his nose and autumn in his heart,’ as he describes himself in one story, wind up in a regiment of Cossacks, known for their extreme brutality, violent masculinity, and hatred of Jews? Born into a middle-class Jewish family in 1894, Babel, who received a traditional Jewish education, was steeped in the polyglot, multicultural communities of Odessa, where he acquired fluency in Hebrew, Yiddish, and French, as well as Russian. In one story, he describes how Odessa Jews were obsessed with turning their sons into great violinists, like Mischa Elman or Jascha Heifetz; but Babel, who concealed copies of Turgenev on his music stand, preferred the traditional Russian view of literature as the most important thing in the world.”
Photo: Belogorsky Monastery
Poem: Moira Egan, “Jardin du Poète”
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