Reviews and News:
The Joconde Nue—a charcoal sketch of a partially nude woman—that was previously attributed to Leonardo’s students is now believed to have been done, “at least in part,” by Da Vinci himself. “We are looking at something which was worked on in parallel with the Mona Lisa at the end of Leonardo’s life. It is almost certainly a preparatory work for an oil painting,”
Giant coconut-eating rats discovered on the Solomon Islands. The rodents are a foot and a half long and weight over 2 pounds—four times the size of North American rats.
Ernest Hemingway’s first short story—written when he was 10—has been discovered in Key West.
The many lives of David Bowie: “Jones’s biography takes awhile to generate momentum, mirroring Bowie’s early career, but it offers the discerning reader clues as to how all the pieces fit together, how the Starman eventually morphed into the whiter-than-white soul man of ‘Young Americans’ and anticipated his own death as ‘Lazarus.’ Whatever Bowie you want is here, from genius to opportunist.”
In Case You Missed It:
In Lapham’s Quarterly, Alison Kinney writes about Richard Wagner’s biggest 19th-century fan: Ludwig II, king of Bavaria. Shortly after a performance of Tristan und Isolde, he began work on a castle that he called “a worthy temple for the divine friend who has brought salvation and true blessing to the world.”
Why do orchestras play behind the conductor’s beat?
Hayden Pelliccia reviews two new translations of the Iliad: “The two recent translators of the Iliad, both veteran classical scholars, have long inhabited that now largely abandoned category, Man of Letters. Barry Powell has published poems of his own; Peter Green has translated Apollonius of Rhodes, Catullus, Ovid, and Juvenal, and both are novelists. Both now bid (Green avowedly so) to seize the crown of the long-reigning king of Homer translators, Richmond Lattimore, whose Iliad of 1951 remains the standard. If either succeeds, I suspect it will be Green, though his competitor is a worthy one.”
What was news like before the 20th century? Pretty much the same as it is now…only sung, in verse.
Interview: Bill Kristol talks with Paul Cantor about Shakespeare’s Roman plays.
Classic Essay: William F. Buckley, Jr., “The Playboy Philosohy”
Get Prufrock in your inbox every weekday morning. Subscribe here.
