Reviews and News:
On Monday, I noted Colin Dickey’s plea to resurrect the Christmas ghost story. As if on cue, Michael Dirda recommends his favorite “heart-stopping tales of specters and spooks.”
How does a poet sell over 2.5 million books? Mix vaguely sappy lines with occasional denunciations of patriarchy, apparently: “When Kaur speaks, her fans, which she says are ‘60 percent female and 40 percent everything else,’ listen. They also whoop and holler when she delivers the climax of her most suggestive poem, Milk and Honey‘s ‘How We Make Up’: ‘Sweet baby, this is how we pull language out of one another with the flick of our tongues.’ They snap their fingers in solidarity after ‘What’s stronger than the human heart/ that shatters over and over and still lives,’ a line that found its way onto posters at the Women’s March in January. ‘Whenever I read her poems, I have the same thought: “This is exactly how I feel but never knew how to say it,”’ Lilly Singh writes in an email days after sharing the stage with Kaur to read selections from The Sun and Her Flowers.”
What was Christmas like with Bob Hope? His daughter remembers.
Priscilla Jensen tells the surprising history of “O Holy Night.” That the French original, “Minuit, Chrétiens” presents the “Redeemer as chain-breaker and brother of slaves,” Jensen writes, “had me madly guessing about the song’s history. It must be some time after the revolution because it’s genuinely Christian, but not terribly long afterwards, with its language of brotherhood unchained, its rather irregular theology, and the notable absence of a certain bourgeois namby-pambitude that comes to mind when one thinks of later-19th-century France. The 1830s, or maybe the ’40s, I guessed, and once we’d extricated ourselves from the commute, I went to check it out. And found a most astonishing story, with laurels, brickbats, calumny, anti-Semitism, cameo appearances by Brook Farm and Action française—in fact, enough nuts for the finest array of the 13 desserts traditional at Christmas feasts in the Languedoc, where ‘Minuit, Chrétiens,’ an example of a cantique de Noël, was first performed in December 1847.”
Nicholas Blincoe’s history of Bethlehem appears to have a predictable political angle, which is no surprise, perhaps, since his wife is Palestinian. Still, it looks like an interesting read provided you’re able to stomach the cant about “colonialization.”
Welcome to the Age of Outrage: “Today’s identity politics has another interesting feature: it teaches students to think in a way antithetical to what a liberal arts education should do.”
Essay of the Day:
The Kindle was released 10 years ago. In Wired, David Pierce looks back at the device’s success and failures and guesses at what the future might hold:
“It’s now been a decade since Amazon unveiled the first Kindle to the world. The first model seems ridiculous in retrospect—what with the giant keyboard filled with slanted keys, the tiny second screen just for navigation, and the mostly pointless scroll wheel—but was wildly popular, selling out its initial inventory in less than six hours. Since then, the device has torn through the publishing landscape. Not only is Amazon the most powerful player in the industry, it has built an entire book-based universe all its own. ‘Kindle’ has become a platform, not a device. Like Amazon tends to do, it entered the market and utterly subsumed it.
“Now, however, Amazon’s ebook project comes to a crossroads. The Kindle team has always professed two goals: to perfectly mimic a paper book, and to extend and improve the reading experience. That’s what readers want, too. In a world filled with distractions and notifications and devices that do everything, the Kindle’s lack of features becomes its greatest asset. But readers also want to read everywhere, in places and ways a paperback can’t manage. They want more tools, more features, more options, more stuff to do. Amazon’s still working out how to satisfy both sides. Whatever route it takes, the next decade of Kindle is likely to be even more disruptive than the last. First it changed the book business. Next it might help change books themselves.”
Photos: Christmas past
Poem: Edwin Arlington Robinson, “A Christmas Sonnet (For One in Doubt)”
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