Reviews and News:
Prehistoric footprints have been found in British Columbia. “It supports the idea that the first peopling of the Americas was from eastern Asia at a time of lower sea levels, when the landmasses were larger.”
Is the future of criticism sponsorship? “The standard concern raised is that subsidized criticism jeopardizes the integrity of the artist-critic relationship, that a reviewer’s opinion of a production will be skewed if he relies on the show itself for his livelihood. It’s a valid concern, but there are innumerable ways around it.”
Alan Jacobs on contemporary children’s crusades: “One clever little speciality of adult humans works like this: You very carefully (and, if you’re smart, very subtly) instruct children in the moral stances you’d like them to hold. Then, when they start to repeat what you’ve taught them, you cry ‘Out of the mouths of babes! And a little child shall lead them!’ And you very delicately maneuver the children to the front of your procession, so that they appear to be leading it — but of course you make sure all along that you’re steering them in the way that they should go. It’s a social strategy with a very long history.”
Another call from Commonwealth writers to ban Americans from the Man Booker.
How Murillo fell out of fashion: “Bartolomé Esteban Murillo (1617-1682) offers a case study in changing taste. From the early 20th century, the painter, famous for his religious pictures and images of street urchins, began to fall from favour. His pictures have been deemed cloyingly sweet or uncomfortably patronising and lacking the astringency of, say, Velázquez or Francisco de Zurbarán, and his sensibility has been re-read as sentimentality. For 250 years, however, Murillo was one of the most lauded painters of all.”
The problem with Pound: “There is still a fundamental inconsistency, Swift suggests, in how we view Pound. He ended up in St. Elizabeths because his friends were able to convince a jury that a poet of such sensibility and intelligence who said the things he said and wrote the things he wrote must be crazy. But to adopt this same attitude to Pound’s legacy—as Swift convinces us we largely have—is both to let him off the hook morally and to limit our engagement with his writing to a sterile formalism.”
Essay of the Day:
Ed Simon explains the science of Paradise Lost in Aeon:
“Paradise Lost (1674) is a consummate example of scientific literature. In it, John Milton effectively mimics the debates that motivated the New Science of his era, and the result is a poem that is ‘scientific’ not just because its content sometimes concerns nature, but also because its rhetoric imitates the emerging scientific method. And much of that, I argue, is due to Galileo, the man whom Milton described as ‘the Tuscan artist with optic glass’.
“For readers who half-remember Milton from an undergraduate survey course, this might be a surprising contention. While the poet still generates reams of journal articles, dissertations and academic books, when the general public thinks of him, it’s often as a dour Puritan poet writing dour Puritan poetry (which assumes that ‘Puritan’ is even an appropriate designation for him). But in fact his greatest work depicts, among other things, how scientific debate operates.
“Far from seeing themselves in opposition to natural philosophy, many Puritans embraced empirical science as a practical application of their religious understanding, and while the simplistic reductionism that views the scientific revolution as a direct product of the Reformation has been made more nuanced by subsequent historiography, it remains true that many Puritans of Milton’s era celebrated the burgeoning scientific method as an extension of their own theology.”
Photos: Northern Lights as seen from a U-2 spy plane
Poem: Timothy Murphy, “Lama Sabachthani”
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