Reviews and News:
It’s the 350th anniversary of the greatest epic poem in English, Paradise Lost, and hardly a word has been said. Not to compare oranges and tomatoes, it’s instructive nevertheless that the 50th anniversary of the first issue of Rolling Stone is in no danger of passing silently. Andrew Ferguson takes stock: “Joe Hagan has written what promises to be the standard biography of Jann Wenner—standard, because it’s hard to imagine anyone working up the energy to take another stab at it. Fifty years ago, at the age of 21, Wenner founded Rolling Stone magazine, and he’s been editor in chief ever since. Thanks to the anniversary, he has lately been much in the news. Not only has Hagan’s very long biography appeared, but so has a coffee-table book, 50 Years of Rolling Stone, a slab of self-congratulation recounting the magazine’s most celebrated articles and writers, with a not-humble introduction by Wenner. He has made the rounds on the chat shows, morning and evening. HBO, meanwhile, is airing a two-part, four-hour documentary, Rolling Stone: Stories from the Edge, produced by Wenner and codirected by the gifted left-wing documentarian Alex Gibney. Altogether it is enough commotion to cause the average consumer of media to rear back and ask: ‘But why?’ As it happens, there are at least two answers to that question. One is that Wenner possesses superhuman powers of self-promotion…The other answer is this: Wenner was a genuinely great editor, and as with all great editors his magazine was an extension of his ambitions and enthusiasms.”
Nautilus magazine owes its freelance writers $50,000 in back payments. On Wednesday, the writers published an open letter at the National Writers Union informing “Readers, Funders, and Board Members” of their situation. Why they think this will help them get paid and not scare off potential donors (wouldn’t you love to give $50,000 for year-old essays that will have no present effect on society?) is beyond me. Oh, and they also accuse the editor, John Steele, of misleading them in order to get free content. Steele has responded here.
Want to live a long and happy life? Learn to expect failure and make a habit of underestimating your future happiness.
“Jupiter’s Great Red Spot is a storm like nothing this world has ever seen. This crimson-hued anticyclone features winds three times as fast as the jet stream and is big enough to swallow Earth whole. It is almost surely older than any living human — 187 years at least — and could well still rage across the gas giant’s surface after all of us are gone.”
Fewer and fewer people are buying literary fiction in England. All the canned explanations are dusted off and put on the table in this piece: It’s because of Twitter, because of television, because of the “lack of experimentation.” Maybe there’s a simpler explanation?
3,500-year-old tombs opened and excavated in Egypt.
Barton Swaim remembers Murray Kempton: “The occasion of Murray Kempton’s centenary—he was born December 16, 1917—has attracted little attention. As a columnist for the New York Post and later Newsday he wrote more about New York than Washington or national politics, but one had a right to expect a biography or maybe a few essays or a short PBS documentary or at least an NPR spot. Nothing so far, except for an appreciation in his hometown Baltimore Sun and the little piece you’re reading.”
Essay of the Day:
Frankenstein’s monster is as popular as ever. “There have been more than three hundred editions of the original novel; more than 650 comic books and cartoon strips inspired by it; over 150 fictional spin-offs and parodies; at least ninety films, including James Whale’s 1931 classic with Boris Karloff; and something like eighty stage adaptations.” And, of course, the clincher: There are more Google results for Frankenstein than for Macbeth. Why has the novel been such a success? Richard Holmes on this and other questions in The New York Review of Books:
“That Mary persisted in developing her story throughout these domestic dramas, as well as diligently researching such authors as Erasmus Darwin and Humphry Davy, is truly remarkable. But it is hardly surprising that painfully adult themes of birth and death, the terrors and responsibilities of parenthood, and the agonies of the outcast or the unloved suffused her youthful imagination like blood. “The 1818 edition of the novel ran to a mere five hundred copies. It was the early theatrical adaptations that popularized the story. Presumption: or, The Fate of Frankenstein was first staged at the English Opera House in July 1823 and opened to scandalous publicity (‘Do not take your wives, do not take your daughters, do not take your families!’) and huge audiences. Five separate theatrical adaptations followed between 1823 and 1825, taking Frankenstein to Paris, Berlin, and eventually New York. In London, Mary Shelley herself attended in the stalls: ‘Lo and behold! I found myself famous! Frankenstein has had prodigious success as a drama…in the early performances all the ladies fainted and hubbub ensued!’
“The hubbub, so to speak, has never really died down. Danny Boyle’s stage production of Frankenstein (with Benedict Cumberbatch and Jonny Lee Miller alternately playing the Creature and his Creator) at the National Theatre, London, was a controversial popular hit in 2011. It was especially memorable for its opening coup de théâtre, in which the actor playing the Creature dropped buck-naked onto the stage from a huge, pulsing artificial womb and for several minutes writhed into glistening life in front of a stunned audience.”
Photo: Saskatchewan church
Poem: Kay Ryan, “Trough”
Get Prufrock in your inbox every weekday morning. Subscribe here.
