Reviews and News:
Poet and antiquarian Ernest Hilbert writes about a “colorful” history of dust jackets: “We are cautioned to avoid judging a book by its cover, yet that is precisely what publishers hope we will do.”
Why do conductors do the things they do? Terry Teachout explains in a review of the wonderful new book Maestros and Their Music: “To read Maestros and Their Music is to come away with a much clearer understanding of what its author calls the ‘strange and lawless world’ of conducting—and to understand how conductors whose technique is deficient to the point of seeming incompetence can still give exciting performances.”
Helen Castor reviews Meetings With Remarkable Manuscripts, “one of the least likely and most wonderful books I have ever read,” she writes. “Least likely: Where to start? It’s a vanishingly rare pleasure, given the commercial constraints of modern publishing, to handle 600 smoothly weighty pages in which the printed text winds its way seamlessly among more than 200 glorious, often full-color illustrations. And in producing such a gorgeous object, Christopher de Hamel’s publisher has had the courage of his convictions, because its physical and visual delights mirror its commercially unlikely subject matter.”
Harvard classicist Richard F. Thomas claims Bob Dylan is the modern heir to Virgil and Homer. Sean O’Hagan isn’t buying it: “‘He is part of that classical stream,’ asserts Thomas, ‘whose spring starts out in Greece and Rome and flows on down though the years…’ This may be so, but in affixing Dylan’s songwriting to that Graeco-Roman tradition, Thomas is forced to constantly negotiate a line between the scholarly and the tenuous. We learn, for instance, that the young Robert Zimmerman liked Hollywood-produced cod-Roman epics as a boy and was briefly a member of his school’s Latin club. How much this proves a deep and abiding affinity with the classics is debatable. Likewise, the number of times that Dylan has included Rome on his touring schedule is hardly evidence of the same given that Dylan tours the world’s capitals constantly.”
Studios are beginning to digitally resurrect actors, and it’s a terrible idea Alexi Sargeant argues over at The New Atlantis: “Peter Cushing’s performance in 2016’s Rogue One: A Star Wars Story is remarkable because Cushing died in 1994. Industrial Light & Magic’s computer-generated imagery (CGI) wizards digitally resurrected Cushing to once again portray the villainous Imperial Grand Moff Tarkin, a central antagonist of the original 1977 Star Wars, in which the character brutally orders the destruction of Princess Leia’s home planet of Alderaan. Recreating Cushing for Rogue One was experimental in two senses: Disney was testing out both the technology and audiences’ reactions to it.”
Jane Austen’s “desperate” walking.
Essay of the Day:
In the latest issue of The Weekly Standard, Cathy Young recommends one of my favorite novels—Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita—which was published 50 years ago:
“How to describe The Master and Margarita? Winston Churchill’s quote about Russia comes to mind: ‘a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.’ The story is fantasy and magic ranging from farcical deviltry to high mysticism to horror. It is riotously funny, with moments of both high and low comedy. It is mordant social satire, vividly portraying Moscow life in the mid-1930s. (The novel, on which Bulgakov worked from 1928 until his final days, mentions no dates and contains contradictory clues pointing to 1934-36 as the likely timeframe.) It is a novel of philosophy and religion, with a story-within-the-story that offers a unique revisionist account of Pontius Pilate’s role in the crucifixion of Jesus. It is a poignant love story. It is a story about literature, creative freedom, and the conflict between the artist and the repressive state—in which the artist wins against all odds.”
Read the rest. Photo: 17-story dragon
Poem: Adam Cooper, “Saint Martha and the Dragon”
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