Reviews and News:
A new collection of letters between Tolstoy and his wife, Tolstaya, casts light on the couple’s difficult and complex relationship: “But living with the burden of single-handedly caring for a large family (Tolstoy did little to help on that front), while also handling Tolstoy’s publishing affairs, Tolstaya felt keenly underappreciated and, perhaps as a result, keenly aware of the one-sidedness and hypocrisy of Tolstoy’s thinking…Two weeks before Tolstoy’s fateful departure, Tolstaya learned that he had signed a secret will giving his literary legacy to the public domain. She blamed this black deed on Tolstoy’s disciple—her archenemy—Chertkov. ‘The government, which you and he have excoriated and lambasted in every which way in all your leaflets—will now legally take away from your heirs their last piece of bread and hand it over to the Sytins and various rich printshop owners and swindlers, while at the same time Tolstoy’s grandchildren will die of hunger thanks to [Chertkov’s] evil and vainglorious volition,’ she lamented. ‘Step by step, through its various actions, Christian love murders the person closest to one (in my sense, not yours)—one’s wife, on whose part there have never, ever, been any evil actions, and there are none now, apart from the most acute suffering.’”
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Does this mark the end of Spain’s three-hour lunch breaks?
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How Artsy convinced galleries to sell fine art online: “Artsy co-founder and CEO Carter Cleveland grew up surrounded by high culture and numbers. The son of an art historian and a financier, when he enrolled at Princeton in 2005, he says he was shocked by the transition from a home full of fine art to the empty walls of his dorm room. So, he set out to decorate, but he was surprised to find there was almost no fine art available to browse or purchase online.”
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Andrew Ferguson on Ring Lardner’s journalism: “Every tendril of 20th-century American literature and entertainment shows his influence. You find him in art high and low. The grotesques of Flannery O’Connor, Eudora Welty’s sly Southern hicks, the laconic heroes of Hemingway’s first stories, Liebling’s boxers, the rummies of Joseph Mitchell—they are unimaginable without Lardner’s having gone before…But it was as a sports reporter and newspaper columnist that he learned to write, and he always remained a journalist at heart: He wrote fast, in great profusion, and for the moment. Reporters on the run often develop little tricks that allow them to kickstart the motor. Lardner’s trick was to slip into the dialect of a Midwestern rube and write the way he talked. He was himself a college dropout from Niles, Michigan, and had a touch of innocence in him. His journalism and his fiction are therefore sometimes hard to tell apart. In both, his sentences race along with double and triple negatives, grammatical boners, comic misspellings, malapropisms, and brutal disagreements between subject and verb.”
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Daisy Fried reviews Adam Zagajewski’s Slight Exaggeration: “The Polish poet Adam Zagajewski’s splendid new book of prose, Slight Exaggeration, is constructed of untitled anecdotes, essays and meditations, some mere sentences long. Writing on art, family, war, ideas, ideology — pretty much whatever his mind settles on — Zagajewski is in fact always writing about displacement. Readers of his poems will recognize his preoccupation with Lvov, a city lost to his parents and their friends after Poland ceded it to the Soviet Ukraine after World War II. With it, they also lost culture, beauty and any sense of being at home. ‘It pains me to know I never lived there,’ Zagajewski writes, lauding ‘the city’s hills and the many spires of its churches.’ He notes ‘the clean sky in May’ and, in the next sentence, ‘the horror of war and occupation (but I didn’t endure it, didn’t see it).’ This acknowledgment of Zagajewski’s own displacement from displacement makes his longing much more than attractive nostalgia.”
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Revisiting the phenomenon of Gef, the talking mongoose: “For several years in the 1930s the case of this Manx mongoose – who was said to speak in a range of foreign languages including ‘Hindustani’, as well as singing, whistling, coughing ‘in a human manner’, swearing, dancing and attending political meetings – was discussed across Britain. As a fantastical beast, he was a contemporary of Nessie, the Loch Ness Monster, who was first supposedly photographed in 1933, although his fame was shorter-lived. Sometimes he called himself an ‘earthbound spirit’ and sometimes a ‘marsh mongoose’. When he first arrived at the Irving house in 1931, he was said to be a malevolent presence, a kind of ‘man-weasel’ who frightened the family with satanic laughter. Over the months, however, the Irvings warmed to some of Gef’s ways, and he became a pet of sorts, who amused the family with his gossip and jokes. He was less eager to share these witticisms with outsiders who came to the house to check him out. He didn’t like to speak to people who doubted him and punished them with silence and insults or threatened to blast them away with a shotgun.”
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Essay of the Day:
I first read the American poet A. R. Ammons a few years before he died in 2001. In Harper’s, Helen Vendler takes a look at his life and work:
“In his childhood home, Ammons once said, there were only three books: the family Bible and two others. There were also (who knows how) eleven pages of Robinson Crusoe, which, along with the sermons and hymns he encountered at the charismatic Pentecostal Fire-Baptized Holiness Church, helped to form his literary imagination. He was in the eighth grade when a teacher recognized his verbal gift and praised his first composition. He began to read voraciously in a wide range of subjects (the sciences, anthropology, ancient history, and, of course, poetry), a habit he maintained throughout his life. It was thanks to this reading that when, in his late teens, his dramatic Christianity failed him, Ammons quickly found a system he could credit intellectually — the inflexible laws of the universe, described in disciplines ranging from the bacteriological to the astronomical. The conflict between those lofty, inhuman laws and the phenomenal life of the body generated much of his poetry. As he wrote in 1970 to Harold Bloom, his first academic admirer, he was trying to pull off a ‘secularization of the imagination’: ‘The spiritual has been with us and will remain with us as long as we have a mind. . . . I don’t feel the desertion [Wallace] Stevens felt [when the gods disappeared], but how could I; I never felt the comfort he imagines before the desertion.’ What Ammons had chiefly felt during his early exposure to religion was terror — the dread of hell and the fear of the Rapture.
“After high school, Ammons worked in a shipyard in Wilmington; when World War II began, he enlisted in the Navy to avoid being drafted into the Army. He never saw combat, but as a yeoman, doing a clerical job, he was given access to a typewriter, a machine later indispensable to some of his poetic effects. During his service, Ammons kept a journal, amassed vocabulary lists, and studied materials from the Navy’s courses in speech and composition. Around night watches, he wrote his first poems — inept pieces in standard rhyme and meter, by turns sentimental and comic. More essential to him than these early attempts at verse were his awed shipboard observations of the interactions between land and sea. As he told The Paris Review in 1996: ‘The whole world changed as the result of an interior illumination: the water level was not what it was because of a single command by a higher power but because of an average result of a host of actions — runoff, wind currents, melting glaciers. I began to apprehend things in the dynamics of themselves — motions and bodies. . . . I was de-denominated.’
“The multiple separate actions absorbed into ocean swells and affecting the bordering shore tutored the young sailor in the vexed relation between multiplicity and unity, a theme that would preoccupy him throughout his career.”
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Photos: Under Antarctica
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Poem: Joseph Mirra, “The Crowd”
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