Reviews and News:
What better way to start your Monday than to read about an epic Yiddish poem on Kentucky? “According to conventional non-wisdom, American Jewish literature started in a Lower East Side sweatshop and then migrated to New Jersey, where it has remained until Philip Roth’s retirement. Of course, reading this way necessitates leaving out things that don’t fit the mold, like a canonical epic Yiddish poem about … Kentucky. Kentoki, as it’s known in Yiddish, first published serially in 1921–22, is largely forgotten today, revived only in translator Gertrude Dubrovsky’s 1990 English rendering published by the University of Alabama Press (and quoted here). But this vast lyrical masterwork was once required reading in Jewish schools from Lithuania to Argentina and was even set to music performed by Yiddish choirs around the world, providing an entire generation of Jews with their first glimpse of a wider America.”
Martin Gayford writes about the “fascinating and idiosyncratic” Renaissance artist Lorenzo Lotto: “Lorenzo Lotto’s portraits — nervous, intense and enigmatic — are among the most memorable to be painted in 16th-century Italy, but his fellow Venetians didn’t see it that way. In a letter to Lotto of 1548, the poet and satirist Pietro Aretino wrote that he was ‘outclassed in the profession of painting’ by Titian. Now, though, with an exhibition of his portraits in store at the National Gallery next year, it looks as though Lotto’s time may finally have come.”
Want to have a real traditional Christmas? Tell ghost stories: “‘Whenever five or six English-speaking people meet round a fire on Christmas Eve, they start telling each other ghost stories,’ humorist Jerome K. Jerome wrote in his 1891 collection, Told After Supper. ‘Nothing satisfies us on Christmas Eve but to hear each other tell authentic anecdotes about spectres. It is a genial, festive season, and we love to muse upon graves, and dead bodies, and murders, and blood.’”
Editing E. B. White: “The Graphic Arts Collection recently acquired The New Yorker magazine’s foundry book for the April 21, 1945 issue, which includes the copy edits and proofs for the entire magazine.” The issue contians work by White, John Cheever, and Edmund Wilson, among others.
Geoffrey Wheatcroft considers the “rural vision” of Eric Ravilious and his friends: “A lower-middle-class boy (‘not quite a gentleman,’ thought Tirzah Garwood when she met him, although she still married him), he made his way to the Royal College of Art and soon developed remarkable skill as a draughtsman and wood-engraver. He became a prolific and successful painter, but also an illustrator of posters and murals for exhibitions. Like every one of the artists mentioned in this article, he designed book jackets.”
Scientists are trying to figure out if a Greenland shark caught last year lived for 512 years, “which would mean that it was born in the year the future Henry VIII broke off his engagement to Catherine of Aragon.”
Essay of the Day:
What was life like at Scottish Highland retreats for Victorian visitors? Posh, Benjamin Riley writes in The New Criterion:
“One of the primary attractions was the annual slate of ghillies’ balls, where each estate’s employees and visitors would dance reels through the long summer nights. Georgiana Swinton, born a Sitwell, nostalgically recalled her yearly stays at the Gordons’ Kinrara in the 1830s: ‘I remember well the beautiful dancing of Cluny Macpherson [descendant of a famed Jacobite chieftain of the same name], and our difficulty in avoiding the invitations of the old shepherd, who was not over-clean.’ By the 1850s, it was recognized that Scotland had indeed been given over to the English. The Inverness Courier described the Highland Season as ‘much more an assembly of English sportsmen and Southern tourists than of the aristocracy of the Highlands,’ and at the Northern Meeting, a public show of Highland games and entertainments, ‘the kilt predominated among the Saxon part of the meeting, [with] the majority of the Highlanders present . . . wearing the less picturesque garb of the South.’
“In the Highlands, especially once the English arrived in force, remoteness was no excuse for parsimony. Duchess Jane Gordon entertained at Kinrara on a prolific scale. Cognac, rosé champagne, and sherry were delivered by Fraser Wilson of Inverness, while delicacies came all the way from London, courtesy of Mackay & Co, ‘purveyors of Truffles etc to hrh the Prince of Wales.’ William Dawson, a Piccadilly grocer, was known to send up ‘pickled tongues, cloves, cinnamon, ginger, nutmegs, macaroons, lemon pickle, milk chocolate, Turkish coffee, raisins, cocoa, and Indian almonds.’
“Much impetus behind the fashion surrounding Scotland must be ascribed to those arch Scotophiles Victoria and Albert, whose long stays and significant improvements at Balmoral, on the River Dee, initiated a vogue among the English for journeying northwards during the summer. ‘Scotch air, Scotch people, Scotch hills, Scotch rivers, Scotch woods, are all far preferable to those of any other nation in or out of this world,’ so Victoria said in 1849.
“And it was Balmoral that dictated the prevailing style of decoration in the Highlands, at least as interpreted by later practitioners. It is true that, as Miers puts it, ‘architecturally Balmoral was relatively uninfluential,’ owing to its status as a shooting lodge (albeit an elaborate one) rather than a Baronial seat. But its main influence was in the sphere of decor: the fashion for tartan everything and ‘glazed chintzes sprigged with thistles,’ which one wag noted were ‘in such abundance that they would rejoice the heart of a donkey.’”
Photo: The year in volcanic activity
Poem: Andrea Cohen, “Ring”
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