Reviews and News:
The art of cheating in baseball: Remembering Red Faber, one of the last great spitballers.
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The fantastic adventures of Alexander Gardner: “In the 1860s, when British visitors first began to explore the high altitude pleasures of Kashmir, it was not just the beauties of the valley and the cool, pellucid waters of the Dal Lake which took their breath away. Living there was a legendary relic of an earlier age, who quickly became an object of pilgrimage for the curious sahibs puffing away at their cheroots on the sundecks of the houseboats. Alexander Gardner was, in the words of his latest biographer, John Keay, ‘a beturbaned colonel of uncertain nationality with a chequered past and a hole in the throat’.”
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Will a 12-part opera distributed online work? “Filmed in the historic San Francisco penitentiary (now part of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area) as well as other locations in the Bay Area, Southern California and New York over three years, Vireo is believed to be the first major opera project to be packaged episodically for digital distribution.”
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What can Sir Thomas Brown teach us today? He “shows us what can be gained from idle reveling.”
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What is it like to be an obituary columnist? “Obit is a fascinating exploration of a form of journalism that is simultaneously of both the past and the present. On one hand, the genre feels old-fashioned, if not unfashionable. The obituary page appeals to those middle-aged and older, while most journalists are obsessed with capturing the fleeting attention of youth. So much writing these days is designed to be consumed quickly and disposed of, while obituary writers don’t have the luxury of being forgotten. Their final word on their subjects comes with immense pressure from the departed’s friends and family to get it right. In other ways, though, obituary writing is just as fast-paced and disposable as what you might find on Buzzfeed or Gawker. One writer describes his job as ‘equal parts exhilaration and terror’. The Times’ obituarists walk into their little corner of the newsroom each day ignorant of their assignment; by the end of that day, each staffer will have been immersed in the life of a figure he may never have heard of before. A belly-dancing teacher. An underwater cartographer. The bass player from Bill Haley and the Comets. An expert on exotic chickens. The next day, they do it all over again.”
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The AP investigates its operations in Nazi Germany: “The report is the result of an exhaustive review of the work of the AP news bureau and its subsidiary picture service in Germany from 1931–45 and was prompted largely by an article written last year by German historian Harriet Scharnberg. Her paper concluded that the AP, by opting to stay in Germany during the years 1933–1941, ceded influence over the production of its news pictures to Nazi propagandists.”
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Plutarch’s Lives revisited: “Mensch’s translation captures the clarity of that work and a good deal of its easy forward momentum. Plutarch’s writing combines the comfortable, gossipy moralizing of Livy with the precise rhetorical calibration of Tacitus, and the result sparks with human insight unmatched by any other writer of the ancient world except the Greek tragedians. Plutarch is writing thematically, ethically pointed lives, so there’s scarcely a passage, however brief, that isn’t freighted with meaning.”
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Bruce Robbins reviews Joseph North’s Literary Criticism: A Concise Political History: “He is characteristically generous with the critics and scholars he profiles, always ready to find intellectual and political virtues in them. But what is going to be talked about in his book is the scandal of his classification itself: the fact that certain paragons of the academic left — Raymond Williams, Fredric Jameson, and Terry Eagleton among them — are here relegated to the category of scholars rather than critics. Even more heretically, North questions whether these writers, all crucial figures in the historicist canon, belong on the left at all.
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Essay of the Day:
In Tablet, Sean Cooper reports on the sold-out, $1,250-a-ticket Content Marketing Conference:
“The Content Marketing Conference takes place in a wing of the Westin Hotel. The spectacular, light-filled lobby is abuzz with men and women ages 20s to 50s in biz attire tapping on laptops, while others quickly wheel compact travel luggage over polished marble. A long escalator to the second floor is decorated with decals of male and female Superheroes soaring through space: neon-green faces, neon-green capes. Spandex-enhanced anatomies accompany motivational implorings such as ‘Rid the World of Bad Content.’
“The Struggling Writer is here because the roaring fire that was 20th-century nonfiction magazine literature has been hosed down to wet coals. In this new 21st-century post-literature era, the techniques and tools of the journalism trade have been plundered by scavenger industries, which rightly foresaw profit opportunities in what has been called branded content, native advertising, or content marketing, which agglomerates techniques used to build characters, create narrative arcs, and establish tones of voice that once served as conduits for nonfiction writers attempting to intimately mind-meld with readers. While journalism continues to struggle, burgled storytelling devices are being leveraged at scale by content-marketing agencies and branding studios that publish content stories to satisfy shareholder expectations. One industry analysis estimates that the content-marketing business will be worth $215 billion in 2017. The Struggling Writer is here to see them count the money.
“In the hallway of the exhibit hall, the S.W. eats the provided boxed lunch with Ketan: Indian, male, 30s. Ketan studied advertising in India as an undergrad and communications in grad school at Emerson and is now the primary content-marketing writer for the North American operations of a multibillion-dollar manufacturer of credit-card terminals. There are a few others on his team, but there are advantages to a single mind tasked w/overseeing all of the brand’s content. It allows him to create a cohesive brand voice and point of view across his employer’s websites, sell sheets, and text library.
“Ketan is skinny, calm, and polite, with parted black hair that reaches past his ears. The S.W. remarks that he’s been surprised by the quality of the content he’s been reading. Ketan says a book he returns to often is a collection of passages from renowned authors like Orwell broken down into techniques to study. ‘It’s important to keep learning,’ he says between sips from a can of Sprite. ‘Because you can always become a better writer.'”
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Image: Lightning storm moves across America
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Poem: Duane K. Caylor, “Stealing Pears”
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