Reviews and News:
A walking tour of London’s forgotten libraries: “Dr. Johnson’s House was just one of a dozen stops on Ford-Smith’s frequently sold-out tour of London’s forgotten book history. We started at Gray’s Inn Library in South Square, which was gutted during World War II, but had held a library of one sort or another since 1488 when there is evidence that Edmund Pickering bequeathed six books to be ‘chained’ there. The Inn is not a traditional traveling lodge, but one of the four Inns of the Court, a professional organization dedicated to educating and supporting students of law and barristers. The Inn doesn’t have a specified founding date but has been in operation since at least the fourteenth century; it housed Francis Bacon and counted Queen Elizabeth I as a patron. William Shakespeare is believed to have performed The Comedy of Errors at Gray’s—it has an exceptionally interesting history. But for our purposes, Ford-Smith focused on the impact of the war on London’s libraries. Gray’s, she explained, lost 30,000 books to Blitz-induced fire, the University College of London lost 100,000 books, and the British Library lost over 200,000.”
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On the trail of Hilaire Belloc’s “Tarantella”: “Have you ever travelled with a poem rather than a guidebook? If it’s by Hilaire Belloc, few pursuits could prove so satisfying. Belloc published his short poem ‘Tarantella’ in 1923, when he was in his fifties. Although I was a ten-year-old boy with no experience of booze when I first read it, Belloc’s reminiscence of a wild night out at a Pyrenean hostelry somehow lodged itself in my imagination.”
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Against empathy: “Empathy, in general, has an excellent reputation. But leads us to make terrible decisions, according to Paul Bloom, psychology professor at Yale and author of Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion. In fact, he argues, we would be far more moral if we had no empathy at all.”
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Chinese family poisoned by their home library (HT: Alan Cornett)
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Playing Walden the video game: “A few minutes into playing the game, one is struck by an absence. There are no hoops to jump through, no races to win, no enemies to subdue—just a world in which to be. This is something of a challenge in itself, but one of a different kind.”
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Camille Pissarro’s “high achievement”: “It was only at twenty-five that Pissarro settled in Paris. Upright, generous, independent-minded, and utterly devoted to his art, he gained the admiration of his colleagues there—to the nine-years-younger Cézanne, he was “rather like God”—so that while he may have lacked for buyers, he never lacked for friends. Moreover, with Julie Vellay, the Frenchwoman he married, he started to raise a large family. But whenever Pissarro—who always retained a Danish passport—stood at his easel to paint rural France, the question implicitly remained of his relation to this adopted terrain.”
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Essay of the Day:
A historian praised for his “breathtaking” erudition is dismissed for his “brazen obscenity” in a posthumous collection of essays. Christopher Caldwell tells the story in The New York Times:
“After the German historian Rolf Peter Sieferle took his own life last September at age 67, Süddeutsche Zeitung, the country’s progressive paper of record, called his erudition ‘breathtaking.’ For three decades Mr. Sieferle had applied the old traditions of German social science to new preoccupations, from ecological sustainability to social capital. He was among the pioneers of German environmental history. He wrote on Marx, German conservatism around World War I and the end of Communism. He advised Angela Merkel’s government on climate change.
“But last month, a posthumous collection of Mr. Sieferle’s observations on Germany’s political culture, Finis Germania (the title plays on a phrase meaning “the end of Germany”), hit No. 9 on the prestigious Nonfiction Book of the Month list — and a scandal erupted. Certain passages on Germany’s way of dealing with the Holocaust horrified reviewers. Die Zeit called it a book of ‘brazen obscenity.’ The Berliner Zeitung wrote of Mr. Sieferle’s ‘intellectual decline.’ Süddeutsche Zeitung retracted its earlier praise. The Nonfiction Book of the Month list was suspended until further notice.
“The book-buying public reacted otherwise. As critical anger rose, so did sales. Soon the book was selling 250 copies an hour, according to its publisher, and ranked No. 1 on Amazon’s German best-seller list, a position it held for almost two weeks, until the publisher ran out of copies.
“What exactly had Mr. Sieferle said? Was this a betrayal of his intellectual legacy, as critics claimed? A vindication of it, as his sales suggested? Or had he simply gone off the rails at a time when public opinion was doing the same?”
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Photo: Church and Alps
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Poem: Frederick Wilbur, “Equinox”
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