Reviews and News:
An unauthorized biography of Prince Charles doesn’t paint a very endearing portrait of the aging royal: “According to Tom Bower’s Rebel Prince, published on Thursday by William Collins, Charles once ‘shrieked’ and ‘trembled’ at the sight of an unknown plastic substance covering his dinner, only to be told ‘It’s cling film, darling,’ by Camilla. On another occasion, Bower claims the prince brought his own mattress, toilet seat, Kleenex Velvet toilet paper and two “landscapes of the Scottish Highlands” when visiting a friend in north-east England.”
Ian McKellen plays John Milton reciting Paradise Lost for BBC Radio 4: “Scenes of confrontations between the various dark angels as they look bitterly upon humanity (‘like to us but lesser in power and excellence’) all take place to the sounds of bubbling lava and distant screams, as though this were an aural Hieronymus Bosch, with unspeakable creatures wearing plague doctor masks lurching semi-broiled from steaming cauldrons. McKellen sounds uber-Gandalf, especially when relishing such phrases as ‘of man’s first disobedience’ and ‘the ways of mortals’.”
Bozo the Clown has died.
What has happened to Ricky Gervais? He has “morphed into something like the British Carlos Mencia: an irrelevant and mediocre public persona who deludes himself that his shabby material is simply too real for the haters to enjoy.”
Will “problematic” operas continue to be produced? Opera is “a target-rich environment” for today’s overly sensitive viewers. “Just in the main run of the repertoire alone, Aida, Madama Butterfly, Die Zauberflöte, Die Entführung aus dem Serail, L’Italiana in Algeri, Otello, Carmen, and Il Trovatore, among others, present “cultural imperialism” and “Orientalism”-style problems, while everything from Don Giovanni to Cav/Pag has questionable sexual politics…If you took out everything that jars with modern sensibilities, you’d be left basically with Don Carlo and La Bohème, the latter of which is only acceptable because broad stereotypes of Paris don’t offend us in the same way that broad stereotypes of Peking do.”
Kevin Williamson leaves National Review.
Napoleon’s English lessons. Exiled on Saint Helena following his defeat at Waterloo, Napoleon decided to learn God’s language: “The daily labour produced a mixed bag of verbal fruit; a sometimes bitter, sometimes sweet taste of his time on the island where he would end his days, six years later, aged 51.”
Essay of the Day:
In The New York Times Magazine, Elizabeth Weil asks why Aleksander Doba kayaked across the Atlantic, for the third time, at the age 70:
“When Aleksander Doba kayaked into the port in Le Conquet, France, on Sept. 3, 2017, he had just completed his third — and by far most dangerous — solo trans-Atlantic kayak trip. He was a few days shy of his 71st birthday. He was unaccustomed to wearing pants. He’d been at sea 110 days, alone, having last touched land that May at New Jersey’s Barnegat Bay. The trip could have easily ended five days earlier, when Doba was just a few hundred feet off the British coast. But he had promised himself, when he left New Jersey, that he would kayak not just to Europe but to the Continent proper. So he stayed on the water nearly another week, in the one-meter-wide boat where he’d endured towering waves, in the coffinlike cabin where he spent almost four months not sleeping more than three hours at a stretch, where he severely tried his loved ones’ patience in order to be lonely, naked and afraid. Then he paddled to the French shore.”
Photo: Bosco Gurin
Poem: Rainer Maria Rilke, “Early Apollo” (Translated by R. S. Gwynn)
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