Reviews and News:
Why is 20 percent of Japanese land without an identifiable owner? A declining population and feudal laws are apparently to blame: “Land registration is not compulsory; rather, it is a civil law procedure designed to let owners protect their property rights and use them as collateral. Land left unregistered is not lost but simply unrecorded. When all land had value, all the owners registered it. But heirs to worthless parcels of land have no reason to register their interest simply so that the taxman knows where to find them. Add in an inheritance law modeled on France and Germany, which gives all children a statutory share of their parents’ assets, and land ownership quickly becomes hopelessly opaque.” (HT: Adam Keiper)
Elena Ferrante to write a column for The Guardian’s Weekend magazine.
In 1865, there were only 700 publications in the United States. In 1890, there were 4,400. What happened?
Revisiting the Spanish flu of 1918: “This year marks the centenary of Spanish flu, the most deadly pandemic in human history. It is estimated that five hundred million people contracted it – a third of the global population in 1918 – and that between fifty and a hundred million of them died. Asians were thirty times more likely to die than Europeans. The pandemic had some influence on the lives of everyone alive today. Donald Trump’s grandfather Friedrich died from it in New York City. He was 49. His early death meant that his fortune passed to his son Fred, who used it to start a New York property empire. My wife’s great-grandmother died from it in Verona; her grandfather, aged eight, had to leave school and find work to support the family. Emilio died in 2011 aged 101. When I told a friend, the writer Andrew Greig, that I was writing this piece, he told me that his father, born in 1899, came down with Spanish flu while on leave from the war in France. ‘His convalescence delayed his return to the front, where his battalion was all but wiped out,’ Andrew said. ‘He always insisted Spanish flu saved his life, and without it, I suppose I wouldn’t be alive either.’”
Paradise Lost is not as popular as it used to be—at least in the West. In the latest issue of the magazine, I explain why you should still read it.
Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury to be adapted to television.
Essay of the Day:
In the 1950s, singer and actor Paul Robeson was internationally famous. When he died in 1976, most people had forgotten he was still alive. Today, hardly anyone under 50 knows who he is. What happened? He was radicalized:
“His appearances in England were especially warmly received: he was seen onstage in The Emperor Jones, Show Boat, and, most daringly, as Othello. His singing voice was extensively broadcast by the BBC, and he made films; by 1938 he was one of the most popular film stars in Britain. Swanning around in the most elegant circles, hobnobbing on equal terms with painters, poets, philosophers, and politicians, he felt exhilarated by England’s apparent lack of racial prejudice. He bought himself a splendid house, threw parties at which one simply had to be seen, and engaged in a series of liaisons with English women under his wife’s nose.
“He had not completely given in to the adoration, though. All the while, he was being quietly radicalized. He consorted with left-wing thinkers and young firebrands, like Kwame Nkrumah and Jomo Kenyatta, bent on overthrowing colonial rule. Touring Europe, drawing crowds of tens of thousands to his concerts, he was stirred by his audiences’ response to his music, and became interested in theirs. He was, he said, a folk singer, not an art singer; folk music, he declared, was universal, the living proof of the community of mankind. He absorbed his audience’s songs into his repertory, whenever possible in the original language; enrolling in the philology department of the School of Oriental and African Languages at London University, he began a study of African languages.
“His increasing awareness of left-wing ideology showed in his choice of work—in London he played the leading role in Stevedore, a play that directly addressed racism—but also inexorably led him to Moscow in 1934. Russia grasped him to its collective bosom; audiences went mad for him, Sergei Eisenstein wanted to make a film with him as Jean-Christophe, emperor of Haiti. He was overwhelmed, declaring that for the first time in his life he felt himself to be ‘not a Negro but a human being’; he placed his young son in a Russian school.”
Photos: 2018 Dakar Rally
Poem: Gail White, “True Endings”
Get Prufrock in your inbox every weekday morning. Subscribe here.
