Reviews and News:
Andy Warhol’s Catholicism: “Almost everyone who remained relevant in Andy’s life was Catholic…Being brought up Catholic gives a sense of hierarchical order, discipline and faith. Faith, when embraced, anchors the creative … I think it would also be fair to say that the romantically rich and multi-layered religion that forgives all – lest we forget! – allows unconventional traditionalists.”
Finland’s screwy sports. There’s the wife-carrying contest, of course, but also swamp soccer, hobbyhorse competitions, and the air guitar championship.
Svetlana Alexievich’s oral history of women at war: “As women, givers of life, they said they found killing harder than the men. Broken up into statements, some no longer than a few dozen lines, following on from each other without interruption, their stories tell of hearing the skulls of dead Germans crunching under the wheels of lorries, of rats so starving in Stalingrad that they ate knapsacks, of the corpses of sailors in striped jerseys so bloated that they looked like watermelons, and of leaving on missions with their babies strapped to their backs. And after they had recounted the fighting, they described the ordinary things, the falling in love, the men’s haircuts and uniforms they were forced to adopt, the way they curled their hair with pine cones and sat doing embroidery between the shelling, and how they missed their children.”
Your manuscript is thirty years late? The university press is still interested in it: “Scholarly presses, which don’t pay the enormous advances one might read about in The New York Times Sunday Book Review, have an interest in producing the best work possible, even if that means some projects far exceed deadlines most would consider timely. Ms. Salisbury said she has labored on a few of these projects, such as one she encountered while working at the University of Mississippi. It was a state encyclopedia that was started in the middle of the 1990s that just published this past spring, though she left that position in 2016.”
Archaeologists uncover “little Pompeii” south of Lyon: “The site unearthed on land awaiting construction of a housing complex covers an area of nearly 7,000 square metres (75,000 sq ft) – an unusually large discovery in an urban area that has been labelled an ‘exceptional find’ by the French culture ministry.”
Piers Plowman in the twenty-first century: “Of all the medieval masterpieces you might expect to be re-imagined for a contemporary audience, the dream vision Piers Plowman is one of the most unlikely. It’s a notoriously difficult poem, full of challenges and contradictions, and one whose length and language can strike fear into the heart of any overloaded English Literature student. Even experts are divided on this Marmite of medieval literature. While some are obsessed with it, dedicating a life’s work to uncovering its complexities, others go out of their way to avoid it… It has therefore been something of a surprise to see the summer of 2017 taken over by a kind of Piers Plowman franchise, created and curated by the literary arts company Penned in the Margins.”
No, HBO’s new series Confederate is not pro-slavery: “The New York Times op-ed page placed the following headline on a piece by writer Roxane Gay: ‘I don’t want to watch slavery fan fiction.’ Are Robert Harris’s novel Fatherland and Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle ‘Nazi fan fiction’ because they imagined what life would be like had Germany won World War II? Gay said in her piece, ‘Each time I see a reimagining of the Civil War that largely replicates what actually happened, I wonder why people are expending the energy to imagine that slavery continues to thrive when we are still dealing with the vestiges of slavery in very tangible ways.’ Gay is being amazingly obtuse here, because the proposition that ‘we are still dealing with the vestiges of slavery in very tangible ways’ is, as you might have guessed and as we have already learned, the central theme of the show.”
Essay of the Day:
Robert Louis Stevenson lived his final five years on the Pacific islands of Samoa. They were some of the happiest and most politically active and productive years of his life:
“Stevenson was always on the move. Before travelling to the Pacific, he tried to satisfy his body and spirit in Davos, New York, San Francisco and Bournemouth. In December 1889, the Reverend W E Clarke of the London Missionary Society noticed an unfamiliar outline by the beach at Apia in Samoa. Stevenson was by this time ‘so slender’, according to one person who encountered him, ‘that he looked taller than he really was; he was barefooted and walked with a long and curiously marked step, light but always metrical, in accord, it seemed, with some movement in mind’. Greeting the man and falling into conversation, Clarke mentioned ‘how much he had admired a book entitled Jekyll and Hyde’. Had the man read the novel? ‘Not only have I read it, I wrote it and before that I dreamt it,’ replied Stevenson.
“Clarke’s introduction to Stevenson – one perhaps too perfect to be entirely true – came at the start of the novelist’s time on the Samoan island Upolu. The story provides the opening scene for the final act in Stevenson’s life. He eventually made his home at Vailima, near Apia, where he wrote with astonishing industry, producing novels, ballads, verse and works of history, while pursuing a vigorous correspondence with friends at home. One estimate puts the number of words he wrote during his five years in Samoa at 700,000. And here too, in December 1894, he died.
“Stevenson’s time in Samoa and his accompanying voyages across the South Seas provide the focus for Farrell’s book. An emeritus professor at the University of Strathclyde and translator of literary works from Italian, Farrell comes armed with perceptive, elegant prose and a revealing understanding of Stevenson’s peculiarly Scottish frame of mind. For instance, he shows how Stevenson, brought up on Walter Scott’s Border ballads, was primed to collect and turn into fiction the island folklore he heard across Polynesia. At ease in Samoan society, Stevenson understood it through his knowledge of ‘the ethos and culture of community’ of the old Highland clan system. According to Farrell, Stevenson, the ‘lapsed’ Calvinist conservative, had ‘a quintessentially Scottish state of mind’. He was both comfortable in his new surroundings and impatient to remedy the evils he saw.”
Photo: Flåm
Poem: John Poch, “Texas Hollywood”
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