Reviews and News:
Thomas Jefferson’s ivory polyptych: “An ivory polyptych…is an ivory notebook of many pages—and that is exactly what Jefferson used each day to record temperature, wind direction, weather, bird migrations and many other indicators of the climate and season. Jefferson was following a long-held tradition. Portable, erasable writing tablets continued to be used from Roman times onward…while ivory notebooks in particular became fashionable in the 18th and 19th centuries.”
Superman’s best friend: “The movies ignore the best thing about the Man of Steel: his dog, Krypto.”
Joseph Bottum reviews Kevin Young’s Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts, and Fake News: “You will either love the sprawl of Bunk—the personalization, the wandering trails, the scent of musty archives explored in part for their musty scent—or you will hate the book’s odd character: essentially Sir Thomas Browne’s Pseudodoxia Epidemica, hauled from 1646 into 2017. I hope you love it, for with Bunk, Kevin Young has produced a unique muddle, an eccentric masterpiece, and a slow-burn bonfire.”
Reconsidering early modern honor: “Before people had an image, they had their honour. For much of history, little was more valuable than individual honour. ‘Better to die 10,000 deaths than wound my honour,’ as a character in Joseph Addison’s Cato, A Tragedy (1712) put it. In his bestselling Of Domesticall Duties (1622), William Gouge declared: ‘a good name is a most pretious thing.’ Despite the persistence of the word and a loosely related idea, the concept of honour, as earlier eras understood it, is so foreign to moderns that it can be hard to grasp.”
The sources of Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms.
Trevor C. Merrill praises the “stylistic brio” Lee Oser’s Oregon Confetti.
Americans are unhappy, and according to Brian A. Smith, Walker Percy knows why: “[W]e relentlessly pursue comfort and pleasure in the way we consume an ever-increasing variety of goods and services. But it isn’t just our ‘stuff’ we accumulate or experiences that we purchase that count here. Percy thought we consume people and places, too. We go on vacation and do ‘vacation things,’ that help us to escape our troubled selves, filling them with hours and hours of activities. Rather than engaging in rest, it seems like our days on vacation need to be occupied by doing something. What are we trying to avoid? Ourselves.”
Joseph Urban designed Mar-a-Lago and the Ziegfeld Theater. His “greatest misfortune,” the cultural critic Deems Taylor once remarked, “as well as his greatest glory, is the fact that his contributions to his art were so fundamental that they are taken for granted.” Stefan Kanfer revisits his life and work in City Journal.
Essay of the Day:
In The New York Review of Books, Lanny Hammer writes about the success and failures of Hart Crane’s The Bridge:
“Reviews of the poem were generally positive, and one or two were glowing. But the ones that mattered most to Crane were by his close literary friends and former advocates, the poet-critics Allen Tate and Yvor Winters, and their assessments, published prominently, were withering. While acknowledging the poem’s extraordinary rhetorical power, they both saw it as an intellectual failure. Crane had not managed the ‘mystical synthesis’ he hoped for; the poem was a mess, without a coherent structure of myth or belief to support its willed optimism about American culture. It proved romanticism was a dead end, Whitman was a disastrous influence, and it was impossible to write a modern epic poem, among other chastening lessons. Crane’s ambition, in their view, had turned out to be ‘too impossible,’ just as he’d feared.
“It’s not clear that the poem has ever fully escaped that judgment, if only because Crane himself seemed to submit to it. At least, that’s one inference from the fact that he wrote almost no more poetry (albeit some powerful fragments and one very great lyric, “The Broken Tower”) in the two years between the publication of The Bridge and when he jumped to his death from the stern of a passenger ship in the Gulf of Mexico in April 1932.
“Crane understood his poem as inheriting and passing on the unfulfilled promises, the open prophecies, of America’s cultural past, and The Bridge itself can be counted among them. The poem survived the wreck of his career to become a message in a bottle tossed up on shore for future readers to discover and decode (an image suggested by his important short poem ‘At Melville’s Tomb’). In 1927, Crane bragged (with the youthful vanity that makes him winning or insufferable, depending on your point of view) that his work in progress was ‘already longer than The Waste Land, and it’s only half done.’ The Bridge is not only longer than T.S. Eliot’s dystopian vision of the modern world, which irked and provoked Crane into poetry; it is also more complicated in its formal plan and the sheer number and range of its sources and references.”
Photos: The Silk Road
Poem: Li Po, “Home”
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