Reviews and News:
Let’s ban Banned Books Week: “In my experience, those with the strongest emotional investment in Banned Books Week tend to be people whose idea of literature is something called ‘Y.A.,’ which they can continue to enjoy well into their 20s, plus whatever they found themselves forced to slog through as liberal arts majors in college in between tweeting and watching prestige cable and old Buffy reruns on Netflix.”
Newton’s anti-Trinitarian Christianity: “We are all hugely in Rob Iliffe’s debt. Few of us would have the skill, in mathematics or philosophy or divinity, nor the patience, to do what he has done, which is read through the huge extent of Newton’s obsessive theological writings. He, together with a team of industrious scholars, has helped to put online the writings which had hitherto been visible only in academic libraries, such as New College, Oxford, King’s College, Cambridge, and the Fitzwilliam Museum. Most of this stuff had either been totally forgotten, or never even read, until the last 15 years; so that, as well as being a punctilious, painstaking historical work of the utmost density, this book also constitutes one of the most sensational ‘scoops’ of recent times.”
Cooking with Gogol: “In St. Petersburg, Russia in the 1830s, peasant style was fashionable, literature was becoming more democratic, and, somewhat weirdly, the poet of human baseness, Nikolai Gogol, was producing some of the best food writing to be found in the Russian canon. His eerie and baroque first collection of short stories, Village Evenings Near Dikanka, is a series of narrations by a beekeeper to the folks gathered in his cottage at night as they’re served snacks: ‘Delicious beyond description! …Pies you couldn’t imagine in your wildest dreams: they melt in your mouth! And the butter—it just runs down your lips when you bite into them.’ Every time I read Gogol, I want to cook like the Ukrainian housewives in his stories.”
Working as an extra in movies and TV was supposed to be a temporary solution for Danielle Sepulveres. It turned into a viable, and surprisingly fulfilling, way to make a living.
In 2009, opera singer Charity Tillemann-Dick received a double lung transplant. “I flat-lined twice; I was put on every form of life support available. They actually left my chest open for two weeks — you could see my heart beating inside of my chest. And after that, I was in a coma for 34 days. It was grueling. I woke up on Oct. 26, 2009 and it was two months before I could breathe on my own.” She would go on to sing at the Lincoln Center.
Is Silicon Valley an “existential threat” to American society? Franklin Foer thinks so.
Essay of the Day:
In the latest issue of the Standard, Dominic Green investigates how photography influenced John Singer Sargent:
“We know that a portable camera traveled with Sargent and the large, convivial group of family and friends that joined him on his plein air expeditions to the Alps, Italy, and the Levant. In the catalogue for Sargent: The Watercolours, guest curators Richard Ormond and Elaine Kilmurray supply snapshots from these trips, now held by the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. And last year, researcher Ella Ravilious discovered more than 600 professionally taken tourist photographs in the Victoria and Albert Museum’s archive. Sargent probably bought these photographs, Ormond and Kilmurray write, ‘in their place of origin.’
“It is difficult to paint in a bobbing gondola. It is possible, though, to sketch the lines of a painting. In The Piazzetta, Venice (ca. 1904), the pencil guidelines for the foreground gondola’s prow are to the left of the final, painted prow. Did the boat move in the water at the time, or did Sargent improve on his sketch afterwards? If so, did he refer to his photograph of the Libreria Vecchia, now in the Victoria and Albert?
“Some of the watercolors are identical to photographs, but it is not clear which came first, especially when Sargent was painting still objects like buildings and people, rather than evanescent effects like sunlight on water.”
Photo: Flattop Mountain
Poem: Dana Gioia, “The Ballad of Jesus Ortiz”
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