Reviews and News:
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and the many stories of the Russian Revolution: “The novel’s events take place in Petrograd/St. Petersburg (both names are used for the same place) from Thursday, 8 March, to Monday, 12 March. When the narrative reaches the last day, the action has the feeling of being followed minute by minute. A supposed bread shortage—due to snow, trains bringing grain to the city are delayed—agitates the civilians, and when soldiers are asked to take up arms against fellow Russians they refuse. The domino effect is exacerbated by inaction and error-ridden commands. Anyone expecting a Great Man thesis or to find Solzhenitsyn, in William Gass’s stupid and mean-minded description of him in Tests of Time, as ‘still in the pay of the czar,’ will be disappointed. The further one reads of Nikolai II’s dithering—he prefers to play games, visit shrines, or communicate via letters and telegrams with the Empress when away—while the nation is at war and when there are conflicting reports reaching him about St. Petersburg, and of his poor judgment of who to put in charge of what, the more one comes to feel that he and his entire brood seem less and less deserving of life with each passing minute. Of course, that’s not Solzhenitsyn’s argument, but the case he presents will lead readers to various conclusions. Again, there’s not only one story here.”
Rod Dreher talks to Ulrich Lehner, author of the new book God Is Not Nice: “RD: What do you mean that God is not nice? Are you saying that God is mean? UL: No, God is not mean, but nice is a terrible description of God. Originally, the word derives from ‘nescius’ which means ignorant and was used in the Middle Ages to describe foolishness. Then, ‘nice’ people were ‘dumb’ people. It is only since the 1700s that it has meant pleasantness. Yet, the God of the Bible is not pleasant like our favorite meal or TV show: Once we use ‘nice’ to describe God, we smuggle in vagueness, shallowness, and subjective pleasantness to describe the Divine. It’s a symptom of our time that we think of God in these terms.”
A new optical illusion has been discovered: Are the lines curved or angled?
How a poll made Quinnipiac University: “‘If you were to follow our admissions and our growth, you could follow the poll,’ Lahey said. ‘We went into New York. You could see the applications increase. Now, it wasn’t just the poll. We started doing advertising in New York and elsewhere — alumni events and so on. But the poll was far and away the most significant thing. You could see the growth into New York, into New Jersey, Pennsylvania.’”
Michael Dirda’s holiday book recommendations.
The first great Romantic symphony: Beethoven’s Eroica “revolutionized music. It elevated symphonies to the prime medium for composers’ most important ideas. Orchestras became larger and symphonies longer and denser. (The first movement of the Eroica is longer than many Classical symphonies in their entirety.) Composers had the space to unspool an idea fully, facing the challenge of unifying a work’s longer movements with common themes.”
The shared vision of Picasso and Lautrec: “Toulouse-Lautrec and Picasso never met. Picasso first went to Paris from Malaga via Barcelona with his friend Carles Casagemas, in October 1900. He visited the Exposition Universelle and saw his own work ‘Last Moments’ (1899), a painting inspired by the death of his sister Conchita in 1895, exhibited in the Grand Palais. Casagemas would commit suicide in 1901, over a broken love affair – Picasso’s Blue period portrait of him (1901) clearly shows the bullet wound in his temple. By the time the Spaniard arrived in Paris, Lautrec was already gravely ill, and had left the French capital (he died in September 1901 at the age of thirty-six at the family chateau of Malromé in the Gironde)…The Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum in Madrid, to celebrate its twenty-fifth anniversary, is staging a superb show of over a hundred works simply titled Picasso/Lautrec, which explores the links between the two artists…It is apparently the first time the two have been paired in an exhibition.”
Essay of the Day:
In the latest issue of The Weekly Standard, Joseph Bottum writes about Ronnie O’Sullivan, considered by many to be the greatest modern snooker player:
“A beautiful simplicity seems to unfold when Ronnie O’Sullivan constructs a century break, potting 100 points’ worth of balls on a single visit to a snooker table. No one ever described snooker as an easy game, but when O’Sullivan begins to flow, he makes each moment look natural. Obvious, almost. Self-evident. To watch him line up a shot is often to think that you—or I, any of us—could pot that particular ball. And while we’re watching the struck ball settle in the pocket, the cue ball has magically drifted to a spot where the next shot possesses the same easy clarity. The same self-evidence. And so with the next, and the next, and the next, until he’s finished putting away the 36 balls that make up a completed frame of snooker.
“‘The Rocket,’ they call him for the speed with which he plays, and he is, more than anything else, an artist at the game. Michelangelo once said that sculptors should discern the shape that wants to be freed from a block of marble, and Ronnie O’Sullivan practices a kindred art, perceiving in some not fully conscious way the simplicity that wants to be revealed on a snooker table.
“That artistry may be what keeps O’Sullivan the crowd favorite everywhere he plays. At age 42—getting on in years for a successful professional snooker player—he is still by a huge margin the most popular figure in the sport from London to Shanghai. He’s lost nine tournaments for every tournament he’s won, but bookies nonetheless make him the favorite in nearly every match, if only to lay off the sentimental bets that invariably follow him.”
Photo: Santa on the slopes
Poem: J. Allyn Rosser, “The Central”
Get Prufrock in your inbox every weekday morning. Subscribe here.
