Reviews and News:
Bad news: Open Letters Monthly, the online review of books started by Sam Sacks, Steve Donoghue, and John Cotter in 2007, will be closing. I’ve been a regular reader over the years and have particularly enjoyed Rohan Maitzen’s “Novel Readings” column, which I hope will find another home. This is the second of my favorite book review sites to close this year (not counting the literary publication Partisan, also a favorite, which has not posted any new content since late 2016). John Wilson’s Education & Culture closed unexpectedly in October. We need more good writing on books and ideas, not less. Ugh.
The good news, if I may say so, is that books and culture coverage here at The Weekly Standard is going from strength to strength. The latest issue has a packed out Winter Books section with all sorts of treats, including John Wilson on Russian novels in translation, Malcolm Forbes on medieval manuscripts, John Check on Mozart’s final years, and Adam Keiper on new science and technology titles. Check out the whole issue. Better yet: subscribe if you don’t already.
Adrianna Smith reviews an anthology of poems on joy edited by Christian Wiman: “Joy is ultimately an invitational, rather than definitive, collection. One gets the sense that it could be the first in a series of anthologies on the word and its presence in poetry. Which is perhaps indicative of joy’s intense and ineffable effect to the human mind. As Richard Wilbur puts it in his poem ‘Hamlen Brook’: ‘Joy’s trick is to supply / Dry lips with what can cool and slake, / Leaving them dumbstruck also with an ache / Nothing can satisfy.’”
Wired decides to go with a paywall, The Wall Street Journal reports: “Wired is planning to introduce a paywall in January, part of a business and editorial reboot that Mr. Thompson says will help protect the 24-year-old tech title as print revenue in the magazine industry continues to decline.”
The oldest complete Latin Bible is set to return to UK after 1,302 years: “The Codex Amiatinus is a beautiful and giant Bible produced in Northumbria by pioneering monks in 716 which, on its completion, was taken to Italy as a gift for Pope Gregory II. On Thursday, the British Library announced it had secured its loan from the Laurentian library in Florence for a landmark exhibition in 2018 on the history, art, literature and culture of Anglo-Saxon England.”
Over at The New Criterion, James Panero has a wonderful essay on Andrew Wyeth’s supposed realism: “Despite all of the details they include, compared to on-the-ground reality, Wyeth’s compositions are most significant for what they leave out, with restrictive editing that imbued his minimal and even abstract paintings with a desolate aura.”
Essay of the Day:
In Standpoint, David Goldman tries to make sense of the new nationalism. Is its rise motivated, in part, by a longing for the sacred?
“The New Nationalists emerged in response to specific irritations: EU meddling in the UK, hollowed-out manufacturing and surging immigration in the US, the migrant wave in Germany, and so forth. But there is a deeper motivation for the nationalist resurgence. This could be seen in November in Poland, when 60,000 nationalist marches paraded through Warsaw, many under signs declaring, ‘We want God!’ Polish nationalism contains chauvinist and anti-Semitic elements at its fringes, to be sure, but the religious fibre that set Poland in opposition to the Soviet Union is not entirely attenuated.
“The spiritual centre of the Catalan nationalist movement lies at the ancient Benedictine monastery of Montserrat, where Father Sergi d’Assís Gelpí has preached support for separatism from his pulpit. Four hundred Catholic priests, including several bishops, signed a declaration in support of independence in September, so outraging Spain’s central government that the country’s ambassador to the Vatican filed a formal protest. There are economic grounds for separatist sentiment in Catalonia, certainly. Spain’s richest province contributes a disproportionate share of Spanish taxes, and the Catalans would rather spend their money at home. But tax grievances did not motivate Catalans to interpose themselves between the ballot boxes and Spain’s National Guard during the October 1 referendum and sustain hundreds of injuries in the confrontation. “Donald Trump’s election victory stemmed in part from an economic protest vote, notably in the rust belt states of Ohio, Michigan and Wisconsin. But Trump also garnered a higher proportion of the evangelical Protestant vote than any other candidate in US political history, by a margin of 80-16 among white evangelicals, according to exit polls cited by the Washington Post. He also won overwhelmingly among America’s small but indicative community of Orthodox Jews. It may seem odd to think of the thrice-married and occasionally vulgar Trump as the champion of America’s religious Right, but the data are unambiguous. “These all are manifestations of what is commonly called the identity crisis of the West, but might better be termed the West’s struggle with the sacred. By ‘sacred’, I mean that which endures beyond our lifetime and beyond the lifetime of our children, the enduring characteristics that make us unique and will continue to distinguish us from the other peoples of the world, and which cannot be violated without destroying our sense of who we are. The sacred is what a country’s soldiers are willing to die to protect; unless there is something for which we are willing to die, we will find nothing for which we are willing to live.
“Tradition surely is part of this, but not every part of our tradition is sacred to us: we find within tradition elements that have prevailed through the ages and which we expect to prevail, if our present existence is to have a purpose, beyond our lifetimes. These elements of tradition cannot exist except through a nation: contrary to Hillary Clinton, it takes not a village but a nation to embody the language, customs and ethos that found our identity. The invariant feature of the various expressions of nationalism on both sides of the Atlantic is an attempt to recapture the past in order to envision a future. ‘Identity’ as a concept is meaningless except as it is rooted in the past and pointed toward the future. Who we are at the moment depends on where we came from and where we expect to go. Our present, as Augustine argued in Confessions XI, is a composite of memory and anticipation.” Read the rest.
Photo: Balloons in Cappadocia
Poem: Jack Hanson, “In Europe”
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