Reviews and News:
The last privately-owned Leonardo da Vinci painting, a portrait of Christ, will go on sale in November.
Tolstoy family recipes: “In 1874, Stepan Andreevich Bers published The Cookbook and gave it as a gift to his sister, countess Sophia Andreevna Tolstaya, the wife of the great Russian novelist, Leo Tolstoy. The book contained a collection of Tolstoy family recipes, the dishes they served to their family and friends, those fortunate souls who belonged to the aristocratic ruling class of late czarist Russia. Almost 150 years later, this cookbook has been translated and republished by Sergei Beltyukov.”
In defense of comments: “Earlier this year, The Financial Times found that its commenters are seven times more engaged than the rest of its readers. The Times of London revealed recently that the 4 percent of its readers who comment are by far its most valuable. ‘You can see the benefits in terms of engaging readers and renewing subscriptions,’ Ben Whitelaw, head of audience development at the Times and The Sunday Times, told the online news site Digiday. When an organization moves these communities onto Facebook, it is handing over everything to the big blue thumb: all of the readers’ data, the control of the moderation tools, control of the advertising, even the opportunity to manage subscriptions — and all in a place where people are more likely to comment without even opening the article.”
The asset management firm that installed the Fearless Girl statue in front of Charging Bull and that recently launched a “Gender Diversity exchange-traded fund” settles discrimination suit: “The custody bank will pay $5 million to more than 300 women, following a U.S. Department of Labor audit that uncovered the alleged discrepancies.”
Was F. Scott Fitzgerald a serious critic of capitalism? No, argues Edward Short, in a review of David S. Brown’s biography of the novelist.
A “horrifying and engrossing” history of madness at sea: “Off the Deep End visits the Bounty of Captain Bligh, who had a ‘brief psychotic disorder’); the Whaleship Essex (survivors driven to delirium by dehydration and cannibalism); Columbus (‘hypomanic, increasingly delusional, possibly psychotic’); numerous open boats in which ‘children, foreigners, minorities’ and the weak were eaten; and the international trade in ‘Maniaks’. Question: if people who are willing to fling themselves into an untried passage to an unknown world are not likely to be slightly batty and at the margins of society anyway, why is New Zealand full of nutters?”
Essay of the Day:
In Standpoint, Jeffrey Meyers writes about the volatile friendship of Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon:
“Both artists had a distinguished lineage, but different attitudes toward their background. Bacon was descended from his namesake, the eminent philosopher and statesman who, as Lord Chancellor under James I, was charged with corruption, dismissed from office and imprisoned. Alexander Pope’s Essay on Mandescribed the fall of great figures from high office: ‘If parts allure thee, think how Bacon shin’d / The wisest, brightest, meanest of mankind.’ Alluding to Pope’s poem but leaving out the devastating ‘meanest’, Freud called his friend, who was certainly not wise, ‘the wildest and wisest man he had ever met’. Bacon, descended from the intellectual nobility, did not value his ancestry. Lucian, the grandson of Sigmund Freud, was extremely proud of his heritage.
“Both men were outsiders in London: Bacon was born in Dublin, Freud in Berlin. They came to England in boyhood and kept noticeable accents. Both had been threatened by an early death: Bacon had near-fatal asthma and continued to wheeze; Freud had escaped from the Holocaust. Both were mad about horses — Bacon’s father bred them — and as boys they had hero-worshipped the grooms. At Dartington Hall school Freud — like Gulliver after escaping from the Yahoos — slept in the stables with the horses, and also rode the most dangerous ones. Freud’s teenaged sculpture of a thick-limbed, three-legged horse, bent into the shape of a horseshoe, won him a place in a London art school, and he later painted several horses.
“Both artists were compulsive gamblers. Freud explained this mad attraction in an equine metaphor: ‘The excitement is like nothing else: galloping home on the straight . . . I’m stimulated by debt . . . The only point of gambling is to have the fear of losing and when I say losing I mean losing everything. It has to hurt.’ When completely cleaned out, he was free to return to his other obsession: his art: ‘When I lost everything — which was quite often, since I’m so impatient (except with working, where patience isn’t quite the point) — I always thought, Hooray! I can go back to work.’ After William Acquavella became his art dealer in 1992, he agreed to settle Freud’s staggering gambling debts, which amounted to £2.7 million.
“Both Bacon and Freud were extravagant spenders who, when flush, carried and dispersed thick wads of cash. For a long time Freud was financially dependent on Bacon’s generous subsidies. He would pull out a thick pack of £50 notes and casually declare, ‘I’ve got rather a lot of these, I thought you might like some of them.’ After Freud had married the wealthy heiress Caroline Blackwood, he reciprocated by using her money to finance Bacon’s trip to the fleshpots of Tangier.
“To the young and impressionable Freud, Bacon (13 years older) was a tempestuous, flamboyant and charismatic model. He embodied Nietzsche’s dynamic amoralism and defied all the rules of conventional behaviour. Both artists were charming, shameless and cruel, and revelled in what Bacon called an ‘atmosphere of threat.’’”
Photos: German bowling alleys
Poem: Tim Murphy, “Ode to King David”
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