Reviews and News:
What does Guernica really symbolize? “It’s laden with meaning, but frustratingly opaque. Even Picasso’s interpretation was inconsistent.”
The mind behind The Conservative Mind: “Lionel Trilling…wrote that while a conservative or reactionary ‘impulse’ existed here and there, conservatism expressed itself only in ‘irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas.’ The reason is simple, Trilling said: ‘liberalism is not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition’ in America.” Three years later Russell Kirk published The Conservative Mind.
Goethe the Renaissance man: “There have been very few Renaissance men since the Renaissance—and they weren’t exactly thick on the ground even in their glory days. No modern figure is more worthy of that appellation than Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832), who was not only the greatest German poet, playwright, autobiographer, and novelist (beside Thomas Mann), but also a painter at a time when that required ability and expertise, a statesman who effectively took over the administration of a small dukedom in his mid-twenties, and a scientist who made suggestive discoveries in zoology and botany and mounted an audacious challenge to Newton’s theory of optics.”
A life of Luther’s wife: “Katie appears to have spent her life making the best of what she had, both in her life as a nun and in her married life. Apparently, this did not always endear her to Martin’s associates—despite her diligent care for his health and finances, or perhaps even because of it. As is so often the case when a husband is an idealistic thought leader and his wife is a shrewd and practical businesswoman, this wife seems to have caught an unfair amount of flak for looking after her husband’s well-being in every way possible.”
In The Atlantic, Roc Morin interviews Ishii Yuichi, founder of Family Romance, a Japanese company that provides actors to impersonate people in a client’s life. Business is apparently booming: “Morin: When was your first success? Yuichi: I played a father for a 12-year-old with a single mother. The girl was bullied because she didn’t have a dad, so the mother rented me. I’ve acted as the girl’s father ever since. I am the only real father that she knows. Morin: And this is ongoing? Yuichi: Yes, I’ve been seeing her for eight years. She just graduated high school. Morin: Does she understand that you’re not her real father? Yuichi: No, the mother hasn’t told her.”
Art after the Council of Trent: “Because of the new regime of piety, Michelangelo came under repeated criticism for his nudes in the Sistine chapel ‘Last Judgement’, and at the order of Pius IV the genitals of the nude figures were covered with drapery. Veronesi was summoned by the Holy Office for putting dwarves and drunken Germans in a ‘Last Supper’ and given three months to change it, but he changed only the title (to ‘Feast in the house of Levi’) and the fuss died down. Under the new rules there must be no superstition, no beauty exciting to lust, nothing indecorous. Paintings should serve to convey and reinforce Catholic theology. The depiction of Christ’s sufferings and agony on the cross was regarded as seemly and proper; images of the Virgin were encouraged, and large didactic altarpieces depicting the Assumption (not official dogma until 1950), the Deposition and the Transfiguration became popular. In particular, the Church wanted to emphasize its strong opposition to Lutheran views on the mystery of Transubstantiation, and did so through ‘targeted figurative catechesis’.”
Essay of the Day:
In Virginia Quarterly Review, Amanda Petrusich writes about the blood feuds of Northern Albania:
“One of the first things I learned in Albania is that when a stranger pours rakia—a sweet brandy typically distilled from grapes or sugar plums and served cold in a short, sweating glass—you drink it, promptly and with vigor, regardless of whether you are already swallowing back a hot snake of vomit, or if it is barely nine o’clock on a Tuesday morning, or if it was poured from an unmarked plastic water bottle stored under the sink amid graying jugs of bleach, or, especially, if the person who has offered it is simultaneously recounting how, a few years back, he got angry and shot a man. Such is the custom here: You honor your host’s hospitality. You honor everything.
“I had flown to the Balkans in late July 2017 to learn about blood feuds, or the ancient oaths of vendetta sworn between warring families and passed on from one generation to the next. The killing is concentrated in northern Albania—in the rural, often unreachable villages of the Accursed Mountains, and in the modern city of Shkodër, one of the oldest municipalities in southeastern Europe. Here, justice works like this: When a man is murdered, his family avenges his death by similarly executing either the killer himself or a male member of his clan. Sometimes, after a killing has been successfully vindicated, the feud is settled. Other times, the head of the family that initiated the feud, while admitting both sides are now ostensibly ‘equal,’ nonetheless chooses to perpetuate the cycle by killing a second male from the avenging family. ‘In this way the feud might rage backwards and forwards for years or even generations, each family being in turn murderer and victim, hunter and hunted,’ the Scottish anthropologist and ethnographer Margaret Hasluck writes in The Unwritten Law of Albania, one of the first accounts of the customary law of the Albanian highlands.
* * *
“Though it’s almost impossible to substantiate the statistics, aid organizations estimate that at least 12,000 Albanians have been murdered for blood in the last twenty-five years. It’s hard to convey the particular tenor of life as the object of a feud, the relentless, pervasive anxiety, the clenching. There’s no relief. In Blood Revenge, the anthropologist Christopher Boehm recounts how, for Montenegrins involved in a blood dispute with an Albanian tribesman, the preferred mode of execution for the Albanians was ‘to creep up onto the house and climb onto the roof. They would remove a shingle, and then would kill their victim where he slept, at short range.’
“Per ancient edicts, the avenging family should hunt only an able-bodied adult male (the elderly, women, or boys who are too young to carry arms are excluded), though in recent years those dictums have relaxed, and it is no longer unusual to hear about the retaliatory murder of a young boy or girl. Feuds can begin over most anything, though a high percentage seem to involve property disputes. Despite earnest intervention by the church and the government, reconciliation between feuding families is rarely (if ever) brokered without blood, and the object of a feud—and his family members—are forced to spend decades barricaded inside their homes, hiding. To venture beyond the property line could mean a forceful and immediate death: sudden bullets from on high. Children are pulled from school; jobs are lost. Untethered from the rhythms of a regular life, and unable to conceive of a peaceful future, people drift into depression. Life is at once terrifying and terrifically boring. Families rely on donations to survive. Maybe friends bring food, boxes of groceries. Everyone watches a lot of television. Suicide is not unheard of.”
Photo: Lake Bled
Poem: Les Murray, “The Quality of Sprawl”
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