Reviews and News:
Edward Lear in full: “This wonderfully rich account of Lear’s life tells the whole story, from his birth in 1812 to a London business family that nearly fell into the Dickensian disgrace of debt after the Napoleonic Wars (his father just escaped the debtors’ jail) to his death in San Remo in 1888 in his mid-seventies, a sort of ‘national treasure’ in exile. It is a familiar enough tale, but seeing Lear through Uglow’s attentive, aesthetically acute eyes, we are reacquainted with his prodigious skills as an artist. His early illustrations of birds and animals for natural history manuals (when he was employed by the Zoological Society in London) are wonderful. He had a particular affinity with parrots and drew them superbly. Then came the phase when he lived at Knowsley in Lancashire at the house of the Earl of Derby. His task was to depict the earl’s menagerie, and it was there that he began to make up verses to amuse the children in the nursery. By his late twenties, Lear’s success as an artist-illustrator was assured and his relatively short life as a landscape painter could begin.”
Muriel Spark’s juvenilia: “Though the shadow of Masefield and Scott seem to dominate (twenty years later Spark would write a book on the former), as she gets older the influence of other poets begins to appear. As in Philip Larkin’s juvenilia, composed shortly after Spark’s, Yeats’s influence is clear.”
How a dodgy German biologist influenced art nouveau: “Haeckel had a degree in medicine but no interest in treating patients, whose visits he curtailed by holding surgeries from 5 to 6 a.m. A man of prodigious energies who survived on a few hours sleep, he preferred to devote his waking hours to documenting in watercolour drawings the intricate structures of different species of Radiolaria, as seemingly infinite in their variety as three-dimensional snowflakes. With no formal art training, he had an astonishing ability to record complex combinations of spirals, lattices, stars, needles and radial spokes by looking through a microscope with his left eye while focusing on drawing with his right.”
A riveting account of the escape of Charles II to France: “Two years after the execution of Charles I, the young Charles II sacrificed the very principles his father had died for to do a deal with the Scots, accepting Presbyterianism as the national religion in return for
being crowned King of Scots. His arrival in Edinburgh prompted the English to invade Scotland in a pre-emptive strike. This was followed by a Scottish invasion of England. The two sides finally faced one another at Worcester in September 1651. After being comprehensively hammered on the meadows outside the city by Oliver Cromwell’s army, the 21-year-old king found himself the subject of a national manhunt, with a huge bounty on his head. Over the following six weeks he managed, through a series of heart-poundingly close escapes, to evade capture before finally making it to safety in France.”
Revisiting the life and work of a Hungarian master in Cornwall: “Végh, who called himself a ‘chauvinist European’, always emphasised the importance of the whole European tradition, and in particular the central and eastern European element — those idiomatic, earthy instincts that are present or implicit in so much of the classical canon. The neglect of that central European element in music-making was exacerbated by the partition of Europe after the Second World War, to say nothing of the loss of so many Jewish musicians from that region in the Holocaust. The ethos of the academies of America, Western Europe and Russia, he felt, lacked the naturalness inherent in making music, wrongly emphasising technique, beauty of tone for its own sake, conformism and a literal approach to the printed score, which inhibited the freer expression of imagination and emotion — the interpretation of the music behind the notes. The fact that each 16th-note in a passage of semi-quavers, say, was written identically did not mean that they must be played in an even, uniform way. Yet this interpretative freedom was not an egotistical licence to impose the player’s own personality on the music, but rather a quest to liberate the soul of the work, undertaken in the spirit and traditions of the great Viennese masters.”
When working from home doesn’t work: “IBM pioneered telecommuting. Now it wants people back in the office.”
Essay of the Day:
In The Public Domain Review, Carl Abbott writes about the life and work of Ignatius Donnelly, a Minnesotan writer and failed politician with a mind for catastrophe:
“The magnificent civilization of Atlantis shattered and plunged beneath the sea in February 1882. Or, to be more precise, the eccentric American Ignatius Donnelly published Atlantis: The Antediluvian World, the first book of a trio that would highlight a series of imaginary catastrophes. The book — a rehash of Atlantis speculation supported with flood myths from around the globe — was an instant success and has continued to draw readers over the decades. Newspaper reviews were laudatory, Harper and Brothers issued seven printings in the first year, and W. E. Gladstone took time out from pondering the Irish Question to write Donnelly a four-page fan letter.
“It was easy to imagine the worst in 1882. President James Garfield had been assassinated only months earlier — the second president shot to death in sixteen years.
The economy was dropping into a new recession even as it struggled to emerge from the dark years of the 1870s. Farmers in Donnelly’s state of Minnesota were especially hard hit. In September, thirty thousand New York workers marched in the nation’s first Labor Day parade, remembering the violent railroad strike of five years earlier.
“Atlantis might have seemed to offer relief from the turmoil. Its densely packed pages of pseudoscience and mythology recounted the supposed golden age of the lost continent and world-spanning civilization first mentioned by Plato. But the subtext was the fragility of a golden age. When Atlantis sank beneath the waves in a global cataclysm, a powerful and nearly perfect society perished. For Donnelly, Atlantis was a model and mirror for the United States, where urbanization, industrialization, and the accumulation of vast wealth were a social deluge destroying the nation’s own golden age of the agrarian frontier.”
Photo: Autumn morning in Poland
Poem: Ryan Wilson, “After the Sonogram”
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