Reviews and News:
Israel has contributed money to PEN American Center’s World Voices Festival to help pay for expenses related to invited Israeli writers. Unsurprisingly, this has sent Alice Walker and 100 other writers into a tizzy: “As a PEN member, I want this organization that is supposed to be a champion of writers’ rights to stand up for Palestinian writers, academics and students who are suffering under a repressive Israeli regime that denies their right to freedom of expression. The last thing PEN should be doing is partnering with and promoting a government that denies Palestinians basic human rights.” Marilyn Hacker, who won the 2010 PEN Voelcker award for poetry, said that while PEN opposes boycotts, it should at least boycott Israel: “Even if PEN opposes all forms of boycotts, PEN should have policies and ethical standards in place forbidding partnerships with significant human rights abusers. On that basis alone, PEN should rule out a partnership with the Israeli government.” PEN, in good sense, is keeping the sponsorship.
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In praise of imperialist tomb raiders: “If ever you find yourself in Berlin, there are three places you absolutely must visit. The first two are museums: the Neues Museum, to see the well-worth-the-detour head of Nefertiti; and the Pergamon Museum, so you can offer up a prayer of gratitude for the arrogance of all those 19th-century imperialist looters who understood that the treasures of classical antiquity are far too precious to be wasted on the barbarous cultures which, by geographical accident, had inherited them in the previous centuries.”
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Scientists call on museums to reject all donations from oil companies: “A group of prominent scientists have united for an odd quest: to reduce funding for science education. They’ve joined with environmental groups and progressive activists to demand that hundreds of museums of science and natural history ‘cut all ties with the fossil fuel industry and funders of climate science obfuscation,’ which means rejecting donations or investment dividends from anyone who doesn’t meet their standard of purity.”
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Has a long-lost version of Caravaggio’s Judith Beheading Holofernes been rediscovered? (HT: Mary McCleary)
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What’s particularly Scottish about Scottish war poetry? Not much: “The experience of the soldier, the sailor, the airman – the suffering unit of the man (or woman) in war – must be common to humanity rather than a particular country. We might call it the Shylock Syndrome – ‘If you prick us do we not bleed?’ By this token, one surely has to admit that a mortally wounded Turk at Gallipoli is going to be feeling pretty much what the mortally wounded Australian opposite him feels. Being bombed in London is really not that different from being bombed in Dresden.”
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A “new” Rembrandt has been created by an algorithm
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Roger Scruton against the New Left
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Stanford students demand a more diverse faculty. “Among WTU’s most ambitious policy demands is that Stanford be required to hire WTU-approved women of color as its next president and next provost. But employment non-discrimination provisions of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and a decades-long litany of Supreme Court cases confirm that employers cannot hire based on race or gender. Given the law’s view of hiring discrimination, this WTU demand might be tough to implement. The racism of the demand is bad, but the logic might be worse: In insisting that these new hires ‘break both the legacy of white . . . and cisgender male leadership,’ WTU makes it clear that even a transgender white person would not provide enough diversity. The next brainwave from the activists is to create a ‘responsive platform for reporting and tracking microaggressions from faculty’ and integrate it within Stanford’s Acts of Intolerance Protocol”
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Essay of the Day:
In The New Criterion, Stephen Eide tells the little-known story of Lorelei fountain in the Bronx—which may be one of the most vandalized monuments in New York:
“In German legend, the Lorelei was a siren whose entrancing songs sent sailors to the depths of the Rhine. Heine’s lyric poem ‘Die Lorelei’ casts the siren in the role of the poet’s beloved, and the fountain and its accompanying statues honor the honor. In the center of the fountain sits a round pedestal supporting a statue of the Lorelei, looking out and slightly downward, presumably towards those ill-fated sailors. The pedestal itself features bas reliefs of Heine, a man slaying a dragon, and a sphinx embracing a woman. At its base are three mermaids: Lyric, Melancholy, and Satire. Between the mermaids are three raised carved shell basins, from which the water flows into the main basin. The statuary group is one of New York’s few public sculptures carved out of white marble, possibly quarried from the Tyrol region of modern-day Italy or Austria.
“It shouldn’t be surprising that New York, America’s cultural capital and a city of immigrants, would commemorate Heinrich Heine. Indeed, as the architectural historian Francis Morrone once noted, the city has done a much better job honoring great foreign authors such as Shakespeare and Robert Burns than its own. (Henry James, Herman Melville, and Edith Wharton are still waiting for their just tributes.) But many would be surprised to learn that the Lorelei fountain makes its home in the South Bronx. When the work was dedicated in the late nineteenth century, the surrounding Grand Concourse neighborhood was populated by middle-class Americans of German extraction. It is now poor and black and Latino. After being vandalized more severely than any other public sculpture in the city during ‘the bad old days’—whose specter now haunts the city again—philanthropy and government patronage restored the work to almost its original glory in the late 1990s. The Heine monument has become a symbol of the Bronx’s own rebirth.”
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Image of the Day: National Museum of Natural History
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Poem: Keith Bennett, “A Consultation on the Weather”
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