I’m sitting in McDonald’s listing to people on CNN talk about a trade war with China. It seems like a big deal, but it’s not, really. The truly important changes are not the ones discussed on TV by beautiful people with shiny skin and glasses. They are, rather, the ones that seem inconsequential and take place over a long period of time. These are the changes that poets and novelists see (or should see), which is why writers are important (and not just today—that’s another news-cycle lie: that we need writers more today than before—but always).
You know what hasn’t changed all that much, though? The techniques used by the voice coach at the Royal Shakespeare Company (how’s that for a segue): “There’s an extraordinary continuity that two millennia later, ahead of the West End opening of Imperium, the Royal Shakespeare Company’s adaptation of Robert Harris’ Cicero trilogy, Kate Godfrey is working with the cast on some of the same techniques Apollonius Molon used to teach Cicero himself. She may not be forcing actors to recite their lines while running up a mountain, but the RSC’s head of voice still teaches them how to breathe and how to stand using age-old methods.”
Just a friendly reminder as we enter the dog days of summer that ice cream is amazing and we are blessed to have it in abundance: “‘If you knew how to make ices, you had a meal ticket for life, and you would lock the door of your confectionery so nobody knew how you did it,’ explained Robin Weir, co-author of Ice Creams, Sorbets and Gelati: The Definitive Guide. ‘If you knew how to make ice cream, you were absolutely laughing — you were set up for life.”’ Emy’s book underscored just how rarefied the dessert was in his day. Ice cream was something that only the very wealthiest people could afford. It required specialized knowledge and equipment, ice and sugar. Unsurprisingly, a pint of ice cream in the 1760s easily cost about as much as the average worker made in a week, if not more. But within the space of 100 years, that all changed.”
A history of the sneaker: “Leave it to a sneaker historian to note that when Tommie Smith and John Carlos made their famous Black Power salute at the 1968 Mexico City Olympics, they stepped up to the podium shoeless, each sprinter carrying a single Puma Suede. (The gesture was meant to symbolize black poverty.) In Kicks: The Great American Story of Sneakers, Nicholas Smith is continually freezing such iconic moments and zooming in on the overlooked footwear. We learn that Eric Liddell and Harold Abrahams, the British Olympians memorialized in the 1981 movie Chariots of Fire, were shod by Joseph William Foster, whose grandsons went on to start Reebok. And that Jesse Owens won his four gold medals at the 1936 Berlin games in a pair of track spikes courtesy of the brothers Rudolf and Adi Dassler, the future founders of Puma and Adidas, respectively. The Dassler brothers’ role in Owens’s triumph over the Übermenschen is, however, somewhat diminished by the fact that they also outfitted the German team and had belonged to the Nazi Party since 1933 — and sold soccer cleats called ‘Blitz’ and ‘Kampf.’ But mostly the story of sneakers is, as Smith’s subtitle suggests, an American one: of humble origins and unapologetic success, of self-expression through consumerism and association with celebrity, of a product being put on a pedestal and a brand name serving as artist’s signature.”
Can Muslims and Christians get along? John Wilson reviews Matthew Kaemingk’s Christian Hospitality and Muslim Immigration in an Age of Fear.
The beauty and horror of jellyfish: “Spineless is a book of many parts. It is an excellent natural history of jellyfish. Berwald describes how they are the most economical swimmers of all living creatures, and that they are opportunistic feeders on plankton, fish and fish eggs, crustaceans, and even other jellyfish. Stinging cells on their tentacles stun or kill their prey; these tiny poison darts deliver toxins that can resemble snake or spider venom, or toxins resembling no others at all. Some are terrifyingly potent. Chironex fleckeri, a box jellyfish from Indonesia and Australia, can kill an unwary swimmer in three minutes.”
David Stuttard’s life of Alcibiades, Nemesis: Alcibiades and the Fall of Athens, is “a lively, fast-paced and eminently readable attempt to bring the insolent young monster back to life.”
Essay of the Day:
In The Times Literary Supplement, Mark Davies writes about Lewis Carroll’s “first and only overseas holiday” in Russia:
“Liddon had a particular purpose: to assess the prospects of greater union between the Anglican and the Russian Orthodox Churches. Dodgson [Carroll] went along more for the ride and the view, and his diary is more concerned with the new foods, customs, languages and peoples to which he was exposed. He writes of Cronstadt Harbour (the main seaport for St Petersburg), for example, that ‘the place looked something like an ant-nest: hundreds of workmen swarming from end to end of the great hollow’; ‘we got a very good general idea of the great scale on which the works here are carried on, and the resources disposable in case of war’. He describes Ems, on the other hand, as a ‘delightful place where people have nothing to do, and all day to do it in. It is certainly the place for thoroughly enjoying idleness’.
“His love of the absurd shows through too: a green parrot in Danzig (Gdansk), for instance, which refused all encouragement to ‘commit itself to any statement’ because it was from Mexico and so ‘spricht nicht Englisch . . . nicht Deutsch’. Of the service at their Königsberg (Kaliningrad) hotel, Dodgson wrote, ‘we enjoy one unusual privilege – we may ring our bells as much and as often as we like: no measures are taken to stop the noise’…In Warsaw he was much taken with a ‘tall and very friendly’ greyhound who attempted to drink Dodgson’s bath water as quickly as it was poured, and in Berlin he perceived that the fondness for statues of ‘a colossal figure of a man killing, about to kill or having killed . . . a beast’ made parts of the city look like ‘a fossil slaughter house’.
“Perhaps the strangest encounter of all, however, was with some people he already knew very well…”
Photo: Palouse
Poem: Ernest Hilbert, “Until the Sea above Us Closed Again”
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