The da Vinci conspiracies: The artist has been the object of many “improbable speculations” on his life and work. Why does he fascinate? “Kemp relates how the master and his works have become a happy hunting ground for eccentrics and conspiracy theorists. In this respect, among the great artists of the past only Van Gogh comes close — and then only when it comes to the question of how and why he might have amputated his ear. With Leonardo, improbable speculations are abundant and never-ending.”
Anthony Burgess unpublished essays to be published next month along with the novelist’s journalism. The short pieces treat censorship, Hemingway, and film, among other things.
Recovering the songs of concentration camps: “Ilse Weber, a Jewish poet, was imprisoned at the concentration camp at Terezin in German-occupied Czechoslovakia when she wrote a song called ‘When I Was Lying Down in Terezin’s Children’s Clinic.’ The song was about caring for sick children at the camp where Weber worked as a nurse. She had little-to-no medicine available. But she had her poetry and her music — some of which her husband managed to salvage by hiding the written verses in a garden shed after her death at Auschwitz in 1944.”
Jon K. Lauck reviews Hendrik Meijer’s Arthur Vandenberg: The Man in the Middle of the American Century: “From the center of the Midwest came Michigan’s U.S. Senator Arthur Vandenberg, Hendrik Meijer’s ‘man in the middle’ of American civic life, who occupied the center-right of the American political spectrum from the 1910s to the middle of the twentieth century. Meijer’s Arthur Vandenberg expertly conveys Senator Vandenberg’s crucial role in building a global order out of the ashes of World War II, a not unknown story, but even more skillfully captures the rhythms of the now-neglected region he came to symbolize. The result is a blended masterpiece of regionalist cultural analysis, old-fashioned political narration, deep biography, and geopolitical history.”
Fearless Girl statue to be moved. Charging Bull may follow.
The nostalgic diversions of Dollywood: It is Dolly Parton’s dream of what Appalachian life could be like and sometimes still is.
Essay of the Day:
What’s the future of Britain? Roger Scruton says a step away from Europe is a step in the right direction. Theodore Dalrymple worries it’s too little, too late:
“While I am in broad agreement and sympathy with Scruton’s outlook, which is that of a broad and tolerant patriotism, I am afraid I find him overoptimistic (despite his recent book on the virtues of a rational pessimism) about the current state of Britain. The fact is that its lamentable condition in many respects is self-inflicted, not inflicted by the European Union, and I see little evidence of much will to reverse the harmful policies so assiduously pursued over the last few decades by governments of various stripes, and which now serve so many vested interests.
“Let me take a small problem, that of litter. Scruton says that the British are particularly attached to their gardens, which are themselves a reflection of their love for the countryside. This was once true, and is no doubt still true of much of the population. But in huge numbers of streets in Britain, gardens have been concreted over to accommodate cars, which are incomparably more important to them than flowers or grass, and which instantly transforms those streets from pleasant locations into slums. Moreover, anyone travelling through the British countryside would now conclude that the British regard it not with love or veneration, but merely as a vast litter bin, into which they throw the wrappings of their vile and incontinent refreshments (they are, not coincidentally, the fattest people in Europe, as well as the most slovenly where litter is concerned).
“As if this were not bad enough, there is no evidence that any attempt is being made to alter this situation. Local government believes it has more important things to do than keep roads and streets clean: not only does it have to use a growing proportion of its income to pay the unfunded pensions of past workers, but it has more important things to do such as develop anti-discrimination policies and rectify the natural consequences of the personal improvidence of so large a proportion of the population. Britain, in effect, is not a large garden, but a large trash can.
“The corruption of its public administration is very great, not in the sense that officialdom takes bribes (that at least would be illegal and in principle preventable) but in the moral and intellectual sense: public employment is largely divorced from the production of any public good. Scruton correctly mentions the appallingly low educational level in Britain: 17 per cent of British children leave school barely able to read and write, though $100,000 each has been spent on their education. How is such a miracle possible? It is not the European Union that has produced it.”
Photo: San Giorgio Maggiore
Poem: John Bargowski, “Moving Day”
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