Reviews and News:
Over 600 Roman statues stored in a basement for 40 years to go on display: “A legendary collection of ancient marbles that has been locked away from public sight is to go on display for the first time in decades. The Torlonia collection, which comprises 620 statues and sculptures, has been described as the world’s most important private collection of classical art – but almost no one has been able to admire it since it was buried in the basement of the namesake aristocratic family in Rome in the 1970s. The Italian government has now announced that decades of negotiations with the Torlonia family were brought to a successful ending and an agreement to unveil the works has been reached.”
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Vincent Connare talks about creating Comic Sans: “I was working for Microsoft’s typography team, which had a lot of dealings with people from applications like Publisher, Creative Writer and Encarta. They wanted all kinds of fonts – a lot of them strange and childlike. One program was called Microsoft Bob, which was designed to make computers more accessible to children. I booted it up and out walked this cartoon dog, talking with a speech bubble in Times New Roman. Dogs don’t talk in Times New Roman! Conceptually, it made no sense… I didn’t have to make straight lines, I didn’t have to make things look right, and that’s what I found fun. I was breaking the typography rules. My boss Robert Norton, whose mother Mary Norton wrote The Borrowers, said the ‘p’ and ‘q’ should mirror each other perfectly. I said: ‘No, it’s supposed to be wrong!’ There were a lot of problems like that at Microsoft, a lot of fights, though not physical ones.”
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George Weigel on Evelyn Waugh’s Helena: It is “an act of faith in the reality of revelation.”
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Bill Knott’s serious nuttiness: “Something about Knott froze in childhood, leaving a body of work marked by the child’s tendency to literalize imaginative schemes. Knott was a poet of zany precision, the zaniness usually coming right away, often in the first line, followed by quite meticulous workings out of his oddball premises. He is, at his best, a poet of home-brewed koans, threading his philosophical paradoxes into scenes of slacker glamour.”
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Domesticity and the divine: “During the Renaissance, the true place of holiness was not the cathedral, church or wayside shrine but the home.”
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Norway may build a ship tunnel.
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Michael Dirda recommends books about books and bookmaking.
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In praise of indexers: “An index can often give a far clearer glimpse of a book’s spirit than the blurb-writers or critics are able to do.”
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James V. Schall goes on a walk in the city.
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Essay of the Day:
In Standpoint, Robert O’Brien argues that we need great critics now more than ever before. Where are they?
“Unlike the production of great art, which simply cannot be, in the short term, willed into being, high-quality criticism and analysis should be well within our reach. But we bow to popular will, so that instead of encouraging genuinely interesting people to talk and write about important things, we have set up as celebrities the judges of occasionally amusing, and generally laughable, carnivals of dancers, pop singers and chefs. Hence this brief critique of critics; hence the urgent need for gifted and sensible writers uncramped by the ideologies which have seized the word and as many courses and students as they can for their drab and charmless discourses, punctuated continually by dreary academic references (Briezeblok and Buldozser, 1999).
“Cultural criticism, we should remind ourselves, can be almost as important as the art itself, can indeed be part of the art. There have been great creative critics, from Alexander Pope (in The Dunciad, Epistle to Lord Burlington, etc) and Dr Johnson onwards, who combined the two arts with the skill of genius. Byron was another, in his English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, Vision of Judgment, and parts of Don Juan. Can you name a great contemporary cultural critic? Someone who could, in writing about literature and other aspects of our culture, hold a candle to T. S. Eliot on poetry, or Herbert Read on modern art? I asked several highly knowledgeable people, who struggled to do so.”
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Photo: Val d’Orcia
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Poem: Marly Youmans, “Two Poems”
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