I don’t listen to Justin Bieber’s music or watch much soccer, but I am going to include both in today’s round-up. Why? Books. You may or may not know that Justin Bieber was photographed crying in a park earlier this week. It turns out he was reading Tim and Kathy Keller’s The Meaning of Marriage as he prepares to wed model Hailey Baldwin. It can’t be easy having so little privacy as you contemplate one of life’s biggest decisions. Instead of lashing out at reporters, he showed them a copy of the book and said he was crying, in part, because of what he was reading. Surely he knows he’ll be mocked for this, but he doesn’t seem to care. Good for him. It’s a good book.
And now soccer: The World Cup apparently boosted sales of Russian literature: “According to state statistics, more than 1 million foreign tourists and football fans visited Russia in the first two months of this summer, contributing a growth in book sales reported to be almost 50 percent higher than were seen in the same timeframe of 2017. The purchases behind the big boost are being attributed to those international visitors… Booksellers queried say that of Bulgakov’s books, English translations of The Master and Margarita were the bestselling volumes among international visitors during the World Cup.” Why am I not surprised that international soccer fans have great taste in Russian literature? If you’ve never read The Master and Margarita, you should. Here’s Cathy Young explaining why (even if we need a better translation of it).
Matt Groening’s new animated series will be released on Netflix on August 17: “His latest series certainly shares a satirical sensibility and a distinctive curvy cartoon style with The Simpsons, his enduring Fox comedy that starts its 30th season in September. But while it takes place in a medieval realm of wizards and dragons, it is not exactly Mr. Groening’s answer to Game of Thrones. Disenchantment is more like Mr. Groening’s comic amalgam of fantasy franchises like Lord of the Rings and the animated epics of Hayao Miyazaki, to name just two of its dozens of influences.”
In defense of hunting: “It is a boon to wildlife and humans alike.”
Tim Markatos on the challenges of depicting Joan of Arc—or any saint—on the screen.
The pleasures of reading old books: William Hazlitt and C. S. Lewis recommended reading old books for different reasons. Both were right.
It’s hot. Tomorrow you might mow your lawn and drink a tall one afterwards—a really tall one. In fact, you may already have the tallboy in the fridge, but if not, check out Matthew Walther’s list of the 10 best tallboys for under $2. He missed Lone Star, but that’s not his fault. I don’t think he’s ever lived in Texas.
Essay of the Day:
In the Atlantic, Adam Kirsch writes about the battle between Germany and Israel over Kafka’s archives:
“If Kafka could read Kafka’s Last Trial, Benjamin Balint’s dramatic and illuminating new book about the fate of his work, he would surely be astonished to learn that his ‘scribbling’ turned out to be incredibly valuable—not just in literary terms, but financially and even geopolitically. At the heart of Balint’s book is a court case that dragged through the Israeli judicial system for years, concerning the ownership of some surviving manuscripts of Kafka’s that had ended up in private hands in Tel Aviv. Because the case was widely reported on at the time, it’s not a spoiler to say that in 2016 control of the manuscripts was taken from Eva Hoffe, the elderly woman who possessed them, and awarded to the National Library of Israel.
“In Balint’s account, however, the case involves much more than the minutiae of wills and laws. It raises momentous questions about nationality, religion, literature, and even the Holocaust—in which Kafka’s three sisters died, and which he escaped only by dying young, of tuberculosis. Hoffe inherited the manuscripts from her mother, Esther, who had been given them by Max Brod, Kafka’s best friend and literary executor. She planned to sell them to the German Literature Archive, in Marbach, where they would join the works of other masters of German literature. This would have been a cultural coup for Germany, and an implied endorsement of the idea that Kafka is properly considered a German writer though he was never a German citizen, but a Jew who was born and lived in Prague. The National Library of Israel argued that Kafka’s writing forms part of the cultural heritage of the Jewish people, and so his manuscripts belong in the Jewish state.”
Photos: Scuba Diving’s 2018 Underwater Photo Contest winners
Poem: Malachi Black, “A Letter from the End of Days”
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