Reviews and News:
Antonio Muñoz Molina on Thomas De Quincey: “Youthful rebellion itself may have been his invention: he was the first, at any rate, to turn it into literature.”
* *
Our iconic age: “It’s hard to overestimate the popularity of ‘iconic’ and ‘icon.’ In one recent week I read about the iconic Henry David Thoreau, the iconic ballet Swan Lake, the iconic stethoscope, the iconic John Muir, the iconic Jane Austen, the iconic Dow Jones Industrial Average, the iconic Isaac Newton, the iconic polar bear, and the iconic modern Indian play Chand Baniker Pala by Sombhu Mitra.”
* *
Bill Clinton and James Patterson to write a book together. It’ll be a thriller called The President Is Missing.
* *
Elvis fans are dying. No one wants their stuff: “In December 2015, an unheard, one-of-a-kind Elvis acetate surfaced at an auction house in Aston in the West Midlands. Widely publicised, and open to the worldwide market, the recording of Suspicion was expected to sell for ¢12,000. It achieved ¢6,500. This shocked many, but not collectors. It marked the arrival of a moment they had always feared. For the first time in popular music history, Elvis records and collections were dropping in value.”
* *
Why we swim: “Any body of water confronts us with our mortality, and our illusory hold on the two-dimensional world, because we know it could so easily kill us. That is part of the thrill and challenge: the abandonment of human hubris. The possibility that this swim might be your last. Yet it is also the ultimate in life-giving.”
* *
A compelling history of the English Reformation: “Historical disputation over the causes and consequences of the English Reformation has been so heated during the last few decades that it is easy to feel overwhelmed by the convolutions of claim and counterclaim. With pleasing dispatch Peter Marshall’s compelling new history of England’s Reformation sweeps all the historians down into the footnotes and just tells the story as he sees it. The picture is not a stately architectural drawing, sharply delineating light and shade, but a many-shaded mosaic, each small piece an individual account of doubt or devotion, idealism or compromise. This is the human story within the grand narrative, written with fluidity and warmth, its scholarship providing a firm foundation without being intrusive, its analysis thoughtful, not polemical.”
* *
Essay of the Day: In Hudson Review, Bruce Whiteman writes about Gustave Flaubert’s public and private lives:
“The writer Flaubert inherited his physician father’s eye for physical detail, and it is no surprise to learn from the Goncourt brothers’ Journal that Flaubert had a bronze bust of Hippocrates on the fireplace mantle in his study. (A similar bust can be spotted in Dr. Bovary’s home in Sophie Barthes’s 2014 film version of Madame Bovary.) Flaubert the anatomist of French bourgeois life under Louis-Philippe maintained throughout his career that science ought to rule as a force of government and as the basis for civic life, not religion, not utopian theories, and certainly not bourgeois ideals of comfort and achievement. Never a success as a student—he was expelled from high school and flunked out of law school—Flaubert nonetheless turned himself into not just the greatest French writer of his century, but also a major critic of French society. Overt criticism is largely confined to his voluminous correspondence; in his fiction it is up to the reader to interpret character and story and to gage the criticism implicit in the details. It was the details, and the right words to capture them, of which Flaubert was a master.
“Despite his hatred for middle-class life and middle-class people, with their bland chatter and their uninspiring aspirations, their philoprogenitive focus on family and their obeisance to the altar, Flaubert was middle class himself in almost every way that mattered. He lived for most of his life on family money, and although he rarely had to struggle to keep himself in modest style (house in the provinces, apartment in Paris, weekly At Homes when he was in the city, and so on), money was always a dominant concern, even as he refused to deal with it directly. He treated his publishers almost like tradesmen, refusing to negotiate contracts with them and assigning others to do this on his behalf. He travelled and ate well and was already showing signs of bourgeois over-indulgence by the time he was thirty: venereal disease, incipient obesity, extensive medical problems, bad teeth, etc. In January of 1851, still only twenty-nine, Flaubert wrote disconsolately to a friend from Naples, as he was making his way back to France, of his ‘fattened face,’ his ‘double chin and jowls.’ He encouraged his niece to marry a man whom she clearly did not love, mainly because he was financially stable and socially acceptable. Of course in other, essential ways, Flaubert held back from bourgeois life, refusing to marry and dedicating himself to writing with an almost sacerdotal devotion. His mother chided his work ethic, and its resultant inhuman coldness, in a famous and stinging insult, when she told him that his ‘passion for sentences had dried up his heart’ (‘Ta rage des phrases t’a desséché le coeur’). That was not really true, as Flaubert’s letters amply demonstrate. He was a faithful friend, an honest and valued critic of others’ literary work, and a boon companion and salon attendee. His relationships with women were hardly above reproach, but bourgeois they were certainly not. His long and deep friendship with George Sand proves how capable he was of maintaining a relationship with a woman that was not in the least sexual.”
* *
Photo: Qiong Ku Shi Tai Village
* *
Poem: Timothy Murphy, “Five Poems”
Get Prufrock in your inbox every weekday morning. Subscribe here.
