Reviews and News:
Shakespeare did not invent as many words as the original editors of the Oxford English Dictionary claimed: The “OED is biased: especially in the early days, it preferred literary examples, and famous ones at that…The Complete Works of Shakespeare was frequently raided for early examples of word use, even though words or phrases might have been used earlier, by less famous or less literary people.”
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The rare books dealer David Mason writes about the Hemingway Heist, which took place in his store in 1993: “The Heist involved the theft of books by Hemingway, plus letters between him, F Scott Fitzgerald, and the Canadian writer Morley Callaghan, all relating to the famous boxing match between Hemingway and Callaghan, with Fitzgerald as the timekeeper. The match took place in Paris during the summer of 1929, and resulted in Callaghan knocking Hemingway down. The subsequent furore caused a huge literary scandal and fractured the friendships of the three writers. After receiving the books and letters, I locked them in a store safe. When I opened my shop the next day, I was shocked to discover the safe had been cracked.”
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Holger S. Syme reviews Brian Vickers’s The One King Lear: “Every once in a while, a book comes along that fundamentally challenges the way we think. Brian Vickers’s The One King Lear is such a book. It constitutes a real challenge to the belief that our system of academic peer reviewing works as it should. Published by one of North America’s most august university presses, it is nonetheless a volume riddled with basic methodological errors, factual blunders, conceptual non-sequiturs, and vituperative ad hominem attacks. It is a book that should never have been printed in its present form. But one of its two prominent, if non-committal, blurbists is right: now that it exists, this is not a book one can ignore. Precisely because Harvard University Press seems to have set scholarly standards aside in putting Vickers’s tome into print, The One King Lear now requires the rigorous critique the press either did not solicit or, more likely, chose to ignore.”
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The dull piety of the new Tate Modern: “I happen to like the new Tate Modern building. The content’s the problem. The art currently on show there sums up some of the worst defects of the art world. Just when it should be exuberant and joyous it is pious, timid, cold.”
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The other William Empson: “When William Empson took a job as a university lecturer in Tokyo in 1931, his star was rising. The previous year he had published his first book, Seven Types of Ambiguity. A guide to the close analysis of poems, the book upended literary criticism in Britain and would soon do so in the United States. In Japan, Empson developed a fascination with Buddhist art that grew into a monograph, The Face of the Buddha; this book, too, became famous, but for entirely different reasons. Empson worked on the project intermittently for a decade, only to discover that his sole copy of the manuscript had mysteriously disappeared, along with a collection of irreplaceable photographs assembled throughout his travels. His friend John Davenport eventually admitted to having left it in a cab. Critics have long known of the lost manuscript, but its rediscovery a few years ago was wholly unanticipated…The Face of the Buddha may not rewrite the study of Buddhist art the way that Empson and other New Critics rewrote 20th-century literary analysis, but for Empson’s many readers, it will go some way toward revising their view of him.”
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The last months of Franklin Roosevelt.
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Essay of the Day:
In First Things, Barton Swaim explains why Hillary Clinton writes in the style of a public information officer (PIO):
“It’s not just that her writing is boring and tends toward empty word-level justifications of her own conduct, though it does. In both her logorrheic memoirs, Living History (2003) and Hard Choices (2014), she writes in the anodyne crisis mode of a government spokesman during an agency meltdown—carefully and dryly, never conceding wrongdoing and always interpreting past decisions in the best possible light. Most political spokesmen and many politicians express themselves in this way under pressure, but Clinton has adopted it as a style of communication—and, it seems, as a way of thinking.
“When she discusses the scandals and debacles of her own career, she typically relays her side of the story (as is her right) and then concludes by lapsing into some truism that doesn’t make sense in context but affords an easy transition to another topic. Living History deals, for instance, with the early Clinton administration scandal stupidly known as ‘Travelgate.’ It seemed fairly clear—and later evidence confirmed this—that the Clintons wanted the White House travel office staff fired and replaced with cronies from Arkansas. Not an impeachable offense, though a nasty one. The dismissed head of the travel office, Billy Dale, had to deal with trumped-up charges of embezzlement. (He was eventually acquitted.) Clinton concludes her very brief version of the story with this sentence: ‘”Travelgate,” as it came to be known in the media, was perhaps worthy of a two- or three-week life span; instead, in a partisan political climate, it became the first manifestation of an obsession for investigation that persisted into the next millennium.’
“Banal, grammatically weird, not quite falsifiable. The controversy did happen ‘in a partisan political climate,’ true enough. When are politics not partisan? But it’s unclear to me what Clinton intends by calling the episode ‘the first manifestation of an obsession for investigation that persisted into the next millennium.’ She seems to mean the press is still trying to dig up stuff on her, as if that observation has any relevance to the controversy she’s purporting to relate. But anyway, digging up stuff is what the press does, so again: true enough.
“Clinton’s second memoir, Hard Choices, covers her time as U.S. senator and secretary of state. It is an unbearably boring account of the author’s public life and gives few hints that anything she ever did or said was controversial in the minds of anyone but her most unyielding critics.
“But of course, something remarkable did happen during Clinton’s term as secretary of state, namely the murder by terrorists of four Americans, one of them a U.S. ambassador, in Benghazi, Libya. Readers will have their own views on Clinton’s role and culpability in the affair. On one of the controversy’s central questions, though—why the U.S. government was incapable of defending one of its most vulnerable consulates—she writes: ‘Our military does everything humanly possible to save American lives—and would do more if they could. That anyone has ever suggested otherwise is something I will never understand.’ She deploys a truism to counter an accusation that hasn’t been made. Nobody blamed the disaster on ‘our military.’ Many, however, blamed the civilian administration in which Clinton served as chief diplomat.
“In essence, Clinton—Clinton the writer—acts as her own PIO. All the unsavory controversies with which Mrs. Clinton is popularly remembered—cattle futures, ‘Filegate,’ Whitewater—receive the same kind of dreary and studiously positive reinterpretation.”
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Image of the Day: White orca
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Poem: Austin Allen, “Tower Scheherazade”
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