Reviews and News:
Elena Ferrante, whose real identity was recently revealed by an Italian journalist, has said that an author never “has anything decisive to add to his work.” In her recently translated memoir, Frantumaglia, she attempts to do just that and, according to Michiko Kakutani in The New York Times, fails miserably: It’s “a hugely misguided endeavor…a padded, often self-indulgent volume that undermines her stated belief that ‘books, once they are written, have no need of their authors.’ In fact, this book is a 384-page repudiation of her assertion that the text is ‘a self-sufficient body, which has in itself, in its makeup, all the questions and all the answers’…the sheer volume of interviews here, the author’s often self-dramatizing discussions of her life (or that of the character of the so-called Elena Ferrante), and the very decision to assemble this book seem to fly in the face of her declaration that writing should have ‘an autonomous space, far from the demands of the media and the marketplace.'”
* *
Evelyn Waugh “possessed many vices and failings — snobbery, spite, cruelty, ire, sloth, arrogance, gluttony, boozery, and pigheadedness.” Two things he wasn’t: dull or cowardly.
* *
Beatrix Potter’s lost tale: “Beatrix Potter was something of an odd duck—and her Edwardian animal stories would seem odder still, if we were to encounter them for the first time. But the most curious part of the Beatrix Potter phenomenon may be that it’s nearly impossible to discover her work for the first time. After all the bedtime readings and birthday gifts of her works—all the bookstore displays and innumerable editions since she first appeared in print with The Tale of Peter Rabbit in 1902—she has wormed her way too deep into the consciousness most readers formed back in childhood. We can’t read Beatrix Potter. We can only re-read her.
That’s true even with The Tale of Kitty-in-Boots, the newly published 24th of Potter’s books.”
* *
Frank Furedi on increasing faculty self-censorship: “Students studying the archaeology of modern conflict at University College, London, have been told they are permitted to leave class if they find the discussion of historical events ‘disturbing’ or traumatising. This does not surprise me. Shielding students from topics deemed sensitive is fast gaining influence in academic life. My colleague at another university showed a picture of an emaciated Hungarian Jewish woman liberated from a death camp. A student, yelled out, ‘stop showing this, I did not come here to be traumatised’, disrupting his lecture on the Hungarian Holocaust. After the student complained of distress, caused by the disturbing image, my colleague was told by an administrator to be more careful when discussing such a sensitive subject. ‘How can I teach the Holocaust without unsettling my students?’ asked my friend. Academics who now feel they have to mind their words are increasingly posing such questions.”
* *
A new Ring: “‘Forget calm,’ announces the marquee outside Chicago’s Civic Opera House, ‘this is opera.’ With his exciting new production of Das Rheingold, the British director David Pountney kicks off Lyric Opera of Chicago’s sixty-second season with the first installment of an ambitious new Ring des Nibelungen, Richard Wagner’s four-evening masterpiece recounting the creation and destruction of the world. This is the first time Lyric has ever opened its season with a Wagner opera, and Chicago’s new Ring, to be delivered in complete cycles in 2020, keeps the company in pace with America’s other leading houses in New York, San Francisco, Washington, and Houston, all of which have introduced elaborate new productions of Wagner’s tetralogy in the past decade.”
* *
The story of Benjamin Franklin’s “most cherished creation,” a glass armonica.
* *
Inside the NYPL’s last appartments (HT: Scott Redd)
* *
Essay of the Day:
In The Guardian, Sophie Elmhirst explains how selling water became a multi-billion dollar business:
“For a substance that falls out of the sky and springs from the earth of its own accord, water has always had an extraordinary commercial lure…For centuries, wealthy Europeans travelled to spa towns to sample the water in a bid to cure specific ailments. The spa visit was a signal of health, but also of status: somewhere to be seen, an association of liquid and individual that broadcasted social elevation – a distant precursor to Kim Kardashian clutching a bottle of Fiji, if you like. In 1740, the first commercial British bottled water was launched in Harrogate. By 1914 Harrogate Spring was, according to its website, the largest exporter of bottled water in the country, ‘proudly keeping the troops hydrated from England to Bombay’.
“In the early 20th century, however, a water revolution nearly killed the nascent business. After early attempts in Germany and Belgium to chlorinate municipal drinking water, a typhoid epidemic in Lincoln in 1905 prompted the public health crusader Alexander Cruickshank Houston to try out the first extended chlorination of a public water supply. His experiment worked, and soon, chlorination of municipal water had spread around the world. In 1908, Jersey City became the first US city to use full-scale water chlorination, and the practice quickly spread across the country.
“The bottled water industry almost collapsed as a result. In the past, buying clean water had been a necessity for the rich (the poor simply endured centuries of bad drinking water, and often died from the experience). Now it was freely available to all. Why would you continue to spend money on something that now came, miraculously, out of a tap in your kitchen?
“The answer arrived in 1977, in the form of what must be one of history’s greatest pieces of television advertising narration. ‘Deep below the plains of southern France,’ rumbled Orson Welles in a voice that sounded as if it were bubbling up from some unreachable subterranean cave, ‘in a mysterious process begun millions of years ago, Nature herself adds life to the icy waters of a single spring: Perrier.’ As viewers watched the water descend into a glass, and admired the glistening green bottle, marketing history was made. The advert was part of a $5m campaign across America – the largest ever for a bottled water – and proved a major success. From 1975 to 1978, Perrier sales in the US increased from 2.5m bottles to more than 75m bottles.
“The Perrier triumph was part of ‘a perfect confluence’, Salzman told me, of a sudden craze for aerobics in the US, prompted, in part, by Jane Fonda releasing her first exercise video – Jane Fonda’s Workout, the highest-selling video of all time – in 1982. There was a new drive not just to be healthy, but to be seen to be healthy. In 1985, Time magazine noted that ‘water snobbery has replaced wine snobbery as the latest noon-hour recreation. People order their eau by brand name, as they once did Scotch.'”
* *
Image of the Day: White reindeer
* *
Poem: Dana Gioia, “Autumn Day”
Get Prufrock in your inbox every weekday morning. Subscribe here.
