Reviews and News:
Osip Mandelstam against Stalin: “In line with most of the Russian intelligentsia, Mandelstam had been initially supportive of the ideals of the Bolsheviks and sought to embrace the spirit of revolution. He soon became disillusioned, however, by the increasing demands of the regime for poetry to serve the political and collective, rather than the personal and the human.”
* *
Setting Whitman to music: “It can be a tricky thing to choose verse for a musical setting that is itself so musical already.”
* *
There are lots of empty buildings in Athens. Rent is cheap. Will it become Europe’s next art capital?
* *
The return of Christianity in Eastern Europe: “This is how the Pew Research Center summarizes the surge of Christianity in Europe around the fallen Iron Curtain roughly 25 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union. ‘The comeback of religion in a region once dominated by atheist regimes is striking’…Today, only 14 percent of the region’s population identify as atheists, agnostics, or ‘nones.’ By comparison, 57 percent identify as Orthodox, and another 18 percent as Catholics.” Yet: “Relatively few Orthodox or Catholic adults in Central and Eastern Europe say they regularly attend worship services, pray often, or consider religion central to their lives.”
* *
The life and work of Ronald Knox: “By the time he took Anglican orders in 1912, having won a fellowship to Trinity College and carried away prize after prize for classics, Knox was high church, indeed ‘papalist,’ in outlook. There was something camp in his involvement with the Society of Ss. Peter and Paul, a flamboyant group organized by Maurice Child to publish Anglican versions of Roman Catholic liturgical texts and sell ‘Lambeth Frankincense’ and ‘Latimer and Ridley votive-candle stands’ to readers of the Church Times. Had he not converted in 1917, entering the Catholic priesthood a year later, he might have been one of those curious and attractive figures in the history of the Church of England like Robert Burton and Dean Swift who perform their ecclesiastical labors cursorily while setting up a niche for themselves in the byways of literature. Instead, he became a dedicated teacher at Shrewsbury School, where he devised an elaborate method of teaching Latin grammar involving hundreds of words typed on individual sheets of paper given to his students with instructions to arrange them into a piece of narrative verse. Later he was to serve for more than a decade as Catholic chaplain at Oxford.”
* *
Ten commandments for the pub: “2. Don’t serve food that takes more than six words to describe. ‘Sausage and mash’ good, ‘Steak and chips’ fine, ‘Cornish lamb cutlets, pulled Lamb croquettes, spring greens and hazelnuts in a juniper & port jus’, no.”
* *
Alan Jacobs on Greg Egan’s Diaspora at 20: “If the mind craves novelty and can’t think of reasons to live when the possibilities for novelty have been exhausted, the body takes the opposite view: it craves repetition, delights in repetition, and shakes in fear when it’s about to be deprived of the simple pleasure of ‘bearing witness / To what each morning brings again to light.'”
* *
The American Writers Museum opens in Chicago on May 16th, and it sounds awful: “Instead of manuscripts and first editions, there are interactive touch screens and high-tech multimedia installations galore, like a mesmerizing ‘Word Waterfall,’ in which a wall of densely packed, seemingly random words is revealed, through a constantly looping light projection, to contain resonant literary quotations. There are also homier touches, like cozy couches in the children’s literature gallery and even the occasional smell of cookies, unleashed whenever someone pushes the plaque for Julia Child’s ‘Mastering the Art of French Cooking,’ included in an installation called ‘The Surprise Bookshelf’. The museum, created with nearly $10 million in privately raised money, may not own any artifacts. But it does have one on loan for the next six months: the famous 120-foot scroll on which Jack Kerouac banged out ‘On the Road.'” That’s right, $10 million in lights and plastic to celebrate American books.
* *
Essay of the Day:
In the Times Literary Supplement, Peter Coates revisits the 1927 Mississippi flood, and its effect on art and life in America:
Only the catchment areas of the Amazon, the Congo and the Nile exceed that of the Mississippi, which drains 40 per cent of the United States, encompassing thirty-one states (and two Canadian provinces). Other renowned calamities in the United States – the (human-caused) Johnstown (Pennsylvania) flood of 1889 (more than 2,000 German and Welsh immigrant ironworkers lost their lives when a rickety dam burst higher up the valley), the Galveston (Texas) hurricane of 1900 (the nation’s deadliest hurricane), the San Francisco earthquake and fire (1906) and Hurricane Katrina (2005) – involved more physical damage and greater loss of life. But the area affected by the Mississippi flood of 1927, the most severe in US history, is unrivalled in the annals of American ‘natural’ disasters. Unusually heavy and persistent precipitation began in August 1926 throughout the Mississippi basin and did not let up until the spring of 1927. Long-term processes of deforestation in the upper basin, wetland drainage and installation of monoculture agricultural regimes had seriously compromised the earth’s capacity to store moisture from rain and snow, hastening runoff and erosion of the ‘naked’ soil. So, by late spring, 30,000 square miles across seven states, from Cairo, Illinois, to the Gulf of Mexico, inhabited by nearly a million people, stood under up to 30 feet of water.
At the flood’s height, an expanse equivalent to all the New England states was awash, and the river was 80 miles wide in places. As Vernon Tull, a character in William Faulkner’s novel, As I Lay Dying (1930), put it, you ‘couldn’t tell where was the river and where the land. It was just a tangle of yellow and the levee not less wider than a knife-back’. According to the American Red Cross, which spearheaded relief efforts, the death toll was 246. But this figure did not include the deaths of black Americans; the total body count was probably over a thousand. Between 700,000 and 900,000 people were rendered homeless. Around 130,000 homes were destroyed. Some 300,000 African Americans were consigned to makeshift refugee camps. At Mounds Landing, just north of Greenville, Mississippi, when a crevasse appeared in the levee on April 21, 1927, a wall of water poured through with a force equivalent to that of Niagara Falls. Around 13,000 residents were evacuated to higher ground, and local black men toiled at gunpoint to shore up the defences. This incident inspired the husband and wife duo, Kansas Joe McCoy and Memphis Minnie, to record ‘When the Levee Breaks’ (1929), a song reworked in 1971 by Led Zeppelin for their fourth album.
The flood of 1927 has multiple dimensions: the harrowing individual sagas of up to a million refugees; a relief effort of unprecedented scale in American history; the hubristic ‘levees only’ conviction of over-confident hydraulic engineers that the unruly, indomitable river had finally been tamed in the early twentieth century by lining its entire lower stretch with enormous dykes 30 feet high and 188 feet wide at the base; the uneven impact of the disaster on blacks and whites, rich and poor, and the inequitable, often brutal treatment of African Americans in the relief camps; the forced levee and relief work imposed on African Americans in a variation on debt peonage and convict-lease, and white bosses’ coercive attempts to prevent the loss of a cheap and servile black labour force enticed by the ‘promised land’ of northern cities and factory jobs; the exacerbation of already entrenched racial tensions in the Jim Crow South, from which charitable operations were in no sense exempt…
“[T]he cultural fallout from the shock of 1927 was also enormous.”
* *
Photos: Jupiter
* *
Poem: Joshua Hren, “Sanguine”
Get Prufrock in your inbox every weekday morning. Subscribe here.
