Reviews and News:
Terrible women writers: “Shelley DeWees has written a book about the lives of ‘seven amazing women writers who transformed British literature’. She ingenuously confesses that when she started out, she only really knew of five female British authors between 1800 and 1940: Jane Austen, two Brontës, George Eliot and Virginia Woolf. (I suppose she had heard of a third Brontë, but still…). She investigated, and found that Elizabeth Gaskell had ‘some fame in modern England, due to recent BBC adaptations’, as well as some others. She decided to write a book about seven ‘missing’ women writers in the 18th and 19th century. The trouble is that most of them are, quite manifestly, terrible.”
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A history of the oldest but least understood American law enforcement agency—The U. S. Marshals Service.
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Michael Dirda reviews a new translation of Alexandre Dumas’s sequel to The Three Musketeers—The Red Sphinx: ” For this handsome new edition — the work’s first translator since a wretched 19th-century version — Lawrence Ellsworth appends a related novella titled The Dove, which brings the adventures of the Comte de Moret and his beloved Isabelle de Lautrec to a dramatic, nick-of-time close.”
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P. G. Wodehouse, sloshed: “Reflecting on the ‘varieties’ of ‘religious experience’, William James wrote philosophically about intoxication. We must, he argues, look again at ‘the power of alcohol to stimulate the mystical faculties’. Alcohol, for James, was a way of understanding our ‘denuded, keenly sentient being’ – it ‘brings its votary from the chill periphery of things to the radiant core’. P. G. Wodehouse’s take on ‘being whiffled’ is more concise. ‘I have come to the conclusion’, he writes to a friend in 1946, that ‘gin and Italian vermouth are the greatest thing in life’. Richard T. Kelly’s enjoyable book sources a wide range of Wodehouse’s writings on drinking, from his early journalism through to Blandings and Mr Mulliner. Against a backdrop of country houses and English pubs, we brood on beer and wine, while New York offers a fresh world of ‘green swizzles’ and ‘lightning whizzers’.”
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Shakespeare in America: “Shakespeare continues to be the most performed playwright in the United States, but his appeal has a global extension, and it has long been so. Sublimity has ever called to sublimity. The great modern nations boast great writers who depict and define the national life and character: Victor Hugo for the French, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe for the Germans, Leo Tolstoy the Russians, Herman Melville and Mark Twain the Americans, and Shakespeare the English. Of course their greatness is hardly confined to their parochial impact: They are masters for all time and every place. And even among these titans an order of rank is observed, as a true aristocracy requires, and it is Shakespeare who ranks supreme.”
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The variety and universality of nicknames.
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Essay of the Day:
In The New Criterion, Marco Grassi remembers the Arno River flood of 1966, which damaged hundreds of art works in Florence, and gives a first-hand account of the work that was done afterwards to restore them:
“Not surprisingly, each anniversary of that fateful event is somberly remembered in Florence. With this recent fiftieth recurrence, however, it became more of a national and even international commemoration. Much reported here and abroad was the reinstallation, in the Refectory adjoining the basilica of Santa Croce, of a huge depiction of The Last Supper by Giorgio Vasari, the mid-sixteenth century painter, architect, and author of the celebrated Lives. It was an apt commemorative gesture since the Vasari was billed as the last remaining flood-ravaged work to be replaced on public view after restoration. The Last Supper panel (in fact, five separate sections of poplar measuring a total of over six by eighteen feet) was originally commissioned for a nearby Carmelite convent. With the suppression of many cloistered religious communities in the nineteenth century, the huge painting was put on deposit at Santa Croce. Here, in the late 1950s, a place was finally found for it in a cramped, rather dark space adjoining the Chiostro Grande as part of a projected museum complex. And it was here, a day after the flood, that I encountered The Last Supper still bolted to the wall in a room where the water had just recently reached to the ceiling.
“Having apprenticed at the Uffizi ‘Gabinetto del Restauro’ several years earlier, I was known well enough by my older colleagues there to be put in charge of a small group of volunteers. We and other ‘first aid’ intervention squads were dispatched as the need arose—and Santa Croce was immediately identified as the highest of priorities. Of these, by far the most important, not only in Florence but also in the entire Arno basin, was the great painted Crucifix by Cimabue.”
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Image of the Day: Manarola
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Poem: Michael Shewmaker, “The Pastor”
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