Reviews and News:
The poet and undertaker Thomas Lynch reviews a history of how we deal with our dead: “‘Why?’ a priest asked me years ago, ‘Why is it they always call you first?’ I was calling to set the time of a funeral for the coming Saturday, which would further beset a churchman’s schedule already stuffed with duties and detail…’Well, Father,’ I told him, ‘it’s because we answer the phone.’ And it was and remains so: the 3 a.m. phone call most likely to be answered is not to the church, the therapist, the bank or insurance company, the accountant or doctor—each of them buffered by business hours and answering machines. The ‘first call,’ as we undertakers call it, is reliably answered at the funeral home, where someone who knows what to do is up and waiting, or sleeping with an ear cocked to the call for help when someone dies. ‘And why is that?’ the good priest continued. ‘Because, Father’—and you can try this at home—’we humans can live with a broken heart; and we can live with a shaken faith; but we cannot live with a corpse on the floor.'”
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Hadley Arkes remembers the Chicago of his childhood and how it has changed: “The point was: there was always someone there. I was given the sense that the grownups could simply be counted on to do what grownups were supposed to do. No, children were not there to render therapy to adults, or offer unsolicited advice beyond their experience or wit. They were to be preserved as long as possible in their innocence, and sheltered, as youngsters, from the harsher language and meaner aspects of the world. They would become tutored in the ways of that world all too soon enough. Many years later, in a program on the First Amendment, an interviewer asked if I could remember the first time when I felt free. I really couldn’t. For it struck me that, as a child, I had never felt unfree. There was a vast world in which to move, and those fences, occasionally seen, were not barriers to my freedom but fences for my protection. It seemed to us, as youngsters, that we had a large field for roaming, and yet we had the sense that we were moving in a landscape in which we were instantly recognized and placed: ‘Levin’s eynikl,’ they would say of me, Levin’s grandson. That landscape seemed filled with ‘catchers in the rye,’ with someone always keeping an eye out for me.”
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Bruce Cole on the unabashed elitism and riveting writing of Robert Hughes: “The chief reason to buy The Spectacle of Skill is for Hughes’s memoir (five chapters from the first part, which appeared as Things I Didn’t Know in 2006, and eleven chapters from the unpublished second part are reprinted here), a rollicking saga of his turbulent life from his Sydney childhood to the suicide of his estranged son, Danton. Fast-paced, unbuttoned, elegant, and engrossingly written, it’s a fascinating account of its maverick author and those who came into (or left) his orbit, including many luminaries of the New York art scene. Aside from the unfinished memoir, this hefty volume features a selection of pieces from Hughes’s oeuvre, including book reviews and columns from Time magazine—the highly readable art criticism that made him famous in America. There are also long passages from his books on Rome, Barcelona, and Goya, and pages from The Fatal Shore (1986), his massively researched, brilliantly told, history of the convict settlement of Australia. Excerpts from the scripts of his TV hits, The Shock of the New (1980) and American Visions: The Epic History of Art in America (1997) are also included.”
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Joseph Epstein: “John O’Hara was wont to complain publicly about the state of his reputation, thereby joining the majority of writers, most of whom keep this standard complaint to themselves. What, exactly, apart from being insufficiently grand to please him, was his reputation? I should say it was—and remains today—that of a writer a substantial notch below Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and William Faulkner, about all of whom he spoke and wrote reverently.”
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Revenge of the analog: “‘Sooner or later, everything old is new again,’ Stephen King once wrote — an observation that’s never been truer than today. Far from being dead, vinyl records sales rose to $416 million last year, the highest since 1988, and artists like the Black Keys, Lana Del Rey and Beck are eagerly embracing the format. Instant Polaroid-like cameras have caught on among millennials and their younger siblings. A new Pew survey shows that print books remain much more popular than books in digital formats. Old-school paper notebooks and erasable whiteboards are the go-to technology among many Silicon Valley types, and even typewriters are enjoying a renaissance in today’s post-Snowden, surveillance-conscious era. In his captivating new book, The Revenge of Analog, the reporter David Sax provides an insightful and entertaining account of this phenomenon.”
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Essay of the Day:
In Vanity Fair, Rich Cohen writes about Canada’s maple syrup cartel, which controls 72% of the world’s supply, and the theft of 540,000 gallons of syrup from its Global Strategic Maple Syrup Reserve in Laurierville, Quebec:
“The Reserve is in Laurierville, a town in the heart of Quebec. Steeples, snowy roads, hills, old men in berets eating croissants at McDonald’s. It’s reached via spotless highways where no one tailgates or cuts you off or honks in anger. It’s just the polite double beep in Quebec, a state of play that seems connected to how most syrup producers have been content to leave the free market for the safety of a cartel. It’s a better life, with less road rage, but also not as colorful, nor as interesting, and forget about the windfall and resulting spree.
“Caroline Cyr met me at the back door of the Reserve and took me on a tour. As I said, it’s the holy of holies, where oceans of syrup, the accumulated wealth of Canadian forests, hibernates, sometimes for months, sometimes for years. I had a clear mental picture of the Reserve: huge vats, surface crusted and covered with flies; tanks reached by tottering ziggurats; visitors in perpetual danger of falling in and doing the slowest, stickiest, sweetest dead man’s float of all time. In fact, the Reserve, which might hold 7.5 million gallons on a typical day, is a warehouse filled with barrels, white drums stacked from floor to ceiling, nearly 20 feet high. There was a Charles Sheeler-like quality to the place, an industrial awesomeness, the barrels in endless rows, the implied weight of them, persnickety and precise in a way that seems especially Canadian. It’s almost like the life we know, but not quite. It’s so close, yet so different. A treasure trove, with inventory, at any given time, worth perhaps $185 million. The syrup is tested when it comes in, then sent through a Willie Wonka-esque conveyor system where it’s pasteurized and sealed in a barrel, forklifted and stacked. Each barrel carries a label with a grade (Extra Light, Light, Medium, Amber, Dark) and percentage. When maple water exits a maple tree, it’s 2 to 4 percent sugar. As it’s boiled, the sugar concentrates. To be syrup, it must be 66 percent sugar. Below that, it’s not stable. Above 69 percent, it turns into something else. Butter. Taffy. Candy. There were two or three guys cruising around on forklifts, in hairnets. ‘We’re all waiting for the spring,’ Cyr told me, ‘when this place will be filled with barrels.’ Being in syrup is like being a tax accountant. Three or four weeks of intensity followed by months of waiting and wondering.
“I asked Cyr if there’d ever been a spill. She looked at me like I was a fool. I told her about a molasses spill that had once smothered Boston’s North End, a wave that upended trees, drove horses mad, and killed 21. ‘No,’ she said calmly. ‘We have never had a spill.’
“The Reserve is a monument to collective planning, to thousands of little guys each giving up a little freedom in return for security. Canadians call this a better life. Americans call it socialism. Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek might call it ‘the Road to Serfdom.’ It’s like all the other roads in Quebec. Calm and predictable, without a single Camaro blasting Bon Jovi, or a sticker of a cartoon man flipping you off while peeing. But it’s had the perverse effect of pooling wealth, of creating just the sort of target Willie Sutton meant when he supposedly said he robs banks because that’s where the money is. Cyr encouraged me to lift one of the barrels. I couldn’t budge it. Imagine trying to steal one of those barrels—now imagine trying to steal 10,000.
“It was the Lufthansa heist of the syrup world. In the summer of 2012, on one of those July days when the first hint of autumn cools the northern forest, Michel Gauvreau began his precarious climb up the barrels in St.-Louis-de-Blandford, a town outside Laurierville, where part of the Reserve was stored in a rented warehouse. Once a year, FPAQ takes an inventory of the barrels. Gauvreau was near the top of the stack when one of the barrels teetered, then nearly gave way. “He almost fell,” Cyr said, pausing to let the picture form. A small man, astride a tower of syrup, realizing, suddenly, there’s nothing beneath his feet. Normally, weighing more than 600 pounds when filled, the barrels are sturdy, so something was clearly amiss. When Gauvreau knocked on the barrel, it tolled like a gong. When he unscrewed the cap, he discovered it empty. At first, it seemed like this might have been a glitch, a mistake, but soon more punk barrels were found—many more. Even barrels that seemed full had been emptied of syrup and filled with water—a sure sign of thieves who’d covered their tracks.”
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Image of the Day: Norwegian fjords
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Poem: Wendy Videlock, “Redress”
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