Reviews and News:
Why young people join ISIS: “I think that there is a strong urge to say that Islam has nothing to do with religion, that ISIS is a bunch of psychopaths, people with blades cutting off heads wantonly. Unfortunately that’s just not true. ISIS has looked into Islamic history with historical accuracy, with intellectual rigor. And that’s part of what has produced that group as well as its Muslim opponents.”
* *
Stallone says no to NEA.
* *
The joy and terror of Shirley Jackson.
* *
Justifying exclusion through “diversity”: “All over the world, this magic word is used to uphold subjective criteria that disadvantage certain people.”
* *
How Washington Irving shaped Christmas in America: “In 1835, he helped found the Saint Nicholas Society of the City of New York, serving as its secretary until 1841. Beyond his interest in Nicholas, Irving advanced Christmas as the festive pageant of presents and feasting that now dominates the American winter calendar.”
* *
Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky have been criticized recently for their translations of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. Their first translation of Pushkin is excellent: It is “less literal than some of their predecessors, but much is gained because of the liberty that they take: their sentences are cleaner, words less clunky, and they capture a story’s psychological and emotional undertones in a way that others do not.”
* *
Remembering Christopher Hitchens: “Christopher Hitchens died five years ago this month. For many years, he was a contributor to the TLS, and between 1982 and 1987, while living in the United States and working at the Nation, he also wrote a column, “American Notes”. Below we republish a selection of his pieces, in which he recounts his surprise phone call with Thomas Pynchon, considers the death of Andy Warhol, and gives his thoughts on the literary efforts of Stephen King. Jeremy Treglown, the former Editor of the TLS, introduces the columns, recalling how the idea first formed, and the long afternoons keeping Hitchens company in the pub.”
* *
The civilized crime fiction of Charles Finch.
* *
Essay of the Day:
In The New York Review of Books, Max Nelson writes about the singing preacher, Washington Phillips (musical clips included):
“In 2003, the Atlanta-based record label Dust to Digital released a six-CD anthology of prewar American gospel music called Goodbye, Babylon. The territory of that music was dauntingly varied and wide. Hellfire sermons, choral ‘sacred harp’ songs, energetic group sing-alongs, solo performances of great fragility, swaggering performances by singers who flitted between spirituals and the blues: these were for the most part commercial recordings, often arranged by talent scouts like Columbia’s Frank B. Walker and released in pairs on 78 rpm records designated for specific markets (in the case of the set’s many recordings by black musicians from the South, ‘race records’). Some were exultant songs of praise. But many others were dark and doubt-haunted. They spoke of devils and temptations, of communities in decline, of pleas for divine salvation that might not be answered or heard.
“Of the range of musicians included on Goodbye, Babylon—Baptist and Pentecostal, urban and rural, black and white—the Texas singer and preacher Washington Phillips was both one of the best-known among gospel enthusiasts and one of the most mysterious. The sixteen songs he recorded for Walker in five Dallas sessions over three consecutive Decembers—1927, 1928, and 1929—had been available together since 1979, and some began circulating on compilations well before then. (Another pair of songs, now lost, was recorded but never released.) In his own time, Phillips had been a brief commercial success. His first 78 sold more than eight thousand copies, and one wonders how many other songs he’d have had the chance to record if the Depression hadn’t forestalled his three-year-long career.
“That career, like those of many of the singers on Goodbye, Babylon, grew out of a much longer record of local preaching and singing. For twenty years before his Dallas sessions, Phillips had been playing—in churches, at local functions, and at his house in a small farming community outside Teague—for neighbors and fellow believers; he kept doing so long after his last 78 appeared. (As a young man he experimented with Pentecostalism, but he spent much of his later life installed as the reverend of a local Baptist church.) In his case, performing in this atmosphere was a chance to develop a technically confounding and startlingly original kind of gospel song. Phillips’s Columbia recordings are sermons or hymns, some of them covers and others original, bleated out in a clear, confident but warbling voice and backed only by the harp-like plucking of a mysterious stringed instrument his studio documents called, cryptically, ‘novelty accomp.'”
* *
Image of the Day: Lausanne
* *
Poem: James Matthew Wilson, “The Third Sunday of Advent”
Get Prufrock in your inbox every weekday morning. Subscribe here.
