It’s the 50th anniversary of the Beatles’ White Album, and with it comes the release of a six-CD-plus-Blue-ray-disc-bonus anniversary edition box set. In THE WEEKLY STANDARD, Dominic Green writes that the White Album may be “the best Beatles album [that] has some of the worst Beatles music.” At the Spectator, Luke Haines remarks that the re-engineered anniversary edition “sounds a bit like a Radiohead record.”
A history of dragons: Tom Shippy reviews Martin Arnold’s “exceptionally wide-ranging and multicultural survey.”
The founders of Aardman—the studio that produces Wallace and Gromit—give 75 percent of the company to employees to “safeguard independence.”
Algis Valiunas reviews Adam Zamoyski’s Napoleon: “To some it might seem only natural to compare Napoleon to Churchill, who was the greatest man of action since Napoleon, though not as a commander in the field. But a less attractive comparison has worked its way into historiographic orthodoxy since the Second World War, and it sees Napoleon ‘as a kind of proto-Hitler whose secret police, press censorship, aggressive foreign policy and desire for a new European order all presaged the horrors unleashed by the Nazism’ as Andrew Roberts writes in his masterly 2014 biography. Roberts finds this comparison as wrong as can be, and he does a manful job of rehabilitating Napoleon, without succumbing to abject devotion. Napoleon’s latest biographer, Adam Zamoyski, though not as inclined to encomium as Roberts, manages to do justice both to Napoleon’s achievements without flattery and to his grave flaws without invocations of totalitarian oppression or genocidal mania.”
Is the Nazareth inscription the oldest artifact of Christianity? “When Wilhelm Froehner died in 1925, at the house on the Rue Casimir-Périer where he had lived since the reign of Napoleon III, he left behind among his possessions a curious inscription that might be the oldest surviving artifact of Christianity. The bachelor Froehner was a scholar and a collector of antiquities. Long before his death, he seemed like a relic. In his youth, he had published a pedantic critique of Flaubert’s historical novel Salammbô; the novelist’s reply, a masterpiece of withering irony, was often included in later editions of the book. Politics of the distant past had frustrated Froehner’s academic career. Amid the upheavals of the Franco-Prussian War, the German-born Froehner was expelled from his post at the Louvre. So for half a century, he made himself an indispensable presence in the auction houses of Paris as a trusted appraiser and arbiter of authenticity. A confidant of several minor aristocrats, he knew the antiquities trade inside and out, in an age when roguish archaeology and audacious forgery prevailed. Froehner was never wealthy. His tastes as a collector ran to the obscure and inexpensive. Any bric-a-brac with writing on it was beyond his capacity to resist. Only the aura that a few thousand years can give to an object, what Froehner himself called ‘the iridescence of centuries,’ clearly separate his habits from the compulsions that go by the name of ‘hoarding.’ The collection of more than 3,400 items he left behind was destined for backroom storage, with the exception of the marble slab known as the Nazareth inscription.”
Essay of the Day:
In First Things, Robert C. Koons writes about T. S. Eliot’s view of folk and high art and the role of populism in shaping both:
“Eliot’s definition of culture as incarnate religion creates the possibility of anti-culture. A purely secular, nonreligious society would lack a culture in Eliot’s sense. So, too, would a society that had successfully privatized religion, so that its religion, insofar as it could be incarnate at all, was incarnate only at the level of individual lives. Finally, a society whose dominant religion is gnostic would also be anti-cultural. By ‘gnostic religion’ I mean a religion or quasi-religion that rejects the very possibility of its being incarnate in this world and in this age. A philosophy such as Marxism or modern liberalism, which rejects existing social institutions and advocates their total replacement, is likewise anti-cultural, in Eliot’s sense (at least, until the eschaton is successfully immanentized).
“True culture at the highest level is the product of an artistic and critical elite, but an elite that is grounded in, nurtured by, and responsible to the upper class. Great artists don’t get ahead through their own talent and ethic alone. They are trained in and sponsored by upper-class institutions.
“A society with a healthy culture, supported by a class hierarchy, realizes that culture at two levels, one relatively unconscious (folk culture) and the other relatively conscious and reflective (high culture). A leveling, elite-dominated society produces something quite different: the relatively unconscious level of pop culture, and the more conscious level of elite anti-culture.
“Pop entertainment is a purely commercial enterprise, an imitation and perversion of folk culture. It is addictive but transitory, appealing to an appetite for novelty and distraction. Pop entertainment is truly the opiate of the masses in a leveling society: numbing, anesthetic, escapist. Folk culture, in contrast, is enduring, noncommercial, and anonymous, and it is perpetuated by families, schools, and clubs. It unifies the members of a local community, living, dead, and not yet born, a source of collective memory.
“High culture is the rearticulation of folk culture at a more conscious and reflective level.”
Images: Portraits of WWI soldiers on beaches across the UK
Poem: James Matthew Wilson, “To an Unborn Child”
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