Summer’s almost over. Perhaps you took a road trip this year? If not, Vincent David Johnson says you should think about it for next year: “In 1998, I took my first self-driven road trip into the vastness of rural America. No GPS. No destination. No reservations. Just myself, my camera, and a Rand McNally atlas. And it changed the way I think. Twenty years later I’ve seen so much of our great land, but what I haven’t seen is still enough to be a country all its own.”
Anthony Madrid on English pop songs written by Swedish musicians: “There’s a delicious mistake in the bridge of ‘Take a Chance on Me,’ where the song slows down and the words are just ‘Take a chance on meeee,’ and Agnetha breathes into the mic: ‘That’s all I ask of you, honey.’ That’s what she says the first time. The second time, she goes: ‘Gimme a break, will ya?’ Now that is definitely not what ABBA meant. They meant ‘Give me an opportunity to prove myself’ (which is what the whole song means). And you can see how they would think ‘gimme a break’ means ‘gimme an opportunity.’ (Wait, doesn’t it mean that? No.) But see, like with the Ace of Base thing above, the song is actually enriched by the error.”
A production of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night includes everything but the Bard: “At the start of the show, which runs through Sunday, we’re told we’re in for a ‘radically inclusive’ evening. This turns out to mean that the stage heaves with dozens of amateurs chosen from community groups who shuffle around in the background as members of the chorus and occasionally pop up to do a line or two. All shapes and sizes are included, which means lots of tubby and homely actors, who also intermittently deliver lines in sign language. Just to underline the freewheeling nature of the production, the costuming looks like an explosion at the Salvation Army. By my troth, this is an ungainly show.”
Min Wild reviews a biography of the eighteenth-century novelist, critic and translator Charlotte Lennox: “Susan Carlile explains with good judgement in her introduction why it is time for a new, full, critical biography of Charlotte Lennox, who, along with Eliza Haywood in particular, acts as a linking presence between the Aphra Behn-inflected, rackety experiments of Delariviere Manley, in the early eighteenth century, and the more solidly respectable achievements of Austen and Frances Burney. This biography, ‘the first to consider Lennox’s entire oeuvre and all her extant correspondence’, gives the fullest account of her life yet (following pioneering work by Miriam Small, Gustavus Maynardier and Philippe Séjourné), and conducts readers through all of her major works. It arrives as a handsome, substantial volume, complete with full scholarly apparatus and a proselytizing zeal of application that is both good to see and a little perplexing in tenor: Lennox is simultaneously ‘representative and exceptional, innovative and illustrative’. Lennox did have an ‘independent mind’, in whatever degree this was possible as one negotiated the path to Grub Street solvency, and Carlile was right to make this the book’s subtitle and leitmotif, rather than giving Lennox the ‘dangerous’ or ‘powerful’ mind she initially considered.”
The literary element of British and Irish caricatures: “In The Politics of Parody: A Literary History of Caricature, 1760–1830, David Francis Taylor considers an impressively large number of satirical prints produced during the late Kingdom of Great Britain and the early United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. In this golden age of parody, printmakers lampooned political figures domestic and foreign, often delivering their satiric messages with the help of canonical literary texts…[R]eaders could be trusted to understand the implication, for they were what Taylor calls the ‘cultural elite,’ rather than the undereducated masses who simply ‘look[ed] at’ the prints rather than ‘read’ them.”
“Nothing flatters an independent journalist less than the sight of him forming a line to drink from the same fountain as his colleagues. Such a spectacle will unfold on Thursday, August 16, as 200 or more editorial pages will heed the call sounded by Boston Globe op-ed page editor Marjorie Pritchard to run editorials opposing President Donald Trump’s unrelieved press-bashing. Participating dailies include the Houston Chronicle, the Minneapolis Star Tribune, the Miami Herald and the Denver Post, as well as the Globe. Joining the movement are the American Society of News Editors and the New England Newspaper and Press Association. Dan Rather is on board, as is the Radio Television Digital News Association.” This is a bad idea, Jack Shafer argues.
Very few people write about live jazz anymore. That’s too bad, because it’s flourishing. Matthew Kassel talks with Nate Chinen about his new book, Playing Changes: Jazz for the New Century.
Essay of the Day:
In The New York Times Magazine, Jaime Lowe writes about the beekeepers who go to California every February to pollinate almond orchards:
“Every February, white petals blanket first the almond trees, then the floor of the central valley, an 18,000-square-mile expanse of California that begins at the stretch of highway known as the Grapevine just south of Bakersfield and reaches north to the foothills of the Cascades. The blooms represent the beginning of the valley’s growing season each year: Almond trees are first to bud, flower and fruit. At the base of the trunks sit splintered boxes — some marked with numbers, some with names, some with insignias — stacked two boxes high on a wooden pallet that fits four stacks. Inside the boxes are bees, dancing in circles and figure-eights and sometimes just waggling. With almond season comes bee season. Everyone in the valley knows when it’s bee season. There are bee-specific truckers; motels occupied by seasonal workers; annual dinners to welcome the out-of-towners; weathered pickups with license plates from Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Texas and Florida parked in front of orchards at all hours of the night. And those ubiquitous boxes.
“This year the beekeepers responsible for those bees gathered on a mid-February Saturday for a potluck lunch at a community center in Kerman, a small town of ranch houses wreathed by acres upon acres of almond orchards. The meeting was supposed to kick off the pollinating season, but the beekeepers, many of them wearing tucked-in plaid shirts and trucker caps with dirt-curled bills, had already been at work for a couple of weeks, summoned to the state early by a heat wave. The sun beckoned the blossoms, and the blossoms begged for the bees. Farmers have a window of just a few weeks when pollination has to happen, otherwise the nuts won’t set, which is what it’s called when blossoms are pollinated and kernels emerge. When the nuts don’t set, much of a crop can be lost. By the time of the potluck, it seemed as if the season were already at its midpoint.”
Photo: River surfing in Thun (Here’s a video)
Poem: Eugène Guillevic, “Coming of Age” (Translated by Andrew McCulloch)
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