Reviews and News:
Tolkien’s darker side: “The Story of Kullervo, the first known prose work by J.R.R. Tolkien, is to be published this week in the United States, offering fans of Middle Earth a chance to read what may be one of the earliest sources for Tolkien’s quintessential literary fantasy realm.”
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How the 1986 Mets won the World Series fueled by drugs and alcohol: “Thirty years after their dramatic World Series title, the 1986 New York Mets remain a study in how to make winning ugly look good. After dominating the National League with a 108-54 record, the combustible roster of mismatched personalities clawed its way to the World Series and stunned the Boston Red Sox, erasing a 3-0 deficit in Game 7 to win the franchise’s second championship. The Mets’ starter that night was Ron Darling, and as he recounts in his forthcoming book, Game 7, 1986: Failure and Triumph in the Biggest Game of My Life (St. Martin’s Press), the three runs he allowed have tormented him ever since. He also offers insights into a team remembered as much for its pharmaceutical pursuits as its starting rotation.”
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Hamilton is big business, but it’s no easy task to keep investors and staff happy and take the show worldwide without “the whole magical enterprise losing its soul.” That job falls to Jeffrey Seller: “Broadway can be a very poor investment, but when shows hit, they really hit. The most successful of them dwarf the revenues of even the biggest Hollywood blockbusters. Hamilton could easily run on Broadway for a decade or more. In September, the first road production will open in Chicago, and it will be a ‘sit down’ show, meaning it is intended to stay there for a year or more. Ultimately, there may be as many as seven Hamilton companies, in addition to the one on Broadway, performing at the same time in multiple American and international cities. Ticket revenues, over time, could reach into the billions of dollars. If it hits sales of a mere $1 billion, which Hamilton could surpass in New York alone, the show will have generated roughly $300 million in profit on the $12.5 million put up by investors. (There are many eye-popping numbers to contemplate, but maybe the most striking one is this: The show is averaging more than $500,000 in profit every week.)”
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What’s the use of rhyme?
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The literary magazine of the dark web: “Of all the places to start a literary journal, the dark web—the shadowy corner of the Internet known primarily for illegal activity—seems like an odd choice. For starters, readers might have a hard time tracking it down (“the dark web, as Kaveh Waddell has previously noted in The Atlantic, ‘is accessible only through Tor, a network of computers that passes web requests through a randomized series of servers in order to preserve visitors’ anonymity’). And most people who frequent the dark web likely aren’t there to check out some new short stories or poetry. Nevertheless, last year, a new dark-web literary publication—fittingly named The Torist—published its first issue, becoming an unusual landmark in territory usually reserved for shadier activities…One of the founders, who hasn’t attached his name to the publication, says The Torist was created to be ‘a place for positivity and creativity’ in a part of the Internet that otherwise has a very different tone.”
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Revisiting the medieval university: “Before 1500, the largest Oxford library had 400 books, and most Cambridge college libraries didn’t have more than 200. (And even after 1500, they kept burning books because of religious disagreements.)… Libraries were uncatalogued collections, badly lit, with no desks or reading spaces. Because books were so valuable, they were chained to the lecterns, and often undergrads couldn’t visit them at all.”
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Essay of the Day:
In The Nation, James Longenbach reconsiders Marianne Moore’s first book of poems, Observations:
“Many people think of Moore as the author of intricately descriptive accounts of animal life, but the impression is largely due to the order that her friend T. S. Eliot (acting in his capacity as an editor at Faber and Faber) devised for Moore’s 1935 Selected Poems, an order to which she adhered in every subsequent selection. Consequently, most readers’ experience of Moore begins with a group of long, descriptive poems written in the early 1930s (‘The Steeple-Jack,’ ‘The Jerboa,’ ‘The Plumet Basilisk,’ ‘The Frigate Pelican’), followed by ‘The Fish,’ an arresting but finally atypical poem from Observations.
“A fresh reading of Observations suggests that, while Moore’s descriptive powers are formidable, she is primarily a poet of argument, which is to say that she is most primarily a poet of syntax—the convolutions of her long, charismatic sentences seduce us into agreement long before we’ve had time to consider the substance of the argument at stake.”
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Image of the Day: Chernobyl
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Poem: A. E. Stallings, “Heirloom”
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