Aretha Franklin has died. She was 76.
Luke Buckmaster watched Nicolas Cage movies for 14 hours straight. He doesn’t regret it: “I arrived at the Cage-a-Thon a fan of Cage’s work. I left it with a new-found respect, and now consider him one of my favourite actors. Is there another actor anywhere in the world as original and distinctive?”
Sign of the times: The University of Akron will phase out 80 degree programs to spend more on competitive video gaming: “On Thursday, Akron announced that it would open three facilities to accommodate varsity, club, and recreational gamers. The university said the centers would represent ‘the largest amount of dedicated esports space of any university in the world to date.’” Way to go.
In praise of Karel Capek: “Two things keep Karel Capek’s War With the Newts from getting the recognition it deserves: its cover and its title. The best translation’s cover design, black text on teal, has all the panache of a dishwasher manual. And the title evokes spacesuit-clad heroes racing around cheap sets, firing laser guns at unscary animatronic lizards. Forget all that.”
Sam Sacks, the fiction critic at the Wall Street Journal, talks about which critics he always reads (they include Andrew Ferguson and Barton Swaim), the value of negative reviews, and more: “Negative reviews are healthy, stimulating, completely necessary. In my view there are fairly stringent moral prohibitions against judging people in life, but art is where one can love and hate at passionate extremes. When I have regrets about my own reviewing, it’s usually when I’ve shied away from negativity into some featureless middle ground.”
What was Anne Hathaway, Shakespeare’s wife, like? Was she “an illiterate, sex-crazed shrew who seduced the teenage Will and made his life a misery” or “a perfect housewife who stoically kept the home fires burning, her cottage and New Place providing the foundations for the couple’s domestic bliss”? According to Katherine West Scheil’s in Imagining Shakespeare’s Wife, we’ll never know: “Uncovering the ‘real’ Anne Hathaway is impossible, and Scheil is not afraid to attack biographers who say they have. She is particularly severe regarding Stephen Greenblat’s Will in the World, one of the most successful Shakespeare biographies of all time. Greenblatt is accused of sensationalism, of sacrificing accuracy for profit and of borderline misogyny. Expect one of the ruthless cat-fights common in academia.”
Essay of the Day:
In GQ, Alex W. Palmer writes about “how the greatest works of Chinese art keep getting brazenly stolen from museums around the world.” Why? Is the Chinese government behind it?
“The patterns of the heists were evident only later, but their audacity was clear from the start. The spree began in Stockholm in 2010, with cars burning in the streets on a foggy summer evening. The fires had been lit as a distraction, a ploy to lure the attention of the police. As the vehicles blazed, a band of thieves raced toward the Swedish royal residence and smashed their way into the Chinese Pavilion on the grounds of Drottningholm Palace. There they grabbed what they wanted from the permanent state collection of art and antiquities. Police told the press the thieves had fled by moped to a nearby lake, ditched their bikes into the water, and escaped by speedboat. The heist took less than six minutes.
“A month later, in Bergen, Norway, intruders descended from a glass ceiling and plucked 56 objects from the China Collection at the KODE Museum. Next, robbers in England hit the Oriental Museum at Durham University, followed by a museum at Cambridge University. Then, in 2013, the KODE was visited once more; crooks snatched 22 additional relics that had been missed during the first break-in.
“Had they known exactly what was happening, perhaps the security officials at the Château de Fontainebleau, the sprawling former royal estate just outside Paris, could have predicted that they might be next.
“With more than 1,500 rooms, the palace is a maze of opulence. But when bandits arrived before dawn on March 1, 2015, their target was unmistakable: the palace’s grand Chinese Museum. Created by the last empress of France, the wife of Napoleon III, the gallery was stocked with works so rare that their value was considered incalculable.”
Photo: Tuvalu
Poem: Charles Baudelaire, “The Enemy” (Translated by Ryan Wilson)
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