Reviews and News:
Terry Teachout revisits America’s forgotten modern composers: “What do you think of when you hear the phrase ‘midcentury modernism’? My guess is that your average educated American is more than likely to respond with the name of a painter like Jackson Pollock or Mark Rothko, a building like Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater, or a piece of furniture like the Eames Lounge Chair. In this country, modernism is a visual phenomenon: It’s something you see. All other manifestations of the modern movement in 20th-century American art take a back seat. If that generalization strikes you as too broad for comfort, try answering this question: Who were Roy Harris, Peter Mennin, Walter Piston and William Schuman?”
* *
An entertaining but simplistic history of paper and human recording.
* *
S. Adam Seagrave reviews Kim R. Holmes’s The Closing of the Liberal Mind: “Is liberalism dead? The shadow of this troubling question overhangs much of the sweeping, profound, and timely narrative of Kim R. Holmes’s new book, The Closing of the Liberal Mind. In his acknowledgments, Holmes helpfully reflects that ‘the history of ideas involves a complex interaction between people’s thoughts and deeds that often remains as elusive as an evening breeze.’ As elusive as this interaction can indeed often be, Holmes tracks the evening breeze remarkably closely and faithfully throughout the book.”
* *
To get a job at the Strand bookstore in New York, applicants have to complete a literary quiz on 10 book titles and authors. There is also one trick question. Some people cheat: “In the late ’80s, Daniel Krieger, now a freelance journalist (he occasionally contributes to The New York Times, among other publications), had just graduated from high school when he walked by the Strand, saw a sign that it was hiring and picked up an application. He matched A Modest Proposal with Jonathan Swift, but was stumped by much of the quiz. ‘I was on my way to see a therapist and together we did it. He said, “Look, I don’t think you’re qualified for this job,” but he gave me the answers to the ones I needed.’ Mr. Krieger soon found himself unpacking shipments in the storage area…Today, would-be Strand employees can use their smartphones, searching for the authors of books in the quiz.”
* *
A history of authors in court: “Over three centuries and on two continents, [Mark Rose] demonstrates how particular legal actions affirmed the notion of copyright and expanded it beyond the written word into hitherto uncharted realms.”
* *
A different Turner? “Moyle’s Turner is a mischievous, manipulative and thoroughly modern painting machine, a man on the make and on the take, selfish, sexual and eminently clubbable. The world of the Royal Academy gave him structure, as well as recognition. ‘His taste for order and tradition,’ she writes, ‘stood in stark contrast to the chaos of his private life.’ Yet this taste for order and accumulation of wealth was surely born of his fear of chaos. His art was strongest when it faced what he feared. Overturning order, chaos became his subject. ‘He paints,’ said William Beckford of Turner’s late style, ‘as if his brains and imagination were mixed up on his palette with soapsuds and lather.'”
* *
Essay of the Day:
In The Washington Free Beacon, Joseph Bottum takes stock of the literature of role-playing video games or litRPG:
“If a single one of the novels is well-written I have yet to find it, as I crashed my way through thirty or so of them in the past few months. Typos, misspellings, malapropisms, jumbled syntax—something about the self-publishing that Amazon facilitates seems to bring out the language-impaired, and I’m willing to believe that not a single litRPG author knows the difference between lay and lie. Or how apostrophes work. Or the conventions of quoted dialogue. Or what italics are for. Or why question marks are needed sometimes. And sometimes not.
“But the annoyance fades fairly quickly, once readers lower their expectations and realize that the authors are essentially amateurs. This isn’t a new genre being delivered to us from above by discerning editors. (I’m willing to believe that not a single litRPG author knows what an editor actually is.) This is something akin to fan fiction at an online appreciation site—the kind of site, it’s worth noting, where Fifty Shades of Grey got its start, before becoming the first book of pornography to make the bestseller list. LitRPG is rising up from the bottom, taking shape through the work of amateurish writers who make up with enthusiasm what they lack in grammar. If none of the books are worth reading as books, they are often surprisingly fun as stories, and the emergence of a new subgenre is a pleasure to watch. A delight. A hoot.”
* *
Image of the Day: Searching for Pokémon
* *
Poem: Catharine Savage Brosman, “Street Piano”
Get Prufrock in your inbox every weekday morning. Subscribe here.
