Two stories from the Dutch crime desk here at Prufrock. In Wired, Kenneth Rosen writes about the world of crime blogging in Holland and the life of one crime blogger, Martin Kok, who was killed in 2016: “Kok joined this fraternity of crime bloggers in 2015 after being released from prison, when he moved to Amsterdam and launched Vlinderscrime. It was easy enough: He was familiar with the crime blog scene, and he had many sources both free and incarcerated. He also wanted to be part of the story himself; a blog could be a conduit to fame…Kok’s method was to talk to guys he’d known in prison, accept their chatter as fact, and publish a story, fast. He was willing to impugn people with little more than anonymous quotes. Then he’d send text messages to journalists alerting them to his scoop. He was a bear poking other bears.”
And in The New Yorker, Patrick Radden Keefe writes about Astrid Holleeder, the sister of Willem Holleeder, the most notorious crime boss in Holland (who makes a cameo in the Kok story above). She testified against him in 2013 and wrote about her decision in her memoir, Judas: “The book’s title reflects her profound ambivalence about her decision to accuse her brother of murder. But the high drama of that choice is what made the book a success, and what attracts so many rubberneckers to the Bunker: the clash of the Holleeders is sibling rivalry distilled to a courtroom duel. ‘This is the ultimate betrayal,’ Astrid told the court in March. Through sobs, she explained that, despite Wim’s many crimes, she still loves him. It was ‘crazy and horrible’ to be testifying against him, she admitted. ‘But, if you have a very sweet dog that bites children, you have to choose the children, and put the dog down.’”
A flesh-and-blood Descartes: We think of Descartes as the great philosopher of rationality. He was a mind carried around by a body. But he was also a man “who travelled around Europe, fought in wars, conducted experiments (including vivisection), played music with friends, and corresponded with royalty, aristocrats, clergy and libertines, as well as scientists and other members of the international Republic of Letters?” A new biography argues that Descartes’s thinking was motivated by practical concerns and his experience of fickle politics: “Cook suggests, though, that Descartes’s epistemological quest for absolutely certain knowledge, for a new science in which truth is ‘based on proof rather than opinion or rank’, is a natural reaction for someone who got a good taste of the fickle social politics of court life. Descartes’s philosophy, Cook surmises, emerges from his experience of this risky and uncertain domain full of deceit, intrigue, rumour and passion. Even the cogito, the exercise undertaken by the solitary meditator in his quest for secure foundations to counter the sceptical challenge, bears political significance: ‘Descartes considered radical doubt puerile or mad, supportive of authoritarianism’.”
Amy Henderson reviews Kathryn Hughes’s Victorians Undone: Tales of the Flesh in the Age of Decorum and offers a measured defense of fleshy biographies.
Michael Dirda recommends A.E.W. Mason’s The Four Feathers: “Do we care about honor these days? In the current global political climate, all that seems to matter is winning, whatever that means. Once upon a time, though, honor—being faithful to ideals of proper conduct, regardless of personal cost—deeply mattered. How deeply lies at the heart of A.E.W. Mason’s celebrated 1902 adventure-romance, The Four Feathers, set in England, Ireland and the Middle East during the 1880s.”
Rare medieval Bible returned to the Canterbury Cathedral: “A 13th century Bible, one of a handful of books which survived intact when the library of Canterbury Cathedral was broken up at the time of the Reformation, is back in the building after almost 500 years. The Lyghfield Bible – named for a monk at the cathedral who once owned it – is the only complete Bible and the finest illuminated book known to have survived from the medieval collection. The cathedral won a grant of almost £96,000 from the National Heritage Memorial Fund (NHMF) and raised £4,000 more to buy it at a recent rare books sale in London.” (Note: I’ve corrected the capitalization of “Bible” above to bring it into line with the Guardian’s practice of capitalizing “Qur’an” and “Bible” in other articles.)
Essay of the Day:
In The American Scholar, Sudip Bose remembers the nearly otherworldly talent of American violinist Ruggiero Ricci on the centenary of his birth:
“‘Where our reason ends,’ the composer Giacomo Meyerbeer once wrote, ‘there Paganini begins.’
“Such was the wizardry of the famed violinist from Genoa that even rational people assumed him to be a practitioner of the dark arts. Thin, gloomy, and shrouded in mystery, Niccolò Paganini performed feats of virtuosity unheard of in his day. Only an allegiance with the devil, many bewildered observers believed, could explain the ease with which he leapt from note to note, maniacally crossing strings, spinning out passages of two- and three- and four-note chords, negotiating wide intervals like octaves and tenths, and plucking rapid passages of pizzicato not with his right hand but with his left.
“He was a prolific composer as well as a performer, with all of his pieces, from the grandest concerto to the most intimate miniature, testing a violinist’s abilities as few other works in the repertoire do. Perhaps the apex of his oeuvre are the 24 Caprices written between 1802 and 1817, virtuoso etudes that stand like a series of daunting mountain peaks. Many violinists have recorded the Caprices: Michael Rabin and Salvatore Accardo, to name two of my favorites. Before them, however, before Ivry Gitlis and Shlomo Mintz, Itzhak Perlman and Midori, Julia Fischer, James Ehnes, and Leonidas Kavakos—before any of them, there was Ruggiero Ricci.
“Ricci, who died in 2012, would have turned 100 this year. He was born in California to an American mother and an Italian father. His given name was Woodrow Wilson Rich—a name for an aspiring bank executive or politician, though perhaps not the most auspicious moniker for a potential virtuoso violinist. Or so Pietro Ricci concluded when it became clear that his prodigiously talented son had a future on the world’s stages. The violinist may have gone by Roger all his life, but to the world, he was always Ruggiero.”
Read the rest and listen to Ricci play a selection of the Paganini Caprices.
Photo: Merganser and her 76 ducklings
Poem: Maria Terrone, “The White Piano”
Get Prufrock in your inbox every weekday morning. Subscribe here.
