Reviews and News:
The story of David Bowie’s unfinished musical.
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Joseph Bottum on the academic novel after Sokal.
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The best tobacco ad ever: “Say, you’ll have a streak of smokeluck that’ll put pep-in-your-smokemotor, all right, if you’ll ring-in with a jimmy pipe or cigarette papers and nail some Prince Albert for packing! Just between ourselves, you never will wise-up to high-spot-smoke-joy until you can call a pipe or a home made cigarette by its first name, then, to hit the peak-of-pleasure you land square on that two-fisted-man-tobacco, Prince Albert!” Printed in 1919, the ad was quoted and discussed in a passage in Babbitt.
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Cocteau and Camus: “Jean Cocteau was a precious aesthete—a poet, novelist, playwright, filmmaker, critic, draftsman, and sculptor who worshiped art and beauty. Albert Camus was a novelist and politically committed activist who pursued existential themes: angst and the absurd, suicide and death. Two books—one new, one a decade old but translated into English for the first time—illustrate the contrasting legacies of these artists representing the opposite extremes of modern French literature.”
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In Case You Missed It:
Anthony Esolen on how politics is ruining college students: “You are discussing with another student Augustine’s tribute to his mother, Monica. It may be the first literary tribute to an ordinary woman—not a queen, not an object of erotic desire—in the history of the world. The student is upset. She has been taught that the lot of women from time immemorial was simply and unrelievedly oppressive, and she is disappointed to find something that does not fit the political template.”
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Scholar discovers new evidence that Shakespeare the man was indeed Shakespeare the playwright: “In the Brooke-Dethick feud, it becomes clear that ‘Shakespeare, Gent. from Stratford’ and ‘Shakespeare the Player’ are the same man…Crucially, in the long-running ‘authorship’ debate, this has been a fiercely contested point. But Wolfe’s research nails any lingering ambiguity in which the Shakespeare deniers can take refuge.”
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Hilary Mantel’s childhood, God, and Wolf Hall: “Psychoanalytic criticism may have fallen out of favor, but it has not ceased to be useful. Even so bare an outline of Mantel’s life, drawn from her 2003 memoir, Giving Up the Ghost, makes clear the connections between Mantel’s biographical backstory and the goings-on at Henry VIII’s court. In her novels about Cromwell, all of Mantel’s formative issues are in play: the plot-driving engine of marital unhappiness; divorce and the impossibility of divorce; ambiguous sexual situations; the desirability but also the powerlessness of children. Mantel’s early experiences explain not only her richly ambivalent attitude toward her Tudor characters, but also her impressive ‘negative capability’ as their artist—her ability, that is, out of the small circle of her original family, either to play or to cast all the parts.
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An amazing short video from Aeon on the dying language of whistles known as Silbo Gomero, which was once used throughout La Gomera, one of the Canary Islands.
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Classic Essay: G. K. Chesterton, “The End of the Moderns”
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Interview: Ian Johnson talks with Tan Hecheng about China’s secret mass killings.
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