I’m no journalist, but it seems like a tall order to write a book about a very private person you’ve never met who refuses to speak with you—and whose friends and colleagues also refuse to speak with you. Of course, journalists write books all the time on presidents and public figures they’ve never met. In those cases, there’s often a long record of decisions, statements, conversations, and interviews. But there’s no such record with the famously private Matt Drudge. This hasn’t stopped Matthew Lysiak from landing a book deal on the man. Maybe Lysiak has some inside information, but it doesn’t look like it: “Lysiak, a former New York Daily News reporter, is…having trouble reaching the man himself. He has sent a number of certified letters, he said, and reached out to friends who say they are too afraid that he’ll cut them off.” The book is scheduled to be published in 2019. Expect lots of sentences to begin “It may be…” or “It could be…”
In other news: A 2009 children’s book has become a best-seller after a video of a Scottish grandmother reading it to her grandson was posted on YouTube two weeks ago. Make your life better and watch it. Seriously.
At least 300 Roman gold coins have been found in a theatre basement. They were “stacked in rolls similar to those seen in the bank today” and have engravings of “emperors Honorius, Valentinian III, Leon I, Antonio, and Libio Severo.” A gold bar was also discovered.
Don’t miss David Pryce-Jones on the “marvelous” Muriel Spark.
How algorithms and copyright law are preventing classical musicians from sharing performances online: “Sony has claimed that it owns the copyright for the works of Johann Sebastian Bach—more than 1,100 of them. Now, you might think the fact that Bach died in 1750 would put his music safely in the public domain, seeing as how it’s 178 years out of copyright (under the American system of author’s death plus 70 years). But there the story was, appearing in several news accounts this past week, all prompted by a Boing Boing report about how ‘you can’t play Bach on Youtube’ without getting served with a takedown notice. Even the jazz historian Ted Gioia, as sane a music critic as exists these days, was prompted to tweet ‘Sony says they own his compositions.’ To dig a little into the report, however, is to see how much the Boing Boing headline oversold the story. And yet, it’s also to see how much the news about the YouTube incident has significantly undersold the story—which is really about the two-front war being waged on musical content.”
Sarah Bradford reviews Behind the Throne: A Domestic History of the Royal Household: “Entertaining, well researched, intelligent and easy to read, this book, as the author explains, is about the private lives of royalty from Elizabeth I to Elizabeth II, and about how the business of looking after royalty has changed and yet in some respects remained the same over the past five centuries.”
Alexis C. Madrigal read that 14,000-word New Yorker profile of Mark Zuckerberg so you don’t have to. He lists Zuckerberg’s eight most interesting statements, which is kind of like listing your favorite shades of white (does white come in shades?). Anyway, lemme narrow it down for you further. Asked whether he found it “insulting” when people claim that he has no emotions, Zuck responded: “I don’t find it insulting. I don’t think it’s accurate.”
This sounds like a wonderful book: James M. Banner, Jr. reviews Joanne B. Freeman’s The Field of Blood: Violence in Congress and the Road to Civil War: “If you’ve ever thought that pretty much everything that could be said about the coming of the Civil War had already been said, this book will prove you wrong. In adding significantly to what we thought we knew, it changes what we did know. What’s more, it brings to the fore a subject—verbal abuse and physical violence, rooted in politics, on the floor of the United States Congress—that has never received the attention that Joanne Freeman brings to it. A superb, serious, authoritative, lively, occasionally amusing work of scholarly bravura, her book is also timely—although today’s circumstances, not the author, make that so. Only a few paragraphs hint at our present discontents.”
Essay of the Day:
In latest issue of The Weekly Standard, Matt Labash visits the strange world of a right-wing street artist:
“It’s not much to look at from the outside, a dingy apartment building in a downwardly mobile stretch of burglar bars, psychics, and coin laundries. When asked the name of the neighborhood, one inhabitant classifies it as ‘no place in the middle of every place.’
“It’s not much better on the inside. The guy I have come to see answers the door of his cheerless one-bedroom shirtless, in camo shorts and Chucks, while pulling on a white polo in order to appear less feral. He’s not a down-on-his-luck porn producer, though he used to work in the industry. He’s not some middle-aged gangbanger, though he could pass for one: solidly built with his name tattooed on his knuckles and a branding-iron mark singed into his chest. He is Sabo, America’s preeminent right-wing guerrilla street artist.
“This sounds impressive. Yet being the Banksy or the Shep Fairey of the right is not a high pile to climb. It’s a bit like being the foremost reggae singer at the Grand Ole Opry or the premier scuba outfitter in the Kalahari. There’s not a lot of competition.”
Read the rest (particularly the end).
Photo: Dolomites
Poem: A. E. Stallings, “Harm’s Way”
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