The last man to know everything: “It has been a long time since anyone knew everything,” Matthew Walther writes in The Week, but Sabine Baring-Gould did: “One really does mean everything. The Victorian parson’s interests included but were not limited to philology, anthropology, folklore, children’s stories, hymnology, hagiography, geology, topography, painting, optics, metallurgy, ancient and modern history, musical theory, biblical archeology, the plausibility of miracles, the minutiae of the English salt mining industry, and the theater. Among the 130 books he published were an anthology of Old Testament apocrypha; biographies of Napoleon I and the Caesars; histories of Germany, Iceland, North and South Wales, Cornwall, Dartmoor, the Rhine, and the Pyrenees; a guide to surnames; a 16-volume collection of saints’ lives and a compilation of medieval superstitions beloved by H.P. Lovecraft among others; numerous volumes of sermons and dozens of novels; a theological treatise on the problem of evil; numerous works on ghosts; a surprisingly scholarly Book of Were-wolves. He also composed some 200 short stories and thousands of essays, prefaces, and magazine articles; he produced two collections of original verse and two memoirs and left behind a vast correspondence, thousands of pages of diaries, and a remarkable quantity of half-digested research.”
The most bizarre museum heist ever: In 2009, Edwin Rist stole 299 stuffed birds (worth $1 million) from the Natural History Museum in Tring. Why? To make fishing flies: “Rist was brought up in Claverack, a small town north of New York City, and home-schooled by parents who bred labradoodles for a living, and who devoted themselves to nurturing enthusiasms in their two sons. Edwin was just 11 when he caught by chance on television a demonstration of how to tie a fly for trout fishing. He was instantly captivated — and very soon as preoccupied with fly-tying as with his flute. He befriended a retired ornithology professor willing to sell him bird skins on the cheap. A zookeeper at the Bronx Zoo sent him feathers from the autumn moult of the Macaw, Spoonbill and Tragopan. He took a job chopping logs to fund his new addiction, but the rarest, most gorgeous feathers — and therefore the most elaborate flies — remained, financially, out of his reach.”
Jason Matthews’s The Kremlin’s Candidate is a thrilling ending to his superb Red Sparrow series, says Ron Capshaw.
Alfred Döblin’s hard-boiled Berlin: “In Berlin Alexanderplatz,” Adam Kirsch writes, “we are plunged into a cauldron of alienation, violence, and social breakdown that would, just a few years after Döblin wrote his novel, deliver all of Germany into the hands of the Nazis…A thriller must be suspenseful, but there is never much doubt as to how Franz’s story will end. Each step in his descent—his desultory attempts to earn a living, his half-hearted decision to join up with a gang, his injuries and losses and final breakdown—feels fated, as if it would be foolish to hope for anything better. The book even features chapter summaries that are deliberately deflating: ‘A speedy recovery, the man is back where he was, he has learnt nothing and understood nothing,’ goes the introduction to chapter five.”
Investigators in California use a genealogy database to capture the now 72-year-old Golden State Killer who is accused of raping 50 women and killing 12 people.
“Scholars have long written that Winslow Homer’s art changed demonstrably after his time in England—his brushstrokes grew looser, his works more expressionistic, his palette darker, his subjects more philosophical.” What brought about the change? A camera, among other things.
Essay of the Day:
In this week’s magazine (available now—why not subscribe?), Joseph Horowitz looks at Leonard Bernstein at 100:
“In 1980, at the age of 62, Leonard Bernstein undertook the composition of a formidable full-scale opera, commissioned jointly by La Scala, the Kennedy Center, and Houston Grand Opera. He called it A Quiet Place. It’s the story of an unquiet family, the same one that Bernstein had depicted in Trouble in Tahiti in 1952, when he was just 34. Trouble in Tahiti is a romp, deftly dispatched. But Bernstein had not composed an opera since, and A Quiet Place did not come easily—so much so that he decided to incorporate Trouble in Tahiti as a flashback. As he worked on the score, he confided to an associate that Trouble in Tahiti was ‘a better piece.’ And so it is. The Bernstein trajectory of promises fulfilled and not is anything but simple.
“This August will mark Leonard Bernstein’s 100th birthday. The centenary celebrations started last August and are worldwide. The Bernstein estate counts more than 2,000 events on six continents. And there is plenty to celebrate. But if Bernstein remains a figure of limitless fascination, it is also because his story is archetypal. He embodied a tangled nexus of American challenges, aspirations, and contradictions. And if he in some ways unraveled, so did the America he once courted and extolled.”
Photos: Socotra
List: 32 Drinks for Poets
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