Reviews and News:
Diary of a Gulag prison guard: “Spare a thought for the poor Gulag guard: the rifleman standing in the freezing wind on the outside of the wire, almost as much a captive of the Stalinist prison machine as the inmates he’s guarding. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Evgeniya Ginzburg and Varlaam Shalamov have left the world a rich, searing portrait of the Gulag from the point of view of the prisoner. But the diary of Ivan Chistyakov is unique — a narrative of the brutal conditions in Stalin’s Gulag, told from the point of view of one of the captors.”
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A. M. Juster on poetry protests and why there are so few well-known conservative poets: “I think part of the reason, the explanation for this, is that poetry has become much more of an academic enterprise, and the poets that become prominent and recognized and reinforce each other, are within academics. And the academy is increasingly progressive in its politics, and increasingly exclusionary. There are poets out there, actually quite a few, who are reasonably conservative in their politics, but you’re not likely to know about them. This has been the case since at least the 70s. My original plan was to go to graduate school in English. I was a state finalist for the Rhodes and Marshall, and other fellowships. For the Danforth Fellowship, a senior Yale administrator called me into her office and told me I would have won but they had ‘decided that people with my politics shouldn’t become academics.’ And that was with me being moderate in politics — I was a Gerald Ford Republican then. So I decided not to beat my head against the wall, and went into law and government. The bias in top academic institutions was very bad in the 70s, but it’s only gotten worse.”
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First synagogue in 500 years opens in Sicily: “More than 500 years after the Jews were expelled from Sicily, a tiny Jewish community will open its first synagogue in the island’s capital city of Palermo.”
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Poetry and first editions: “For a decade and a half I have worked more or less contentedly as a rare book dealer, roughly half the number of years I’ve devoted to being a poet, an equally eccentric pursuit. In that time I’ve had the pleasure of placing quite a number of extraordinary first editions of poetry into my clients’ collections. I am often asked what precisely makes a book ‘rare.’ Why, for instance will one volume of poetry sell for $5 (a used copy of a recent title, something I would buy for myself), $50 (a first edition of Diane Wakoski’s 1966 Discrepencies and Apparitions signed by her along with a drawing in her hand), $500 (poet and translator Richmond Lattimore’s copy of the 1955 first edition of Elizabeth Bishop’s second book Poems: North & South and A Cold Spring), $5,000 (an inscribed 1926 first edition of Langston Hughes’ The Weary Blues), while another might sell for $50,000 (a 1633 first edition of John Donne’s Poems by J.D. with Elegies on the Author’s Death), and yet another for well over $500,000 (Edgar Allan Poe’s impossibly rare 1827 first book of poetry, Tamerlane, authored by ‘A Bostonian,’ which hammered at $662,500 at a 2009 Christie’s sale, a tattered and rather stained copy at that, but one of only 12 thought to remain from a print run of 50)…The last two centuries have yielded remarkable moods and movements in English language poetry, some dislodging centuries-old traditions and producing masterpieces that would have been completely unimaginable even a generation before. In a little over a century—that separating Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads and T.S. Eliot’s Prufrock and Other Observations—the art form experienced fantastic advances or disfigurements, depending on one’s standpoint. Truly revolutionary books of poetry are rare, and few were seen as such at the time. Evidence for this can be found in the trifling print runs for what would become enormously famous books.”
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Beware the Slenderman—the origins of an Internet bogeyman.
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The early life of Prince Edward VI: “Far from being the sickly child that history has often portrayed him as, Edward VI was a robust little boy and, as Thomas Cromwell put it, ‘sucketh like a child of his puissance.’ But Henry VIII was taking no chances. He ordered that the son whom he referred to as “this whole realm’s most precious jewel” should remain at Hampton Court, well away from the perpetual sickness that plagued the capital. More conscious of hygiene than most of his contemporaries, the king provided a new washhouse at the palace and ordered that the walls, floors, and ceilings of Edward’s apartments should be washed down several times a day. Everything that might be handled by the prince had first to be thoroughly cleaned. Only those of the rank of knight or above were permitted to attend the prince, and they must all be scrupulously clean before touching him, as well as free from sickness. They were not permitted to speak with persons suspected of having been in contact with the plague, and they were strictly forbidden from visiting London during the summer, when outbreaks of the disease most commonly occurred. Any servant who fell ill was ordered to leave the household at once. Serving boys and dogs were specifically barred because they were clumsy and prone to infection.”
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Essay of the Day:
In the Intercollegiate Review, Kenneth B. McIntyre recommends the work of historian Herbert Butterfield:
“In an age of specialization and secularization, Herbert Butterfield’s diverse accomplishments are as extraordinary for their resistance to these predominant cultural movements as for their insight and prescience. Butterfield achieved success as both a public intellectual and as an academic historian in a variety of fields ranging from historiography and international relations to the history of England in the eighteenth century and the history of the scientific revolution. He also maintained a sincere fidelity to the Augustinian Christianity of his upbringing. He was a committed and respected scholar whose influence over the development of modern historiography, the history of science, and the English School of international relations is widely acknowledged. His understanding of his faith informed the development of his ideas about the nature and limits of political activity at the domestic and international levels.
“While not a conventionally systematic thinker, Butterfield was a prolific and erudite writer with a penetrating intelligence and a shrewd grasp of many of the central intellectual and moral issues of his day. His essays are remarkable for their highly epigrammatic style and effortless accessibility, qualities which contributed to his reputation inside and outside of academia. He was also a notable contrarian, always questioning the conventional wisdom of the day. Butterfield’s work is remarkable for its depth of insight and for its diversity and breadth.
“He is best remembered for his early historiographical essay The Whig Interpretation of History (1931), which made his name amongst academic historians and popularized the notion that the historical past is somehow distinctive or different from a merely practical account of the past. This notion that historical explanation entails a sympathetic understanding of the past in its particularity or independence from present concerns was also being given a philosophical elaboration by thinkers like R. G. Collingwood and Michael Oakeshott, but Butterfield translated the somewhat arcane language of the philosophers into a medium that has had a decisive influence on European and American historians ever since.
“His essays on the origins of modern historical explanation and on the origins of modern science basically created the modern disciplines of the history of historiography and the history of science. These investigations into the emergence of the historical and scientific consciousness profoundly influenced such contemporary thinkers as J. G. A. Pocock and Thomas Kuhn. Butterfield was one of the first contemporary thinkers to place the scientific revolution at the heart of Western modernity, and was also one of the first historians to recognize the radical novelty of modern historical experience.”
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Image of the Day: Black starlings on snow-covered trees
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Poem: Angela Alaimo O’Donnell, “The Still Pilgrim Considers a Hard Teaching”
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