Tolkien’s illustrator: How Alan Lee came to spend 20 years illustrating Tolkien’s Middle-earth. “After leaving college, Lee worked on magazines like Reader’s Digest and Women’s Own, before graduating to book covers. His best-remembered covers adorned Fontana ghost-story anthologies and Alan Garner novels, including The Weirdstone of Brisingamen. Lee also created a series of illustrated books on fantasy, which came to the attention of Jane Johnson, an editor at Allen & Unwin and responsible for the Tolkien list. She showed his work to Christopher Tolkien, who agreed that Lee was the perfect choice to illustrate a lavish edition of The Lord of the Rings, to be released in 1992 to mark the centenary of Tolkien’s birth. That was the start of Lee’s 20-year association with Tolkien’s world. What would the 17-year-old art student think, if Lee could go back and tell him that he would one day illustrate the series? ‘I would have been amazed,’ he says. ‘At that age, I didn’t even think that illustration could be a proper job, or at least, not for me. I grew up on a council estate, I failed my 11-plus exams.’”
In Modern Age, Deirdre McCloskey reviews Patrick Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed and doesn’t mince words: “In line with the usual American definition of ‘liberalism,’ Deneen sees ‘social cooperation’—which I agree we all need very much indeed—as coming only two ways, from either the traditional village and church or from ‘an ever-expanding state.’ He reveals thereby that along with most of the left and right critics of the modern world, he has no understanding of a market economy, the gigantic third instrument of cooperation for which Friedrich Hayek coined the phrase the ‘spontaneous order’—old Adam Smith’s ‘invisible hand’… Deneen claims, as is commonly claimed on left and right but not in liberal thought properly so called, that ‘the expansion of markets and infrastructure . . . [does] not result from “spontaneous order”’—take that, Hayek!—but from ‘an extensive and growing state structure.’ Whenever you encounter the word infrastructure you can be sure the writer believes that the state underlies property and trade and innovation. The evidence is slender. The economist Mariana Mazzucato, for example, has claimed recently that the government is an important source of innovation but offers only tendentious anecdotes in support of an ‘entrepreneurial’ state. Deneen is no better. ‘The market . . . in fact depends on constant state energy, intervention, and support.’ Please. How could he be so misled? I believe it is because he is not curious about the alternatives to his convictions.”
Thousands respond to search for a “barefoot bookseller” at the Soneva Fushi luxury resort—including a member of the White House press team.
Is Europe suffering from “overtourism”?
The 2019 J. F. Powers Prize for Short Fiction is now open for submissions. “The contest awards prizes of $500 to the winner, $250 to its runner up, and publication for any additional honorable mentions at the discretion of the editors. Submissions will close on November 30, 2018.”
The chancellor of UNC has said that Silent Sam should return to campus, but not to its original spot: “Silent Sam has a place in our history and on our campus where its history can be taught, but not at the front door of a safe, welcoming, proudly public research university.”
In The New Criterion, James Panero writes about the removal of another statue—that of J. Marion Sims, surgeon and philanthropist: “Following the deadly August 2017 conflagration in Charlottesville, Virginia, and a national reckoning with monuments to the Confederacy, few might have predicted that Dr. Sims, the ‘father of modern gynecology,’ would be the New Yorker ultimately destined for ignominious denouement. But such are the capricious politics of our modern iconoclasm and the unexpected opportunities it presents for displays of scolding and shame.”
A Reader Recommends: Patrick Kurp recommends the novels of Janet Lewis: “Without exaggeration, I think she is one of the great American novelists, nearly in a class with Willa Cather (and not because she was female). All of her novels are worth reading, and The Wife of Martin Guerre (1941) is probably the best-known neglected book in the world, but let me recommend Against a Darkening Sky (1942), her only novel with a contemporary American setting. I don’t know a better book about motherhood and the importance of mothers in encouraging moral reflection in their children. Lewis describes Mary Perrault without sentimentality or melodrama. Mothering – let’s add fathering, too – is hard, unsung work. Lewis sings it.”
Essay of the Day:
In The American Scholar, Megan Buskey writes about her family’s Siberian exile:
“Exile as a political tool has a long history in Russia. According to Daniel Beer, author of the 2016 book The House of the Dead: Siberian Exile Under the Tsars and a historian at the University of London, the monarchy, as far back as the mid-17th century, had viewed Siberia, a land of indigenous reindeer herders, fishermen, and nomads, as a ‘convenient dumping ground for dissidents and subversives.’ Between 1801 and the 1917 Russian Revolution, the regime sent more than a million people there, most famously Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Vladimir Lenin, and the Decembrists, who in 1825 attempted to overthrow the monarchy. The tsars’ intent went beyond mere punishment—they wanted to colonize the valuable Siberian landmass for economic gain while morally purifying deportees through hard labor and isolation.
“The revolutionaries, eager to distance their movement from a detested feature of tsarist life, abolished exile within two months of assuming power, but they soon found themselves facing the same dilemma: Siberia had valuable commodities and a dearth of workers. Meanwhile, the Bolsheviks had a growing list of people they wanted to marginalize and punish. In 1919, they renewed the practice of exile, adding to it a network of forced-labor camps. By 1930, the Soviets had established a new penal agency to oversee the operation: Glavnoe Upravlenie Lagerei, or Main Camps’ Administration, better known by its abbreviation, gulag.
“Under Stalin, the gulag grew so substantially that an estimated 24 million people passed through its institutions during his rule. Exile to special settlements was a fundamental part of the gulag, though it attracts less attention, both public and scholarly, than the more punitive and populous labor camps. Stalin’s first Five-Year Plan, launched in 1928, laid the groundwork for special settlements by calling for the rapid industrialization of what was then still a largely agrarian country. A senior Soviet official introduced the idea of creating ‘colonization villages’ in remote areas that were rich in natural resources such as coal, iron, and timber but unfriendly to human habitation. Middle-class peasants thought to be resistant to collectivization, known as kulaks, were the first unwilling inhabitants of these settlements. In many cases, the peasants arrived to find nothing but a thick swath of taiga, or subarctic forest. ‘The deportees suffered just as much as their countrymen who had been sent to labor camps, if not more so,’ wrote journalist and historian Anne Applebaum in her 2003 book, Gulag: A History. ‘At least those in camps had a daily bread ration and a place to sleep. Exiles often had neither.’ Steven Barnes, a scholar of Russian history at George Mason University, estimates that over the course of Stalin’s rule, more than a million exiles died during the difficult trip east and amid the harsh environment of the settlements.
“In the mid-1930s, the regime’s targets shifted. The members of my family were sent away not for being kulaks but because they lived on the fringes of a radical, anti-Soviet variant of Ukrainian nationalism. My grandmother’s elder brother Stefan had been a member of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, the movement’s military arm. He died, according to rumors my family heard later, when a Soviet soldier threw a grenade into the bunker where he was hiding.”
Photos: Fire at the National Museum of Brazil
Poem: Geoffrey Hill, “September Song”
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