Eplieptic, ugly, and sickly, Edward Lear, who was largely ignored by his parents and educated by his sisters, was sent out into the world as a teenager to make a life for himself. Before long, he was giving drawing lessons to Queen Victoria: “Still, he was more gypsy than courtier and much of his life was ultimately spent abroad, sketching or painting in Italy, Albania, Greece, Egypt, Palestine and even India. He learned Italian well enough to give lessons, taught himself modern and ancient Greek — he read the New Testament and Plato in the original — and made a stab at basic Arabic. To underwrite this peripatetic lifestyle, he transformed his expeditions into a series of illustrated books with such titles as Journals of a Landscape Painter in Corsica and Views in the Seven Ionian Islands. Some of the most famous pictures evoke the Mediterranean of Middle Eastern sublime: The Roman Campagna, the sea cliffs of Amalfi, the ruins of rose-red Petra.”
Andre the Giant was big, kind, sensitive, and in pain for most of his life. Dylan Croll reviews HBO’s documentary of the French wrestling superstar.
Postmodern literary theory provides a weak account of the value of literature. Renaissance theories are far more convincing: R. V. Young on why literature—and literary scholarship—matter.
In search of Patrick Leigh Fermor’s Constantinople: “In the catalogue to the exhibition Charmed Lives in Greece: Ghika, Craxton, Leigh Fermor (at the British Museum until July 15), Michael Llewellyn-Smith writes that, in his later years, Patrick Leigh Fermor ‘had an all-purpose excuse to send to pesterers’. The note read: ‘It was very kind of you to write. The trouble is that I am having to work to a strict deadline for the completion of my new book. This makes me a poor correspondent until I have finished it and have reached Constantinople – I am not sure when this will be’. The warning to inquisitive readers, colour-supplement journalists, adventurous holidaymakers and others was despatched from Kardamyli in Mani, in the Southern Peloponnese, from the house which Fermor had built himself, with local labour and expertise, in the mid-1960s. It was where he had completed the first two parts of his account of the ‘great trudge’ across Central Europe in the 1930s, projected to end, in a long-anticipated third volume, in Constantinople. The book itself had become something of a pest, and he failed to complete it before his death in 2011, aged ninety-six. His wife Joan had died there eight years earlier.”
Sad news for the poetry world: J. D. McClatchy, longtime editor of The Yale Review, poet, translator, and librettist, has died. Alexandra Schwartz remembers him as a teacher: “‘Let me impress one thing upon you all,’ he said. ‘I don’t want to see a single poem about your families and their dysfunctions. I hate your mother, and I really hate your grandmother.’ This was a belated warning; we had been asked to bring an original poem to read at this first gathering. Next to me, a student started in on his, an ode to his grandmother in her porch rocker. Sandy cut him off after a line. ‘There’s the hated woman herself!’ he crowed. The chagrined student fled the room and never returned…As a teacher he could be gruff and imposing, but he was thrilling, too, passionate, funny, and challenging, committed to initiating his students into the rigors that poetry demanded.”
Essay of the Day:
Should the university be open to everyone? Probably not, David Goodhart argues in Standpoint:
“University expansion has almost certainly diverted students away from STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) and technical courses, that prior to 1992 they would have done at one of the 35 polytechnics, into business, arts and social science degrees.
“And the claims for the economic success of the elite university model do not stack up. One-third of recent graduates are in non-graduate jobs. The graduate premium in pay is falling, and in any case only tells you about a differential, not absolute incomes. Willetts’s claims that graduates are good for productivity and exports ring hollow given Britain’s weaknesses in both those areas. It turns out that just creating lots of graduates doing the courses they fancy at age 18 does not magically produce a high-productivity economy.
“Of course, every parent wants their child to go to university: it signifies security and joining the middle class. And vocational education will never compete with the high road of A levels and a prestigious academic course at a university where you will mingle with the next generation of managers and professionals.
“But the British growth model of easy hire and fire plus high labour market participation (and high immigration) and generalist academic training for as many as possible, is a lop-sided one both socially and economically. A degree is a signalling device to employers, but 40 per cent of all new workers have studied an irrelevant subject and an increasing proportion of graduates have poor basic skills.
“For all the rigidity of the company-based vocational training system (typical in the Germanic world) it helps to motivate the bottom 50 per cent in the schooling system because the better they do the better the apprenticeship scheme they can join. In Britain, by contrast, if you don’t make the cut to do A levels, which is usually pretty clear by age 13 or 14, the system has little to offer.”
Photos: Lake Baikal
Poem: Tim Murphy, “Prayer for the Farmers”
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