Happy fifth, everyone. Hope you had a good Fourth. Our family survived another move. The truck has been unloaded, most of the boxes have been unpacked, and the dog fence has been installed. Now we’re fixing those small problems—why is the gas not on, when is the Internet guy coming again, how do you turn this damn light off?—that seem to linger for days. But it feels good to have most of the move behind us.
I haven’t had Internet for a couple of days, so I’m a little behind on culture news. One of the first things I read this morning was that a group of Swedish writers and celebrities were planning an alternative to the Nobel Prize in Literature. This year’s Nobel was canceled, you may recall, following allegations of sexual assault made against someone close to the Swedish Academy. The new group is calling themselves the New Academy, and they will be awarding a prize in October—when the Nobel is traditionally announced. According to the new group’s website: “We have founded the New Academy to remind people that literature and culture at large should promote democracy, transparency, empathy and respect, without privilege, bias, arrogance or sexism.”
“In awarding this prize, we are staging a protest,” they also said. Nothing like a joyless, self-righteous committee to restore our faith in literature and literary awards.
The poet Tim Murphy has passed away. He was 67.
A copy of The Faerie Queene with a note from Charles I has been discovered. The volume belonged to his jailer, and it contains the motto “Dum spiro Spero” followed by Charles I’s initials.
Has the real D. B. Cooper finally been identified?
Flann O’Brien’s vitriolic letters: “Writing was a battle for O’Brien, and almost from the outset the career arc we follow is downward.”
You know what’s obscene about art today? Its price: “This might seem strange, in a time of such political uncertainty, but look closer: the art world is a fascinating canary in our cultural/social/economic coal mine, an odd liminal zone where profound reflection on the human condition is strung up on a white wall, and traded for increasingly wild sums of money.”
Donald Hall’s work, James Matthew Wilson argues, asks us to choose “between the academy and the ancestral home, between meter and ‘free’ verse, between intellect and experience.” This is “one of the misfortunes of Hall’s life and of our American culture more generally.”
Essay of the Day:
Last week, the Russian poet Naum Korzhavin died in North Carolina. He was almost entirely unknown in America. Masha Geesen remembers the man and his work in the New Yorker:
“He wrote three poems that all Russian readers of poetry can quote, and many can recite by heart. Of his ninety-two years, he spent forty-five living in the United States (forty-three of them in Boston, until the death of his wife, Lubov, two years ago; he then moved to Chapel Hill to be near his daughter). Still, he was one of the most significant Russian poets in a century that tragically called forth a lot of poetry.
“Korzhavin was born Naum Mandel in a secular Jewish family in Kiev, in 1925. As he pointed out in a memoir, this was eight years after the Russian Revolution, but still a few years before collectivization destroyed life as it had been known in Ukraine, at the cost of millions of lives. Korzhavin’s earliest poems were filled with nostalgia for a revolution whose spirit had already vanished. In 1944, while Soviet newspapers and most Soviet people extolled the heroism of the anti-German offensive, Korzhavin wrote a poem called ‘Envy,’ in which he lamented the unheroic nature of his generation. Written when Korzhavin was nineteen, ‘Envy’ would remain one of his best-known poems.
“Three years later, Korzhavin, a student at the Literary Institute in Moscow, was arrested, in the middle of the night, in his dormitory. Some said that Korzhavin was arrested for a poem critical of Stalin. Others said that he fell victim to Stalin’s anti-Semitic campaign against what Soviet papers called ‘cosmopolitanism.’ When Korzhavin wrote about the arrest, forty years later, he described it primarily as absurd. When the secret police woke him up and demanded to see his poems, he recalled, he had nothing to show them: he kept his manuscripts with friends, not because he felt that he had anything to hide but simply because he was incapable of maintaining his own papers. Once he faced his interrogator, he wrote, he subverted the script by earnestly asking what he had done wrong. ‘I really wanted to know what happened—and what if I had made a mistake and this man knew what it was,’ Korzhavin recalled. ‘Thus I won this idiocy contest. My cultivated sincere idiocy prevailed over his professional idiocy.’
“Korzhavin was deemed ‘socially dangerous,’ and sentenced to internal exile. He didn’t return to Moscow until the mid nineteen-fifties. He was thirty-four when he finally graduated from college. He had grown disillusioned with the revolutionary myth and the entire Soviet project. It was only a matter of time before his poems and public statements got him forced out of the Soviet Union. Korzhavin landed in Boston in 1973.”
Photo: F-15 in Wales
Poem: William Runyeon, “Church Bells”
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