Well, we had a great time at Holden Beach last week (the best North Carolina beach, in my opinion, for not entirely sentimental reasons), and this morning we saw our second daughter off for a nine-month visit to Europe (Switzerland for three, Germany for six). Ah, to be young and free and have so much of life’s possibilities ahead of you. Some of you asked what books we took with us on vacation. I can’t remember all the titles, but there was a bunch of Erik Larson, Andrew Klavan (I started The Great Good Thing—so far, so good), Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop, and some Walker Percy.
Speaking of Walker Percy, the annual Walker Percy Weekend wrapped up on Sunday. I went to the first in 2014 and haven’t been back since, but I had a great time. Maybe I’ll go next year. Keep an eye on Rod Dreher’s blog for a recap and probably a few pictures of people drinking beer and eating crawfish.
I’ve got a lot to catch up on, but here are a few items that caught my eye this morning: Have you read Gordon Wood’s essay on Benedict Arnold in the latest issue of The Weekly Standard yet? If not, you should: “This story has it all: There are spies and counterspies, suspense and close calls, a beautiful woman, a handsome and charming British major, and Alexander Hamilton. It’s amazing that Hollywood hasn’t made a serious effort to adapt it for the screen.”
The second-worst poet in English: It is said that William McGonagall was the worst English-language poet. Who was the second worst? Anthony Daniels says it was Cumberland Clark: “Born in 1862, he seems to have commenced author, as the saying goes, in his middle fifties, thereafter suffering, or perhaps enjoying, severe graphomania, the compulsion never to leave off writing. Until then he had led a wandering life, abandoning his native London for Australia as a teenager, studying for the church at Sydney University, and working variously as a minister, gold miner, and sheep farmer in many far-flung places. But he settled eventually in Bournemouth and evidently decided that Bournemouth was best. Much of his poetry extols the town. It is wonderfully, gloriously, hilariously awful.”
How did an editor at The Sun who loves American sports and Guns N’ Roses and keeps no literary friendships become the editor of one of England’s most prestigious literary publications? He wrote a memo.
Why do students sign yearbooks? “In 1635, the first public school in what would become the United States opened for classes. The Boston Latin School admitted only boys and focused on a humanities curriculum. The first ‘yearbooks’ and their signatures can be traced back to the East Coast schools of the late 17th century, where people would sign scrapbook-style books containing hair clippings, dried flowers, newspaper articles, and other mementos of the school year.”
Peter Leithart on the orthodox poetry of the unorthodox R. S. Thomas: “William Davis has said that many readers assume that Thomas the priest is orthodox and are surprised when his poetry is not. The reality is the opposite. Thomas’s beliefs were loose at best, but in its evocation of the ‘extraordinary nature’ of God, its power to shatter every ‘comfortable, conventional, simplistic view of God,’ its scathing exposure of our evasions, resistance, inattention, and cowardice, his poetry is more orthodox than he let on.”
Van Gogh’s yellow sunflowers are turning brown.
Kevin Williamson on the return of Firing Line.
Constantine’s giant finger found in the Louvre.
And from the Things-You-Already-Knew-But-Now-There’s-A-Study-To-Prove-It Department: Owning print books feels different from owning e-books. “Researchers from the University of Arizona and Towson University have found that the psychological experience of owning an e-book is significantly different from that of owning a print book. The results of their study into ‘consumer interpretations of digital ownership in the book market,’ published in Electronic Markets last month, make clear what many in the publishing industry have long suspected–that owning an e-book just feels different. The study found that research participants ‘described being more emotionally attached to physical books, and said they use physical books to establish a sense of self and belonging.’”
Essay of the Day:
In Modern Age, Vickie B. Sullivan revisits Shakespeare’s Rome in a review of two books by Paul A. Cantor on the topic:
“Montesquieu, a thinker of great acuity, wrote in his private notebook that from the perspective of solely human causes the development of Christianity had to ‘be the strangest event of its kind that has ever occurred.’ What amazed Montesquieu was the fact that the mighty Romans, who conquered on three continents—Europe, Africa, and Asia—ultimately succumbed to peaceful conquest by a new type of morality. Whereas the pagan Romans had been fierce victors, the new Christian Romans lauded meekness and decried war. Rome went from the center of an earthly empire to the seat of a spiritual one.
“Rome’s transformation from a pagan warrior society to a Christian one is the prime example of the phenomenon that Friedrich Nietzsche would later term the transvaluation of values. It is also the riddle that Paul Cantor, a professor of English and comparative literature at the University of Virginia, looks to the Roman plays of William Shakespeare to explain. Cantor’s great achievement in these two books—one originally published in 1976 and recently reissued with a new preface, and the other a new volume that pursues the questions of the first in a more forthright manner—is to highlight the depth of Shakespeare’s understanding of the early Roman republic, the empire it became, and most importantly and prominently in the later volume, how that empire prepared the way for the emergence of Christianity. An eminently learned and perceptive commentator, Cantor does the great service of revealing the titanic intellect of a playwright whose artistic creations contain powerful historical and psychological explanations of a moral revolution.”
Photo: Swiss vineyards (not too far from where my daughter will be staying this summer)
Poem: A. M. Juster, “Sudden Onset”
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