Reviews and News:
Hunter S. Thompson’s widow returns the antlers that the journalist stole from Ernest Hemingway’s home over 50 years ago.
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Classical architecture and California: “Classic movie sets apart, California, that byword for the cutting-edge trendsetting contemporary in so many spheres, and the world of ancient Greece and the Roman Empire would seem to have little in common. Indeed, even Peter Holliday, a professor at California State University, Long Beach, the author of this handsomely illustrated and densely texted book, admits their surface incongruity: ‘For somebody trained as a historian of classical art and architecture to write about modern California might, at first glance, seem a stretch.’ But he also sees similarities between how those long-ago cultures themselves evolved and the development of his home state.”
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The Franciscan Beat: “In this age of Francis, in which the Holy Father seems to surprise everyone with his off-the-cuff pronouncements on matters of passionate intensity, we would do well to consider the work of David Craig, America’s most conspicuously Franciscan poet. If one waits with anxiety to hear what the Pope will say in his next in-flight interview with the press, then one will perhaps approach in the proper spirit an early poem of Craig’s, called ‘Pentecost,’ which runs in its entirety, ‘Who is this Holy Spirit? / And what is He doing in the eggplant?'”
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Thomas Bertonneau reviews a new biography of the philosopher and novelist Colin Wilson: “Wilson lived by writing. Because he spent profligately on intellectual necessities (books, recordings, and fine wines), he often heard from his banker about the parlous state of his overdraft. Wilson therefore wrote inveterately, a fact that explains the uneven quality of his large output. He also undertook lecture-tours, which while they often turned a profit were physically and mentally taxing. In Lachman’s telling, as Wilson grew older, he suffered increasingly from the hardships of these excursions. A family man who preferred to remain at home where he could turn to his typewriter at will, he would return home exhausted and with his health sapped. Despite the hardship, Wilson sustained the reputation of a fine and committed speaker. He invariably spoke impromptu yet with astonishing coherence—and he could speak (as I once heard him do in Los Angeles in 1987) charismatically for two or three hours.”
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Statue of ‘real Robinson Crusoe’ in Bristol churchyard raises objections: “According to local residents, the life-like crouching statue could look out of place and ‘be a bit creepy’ and ‘terrifying’ at night in a graveyard. Despite 10 letters of objection to the diocese, Reverend Langham said the church was ‘supporting this installation’. ‘These things are always going to divide people,’ he said.”
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The meaning of trees: “Stafford repeats Robert Graves’s claim in The White Goddess that [the yew] was ‘the death-tree in all European countries’ to help explain the presence of so many ancient yews in British graveyards. Some of the best-known examples — at Much Marcle in Herefordshire or Cumbria’s Watermillock — are 1,500 years old and even older, while many long pre-date Christianity in Britain. The likelihood is that an earlier pagan reverence for yew played a part in shaping subsequent religious practice. We should perhaps think of the arrangement less as yews in churchyards and more as churches repeating the location of sacred trees. The author further points out that yew contains highly toxic alkaloids in all of its physical parts and is thus an occasional aid to modern suicides as well as a cause of accidental death. Both Gray in his ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’ and Sylvia Plath in ‘The Moon and the Yew Tree’ traded on such darker associations, and Stafford, an Oxford professor of English literature, is attentive to these references. Yet she also points out how the yew has acquired new meanings. A compound called Taxol derived from the species was licensed as a chemotherapeutic drug in 1992 and has since been used in all manner of cancer treatments. The pre-eminent
tree of death, it transpires, is also now a tree of life.”
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Essay of the Day:
What was it like to work at Trump magazine—even for a few months as a receptionist? Carey Purcell explains in Politico:
“It was even harder to ignore the chaos that was building inside the office. The lack of organization was rampant. There was no companywide database for subscriptions; all the information was stored in Excel spreadsheets that were emailed back and forth. Staff meetings were few and far between, with little communication taking place despite our close quarters. Jacobson’s demands were erratic and always urgent, and often had no clear connection to the publication, including shipping framed paintings via UPS and DHL. I left the office promptly at 5 p.m. every day, but the majority of the staff was still hard at work when I closed the doors.
“Our creative and editorial director would throw explosive temper tantrums, then threaten to quit—a cycle repeated numerous times during my few months at the company. One time he actually did quit—demanding that the contents of his desk be messengered to him—only to get rehired without explanation. (‘Life … is about perspective,’ the director, Aaron Sigmond, said in a statement when contacted by POLITICO. ‘[My] discontent with Michael Jacobson and his financial advisers who controlled the company … stemmed from self-preservation of my professional standing that at that point I had spent over a decade building.’)
“Jacobson was himself a mystery, disappearing for days at a time without explanation. The office was frequently visited by his friend Billy K., an obese man who always carried a tiny Yorkie tucked under his arm, who had no official position, and whose presence was never explained. By then, the number of employees was rapidly decreasing. One at a time, the magazine’s longtime staffers—including Jacobson’s personal assistant, who had been with the company since its first day—found new jobs and left the company. Rumors began circulating about the state of Trump, and nobody was optimistic.
“That’s about when our paychecks started to bounce.
“The first time it happened, it seemed like an accident, or maybe an oversight. The office accountant quickly issued a new payment and covered the fee for the check bouncing. But then it happened again. And this time, the company didn’t reissue a check. Instead, I was handed a brown paper bag filled with hundred-dollar bills to cover for the company’s lack of payroll funds.”
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Image of the Day: Waterfall jumping
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Poem: Paul Lake, “Pro Forma”
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