Reviews and News:
Rocking Bach: Cameron Carpenter’s All You Need Is Bach opens with an “arrangement of Contrapunctus 9, from The Art of the Fugue. It is aggressive, loud, and exciting.”
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What makes for great genre fiction? Joseph Bottum offers an answer in a review of Naomi Novik’s League of Dragons.
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Boris Johnson puts his Shakespeare biography on ice—indefinitely: “Originally scheduled for release this October – rather late for the 400th anniversary of the playwright’s death back in April – Shakespeare: The Riddle of Genius ‘will not be published for the foreseeable future’, says its publisher, Hodder & Stoughton.”
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Siberia under the Tsars: “Almost as soon as Siberia was first colonised by Cossack conquistadors in the 17th century, it became a place of banishment and punishment. As early as the 1690s the Russian state began to use Siberia as a dumping ground for its criminals, as though its vastness could quarantine evil.”
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Roger Ailes to write a memoir about his time at Fox: “The autobiography is a forum for Ailes to recount his accomplishments, including the creation of Fox News in the mid 1990s. He may choose to respond in some way to the harassment allegations against him. He has vehemently denied the claims in ex-anchor Gretchen Carlson’s lawsuit. What Ailes can’t do, according to a source with knowledge of his exit agreement, is criticize his former employer or its owners, the Murdochs. The agreement includes a non-disparagement clause.”
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J. K. Rowling’s play, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. is entertaining nostalgia and has plenty of impressive special effects: “There are magic tricks, surprise reveals, quick-change transformations and an intricate set, built to look like layered iron railway arches. Stand-alone staircases whirl around to replicate the magical building at Hogwarts; actors float on wires to simulate swimming; and the somersaults of one fight scene are aided by a large cast of almost-invisible, black-clad assistants whirling the protagonists around. One of the most stunning effects is the simplest: when time shifts, the lighting wobbles to make the set tremble like a subwoofer.”
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Late James: At the end of his life, Henry James wrote two letters as Napoleon. He also met Winston Churchill who had no idea who James was and apparently behaved rather rudely: “James was shocked, but, as was his manner, he took it all in. On Monday morning, as the guests were leaving, James took Bonham Carter aside. It had been, he told her, an ‘interesting’ experience. ‘It was brought home to me,” he said, very slowly, ‘very forcibly and vividly . . . the limitations by which men of genius . . . purchase their ascendancy . . . over mankind.’ He paused for a long time, searching for the expression that would do justice to the whole business. ‘It bucks one up!’ he finally said.”
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The problem with “non-mimetic” portraits: “Most visitors can’t judge by seeing Thomson’s score, O’Keeffe’s painting or Stieglitz’s photographs whether they meet their goal of getting to someone’s essence. To understand them in more than a cursory way, the viewer must know more about the subject’s life. Many works in the show seem intimate, reflecting long relationships between artist and subject. Without a key provided by the artists, we are locked out of this in-world. We have no way of knowing whether a work like Ms. Antin’s 1970 bicycle ensemble portraying the dancer and filmmaker Yvonne Rainer is perceptive, merely clever or even trite.”
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Essay of the Day:
In Standpoint, Ben Judah writes from Paris on Islam in France:
“You only really know Paris when you know the Métro. When you recognise the Roma rapping on La Ligne 13, when you know without needing to look which stations let the sleeping bags in at night, when you get that instinctive feel for the hour the homeless beggars do their rounds up and down the carriages — ‘Mesdames, Messieurs.’
“You only really know Paris when you know the spots where women look behind themselves at night. Get out quickly from the tunnels at Stalingrad — watch out for your bag, they say, that’s where the Eritreans are sleeping. Don’t get yourself a commute on La Ligne 13, they joke, it may be light blue but it goes from Romania to the banlieue end of hell. And with this ticket this is where I am going. I have to see the new France for myself to ask: is this country in danger? This is not just any old question to me. This is about my family.
“My aunt lives on La Ligne 13. She, like most of my family is French. French and Jewish. She lives in the Paris that the tourists think can never change. But this is not the France we knew. Outside her apartment on the pavement someone has spray-painted in black ‘Too Many Arabs’, while inside our family has been arguing. Le Bataclan, les banlieues, Marine Le Pen, burnt police cars, jihadi assassinations, the HyperCacher — do we smell smoke?
“If we get one more failed president then Marine Le Pen will win the presidency, says my uncle. My aunt wants a British passport. This is hysteria! Let’s be calm, tuts my cousin. But the killings have already started, says his wife. Round and round it goes. Optimists, turning into pessimists, and back again. Are we paranoid? I am on the Métro to find out.
“A swirl of purple and blue light glows out of the rose windows of the cathedral of Saint-Denis and spills mystery over the silence of the nave. I am standing in a sacred necropolis: the burial place of the kings of France. Tombs surround me. Carved out of limestone, their faces calm, they look as ifthey are sleeping. The crypt holds their bones, from Dagobert I all the way to Louis XIII. This is the line of the Sun King. A man lies here who was not a king: Charles Martel, the Frankish warrior who Gibbon believed had saved Christendom by defeating the Arab invasion of France on the battlefield near Poitiers in 732.
“Two hundred metres away, it is time for Friday prayers. The mosque is overflowing. Every week 3,000 believers come to pray here on Rue de la Boulangerie, in a dingy space that cannot hold more than 1,800. In tracksuits, jubbah, and the white tunics of Islamists it overflows. The road is crowded, blocked, as around a hundred fall to their knees towards Mecca. These hardline mosques are building a parallel Paris: segregated by faith.”
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Image of the Day: The submerged church of Potosi
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Poem: Ned Balbo, “A Word the Romans Used”
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