Reviews and News:
Juan Bautista Maíno’s Adorations: “On 27 July 1613 a man prostrated himself in the church of San Pedro Mártir in Toledo, having first made a solemn declaration: ‘I, Juan Bautista Maíno, make profession and promised obedience…’ Thus he became a Dominican friar. At the time, Maíno was halfway through painting ten canvases for the high altar of this very same church. Two of these, the most glorious and seasonally apposite, are currently on loan from the Prado…They open a window on to a little-known episode in Spanish art — and the spiritual life of an intriguing man.”
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Murals saved by Shakesepeare’s father restored: “A group of wall paintings in Stratford-upon-Avon’s Guild Chapel should have been destroyed in 1563, but John Shakespeare had them covered in limewash instead, preserving them for centuries.”
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The parochial progressive obsession with Ayn Rand: “Bring up your undying love of Atlas Shrugged at the typical conservative gathering and people will smile at you and try very hard not to roll their eyes. Some people think of her novels as a kind of guilty adolescent enthusiasm now grown out-of-date, an intellectual mullet, a stage one goes through between the ages of 14 and 20. Some people use Atlas Shrugged as a totem — it had a moment at the cresting of the Tea Party phenomenon. But it is rare to meet actual adult human beings who organize their politics views (or, for pity’s sake, their lives) around Ayn Rand and her views. I don’t think National Review has a single Randian in the house; I’d be surprised if the Weekly Standard did, and if one showed up at Commentary then John Podhoretz would simply mock him out of existence. Strangely, our progressive friends insist that the Right is entirely in thrall to the ideas of Ayn Rand.”
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University of Pennsylvania students recently replaced a portrait of Shakespeare with a photo of Audre Lorde. “Why Audre Lorde? Because she is an African American lesbian, and that makes some students feel more welcome in the department. It’s a therapeutic act.”
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Zoran Zivkovic’s “entrancing” fiction: “Why isn’t Zoran Zivkovic better known in this country? He possesses an imaginative ingenuity and charm similar to that of, say, Paul Auster or Italo Calvino, with bits of Kafka, Borges and Beckett mixed in. His body of work, superbly translated (mainly by Alice Copple-Tosic), has even grown substantial enough that Cadmus Press is bringing out a multi-volume Zoran Zivkovic Collection, which already includes Impossible Stories I, The Papyrus Trilogy and The Five Wonders of the Danube.”
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Modernism and Mexican art: “One point of tension was just what should be ‘modern’ and ‘progressive’ about Mexican art. ‘This exhibition alters our idea of what modern is,” Affron tells me as he opened his show. The Mexicans ‘might also change our understanding of what is progressive art and what is regressive art,’ he adds. For one, they ‘complicate our ideas of realism. There are elements of murals that speak to masses, but there are also elements that are much more coded. There is an interesting dialog between an art which wants to speak to many publics at once, a wide public, and an insider public.’ Drawing directly on the esoteric influence of symbolism in late nineteenth-century Mexico City, there known as ‘Modernista,’ for example, even in its most realistic and didactic forms the art of the Mexican modernists ‘dislocates what is looking forward and what is looking back. This quite elite streak in modernism, that doesn’t end.'”
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Essay of the Day:
In The Times Literary Supplement, Rupert Shortt looks at the lasting power and far-reaching effects of Christianity:
“Religious believers should be willing to salute the many blessings of pluralism, even if they remain ambivalent about its slippery parent, liberalism. Nick Spencer and Robert Reiss, two liberal British Christians, are as quick to deplore faith-based shackles as any atheist. They would add that a creed not freely embraced will induce stagnation or worse. But Spencer, by far the better-equipped of the two, might add a caveat. Isn’t the contemporary surge in fundamentalism itself in part a reaction against anti-religionists bent on muzzling faith-based voices? A glance at recent history in North Africa or the Middle East or India supports the hunch.
“News that we inhabit a post-secular world – thanks precisely to globalization and democratization, most societies now display high levels of religious practice – has also yet to permeate bien-pensant corners of the West. Several random examples bear this out. The printmaker Anthony Green has said in a BBC interview that an interest in religious themes can be the kiss of death to an artist’s career. The quest for transcendence tends to be shunned in contemporary fiction, too. Hailing Marilynne Robinson’s novels Gilead, Home and Lila, the journalist Bryan Appleyard has written that these works will seem odd to large numbers of people, ‘because what is going on here is religion’. He added that ‘many, probably most, British people – artists, writers, audiences – will find this exotic because to them, religion has been embarrassed out of existence’. Another sort of cautionary tale is supplied by Iain McGilchrist, psychiatrist and critic. His masterpiece, The Master and His Emissary (reviewed in the TLS, April 2, 2010), uses discussion of left- and right-brained perspectives on the world to question narrow modern models of what counts as genuine knowledge. In essence, McGilchrist argues that tasks associated with ‘left-brained’ activity such as problem-solving are still valued far more than the right brain’s less tractable but equally important grasp of the big picture. The author granted in private that his book was heavily religious in inspiration. But if this were broadcast, he warned, other scholars would not bother to read it.
“Two questions arising from this sketch are critical, both of them focused by Joe Moran’s recent Guardian tribute to Clive James for his reflections on “the whole pointlessly beautiful farrago of human meaning-making”. First, is secularism really robust enough to carry the freight once shouldered by the Church in Europe? Ask politicians or NGOs about the functional aspect of human rights, say, and you’re likely to get an assured answer. Ask about the source of those rights, or about deeper questions of truth and purpose, and the replies are coy. Second and more significantly, is Moran’s apparent assumption that we are simply dancing a minuet around the void actually true? Armchair philosophers – many of them far less acute than James or Moran – regularly announce that the centre cannot hold. As Terry Eagleton among others has emphasized, such people can purchase their unbelief on the cheap, usually by setting up a straw man version of religion no thoughtful believer could accept, before felling it with a single puff. To counter that things do not fall apart may take courage, or insight of another sort – or maybe just the innocence of a child.”
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Image of the Day: Volcanoes
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Poem: Clare Jones, “The Fact”
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