Reviews and News:
Barton Swaim reviews Stephen Hess’s book on the relationship between Richard Nixon and liberal academic Daniel Patrick Moynihan (who served in Nixon’s administration) in the latest issue of The Weekly Standard. The two made an odd couple: “Stephen Hess had known both Nixon and Moynihan for several years, having worked for the Republican and alongside the Democrat in various capacities, and he was of course right to wonder whether they could function together profitably: Nixon the profane, cynical, and attitudinally conservative hardball politician; Moynihan, the urbane and idealistic liberal and fluent Harvard academic. The president liked Pat, as he was known, immediately. He placed him at the head of the administration’s Council for Urban Affairs, an entity created primarily, it seems, in order to help the president figure out what his policy on urban affairs should be. Immediately, Moynihan began sending the president long, discursive, almost literary memoranda that one might have assumed would irritate or bore Nixon…’Most staff memos to a president,’ writes Hess, ‘are essentially politician-to-politician or expert-to-CEO. But Pat is writing to Nixon intellectual-to-intellectual, without a bit of patronizing. Nixon has never been treated this way before. He loves it!'”
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Terry Teachout takes stock of a middlebrow master: “Why has [Peter] Shaffer faded from the scene? The main reason is undoubtedly that most of his best-known plays, which were written for England’s state-subsidized theaters, were large-scale works whose big casts (Amadeus and Equus both require 15 actors) put them out of reach of most American companies. At the same time, though, I also get the impression that Mr. Shaffer is regarded by many drama critics as a middlebrow, a purveyor of high-minded, impeccably effective plays in which he watered down challenging subjects to make them palatable to the masses. A poor man’s Tom Stoppard, you might say. It may be that there’s something to that indictment, though it certainly fails to do justice to Amadeus, which has long struck me, both in its original 1979 stage version and in Miloš Forman’s justly successful 1984 screen adaptation, as an immensely potent parable of the terrible mystery of human inequality.”
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A friend and critic of Nietzsche and fellow professor at Basel, Jacob Burckhardt thought of history as “poetry on the grandest scale.” His writings, according to Algis Valiunas, “constitute the most important treatment of ancient, Renaissance, and modern history composed by one scholar.”
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A “brilliant” history of Nazi concentration camps.
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Why do artists collect? The painter Joshua Reynolds “used pieces to illustrate his lectures to the students of the Royal Academy and, in a dialogue with the past, he would retouch other works to ‘improve’ them… there is a tangible sense that in owning pictures by the old masters he was allying himself with them too in an unbroken genealogy.”
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Joseph Bottum: “Douglas MacArthur was talented, decisive, and forceful as an American military commander, and incident after incident proves that he was physically brave beyond measure. But he was not some impossible combination of Robert E. Lee and Ulysses S Grant. If we have to seek a historical model, he was basically George Custer—or, rather, a competent Custer, if that’s not too much of an oxymoron.”
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Essay of the Day:
In The Montreal Review, Angus Smith takes a look at Mikhail Bulgakov’s “comic morality” in the wonderful Master and Margarita (a book you should read if you haven’t already):
“A fascinating mockery of Soviet junk science and Stalinist social engineering, The Fatal Eggs was written during the heyday of Trofim Lysenko, a charlatan who convinced generations of Stalinist agronomists that changes could be affected in the genetic structure of cereal grains by intense exposure to heat and cold. By turns absurdly funny and genuinely creepy – note the anticipation of movies like Godzilla and King Kong, which Bulgakov, a fan of cinema and cartoons, would have adored – The Fatal Eggs was just pointed enough that thinking people would ‘get’ it; and just Aesopian enough to fly under the radar of the NKVD.
“The Fatal Eggs – one of his earliest works – tells us a lot about Bulgakov. As a physician, a scientist, Bulgakov was a trained and unflinching observer, with a keen eye for pathology in all of its manifestations. As an ‘haute bourgeois,’ – born in 1891 into an eminent family of physicians and theologians – he was no ‘Soviet Man,’ but a committed Orthodox believer. He was appalled by the manner in which he saw both science and faith being distorted in the quest to create a society based on purely materialist principles; and the stark choices that sometimes forced even good people to bend to those principles. And as an artist, well-versed in Russian and European culture, both high and low, he could blend the realistic and the fantastical to build wonderful stories around instantly recognizable archetypes.
“All of these qualities come together in The Master and Margarita, his final masterpiece. In it, the Devil and his entourage appear in 1930s Moscow, where they find endless opportunities for mischief and comic mayhem. Meanwhile, a “novel within a novel,” narrated partly by Satan and partly by the titular Master, is an astonishing retelling of the encounter between Christ and Pontius Pilate.
In its delirious mashup of Faust, The Three Stooges, and the Christian Gospels, The Master and Margarita addresses itself to hypocrisy, especially the hypocrisy and fundamental emptiness of the Soviet experiment; to the nature of good and evil and the sometimes blurry line between them; to power; and to the possibility of redemption.”
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Image of the Day: Northern lights above Lofoten
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Poem: Brett Foster, “Three Poems”
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