Reviews and News:
Did Wallace Stevens convert? Paul Mariani responds to Helen Vendler.
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Liel Leibovitz makes an interesting (if unconvincing) case for Pokémon at Auschwitz.
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GMOs could save your life: “The shadow of the Zika virus hangs over the Rio Olympic Games, with visitors and even high-profile athletes citing worries about Zika as a reason to stay away (even if the risk is probably quite low). The public’s concerns are a striking example of the need to rapidly combat emerging infectious diseases. In the fight against Zika, public health experts have turned to what may sound like an unlikely ally: genetically modified organisms, or GMOs.”
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Michael Robbins reviews Gay Talese’s The Voyeur Motel: “How you feel about The Voyeur’s Motel will depend in part on how much you value facts, since they are very much in question here.”
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Andrew O’Hehir reviews Blake Crouch’s Dark Matter: “In the technical sense of the term, Blake Crouch’s Dark Matter is definitely a book. Even the advance galley I just read (in one sitting) was printed on actual paper, with an artfully designed cover and everything. But rather like the mysterious cubelike chamber invented by the physicist Jason Dessen in Crouch’s novel — well, let’s say by at least one version of Jason and perhaps by several; indeed, perhaps by an infinite or incalculable number of Jasons — “Dark Matter” is a portal into other dimensions of reality.”
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Nietzsche’s chilling politics: “Nietzsche’s sane life coincided with the main political events of his time. He served as a medical orderly in the Franco-Prussian War, witnessed German unification and experienced at first hand the traits of a modern democratic order: party competition, secret ballots, voting and the influence of mass media. He also lived through Britain’s and Russia’s “great game” for control over central Asia. He went mad in the year Bismarck tended his resignation to Wilhelm II. Drochon traces Nietzsche’s ‘intelligible account of modern society’ in response to these events. Inspired by the Greeks – especially Plato and his mission to legislate a new state and train the men to do it – Nietzsche wanted to establish a healthy culture in which philosophy and great art could be produced. He was certain that slavery was necessary for this (a view that led to his eventual split with Wagner). The ‘cruel-sounding truth’, he admitted, was that ‘slavery belongs to the essence of culture’, as the artistic class, ‘a small number of Olympian men’, is released from the drudgery of daily existence to focus on producing art.”
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Essay of the Day:
In The Hudson Review, Antonio Muñoz Molina revisits the many lives of priest, librettist, and grocer Lorenzo Da Ponte:
How many lives was Lorenzo Da Ponte able to live in the eighty-nine years that took place between his birth in a Jewish ghetto outside Venice in 1749 and his death in New York? The mere outline of dates and places is already somewhat astonishing: for someone to reach such longevity at a time when the median life expectancy was under forty years, and also to be able to travel so far in a world of difficult and unsafe paths, of archaic and closed societies in which the immense majority of people grew old and died either in the same place where they had been born or not very far from it, leading a life that was identical to that of their most remote ancestors. But Lorenzo Da Ponte escapes habitual categories as audaciously as he used to escape the cities and countries where life was starting to become difficult, which in one way or another would be almost all of them, or as he would abandon jobs and even identities, possible futures in which he would have undoubtedly liked to get settled. A scarcely exhaustive enumeration already provides somewhat of a frame: he was a seminarian; he was a gambler; he taught Hebrew, classical languages, Italian literature; he was a shopkeeper in Pennsylvania and a bartender in New Jersey; he was a librettist, editor, bookseller, opera impresario; he successively practiced Judaism, Catholicism, Anglicanism; he bowed down in the antechambers of emperors, archbishops and princes and then scribbled clandestine pamphlets against them. Reading his memoirs is as agitated an experience as witnessing the exploits, ruses, escapes, jolts, strokes of daring or of shamelessness that take place in the three Mozart operas whose librettos he wrote, generally with utmost speed, and during a time of his life that turns out to be quite brief in comparison to the length and variety of his disorderly biographies. Historians often say that, as a memoirist, Da Ponte is not very trustworthy. Charles Rosen observes that he usually fails to remember precisely what we would most like to hear. But if the words in these memoirs are not too exact, their music immediately becomes familiar, and in it there is no room for deception: as we read pages more replete with adventures than the wildest serial, we have the feeling of recognizing some of Don Giovanni and Leporello’s tricks and the conspiracies that baleful Bartolo and resentful Marcellina plot against Figaro and Susanna, and the games of masks and impersonations to which the couples of symmetrical lovers devote themselves in Così fan tutte no longer seem so implausible.
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Image of the Day: Mars’s dark dunes
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Poem: Marilyn L. Taylor, “Noise”
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