NYC offers to make the Strand bookstore a city landmark. The owner of the bookstore and building that houses it said the move would destroy it. “Nancy Bass Wyden, who owns the Strand and its building at 826 Broadway, said landmarking could deal a death blow to the business her family has owned for 91 years, one of the largest book stores in the world. So at a public hearing on Tuesday before the city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission, her plea will be simple, she said: ‘Do not destroy the Strand.’ Like many building owners in New York, Ms. Wyden argues that the increased restrictions and regulations required of landmarked buildings can be cumbersome and drive up renovation and maintenance costs.”
John Banville reviews Colm Tóibín’s study of the fathers of Wilde, Joyce, and Yeats: “This book is, in its sly way, far more substantial than it might at first seem – more, indeed, than it presents itself as being. Colm Tóibín’s subject is the influence of their fathers on the artistic thought, attitude and writings of three great Irish literary artists: Oscar Wilde, W B Yeats and James Joyce. What Tóibín has produced is not only a group portrait of three men who in their way were almost as brilliant as their sons, but also an illuminating meditation on the familial sources of artistic inspiration.”
B. D. McClay reviews Elaine Pagels’s Why Religion: A Personal Story: The book “ is a valuable attempt to rescue the religious instinct—which here largely means the desire for meaning, ritual, and some way of coping with death. It fits, however, into another genre: the why-the-humanities book. And like many if not all of these books, it chooses to explain the worth—or at least the so-what-ness—of humanistic study by telling part or all of the writer’s life story. What exactly compels people to write this way? On one level, I get it—for I, too, was formed by books and have passionate reactions to them. Disciplines like literature or philosophy are relevant to everyday life if only because without them, people are ill-equipped to face tragedy or other moments when existential questions become pressing and immediate. Yet the more these books are published, the more skeptical I am of what they can accomplish. If readers come to a book like Why Religion? already doubting the value of religion in general, and the study of it in particular, will they care that this or that piece of her work was steeped in grief, or written after the death of her son? Much like a conversion narrative, in which the writer hopes to reach potential converts by relating a story that carries an emotional appeal, these books dramatize the experience of intellectual work. They situate the reader in the place of the scholar, hoping to communicate in some visceral way the attractions of mucking about in ancient texts: this is how I fell in love; you can too. It is a scholarly altar call.”
Silent Sam will stay on UNC’s campus, but it will be housed in a new center for history and education: “The cost of the new center would be $5.3 million with $800,000 a year in operating expenses. The building, which would be completed by 2022, would feature “state-of-the-art security measures, as well as the development of excellent exhibits and teaching materials,” according to a 10-page document explaining the plan.”
Pushcart-nominated poet accused of stealing clichéd images and flat lines from other poets.
As Netflix begins work on a new adaptation of George Orwell’s Animal Farm, Guy Davies revisits previous adaptations of the novella: “The bastardized cartoon version of Animal Farm is not the only trap Andy Serkis could fall into. If by ‘updating’ Animal Farm and making it ‘relevant’ for the Netflix generation, he means to explore parallels with today’s political situation, he is surely mistaken, if not doomed to repeat previous misappropriations of Orwell’s message.”
Essay of the Day:
Arthur Krystal, as he sometimes does, sets off around Robin Hood’s barn in an essay about pleasure in literature, but eventually gets to his point, and it’s a good one. What do we lose when we care more about the politics than the style of a literary work:
“Something, I fear, goes missing when the historical particularity of style is dropped from the curriculum. That aesthetic exchange whereby writers strive to outdo their precursors (vividly traced by Harold Bloom and W. Jackson Bate) has taken a back seat to more socially pressing concerns. Although serious writers continue to write good books, interesting books, unusual books, literature itself is now viewed primarily as a cultural artifact defined by limitations of sex, race, and class. It acts more as a critique of society than as a gloss on previous work. To take a well-worn example: Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is invariably seen as a racial and colonialist work of fiction. No one is saying that the story is not well told. Nonetheless, it is bad in a way that is more important than the ways it is good.
“More recently, the novelist Jesmyn Ward, writing in The New York Times Book Review, gracefully extolled the virtues of The Great Gatsby while focusing on Gatsby’s exclusionary status as though it were the novel’s most important feature: ‘the idea most invisible to [her] as a young reader [was] that the very social class that embodied the dream Gatsby wanted for himself was predicated on exclusion. That Gatsby was doomed from the start. He’d been born on the outside; he would die on the outside.’ But what reader past the age of 14 doesn’t get this? It’s not that Ward is wrong; it’s just that harping on James Gatz’s displacement conveniently lines up with our culture’s need to condemn privilege.
“I may be overreaching, but this emphasis on the socioeconomic aspect of the novel suggests that we’re in danger of losing a category of pleasure. If what is most important in a book is its attitude toward imperialism or class or injustice, then we automatically consign good writing to secondary status. Gatsby is great not because James Gatz is an interloper who exposes class prejudice, but because Fitzgerald learned from Conrad (as well as from Booth Tarkington, Sherwood Anderson, and Compton Mackenzie). Wanting to be a great writer, he had to be his own writer, and with Gatsby, he aspired to ‘write something new—something extraordinary and beautiful and simple + intricately patterned.’ And part of the pleasure of reading Gatsby is discovering where and how he differed from the writers he admired.
“That said, arguments against a purely aesthetic approach to art are legitimate. Not only because canon formation reflected the views of educated white males, but also because when you come down to it, who’s to say what makes a poem or novel truly great? After all, criticism is never absolute and therefore always imprecise. John Gross, author of the excellent The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters, tells us that when Charles Lamb, William Hazlitt, and Thomas Carlyle were writing for magazines and literary reviews, their pages were “unashamed vehicles for party propaganda, often of the narrowest kind, and generally too overbearing and coarse-grained in their approach to encourage criticism of much depth.”
“So how do we reconcile the idea of the Great Books with the cronyism, personal antipathy, stupidity, spite, and greed that all played a part in sustaining that idea? Simply put, you take note and then move on. Because whatever built-in bias prevailed in canon formation, whatever self-interest motivated writers and critics, what really mattered was the act of departure that distinguished one poet from another. Without writers wanting desperately to distinguish themselves, our literature would be, at best, an enjoyably inert affair, summoning neither joy nor dismay.”
Photo: Val di Funes
Poem: John Updike, “Recital” (Roger Bobo remembers his tuba recital here)
Get Prufrock in your inbox every weekday morning. Subscribe here.
