In 1931, Plennie L. Wingo tried to walk around the world backward. He didn’t succeed. Why did he try?
Is opera in America dead? Probably: “It is not that grand opera is incapable of appealing to American theatergoers. Even now, there are many Americans who love it passionately, just as there are regional companies such as Chicago’s Lyric Opera and San Francisco Opera that have avoided making the mistakes that closed City Opera’s doors. Yet the crises from which the Metropolitan Opera has so far failed to extricate itself suggest that in the absence of the generous state subsidies that keep European opera houses in business, large-house grand opera in America may simply be too expensive to thrive—or, ultimately, to survive. At its best, no art form is more thrilling or seductive. But none is at greater risk of following the dinosaurs down the cold road to extinction.”
Excerpt: Winston Churchill’s mother is disappointed. “Dearest Winston you make me very unhappy—I had built up such hopes about you & felt so proud of you—& now all is gone. My only consolation is that your conduct is good and you are an affectionate son—but your work is an insult to your intelligence.”
Revisiting a 1920s art hoax: “In 1924, American literary scholar and author Paul Jordan-Smith adopted a new identity: Pavel Jerdanowitch, an avant-garde Russian artist whose visceral paintings would beguile modern art critics. Parading as Jerdanowitch for the next three years, Jordan-Smith gained traction at the helm of his one-man art movement, which he called Disumbrationism. But Jordan-Smith wasn’t a brooding artist from Moscow, and Disumbrationism was less of an aesthetic than it was a practical joke intended to shame the art world.”
A history of the book, starting with Chinese tortoise shells.
A new film follows Alex Honnold as he attempts to summit El Capitan without ropes or safety gear.
Essay of the Day:
Atheism was not an accidental part of Soviet communism. It “was central to the Bolshevik project,” Gary Saul Morson argues in Commentary:
“Bolshevik ideology demanded that religion be wiped out. Perhaps even more than constructing dams and factories, creating a population of atheists became the regime’s most important criterion of success. ‘Atheism [was] the new civilization’s calling card,’ as S.A. Kuchinsky, director of the Leningrad State Museum of the History of Religion and Atheism, explained.
“Communist society could be built only by a new kind of human being, one who would at every moment be guided by partiinost (party-mindedness), a singular devotion to the Party’s purposes. Partiinost demanded militant atheism (mere unbelief was not enough), and atheism became, as Smolkin observes, ‘the battleground on which Soviet Communism engaged with the existential concerns at the heart of human existence: the meaning of life and death.’”
Photo: Common Five Rings
Poem: David Mason, “A Cabbie in America”
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