Was the creator of the iconic LOVE image exploited in his final years? Isaac Stanley-Becker reports: “When Indiana died in May at age 89, he left behind an estate worth an estimated $28 million, including a cache of artwork in his residence, a former Independent Order of Odd Fellows lodge known as the Star of Hope. His will leaves much of his property to a nonprofit, named after the 19th-century building where he grew old. The will gives Jamie Thomas, Indiana’s caretaker, power of attorney and makes him executive director of the nonprofit, responsible for turning the dilapidated Victorian home into a museum featuring his work. But in a striking turn of events, Thomas is one of two defendants named in a lawsuit filed the day before Indiana’s death accusing the caretaker, as well as a New York art publisher, of isolating the aging artist from friends and opportunities and producing counterfeit versions of his art. The company behind the lawsuit, Morgan Art Foundation, says it represented Indiana beginning in the 1990s and owns rights to some of the artist’s most popular designs. The other defendant is New York art publisher Michael McKenzie.”
The prevailing view regarding Oscar Wilde’s final years is that after he was released from prison in 1897, he was a broken man, “languishing in…miserable exile on the continent…no longer resembling the brilliant charmer he had once been, bouncing from run-down hotel to run-down hotel, and despised by those he had once called friends.” No so, argues Nicholas Frankel in Oscar Wilde: The Unrepentant Years.
What were the Vikings really like? Violent and “utterly dauntless.” Michael Dirda reviews Tom Shippey’s Laughing Shall I Die: “When Ivan Morris produced his classic study of the Japanese conception of the hero, he titled it “The Nobility of Failure.” Vikings and samurai are much alike: A hero, stresses Shippey, ‘is defined not by victory but by defeat. Only in defeat can you show what you’re really made of. Only in final defeat can you show that you will never give in.’ A true Viking goes down fighting while uttering a defiant wisecrack and never showing any emotion except contempt for his enemies. Prestige and ‘drengskapr’ — honorable behavior — matter more than winning.”
Sean Spicer’s The Briefing: Politics, the Press, and the President is the dad memoir of the Trump White House: “Like a lot of dads, Spicer has something like a negative gift for imparting details about things like color and furniture. It is admirable that he recognizes that we generally expect these things of authors and tries his best anyway, which results in such masterpieces of description as ‘the White House itself is rather expansive’ and ‘President Donald J. Trump was sitting at the end of the dining room table — a rectangular table made of polished, dark-brown wood.’ A table made of wood? Imagine that! When he wants to make sure we realize that he is talking about something that happened a long time ago, he notes that it ‘was in the days before BlackBerrys and iPhones.’ The advent of new technology, which seems to fascinate and confuse him simultaneously, is a recurring theme in these pages.”
How the opioid crisis began: “Fewer than 50 pages into Beth Macy’s Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors, and the Drug Company That Addicted America, one of the many opioid users she talks to — this one a mother in Virginia — explains how her addiction started in the early 2000s, after routine gallbladder surgery. ‘The doctor didn’t force me to take them,’ she said of OxyContin and Percocet, two powerful painkillers she was instructed to take concurrently. But her doctor, she assumed, was a ‘high-standard person, someone you’re supposed to trust and believe in.’ If you want a glimpse into how the opioid crisis began, the woman’s words are a good place to start. She was aware of her own choice in the matter, but her physician instructed her to double up on highly addictive narcotics…[Macy] traces the beginning of the current epidemic to 1996, when Purdue Pharma released OxyContin with the claim (preposterous in hindsight) that its new pills would be less addictive than other opioids on the market. Yes, OxyContin contained more medication than the others, but its time-release formula (the ‘contin’ was pharma-speak for ‘continuous’) would frustrate an impatient addict looking for a quick high.”
Essay of the Day:
In Tablet, Jake Marmer writes about early recordings that capture snippets of the life and music of Ukrainian Jews in the early twentieth century:
“Historical narratives are built around artifacts—preserved and frail relics from past epochs. Mythology erupts in the absence of such relics, and it is the sort of absence that doesn’t let one alone. Celebrating its first centennial this year, the Jewish Archive at the Vernadsky Library in Kiev is, perhaps, one of the oddest crossroads of history and mythology: It is filled with incredible artifacts of the Eastern European Jewish past, and yet, it hangs suspended within a cognitive void, in the absence of the community that engendered these artifacts. Growing up in Ukraine, the notion that there may exist a Jewish archive never once crossed my mind, for I simply knew nothing about the material culture such an archive might contain.
“The original filing system of the archive, containing records and descriptions of its holdings, was demolished by the KGB, and its demise, in a way, mirrored the demise of access to knowledge of Judaism for people like me. Even today, there are only a limited number of scholars privy to the collection’s riches. The library has thus become a Borgesian establishment, the sort that engenders, or even necessitates, myth.
“I set out to visit the library to learn more about its musical archive—a huge set of Jewish vocal and instrumental recordings from the early decades of the 20th century. It is mind-boggling that long before any serious recording technology was invented, without much funding or publicity, groups of ambitious scholars set out on ethnographic expeditions into the heartland of the Ukrainian shtetl world, aiming to capture the community’s folklore, and amassed a treasure trove of material. In recent years, these fragile, virtually unknown recordings were digitized and released in CD format. There are currently nine volumes of music out, with the three latest volumes released just within the past year. These most recent discs included the 1930s recordings of ‘Jewish Agricultural Colonies of the Southern Ukraine’ and, oddly, a 1913 collection of fieldwork conducted in the Jewish communities of Palestine.”
Photo: At the Toyohashi Gion Festival
Poem: Jan Schreiber, “A Life in Little”
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