“Humanitarianism is displacing Christianity, but without its redeeming effects.” Gerald J. Russello reviews Daniel J. Mahoney’s The Idol of Our Age: How the Religion of Humanity Subverts Christianity.
A cultural history of the shoeshiner: “People sit before him and tell them their secrets, or the gossip they’ve heard on the boulevards. In the mind of the shoeshiner, a detailed picture of the city slowly and covertly develops. So, at least, the legend goes. The myth of the shoeshiner’s particular kind of knowledge is international.”
In the New Yorker, Vinson Cunningham reviews Tom Stoppard’s play about the quiet faith of a young psychology student: “The stereotype about religious belief, which Spike eagerly marshals early on, is that it is purely psychological, born of the necessities of trauma, or hardship, or plain old existential terror. Hilary’s mixture of honest anguish and sincere pursuit of the truth makes that idea moot, even as it makes her a compelling theatrical creation: we all have pasts, she seems to say, as well as the sufferings and joys that these histories bring. But reason sits just next to these contingencies—and is often nourished, not diminished, by their presence. That this makes all thought impure and difficult to parse is nothing to scoff at; it’s implicit in being human. Unfortunately, the play fails to ask emotional questions of the characters who surround Hilary, and they tend, in their flatness, to wilt in her shadow. The likes of Spike are seldom asked—onstage, or in life—whether their smug certainty might have its roots in a more personal, less comfortable place. It might have been nice to see that question posed here. Spike is a spectacular jerk. One of the best scenes in the show is a party that he ruins; the roots of such asocial behavior might be just as harrowing as a lost child.”
The women of Abstract Expressionism: “Ninth Street Women focuses on this spirit: the bull sessions, the fights, the couplings, the tantrums, the jealousies, the struggles to stay warm, the penny pinching, the drinking—and the art. Had Gabriel pursued a strictly feminist mission in depicting the lives and careers of Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell, and Helen Frankenthaler, her book might have been tiresomely reductive. Instead, what she has achieved is a comprehensive, landmark study of what it was like, in the time of the Abstract Expressionist movement, to be a woman and an artist in a man’s world.”
A short history of bear repellent accidents in Amazon warehouses.
John Wilson keeps his annual book recommendation column going at First Things. This year, he recommends Michael Connelly’s Dark Sacred Night, Colin G. Calloway’s The Indian World of George Washington, and many others. His “book of the year” is Craig Childs’s Atlas of a Lost World: Travels in Ice Age America: “This book about the peopling of North America over many thousands of years combines history, reportage, and personal narrative to dazzling effect. Never has a book given me such a palpable, yet dreamlike sense of the history of this place where I was born and have lived my life, nor of those who came before.”
Essay of the Day:
In Deadspin, Jessica Camille Aguirre writes about Ira Mowen who raised money to be the first person to surf a wave in the Baltic Sea that was created by a ferry. The only problem was it was a lie:
“It was a beautiful project. Mowen posted photographs of his spot where things seemed out of proportion: pewter sky towering over a tempestuous sea; enormous ship blotting out the horizon over sapphire waters. He quoted Ralph Waldo Emerson (‘The health of the eye seems to demand a horizon.’) The wave looked like a pristine little barrel; a right breaking cleanly for almost a full minute. Mowen’s documentary was written up by Surfer and Outside magazines; he was interviewed by Gizmodo and Vice. It was like a dream: a perfect, undiscovered wave that would be surfed only by one fanatical madman before disappearing forever. It was also like a dream in that it would prove only a dim shadow of what was true.
“The location of Mowen’s wave was a little seaside resort town named Warnemünde, which derives from Warnowmündung that translates literally to ‘mouth of the Warnow,’ because it is where that river flows into the Baltic Sea. Warnemünde is a popular cruise ship stop, and is considered almost an extension of the city of Rostock, once a prominent member of the powerful maritime Hanseatic League and still an important port. In the middle of Warnemünde, on a street that runs adjacent to the town’s central park and that ends at the seaside promenade, is a surf shop owned by a thirty-something local named Hannes Winter.
“Winter, along with another surf shop owner named Joscha Jancke, was among the first German surfers to take note of Mowen’s quest in the waters just beyond his store. It annoyed him. ‘He sold himself as the discoverer of this wave,’ Winter told me. ‘But he had come into the shop and asked about how to surf it.’”
Photo: Abraham Lake
Poem: Rebecca Goss, “Room in a Hospital”
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