Reviews and News:
The poetry, politics, and madness of Ezra Pound.
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The passions of Elizabeth Bishop: “‘I’m not interested in big-scale work as such,’ Elizabeth Bishop once told an interviewer. ‘Something needn’t be large to be good.'”
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Bosch and Bruegel: “Almost all the themes that in Bruegel look like ‘genre’ subjects were painted first by Bosch. The difference, and it is a giddying world of difference, is in tone and intent.”
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“First published in 1785, Baron Munchausen’s Narrative of His Marvelous Travels and Campaigns in Russia was purportedly written by a real-life baron who regaled dinner guests with barely believable, yet compulsively listenable stories of his travels. Every sentence seemed to put ironic quotation marks or italics around claims about what might be real or true. The ‘real’ author, Rudolf Erich Raspe, had assembled and elaborated the stories from other sources, and he was slippery (and canny) enough to encourage the book to travel out of his oversight. The Baron von Munchausen took on a life of his own in print; like Voltaire’s Candide, the story was popular enough to gain translators, imitators, sequelizers, illustrators, and other fans who transformed the tale to keep the Baron talking.” In Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky’s 1918 novel, the Baron “jounces” across time visiting wars and revolutions.
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The Martin Luther of Belarus: “Francysk Skaryna published a book of Psalms in his native Belarusian: it was one of the first to use the Cyrillic script. Only two years later, he had translated large swathes of the Bible.”
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Where to watch the total eclipse on August 21
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Essay of the Day:
In The New Republic, Mene Ukueberuwa argues that an intolerant progressivism is not the only thing to blame for the rise in campus protests and the proliferation of safe spaces. So are increasingly risk-averse administrators, who cave to student demands to protect revenue:
“This new, fervent insistence on cleansing campuses of contradictions is usually attributed to politics. Watchdog organizations like Turning Point USA report on the mistreatment of conservative students by liberal professors, suggesting that the academy has become so uniformly progressive that it can no longer tolerate a single word or thought that strays from its new orthodoxy. The dominance of progressive politics on campus is undeniable. A 2014 study by the social psychologists Yoel Inbar and Joris Lammers found not only that liberal professors now dominate every corner of the social sciences, but also that universities often express an open reluctance to hire conservative professors.
“In focusing on this political cartel effect, however, critics tend to underemphasize the increasing fragility of the universities themselves—the second great factor that has wiped away tolerance for ‘dangerous’ ideas on college campuses since the mid-twentieth century. The schools of a half-century ago were much leaner, with comparatively tiny budgets and administrative staffs, meaning they felt no itch to raise ever-higher funds with each passing minute and no need to keep their image so squeakily clean for the donors. Today, every controversy that arises on campus has the potential to tarnish the image that generations’ worth of administrators have crafted to keep admissions numbers high and donations pouring in—that is, the banner shot of carefree students, tossing a Frisbee on a well-kept lawn with a preternaturally diverse group of their classmates. The president of Yale may find the sight of John Calhoun’s name emblazoned above a dorm building to be offensive. Of more immediate concern, though, would be the drop in applications and tightening of Yale’s famous endowment that would follow from a reinvigorated protest, spurred by his reluctance to chisel Calhoun’s name away.”
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Photo: Mount Moriyoshi
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Poem: George David Clark, “Temporarily Eternal”
