Reviews and News:
Looking for the lost Franklin expedition: "In August 2016, the Crystal Serenity, an 820-foot luxury cruise liner with 13 decks, a casino, six restaurants and a driving range, set off on its first voyage from Alaska to New York through the fabled Northwest Passage. About two weeks after leaving Alaska, the Crystal Serenity passed by the spot where, in April 1848, two Royal Navy ships, the Terror and Erebus, on a mission to discover and navigate the Northwest Passage for the first time, were abandoned by their officers and crew. The ships, commanded by Rear Adm. Sir John Franklin, had been trapped in ice for more than a year, and were most likely running low on food. Poorly equipped, and dragging lifeboats filled with tons of gear and supplies, much of which proved useless, the hundred or so remaining men first walked east across the frozen sea, then south along the coast of King William Island. None of them survived, but the question of exactly how, and when, and why they died has continued to fascinate amateur and professional historians ever since."
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The houses that shaped Tudor England: In Houses of Power, Simon Thurley sets out "to tell the story of why the Tudor monarchs built their houses the way they did and what went on inside them. The result is a triumph: a masterly collective biography of these buildings, replete with insights into their owners' private lives and into politics, diplomacy and court etiquette."
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Why you should go to a performance of Bach's St. John Passion and not just listen to it on a recording: "There is something distorted – one could say, dysfunctional – in the relationship between classical music and recordings...There are, of course, many benefits to being able to access such an extraordinary resource but there are also some dangers. The first stems from the ease with which we become casually familiar with music."
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Adventures in antedating: "'Antedatings' for the Oxford English Dictionary are always exciting, showing that a word or meaning has been around for longer than previously thought. Sometimes, though, they just take your breath away. For instance, the OED's editors recently prepared a new version of WHITE and its various compounds and derivatives. This involved, among other things, carefully combing through all of OED's existing quotation files, and numerous online databases of historical linguistic evidence. In this process the earliest example we found of white lie ('A harmless or trivial lie, especially one told in order to avoid hurting another person's feelings') was from 1741. Imagine, then, our surprise and delight (and yes, it is delight, rather than lexicographical sour grapes!) when keen-eyed Shakespeare's World participant mutabilitie found this in a letter from 1567."
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The subtle morality of Daniel Deronda: "Near the beginning of her newly released lectures on George Eliot's 'crowning' novel, Daniel Deronda, Harvard professor emerita Ruth Wisse observes that Eliot's initial presentation of beauty contains a skepticism that is unusual in love stories. It is unclear whether the beauty of the heroine Gwendolen Harleth draws the observer, Daniel Deronda, toward good or evil. Wisse compares this skeptical approach to beauty to the uncritical approach in the tale Tristan and Isolde, where two lovers fall head-over-heels for one another, never questioning whether the beauty they encounter in each other is good or evil. Wisse remarks to her students that reading Tristan and Isolde 'can change your life—perhaps not in the right direction.'"
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Baseball is best on the radio.
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Howard Hodgkin's portraits: "It always feels wrong to scatter words around Howard Hodgkin's paintings. Their tactile richness should just burn into eyes and minds, leaving a trace behind the eyelids, a memory to which we can return. Their energy is enormous, their beauty intense. Yet 'words' are eerily present in these paintings: conversations, jokes, arguments, and endearments. In a way, Hodgkin is a narrative artist and it's not surprising that he numbered writers among his close friends: Bruce Chatwin, Colm Tóibín, James Fenton, Julian Barnes."
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A Bob Dylan forgery shows "how far forgers will go to defraud dealers and avid collectors, and how they can sometimes exploit an auction house's less-than-rigorous approach to research."
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Essay of the Day:
In Humanities, William H. Funk writes about the Maroons—a morphing group of Native Americans and runaway slaves who lived in the Great Dismal Swamp from the early 1600s until after the Civil War:
"Located in southeastern Virginia, the lone surviving remnant of a sprawling wetlands that formerly stretched over one million acres of coastal plain, the Great Dismal Swamp is now largely confined to 112,000 acres of wildlife refuge. Though modified by centuries of human encroachment, it remains one of the largest intact wild areas left on the Atlantic Coast. From a Native American legacy reaching back at least 6,000 years to a motley assemblage of criminal fugitives, moonshiners, poachers, and outlaws that flourished until relatively recently, the swamp has seen its share of vibrant American history. Perhaps most fascinating, however, is the story of the Maroons, a hybrid band of fugitive slaves and isolated Native Americans that held out deep in the inaccessible interior from the 1600s until after the Civil War. Today, the story of the Maroons is finally coming to light through groundbreaking archaeological work.
"Beginning in the early seventeenth century, the swamp was slowly surrounded by English agricultural plots worked by slaves. Its unapproachable interior was a powerful attraction for slaves desperate to escape servitude. Arriving with little more than their clothing, some runaways established a relationship with the Native American peoples, a loose collection of several Algonquian tribes who had been hemmed in by colonial development and separated from other Indians. From the Indians, escaped slaves learned subsistence techniques of hunting, fishing, and cultivation of the scattered hummocks that still rise in places above the black waters.
"Tools were scarce. The thick peat foundation of the swamp provided few stone outcrops for the fashioning of essential knives, axes, or arrowheads. Maroons sometimes resorted to digging up and refashioning discarded stone implements brought into the swamp during millennia past. Dan Sayers of American University, an archaeologist who pioneered the first systematic excavations of the Great Dismal Swamp's human past, is one of the country's leading authorities on this long-lived subculture. His team's groundbreaking surveys, involving less than 1 percent of the swamp, have uncovered cabin foundations, fire pits, middens, and heavily used and reused stone implements, what he calls 'resuscitated' tools, made of chert, quartzite, and flint—a careful reuse of ancient stone implements not previously known to science."
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Photo: Dutch tulip fields
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Poem: Adam Wyeth, "Oak"
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