Reviews and News:
The return of Italy's pipe organs: "They're known for a velvety, vocal sound, and there's a body of music written just for them. They are a portal into the past." But few people can play them.
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Andrew Hook—lifetime subscriber to The Guardian— is bored by The Guardian: "Page five, as normal, is given over to the thoughts of either a regular or specially invited contributor. Today it's by a recovering alcoholic who had decided to dramatise her break with the past by shearing off all her hair. The piece refers to other women who have chosen to do likewise (I recognise hardly any of the famous names) and goes on to comment on how people react; head-shaving in the past and so on. Marginally interesting at best. Next is a long, four-page extract from a new book. It is a memoir concerning Caitlyn Jenner's 'journey to transgender womanhood'. Before her transition, she had been married three times – including to a member of the Kardashian family – had fathered six children, and had won an Olympic gold medal in the decathlon. I suppose it is striking that she waited until she was 65 before switching genders, but at a time when stories on the transgender theme are no longer a surprise, I'm far from persuaded that G2 should be giving free publicity to such a vastly profitable and self-serving book...The health page that follows concerns postpartum psychosis. At least with this I was learning something new." (h/t: Barton Swaim)
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A history of Mary's visit to Elizabeth in art: "Falling between the artistically more popular scenes of the Annunciation (Angel Gabriel, ray of divine light, holy dove, bashful, slender Virgin) and the Adoration (shepherds, magi, stars, tumbledown stable, ox, ass, newborn baby), the Visitation is less often chosen as a subject. The artists who did choose it invest their Visitations with quiet grace."
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A vivid account of the building of the Brooklyn Bridge: "This magnificent book by Wagner...focuses on the two men responsible for building the edifice: John A Roebling and his patriotically named son Washington. Roebling Sr, a German émigré (born Johann August Röbling), was an inspired engineer who developed the wire cables and other mechanical features that would enable the construction of the bridge. This was his contribution to his adoptive land, as if he were supplying its sinews and neural networks. Yet he was also a domestic tyrant with a "great slaughter" of a temper; he often punched his wife and terrified his children with assaults that drew blood and put them in fear for their lives."
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Listen to Bob Dylan's rambling but personal Nobel Prize lecture.
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Art Basel sues Adidas: "Art fair says the sportswear company infringed trademark with trainers distributed during Art Basel Miami Beach."
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Adam Zagajewski and the poetry of living in "two idioms."
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Essay of the Day:
What is Christianity's relationship to modernism? Matthew J. Franck considers:
"Why Christianity's role in shaping the West should be in need of vindication is itself an interesting tale. In secularist circles, from the eighteenth-century Roman historian Edward Gibbon to the most recent popularizers of the 'New Atheism,' it has long been axiomatic that everything praiseworthy in western societies was achieved by overcoming and displacing the legacy of Christianity. Equality, freedom, democracy, the rule of law, human rights, modern science and its fruits—all of these are viewed as luminous achievements brought about by an escape from the stultifying, superstitious shadows of the Christian religion.
"This view does not withstand serious historical scrutiny. Indeed, after reading this book, there are two things one can no longer credit. The first, which Spencer explicitly debunks, is that modernity's highest achievements owe nothing to Christianity and everything to secularism. The second, the untenability of which he pauses repeatedly to underscore, is that everything that is good about modernity is due to Christianity in some unambiguous or univocal way. The matter is more complicated than that. One might add a third myth that Spencer nowhere mentions, let alone debunks, but one that is worth mentioning because it travels well in some quarters: that the modern is the secular, the secular is the anti-Christian, and . . . we're doomed, unless we somehow tear up the roots of the modern altogether. That myth, too, does not survive this book."
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Photos: Sun
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Poem: David Solway, "The Dreams"
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