Reviews and News:
Marjorie Perloff on William Empson's accomplishment: "Empson was all of 22 when he produced, at the suggestion of his Cambridge supervisor I. A. Richards, a bulky manuscript called Seven Types of Ambiguity. Published in 1930, the book quickly became a classic, read and hotly debated in classrooms across Britain and the United States. Not until the 1970s, with the rise of Deconstruction, did Empson's star go down, the irony being (as Wood notes) that he anticipated so many of the theorems of what he called, in a letter to a friend, 'those horrible Frenchmen'—he referred to the chef d'école of Deconstruction as 'Nerrida'—who were 'so very disgusting, in a social and moral way.'"
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Brian Doyle's The Adventures of John Carson in Several Quarters of the World is based on an idea Robert Louis Stevenson had for a novel but never wrote. It is, James McNamara writes, "a triumph."
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Joseph Koerner's Bosch and Bruegel: "A new book by Joseph Koerner is always an event. Here, as usual, he seems to have read everything and to have thought about everything connected with his chosen subject, the two early modern Netherlands painters Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Bruegel the Elder, so similar in many ways and yet so different: their lives and their work; the complex history of the Netherlands and Europe in the sixteenth century; the seismic cultural shifts occurring at the time; the commissioning and afterlife of individual paintings; the way they lay on the paint and the way they intend their work to be seen and how it is seen now – the Boschs mainly in the Prado, the Bruegels mainly in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna…But it is his ability to look and to find words for what he is looking at that sets him in the very front rank of art historians."
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The orchestra that makes the opera: "Why, demands my companion, why can't it be like this in London? We are sauntering through the lobbies of the Vienna State Opera in the interval of a Nabucco revival — no headline names, no fuss, no media, just a performance of liberating intensity, the kind of show that passes in Vienna as routine. Listen, I tell my companion, listen to where it all begins. Recall the opening chords, rising like dawn mist over a summer lake, an immersive impression, delicate in colour and immovably present. This particular sound sets the tone for every performance, assuring us that, come what may, elemental excellence will never waver. This orchestra is the custodian of house quality."
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A. N. Wilson on David Jones: "When Stravinsky visited David Jones in his cold Harrow bedsit, he came away saying, 'I have been in the presence of a holy man.' Other admirers included T.S. Eliot (his publisher) and the Queen Mother (who wrote asking if she could buy some of his work). Harold Bloom, Kenneth Clark and W.H. Auden were all not merely admirers, but passionate in their admiration. Auden thought Jones's long Eucharistic poem 'The Anathemata' the 'finest long poem written in English this century'."
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James Longenbach on the music of poetry.
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Essay of the Day:
In Bloomberg Businessweek, Ira Boudway and Max Chafkin write about ESPN's decline and the network's decision to defend the TV bundle model rather than go after individual subscribers:
"ESPN broke ground on this $175 million, 194,000-square-foot facility, called Digital Center 2, in 2011. It was billed by executives as "future-proof," capable of adapting to any possible change in the way people watch sports. At the time, ESPN looked indestructible. Its namesake cable channel had just topped 100 million subscribers and was posting record profits for its parent company, Walt Disney Co., even as streaming apps such as Netflix were growing rapidly. Ratings for live sports, unlike almost everything else on TV, were soaring. And ESPN had big games year-round— Monday Night Football, college football bowl games, Major League Baseball's opening day, and the NBA playoffs, to name a few. A cover story in this magazine in the fall of 2012 dubbed ESPN the 'Everywhere Sports Profit Network.'
"Five years later the network's profits are shrinking, and the 10,000-square-foot SportsCenter studio has already begun to look like a relic. The show's formula, in which well-fed men in suits present highlights from the day's games with Middle-American charm, is less of a draw now that the same highlights are readily available on social media. Viewership for the 6 p.m. edition of SportsCenter, a bellwether for the franchise, fell almost 12 percent from 2015 to last year, according to Nielsen. Keith Olbermann, the SportsCenter-host-turned-political-commentator, put it bluntly on a podcast last year: 'There's just no future in it.'
" SportsCenter is only part of the problem. ESPN has lost more than 12 million subscribers since 2011, according to Nielsen, and the viewership erosion seems to be accelerating. Last fall, ESPN lost 621,000 subscribers in a single month, the most in the company's history. The losses have helped depress Disney's stock price—down 7 percent since August 2015, despite a big jump in the company's film revenue thanks to a string of hits, including the latest Star Wars film, Rogue One. John Malone, the cable entrepreneur and chairman of Liberty Media Corp., has publicly suggested that Disney would be better off selling ESPN.
"As subscribers leave the network, and often cable altogether, ESPN is stuck with rising costs for the rights to broadcast games. Programming costs will top $8 billion in 2017, according to media researcher Kagan. Most of that money goes to rights fees through deals that extend into the next decade. Last year profits from Disney's cable networks, of which ESPN is the largest, fell for the first time in 14 years. The dip was small, about half a percent, but nonetheless alarming. Rich Greenfield, a media analyst at BTIG Research, says ESPN has been 'over-earning,' with cable customers paying for the channel as part of their subscription bundle, whether they watch it or not. 'It's pretty clear that the years of over-earning are going to end,' says Greenfield, who's made a name for himself as an ESPN naysayer. 'The question is does it end slowly or fast.'"
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Photo: Bookcases
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Poem: Jennifer Reeser, "Preferring These Brief, Temperate Winter Sessions"
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