Note: I will be on vacation next week, and the only things I plan on reading are novels in paperback. Prufrock will return on Monday, June 4.
The Globe Theatre goes full SJW: “ Michelle Terry, the new artistic director at The Globe, has made it known that her interpretation of Shakespeare will be less about the Bard and more about celebrating ‘inclusivity’. ‘Shakespeare gives us no character descriptions but gives us the note to “hold the mirror up to nature”’, she told Time Out in April. ‘I think this binary way of looking at gender, looking at the world, has reached a tipping point. We’re doing a gender-blind, race-blind, disability-blind production [of Hamlet].’” By which she means, of course, that her production of Hamlet will be only about gender and race. Ella Whelan say the production, and it was terrible: “It was hard to see any point to the production other than the fact that Terry has employed a diverse cast. Many of the actors came across as simply reading lines. Ophelia is played by Shubham Saraf, a tall man with nothing identifiably Ophelia-like about him, apart from a dress. Laertes, her brother, is played by Bettrys Jones, who is markedly shorter than Saraf. This made the scenes of protective brotherly love ridiculous where they should be poignant. Ophelia’s tragic beauty was entirely lost – Saraf even turned her exiting line, ‘good night, sweet ladies’, into a bitchy retort. The audience were laughing instead of weeping.”
The mystery of American Gothic: “The story behind American Gothic is simple enough: Traveling around his native Iowa in 1930, Wood visited the little town of Eldon, where he discovered a two-story house with an arching window. The sight of a modest American home that gestured toward the vaulting majesty of European cathedrals struck him as a potent incongruity. In his painting, Wood heightened this subtle tension by adding the puzzling pair of people who stand in the foreground. At first glance, they’re a farm couple. Upon closer examination, he looks older. Are they a mismatched husband and wife, or a father and daughter? Why does he stare at us while she glances away? And what about those funereal expressions? If the great enigma of Mona Lisa is her smile, then the central mystery of American Gothic may be the complete lack of one.”
John Wilson recommends some mid-century Catholic fiction lit crit: “A young literary reader today would find himself in unfamiliar territory, recognizing some of the main players but viewing them from the perspective of fifty years ago, and encountering language quite different from today’s critical lexicon. And that would be all to the good. Not that these essays are by any means uniformly excellent—but we can benefit from gaining a certain distance from the habits of our own time.”
Did a Jewish Nazi collaborator betray Anne Frank? A new book revisits the claim: “The involvement of Ans van Dijk, who was executed in 1948 after admitting to collaborating in the capture of 145 people, including her own brother and his family, had been previously claimed. But, the Anne Frank House museum and research center had been unable to come to any conclusion, despite police investigations and its own studies. Fresh claims have now been made in a book by Gerard Kremer, 70, the son of a member of the Dutch resistance of the same name, who was an acquaintance of Van Dijk in Amsterdam.”
The official color of the Impressionists: Modern painting began with “luminous violet...in Paris in 1874. On April 15.”
Revisiting the memoirs of a French exile: “In his lifetime, François-René de Chateaubriand won renown as a politician, diplomat, novelist and travel writer. Today he is best remembered for his Memoirs From Beyond the Grave, a gigantic 42-volume work intended for publication only 50 years after his death. In the end, though, obliged by poverty in old age ‘to pawn my tomb,’ as he lamented, the memoirs appeared soon after he died in 1848, at the age of 79, in Paris. This new edition, which comprises the first 12 books of the memoirs (considered by many critics to be the most interesting), covers Chateaubriand’s aristocratic upbringing in Brittany, the first two years of the French Revolution, a six-month trip to the United States, his combat alongside Royalists resisting the revolution, the loss of family and friends to the Terror and his eight-year exile in England, which ended in 1800.”
Essay of the Day:
In Commentary, Joseph Epstein praises the genius of Heinrich Heine:
“Heinrich Heine was one of those writers, rare at any time, welcome always, who found it impossible to be dull. In everything he wrote, he captivated, sometimes infuriated, often dazzled. Heine, who was born in 1797 and died in 1856, wrote poetry, plays, criticism, essays, fiction, travel books, and journalism. All of it was marked by passion and wit, not a standard combination. ‘I hate ambiguous words,’ he noted, ‘hypocritical flowers, cowardly fig-leaves, from the depth of my soul.’ He thought himself, not incorrectly, in the line of Aristophanes, Cervantes, Molière. Matthew Arnold called Heine ‘the most important German successor and continuator of Goethe in Goethe’s most important line of activity…as “a soldier in the war of liberation of humanity.”’
“George Eliot, that other great Victorian, wrote of Heinrich Heine that he was one of the most remarkable men of this age: no echo but a real voice…a surpassing poet, who has uttered our feelings for us in delicious song; a humorist, who touches leaden folly with the magic wand of the fine gold of art—who sheds his sunny smile on human tears, and makes them a beauteous rainbow on the cloudy background of life; a wit, who holds in his mighty hand the most scorching of lightnings of satire; an artist in prose literature, who has shown even more completely than Goethe the possibilities of German prose; and—in spite of all the charges against him, true as well as false—a lover of freedom who has spoken wise and brave words on behalf of his fellow men.”
Photo: Lava river
Poem: Richard O’Connell, “Morning After”
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