Why “Once upon a time” and not just “Once”? It’s a signal that this story is going to be light, fun, and only momentarily distressing. Anthony Madrid: “Apparently in Hausa (forty or fifty million speakers in Niger, Nigeria, and all over West Africa), you launch a folktale with, ‘A story, a story. Let it go, let it come.’ Every single Hausa story in the book starts like that. For this formula, I experienced love at first sight, but I must confess I don’t understand it. I get the ‘let it come’; I don’t know what they mean by ‘let it go.’ Yoruba meanwhile (thirty million speakers, Benin and Nigeria and elsewhere) has a similar seesaw formula: ‘Here is a story! Story it is.’”
Can we please stop calling art “necessary”? (We’re looking at you, James Wood.) “The word is a discursive crutch for describing a work’s right-minded views, and praise that is so distinct from aesthetics it can be affixed to just about anything, from two-dimensional romantic comedies to a good portion of the forthcoming books stacked beside my desk. Necessary for what is always left to the imagination...”
Does technology always improve productivity? In the case of clocks, yes.
Thomas von Steinaecker recommends Anna Seghers’s classic novel The Seventh Cross: “It had been a hit almost immediately after it was published in 1942—simultaneously in German by a publisher in exile in Mexico and in an English translation in the United States. Within six months, it had sold 421,000 copies in the US. To date, it has been translated into more than thirty languages. Then, in 1944, the Austria-born director Fred Zinnemann, who would make the western classic High Noon a few years later, filmed The Seventh Cross for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Besides Tracy, the cast included Jessica Tandy, Hume Cronyn, and Helene Weigel (in her only film role during her American exile)... The Seventh Cross is an example of something rare in the literature of the German language: a brilliantly written novel that keeps alive one of the most important chapters of German history—though I can still see why as a student I thought the book was old-fashioned. The grammar is complex, the language at times curious, its female characters oddly passive. So what gives The Seventh Cross its literary quality? First, something quite simple: Anna Seghers, it turns out, was a veritable master of suspense.”
The decline of Time: An oral history. “By the time I arrived, the so-called bar cart was a copy boy who would come around on Tuesdays and give each senior editor two bottles of liquor and a couple bottles of wine for that week’s closing nights. You could go into a senior editor’s office on a Thursday or Friday night for a drink, but you’d be crazy to, because the senior editor would ask, ‘So, how’s the story going?’”
The crusades are often misunderstood. What is clear, as a new book shows, is that the Siege of Acre was one of the bloodiest battles of the on-again, off-again conflict.
Essay of the Day:
Is it a Leonardo? Noah Charney explains why we still need experts to answer this question even if forensic evidence can help:
“The drawing certainly looks right. In pen and ink and lightly shadowed, an anguished-looking Saint Sebastian is tied to a tree, wide-eyed and wild-haired, and about to be shot through with Roman arrows because of his Christian faith. (Miraculously, he will survive the arrows, though later, according to The Golden Legend, a medieval encyclopaedia of the lives of the saints, he was clubbed to death.) Aside from a loincloth, the saint is naked, his neck craned toward the heavens, arms bound behind the twisting tree trunk, awaiting the bite of the first arrow. The flip-side (the verso, as opposed to the recto, or front side, of the drawing) contains some optical studies (lines and planes), some sketches of light and shadow (crosshatching), as well as text that appears to be in Leonardo da Vinci’s hand.
“The drawing has been called ‘quite incontestable’. The French government agrees, pronouncing it a ‘national treasure’, a ‘rare item’ and ‘a precious testimony to the genius of Leonardo da Vinci’. Much is in the balance. To find a new Leonardo is to strike the purest vein of artworld gold. But only a few dozen of his works exist worldwide, and one of them sold recently for more than any other artwork in history. Leonardos have become a cultural currency, so to have discovered a once-lost drawing is a position of enormous potential power. If it is authentic, of course. The French seem to think so, but are they right? And how can they be sure?”
Photos: A fox to the left of me, an eagle to the right, here I am, stuck in the middle with death (HT: Richard Starr)
Poem: John Foy, “Fermi’s Paradox”
Get Prufrock in your inbox every weekday morning. Subscribe here.