Reviews and News:
What Philip Larkin’s personal objects tell us about the poet: He was obsessed with his appearance, owned a Hitler figurine, and thought of Monica Jones as an editor more than muse. “Larkin would weigh himself twice a day on two different sets of weighing scales, and the exhibition displays quotes revealing the depth of his self-loathing. Farthing said it was one of the biggest revelations in her research. ‘People presume that men don’t care about their body image and it’s a side of Larkin’s character that has been neglected.’”
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“One October night in 2004, Curtis Dawkins smoked crack, dressed up for Halloween in a gangster costume and terrorized a household, killing one man and taking another hostage in a rampage that drew 24 patrol officers and a six-member SWAT team. He is serving a life sentence without parole in Michigan. On Tuesday, he will also be a published author when his debut story collection is released by Scribner, a literary imprint at one of the country’s top publishing houses. The unlikely story of how Mr. Dawkins, a recovering addict and confessed killer, landed a major book deal is a strange inversion of the usual prison-writing trajectory.”
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A history of souvenirs: “The souvenir is a relatively recent concept. The word only began to refer to an ‘object, rather than a notion’ in the late eighteenth century. Of course, the practice of carrying a small token away from an important location is ancient. In Europe, souvenirs evolved from religious relics. Pilgrims in the late Roman and Byzantine eras removed stones, dirt, water, and other organic materials from pilgrimage sites, believing that ‘the sanctity of holy people, holy objects and holy places was, in some manner, transferable through physical contact.’ We might call this logic synecdochic: the sacred power of the holy site is thought to remain immanent in pieces of it, chips from a temple or vials of water from a well. As leisure travel became more common, souvenir commodities evolved from relics.”
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Highland retreats: “Let Wordsworth spout about Lake District daffodils; here was Romanticism reduced to its rugged core in a way that could be found nowhere else in Britain. The appeal was infectious. During the 19th century, more and more Brits went north for a holiday in the heather. Often they built modest houses for themselves. But the floodgates opened in 1852 when Queen Victoria purchased a ‘retreat’ at Balmoral (remarkably, she could afford it only because an eccentric miser had bequeathed her £500,000 in his will). Her notion of Scottishness comprised a flurry of tartan (kilts, carpets, curtains and upholstery), a skirl of bagpipes at every meal and, in the evening, a parade of reels. Purists sneered and called it ‘Balmorality’. Nevertheless, it became a social requisite for her wealthy and status-hungry subjects to follow suit.”
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The vanishing world of the Transylvanian aristocracy: “On one night, the entire aristocracy, titled and untitled, was awoken by hordes of armed men led by the militia and the Securitate (the Romanian secret police), loaded onto trucks—babes, grandmothers and all—and driven far away to new ‘homes,’ with their identity papers stamped with “DO,” meaning Domiciliu Obligatoriu—obligatory place of residence. It was soon recognized as a dramatic change, a permanent stamp not only on paper but on the souls of the Transylvanian aristocracy. Their lives changed radically. It was more than ‘moving from a castle to a cellar,’ as one of his interviewees puts it. They were dispossessed of everything: lands and properties, jewelry, gold, art collected over generations, even photos and personal items—treasured mementos of the past. Those who didn’t end up with long and heavy prison sentences, those who weren’t executed on made-up charges, were sent to work on the construction of the Danube–Black Sea Canal—the equivalent of slave labor.”
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Why Hollywood stopped making John Grisham movies: “Studios would rather spend the big money on Superman or Spider Man 5 or whatever.’
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Warner Bros. and the Tolkien estate settle lawsuit over online gambling.
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The myth of the apolitical Montaigne.
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Essay of the Day:
“In the early days of ranching in the West, few laws existed, and those that did were hard to enforce.” Now, Tay Wiles writes, we have “cow cops”:
“On a July morning in 2014, a third-generation cattleman named Mitch Heguy was driving his truck along Susie Creek in Elko County, Nevada, when he saw something peculiar. It was one of his neighbor Jon Griggs’ cows, standing there with an odd-looking, circular wound on her shoulder, several inches in diameter, with its blood crusted over her dark hide. Heguy wondered if it was a particularly horrible rattlesnake bite, or if the heifer had stuck herself with a tree branch, which cattle can do on a bad day. But as the rancher looked closer, squinting in the sun, he decided it had to be the result of something more intentional, nefarious even. It was a bullet wound. He called Griggs. ‘I think someone shot one of your cows,’ he said.
“The dazed heifer meandered back into the hundreds of thousands of acres of sagebrush and juniper of the Maggie Creek Ranch, a checkerboard of Bureau of Land Management and private land. She wasn’t seen again for six weeks, when Griggs gathered his herd for sale at season’s end. By then, the wound was partly healed.
“As Heguy and his wife, Rhonda, remember it, that cow, worth at least $2,000, was the first such victim found near their property, though they had heard of livestock being shot elsewhere over the past couple of years. The Nevada Cattlemen’s Association eventually reported 25 wounded or dead cows that year, in addition to at least 35 more since 2012 — though it wasn’t clear how many had been shot with guns.
“Through the summer, Jon Griggs and the Heguys counted about 30 cows wounded between their two herds. By August they were ready to call the cops. The people who respond to these kinds of incidents across the state comprise a six-person team called the Agriculture Enforcement Unit within the Nevada Department of Agriculture. They are well known to ranchers, but unknown to most other people. Each member of the team has a background in ranching and is a graduate of law enforcement academy. They carry handguns and a handy book of livestock brands; their patrol vehicles are equipped with police sirens but also veterinarian supplies. They call themselves jokingly, but accurately, cow cops. And those were the cops the ranchers called.”
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Photo: Balloons over Burma
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Poem: Paul Muldoon, “Cuttlebone”
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