Reviews and News:
Marjorie Perloff reviews Ben Lerner's The Hatred of Poetry: "His argument is…pure sophistry, cleverly designed to make light of his own uncertainty about the value of the poetry he has composed, and to explain—to himself as to the reader– why he, for one, turned to the novel as a more satisfactory mode of creative expression."
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When pop was literary: "Just as much as synthesizers, hairspray and record sleeves in the Russian abstract style, a major marker of the pop of the early 1980s and late 1970s, particularly British pop, was bookishness. If literary influences weren't always worked subtly, or even meaningfully, into the lyrics of the era, they at least indicated an intellectual curiosity and ambition on the part of their authors, not many of whom, it is worth noting, were university graduates. This habit of advertising in song the contents of one's bookshelves suggested, too, that being widely read might even have a distinct glamour about it. To anyone studying the downloads charts today – where you will search in vain for echoes of the English Renaissance stage or the Penguin Classics backlist – this idea will probably seem quite bizarre."
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A fascinating guide to moths: "The love of moths is apt to baffle the uninitiated. The term 'lepidopterist' perplexes even those with a classical education: it comes from the Greek for 'scaly+wing', which sounds as if we are Magizoologists, studying Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them. But looking closely at moths — which one needs to do to realise their extraordinary beauty — one can see that the powdery coating on their wings, which is so easily damaged by a passing touch, is made up of myriads of minuscule scales. These are pigmented just brown or black: the colours red, blue and yellow are created by the microstructures of each scale, which are natural photonic crystals. Like the shifting colours of an opal, vivid hues are formed by the scattering of light. Some moths are actually iridescent; all, when freshly hatched, have a fragile, silky, shimmering beauty. Fantastic, indeed."
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The rise of canned fish: "Napoleon invented a lot of things: Italy, the concept of a unified Europe and Egyptology. He was also responsible for the canning industry. He offered 12,000 francs to anyone who could devise a method for preserving food for his army to carry on their campaigns. A confectioner called Nicolas Appert came up with the idea of heating comestibles in sealed glass jars 50 years before Pasteur discovered that microbes caused spoilage. The British transferred this idea to metal containers, soldering them shut. Tinned sardines, cheap and rich in omega oil, became a staple, feeding soldiers until the Second World War. In Britain we eat them on toast for tea. In France they are served as an entrée still in the tin, and people buy them according to vintage—four years old is considered the most delectable."
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Michael Dirda reviews African Kaiser—"a sweeping military history that reads like a novel."
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The rise of robolawyers: "Near the end of Shakespeare's Henry VI, Part 2, Dick the Butcher offers a simple plan to create chaos and help his band of outsiders ascend to the throne: 'Let's kill all the lawyers.' Though far from the Bard's most beautiful turn of phrase, it is nonetheless one of his most enduring. All these years later, the law is still America's most hated profession and one of the least trusted, whether you go by scientific studies or informal opinion polls. Thankfully, no one's out there systematically murdering lawyers. But advances in artificial intelligence may diminish their role in the legal system or even, in some cases, replace them altogether."
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Essay of the Day:
In The American Scholar, Helen Hazen writes about a convent in the Andes that has 20,000 books in its library, 3,500 of them printed between 1450 and 1800. It is a reminder of how much physical labor was needed to store knowledge:
"In our digital age of e-readers and same-day delivery, it's worth remembering how much blood and sweat used to go into the distribution of the written word. Consider the journey of a book I've had the rare privilege to examine, a Catholic breviary published in 1697. A call-and-response worship device, bound with wooden boards and covered in tooled leather, it is printed in bold blacks and reds and features lush illustrations throughout. The massive tome measures 18 inches high, 12 inches wide, and six inches thick, and weighs in excess of 22 pounds. Not an easy book to carry around. Yet, not long after its publication, someone did carry it—all the way from its publishing house in Antwerp, down the thousand miles through Europe and the Iberian Peninsula to the city of Seville. There it was loaded onto a boat and transported down the River Guadalquivir to the Atlantic loading port of Sanlúcar, where, along with thousands of other books, it began a month-long journey to the Caribbean Sea. Arriving at one of the islands of the Lesser Antilles, it was offloaded and placed aboard a smaller vessel for transit through pirate-infested waters to the port of Nombre de Dios (later Portobelo), which lay on the Atlantic side of the Isthmus of Panama.
"The next leg of the journey, crossing the Isthmus itself, a mere 30 miles at its narrowest point, was a cursed ordeal. The shorter of the two possible routes took only four days but wended up into the mountains and along the Isthmus's spine on a perilously rugged and narrow path. The longer route, known as the Gorgona Trail, was safer but required two weeks of hard travel down the Atlantic coast to the Chagres River, a muddy mess harboring dangerous reptiles and malarial mosquitoes. Adding to the difficulties of either itinerary was the presence of pirates and fugitive slaves whose livelihood depended on plunder. Both routes led to the city of Panama, on the Pacific side of the Isthmus. From there, the breviary and its companion books were loaded onto galleons for the 1,400-mile voyage down the Pacific coastline to Lima—the City of Kings and, for the legions of Spaniards seeking their fortunes, the major port of arrival in South America.
"Once in Lima, where they often spent some time in the collections of private owners, the books eventually made their way south some 630 miles, probably carried by mules through the mountains, to the southern city of Arequipa. Some of them may also have been shipped down the coast to the port of Islay, then hauled uphill another 70 miles by mule or oxcart to reach the city. In all, the breviary, which I could barely lug from one room to another, and whose precise route to the New World we can, of course, never truly know, traveled about 9,000 miles to reach its destination.
"It resides there still, in the Convent of the Recoleta, perched high above the Chili River in Arequipa. The city was founded in 1540 by the Spanish conquistadors, though found is perhaps the better word. When the armored and sturdily mounted Spaniards first clattered onto the site, they encountered a series of riverside villages set among the Andean foothills. In due course, they created a prominent colonial center of civic buildings, churches, and mansions, all in the heavy stone architecture of Old Spain that nonetheless incorporated an exotic mix of New World décor. Carved depictions of Indian warriors and maidens mingling with cowled European saints bedeck white-stone façades and pillars throughout the city, somewhat to the confusion of modern-day tourists. The days are mostly sun-filled and, at an elevation of 8,000 feet, Arequipa—known in Peru as the White City—shimmers in the clean mountain air.
"The Recoleta, established in 1648, was built as a retreat not for pious women but for the exhausted missionaries who spent harsh decades in the mountains and jungles of Peru pursuing the conversion of new subjects to the Catholic faith. Its bougainvillea-covered stone walls enclose four calm and sheltering courtyards, each featuring thick, green lawns, handsome fountains, and statuary. The building's low-slung structure contains meeting rooms and private cells ideal for recuperation and reflection. As in most Latin American convents, there is also a library. The Recoleta's holds some 20,000 volumes, and I am its librarian."
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Photo: German pipe organs
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Poem: David Yezzi, "The Double Deuce"
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