Reviews and News:
Philip Roth's Newark: "In March 1969, 19 months after riots had devastated Newark, Philip Roth took to the New York Times with a plea to save the city's library. In a budget-cutting move, the Newark City Council had proposed slashing funding for the library's main branch and the adjoining Newark Museum, two notable landmarks constructed during more prosperous times in the early twentieth century. 'When I was growing up in Newark,' wrote Roth, 'we assumed that books in the public library belonged to the public. Since my family did not own many books, or have the money for a child to buy them, it was good to know that solely by virtue of my municipal citizenship I had access to any book I wanted from that grandly austere building downtown on Washington Street.' Soon after Roth's appeal, city council members found the money to keep the library and museum operating, most likely because they never really intended to shutter two of the city's signature institutions. The threat was likely a way to dramatize Newark's accelerating decline. Nearly five decades later, Newark is described as a failed city, 'a classic example of urban disaster,' 'the worst American city,' and 'America's most violent city.' One of Roth's own characters, Swede Levov, from his 1997 novel American Pastoral, calls Newark a place that once 'manufactured everything' but turned into 'the car theft capital of the world.' Still, Roth, who left Newark in 1951 for college and a writing career that includes a novel titled Letting Go, has been unable to let go of the city. Last October, he announced that he was bequeathing his collection of 4,000 books to the Newark Library—recognition of the role that Newark played not only in his life but also in his work."
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Julius Caesar in Gaul: "Some of the most colourful passages of Greek and Latin literature describe the people of Gaul. There are haughty, bellicose Gauls, drunk Gauls, Gauls who sleep on straw like animals, Gauls who make severed heads into necklaces for horses or store them in cedar oil to bring out on special days. And then, 'living beyond the deep sea and quite cut off from the world', are the huge and 'terrifying' Britons. All in all, a horrible bunch. One of the effects of the Gallic War, which Julius Caesar waged between 58 and 51 BC, was to draw what Bijan Omrani calls 'an impenetrable veil over centuries of indigenous Gallic culture'. The campaign, which Caesar initially undertook to pay off his debts and outshine his political rivals, helped the Romans to rewrite Gallic history. Conquered tribes left little trace of their former ways of life. Caesar, meanwhile, left his extensive Commentaries on the Gallic War. The text is Omrani's guide as he travels across France, Belgium and Switzerland in search of the conflict it describes – and the history it doesn't."
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A history of heart surgery: "In 1628 William Harvey, the king's physician, published De motu cordis, proving that the heart was not the seat of the soul, but a pump. 'The animal's heart is the basis of its life, its chief member, the sun of its microcosm,' he wrote in the book's dedication; 'on the heart all its activity depends, from the heart all its liveliness and strength arise.; Harvey was a skilled and dauntless anatomist (he dissected his own sister and father)..."
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The hope of the War Poets? "At first glance, Death Comes for the War Poets sounds like the last thing one needs more of these days. Death and war. Amsterdam. London Bridge. Is falling down to terrorism our new reality? It's part of the reason Donald Trump is president. People have had enough. I stood a few yards from the vice president of the United States this week as he talked about the genocide of Christians as targets of the so-called Islamic State. The culture-wide feeling is that nowhere is safe. The fatigue with the violence is real and overwhelming. And yet, at the Sheen Center in Manhattan, Death Comes for the War Poets is being performed as a 'verse tapestry' exactly right for our times. Writer Joseph Pearce is determined to present people with hope."
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The persistence of prog rock: "The genre's bad reputation has been remarkably durable, even though its musical legacy keeps growing. Twenty years ago, Radiohead released OK Computer, a landmark album that was profoundly prog: grand and dystopian, with a lead single that was more than six minutes long. But when a reporter asked one of the members whether Radiohead had been influenced by Genesis and Pink Floyd, the answer was swift and categorical: 'No. We all hate progressive rock music.' It is common to read about some band that worked in obscurity, only to be discovered decades later. In the case of progressive rock, the sequence has unfolded in reverse: these bands were once celebrated, and then people began to reconsider. The collapse of prog helped reaffirm the dominant narrative of rock and roll: that pretension was the enemy; that virtuosity could be an impediment to honest self-expression; that 'self-taught' was generally preferable to 'classically trained.' In the past twenty years, though, a number of critics and historians have argued that prog rock was more interesting and more thoughtful than the caricature would suggest,"
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Tocqueville unplugged: "Tocqueville told his family and friends that these writings should not be published in his lifetime. It does not take long for readers to understand why. They contain uninhibited and at times brutally candid sketches of some of the most important actors in French politics of the period. These portraits have been enhanced by the editor's inclusion of often hilarious illustrations of some of these individuals by the incomparable caricaturist and painter, Honoré Daumier."
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Essay of the Day:
In The New York Times, Daniel Duane gives a riveting account of the first free-solo climb of the 3,000-foot El Capitan:
"Alex Honnold woke up in his Dodge van last Saturday morning, drove into Yosemite Valley ahead of the soul-destroying traffic and walked up to the sheer, smooth and stupendously massive 3,000-foot golden escarpment known as El Capitan, the most important cliff on earth for rock climbers. Honnold then laced up his climbing shoes, dusted his meaty fingers with chalk and, over the next four hours, did something nobody had ever done. He climbed El Capitan without ropes, alone.
"The world's finest climbers have long mused about the possibility of a ropeless 'free solo' ascent of El Capitan in much the same spirit that science fiction buffs muse about faster-than-light-speed travel — as a daydream safely beyond human possibility. Tommy Caldwell, arguably the greatest all-around rock climber alive, told me that the conversation only drifted into half-seriousness once Honnold came along, and that Honnold's successful climb was easily the most significant event in the sport in all of Caldwell's 38 years. I believe that it should also be celebrated as one of the great athletic feats of any kind, ever.
"Like all mature athletic endeavors, climbing has sub-disciplines that call for different genetic gifts and venerate different accomplishments. Alpine climbing demands perverse cardiovascular endurance coupled to a lust for suffering, while its devotees have trouble getting lathered up over anything that doesn't involve a delicious risk of death by avalanche or freezing. Indoor-gym climbing rewards one-finger pull-ups fired by a deeply spiritual connection to textured polyurethane, plus emotional tolerance for the sight of shirtless young men with complicated mustaches spidering up fiberglass overhangs.
"Fear of falling is about as primal a fear as we humans have, and that fear is present to some degree whether you are 10 feet off the ground or 3,000. In this sense, Honnold's specialty — free-soloing — is a distillation of the entire climbing world's collective fantasy life. Vanishingly few elite climbers make careers out of free-soloing, and plenty call it irresponsible and deplorable, but in their heart of hearts they all recognize it as the final word in bad-assery."
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Photos: Valence
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Poem: Abraham Sutzkever, "Toys"
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