Why is nineteenth-century utopian literature so bad? For the same reason, James Bowman writes, that all utopian literature is bad: “The task of utopian literature has always been to provide an excuse or a pretext for people to believe in what would otherwise be unbelievable, but such pretexts tend to wear out rather quickly—as more recent ones, mostly based as they are on swiftly obsolete technologies, should warn us. This stuff dates, in other words, and if we look back to the utopian literature of the 19th century, it takes a very special kind of naïveté to find anything remotely believable about it.”
The writer Alan Garner remembers his childhood near Alderley Edge, where his family has lived for 400 years: “Artefacts and people of a bygone England abound: Garner writes of rag rugs, outdoor toilets and new clogs whose wooden soles are greased ‘with lard between the irons to stop the snow from bawking up and twisting my ankles’. Passing gypsies sell carpets, clothes-pegs cut from willow branches and skinned rabbits with their paws left on to show they aren’t cats, and are invited into the garden for cups of tea. Evacuees from London also inhabit the village, while a spinster neighbour lives with scores of cats and cadges offal and scraps from the butchers — ‘the stink wrapped round her and stayed after, as she shuffled along’. This is a gentle book, delivered like the fireside recollections of a grandparent to a child, and it’s hard not to forgive a writer in their mid-eighties for occasionally succumbing to the wistful sense of nostalgia that permeates here, especially as Garner has always been a writer out of step anyway, his prose prone to punching through into new dimensions, via narratives measured by millennia and centuries rather than minutes and seconds. His message isn’t that life was better then, merely different.”
What did ancient Greek music sound like? Find out.
Trevor C. Merrill reviews Joshua Hren’s collection of short stories, This Our Exile. It is “an extended meditation on, and demonstration of, how the ‘action of grace changes a character,’ as Flannery O’Connor put it in a 1958 letter.”
Jerry Alter, a retired musician and teacher, died in 2012. His wife followed in 2017. A stolen Willem de Kooning painting worth $160 million was discovered in their home in Cliff, New Mexico. Did they steal it?
The grim and charming Christopher Robin: “What a strange movie Christopher Robin is. On the one hand, it's a rather straightforward family-friendly fantasy film, one that picks up a few decades after the Winnie the Pooh books and movies were set, one that's filled with talking stuffed animals and whimsy and life lessons about the need to enjoy our precious little time on this spinning blue rock. On the other, it's a borderline horror movie, a gutwrenching examination of a man at the end of his rope who reverts to childlike innocence in order to escape the realities of modernity and the family life he loves yet cannot fully experience due to professional obligations.”
Henry James, failed playwright.
A history of Rome in seven sackings, beginning in 387 B.C., “with the Gauls poised just north of the city,” and ending in 1944, when American troops entered the city “from the south to expel the Nazis.”
Alberto Manguel on how to acquire a 35,000-book personal library: “Step one? Don't lend books. ‘I never lend a book. To lend a book is to tempt the reader with theft. Books are seldom returned,’ Manguel says. ‘If I want somebody to read a book I would buy the book for that person and give it to that person. I believe in Polonius's advice to his son — I've got [Shakespeare’s Hamlet] in my library: ‘Neither borrower nor lender be.’ Step two: follow your nose. Manguel says his collection reflects his ‘cornucopia of interests.’” You should probably also make lots of money. It can be expensive to follow your “cornucopia of interests.”
Essay of the Day:
What was it like to be the first daughter of Steve Jobs—the one he initially denied was his own? Not great:
“For a long time I hoped that if I played one role, my father would take the corresponding role. I would be the beloved daughter; he would be the indulgent father. I decided that if I acted like other daughters did, he would join in the lark. We’d pretend together, and in pretending we’d make it real. If I had observed him as he was, or admitted to myself what I saw, I would have known that he would not do this, and that a game of pretend would disgust him.
“Later that year, I would stay overnight at my father’s house on several Wednesdays while my mother took college classes in San Francisco. On those nights, we ate dinner, took a hot tub outside, and watched old movies. During the car rides to his house, he didn’t talk.
“‘Can I have it when you’re done?’ I asked him one night, as we took a left at the leaning, crumbling white pillars that flanked the thin, bumpy road ending at his gate. I’d been thinking about it for a while but had only just built up the courage to ask. ‘Can you have what?’ he said. ‘This car. Your Porsche.’ I wondered where he put the extras. I pictured them in a shiny black line at the back of his land.
“‘Absolutely not,’ he said in such a sour, biting way that I knew I’d made a mistake. I understood that perhaps it wasn’t true, the myth of the scratch: maybe he didn’t buy new ones. By that time I knew he was not generous with money, or food, or words; the idea of the Porsches had seemed like one glorious exception.
“I wished I could take it back. We pulled up to the house and he turned off the engine. Before I made a move to get out he turned to face me. ‘You’re not getting anything,’ he said. ‘You understand? Nothing. You’re getting nothing.’ Did he mean about the car, something else, bigger? I didn’t know. His voice hurt—sharp, in my chest.”
Photo: Yellowstone
Poem: Tristan Corbiére, “Epitaph” (Translated by Ryan Wilson)
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