Yes, the American Civil War and Reconstruction were about race, but they were also about what kind of government should rule America— republican or oligarchic.
The nightmarish logic of Bruno Schulz: “Two slim volumes and some correspondence: that’s all that the secondary-school art teacher from Drohobycz left us as literary output. Before Bruno Schulz’s murder in 1942 by Nazi officer Karl Günther, he was rumored to have been working on a novel, The Messiah, which, appropriately, has never reached us. There are also his enigmatic drawings and oil paintings depicting figures and landscapes that appear refracted through warped amber, undulating in a non-Euclidean spacetime. Seeing these in person at an exhibition at the Museum of Jewish Art and History in Paris in 2004 was a revelation, but for me they have always supplemented Schulz’s fiction, the sketches a wooden undergrowth upon which the lush foliage of his stories unfurled.”
Christine Smallwood revisits John Updike’s Couples. It has not aged well, she argues: “By the time Couples came out, John Updike had already published four novels, three story collections, two poetry collections, and a volume of assorted prose. He had been called, by the New York Times Book Review, ‘the most significant young novelist in America,’ and had been sent by the State Department on a tour of the Communist bloc. And yet there was a growing sense that he had not made a major statement on the issues of the day. He could describe a barn well enough, but to what end? The man whose name will be forever asterisked with the insult David Foster Wallace made famous—‘just a penis with a thesaurus’—was thought to be clever but a little small, too decorative, and overly fond of childhood reminiscence. Norman Podhoretz complained that Updike ‘has very little to say.’ John Aldridge put him in ‘the second or just possibly the third rank of serious American novelists.’ Elizabeth Hardwick admired Rabbit, Run, but thought there was ‘something insignificant, or understated, or too dimly felt in the heart of Rabbit himself.’ As for his sexual frankness, Updike, like his contemporaries, had ‘not decided or discovered in what way this frankness will change the work itself. It cannot be merely interlarded like suet in the roast.’ With Couples, Updike served up a whole plate of suet.”
Adam Ford—founder of the Christian satirical site Babylon Bee—writes about the dangers of relying on Facebook to reach readers: “Facebook and Google are extremely liberal and they have massive control over what information reaches billions of people every day. Facebook the company is structured so Mark Zuckerberg—liberal Silicon Valley billionaire—has nearly complete control. Google the company is structured so Larry Page and Sergey Brin—liberal Silicon Valley billionaires—have nearly complete control. These are not co-ops. Facebook has hooked the world onto their service and now controls what information we see as we mindlessly scroll through our feeds all day. Google has a monopoly on search and controls what information we see when we ask any questions about anything. Almost everybody knows this, but it isn’t until somebody starts talking about it that people consider the implications. We like to lull ourselves to sleep with the notion that Facebook and Google are controlled by some mindless, unbiased algorithm that would never do us wrong. But algorithms are programmed by people, and people have biases.”
Claude Monet’s cinematic eye: “Claude Monet once wished he had been born blind so that, when his sight was restored, he could see everything with a completely new vision. To achieve this, he painted 30 versions of Rouen Cathedral that reveal the cinematic aspect of his art. Five pictures from this vivid series appear in the current Monet & Architecture exhibition at the National Gallery until July 29. Monet raced back and forth between these canvases, painting a whole sequence simultaneously, just as a silent film director rushed from scene to scene. His paintings were motion pictures. Monet’s eye was the camera, the cathedral his image, the paint his unexposed film, the canvas his screen.”
Chad Post reviews Sergio de la Pava’s Lost Empress: “One of the most ambitious, audacious books of recent memory, Lost Empress by Sergio de la Pava brings together a smorgasbord of plot lines and scenes ranging from the serious to the comic, including: a clash between the NFL and the Indoor Football League, the history of Joni Mitchell’s career, the heist of a lost Picasso, a court case involving a high-profile murder and an incredibly intelligent inmate, the Mandela Effect, the life of a 911 operator, the origins of a brain tumor, quantum mechanics and the mind-body divide as it relates to time and consciousness, an accidental impaling and the said consequences of such as relates to the nature of getting revenge, multiple love stories that go unfulfilled, and a fight between a pig mascot and a crab one.”
Essay of the Day:
In The New Atlantis, Natalie Elliot takes a closer look at the science in Shakespeare:
“Until relatively recently, Shakespeare’s contact with the scientific world has gone largely unnoticed both among scholars and general audiences. Perhaps Shakespeare scholars and audiences don’t notice the way he takes up science because they are unfamiliar with much of the science he was exposed to, while most scientists don’t see Shakespeare as valuable for reflecting on science because they assume he was unfamiliar with it. Usually, even when readers are made aware of Shakespeare’s references to this or that scientific subject — perhaps Hamlet’s reference to infinity or Lear’s allusions to atomism — these are treated as little more than interesting artifacts, window-dressing to Shakespeare’s broader human concerns.
“A small but growing number of scholars are now taking up the connection between Shakespeare and science. And, spurred perhaps by science fiction, by the ways that science factors in the works of key late-modern writers such as Nabokov, Pynchon, and Wallace, and by the rise of scientific themes in contemporary literary fiction, a growing number of readers are aware that writers can and do take up science, and many are interested in what they do with it.”
Photo: Sun pillar over Norway
Poem: Nicholas Friedman, “Distraction Display”
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