Editor's note: There will be no Prufrock tomorrow or Friday.
Reviews and News:
Philip Roth on his love of American names: "It was precisely in the sounding of the names of the country's distant places, in its spaciousness, in the dialects and the landscapes that were at once so American yet so unlike my own that a youngster with my susceptibilities found the most potent lyrical appeal. That was the heart of the fascination: as an American, one was a wisecracking, slang-speaking, in-the-know street kid of an unknowable colossus. Only locally could I be a savvy cosmopolite; out in the vastness of the country, adrift and at large, every American was a hick, with the undisguisable emotions of a hick, as defenseless as even a sophisticated littérateur like Benét was against the pleasurable sort of sentiment aroused by the mere mention of Spartanburg, Santa Cruz, or the Nantucket Light, as well as unassuming Skunktown Plain, or Lost Mule Flat, or the titillating named Little French Lick. There was the shaping paradox: our innate provincialism made us Americans, unhyphenated at that, in no need of an adjective, suspicious of any adjective that would narrow the implications of the imposingly all-inclusive noun that was—if only because of the galvanizing magnum opus called the Second World War—our birthright."
* *
Queen Victoria's food: "Breakfast was a hearty meal, often featuring lamb chops. For dinner Victoria ate rich French food, and her menus were always written in French. No plain Mrs Beeton-style cooking for the queen. Dinner began with a choice of soups. One of these was a deceptively simple pale consommé, which involving a complex, labour-intensive process of clarifying veal stock with a paste of crushed eggshell and minced breastmeat."
* *
What do dental records tell us about the advantages and disadvantages of living in cities? "A specialist in dental and osteopathic forensics based at the Natural History Museum in London, Hassett lays out the available bio-archaeological evidence about
the dwellers in early cities. She sneers at the false sentimentality of those who praise the nomadic life and urge on us a paleo-diet that hunters and gatherers might have eaten. At the same time, she shows that early urban life was not always beneficial. Cities produced enormous gains in economics and civilizational arts, but those cities also weakened us. City dwellers tended to be shorter and less robust than their nomadic cousins. They were also much more disease ridden and even more often killed violently by other human beings. As a race, humanity advanced enormously by means of the city. As individuals, however, we often suffered from urban life."
* *
Matisse's objects: "'I am afraid,' he admitted to his son Pierre in 1940, 'of getting down to work tête-à-tête with objects that I myself have to animate with feelings.'"
* *
Mike Tyson on the man who made him a champion.
* *
Rare books are thriving in the digital age. Why?
* *
Essay of the Day:
In First Things, Eugene Vodolazkin—author of the novel Laurus—takes stock of the relationship between Russia and the United States. There may be economic and political reasons for the growing distance between the two countries, but there are metaphysical ones, too:
"The relationship between Russia and the West at this time could be compared to a love story. At the beginning of the post-Soviet period, Russia was like a girl without a dowry who stood ready to marry the rich West on any terms. Though some might say this romantic abandon was little more than a crude desire to sell herself, it was in fact true love. Genuine though it was, her love turned out to be unrequited, and the girl was unceremoniously shown the door. The plot then developed, just as it should in a good story, in the direction of a radical transformation of the protagonists.
"In the last quarter century Russia has passed from chaotic permissiveness—'That's your problem'—to a tightly structured and harshly directed state based on the principle of traditionality, which is to say a self-conscious program of restoring tradition, not the organic perpetuation of an already traditional society. Sometimes this state has been out of kilter, as any growing organism is apt to be. Meanwhile an important part of the West,
the European Union, has pushed forward to realize ideals of liberal universalism, although it is beginning to feel the ground shifting beneath it. The USA has also experienced great changes, as witnessed by the recent presidential campaign and its result. I will leave it to my friends in the E.U. and America to characterize those changes, but this I can say with confidence: All talk of a possible wedding has permanently ceased. The West in its contemporary form no longer suits Russia. This is that rare instance when the feelings of the West and Russia toward each other are mutual.
"The contrast between Russia and the U.S. has reached a point that it did not seem to have attained even in Soviet times. The propaganda war waged by each side has taken on a form unprecedented in its harshness. At times, one fears that rashly pronounced words could turn into bullets. And all this is taking place with Russia no longer a communist country in ideological conflict with the West. An absurd situation? Yes, but only if one takes into account nothing other than economic and political factors. If one believes metaphysics is one of the movers of history, the situation is less surprising."
* *
Photo: Matterhorn
* *
Poem: Amit Majmudar, "The Neurology of Love"
Get Prufrock in your inbox every weekday morning. Subscribe here.