Reviews and News:
" Democrats have always prided themselves on being a voice of political sanity. So why has Trump's election turned the left into a breeding ground for conspiracy theories?"
* *
"Without Goethe, one might say, the great tradition of high culture that characterises modern Germany would never have begun; without Goethe, the archetypes of the national imagination – the raging Werther, the ageing Faust – would never have come into being. How could one man accomplish so much?" He eschewed specialization and pursued excellence.
* *
Chinese poets hate poems written by a robot: "It disgusted me with its slippery tone and rhythm."
* *
Make classical statuary colorful again.
* *
Mary Beard on voting in the ancient world: "In both Athens and Sparta, the male citizen body was relatively small (in Athens, fewer than 40,000 and many of those certainly not showing up regularly; perhaps a quarter as many in Sparta). In Athens they all came together and voted by a show of hands; in Sparta they did it by shouting (loudest won — which the Athenians thought very weird)...But the Romans never seem to have devised any system of local voting, so everyone who wanted to participate had to come to the city itself (most of them would not usually have done so). And they never seem to have hit on the idea of the groups voting simultaneously. Instead each group voted sequentially, one after the other, so that it could take more than a single day to deliver the vote, and an awful lot of hanging around for the average voter."
* *
Maureen Mullarkey on the limits of a history of the cross in Christian art: "The most significant 20th-century controversy over a cross, however, was not local clamor over Piss Christ. It was the virulent polemics, reaching to the Vatican, over Germaine Richier's bronze Crucifix, cast for the altar of the Church of Notre-Dame de Toute Grâce at Assy. It is reasonable to expect mention of it, given its prominence within the scope of Jensen's subject. Yet it is missing. The church of Assy was a renowned mid-century experiment by the Dominican-led Sacred Art Movement, based in France, to reconcile religious imagination with modern art. Richier's crucifix, a hallucinatory scream of pain, prompted Pope Pius XII's 1950 exhortation Menti nostrae, which took aim at 'works which astonishingly deform art and yet pretend to be Christian.' The Dominicans were pressured to remove the crucifix from the altar. Calls were made for an Index of modern art. Journalists around the world covered the disputes."
* *
Essay of the Day:
In The New Criterion, Andrew Stuttaford revisits one of the strangest movements of the twentieth century— the cult of Kibbo Kift:
"The English countryside in the mid-1920s, near Stonehenge perhaps, somewhere, ideally, with the afterglow of ancient strangeness about it: the first harbinger of the Kibbo Kift is the sound of distant music, the strumming of a lute, the singing of what White Fox, Kibbo Kift's 'Head Man,' John Hargrave, a compulsive manufacturer of hopefully evocative compound nouns, dubbed a waysong: 'If you love the camp life, / Open air and sun, / Just fall in behind us ere the long trek's done. / Swing along together, let your step be free / Hey ho! Hey ho! Kibbo Kift are we.'
"A group of young people come into view, hiking in wedge formations—dubbed 'woks' by the Kibbo Kift, their lexicon an invented echo of Heorot.
"To the Daily Sketch, struggling to summarize one of Britain's more bewildering new movements, the practical, Utopian, playful, and earnest Kibbo Kift was a 'camping fraternity' combining 'the ideals of scientists and Red Indians.' Well, sort of/not really, but that'll do for now.
"If the woks aren't singing, they may be walking in what Hargrave described in The Confession of The Kibbo Kift (1927) as 'perfect silence' except, perhaps, for an 'outcry of joy for the furze bush that bursts into a sunlit blaze.'
"The men are wearing shorts, knee socks, stout shoes, and hooded jerkins. The women sport similarly sturdy footwear, simple one-piece dresses, leather belts, and, in the early days of the Kibbo Kift, wimples, later replaced by suede headdresses, with, explained Hargrave, 'something of the Valkyrie' in their 'helmet-like design.' A 'cope and cowl' (a hooded cloak) could be worn on those English days with little in the way of sunlit blaze. This clothing, which came in browns, grays, and greens, had, said Hargrave, something of the Middle Ages about it: it was 'suitable for the journeyman-craftsman, the pilgrim, and the camper,' if less so for the Roaring Twenties.
"Some marchers are carrying staves crowned with hand-carved totems: an eagle, a wolf, and, in one case, a plaster cast of Piltdown Man's skull, one of the 'Dawn Men' from whom much, they believed, could be learned (the Kibbo Kift was not the first sect to be taken in by bogus bones). These totems were often finely crafted, renderings of an idealized primitive seen through an unmistakably deco lens. A year or so ago a few of them—along with other offbeat, sometimes strikingly beautiful Kibbo Kift artifacts, banners, vestments, even the 'Bok Scamel' (to you and me, a lectern)—could be viewed at an intriguing exhibition at London's Whitechapel Gallery."
* *
Photos: Symmetrical libraries
* *
Poem: Marly Youmans, "The Wrexham Coverlet"
Get Prufrock in your inbox every weekday morning. Subscribe here.