Reviews and News:
The metaphysics of the hangover: “The hangover has a physical dimension, no doubt about that. You’ve gone and poisoned yourself. But it’s something else as well. The hangover is mourning for the feeling of wholeness that you had the night before. You look back at a time when you attained—or stole—the experience Jean-Paul Sartre calls being in itself.”
* *
Raphael up close: “Although Raphael for much of the last five hundred years has been celebrated as a prince of painters, today he is often dismissed as no more than a kind of chief courtier: supreme in grace and rhetoric, yet mannered and unnatural, even insincere. The current disregard for him arises not just from the stark change of taste in modern art, but also from the severe difficulties in seeing his works as they were meant to appear. Many of his pictures have been over-restored, thereby amplifying their unearthliness; others are products of his large and prolific workshop; and his greatest masterpieces, including the School of Athens and the Transfiguration, are at the Vatican and can only be seen among rushing mobs of tourists. Those sublime paintings are familiar to us primarily from photographs in books, which are wholly inadequate in conveying the pictures’ subtlety, detail, and scale...Raphael seems so abstract and remote, because we have so little direct contact with him. ‘Raphael: The Drawings,’ on view at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, until September 3, provides a rare chance to see up close a wide array of the artist’s works from throughout his life, and the effect is thrilling and revelatory.”
* *
Italy's brutal calcio storico tournament: “A young man lies spread-eagle in the center of a sand-covered arena, blood streaming from a gash above his eye. The guy who opened up this wound is straddled across his chest, pinning him down. All around them, more men are brawling in a terrifying tangle of fists and knees, shoulder charges and thrown elbows. Lending a surreal edge to this scene is the combatants' attire. While some are bare-chested and others wear T-shirts, every one of them is clad in a pair of puffy-legged, brightly striped, 16th-century replica pantaloons. They are playing calcio storico fiorentino — Florentine historical football — or, as many locals here know it, calcio in costume — football in costumes. A distant forerunner to modern sports such as soccer and American football, it most closely resembles a blend between mixed martial arts and rugby.”
* *
James Comey is writing a book.
* *
The real Nadar: “It’s quite a scene to imagine. A maniacal self-publicist with absurd facial hair takes off in what’s thought to be the biggest hot-air balloon the world has ever seen. Adoring crowds gather to watch the launch. He rises rapidly and sails off towards the clouds — but in due course the whole thing goes arse-up and he comes clattering to earth, narrowly escaping with his and his crew’s life. Never mind: the catastrophe is reported around the world and has made him even more famous than he was before. It was a ‘semi-unsuccess’. And within weeks he’s back planning another ascent in another giant balloon. As if to bear out the wise view of Ecclesiastes that there is nothing new under the sun, the year in this case is not 1987 but 1863; and the balloonist is not Richard Branson but Félix Tournachon, known around the world by his nickname Nadar.”
* *
Food at the Tour de France: “While riders, unsurprisingly, want to go into the Tour as lean as possible, once the race begins they can hardly eat enough. They’re estimated to burn 8,000 calories a day in the course of 21 stages of between 101km and 222.5km, including 23 enormous climbs. That’s roughly the equivalent of 32 slices of tarte tatin, 22 croissants, or 11 generous portions of moules frites. Time was, these indulgences were allowed. Though we have no record of anyone putting away such heroic quantities of patisserie in pursuit of a fancy jersey, many of the legends of the Tour tucked into the finest France had to offer. The first race in 1903 set off from a convivial cafe on the outskirts of Paris, and the winner of the second apparently achieved victory on daily rations that included a staggering 11 litres of hot chocolate, 4 litres of tea, and 1.5kg of rice pudding. Bernard Hinault, who won five times in the late 1970s and early 1980s, hydrated with champagne on the last climb of the day, while Belgian Eddy Merckx was free with the cakes on the basis that: ‘It’s not the pastries that hurt, it’s the climbs.’”
* *
Essay of the Day:
Is cultural appropriation ever appropriate? Arthur Krystal says yes in The Los Angeles Review of Books:
“How could I, a Jewish boy born in Sweden and raised in New York, understand the experience of a black slave? Well, I could do what fiction writers usually do and enter imaginatively into his head, just as I would with a white character. If I did a poor job, I’d suffer the same fate as Styron, and I was okay with that. I also accepted the fact that I’d be given less leeway than a black writer. What was more difficult to accept is that I wouldn’t even be allowed to fail.
“Yet why should black writers better imagine Molineaux’s cast of mind? Black people were not merely an oppressed minority in 1810, they were legally considered chattel, supposedly incapable of finer emotions, and thus undeserving of normal human rights. Do you really have to be black to get it? Many ethnic groups, including my own, have at one time or another been enslaved or been the victims of genocide. The truth is, it isn’t bondage that is unimaginable, or suffering, or the evil men do to one another, it’s the absurd ethos that justifies slavery. But while I maintain that it’s no more credible for a black writer to recreate Molineaux’s London than a white one, I also feel compelled to add that I am probably the wrong person to represent the experience of black people closer to my own day.
* * *
“It may not be politic to say it, but politics — whether of the left or the right — should not prevent writers from loosening their imaginations. Unpleasant or not, their choice of subject or approach to it is part of our democratic fabric, and when we discourage writers from writing, we are, in effect, strangling artistic freedom. What’s more, we’re repudiating plain old human sympathy. Empathy exists. It exists because pain, humiliation, suffering, and powerlessness are universal. The particulars may differ, but the sympathetic imagination discerns the common humanity in all inhuman acts.”
* *
Photo: Gospa Od Shkrpjela
* *
Poem: Tim Murphy, “January 25, 2017, an Ode”
Get Prufrock in your inbox every weekday morning. Subscribe here .