Reviews and News:
“One of the world’s most confounding literary mysteries may finally be, in part, solved: the author of the mysterious and as-yet untranslatable Voynich manuscript has been identified as a Jewish physician based in northern Italy, an expert in medieval manuscripts has claimed.”
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Edward Albee has requested in his will that all his unfinished manuscripts be destroyed. Will his executors honor his request?
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Ezra Pound’s asylum years: “As Daniel Swift puts it in The Bughouse, his lively and searching account of Pound’s years at St Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, DC, from 1946 to 1958, it was ‘the world’s least orthodox literary salon: convened by a fascist, held in a lunatic asylum’. Though there has been much hand-wringing over the years by Pound’s acolytes about the incarceration, it proved to be in many ways a perfect environment for the garrulous poet. His visitors ranged from illustrious old friends, such as T. S. Eliot, Marianne Moore and William Carlos Williams, to eager younger poets, such as Robert Lowell and Allen Ginsberg, to less savoury members of the real lunatic fringe, among them the violent white supremacist John Kasper, whose neo-Nazi views ‘Uncle Ez’ warmly supported and encouraged. To the end Pound remained an anti-Semite, but now he added black Americans and civil rights protesters to his roster of well-nurtured hatreds. Best of all for Pound, however, was the opportunity to lecture and harangue his seemingly endless procession of admirers, whether on his crack-brained economic and political theories or on matters literary and aesthetic.”
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Why do smells trigger memories?
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Rowan Williams on the Mabinogi tales: “The stories move bewilderingly from realistic, even humorous, evocations of life in the small Welsh courts of the Middle Ages to moments of bizarre and extreme violence; they contain intense lyrical and elegiac emotion and incomprehensible survivals of what seems to be pre-Christian, pre-Roman mythical themes. The names of many of the leading figures tantalisingly echo names given to the gods in Irish and even Gallic paganism. These stories are an archaeological site in themselves, a many-layered mound of tradition, in the depths of which lie some of the most basic imaginative tools of Indo-European religion and storytelling.”
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In defense of Toscanini: “For generations, the Italian maestro was the most electrifying figure in classical music. Why did critics turn against him?”
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Essay of the Day:
In the Los Angeles Review of Books, Alexander Landfair revisits the momentary success of The Human Slaughter-House. Translated and published in the United States in 1913, it was praised as “one of the most remarkable and powerful indictments of war ever written.” But the book isn’t against war as much as it is against technology:
“The book was so quickly forgotten for the same reason that it gained such immediate fame. Books that rest on opposition to specific technologies have short shelf lives, growing obsolescent with the technologies they oppose. They age poorly almost by definition. We now live in a golden age of technophobic literature, most of it bound to be terribly embarrassing in 20 years time, or even sooner than that.
“The problem with The Human Slaughter-House, then, is one of genre. Its central argument now seems quaint. If it had been the pacifist book it was believed to be, it may have enjoyed a place next to Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage and Émile Zola’s The Downfall, books it had once been compared to favorably. Though Luddism is as evergreen a theme as pacifism, it lacks continuity from generation to generation. The irony of Luddism — and the secret of its longevity — is that its ideal moment may be any time and always, but its manifestations expire as its particular targets obsolesce. We agree on nothing, really, when we agree with James Thurber that “progress is alright, only it went on too long.”
“Perhaps this is why technophobia has proved so ineffective as a movement — even less effective than pacifism. Luddism is a religion in which paradise exists not far in the future but in the present, which immediately slips away. In fact, it is striking that Lamszus’s soldier identified with the Luddites who came before him, when the usual Ludditic impulse is to distinguish our technophobic impulses from those of our forebears.
“The story of the world’s brief love affair with The Human Slaughter-House is the story of technophobic literature in general. If the book is still relevant, and I think it is, it’s as the biggest, earliest success of the modern Luddite genre, even if it wasn’t recognized as such in its time. One hundred years after The Human Slaughter-House, our shelves creak beneath breathless technophobic titles like Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology; Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other; The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains; and You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto. In this context, it’s worth revisiting The Human Slaughter-House, perhaps the genre’s first real success, in order to restore a sense of continuity to the battle against progress, which is as old as progress itself.”
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Photo:
Sunset
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Poem: Charles Baudelaire, “The Former Life.” Translated by Emily Leithauser
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