A Lecture in DC and Other Upcoming Events
Plus, a new book on direction, raunch culture, a new kind of literary reading, Van Gogh’s roots, and more.
I will be giving a short talk on understatement for the DC Arts Center’s inaugural “Poetry Series” this Sunday at 3pm. But the real draw is that both David Yezzi and Morri Creech will be reading from their work. I would love to meet any Prufrock subscribers who live in the area, so if you’re free this Sunday and live in greater DC, why not come out?
I will also be in New York next week and will attend the Liberties Journal event at the 92nd Street Y on “Politics and the Literary Magazine” on Tuesday. If you’re in New York and plan on attending this, let me know so we can connect.
Finally, I will be going to ISI’s Western Civilization gala on May 2nd. Dana Gioia will be the keynote, and the event will also honor the painter, Jamie Wyeth. As above, if you plan on attending and would like to meet, do let me know.
In the latest issue of The London Review of Books, James Vincent reviews a new book on the history of direction:
The Gospel of Matthew tells the faithful they should look to the east for the second coming: ‘For as the lightning cometh out of the east, and shineth even unto the west; so shall also the coming of the Son of Man be.’ Such symbology combines the geographic and the temporal: the daily journey of the Sun is taken to mimic not only the brief span of human lives but the grand Christian timeline of judgment and redemption, the clock that goes round just once.
This cardinal preference came to be enshrined in architecture. Early Christian churches were built so that the altar, congregation and priest faced ad orientem (literally, towards sunrise), a decision that was eventually a focus of theological controversy. During the Reformation, the Church of England placed altars in the north of the church or had the priest stand at the north end of the communion table instead of facing east. In the 19th century, the Oxford Movement began to worship ad orientem once more as part of a broader effort to reclaim the Catholic heritage of Anglicanism. The issue even reached Parliament, Brotton notes, when ad orientem services were banned by the Public Worship Regulation Act of 1874 along with other elements derided as ‘ritualism’. (The Act was repealed in 1965.) Islam also sought to distinguish itself from Sun worship by establishing the qibla: the direction in which Muslims must pray, codified in 623 CE as the location of the Kaaba in Mecca. But for Catholics the opportunity to unite faith and cosmology is too powerful. As Pope Benedict XVI wrote in 2000, ‘praying towards the east is a tradition that goes back to the beginning. Moreover, it is a fundamental expression of the Christian synthesis of cosmos and history.’
The devotional power of the rising Sun made east the prime direction for early mapmakers, and it remained so into the medieval period. The most significant maps of this era were mappae mundi like the Ebstorf Map (destroyed by Allied bombing during the Second World War), the Sawley map (the oldest surviving example made in England) and the Hereford Mappa Mundi (drafted around 1300 CE). These maps were more religious than topographical, surveying not only space but time. They are oriented with east at the top, marked as the location of the Garden of Eden, from which the Christian story flows downwards like grains in an hourglass, coming to a focus at the map’s centre, the city of Jerusalem, before spreading out once more to the pious inheritors of the Gospel in Europe. This temporal symbolism has proved irresistible for many. ‘The History of the World travels from East to West,’ Hegel wrote, ‘for Europe is absolutely the end of History, Asia the beginning.’
The tree roots that Van Gogh captured in his final painting still exist. The roots are located on the property of Jean-François and Hélène Serlinger in Auvers-sur-Oise. The mayor of the city tried to have the property declared “an accessory to the public highway” to take the land (and the famous landmark) from the couple, but an appeal court has ruled against the mayor and in favor of the landowners: “‘We are very happy that this is now over,’ Hélène Serlinger told the Independent, which reports that it was the couple’s love of Van Gogh that inspired their 1996 move to the village. ‘The mayor tried to grab the bottom part of the site by saying it was part of the road, which is terrible.’ The couple had no idea of the art historical significance of the small patch of land when they bought it in 2013.”
In the new issue of Harper’s, Geoff Dyer writes about his mother and her skin:
I went home for Christmas in 2009. My mum had been feeling unwell for a while and had taken to her bed on Christmas Eve. I was sitting downstairs in the living room, reading. My dad called down and asked if I could come upstairs. She had collapsed in the bathroom.
I phoned for an ambulance and, when it arrived, spoke calmly to the paramedics—a man and a woman. From the time of the first death in our extended family, I became aware of how those who fell apart, went to pieces, spent their time bawling, were viewed not with disdain, exactly, but with a lack of respect; crises meant you had to be able to cope, to get things done. In this emergency I needed to be as efficient and composed as possible. And I was—until, as they were carrying her out of the driveway on a gurney, to the ambulance and on to the hospital, I added a few final words to the female paramedic.
“My mum has a very large birthmark on her arm,” I said to this overworked woman who had seen everything, who was unshockable. “It’s been the most important thing in her life.” I couldn’t go on. I was crying. I forced myself to continue. “Can you please do everything you can to make sure that she is covered up in the hospital, that no one sees it?”
Sinéad Campbell writes about a new kind of literary event in London for The Guardian: “On a Saturday evening in London’s Notting Hill, a large crowd of moderately tipsy young people are spilling into a tailor’s shop on Portobello Road. A passerby could easily assume they were walking past a fashion pop-up attracting a stylish herd of fanatics. But they’d be wrong. The buzzing crowd is here for a live reading event, and they’re eager with energy and anticipation. Soho Reading Series began in the summer of 2023 and was founded by Tom Willis, a writer and PhD student. He wanted to make a ‘scene where anyone could turn up, party, and have a killer time with literature as the centre,’ he tells me over an extra-dry martini a couple of hours before one of the events.” Who doesn’t want to have “a killer time with literature”?
Michial Farmer reviews Ross Benes’s 1999: The Year Low Culture Conquered America and Kickstarted Our Bizarre Times in The Front Porch Republic:
In her 2005 book Female Chauvinist Pigs, the feminist culture critic Ariel Levy attempts to understand the sudden (and to her, distressing) popularity of what she calls ‘raunch culture.’ Everywhere she looked at the turn of the millennium, she saw softcore pornography: women taking lessons in pole- and lap-dancing; teenage pop stars semi-clothed and gyrating; hit movies like the 2000 remake of Charlie’s Angels that seemed to exist mostly for male sexual gratification. And what really annoyed her about raunch culture was the way that so many feminists were celebrating it . . . Two decades on, raunch culture has so dominated American popular culture that the phenomena Levy complains about seem almost traditional. We live in a culture that sent the Cardi B song “WAP” (if you somehow don’t know what the acronym stands for, please don’t look it up) to the top of the charts in eight countries; a culture in which the average child has been exposed to hardcore pornography before they turn thirteen; a culture in which national, supposedly conservative, politicians sidle up to porn stars and traffic underage girls.
Of course, nothing comes from nowhere, and Ross Benes’s new book 1999: The Year Low Culture Conquered America and Kickstarted Our Bizarre Times, attempts to sketch the history of twenty-first-century mass culture. As the title suggests, Benes sees a lot of the seeds of modern low culture in that pivotal year of 1999, the year Britney Spears released her first album and Limp Bizkit’s Significant Other debuted at number one; the year that South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut crossed boundaries that even basic cable wouldn’t have allowed; the year that WWF Smackdown premiered.
Charles F. McElwee reviews Peter Wolf’s Waiting on the Moon: Artists, Poets, Drifters, Grifters, and Goddesses:
In his elegant memoir of postwar Greenwich Village life, When Kafka Was the Rage, the literary critic Anatole Broyard wrote that “you could always find your own life reflected in art, even if it was distorted or discolored.” Broyard then cited one sentence from a book on surrealism that struck him: “Beauty is the chance meeting, on an operating table, of a sewing machine and an umbrella.”
Such surrealism—or the chance encounters once common at bars, shops, and cafes—might also fit to describe Peter Wolf’s life in his memoir, Waiting on the Moon. Wolf has had a long solo career, but before that he was the lead singer of the J. Geils Band, the Worcester-based rock and blues group known for its live gigs and cheery Top 40 hits in the 1970s and early 1980s. The band is best remembered for “Centerfold,” its sole Number One hit, with its playful music video that debuted right after MTV’s launch in August 1981.
The band itself, which fell apart in 1983, serves as a distant backdrop in Wolf’s memoir. The book is less a reflection on his own life than a series of poignant, Runyonesque vignettes featuring celebrities, has-beens, nobodies, and those in between—figures he encountered from childhood onward in the cities that shaped him. In writing the book, Wolf said he was guided by a line from Christopher Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin: “I am a camera with its shutter open.” He succeeds by presenting vaudevillian reels that reveal the quirks and eccentricities of both famous and forgotten characters navigating the gritty urbanity of mid-century life.
Mark LaFlaur revisits Paul Auster’s translation of The Notebooks of Joseph Joubert: “Amid the recent tributes to Paul Auster, who died on April 30, 2024, at age seventy-seven, one important work of his that was overlooked was his translation in the early 1980s of The Notebooks of Joseph Joubert. Joubert was a French writer from the late 1700s and early 1800s, a man of both the Enlightenment and the Romantic age. You may not have heard of Joubert before—he never actually published in his lifetime, and he’s not famous for his maxims like Pascal or La Rochefoucauld—though you may have encountered his saying ‘To teach is to learn twice.’ Joseph Joubert is, however, an original thinker, a writer of piercing aphorisms of surprising modernity and warm humanity who is well worth reading and rereading. He was a friend of Diderot and Chateaubriand among others, and he saw both the aristocracy and the common folk up close, before and after the French Revolution.”
Sophy Roberts reviews World War Zoos in The Wall Street Journal:
In World War Zoos: Humans and Other Animals in the Deadliest Conflict of the Modern Age, John M. Kinder, a professor of history at Oklahoma State University, chronicles the devastating effect that World War II and its surrounding decades had on zoos—including the Great Depression, the Spanish Civil War and the dawn of the Cold War. He surveys “the breadth of the global zoo industry” with material that has “a not-so-subtle American bias.” (Mr. Kinder includes detailed context on the 1930s rise of the American zoo and its postwar influence as Europe’s supremacy diminished.) Citing Claude Levi-Strauss’s maxim that zoos are “good to think with,” Mr. Kinder examines how an anthropocentric worldview, “hard-wired into the modern zoo,” not only become more pronounced in wartime but was exploited by Nazi ideologues who regarded Jews as worth less than those animals Hitler had sought to protect with his early lawmaking.
In 1933, the Nazi party’s new antivivisection “Reich Animal Protection Act” introduced a maximum two-year custodial sentence for anyone caught harming a pet and became “the most comprehensive animal protection law of its time.” Hitler was nurturing his reputation as a “vegetarian and an animal lover”; like a child watching a horror movie, he was said “to shield his eyes during scenes of animal violence on film.” Since their inception in the late 18th century, modern zoos functioned as “showcases of imperial power,” but they were “especially beloved” in Hitler’s Germany. As manifestations of “open-air prisons where the strong ruled the weak,” they gave Nazi propagandists metaphors to exploit, including Joseph Goebbels’s “‘eternal laws’ about the virtues of aggression and the inevitability of conflict.”
Mr. Kinder recounts some of the chilling effects that aerial bombardments, food shortages and “fearmongering” during the war had on the operation of zoos. To ensure the survival of both the people and the institutions, sacrifices were made: Many keepers were forced “to shoot, strangle, poison, intentionally starve, and beat to death hundreds, possibly thousands, of animals in their care,” which included creatures considered “dangerous” had they escaped. There were 3,000 animals in Berlin’s Tiergarten at the outbreak of World War II; by the end, there were 91. In London, zoo staff killed some 200 animals—more than the Germans destroyed in their blitzkrieg campaign on Britain. (These 200 animals, including a rare Siberian tiger, amounted to 0.05% of the domestic pets euthanized by their owners using pistols or veterinarians during the so-called September Holocaust—the result of a BBC broadcast rallying the country to prepare for German attacks.)
Scientists believe they have discovered the part of the brain that regulates consciousness: “A team of scientists has identified areas of the brain that are activated when a person becomes aware of themself and their thoughts. This enigmatic process appears to be controlled by the thalamus, a central region of the brain already known for its function as a filter between sensory signals and the cerebral cortex, the portion of the brain that governs higher-level processes such as memory, thought, and personality.”
