Saturday Links
Gimmicky literature (and art), Jewish classifieds in the 1930s, the CIA Book Club, Mark Lilla’s ignorance, and more.
Good morning! After 20 years, Mary Jo Bang has finished her translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy . . . and no one is talking about it except NPR, which is probably worse for Bang. Someone there confuses Paradiso with Purgatorio (“Purgatorio is the final installment and continues her style of lively, lyrical translation”) and Ari Shapiro is surprised to learn that it’s easier to rhyme in Italian than it is in English.
Of course, Bang’s Paradiso has just been published, so perhaps the reviews are forthcoming, but I wonder if the lack of coverage so far is because Bang’s attempt to modernize the poem by mixing contemporary figures with Dante’s medieval ones just isn’t that interesting in the long run.
Donald Rumsfeld—remember him?—got an allusion in her Inferno. Elton John gets one in Paradiso. In his blurb for Paradiso, Shane McCrae writes that “Bang has done the impossible: she has revitalized that which is eternal” by translating Dante “into a language alive to the very moment in which it is meant to be read.”
But I tend to agree with Mark Ford, who wrote this of Bang’s Inferno when it was published in 2012:
I am all in favor of versions of the classics that cast caution to the winds, tear up the rule book, and go for something radical. By far the best cinematic adaptation, in my opinion, of a Jane Austen novel is Clueless, which updates Emma to a Beverly Hills high school. Such versions tend, though, to elicit a fairly direct response. After our first gasp of wonder at the chutzpah that allows such liberties to be taken, there is only one question we ask of an experiment of this kind: Does it work or not? Hurrah if it does; oh dear if it doesn’t.
Does Mary Jo Bang’s updated version of Dante’s Inferno work? No, it doesn’t—No, in Thunder, it doesn’t, I can’t help adding, in emulation of Bang’s penchant for making use of inapposite quotes on all occasions. The numerous allusions Dante makes mean that reading the Commedia is inevitably a somewhat interrupted process for all but scholars of late-thirteenth- and early-fourteenth-century Italian history, since we find ourselves continually having to refer to the notes to work out who’s who. Bang’s version, however, introduces whole new strata of cross-referencing to a vast range of characters and events that postdate the poem. These gimmicky allusions to all and sundry seem crowbarred into her text mainly in the hope that they will make us admire her cleverness and audacity, and the breadth of her reading.
Bang continues this approach (which she must, of course) in Paradiso, but like Ford, I find it “gratuitous” and “self-congratulatory”—in short, boring.
Speaking of gimmicks: “If you’ve ever stood before a hulking sculpture and thought, ‘I wish I could take just a sliver of that home,’ MSCHF has you covered. The Brooklyn-based collective—best known the ATM at Art Basel Miami Beach that had monied art fair fans jockeying for position, selling a Damien Hirst painting one dot at a time, and the Big Red Boot that went viral in 2023—is back with King Solomon’s Baby, a sculpture that’s built to be dismembered.”
John Jeremiah Sullivan reviews Geoff Dyer’s Homework, in which the essayist, who tends to mix genres, plays it straight:
It’s a memoir of Dyer’s school days in England. It’s about his family and friends and hometown and what he can reconstruct, via autobiographical reflection, of his youthful inner life. If I find out that any of it is made up, I will feel violated as a reader—it has not been written in the cheeky tone and spirit that made those genre transgressions forgivable and fun in the earlier books. It moves through time in a reassuringly linear fashion, starting with the author’s birth in 1958 and ending with a trip home that he made just a few years ago. It’s coherent, or maybe stable is a better word, free of the comical overstatement and fictional swerving that characterize Dyer’s other books. It’s formally recognizable in pretty much every way. It is also extremely good. So good, in fact, that it makes me want to quote an obscure couple of lines from Paul Valéry’s Monsieur Teste that have been stuck in my head, at times self-reprovingly, since I encountered them in college: “Au Romantiques Teste dixit: ‘Les extrêmes sont pauvres.’”
To the Romantics, Teste says: “The extremes are poor.” In more prosaic language: the experimental forms can be thin. I don’t always agree with that, of course. One would never want to side with it too completely—to the extent, for instance, of wishing that Dyer’s previous books had been different, had lacked their impudent brilliance. Here, though, is an example of what I think Valéry’s great character meant. Sometimes we fear the conventional—not in the pejorative sense of banal or bourgeois, but literally conventional, as in, the things we do by convention, including the conventional genres—precisely because the wood can be so thick there. Either drill deep or go home (or have your shallowness exposed). The other, more “extreme” modes are forever offering outs. Come up against the most painful and difficult parts, the places where you are required to reach down and really say what you mean? There is always another formal trick to pull. Hit the genre-shift button. Or break the whole thing up and call it a “lyric essay.” Pray that formal game-playing will somehow generate the meaning from which you had shied and shirked. Whereas, when you commit to the major, conventional forms, “the only way out,” as Robert Frost wrote, “is through.”
Willard Spiegelman revisits Frederic Edwin Church’s painting The Meteor in The Wall Street Journal’s “masterpiece” column:
Comets and meteors have traditionally been said to foretell the fall of princes. They also often serve as metaphors for other disasters of epic or biblical proportions. On July 20, 1860, a meteor procession—a string of fireballs, therefore different from a conventional “shower”—streaked across the sky in North America, moving from northwest to southeast. It was visible to the naked eye along the Eastern seaboard.
One person, among many, who recorded his experience was the painter Frederic Edwin Church (1826-1900), looking up from his farm in the Catskills near the site where, a decade later, he would build Olana, his eccentric, exotic orientalist house. Having witnessed the meteor procession, he painted it, indoors, from memory. He exhibited his work four times during the Civil War; it then hung in his bedroom at Olana until his death. After remaining for years with descendants of the artist, the picture has arrived at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, an appropriate venue because Hartford, Conn., was the artist’s birthplace. The work (oil on paper, then laid on canvas) is a stunner. It now joins 11 other Church paintings owned by the Atheneum.
Also in this weekend’s Journal, Diane Cole writes about Jewish families in Austria who placed classified ads in other countries in the 1930s seeking people to care for their children:
In their desperation to save their only child, Lisbeth’s parents tried a ploy so unusual it is almost absent from the literature of Holocaust history: They placed a classified ad in a Manchester, England, newspaper asking if a British family might step forward to care for a “clever child worthy of support.”
Remarkably—one might almost say miraculously—a family in Oldham, near Manchester, said yes. In I Seek a Kind Person, Julian Borger, an editor with the Guardian newspaper, tracks the histories of Lisbeth and nine other Austrian children who owe their survival to newspaper ads and the people whose answers allowed them to forge new lives in foreign countries.
I review Charlie English’s The CIA Book Club in the latest issue of The Washington Examiner:
Every fall, the American Library Association publishes a list of banned books during its Banned Books Week campaign. No book on this list is actually banned in the United States. Every single one can be bought “wherever books are sold,” as the slogan goes.
So, why does the ALA publish it? The short answer, I suspect, is to raise money. Banned Books Week is part of the organization’s fall fundraising push. Every year, newspapers run earnest stories about the threat of censorship in the U.S. They praise the ALA’s courageous defense of freedom and include Amazon links to “banned” books. Donations to the ALA have increased by nearly 50% recently. American publishers, who had first suggested that the ALA run such a campaign in 1982, benefit from the free publicity, too. In fact, it may be one of the most successful marketing campaigns of the past 50 years, and thanks to gullible journalists, it is still going strong.
For a refresher on what censorship is and what freedom fighting actually looks like, these journalists might consider reading Charlie English’s excellent The CIA Book Club: The Secret Mission to Win the Cold War with Forbidden Literature.
More:
The CIA’s publishing initiatives during the Cold War have been the subject of a handful of books. Before English’s, the most recent was Joel Whitney’s Finks: How the C.I.A. Tricked the World’s Best Writers (2017). For Whitney, the CIA’s support of literary magazines such as The Paris Review was akin to Soviet propaganda. In The CIA Book Club, English argues that the CIA was a strong supporter of the freedom of expression while the Soviets suppressed it, often violently. He tells the story of the CIA’s support of the Polish-language Kultura and the underground press in Poland — and the selfless actions of individuals on both sides of the Atlantic in the battle for freedom of expression before the fall of the Soviet Union.
Adam Mars-Jones reviews Alan Garner’s Powsels and Thrums: A Tapestry of a Creative Life for The London Review of Books:
Alan Garner ’s new book is a patchwork of memoirs and essays, taking its title from the offcuts of tapestry that weavers (like some of his forebears) would take home with them. His heyday has been a long one. Garner’s first book for children, The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, published in 1960, has a place on the shelves and in the memories of generations of readers, while his tiny, exquisite novel Treacle Walker was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2022. It has also been a very rooted life, not just in modern terms, but by the standards of any century. He was brought up in Alderley Edge in Cheshire and before he was a published writer bought part of a medieval hall house in Blackden, six miles away, with a £510 loan from the Order of Odd Fellows, buying the rest later for £150. When his growing family needed more space, and television versions of his books provided the means, he bought a timber-framed Tudor house (due to be demolished) for a pound, disassembled it and moved it eighteen miles to sit next to the hall. The cover of Powsels and Thrums shows an image by Garner’s wife, Griselda, of the two buildings, with one of Jodrell Bank’s telescopes in the next field.
Almost all of Garner’s books are set partly or wholly in this area. He has carried out excavations, unofficial but conscientious, on his own property – this part of Cheshire is the site of the oldest metal mining in England, with workings dating back to the early Bronze Age – and has published collections of folk tales. He maintains that there are no original stories; folk tales too are excavations, shafts going down into the past. He prefaces The Weirdstone of Brisingamen with ‘The Legend of Alderley’. A hundred and forty knights sleep under the hill, ready to wake when England is in mortal danger, all but one with a milk-white mare sleeping by his side. Then a local farmer taking his fine white mare to market meets a wizard ... There’s a pleasing Cheshire usage that Garner uses throughout his books, plunder to mean ‘ponder’, and as far as he’s concerned this is a story that can never be fully plundered. In Powsels and Thrums he devotes a rather exhausting essay to its origin and meaning. He’s even convinced he knows the exact location of the iron gates that lead to the cave where the knights sleep.
Paul J. Griffiths reviews Mark Lilla’s new book, Ignorance and Bliss, for Commonweal:
Mark Lilla’s elegant and stimulating book, Ignorance and Bliss, anatomizes appetites for ignorance, together with their effects. He identifies five modes of seeking ignorance: evading uncomfortable knowledge; placing some kinds of knowledge under taboo; emptying ourselves of knowledge so that we can be inspired; seeking childlike innocence; and nostalgically imagining and trying to recover a lost paradise. These overlap and intertwine, but are, as he presents them, distinct enough that each has its own characteristic flavor.
More:
Lilla’s view of what reason can deliver is optimistic, and perhaps naïvely so. He doesn’t, of course, have the extreme confidence an eighteenth-century philosophe would have had in the deliverances of reason, but he appears to be far from even a modest skepticism. This is important because the passion for ignorance would appear very differently than it does in this book were Lilla to embrace, or at least entertain, such a skepticism.
We might, for instance, say that we know very little of what could be known, that we’re wrong about a very large proportion of what we take ourselves to know, and that we’re virtuosos at being certain of what we’re in fact in error about. This, we might go on to say, is true of each of us individually and all of us collectively. And we might add that these claims about the frailty of reason are among the relatively few we can rely upon. This isn’t a root-and-branch skepticism that denies any possibility of knowing. Total skepticism is hard to state coherently because it must exempt itself from the scope of its own claim. But the more modest skepticism I am describing is a corrective to intellectual arrogance. Reason, according to modest skeptics, has among its few gifts the capacity to show, with clarity, its own limits. The Socrates of the early dialogues would have agreed. Lilla, so far as I can tell, mostly would not.
He is confident in what reason, together with experience, can teach us about the world, and therefore eager to embrace the kind of curiosity that seeks to know, as well as to damn the passion for ignorance that shuts knowledge-seeking down. It’s this confidence that leads him, when his own certainties surface, to present them in stark and immoderate tones.
The Bayeux tapestry to return to the U.K. for the first time in nearly 1,000 years: “One of the most important cultural artefacts in the world, it is to be displayed at the British Museum from September 2026.”
Poem: Jim Richards, “Forecast”
Marianna Cerini visits Italy’s—and the world’s—only mosaic school: “Walking the corridors of the Scuola dei Mosaicisti del Friuli (Friuli Mosaicists School) on a Friday morning, the first thing I noticed was the silence. I had expected the chatter of students, the hum of conversation between teachers, the shuffle of footsteps. Instead, the air was still, broken only by the occasional tap of a hammer and the delicate click of tiles sliding against tiles.”
Shortlisted designs for Queen Elizabeth II’s official London memorial have been unveiled: “A pair of gently curved bridges, a bronze oak tree and a lily pad-inspired walkway are among the standout features of five shortlisted designs for Queen Elizabeth II’s official memorial site in central London. The national memorial will be built in St. James’s Park, near Buckingham Palace in the heart of the British capital.”
Lex Duff visits The Factum Arte in Madrid: “When I’m first invited to a sojourn in Madrid to learn about the life and work of Francisco Goya and the conservation work of Factum Arte, I’m thrilled but also a little apprehensive. While art-themed travel is right up my street and I live a mere train trip from the Spanish capital, Goya’s work is known for being a little, well, dark – particularly during his later years. As a fan of the Botticellis of this world, spending a few days with the artist famous for his ‘black paintings’ was not something I was sure I’d enjoy. And yet, three days later, as I stand in front of Goya’s grave in La Ermita de San Antonio de la Florida, I find myself moved in a way I never could’ve anticipated.”
Amanda Craig praises Laura Shepherd-Robinson’s The Art of a Lie: “In this age of lies and delusions, the trickster may seem to be a peculiarly modern creature, but he or she is almost as old as literature itself. Long before phishing or fake news, stories about cunning foxes, Loki, Anansi the Spider-Man and Odysseus brought delight; Puck, Tom Ripley and Sarah Waters’s fingersmith Sue Trinder are some of their descendants. Encountering such a figure is always a joy, and in Laura Shepherd-Robinson’s latest novel, The Art of a Lie, there are two.”
Andre Popovitch writes about the most widely used calculator in the world and the computer scientists who made it: “Consider this straightforward calculation: (10100) + 1 - (10100). The answer, of course, is 1. But if you were to input it right now on your iPhone calculator, the answer you would get is 0. Android, however, gets it right. Why is there a difference? The answer to that question begins with the story of how one of the world’s top computer scientists ended up working on a humble calculator app.”
David Lehman wins the twenty-fifth New Criterion Poetry Prize for his collection Ithaca. It will be published by Criterion Books in 2026.
Forthcoming: Catherine Conybeare, Augustine the African (Liveright, August 5): “Augustine of Hippo (354–430), also known as Saint Augustine, was one of the most influential theologians in history. His writings, including the autobiographical Confessions and The City of God, helped shape the foundations of Christianity and Western philosophy. But for many centuries, Augustine’s North African birth and Berber heritage have been simply dismissed. Catherine Conybeare, a world-renowned Augustine scholar, here puts the ‘African’ back in Augustine’s story. As she relates, his seminal books were written neither in Rome nor in Milan, but in Africa, where he had returned as a wanderer during a perilous time when the Western Roman Empire was crumbling. Using extant letters and other shards of evidence, Conybeare retraces Augustine’s travels, revealing how his groundbreaking works emerge from an exile’s perspective within an African context.”
A recommendation of an update of classic literature. The 2012 film version of Henry James What Maisie Knew.
Thanks for the recommendation on Charlie English’s ‘The CIA Book Club.’ Just purchased!