Saturday Links

The “magazine scene,” Tarjei Vesaas’s novels, the exacting magic of film restoration, a new John Singer Sargent portrait, a new Raymond Chandler story, and more.

Good morning! In the latest issue of The Critic, David Goodhart takes stock of Prospect at 30 and surveys the “magazine scene”:

Fifteen years after I ceased to edit Prospect, I’m pleased to say that my creation still exists thanks to the generosity of Clive Cowdery, its low-profile owner. But under the direction of ex-Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger, its voice is seldom heard. The monthly has settled into an early middle-age, occasionally stirring itself to shake a fist at a bewildering world that no longer bends to its establishment progressivism.

My own very partial view of the magazine scene is that the energy and interest is coming overwhelmingly from the right, or at least the non-left, as in politics itself. There are the best substacks: the engaging Ed West, the optimistic Anglo-Futurists/Works in Progress cluster, the sharp and angry Pimlico Journal, (even read by Cowdery, he tells me). There is this readable and often surprising magazine, described as “dyspeptic” in a Prospect piece on who is funding Reform, one of the few in the last year that I learned something from.

Just down the street in Westminster from Prospect’s offices sits the online success story, Unherd. Despite leaning rightwards, it does make some effort to “escape the echo chamber”, Prospect’s marketing slogan which I can only assume is some sort of in-joke, given the narrowness of its political range.

Leslie Jamison goes to Disneyland: “Over the course of thirty-six hours, my daughter and I rode with Mr. Toad into the depths of hell, squinted at a bonfire of sewing spindles, choked on hairspray, broke the fourth wall at least fifteen times, smiled at a thousand strangers, fell asleep with grease-glistening fingers, and learned to navigate the Lightning Lane as if it were a second language. We sang each other the Small World song and begged each other to stop singing the Small World song. We braved the dynamite and shadows of Big Thunder Mountain Railroad, where my first boyfriend once sank into the glittering depths of a doom-skewed mushroom trip; and in the darkness of Space Mountain, we felt as close as we’d felt since the womb. Or at least, I did. The gap between I and we grew and shrank like the bathroom lines: nonexistent, then massive. I lost and regained faith in myself as a good mother many times, often over the course of a single hour. I felt a kinship with other parents whose children sported impossibly large frozen lemonades, or light-up wands—my kindred capitulators, my kind—and I spent massive amounts of money, and hated capitalism, and googled Disneyland Annual Pass and hated myself . . . You haven’t lived until you’ve watched your child stand on a pile of fake treasure, at the edge of a fake island, in the middle of a fake lake, and shout in a guttural demonic voice ‘All of this is mine!’ In truth I was a little bit horrified, but also immediately gratified, because I realized it would make an incredible photo, and photos were the treasure I was hoarding.”

Michael Barber revisits Geoffrey Wellum’s 2002 memoir, First Flight, about flying a Spitfire during the Second World War:

‘Boy’ Wellum, as he was known, grew up fast. He had to: many of the German pilots he would face had already fought for Franco with the Condor Legion in Spain. Over the next eighteen months we observe his first pint, his first kill, his first car (bought for a fiver) and his first sexual conquest. At the risk of offending his shade by using a German term, I would describe First Light as a Bildungsroman – a story of growing up. Perhaps he did it too fast, because at one point he laments: ‘What on earth shall I find to do when I am not able to fly a Spit any more?’

First Light is based on some notes Wellum made at the time in a school exercise book, which he then put aside. Like many veterans who had lost a lot of friends, he recoiled from a trip down memory lane. But in the 1970s his life took a turn for the worse: his marriage ended, his business failed and he lost his house. Feeling rather worthless, he dug out the old exercise book in the hope that it would prove ‘that at some point in my life I had been of use’.

Karl Ove Knausgaard revisits Tarjei Vesaas’s The Birds and The Ice Palace: “There are books that don’t leave you once you have finished reading them but remain with you, some for the rest of your life. To me Tarjei Vesaas’s two masterpieces, The Birds and The Ice Palace, are such books. This is not just because they are good—the world is full of good books—but also because they did something to me, changed something in me. I think of The Birds as a place, a place where something vital becomes visible, something that is always present but goes unnoticed, something that Vesaas’s novel, through its great attentiveness, allows to appear. The protagonist is named Mattis. He is mentally disabled and lives with his sister, unable to provide for himself. In social settings he is helpless, he senses other people’s wills and demands but is unable to satisfy them, he gets all tangled up inside. But when he is by himself, in the forest, for instance, or out on the lake below the house they live in, his being opens up, and the world he knows, the world of nature, flows through him; in his relation to it, he is free and unfettered. The linguistic sensibility that Vesaas evinces to accomplish this is unsurpassed. The same sensibility is found in The Ice Palace, which is about an encounter between two eleven-year-old girls, Siss and Unn. They are drawn to each other without knowing why, and their encounter—where everything that is at stake, everything that happens between them is wordless—takes place in an indefinite zone between sensations, emotions, and thoughts, a zone in the novel with its own animal alertness.”

The exacting magic of film restoration: “Bologna is the site of an annual festival called Il Cinema Ritrovato—literally, ‘refound cinema,’ although for movie buffs a more fitting translation would be ‘paradise regained.’ Run under the auspices of the Fondazione Cineteca di Bologna, a major film archive, it specializes in the shock of the old: films that have been forgotten, overlooked, undervalued, truncated by studios, or damaged by time, and that are asking to be brought back into the light. Resurrection, as often as not, means restoration, and one of the festival’s many missions is to showcase, and to explore, the painstaking ways in which wounded films can be healed . . . The festival has been running since 1986. Back then, it was a quiet, five-day affair, taking place in December, and Gian Luca Farinelli—a founder of the event and now one of its four co-directors, as well as the over-all director of the Cineteca—reckoned that he was personally acquainted with most of the folks who turned up. Not until 1995 did the festival switch to summer, and with the change of season came a chance to show movies in the open air. The first film to be screened in the Piazza Maggiore that year was the 1922 Nosferatu, with the long-fingered, sleep-ravaging Max Schreck as the vampire. Think of watching that alfresco, beside a sacred edifice, while trying to digest your tortellini in brodo. Over time, the festival has swelled, and in 2025, for its thirty-ninth incarnation, it sprawled languidly across the last week of June. At ten venues around the city, outdoors and indoors, more than four hundred films were shown, drawing a hundred and forty thousand spectators, some of whom even Farinelli may not have known.”