Saturday Links
The rise of the anonymous music star, stunning new frescos in Pompeii, W.S. Gilbert’s cutting wit, the literary manuscripts of the Bodleian, and more.
Good morning! Stunning new frescos have been discovered in Pompeii: “Archaeologists say the frescos are among the finest to be found in the ruins of the ancient site. Mythical Greek figures such as Helen of Troy are depicted on the high black walls of a large banqueting hall. The room's near-complete mosaic floor incorporates more than a million individual white tiles.”
Alexander Larman praises the cutting wit of W.S. Gilbert: “Today, ‘Gilbert and Sullivan’ remain one of the great British duos, like fish and chips, Morecambe and Wise, or Cook and Moore . . . When Arthur Sullivan expired from a heart attack following an attack of bronchitis, his reputation was assured. Yet Sullivan without Gilbert is a very different proposition to the other way around. The one man had talent; the other, genius.”
Jonathan Miles reviews a new biography of the artist and country singer Terry Allen: “The intersection of the rarefied world of fine art, with its gallery exhibitions and Chablis-sipping collectors, and the down-home world of country music, with its honky-tonk shows and Lone Starswigging boot-scooters, can be boiled down to two words: Terry Allen.”
Ted Gioia writes about the rise of the anonymous music star: “How do you generate more Spotify streams than Michael Jackson or Elton John? Swedish composer Johan Röhr pulled off that impressive feat in the strangest way possible. He hid behind 656 different pseudonyms.”
Poem: Giacomo Leopardi, “The Calm after the Storm,” translated by Beverley Bie Brahic
Freddie deBoer reviews Lauren Oyler’s No Judgment: “I enjoyed Lauren Oyler’s new essay collection No Judgment a lot, and I think it’s a good demonstration of growth from a remarkably talented but frequently frustrating writer. She’s kept her trademark complexity and compositional adventurousness while leaving some of the adversarial framing and self-defensive tics behind. The result is a collection that’s confident, pleasantly crabby, and never less than fully committed, even when it stumbles over its own ambitions as a work of craft . . . The lengthy nature of the essays, and their admirable lack of haste, help to tamp down Oyler’s worst impulses, which can include a tendency to rush from one clever sentence to the next clever sentence without attending to the boring, necessary stitching that goes in between.”
A new book on the literary manuscripts of the Bodleian at Oxford pleases and disappoints: “Write, Cut, Rewrite is an agreeable glimpse of some highlights from an important collection of literary manuscripts in the Bodleian Library, Oxford. For some reason, the book also discusses Samuel Beckett’s manuscripts, housed at Reading University, but otherwise it sticks to the Bodleian’s collection. This has its disadvantages in approaching the subject.”
Don Winslow’s last novel will be City in Ruins, which is also the final book in his Danny Ryan trilogy. Andrew Taylor reviews:
City in Ruins is the third book of a trilogy loosely modeled on the great poems of the classical world, particularly the Iliad and the Aeneid . . . Winslow knows exactly what he’s doing. He’s a skilful storyteller and also, in the laconic American style that derives from noir crime fiction, an unobtrusively excellent writer. His narrative sweeps you along, reducing you to a twig in a torrent.
The cast is crowded and the characterization isn’t exactly subtle — any more than Homer’s or Virgil’s was. But there’s a substantial moral undertow to the story, the conflict between good and bad in the lives of messy, confused people on both sides of the law. Another theme is America’s conflicted relationship with money.
After embarrassing himself by pulling Joanna Chen’s essay “From the Edges of a Broken World” because it acknowledged that Israelis suffered in Hamas’s horrific October 7th attack, Guernica’s founding editor Michael Archer has named a new publisher—the “social entrepreneur” Magogodi oaMphela Makhene (which Archer seems to have misspelled as aoMphela). In Archer’s announcement, he doesn’t apologize for pulling the essay and acts as if a lack of transparency in Guernica’s “decision-making processes” were to blame. He writes: “Guernica is oriented towards the margins and drawn to the expansive imaginations that emerge from relentless exclusion. We are not driven by the news cycle, but instead constantly seek to excavate the narratives upholding structures of violence.” Yeah, right. (The Washington Monthly republished Chen’s essay. You can read it here.) In a brief statement, Magogodi oaMphela Makhene writes that “We cannot imagine, much less live, our way into a more egalitarian world, without expanding our center to include the marginalized.” Including marginalized Jews?
Also, in case you missed this, Uri Berliner, a senior editor at NPR who has been with the organization for 25 years, writes about its increasing liberal bias: “It’s true NPR has always had a liberal bent, but during most of my tenure here, an open-minded, curious culture prevailed. We were nerdy, but not knee-jerk, activist, or scolding. In recent years, however, that has changed. Today, those who listen to NPR or read its coverage online find something different: the distilled worldview of a very small segment of the U.S. population. If you are conservative, you will read this and say, duh, it’s always been this way. But it hasn’t.”
The Amish are growing: “According to the Young Center for Anabaptist and Pietist Studies at Elizabethtown College, the estimated population of North American Amish in 2023 was 384,290 (6,100 in Canada), a 116% increase from 2000. Statistics show that the population nearly doubles every 20 years.” (HT: Jeffrey Bilbro’s excellent weekly round-up for Front Porch Republic.)
Heather Wilhem reviews Abigail Shrier’s Bad Therapy: “‘Whatever you do, don’t run around telling other people about your problems,’ my husband’s grandfather used to say. ‘Half of them don’t care, and the other half are happy the problems are happening to you.’ It’s sound advice. These days, it’s also wildly and almost laughably countercultural. Bad Therapy, Abigail Shrier’s important, compelling, and often alarming new book, details how many of today’s kids are taught to do the exact opposite, encouraged to marinate obsessively in a murky bath of their own inchoate—and sometimes capricious—feelings. The results are not good: The kids these days, it appears, are increasingly a basket case.”
Forthcoming: Alexander Larman, Power and Glory: Elizabeth II and the Rebirth of Royalty (St. Martin’s, April 30): “In Power and Glory, Alexander Larman completes his acclaimed Windsor family trilogy, using rare and previously unseen documents to illuminate their unique family dynamic. Through his chronicling of events like the Royal Wedding, George VI’s death and the discovery of the Duke of Windsor’s treacherous activities in WWII, Larman paints a vivid portrait of the end of one sovereign’s reign and the beginning of another’s that heralded a new Elizabethan Age which would bring power and glory back to a monarchy desperately in need of it.”