Saturday Links
Joachim du Bellay's remains discovered, a new Mozart composition, our UFO obsession, the state of Christian sci-fi, and more.
Good morning! The remains of the 16th-century French poet Joachim du Bellay were discovered during the restoration of Notre-Dame. The BBC has the story: “Born near Angers in western France around 1522, du Bellay was – with Pierre de Ronsard – founder of a circle of poets known as La Pleiade which championed French, rather than Latin, as a language of poetry. It was known from records that du Bellay was buried in Notre-Dame, where he had served as a minor clerical official. But his tomb has never been found.”
A previously unknown Mozart composition has been found in Germany: “The piece dates to the mid to late 1760s and consists of seven miniature movements for a string trio lasting about 12 minutes, the Leipzig municipal libraries said in a statement on Thursday.”
On visiting Marianne Moore: “As a student from 1952 to 1956 at Bishop Loughlin Memorial High School, located on Greene and Clermont Avenues in Brooklyn, I was already committed to the study of modern poetry as part of my life’s work, and I was impressed to learn from one of the Christian Brothers who taught there that Marianne Moore lived nearby. I wished that I might see her some time, perhaps at the library or when I was headed to the subway after school, but that never happened. In my senior year at St. John’s University, however, several members of the English Club were complaining of the uninspiring character of club meetings, and Lorraine DeFranco and I observed that it would be an excellent thing if we could persuade Miss Moore to give a reading; Lorraine had learned her exact address, and I knew how to get there on the subway. Deputed, accordingly, to go to Miss Moore’s apartment (we mistakenly assumed that she would have an unlisted telephone number) and invite her, we met after our last classes on the sprawling new campus in Queens, headed down the hill to the subway.”
A “comprehensive” life of Stanley Kubrick: “The great American film directors have suffered from a common predicament. Democratic fealty and, more important, financial constraint meant they were bound to respect popular taste. That requirement need not have been oppressive – silent movies, after all, were descendants of the popular fiction of Balzac and Dickens. What dampened the spirits of all but the most cunning veterans was the incessant pressure to follow a proven formula – which actor was bankable, what story might attract or offend which particular audience. And ultimately there was no choice. An original like Howard Hawks could defy the odds with Scarface and His Girl Friday, but a personal ‘signature’, too, becomes a formula in the end, and Red River gives way to Rio Bravo and Rio Lobo. To step seriously out of the groove of the big studios condemned a director to failure and the posthumous honour of indie renown. The largest exception to the rule, as Robert Kolker and Nathan Abrams show in Kubrick: An Odyssey, owed his escape to a coalescence of luck and preternatural self-confidence.”
Clare Coffey writes about our UFO obsession:
Over the span of a few weeks in January and February 2023, four different strange high-altitude objects were discovered floating over the U.S. and Canada, and were shot down. Tabloids recently reported ten-foot-tall humanoids stalking Miami. Senator Chuck Schumer introduced legislation to declassify information about UAPs as an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act. And former intelligence officer David Grusch, after testifying before Congress, went on Joe Rogan’s podcast to talk about one of the earliest publicly disclosed UFO recoveries (it was in the 1930s and the Vatican was involved, as it always seems to be), as well as the siloed warren of competing bureaucracies that guard access to recovered materials and information about how the government uses them.
The American UFO disclosure saga is not a line, or even an arc, but a roundelay: we repeat the same steps at intervals, and if at each revolution the beat seems a little more insistent, it is hard to say whether that’s the music or the trance of the dance. The effect of this accelerating circle-dance on the American public has been a particularly strange kind of irony poisoning. Aliens are being discussed in publicly unimpeachable places — and yet aliens are never actually confirmed by anyone in authority, and they never show up to give an account of themselves. They can’t be wholly scoffed at, but neither does there seem to be much to do, or any reason to do it. The result is a jump from ridicule to acceptance without any intermediating moment of belief, a transition that can only be negotiated in a blasé, half-joking register.
But whether we’re just getting lost in the music or the beat is really dropping, something about the UFO vibe has shifted these last few years, from sci-fi to something much older and weirder. In this shift we can find a clue to what, exactly, is driving this train across the margins of American culture.
We are in the middle of a writing boom, Sam Kahn argues at Compact: “There are, according to the company, 35 million active Substack subscriptions, including 3 million paid ones, across thousands upon thousands of newsletters. If there had always been a certain stench of failure in the self-publishing world and on writing platforms like Medium and WordPress, Substack seemed to overcome that, first, by offering generous pay to prominent writers in the early going and then generating a coattails effect . . . The pseudo-controversy over extremism on the platform obscured the fraught dynamics between Substack and legacy media. Basically, Substack existed in a much more harmonious and organic relationship to the internet than did legacy media. The controls were off, the editorial oversight was removed, and that allowed writers to produce a staggering quantity of content—much of it rubbish, of course, but a lot of it really good. The legacy media preferred to either ignore it or defame it. And since the legacy outlets still largely held onto its position as the evaluator of content (there are, for instance, awards for published books but not awards for Substacks), the culture at large has found it easy to miss the scale and importance of what has been happening.”
Poem: Alfred Nicol, “Gibbous Moon”
Malcolm Forbes reviews Rachel Kushner's Creation Lake: “Creation Lake is a blend of genre fiction and literary fiction. It could be classed as a ‘philosophical thriller’ — that type of book that aims high and means well but all too often leaves readers cold. It could have seriously backfired. But, for the most part, Kushner’s fourth novel succeeds as a fiercely intelligent and richly entertaining story of a woman learning more about who she is and where she came from while deep undercover.”
Axel Springer and KKR reach a deal to split the company's digital media and classified businesses: “Under the deal announced on Thursday, Axel Springer will be controlled by the billionaire Mathias Döpfner and Friede Springer, while the private equity group KKR will take majority control of its profitable classifieds business.”
Ryan Wilson has announced that Literary Matters, a publication of the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers (ALSCW), will continue. The new editor is John Matthew Steinhafel, who is a doctoral student at the Catholic University of America. The latest issue, which will be Wilson’s last, includes lots of great poetry and intriguing essays, including this essay by Stephen Kampa on “hidden forms”:
A critic might point out that you can scan passages from almost anything and find buried pentameters—indeed, “scan passages from almost anything” is iambic pentameter—so that Burnside’s method isn’t really a method but merely the byproduct of an analytic language that favors the iamb. To this, I would respond that the practice is too consistent to be accidental. Burnside doesn’t always do this, nor do the lines always resolve neatly into a series of pentameters as they do in the third section of “Alcools,” but the fact that Burnside presents those lines as a series of couplets, most of which can easily be scanned as pentameters, suggests that at least in certain contexts, the technique is quite purposeful. Furthermore, he does it often: read through Selected Poems, Black Cat Bone, and All One Breath and tell me how often you encounter iambic pentameter, either in its fully realized or broken-backed form. I find that most commonly it is a mixture of the two: the broken-backed pentameter provides variety in generally pentametric contexts. In any case, when something happens that often, we have every reason to suspect the poet is doing it on purpose.
This invites the more interesting question: what is the purpose? A Scottish Poetry Library website page identifies this technique as “flexible pentameters” and suggests it as a means of keeping technique an undercurrent, saying it might also be a means of “creating a looser visual effect, which can have the effect of speeding up one’s reading.” Maybe. It might be a way of experimenting with enjambment or heightening the importance of pentameter’s phrasal caesurae. It might be both a continuation and a critique of Pound’s “first heave,” which was to “break the pentameter.” It might be an attempt to play the visual against the aural. It might have a heuristic function: it is simply what Burnside needs to do to get the poem written. It might also be a disguise.
Marian A. Jacobs writes about Christian sci-fi and fantasy for World: “Christian publisher Revell doesn’t accept sci-fi or fantasy. Tyndale declined to comment for this story. Baker Publishing Group has published fantasy in previous years, and while author Gabrielle Meyer has a time travel series in the works, that’s something rare for the publisher.”
John Wilson recommends a book on rocks, which is ultimately about “our common world” told from “an unfamiliar angle.”
Forthcoming: Sarah Irving-Stonebraker, Priests of History: Stewarding the Past in an Ahistoric Age (Zondervan, September 24): “In the attempt to appear relevant, the church often embraces this ahistoric worldview by jettisoning the historic ideas and practices of Christian formation. But this has unintended consequences, leaving Christians unmoored from history and losing the ability to grapple with its ethical complexities. In Priests of History, Sarah Irving-Stonebraker draws upon her expertise, and her experience as an atheist who has become a Christian, to examine what history is and why it matters.”