Saturday Links
The life and art of 19th-century Philadelphia, the history in Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s “The Red Wheel,” Erik Satie’s “lost” works, Picturesque Japan, and more.
Good morning! D.G. Hart writes about 19th-century Philadelphia—“the Athens of North America”—for The Wall Street Journal:
Next year—2026—may mark the 250th anniversary of America’s founding, but for New Englanders, 2025 is the real quarter millennial of the nation’s independence. The soldier who fired “the shot heard round the world,” as Ralph Waldo Emerson put it, did so on April 19, 1775. Just as skirmishes between minutemen and redcoats in Concord and Lexington, Mass., led to the signing of the Declaration of Independence at the Pennsylvania State House, 2025 commemorations in New England will migrate in 2026 to Philadelphia.
The city founded by William Penn not only had facilities—the State House (later Independence Hall) and Carpenters’ Hall—large enough to accommodate the Continental Congress and afterward the United States government. At the time, Philadelphia was also the Athens of North America, home to many of America’s best minds, elite cultural institutions and distinguished architecture. Peter Conn’s book on the Philadelphia subjects of the artist Thomas Sully captures the aristocratic element of the city’s early history. W.C. Fields once joked (though the line may be apocryphal) that spending a day in Philadelphia felt like a week. In 1800, a day in Philadelphia would have been too short to enjoy its charms.
Dominic Green writes about Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Red Wheel cycle in The Lamp: “Tolstoy started to write a history of the Napoleonic invasion but found that he was writing a novel. Solzhenitsyn started a novel about the origins of the Russian Revolution, but it became a work of history. In his philosophical epilogue to War and Peace, Tolstoy dismisses the notion that history is made by individuals. In The Red Wheel, individuals shape the fates of their family and nation. They cannot know, however, whether their assumptions are accurate or understand the significance of their actions. Granting each character an internal monologue on his or her own terms, Solzhenitsyn builds a fragmentary, discordant chorus of partial insight. The effect is somewhere between history and fiction, in which every little world is demolished by the great world of ideology.”
Dana Gioia reviews Alan Jacobs’s new book on Paradise Lost: “It takes effort to engage Paradise Lost, but once you’re under way, the epic leaves you breathless and dizzy with excitement—emotional, intellectual and poetic. Paradise Lost is a sublime cosmic drama about the origin of evil and the fate of humanity.”
Helen Pfeifer reviews Ruby Lal’s Vagabond Princess: The Great Adventures of Gulbadan:
No space has elicited more lurid Orientalist fantasies than the harem, once found in elite residences across the Islamic world. In practice, most harems (haram in Persian) were unremarkable sites of domestic labour. What caught the attention of Western Europeans were the enslaved women, as well as the social mores dictating that respectable women rarely appear in public. Early travellers sometimes compared harems to nunneries (as strictly regulated, hierarchical, female-dominated spaces), but by the 19th century Westerners tended to view them as prisons or as the depraved sex palaces depicted in the paintings of Ingres. Even in the early 1990s, some scholars were still imagining the royal harems of the Mughals or Ottomans to be places of orgiastic pleasure. Since then, a pioneering group of historians – most of them women – has turned these assumptions on their head. Imperial harems were in fact regimented institutions, where sexual relations (a matter of state survival, after all) were carefully managed. At least for their most privileged inhabitants, harems were the headquarters for political and diplomatic operations of the highest order.
Ruby Lal has made a career of bringing to light the lives of Mughal women. Her latest book is a study of Gulbadan Begum, the daughter of the founder of the Mughal Empire. During her lifetime the Mughals rose from being a Central Asian dynasty struggling to establish a foothold in South Asia to become the rulers of one of the largest and wealthiest empires in the world. Gulbadan was born in Kabul in 1523, a few years before her father, Babur, conquered large parts of the Indo-Gangetic Plain; she came of age in the reign of her half-brother Humayun, who pushed the imperial boundaries eastwards as far as Bengal; and she died in 1603, during the reign of her nephew Akbar, the most celebrated of Mughal emperors. She is also the only Mughal woman known to have written an imperial history. Conditions in the Age of Emperor Humayun was composed at Akbar’s behest when she was 64. Since it foregrounds women and children, Gulbadan’s history helps Lal achieve the rare feat of viewing the rise of the Mughals from a female perspective.
Performing Erik Satie’s “lost” works: “Twenty-seven previously unheard works by Erik Satie, from playful cabaret songs to minimalist nocturnes, are to be premiered a century after the death of the notoriously eccentric and innovative French composer. Painstakingly pieced together from hundreds of small notebooks, most of the new works are thought to have been written in the bohemian bistros of Montmartre in Paris where Satie worked as a pianist in the early decades of the 20th century.”
Poem: Peter Kline, “SFO↔LAS”
George Young visits the French sculptors building a new Statue of Liberty:
At a miserable-looking rally for the centre-left Place Publique in mid-March, its co-president, MEP Raphaël Glucksmann, made international headlines calling for the Trump administration to return the Statue of Liberty, gifted by the French in 1886 to commemorate the Declaration of Independence: ‘It was our gift to you. But apparently you despise her. So she will be happy here with us.’ The predictably sensationalist headlines dissipated in a flurry of Republican outrage against ‘the low-level French politician’ as quickly as they had arrived. But Glucksmann’s demand – sincere or not – caught the attention of a group of sculptors who, in their words, have ‘taken up the dream of civilisation’ to produce monumental civic sculpture.
Two days after the MEP’s proclamation, Atelier Missor posted on X: ‘Keep the Statue of Liberty; it’s rightfully yours. But get ready for another one. A New Statue of Liberty, much bigger, made from titanium to withstand millions of years. We, the French people, are going to make it again!’ It was accompanied by an AI-generated image of her future titanium partner Prometheus. So far, so American Golden Age, validated by a typically laconic reply from Elon Musk: ‘Looks cool.’ The brief online exchange was a public-relations coup for Missor – and decried as such by cynics. Surely no one believed that this hare-brained scheme could be feasibly implemented? Think again.
In his preface to One Hundred Views of Fuji, published posthumously in 1859, Utagawa Hiroshige wrote that he wanted to make ‘true-to-life landscapes’ that would ‘give others a few moments of pleasure without the inconvenience of a long journey’. More than a century and a half later, ‘Hiroshige: Artist of the Open Road’ offers a vivid demonstration of the artist’s enduring ability to transport viewers to snowy mountains, riverside picnics and rainswept hillsides. Graceful curves, comic asides and exquisite gradations of hallucinatory colour offer many pleasures along the way.
In Evening View of the Eight Scenic Spots of Kanazawa in Musashi Province (1857), one of the artist’s last works, the landscape stretches across the triptych with the ease of a sleepy cat. Boat masts echo the pine trees that line the shore in delicate rhythms, white sails chime with a moon that looms dead centre, its pale presence etched by silhouettes of birds in flight, while arches of a bridge in the lower right echo the hills and mountains in the distance. Nature and civilisation are one. With its restaurateur soliciting business from passersby and the boats hovering in the vivid blue water, Tōkaidō Autumn Moon: Restaurants at Kanagawa, Musashi Province (c. 1839) could be a scene reminiscent of a summer’s night on a Cycladic island. The work was designed to be pasted over the bamboo ribs of an uchiwa, or fan. Most would be worn out and tossed aside, but about 600 of Hiroshige’s survive, suggesting his fans were in high demand as a fashion accessory. That such a carefully made print was used for such a utilitarian purpose underlines the era’s integration of beautiful things into everyday life.
Thea Lim writes about Gaspereau Press in Nova Scotia:
In 1997, Andrew Steeves and Gary Dunfield sought to set up a small literary press. Steeves grew up outside Moncton, but he didn’t want the press to be in what he calls a place “littered with the trash of capitalism.” Ottawa, where Steeves went to university, was “the Death Star.” So Steeves and Dunfield opened up shop first in Wolfville, then relocated to 47 Church Avenue in Kentville, Nova Scotia, a town where, by the terms of community and connection, “the scale was right.” They named their new company after the river and the avenue: Gaspereau Press . . . Steeves won so many Alcuin Society Awards for Excellence in Book Design, he’s withdrawn himself from competition. Even his trade paperbacks are art objects: Smyth-sewn, printed on laid finish paper, nestled in letterpress covers hand-fed into the machine. This jargon may mean nothing to lay readers; maybe you have to touch the books yourself. Annick MacAskill, who won a Governor General’s Award for Poetry with Gaspereau, invents a word to describe them: “they durate.” Steeves himself believes beauty stems from utility. One of his favourite words is “useful,” like Thomas the Tank Engine.
The press is so fused to Steeves’s vision that it felt final when Gaspereau announced that, because Dunfield was retiring, the two of them would hand over operation to a new owner: Keagan Hawthorne in Sackville, New Brunswick. By the end of 2025, Kentville’s green Gaspereau building, its tremendous machines, its shelves loaded with slabs of overrun book jackets waiting for reprints, will be gone.
What happened to the middle-class musician?
Pemberton’s . . . debut album, Breaking Kayfabe, earned him a cover story in Exclaim! magazine and a nomination for the Polaris Prize, which recognizes the best Canadian album of the year. He released more music, played the legendary Glastonbury and Lollapalooza festivals, DJ’d Sacha Trudeau’s birthday party, and performed for Queen Elizabeth II at the 2010 Canada Day festivities on Parliament Hill. By then, Edmonton had selected Pemberton as the city’s poet laureate, and the CBC had picked him to sit on the panel of its battle-of-the-books show, Canada Reads. He was everywhere. From the outside looking in, it seemed that Pemberton had made it, and then some.
Behind the scenes, however, he was scraping by, living off earnings from freelance writing gigs, informal DJ sets, seasonal retail shifts, and $11,130 worth of additional advances that Upper Class paid him for his second and third albums. All the other money he made was being collected by Upper Class; per Pemberton’s contract, the label was entitled to collect his portion of revenues (20 to 50 percent, depending on the source) until they’d fully recouped his advances as well as tens of thousands of dollars the label had invested in recording, marketing, and touring, including covering the costs of Pemberton’s flights, car rentals, and hotels. As a result, he was playing hundreds of shows a year yet making no money.
Pemberton calculated that between signing in 2006 and 2015, he’d made Upper Class more than $250,000. The label had collected the $25,000 he earned on the Breaking Kayfabe tour, his $10,000 poet laureate fee, and six figures worth of grants—that he knows of. Apart from the $12,130 in advances he’d received from Upper Class, he’d seen only a tiny sliver of royalties.
Alexander Larman reviews F1: “F1 is leaps and bounds ahead in terms of technical wizardry; Pitt and his co-star, newcomer Damon Idris, were both filmed at various races worldwide (in Formula Two cars, rather than the more expensive and dangerous Formula One vehicles), and when the film takes to the track, it’s almost impossibly exciting, thanks to the needle-sharp editing, Zimmer’s rousing score and Miranda’s stunning cinematography . . . If however, F1 is five-star unmissable entertainment when it’s speeding ahead, it’s distinctly more pedestrian when the racing stops and the talking starts.”
Forthcoming: Chris Warley, Auerbach’s Renaissance: Rebirths of an Aesthetic from Shakespeare to Ferrante (Cambridge, July 3): “Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis is among the most admired works of literary criticism of the last hundred years. Amidst the horrors of the Second World War, Auerbach’s prodigious learning managed – almost miraculously – to give voice to a delicate, subtle optimism. Focusing on Auerbach’s account of Renaissance literature, Christopher Warley rediscovers the powerful beauty of Mimesis and shows its vitality for contemporary literary criticism. Analysing Auerbach’s account of Renaissance love lyric alongside Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, fifteenth-century Burgundian writing alongside Ferrante, and Shakespeare alongside Michelet, Ruskin and Burckhardt, Auerbach's Renaissance traces an aesthetic that celebrates the diversity of human life. Simultaneously it locates in Auerbach’s reading of Renaissance writing a challenge to the pessimism of today, the sense that we live in an endless present where the future looms only as a threat. Auerbach’s scholarship, the art he learns from Dante, Rabelais, Montaigne, and Shakespeare, is a Renaissance offering democratic possibility.”