Saturday Links

On two Thoreaus, revisiting Studs Terkel’s “Division Street,” a mysterious Pompeii fresco, Tom Holland’s “The Lives of Caesars,” a new translation of “Brothers Karamazov,” and more.

Source: Pompeii Archaeological Park

Good morning! The investigation into the deaths of Gene Hackman and his wife is ongoing. The latest is that Hackman was likely dead for nine days before he was found. A couple of years ago, a Youtuber collected clips from all of Hackman’s movies and uploaded them. You can watch them here. It is striking to be reminded of how long Hackman has acted and the variety of roles he played—though he clearly liked Westerns.

Jeff Bezos has decided he has an opinion about what the paper he owns should publish. For Michael Shaffer of Politico, this is an attack on the free press and, of course, democracy. Doesn’t Bezos know that only journalists can have opinions? He should shut it, and just write checks.

In Commonweal, Ashley C. Barnes writes about the two sides of Henry David Thoreau: “f the large number of visitors flocking to Massachusetts’s Walden Pond State Reservation each year are any indication, the life of Henry David Thoreau continues to exert a powerful hold on our collective imagination. That’s certainly true for Canadian poet and novelist Helen Humphreys who, in order to novelize Thoreau’s life in Followed by the Lark, read all his journals—some forty-seven manuscript volumes—to let ‘his voice guide hers.’ Her ‘Henry,’ as the narrator calls him, is a friendly antidote to the self-righteous, go-it-alone libertarian favored by off-the-grid preppers, emerging more as a brother and companion, longing for intimacy even as he shuns it . . . Readers seeking a different kind of intimacy with Thoreau should turn instead to Lawrence Buell’s Henry David Thoreau: Thinking Disobediently, a helpful primer on the historical Thoreau’s thought. It’s short, but thorough: Buell considers Thoreau’s biography as well as his reception by later acolytes and scholars, his journaling and methods of composition, his interest in Indigenous peoples, and his commitments to science as it was then developing. Buell succeeds at defamiliarizing Thoreau, leaving us better equipped to grasp the complexity of his project.”

Art historian questions whether the National Gallery’s Samson and Delilah is in fact a Ruben: “Forty-five years after it was bought for a then record price, it is being dismissed as a 20th-century copy of a long-lost painting by the 17th-century Flemish master. A detailed stylistic comparison between the painting and ‘undisputed’ Rubens pictures will be presented in March by the art historian Euphrosyne Doxiadis in a book and a lecture at King’s College London. Doxiadis will include the research in her forthcoming book, NG6461: The Fake National Gallery Rubens, which is published on 12 March, a day before her lecture. She will argue that ‘the flowing, twisting brushstrokes that are so characteristic of Rubens are nowhere to be seen’ in Samson and Delilah.”