Saturday Links
The appeal of skyscrapers, the man who invented the 40/4 chair, the ethics of rock climbing, the beginnings of spycraft in England, and more.
Good morning! John Wilson is back with his monthly fiction chronicle for this newsletter. Check out his latest on Evangelia Adamou’s Endangered Languages and the “endangered” language of novelists (paywall removed): “To read fiction written by men and women formed in a time different from our own, we have to ‘learn their language,’ and this is true not only if we are reading fiction from the eighteenth century, say, but also much more recent stuff. For a while now, I’ve been wishing for a really good book on the remarkable and wildly diverse cohort of outstanding American fiction-writers born in the 1930s, including (in order by date of birth) Toni Morrison, Donald Barthelme, John Updike, Reynolds Price, Philip Roth, Donald Westlake, John Gardner, Charles Portis, Larry McMurtry, Thomas Pynchon, Robert Stone, Raymond Carver, and Joyce Carol Oates . . . In the last several years, I’ve had conversations with readers who are younger than I am . . . for whom the writers I mentioned are not (with a couple of exceptions, perhaps) particularly of interest . . . And to me that seems a terrible loss.”
Peter Hitchens also writes about language loss in The Lamp—how quickly the old way of saying things is replaced and forgotten: “A new liturgy or a sudden unexplained change in English grammar which, in a matter of days, replaces the older style, very soon become commonplace for most people. Many Anglicans came to accept, with barely a sigh, the systematic suppression of the 1662 Book of Common Prayer. And then there is language itself. For example, for the first fifty or so years of my life the verb “commit” was reflexive. You committed yourself, and I committed myself. Then, one day, everybody in public life and the media dropped the reflexive pronoun. It happened much as yellow became a fashionable color in women’s clothes, and ‘taupe,’ whatever that is, ceased to be.”
In the Times Literary Supplement, Diarmaid MacCulloch reviews two books on the beginnings of spycraft in England: “The big picture is England’s emergence under Elizabeth and the Stuarts from a relatively insignificant and marginal place in European politics into a position as a future global maritime power, and moreover a Protestant power, that was driven to practise the arts of the ‘intelligencer’ to survive. Antagonism with Europe’s Catholic powers impelled belated acquisition of skills in intelligence and counterintelligence that the Plantagenets had not bothered to learn. The earliest English government example of the use of cipher in a dispatch comes from 1499.”
Liam Shaw reviews a new book on the search for the flightless seabird the great auk and how Victorians thought about extinction: “Pálsson argues that Newton understood humans to be a primary cause of species loss at a time when the idea was almost unthinkable. Even as industries such as whaling faltered, whalers attributed the decline in whales not to a fall in numbers but to increasingly evasive behaviour; they were supremely confident that more whales existed somewhere over the horizon to replenish the stocks. In Moby-Dick, Ishmael considers the possible ‘gradual extinction’ of the sperm whale but argues that the whales can always retreat to safety in their ‘citadels’ in the icy polar seas, ‘as upon the invasion of their valleys, the frosty Swiss have retreated to their mountains.’ Humans have been slow to accept that species are not eternal.”
You may know that the editor of First Things, Rusty Reno, is an avid rock climber. He is famous for having taken a 200-foot fall at El Cap and has written about his passion for rock climbing for various publications over the years (the Beatrice Institute has a great interview with him on how he got into climbing and his El Cap fall). In Rusty’s latest piece on the topic, he considers the virtues of scaling a sheer face hundreds of feet above the ground:
Breathing is hard at 11,000 feet above sea level, and we’ve already climbed more than 800 feet up the Petit Grepon, an imposing granite spire in Rocky Mountain National Park. And I’m happy. I’m struck by the paradox: under physical strain, courting danger, exposed—and enjoying the peace that comes from concentrated, fluid, and purposeful activity. It’s a familiar experience. I enjoy climbing, even when (perhaps because) it sometimes brings exhaustion, physical suffering, anguishing uncertainty, and moments of terror. I climb on, reaching for holds, angling my body to gain the best purchase on the small edges. The rock wall falls away below me. The achingly blue sky beckons above. I slot a few more pieces into rock crevices as I make my way upward. Soon I’m tying into anchors on the sought-after ledge, yelling “Off belay” to my partner 150 feet below.
More:
C. S. Lewis observed that, unlike romantic love, in which lovers engage each other face-to-face, friendship arranges us shoulder-to shoulder. We talk easily with friends about themes of common interest. We embark on shared projects and adventures. When friends are well-matched, conversation flows easily. There’s a fluid give-and-take, like runners passing batons to the next person in the relay. True friends pull in the same direction. They may face impediments and difficulties—such is life. But friction comes from without, not within their relations.
Rock climbing encourages this kind of friendship. We share a common objective: Get to the top, and then safely down. At the summit, it’s our triumph, not mine or his. When difficulties are too great and risks too grave, we turn back together.
There’s a deeper dimension to partnership in climbing. Trust is a kind of letting go. At its most intense, trust involves giving responsibility for something precious and essential to the other. When I’m climbing, I’m usually confident I will not fall. But I might, and I have. In a very real sense, every time I’m on the rock wall, I’m entrusting my life to my partner. The effect is freedom. He is managing the rope, my lifeline, liberating me to think only of my task—to make the moves.
Ted Gioia writes about how the composer Philip Glass worked blue-collar jobs to support his family:
In his autobiography, Glass explains: “I could manage quite well working as few as twenty to twenty-five hours a week—in other words, three full days or five half days. Even after I returned from Paris or India in the late 1960s and well into the 1970s, I could take care of my family by working no more than three or four days a week.”
Like many artists, Glass took advantage of the revitalization of Soho, when industrial lofts were converted into residences and creative spaces. But Glass benefited in a different way from other musicians—he actually built artist lofts.
At first, he got jobs installing walls with sheet rock. “This was heavy work,” he recalls. Then he started taking on plumbing jobs—even though he had no experience in the field. When he had an installation job, he got advice from the guys who worked at the plumbing supply store on Eighth Avenue near 18th.
He simply did what they told him—and gradually learned the plumbing trade. He started with sinks and toilets, and worked up to hot water heaters and interior pipes. For three years, he worked for a plumbing company on Prince Street off of West Broadway.
This sometimes led to strange encounters. Glass shared this story in a 2001 interview: “I had gone to install a dishwasher in a loft in SoHo. While working, I suddenly heard a noise and looked up to find Robert Hughes, the art critic of Time magazine, staring at me in disbelief. ‘But you’re Philip Glass! What are you doing here?’ It was obvious that I was installing his dishwasher and I told him I would soon be finished. ‘But you are an artist,’ he protested. I explained that I was an artist but that I was sometimes a plumber as well and that he should go away and let me finish.”
Nic Rowan writes about the appeal of skyscrapers in Saudi Arabia and around the world:
The idea is that by constructing outlandishly tall buildings, Saudi Arabia, following the lead of the United Arab Emirates, can transform itself from a country whose economy is dependent on goods (oil) to one more reliant on services (luxury travel) for its flourishing.
But why with skyscrapers? This is the question that Jason M. Barr seeks to answer with his new book Cities in the Sky: The Quest to Build the World’s Tallest Skyscrapers. In it, he proposes that skyscrapers are the primary engines of the global economy. “We want them and we need them,” he writes in the book’s introduction. “You may not directly ask for them, but we are all part of the larger system of networks and nodes of trade and urbanization that gives rise to tall buildings.” Barr, who is an economist by trade, argues that, whether it is the Empire State Building, Sears Tower, or the Burj Khalifa, the driving motivation for raising the world’s tallest buildings is economic—no matter what anyone claims to the contrary. “I have come to see that too much emphasis is placed on the ‘ego theory,’” he writes, adding that while some developers and architects are blowhards with crazy dreams, the cold fact is that “a city’s population and its GDP are the two most important predictors of how many—and how tall—a city’s skyscrapers will be, making economics their fundamental driver.”
On paper, Barr is of course correct in his analysis. Anyone who participates in the global economy is bound by the rule that all we do, we do for money. In this case, however, he is mistaken to draw such a hard line between ego and economics (he hardly leaves room for any other motivations). Anyone who has climbed to the top of a skyscraper knows that these distinctions become meaningless at such great heights. The desire for wealth is a base thing, and while it may lay the foundation of the tower, on its own it cannot rise much higher than the trading floors and malls which occupy the real estate at street level. When the tower begins to reach toward the sky, it often conveys that desire along with it, stretching and reshaping it as the building tapers upward. In the offices above the malls and trading floors, the lust for money becomes a lust for power. In the luxury apartments above the offices, the need for power gives way to requirements of ostentation; and in the penthouses above those, ostentation disguises itself as magnificence. Finally, higher than even that, at the tip of the spire, all that remains is desire—pure desire—the sort of unfulfillable longing that dare not look back on the world below, knowing full well that what it has left behind is vanity, all vanity.
Christopher Sandford revisits the work of Joseph Conrad on the 100th anniversary of his death: “There is a long tradition of critics misunderstanding Conrad, surely in part because both the man himself and his works are so full of humanizing contradictions. He was the youthful adventurer who developed a debilitating need for domestic order and stability; the forbiddingly austere chronicler of man’s fallen nature who could turn a comic phrase with which P. G. Wodehouse might not have been disappointed . . . a hypochondriac who was an all-too-real martyr to gout and toothache, neither of which served to mollify a personality already prone to the choleric; a curious mixture of patriotism and skepticism; a native Polish speaker justly celebrated for his mastery of the most intricate nuances of the English language who struggled all his life with what he called the “elusive mother tongue,” only coming to speak it in his early twenties; and a man who for the most part hid himself behind a mask of inscrutable courtesy. As H. G. Wells noted, expressing a widely held view of those who came into direct contact with Conrad: ‘He impressed me as the strangest of creatures. . . . [He had] a trouble-wrinkled forehead and very troubled dark eyes, and the gestures of his hands and arms were from the shoulders and very Oriental indeed.’”
Poem: Geraldine Clarkson, “Postscript”
Diane Scharper reviews Willard Spiegelman’s biography of the poet Amy Clampitt:
Examining Clampitt’s career, the influences behind her poetry and Amy herself—he calls her Amy—Spiegelman suggests Clampitt succeeded mostly because her work had a vitality and a spiritual component that other poets lacked. Her poetry teems with metaphors and buzzes with sound. It is nothing like the terse, imagistic poems that were popular in the latter part of the 20th century.
Much of the credit for Clampitt’s achievement belongs to the complex, exuberant poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins, S.J., which inspired Clampitt’s luminous style. As Spiegelman describes it, she was first taken by the work of Hopkins at Grinnell College. His ornate imagery, sprung rhythms and sense of the spiritual undergirding the physical had a major impact on her.
As Clampitt said in a Paris Review interview, her greatest debt was to Hopkins. She owed him her “delight in all things physical, the wallowing in sheer sound, [and] the extravagance of the possibilities of language.” In fact, Hopkins’s poem “As Kingfishers Catch Fire” served as the basis for “The Kingfisher,” the title poem of Clampitt’s first collection.
The problem with fact-checking: M. Anthony Mills writes in The New Atlantis about how fact-checking is now used to manipulate public opinion—not eliminate falsehoods: “Defenders of the new style of fact-checking insist that it preserves the best of the old traditions of factual accuracy and adversarial journalism for a new, radically different media and political environment. Critics, by contrast — though not always on the political Right — argue that because fact-checking now means checking not just politicians’ speech but online discourse in general, it looks less like a benign public service than manipulation of public opinion.”
Oliver Traldi reviews J.P. Messina’s Private Censorship: “By taking censorship rather than free speech as its primary reference point, Private Censorship adds an important perspective on these issues. Defenders of cancel culture are fond, for example, of saying that freedom of speech does not entail the freedom from condemnation of that speech or from some of the consequences that might attend such condemnation. And that’s certainly true. But by the same token, the freedom of association enjoyed by individuals and groups, which underlies the greater legal latitude they’re afforded for actions like censorship, does not entail freedom from condemnation either. In Messina’s account, if a company or organization engages in a great deal of censorship, they undermine public discourse and make it less likely that we as a society will get to the truth of the matter, and thus are appropriate targets of condemnation themselves.”
Michael Arditti praises Elif Shafak’s novel There Are Rivers in the Sky: “Water is both the unifying image and the dominant concern of Elif Shafak’s gloriously expansive and intellectually rich There Are Rivers in the Sky. After a brief prologue in seventh-century BC Mesopotamia, it consists of three strands.”
A 2,000-year-old mosaic has been discovered in England: “The decorated floor covering depicts stylized dolphins and several species of fish. It was located in a home likely owned by a wealthy and powerful family, according to a press release by Vianova Archaeology & Heritage Services, one of the organizations involved in the excavation.”
The man who invented the 40/4 chair: “You can stack 40 of them at a height of just 4 feet. Singly, they can fill a room. Then they can be packed up into a tiny storage space. [David] Rowland’s chair debuted in 1964. That year, it won the grand prize at the Triennale di Milano, the annual exhibition mecca for art and design. Since then, the 40/4 has become part of many permanent collections, including at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Musée D’Orsay in Paris. But it’s no museum piece. Many examples of midcentury modern furniture now look very much “of their time.” By contrast, the 40/4 seems timeless. It looks equally at home inside a modern office or at the ancient edifice of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London.”
Forthcoming: Caroline Burt and Richard Partington, Arise, England: Six Kings and the Making of the English State (Faber & Faber, September 17): “Between 1199 and 1399, English politics was high drama. These two centuries witnessed savage political blood-letting – including civil war, deposition, the murder of kings and the ruthless execution of rebel lords – as well as international warfare, devastating national pandemic, economic crisis and the first major peasant uprising in English history. Arise, England uses the six Plantagenet kings who ruled during these two centuries to explore England’s emergent statehood. Drawing on original accounts and arresting new research, it draws resonances between government, international relations, and the abilities, egos and ambitions of political actors, then and now. Colourful and complicated, and by turns impressive and hateful, the six kings stride through the story; but arguably the greatest character is the emerging English state itself.”
Oh my, what a poem. As someone moving through the reality of illness, grief, dying and letting go, it touched me. Thank you.