Saturday Links
A life of King Cyrus, Cormac McCarthy as editor, the $55,000 ads of “Air Mail,” ancient glass, and more.
Happy Saturday morning, everyone! It’s already hot here in southeastern Virginia, but I am sitting comfortably inside sipping on my third cup of coffee and enjoying the morning sun and big blue sky. I’ve got work to do later this morning, then it’s off to play some golf with my brother, so let’s get to it, shall we?
First, if you missed John Wilson’s latest fiction chronicle yesterday, you’ll want to check it out. He recommends the novels of Eric Ambler but also talks about the pleasures of rereading. John’s piece is for paid subscribers only. If you haven’t given the paid email a try, why not sign up for a free trial? In addition to John’s monthly post, you’ll get three emails a week on the best in books and arts across the Web, plus another feature I hope to be adding soon!
Joel J. Miller has a great piece at his Substack on Cormac McCarthy as an editor. McCarthy, Miller writes, “preferred the company of scientists and actually moved to New Mexico to be close to the Santa Fe Institute, a multidisciplinary think tank”:
He joined the board of trustees and kept an office there among the physicists, mathematicians, biologists, archeologists, anthropologists, and economists.
It was for one of those economists McCarthy offered his editorial services in 1996, maybe for the first time. W. Brian Arthur was a fellow at the institute and had written an article on a new theory called increasing returns for Harvard Business Review. Arthur sent a draft to McCarthy and later called to see what he thought.
“Would you be interested in some editing help on that?” McCarthy responded. Arthur said yes, and the pair spent four days reworking the piece the next time they were together.
Edward Short reviews Ryan N. S. Topping’s Thinking as Though God Exists: Newman on Evangelizing the “Nones”: “If the good books on Saint John Henry Newman are few and far between, the bad ones are of a stupefying profusion. Why so bright and charming a man as Newman should have given rise to so many dull, slack, lifeless books is mystifying. Of course, it is easy to see why he inspires detractors. Dull men always resent their brilliant betters. Yet here I am not referring to Newman’s detractors but to those who cannot write of the man without distorting him. It is regrettable that an author as well-intentioned as Ryan N.S. Topping should fall into such a category, but there it is: Thinking as Though God Exists: Newman on Evangelizing the “Nones” is a seriously flawed book.”
Tony Wood reviews Karl Schlögel’s personal account of the Soviet Union: “Published in German in 2017, on the centenary of the Russian Revolution, the book is his attempt to capture the particular texture and experiences of Soviet life, memories of which are fast fading. It is also a personal reckoning, what Schlögel calls ‘a balance sheet, a sort of final account of my studies of Russia or the Soviet Union’. This doesn’t mean he plans to retire: Schlögel has another huge book out in German later this year, on American industrial modernity. But it does mark the end of his engagement with the Russia he studied and knew. It’s almost 35 years since the USSR entered its terminal crisis. As Schlögel puts it, ‘the quarter of a century that has elapsed since that time has shown how painful this process of transforming the former Soviet Union has been’ . . . Schlögel’s approach to his material isn’t exhaustive or systematic, and he doesn’t pretend the selection is anything other than personal. This is his own Soviet Wunderkammer. It’s not a coincidence that the book opens with chapters on flea markets (barakholki) and museums. At the bazaar in Moscow’s Izmailovsky Park in the early 1990s, Schlögel found electric irons, Party newspapers, old family photo albums, gramophones, Second World War memorabilia, stamp collections – ‘fragments of the world of objects belonging to the empire that has ceased to exist’. The Soviet museum is the orderly counterpart to the chaos of the barakholka.”
Poem: Tomas Tranströmer, “Breathing Space, July” (translated by Patty Crane)
Ancient glass: “Like any number of materials that we take for granted today, the exact origin of glass is shrouded in mystery. Where glassmaking first emerged is still highly debated. Rough and unworked fragments of glass appear in both Mesopotamia and Egypt around 2000 BC, but it wasn't until about 400 years later that glass vessels, amulets and jewellery began to be crafted in proper workshops.”
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Prufrock to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.