Saturday Links
What makes a magazine, are travel sports good for kids, and why are most biennials trash?
Good morning! I have been reading Joseph Epstein for years, so it was an honor to review his autobiography and his selected essays for National Review: “Every reader of this magazine, surely, knows the name of Joseph Epstein. One of the most gifted and prolific essayists of the past 50 years, he is the author of over 30 books and has been published in many of the country’s most prestigious publications, including National Review. What readers may not know is that he never set out to be a writer.”
Speaking of Joseph Epstein, here he is in the latest issue of Claremont Review of Books taking stock of Tom Holland’s three-volume history of Rome:
Holland is a dab hand at biographical portraiture, and his Roman trilogy has given him a marvelous cast of players on whom to display it: the brothers Gracchus, Sulla, Marius, Pompey, Cicero, Cato, Agrippa, Maecenas, Seneca, the Plinys (Elder and Younger), Herod, Josephus, and many others. He treats some among them at length, some with a touch or two. “Herod the Great,” he writes, “a brutal but slippery survivor much admired by both Antony and Augustus, had richly deserved his renown…. He had raised temples to Augustus; graced Jerusalem with a theatre, a hippodrome, and various other monuments fit to impress any visiting Roman; and commissioned a stupefying harbor which he had named—with typical smoothness—Caesarea.” Of the 23-year-old Pompey, Holland sketches: “Precocious swagger, a genius for self-promotion and an almost childlike relish for the perks of success: these were to be the defining characteristics of Pompey’s rise to success…. Pompey always had a nose for where the richest opportunities might lie.”
Roman history reads like a vast novel, Tolstoy’s War and Peace played out in real life. Greece had the greater dramatists, the more elegant poets, the more profound philosophers, the deeper culture. But the Romans, like no other people, put human nature most vividly on display. Ambition, greed, the propensity to violence, envy, the yearning for approval, desire in its every form—all play out in Roman history as nowhere else. If God were a novelist, the history of Rome would comprise I do not say his finest but easily his most absorbing single work, one that bears endless re-reading, and one that has found a most able scribe in Tom Holland.
Highsnobiety.com has won a National Magazine Award for general excellence. As Jessica Testa writes in The New York Times, Highsnobiety started as “a sneaker blog in 2005. Today it is a website that covers fashion and youth culture broadly. It is also a clothing store and clothing line and, more lucratively, a creative consultancy and production agency. In other words, Highsnobiety writes about and recommends T-shirts, but it also makes its own T-shirts, sells and advertises other labels’ T-shirts, advises brands on how to market their T-shirts and throws big parties in honor of T-shirts.” Should it have won a magazine award? Testa doesn’t say. With articles like “HOW ARE NIKE'S TINY LEATHER WALLETS SO INCREDIBLY GOOD?” and “A BIRKENSTOCK BOSTON CLOG CHUNKED UP FOR CHEFS BUT DESIGNED FOR OUTDOORS” I am going to say no.
In Humanities—a real magazine— Angelica Aboulhosn writes about the marvels of Byzantine Africa: “Until recently, Roman and Byzantine art in North and East Africa—like the Lady of Carthage mosaic—was not considered African, says curator Andrea Myers Achi. Objects like these were ‘in Africa but not of Africa,’ she explains. The Met installation, by contrast, pays homage to the African context of the monks and writers, painters and weavers who made these wonders and lived alongside them. This is their story, elegantly told.”
Timothy Carney writes about the problem with travel teams in the latest issue of The Lamp:
“Baseball isn’t fun,” Coach told the boys gathered inside for their first workout of the year. “Winning baseball is fun.” The scene in the Baseball Zone Training Center that winter night was as different as could be from the idyllic “Friday Nights on the Field” where my son Charlie first swung a bat six years earlier. Spring was two months away, and I was already doubting my decision to sign Charlie up for a twelve-and-under “select” baseball team.
After years of successfully avoiding the rat race of elite youth sports in the Washington, D.C., suburbs, I had my first real encounter with this hypercompetitive beast. I use “competitive” in a narrow sense here: after the team’s sixth loss in seven games, the head coach would quit. “I’m washing my hands of this mess,” he would tell the parents.
Yes, the team’s infield defense was often a mess. The relief pitching was always a mess. That’s because twelve-year-old boys are a mess. But by the logic of today’s middle-class and upper-middle-class parenting culture, our team’s one-and-six start wasn’t simply unfortunate; it was shameful. This attitude—equating youth sports success with moral rectitude and seeing failure on the field as a failure of character—shone through before our players got their first at bats.
David Skinner reviews a new book about the volunteers who helped create the Oxford English Dictionary: “Organized into twenty-six alphabetical chapters, each one presented under the heading of a salient characteristic (‘H for Hopeless Contributors,’ ‘I for Inventors,’ ‘J for Junkie’), Ogilvie has written a dictionary of human beings who helped create the OED. The Dictionary People even mimics a reference work in its use of cross references. Rest assured, though, the book is a straightforward and compelling series of stories, not any kind of synoptic treatment of lexicography.”
Poem: Richard Tillinghast, “The Gardener”
Mark Bauerlein visits the only Carthusian monastery in North America: “In a hollow just north of Bennington, Vermont, near the New York state line, nineteen monks at the Charterhouse of the Transfiguration live and die in seclusion. It’s the only Carthusian site in North America, a remote spot in the shadow of Mt. Equinox, highest peak in the Taconic Range. In 2005 the documentary Into Great Silence gave secular audiences a reverent look at the Grande Chartreuse in France, the ‘Mother House’ of the Carthusians, and particularly the regimen of solitude and prayer, which struck viewers around the world as blissful, sweet, and wholly otherworldly. Here in New England it’s the same. There are no signs or markers pointing the way there. A bumpy side road passes a small reservoir, turns a corner, and the monastery appears, blank and quiet. The compound spreads across two acres behind an entrance crowned by a twenty-foot cement cross on a hill beside the gate. A ten-foot wall of monochromatic gray stone surrounds the buildings and gardens. The cemetery inside has a row of eight plain wooden crosses with no names or dates.”
Alex Garland’s Civil War, B. Duncan Moench writes, is “a good movie with very stupid politics”:
Civil War is both beautiful and horrifying, containing some of the most realistic urban combat scenes yet put to film. Seen in IMAX, it is downright jarring. Through Garland’s vision, we’re able to get a Dunkirk-like glimpse of what the worst case scenario of the culture war might look like. Internal U.S. refugees camped out in tent cities, receiving aid in graffitied stadiums. Highways of death filled with bombed out cars and trucks. Attack helicopters used on U.S. citizens. A total absence of law and order that allows armed lunatics to massacre anyone they deem not the proper kind of “American.”
The film relies on a mostly unexplained premise that a future third-term U.S. president has dissolved the FBI, turning the United States into an authoritarian state. Garland doesn’t beat the audience over the head with his intentions or his politics. However, in his press tour for the film—including an advance NYC screening earlier this week I attended—he revealed that he felt no need to explain why the country broke apart. “Everyone knows,” he says. Indeed, we do.
Without making it explicit in the film, Garland clearly wishes to make an allusion not just to the orange man—and his all-too-familiar badness—but the much-lamented rise of “dangerous populism” across the West. Garland is subtle in how he takes sides, but he clearly aligns with the elitist interpretation of rising mass dissatisfaction as driven by the bad behavior of deplorables and their ignorant love of “disinformation.”
Most art biennials are trash, Digby Warde-Aldam writes, in Spectator World: “If you’ve ever visited a biennale (or a triennale, a quinquennial or indeed, in the case of Germany’s Skulptur Projekte Münster, a decennial) all this will probably sound uncannily familiar. The format, conceived in Venice at the tail end of the nineteenth century, has since proliferated across the globe, from the US to Brazil to India and (in a big way) China. Venice — the next iteration of which opens in late April — remains the daddy of the biennale world, but a smattering of others, notably in São Paolo, Kassel and the Korean city of Gwangju, are taken almost as seriously. The other 300 or so such events that have sprung up worldwide, alas, do not command such respect. And for good reason.”
New release: Eli Burnstein, Dictionary of Fine Distinctions: Nuances, Niceties, and Subtle Shades of Meaning (Union Square, April 9): “What’s the difference between mazes and labyrinths? Proverbs and adages? Clementines and tangerines? Join author Eli Burnstein on a hairsplitter’s odyssey into the world of the ultra-subtle with Dictionary of Fine Distinctions. Illustrated by New Yorker cartoonist Liana Finck, this humorous dictionary takes a neurotic, brain-tickling plunge into the infinite (and infinitesimal) nuances that make up our world.”
I just purchased the Fine Distinctions book, It looks great. None of my now adult children were in any travel teams, but observing other families, I come away with the impression that it is a bade deal for families. It kills the unstructured hang out time during the weekends that my wife and I found so valuable for us and out three children.