Saturday Links
One-Euro Sicilian homes, Christianity and horror, Rod Serling’s WWII short story, against victimhood art, and more.
Good morning! What happened after towns in Sicily offered homes for one Euro? Lisa Abend reports: “The morning after my dinner in Sambuca di Sicilia, I leave my home base to see my first one-euro house. Before that, I stop in the Valley of the Temples. Located in a national park, the valley preserves the remains of a Greek colony founded in the 6th century B.C.E. on land inhabited by the indigenous Sicani. A couple of millennia later, the original temples to Hercules and Hera survive, but so does evidence of Carthaginian rampage and Roman reconstruction. Those peoples would in time be followed by Vandals from northern Europe and Muslims from Africa, to say nothing of the French and Spanish. Standing there, looking at the gold-colored columns of once-grand temples set against the sparkling sea and flowering almond trees, time seemed to bend. Outsiders, I realize, have been making their homes here for a long time. They’ve also been leaving. When I arrive in Cammarata, a steep jumble of a village whose mountains are dusted with snow, I can feel an absence. In the winter sunshine, it’s beautiful, but it’s also empty. In the 15 minutes I spend standing in front of a very sleepy-looking town hall, where I’ve arranged to meet architect Martina Giracello, not one person passes by.”
In The American Conservative, Peter Tonguette revisits Arlene Croce’s 1994 essay in The New Yorker on victimhood and art:
How can you critique, contend with, or question a work of art centered on the ill or the dying? Thirty years ago, the great American dance critic Arlene Croce had the temerity to answer the question honestly: You can’t.
In the end-of-year double issue of The New Yorker in December 1994, Croce published a blistering broadside against what was then a still-novel trend, the valorization of victimhood in contemporary art. Croce’s piece, titled “Discussing the Undiscussable,” was occasioned by her decision to skip the celebrated dance piece Still/Here by African-American choreographer Bill T. Jones, a work that was inspired by, and made direct use of, the sentiments of real people grappling with terminal illnesses. That category included Jones himself, an HIV-positive homosexual man. (The much-lauded Jones is now 72.) Professional dancers performed the piece, but first-person accounts of ill patients informed it and were spliced in through audio and video.
“If I understand ‘Still/Here’ correctly, and I think I do—the publicity has been deafening—it is a kind of messianic travelling medicine show, designed to do some good for sufferers of fatal illnesses, both those in the cast and those thousands more who may be in the audience,” wrote Croce, who successfully encapsulated the aims and methods of the dance before stating her reasons for saying “thanks, but no thanks.”
For Croce, choosing to steer clear of Still/Here was a way of conceding her own paralysis in the face of art dependent on victimization and making the essential point that audience paralysis is what such works intend. This dance does not exist to stir debate, let alone to invite argument, but to elicit sympathy for the victims it allegedly speaks for.
“By working dying people into his act, Jones is putting himself beyond the reach of criticism,” wrote Croce, who had been contributing dance reviews to The New Yorker for decades. “I think of him as literally undiscussable—the most extreme case among the distressingly many now representing themselves to the public not as artists but as victims and martyrs.”
Tonguette goes on to note that “Croce called victimhood ‘a kind of mass delusion that has taken hold of previously responsible sectors of our culture.’”
The journal Anglo-Saxon England has been renamed Early Medieval England and its Neighbours. The decision doesn’t make sense: “It is of course striking that Cambridge University Press has not been clear about their intentions behind this rebrand. It is obvious that their move from ‘Anglo-Saxon’ to ‘Early Medieval England’ is a political act, a capitulation to Mary Rambaran-Olm and her coterie. If the people behind the rebrand thought that this was a defensible position to take — if they thought that it could be rationally supported — they would surely have made an effort to present that case, rather than feebly evading the issue altogether.”
Tim Rice reviews Lyndsey Stonebridge’s We Are Free to Change the World: Hannah Arendt's Lessons in Love and Disobedience: “Hannah Arendt was a titan of political theory, an original thinker who put modern politics in dialogue with the Western philosophical tradition and helped the 20th century understand itself. She was also, as University of Birmingham professor Lyndsey Stonebridge insists repeatedly throughout We Are Free to Change the World, a woman, a refugee, and someone who liked long walks, talking to her friends, and vibing out while thinking about the craziness of life. You don’t need a Ph.D. in political theory to see the dissonance between these two characterizations of Arendt—nor to surmise that the former is more accurate. Stonebridge’s book fails by attempting to reduce the author of Der Liebesbegriff bei Augustin into a lifestyle blogger, inferring too much about her life and flattening most of her work in the process. It’s an unfortunate approach, but it’s hardly a novel one.”
The Stand has published a short story by The Twilight Zone’s Rod Serling: “Not long after he returned from the war in 1946, Serling attended Antioch College on the G.I. bill. There, in his early 20s, he penned ‘First Squad, First Platoon,’ a short story which is being published for the first time Thursday in The Strand. It was one of his earliest stories, starting a writing career that Serling once said helped him get the war ‘out of his gut.’”
Poem: Benjamin Myers, “Our Daughter Beside the Sea: Blue Hill, Maine”
When a game of Rock Paper Scissors determined who would sell a collection of Impressionist and Modernist paintings: “Across 200 years of competition, Sotheby’s and Christie’s have adopted daring and surreptitious tactics in pursuit of securing consignments. None stranger, however, than those employed in a Tokyo conference room in 2005.”
Peter Leithart’s Theopolis Institute hosts an online forum on horror. Read the opening essay by Justin Lee and responses by Sebastian Milbank, John Wilson, Zach Parker, and Ryan Duns.
Helen Andrews reviews Austin Frerick’s Barons: Money, Power, and the Corruption of America’s Food Industry: “Austin Frerick declares himself surprised to find conservatives among his allies in his fight against consolidation in American agriculture. In his new book Barons: Money, Power, and the Corruption of America’s Food Industry, he marvels that in the 1990s, when hog farming was making its transition from medium-sized farms to massive, environmentally hazardous ‘confinements,’ the only presidential contender to propose new regulation was ‘right-wing commentator Pat Buchanan.’ This pro-farmer stand was one reason Buchanan came close to winning the 1996 Iowa caucuses, which as Frerick says ‘elevated him from protest candidate to legitimate contender.’ Frerick is a staunch Democrat, but if there is one issue where the left and the populist right can make common cause, it’s farm policy.”
In the latest issue of First Things, Valerie Stivers writes about her conversion to Catholicism after reading Sigrid Undset’s Kristin Lavransdatter:
For years I have been writing for the website of the Paris Review a series of essays in which I cook from classic literature. I select food scenes from great novels, make up recipes for them, cook and photograph them, and then write about the meaning of the food in the work. The process is equal parts criticism and mysticism: I always learn something about the book through how the food turns out.
For my column I’m always looking for books in translation, written by authors who represent different food cultures. In spring of 2021, a few months after—finally—making the formal separation from my husband, I came across Kristin Lavransdatter, a novel set in the Middle Ages and published in the 1920s. Its author, the Norwegian writer Sigrid Undset, was an adult convert to Catholicism, and the book reflects her religious concerns. That part wasn’t important to me—my youthful interest in the subject had long been abandoned—but I found the book to be an absolute masterpiece. Undset responds to Joyce and modernism while commenting on feminism and womanhood—all in a medieval tale. I came up through women’s studies programs. I read endless iterations of A Room of One’s Own and “The Yellow Wallpaper” and other rejections of the stultifying roles of women, at the same time that my teachers and fellow students decried the lack of women’s voices and women’s experiences in literature. For any of these courses, Kristin Lavransdatter, which leans into, not out of, women’s biological reality, should have been a foundational text. Among its many other virtues, it is the only great work of literature I’ve come across that makes the ghastly mess of sequential childbearing a pillar of the narrative.
In the latest issue of The Washington Examiner, I review Eli Burnstein’s Dictionary of Fine Distinctions: Nuances, Niceties, and Subtle Shades of Meaning:
Burnstein devotes much of the book to the differences between commonly confused objects. Every reader of this magazine will already know the difference between England and the United Kingdom or between a symphony and a concerto. Most will also likely know the difference between an epigram and an aphorism or between a crypt and a catacomb, even if they might struggle to define that difference succinctly. (An aphorism is a short philosophical saying, whereas an epigram is a witty one, Burnstein notes, though there is a fair amount of overlap. A crypt is a vaulted chamber for the dead under a church. A catacomb is a network of cells under a city. Or, as Burnstein puts it: “One is an underground tomb for the few, the other an underground cemetery for the many.”)
But fewer may remember the difference between a catapult and a trebuchet (the former hurls “objects through a sudden release of tension,” whereas the latter does the same with counterweights and a sling) or between ristorantes (for formal dining), trattorias (for casual dining), and osterias (for “very casual” dining). Our friends at Reason surely know the difference between a joint and a spliff, but Washington Examiner readers may be interested to learn a spliff is a joint that contains both tobacco and cannabis. A blunt is pure cannabis wrapped in tobacco paper.
Naomi Schaefer Riley reviews a critique of adoption: “In her new book, Relinquished: The Politics of Adoption and the Privilege of American Motherhood, Gretchen Sisson, a sociologist at the University of California in San Francisco, argues that our views about adoption are not informed by “lived experience.” And once we listen to the stories of mothers who placed their children for adoption (not adoption as a result of child maltreatment through the foster-care system), we will rethink this positive view and see adoption for the exploitative practice that it is.”
Forthcoming: Brett Lott, Gather the Olives: On Food and Hope and the Holy Land (Slant, June 18): “Through meditations on such varied matters as an olive oil cooperative run by Israeli and Palestinian women, a non-kosher butcher shop in the middle of upscale—and very kosher—German Colony, the nighttime harvesting of olives by Bedouins in downtown Jerusalem, a traditional Shabbat dinner at an ancient home within the walls of the Old City, a simple yet beautiful plate of fruit in an office in Ramallah, Bret Lott considers how food and the people with whom we share it can bring together hearts and souls in a lasting, meaningful, and peaceful way.”