Saturday Links
Isaac Bashevis Singer’s older brother, a €100 million Botticelli in Italy, on making friends, the Great Poets’ Brawl of 1968, and more.
Good morning! A €100 million Botticelli has been found in a family home in Italy: “The artwork was originally displayed in a small church in the Italian town of Santa Maria la Arita before being given to a local family who safekept it in their private residence for several generations. However, the painting—one of the last works by Botticelli and valued around €100 million (roughly the same in USD)—disappeared under mysterious circumstances, and after a fruitless search by the Italian state, was considered lost.”
In The New Yorker, Adam Kirsch writes about the “forgotten giant of Yiddish fiction”— Isaac Bashevis Singer’s older brother:
In 1966, the critic Irving Howe published an essay whose title, “The Other Singer,” testified to a literary usurpation. For American readers in the nineteen-sixties, the name Singer meant Isaac Bashevis Singer, the only Yiddish writer to have reached the pinnacle of the American literary world. Singer’s stories about Jewish life in Poland, where he was born, and New York, where he settled in 1935, appeared in the Forward, the city’s leading Yiddish newspaper, before they were published in English in magazines including this one, Harper’s, and Playboy. It was an era when Jewish fiction was in vogue, with writers like Saul Bellow and Philip Roth on the best-seller lists; Singer won the National Book Award twice. In 1978, he became the first (and, to this day, the only) Yiddish writer to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.
In Howe’s opinion, however, the ascent of I. B. Singer—known to Yiddish readers by his nom de plume, Bashevis—was not a cause for celebration, because it meant the eclipse of a better writer: his older brother, Israel Joshua Singer. In the thirties and forties, it was I. J. Singer who was the star contributor to the Forward, writing both fiction and journalism, and whose books got translated in America and Europe. Maximillian Novak, a Yiddish scholar, writes in his book “The Writer as Exile: Israel Joshua Singer” that when Singer’s epic novel “The Brothers Ashkenazi” was published, in 1936, he was compared to Tolstoy and mentioned as a future candidate for the Nobel Prize. When he died, from a heart attack, in 1944, at the age of fifty, his younger brother Isaac was almost completely unknown.
David Mikics reviews Robert Boyers’s new book on Susan Sontag and George Steiner:
“Have you ever been given an order and just followed it? Or are you incapable of keeping your mouth shut and doing what you’re told?” Susan Sontag said to a cab driver who proposed a faster way to get downtown. His response was predictable: Get out of my cab. “You can’t be serious!” a genuinely surprised Sontag exclaimed, and then trudged home through the heavy rain.
Sontag’s companions that day in the taxi were Robert Boyers and his wife, Peg. Boyers’ new book, Maestros & Monsters: Days and Nights with Susan Sontag and George Steiner, about his friendships with Sontag and George Steiner, is full of juicy stories, some more appalling than others. Steiner, though a tough cookie and at times quite snooty, was no match for Sontag the tempestuous diva, who specialized in demeaning friends and foes alike.
But Maestros & Monsters is not merely about the bad behavior of a couple of intellectuals. (How bad could they be, anyway, compared to actors, financiers or rock stars?) Boyers delivers the gossip, but he also makes a serious case for the importance of Sontag and Steiner. Both were proudly independent and unafraid to dissent. They were a different species from today’s intellectuals, who run with the herd, largely conforming to progressivism’s neo-Stalinist orthodoxy.
As Philip Rieff noted in his 1966 book The Triumph of the Therapeutic, we live in a therapeutic culture in which the only authority is the authority of the self and its feelings. Alexander Stern reviews three books that “attempt, with varying degrees of success, to sketch pathways out of this predicament”: “In Ars Vitae, Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn surveys the resurgence of interest in ancient traditions and their modern analogs, including Gnosticism, Stoicism, Epicureanism, Cynicism, and her favored solution, Platonism. In The Age of Guilt, Mark Edmundson, like Rieff, turns to Freud for diagnosis and treatment of an out-of-control superego that he finds at the root of many of our psychosocial problems. And in Happiness in Action, philosopher Adam Adatto Sandel offers an alternative to modern striving in Aristotle’s concept of self-possession.”
I review a new book that tries to rehabilitate a version of the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis:
Whorfianism — the idea that language determines thought — has had its ups and downs. It was all the rage in the 1950s, fell out of favor in the 1960s, and had something of a revival in the 1980s as postmodern theories of language came into vogue in the United States. It hasn’t fared so greatly since, largely because it has been difficult to find evidence to support it. It hasn’t helped, either that it leads to the conclusion that if English, for example, determines the thoughts of English speakers, this idea could not be expressed in English.
In A Myriad of Tongues: How Languages Reveal Differences in How We Think, Caleb Everett tries to salvage a version of Whorfianism from the rubble. Everett, a professor of anthropology at the University of Miami, is the son of Daniel Everett, a major voice on the side of the linguistic relativists over the past twenty years. Everett states that he has no desire to revisit Whorf’s more “radical” claims . . . Yet, while Everett never directly claims that language determines thought, he regularly suggests that it may have a much stronger impact than we think.
I don’t buy it, as I explain in the review.
Poem: Aaron Belz, “Passionate Souls”
Allen C. Guelzo reviews Elizabeth Varon’s Longstreet: The Confederate General Who Defied the South: “There will probably come a time when every Civil War general officer will have received a full-dress biography of his own, irrespective of whether he accomplished much of real note. So it may be with a certain weariness of heart that we welcome the arrival of yet another heavy-duty Civil War general’s biography, Elizabeth Varon’s Longstreet: The Confederate General Who Defied the South. If so, however, it is an unrighteous weariness, for Varon is fully aware that most of the books about Civil War generals are weighed down by the dreary business of litigating battlefield performances. Varon’s Longstreet is instead about a general’s post-war life and a ‘political conversion’ of the most dramatic sort, and her purpose is to explore why a Confederate leader as prominent as James Longstreet could execute so complete a post-war political reversal — and survive.”
In The Hedgehog Review, Matt Dinan writes about the importance of friendship and about making friends in his thirties:
It began to dawn on me when social life was largely curtailed during the pandemic and I realized that my social calendar remained, for the most part, unchanged. Like many members of the itinerant creative class, I had good reasons for this. My family had moved three times in ten years, from one end of North America to another and then to another. If you had asked me, I would have said that I had many friends—perhaps too many—scattered from San Antonio to Olympia to Halifax. I would have said it made sense that I might have trouble maintaining close friendships with people I saw only once or twice a year. Perhaps I would have tried to console myself with Friedrich Nietzsche’s concept of the “star friendship”—that my friends and I inhabited a “tremendous but invisible stellar orbit in which our very different ways and goals [might] be included as small parts of this path.” But likely failing to convince myself of that, I would have said that with my life being so replete with other forms of human connection, friendship felt superfluous.
And friendship is superfluous. That makes it no less desirable, of course—but it means that when we arrange our lives according to necessity, we often don’t know what to do about friendships. As Aristotle points out, even if one had every other good, one would still choose to have friends. This recognition is what led me to make friends in my thirties: I came to see that because you don’t need friends, and they don’t need you, you must seek them out. And an insufficient understanding of how this makes friendship different from other forms of love is one of the primary roadblocks to finding friendship in our time and place.
Social media may be bad for you, but it’s not an addiction:
Almost 60 percent of American adults think they spend too much time on their phones, and social media represents one of the biggest time sucks: On average adults spend more than 2 and a half hours on social media sites like TikTok, Facebook, and Instagram every day, while teenagers clock nearly double that. All that scrolling, as we know, can leave people feeling sad and anxious, sleeping badly, doing poorly in school, getting little done at work, and neglecting friends and family.
So is attachment to social media an addiction? Many psychologists and public health figures think so, based on criteria used to diagnose other forms of addiction, such as internet gaming addiction . . . Now a small but thoughtful new study in PLOS One calls into question whether addiction is the right term for heavy social media use, and suggests digital detox, at least over the short term, may not have much impact on mental health at all. “I think ‘addiction’ is the wrong word to use,” says Durham University psychologist Michael Wadsley, co-author of the study. “Social media can certainly be problematic and people can use it in harmful ways, but I think we should be careful not to over-pathologize behavior as an addiction.”
Nick Ripatrazone writes about the Poets’ Brawl of 1968: “From June 21 to June 23, 1968, poets convened on Long Island. It was a formidable group . . . The arriving poets were treated to a meal of fresh lobster, and plenty of wine and vodka. Harrison once quipped that most academic conferences had spreads of cold cuts, and as a gourmand, he spared no expense at Stony Brook—going $50,000 over budget. The poets started out amiable, but by the first evening, they were drinking too much and gossiping. Simic noted that ‘every poet one admired or hated was likely to be there in person’ . . . According to Sanders, the fight started on the outside patio when ‘a male professor’ taunted ‘the wife of another professor.’ He said to her: ‘You’re nothing without your husband.’ Sanders stepped in to defend her, and was joined by another poet who ‘came up from behind and / broke a bottle of champagne over his head.’ The taunting poet tumbled into a glass table, shattering it, setting off the drunken brawl that spilled across Simpson’s suburban lawn.”
Forthcoming: Anthony Grafton, The Art of Magic from Faustus to Agrippa (Belknap, December 5): “In literary legend, Faustus is the quintessential occult personality of early modern Europe. The historical Faustus, however, was something quite different: a magus―a learned magician fully embedded in the scholarly currents and public life of the Renaissance. And he was hardly the only one. Anthony Grafton argues that the magus in sixteenth-century Europe was a distinctive intellectual type, both different from and indebted to medieval counterparts as well as contemporaries like the engineer, the artist, the Christian humanist, and the religious reformer. Alongside these better-known figures, the magus had a transformative impact on his social world.”
Haha. ‘came up from behind and / broke a bottle of champagne over his head.’ I would have trouble breaking a champagne bottle against a concrete curb. Poetic license I guess. Of course in ‘68 I turned 13 (at the end of the year) and my only experience with any kind of wine bottles was pilfering a bit from the gallon bottle of Gallo my father turned to very infrequently. Perhaps the bottles were more fragile then, or heads were harder.