Saturday Links
Dark Jane Austen, in search of Vergil, an unauthorized Hunter S. Thompson musical, prehistoric counting, changes at "National Review," and more.
Good morning! The best new library in the world according to the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions is the Gabriel García Márquez Library in Barcelona: “In awarding the prize, the jury praised both its architecture and its innovative approach to encouraging local people to use the resource, the interaction between staff and the local community, the flexibility of the spaces and services, the commitment to learning and the sustainability of the building.” More pictures here.
I wanted to like Sarah Ruden’s new biography of Vergil, but I just couldn’t:
How to go about writing a biography of someone who left behind no memoir, no collection of letters, and whose entire biographical record consists of a few pages in Suetonius Tranquillus’s On Illustrious Men? Use historical contexts to speculate as to what he might have thought or could have done. Call it the Might-Have-Could-Have approach to biography.
The risk of such an approach is obvious. The subject of the biography becomes a mere object of our own projections. What we get is not Vergil himself, but the proto-fascist Vergil or the anti-imperialist Vergil, the proto-Christian Vergil or the gay Vergil. I am reminded of Daniel Mendelsohn’s article in the New Yorker a few years ago in which he presented Vergil as something of a tragic, bleeding-heart liberal, whose sympathies are on the side of the victims whom “‘empire’ leaves in its wake” but who was pressed into the service of empire nonetheless.
Ruden is aware of this risk. “We need to make our own peace with our own histories,” she writes, “and leave Vergil out of them.” She proposes to avoid it by sticking closely to what Vergil wrote and extrapolating only those biographical tidbits that seem plausible. H. L. Mencken may have been right when he wrote that criticism “is no more than prejudice made plausible.” But a biography that is no more than prejudice made plausible is no biography at all.
Amit Majmudar on Johann Peter Eckermann’s Conversations with Goethe: “Any discussion of Johann Peter Eckermann’s Conversations with Goethe ends up focusing, inevitably, on Goethe. The poet commands our fascination; we are grateful the record-keeper put in the work but eager to get past him and meet the celebrity. Yet Eckermann, in an age before audio and video recording, had a central role in creating the Goethe we encounter. Eckermann’s book is not a photograph but a portrait, as Ritchie Robertson makes clear in his introduction to Allan Blunden’s new Penguin Classics translation. Eckermann himself offers that image of his role in the first pages.”
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