Wednesday Links
Ancient brains, medieval churches, Edgar Allan Poe in Vietnam, “Girls, girls, get that cash,” and more.
Good morning! President Biden awarded National Medal of Arts to 20 recipients on Monday evening. The winners included Steven Spielberg, Spike Lee, Queen Latifah, and Missy Elliot, among others. The singer-songwriter Elliot is known for classics like “Work It,” “Get Ur Freak On,” and “Dog in Heat.” Biden told the winners that “you are the masters of your craft that have made us a better America with all of you have done” and added that he knew “the power of the women in this room to get things done.” Was he alluding to this line from Elliot: “Girls, girls, get that cash / If it’s 9-to-5 or shakin’ your ass / Ain’t no shame ladies, do your thang / Just make sure you ahead of the game”? Probably not.
One of my favorite books of history at the moment is Nicholas Orme’s Going to Church in Medieval England, published by Yale in 2021. You might think that a book with chapter titles like “The Staff of the Church” might be a little dry, but it’s a fascinating read. In Chronicles, Derek Turner reviews Orme’s latest book, also from Yale, The History of England’s Cathedrals, in which he “focuses on grander buildings and statelier celebrations, showing how cathedrals emerged and evolved over 14 centuries, from their ‘Dark Ages’ origins.” Turner calls it “simultaneously deeply learned and piquantly evocative of an unrecoverable Europe.”
Remember the 80 activists who signed an open letter demanding London’s Old Vic cut ties with the Royal Bank of Canada because of the banks investments in fossil fuels and weapons manufacturing, which “have supplied the Israeli military during the war in Gaza”? No? Nobody else does either. As far as I can tell, the Old Vic ignored the open letter and got on with producing a great fall schedule, which included or will include, a new production of Tom Stoppard’s 1982 The Real Thing, a new play by Conor McPherson, and the final run of its popular adaptation of The Christmas Carol.
Peter Hitchens reads Nicholas Shakespeare’s biography of Ian Fleming and wonders why it was written: “There are already lives of Fleming by John Pearson (1966) and Andrew Lycett (1995). I should have thought that was quite enough. Even so, here is another one. You might think we were dealing here with a great war leader, the last of the Impressionist painters, or at least a Nobel Prize winner . . . I cannot say how many times, during Nicholas Shakespeare’s account of the life of Ian Fleming, I wondered what this book was for, whom it benefited, and why it had been written. There is nothing wrong with it as a piece of work. The research is diligent and thorough, obviously the fruit of conscientious hard work and patience. The volume is handsomely bound. The storytelling is excellent and well ordered. But I have seldom been so glad to finish a book, which had sat for some weeks by my chair radiating gloom into the room.”
I read and reviewed the book, too, and quite liked it. Why was it written? I don’t know, but I think that a book that is entertaining (even if also gloomy) and has “excellent” storytelling, as Mr. Hitchens himself observes, is reason enough.
Speaking of why things are written, Joseph Epstein reviews Oswyn Murray’s The Muse of History: The Ancient Greeks from the Enlightenment to the Present:
Historiography, the history of history, is a richly complex subject, which asks why history has been written the way it has. Ever mindful of the truth factor in the portrayal of the past, it seeks out the ways it has been told and the most accurate ways it can be told. “History is written by victors” is perhaps the most common adage of historiography, and indubitably a false one. Victors may set out their own record of the past, but the past, on closer examination, is more complicated than their imagining. For the historiographer more, much more, is involved in history than a record of its winners and losers.
Oswyn Murray’s The Muse of History: The Ancient Greeks from the Enlightenment to the Present provides an account of both how history has been written and the theories, conscious and unconscious, that have supported its various leading versions over the past three centuries. A retired Oxford don whose speciality is the world of classical antiquity, Murray is the great-grandson of James Murray, the founding editor of The Oxford English Dictionary . . . The Muse of History provides a cavalcade of the notable scholars of history. Along with Jacob Burckhardt, Murray provides profiles of various lengths of John Gast, Edward Gibbon, Walter Scott, George Grote, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Gilbert Murray, B.G. Niebuhr, Benedetto Croce, Moses Finley, and others. He has an excellent chapter on Socrates, in which he notes that “from the Platonic dialogue arose the art form of the novel.” . . . Another is devoted to the Warburg Institute and the diaspora of German-Jewish scholars who fled Hitler to continue their studies at the Warburg in London. Murray is not fearful of strong judgments. “Fernand Braudel (1902-85) was the greatest historian of the twentieth century,” he writes. Again: The “most significant book on Roman history since the beginning of the [twentieth] century [is] Ronald Syme’s The Roman Revolution.”
More:
If a central argument plays through the pages of The Muse of History it is “ancient history as the interplay between great concepts, rather than as the history of events and political and military power struggles of a long-dead civilization.” The meaning of history, in Murray’s view, is not to be found so much in cause and effect, nor in the emergence or want of great men to engage with great events, though neither can these be entirely eliminated: Economic depressions, surely, have causes; and without Winston Churchill, the outcome of World War II might have been quite different. But Murray’s larger argument is one against positivism.
Alexandra Morton-Hayward collects ancient brains. Here’s Kermit Pattison with the story in The Guardian: “At Oxford, where she is a doctoral candidate, she has gathered the world’s largest collection of ancient brains, some as old as 8,000 years. Additionally, after poring over centuries of scientific literature, she has tallied a staggering catalogue of cases – more than 4,400 preserved brains as old as 12,000 years. Using advanced technologies such as mass spectrometry and particle accelerators, she is leading a new effort to reveal the molecular secrets that have enabled some human brains to survive longer than Stonehenge or the Great Pyramid of Giza.”
Edgar Allan Poe in Vietnam: “For most of its history, Vietnam was dominated by the Chinese-originated genre of chuanqi—short stories of strange encounters with gods, spirits and demons, often laden with social commentary. Thus, when Poe came to Vietnam, escorted by Baudelaire’s praises for being an imaginative writer, he quickly found an audience engrossed in his tales of sentient houses and premature burials. Soon enough, Poe became the singular American author to cast a broad shadow over the dawn of modern Vietnamese literature.”
A journalist’s journalist: “No one should be put off reading Patrick Cockburn’s remarkable biography of his father by its misleading subtitle. ‘Guerrilla journalism’ doesn’t do justice to its subject. The suggestion of irregular warfare from the left underrates Claud Cockburn’s great accomplishments in mainstream politics and journalism and doesn’t begin to embrace the romantic and daring complexity of his life and career.”
The example of Boethius: “In a prison dank and dark, somewhere outside the town of Pavia in northern Italy, a middle-aged man whiles away his final days, writing. His execution looms, and he knows it. Understandably, he feels quite sorry for himself, reflecting on the injustice of a ruler who believed falsehoods about him—falsehoods that have landed him, after a life of extreme privilege and significant political power, in this jail. Forsaken (as he believes) by both God and other men, he wonders: Did it have to end thus? Suddenly he realizes he is not alone. A beautiful lady, larger than life, clearly superhuman, appears to him. She introduces herself as Philosophia.”
Totally agree on those Orme books. That cathedrals book is wonderful.
Thanks so much for pointing to the article about Vietnam and Poe and for the Boethius article.
On the presidential medals - you think a bit of pandering is on display here? Couldn’t be. I can’t say much about Missy Eliot(sounds like a wise , perceptive observer of human affairs).I can say a thing or two about Stephen Spielberg and Spike Lee. Spielberg is probably the most overrated film director in history. He produces decent , polished schlock, dare I say kitsch.Yet we’re continuously told this artistically unadventurous utterly conventional purveyor of Hollywood progressive wisdom and juvenilia is a genius. I think he peaked with Jaws. I can only laugh when I think of his West Side Story remake which had the New York Times in a state of near ecstasy because it had a diverse cast. Who cares if it was any good!As for Spike Lee , he’s also a genius because, because of what exactly? Think of Clockers - the film which should have been interesting is a boring, incoherent mess. Malcom X is stiff. Don’t get me started on Do The Right Thing!Yeah , these medals are tributes to greatness ! Makes me sympathize with Sartre refusing the Nobel prize and George C. Scott the Academy Award.