Wednesday Links
On hating Valentine’s Day, loving opera, in praise of England’s quiet surrealist, forgotten female Catholic novelists, and more.
Good morning! Last night, my wife said: “Listen, we love each other, right? So, let’s skip Valentine’s Day.” Me: “Deal.” We did, however, have a tipple to mark Fat Tuesday, though we are not observing Lent either.
Matt Labash loves lots of things, he claims, but “if there’s one thing I have no love for — in fact, I hate it with my whole heart — it is this high crime of a day that rolls around every “Loveuary,” as the Hallmark Channel now calls it. Valentine’s Day is a scourge, a pestilence, a stain on our souls. To that end, I offer you this humble evergreen, explaining why Valentine’s Day should be eliminated, while illuminating what real love looks like when it’s not being coerced by cynical marketing hucksters.” Read it here.
Dana Gioia writes about his—and his parents’—love of opera: “I was raised among Italians and Mexicans, all deeply Catholic, even the atheists. Yet they half agreed with the Puritans. Opera crossed some boundary. It might not be depraved, but it was virulent in its pretention and sentimentality . . . I realized the dangers of opera too late to be saved. By ten I had already been corrupted by my parents. Neither of them had ever been to the opera. The notion would have struck them as absurd. But they loved singing, and that included the operatic arias they heard on variety shows. Back then opera stars were frequent guests on radio and television. There were about two dozen operatic standards that everyone knew.”
Peter Frankopan loves Amitav Ghosh’s new book on the devastation of the opium trade: “Ghosh’s focus in this book grew out of his ‘Ibis’ trilogy (beginning with Sea of Poppies), in which he came across many of the themes that appear here. Opium plays the central role; but rapacious greed, the evolution of poisonous ideas about race, mind-boggling double standards, the legacies of the past — and some painful modern parallels — provide an unsettling backdrop. Ghosh is too elegant a writer to frame his book through the prism of burning anger. Nevertheless, there is passion aplenty.”
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