Wednesday Links
In defense of the penny, biking the Dinaric Alps, Hollywood’s biggest flops, Jackson Lears’s essays, and more.

Good morning! I love to cycle, as some of you know, and so I was interested to read about a new cycling route across the Dinaric Alps: “Stretching 5,500km from Slovenia in the north to Albania in the south, the route climbs, twists and slaloms through national parks, Unesco sites and remote villages as it crosses the Dinaric Alps, one of Europe's most pristine and least-visited landscapes. The trail was inspired by the 2,000km-long Via Dinarica, a popular long-distance hiking trail that first opened in 2010 with the goal of reconnecting people across borders of this formerly war-torn region and attracting more tourists to the Balkans' lesser-known corners. While crowds of tourists flock to coastal resorts in Croatia and Montenegro, the craggy mountains, untamed rivers and dramatic canyons of the Western Balkans remain unknown to most travellers.”
In an excerpt from his new book—The Study: The Inner Life of Renaissance Libraries—Andrew Hui discusses what he claims is a new view of reading that emerges in the Renaissance: “From Augustine onward, the Christian tradition posits that reading is a dialogue with God. Machiavelli (and before him Petrarch) marked a change: in this new practice, reading became instead a dialogue with the voices of antiquity. In the 1330s, in Vaucluse, a remote valley in southern France, Petrarch constructed a little villa with a small study, in modest imitation of the ancients. While there were already private studies in the Burgundian courts and the papal palace in Avignon, Petrarch was one of the first to construct one unattached to any institutions. ‘Meanwhile here I have established my Rome, my Athens, and my spiritual fatherland’, he wrote. ‘Here I gather all the friends I now have or did have, not only those who have proved themselves through intimate contact and who have lived with me, but also those who died many centuries ago, known to me only through their writings.’ Petrarch inaugurated the idea of reviving classical antiquity as a transhistorical conversation between the living and the dead. The studiolo thus becomes a sort of chronotope, an ingathering of time and space, where the perception of the past, present, and future accelerates or dilates at the will of the reader. In their tiny corners of the world, Petrarch, Machiavelli, and Du Bois each in their own ways conjure a utopia of friends, binding together the far and near, the long-ago and recent past into the plenitude of the here and now.”
Christopher Caldwell reviews a new collection of Jackson Lears’s essays: “The Rutgers professor T.J. Jackson Lears is one of the most original historians of our time—so original, in fact, that it is hard to say exactly what he is a historian of. American thought and culture are his subject. His period is Reconstruction, the Gilded Age, the Progressive Era, the Great War … that cascade of political battles that make up the two long generations between 1865 and 1932, when the United States was re-founded by moneymen on the broken promises of the Civil War. Lears edits Raritan, a prestigious literary/cultural quarterly. Year-in, year-out, for decades, he was a star reviewer in the book pages of the New Republic and the Wilson Quarterly. There his commanding and highly readable essays often dealt with canonical American writers and thinkers—Henry Adams, William James, Van Wyck Brooks. But his life’s work, pursued in half a dozen book-length studies, has been to discover something more elusive—the history of American moods and inclinations, even of American character.”
Alexander Larman reviews a new book on Hollywood’s biggest flops: “Gore Vidal once sighed that “every time a friend succeeds, I die a little,” and there is inevitably a sense that when some idiotic blockbuster makes $1 billion worldwide, our collective intelligence loses a couple of IQ points. It’s a relief, then, when the worst examples of their kind, made at enormous cost to negligible artistic impact, flop hideously: proof that audiences will not fork out for any arrant piece of trash . . . Still, if Box Office Poison were merely 300-odd pages of elegantly written sarcasm and bitchy invective, it would quickly become tedious. Instead, Robey sets out to champion what he terms “the medium’s weirdos, outcasts, misfits and freaks” as much as he denigrates them. He is an admirer, endearingly, of such perennially underrated pictures as Tod Browning’s disturbing circus horror film Freaks and Orson Welles’s mutilated masterpiece The Magnificent Ambersons. He does a fine job, too, of arguing the case for such little-known examples as the Katherine Hepburn vehicle Sylvia Scarlett, which dealt with gender fluidity decades before the idea had entered the mainstream, and the ahead-of-its-time sci-fi adventure Speed Racer, which casts Roger Allam as its corporate villain and offers Robey the chance to make a good joke about the brothers Hitchens.”
The organ was once all the rage. So why is it so hard to find recordings of pieces written for the instrument? R.J. Stove investigates and recommends a few of his favorites: “One of Purcell’s very greatest masterpieces is his ode Hail, Bright Cecilia; and that ode’s very greatest single movement might well be the one that starts ‘Let these among themselves contest’, in which a pair of bass voices must slither over and under each other’s melodic lines as if they were two seraphic anacondas. The movement’s words are a tribute to the organ, with which music’s patron saint has traditionally been associated . . . Literally thousands, possibly millions, of pre-YouTube music-lovers eagerly pursued ancient operatic recordings . . . But ancient organ recordings? The market for them scarcely existed. A few stray reprints here and there, for the most part on obscure labels; the rest is largely silence, tempered by surface noise.”
Poem: Charles Martin, “Random Sestina”
James Panero writes about the Gilded Age’s medallic art: “How did America’s Gilded Age leave its most enduring mark? Through its architecture? Its institutions? By the numbers, the age’s most lasting currency has been its coins and medals. Consider the penny. The sculptor Victor David Brenner designed the Lincoln cent in 1909. Since then, the U.S. Mint has produced nearly five hundred billion pennies featuring Brenner’s obverse design. On August 6, 2012, one such coin minted in 1909, a rare variety featuring Brenner’s initials, touched down on the planet Mars as a passenger on the Curiosity mission. Since the lander used the penny as a calibration target, what is surely mankind’s most remote work of bas-relief sculpture became covered in Martian dust. Closer to home, but equally remote and dust-covered, there is probably a Lincoln cent in the pocket or couch cushion of every American. The New York Times Magazine recently saw fit to publish a cover story slamming the penny’s obsolescence, but no consideration was given to the astonishing success of its design. In the history of the world, no other work of sculpture has been as ubiquitous.”
The cult of Haruki Murakami: “The world of Murakami is a land of mysteries, but perhaps the most pressing enigma has less to do with the meaning of any of his novels and more to do with the unlikeliness of his literary rise. Born in Kyoto in 1949, Murakami came of age in the complicated decades following the devastations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki . . . Murakami married young, ran a jazz café called Peter Cat for much of his twenties, dragged his (admittedly tired) heels before finally graduating after seven years . . . In April 1978, Murakami attended a baseball game at Jingu Stadium in Tokyo. An American player named Dave Hilton hit a double into left field, and when the ‘satisfying crack’ of Hilton’s bat arrived at Murakami’s ears, he thought to himself, apropos of nothing, I think I can write a novel. And he was right.”
A new publisher plans to print 8,000 books a year with the help of AI: “A new publisher has claimed it aims to ‘disrupt’ the books industry by publishing 8,000 books in 2025 alone using artificial intelligence (AI). Spines, founded in 2021 but which published its first titles this year, is a startup technology business which—for a fee—is offering the use of AI to proofread, produce, publish and distribute books. The company charges up to $5,000 a book, but it can take just three weeks to go from a manuscript to a published title . . . Spines recently secured $16m in series A funding and claims to have so far published 273 titles in September 2024, 33 of which were published on the same day . . . ‘The goal is to help a million authors publish their books,’ Yehuda Niv, C.E.O and co-founder of Spines told The Bookseller.”
John Banville reviews Mark Lila’s new book on ignorance:
This is at once a wise and wonderfully enjoyable book. Mark Lilla treats weighty matters with a light touch, in an elegant prose style that crackles with dry wit. Almost every one of the short sections into which the narrative is divided – and there is a narrative, cunningly sustained within what seems a relaxed discursiveness – takes careful aim and at the end hits the bullseye with a sure and satisfying aphoristic thwock.
The central premise of the book is simply stated: “How is it that we are creatures who want to know and not to know?” Lilla, professor of humanities at Columbia University, New York, and the author of a handful of masterly studies of the terrain where political and intellectual sensibilities collide, is an acute observer of the vagaries of human behaviour and thought in general, and of our tendency to self-delusion in particular.
Israel versus Hamas in manga: “Since Oct. 7, comic artists, both Japanese and Israeli, have used manga as a medium to convey their thoughts about the Israel-Hamas war and its consequences, speaking to Japanese, Israeli and Palestinian, and global audiences. Through manga, all of these artists hope to voice their sometimes complex, sometimes unrefined, but always honest feelings about the events surrounding Oct. 7 and after. As the mangaka Guy Lenman explained, ‘I knew from the start I wanted to create comics about that, because this is my art, this is my talent. I will use it for good, I hope.’”
Forthcoming: Benjamin P. Myers, Ambiguity and Belonging: Essays on Place, Education, and Poetry (Belle Point Press, December 10): “Gathering critical observations about localism, liberal arts education, and contemporary poetics, Ambiguity and Belonging lays out the work necessary to live intentionally in one’s home, career, and vocation. With a unique perspective as a former state poet laureate, Myers intertwines personal reflections with close readings, poetry reviews, and cultural analysis, making these essays accessible to writers and educators interested in creating their own expressions of authentic community.”
Wonderful to read those Charles Martin poems. Thank you for that.