I’m shocked and delighted that Anne Carson has won the Nobel Prize for literature. Back in 2003 I wrote about her translation of Sappho — in the context of her whole remarkable career to that point. And I compared the love poetry of Sappho and Carson alike to the Song of Songs.
As Graham Greene reported in his review of [Make Way for Tomorrow] in Night and Day in the summer of 1937, “a sense of misery and inhumanity is left vibrating in the nerves.” The film is a withering criticism of a terrible wrong — and an eloquent vindication of the justice of the New Deal that had recently been devised by liberal gerontocrats in Washington. (The first Social Security payments were sent out only a few months before the movie’s premiere.) The film is also a devastating repudiation of the spirit of [Samuel] Moyn’s book and its insolent generational partisanship. Watch Make Way for Tomorrow and you will throw the book across the room, and not only for sentimental reasons. The film represents an entirely different and more sympathetic approach to the problem that the French call un pere qui vit trop, the father who lives too long. I have always detected a tincture of sublimity in filial devotion. Indeed, filial devotion should be enlarged and elevated into a standard for humaneness and a basis for social policy. We would inhabit a less indecent society if somehow we could find in ourselves a measure of filial devotion for other people’s fathers and mothers, too. Biology is only biology. We will be known by our choices.
I wonder if Wieseltier happens to have read my commendation of Make Way for Tomorrow in the first issue of Portico.
I finally heard from OUP, so I have posted an update to the update. Again: I cannot wait until all this is over.
This exceptionally handsome fella is four years old today!
The Greatest Monument Builders of All Time - The Atlantic:
In place of the heroic proportions and rigidity of royal tradition, statues of Akhenaten emphasized eccentric curves — narrow shoulders, swelling hips, carefully detailed sagging tummy flesh, and a face at once cadaverous and voluptuous. The writer Thomas Mann used the analogy of “an aristocratic young Englishman of somewhat decadent stock; spare, haughty, weary,” but the stylizations could reach buglike extremes. A stela included in “Treasures” shows Akhenaten, Nefertiti, and two of their daughters as wasp-waisted, with bulbous thighs and spindly arms. And yet the affectionate way the two little girls hold hands seems entirely natural. In the context of royal Egyptian art, such scenes of familial intimacy were a novelty, and remain touching.
I wrote about Akhenaten (and his curious preferences in self-representation) in my series of posts on Mann’s Joseph and His Brothers.
I continue to believe that Manchester City will suffer no punishment for their cheating. They will appeal and delay, appeal and delay, making every possible use of their nearly endless financial resources, and eventually the whole thing will just fade away. I hope I’m wrong.
My post on what happened with my DLS biography has gotten more attention than I expected or wanted, so I had to write an update. I’ll be glad when all this is over.
C. S. Lewis, from That Hideous Strength:
“And so,” said Straik, “the lessons you learned at your mother’s knee return. God will have power to give eternal reward and eternal punishment.”
“God?” said Mark. “How does He come into it? I don’t believe in God.”
“But, my friend,” said Filostrato, “does it follow that because there was no God in the past that there will be no God also in the future?”
“Don’t you see,” said Straik, “that we are offering you the unspeakable glory of being present at the creation of God Almighty? Here, in this house, you shall meet the first sketch of the real God. It is a man — or a being made by man — who will finally ascend the throne of the universe. And rule forever.”
Wes and I looking out over the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone (2005). It’s one of those places that doesn’t look real in photographs — but doesn’t look real when you’re there either.
