Reviews and News:
Why do critics still hate Andrew Wyeth? "Certainly, critics have held the artist's conservative political leanings against him, as evidenced in Wyeth's New York Times obituary in which critic Michael Kimmelman found it relevant to point out that 'he voted for Nixon and Reagan.' Time magazine's Robert Hughes disparagingly described Wyeth's art as suggesting 'a frugal, bare-bones rectitude, glazed by nostalgia but incarnated in real objects, which millions of people look back upon as the lost marrow of American history.' That seems mild compared to what others have said. Robert Storr, for a time curator of Contemporary painting and sculpture at New York's Museum of Modern Art and currently dean of the Yale School of Art, wrote of Wyeth as 'our greatest living kitsch-meister.'"
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The real William the Conqueror: "The cheerful and generous nature many chroniclers ascribed to the victor of the battle of Hastings in fact belonged to someone else."
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In praise of the TransCanada Highway: "Railways give rise to a certain romance, with poets and historians rhapsodizing about how the ribbons of steel wrought a country out of the wilderness. There is truth in that, but road-building is rather more onerous, requiring more complex engineering, and the value to the ordinary person is so much greater. Expansive asphalt avenues open up vast possibilities of freedom, linking the great emptiness of Canada to its cities, and making it all accessible to rich and poor alike on roughly similar terms. Only a minuscule number of Canadians have driven the entire TCH from coast to coast, but it is a concrete — in some places literally — reminder, as close as the nearest on-ramp, that indeed we are a dominion a mari usque ad mare."
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Overselling ADHD meds.
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"Matt Bissonnette, a former member of Navy SEAL Team 6 who wrote an account of the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, agreed on Friday to forfeit $6.8 million in book royalties and speaking fees and apologized for failing to clear his disclosures with the Pentagon, according to federal court documents."
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How to visit a museum: "'Two hours maximum' is what Lisa Hanover of the James A. Michener Art Museum in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, advises for the length of a museum visit. Fatigue sets in earlier for others: Hower suggests 45 minutes, allowing additional time to visit the café and museum store…"
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Essay of the Day:
In Tablet, Shaul Magid asks: "Is it time to take the most-published man in human history seriously?"
"There are at least two ways to write a biography of an individual The New York Times called the most-published person in human history. In a little over half a century, Jacob Neusner published more than a thousand scholarly and popular books and countless essays, op-eds, and public and private letters, and was part of almost every significant American Jewish controversy since World War II. The first way to write the biography of such a person would be to write a multivolume 1,000-page tome plodding through each work, each period, each controversy, each accomplishment. The second would be a concise 300-page book that adeptly touches on the most important dimensions and contributions of this paradoxical intellectual figure (who remains the only person to be appointed to both the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Council on the Humanities), and to simultaneously honestly engage with, but not get mired in, the many controversies that he compulsively generated. To write such a biography the author would need to know how to separate the wheat from the chaff and how not to get seduced by the lure of tabloid scholarship. Thankfully, Aaron Hughes, the author of an extensive study of Neusner's scholarly work on religion titled Jacob Neusner on Religion: The Example of Judaism, chose the second option in his Jacob Neusner: An American Jewish Iconoclast (NYU Press), which navigates through the often-turbulent waters of a complicated, colorful, and in many ways unappreciated, intellectual life.
"The sad irony about Jacob Neusner is that he is arguably one of the most influential voices in American Jewish intellectual life in the past half-century—yet outside of the academy, and more specifically outside the academic study of Judaism, while many people know his name, few are actually familiar with his work. He is perhaps most widely known for his irascible, sometimes quite nasty, and often pugnacious personality, his famous excoriating reviews, sometimes book-length critiques, and his fallings-out with almost every institution he worked in, almost every teacher who taught him, many of his students—as well as the errors that scar his many translations and publications. He sued institutions he worked for and individuals who attacked his work. And yet, as Hughes shows, the importance of his contribution should not be underestimated.
"There is a joke that in 200 years when scholars study Neusner they will think Neusner was a 'school' and not a person. No one would imagine one individual could have produced that much work in such disparate areas, from late antique Judaism to the Holocaust, Zionism, Jewish-Christian relations, higher education, the humanities, and American politics (just to name a few). Hughes notes in his conclusion that Neusner may be 'the most important American-born Jewish thinker this country has produced.' It is a huge claim, for sure, and therefore contestable, but upon reflection, it is actually quite reasonable."
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Image of the Day: Dive
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Poem: Bhaskar Chakraborty, "Winter"
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