A bard by another portrait...

Everyone is excited that we have a new picture of the Bard. And isn't he a looker! As reported in the NYT:

"His face is open and alive, with a rosy, rather sweet expression, perhaps suggestive of modesty...There is nothing superior or haughty in the subject, which one might well expect to find in a face set off by such rich clothing. It is the face of a good listener, as well as of someone who exercised a natural restraint."


While the LA Times cheered that we are now blessed with a "hot young Shakespeare," the Irish Times and Irish independent are quick to point out that the portrait hung for years winking at an Irish house in an Irish family.

Verlyn Klinkenborg is on the other hand, is more meditative: "The most that can really be said is that the Cobbe portrait...was probably painted in Shakespeare's lifetime and that it bears a likeness to other reputed Shakespeare portraits...But given the stylized conventions of Elizabethan portraiture, a police dragnet in London circa 1610 might have turned up many dozens of men with a resemblance to this image. What we have, as always with Shakespeare, is a trail that leads us back to the past and dissolves into uncertainty..." And Andrew Dickson and Charlotte Higgins are more skeptical; Dickson notes that "this isn't the first 'new' image of Shakespeare we've seen," and despite the approval of Professor Stanley Wells (chairman of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust) Tarnya Cooper, the 16th-century curator at London's National Portrait Gallery is "very sceptical," and notes that while she does "respect Wells's scholarship enormously...portraiture is a very different area, and this doesn't add up."

In any case, the hits keep coming as architects discover the remains of Shakespeare's first theatre (before the Globe) out in "the suburbs of sin" surrounding central London. The Tower Theatre company, which owns the site, plans to build "a 21st Century equivalent of the original playhouse, a 'no frills, hard-working place of entertainment' that would bring London theatre 'back to its roots.'" And because it was the right time, apparently, the archaeologists even found a piece of 16th-century pottery with what looks like Shakespeare's face on the site. "There is no proof that the face on the fragment of Beauvais pottery is the Bard's," Maev Kennedy reports, "but insiders are excited."
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Literature on the Web: “a good book is the precious life-blood of a master spirit…”

In a TLS review, Jonathan Bate suggests that Milton has been a mirror which each era's biographers have used to reflect their professional self-image. "For Masson," he writes "it was sufficient to be clubbable around the Athenaeum. For William Empson in the following century, the professor of literature could be the naughty schoolboy throwing paper darts from the back row of the classroom (the Christian-baiting of Milton's God)." In reviewing Gordon Campbell and Thomas N. Corns' new biography, then, Bate notes that we see, in turn, "a Milton who would have been at home in the corridors of New Labour power or in the managerialized modern university. He is a nimble committee man, like some wily pro-vice-chancellor who proudly wears his radical credentials yet is prepared to write position papers to order and to modify his stance in response to subtle changes in the ideological direction of his leader." Bate doesn't much care for this approach, it seems, judging "an authoritative Life of Milton in which the pamphlet "Animadversions upon the Remonstrants Defence against Smectymnuus" is given three times as much space as Lycidas" to be only "symptomatic of an age in which professors in English departments have been 'making literature history.'" I have to admit, though, I don't mind seeing the pendulum swing this way a bit. It's not like anyone is going to stop reading "Lycidas" (or that long epic he wrote), and there are just too many gems buried in Milton's non-fiction prose to bemoan the fact that a little light is getting cast on the stuff he spent most of his life actually writing.

John Banville may think that civilization invented the sentence, but the death of writing does not - Adam Kirsch tells us - necessarily mean the end of writing: "Human beings wrote long before there were newspapers or books or even paper, and they will continue to do so when these have been replaced by pixels and bytes." In his Slate review of several new biographies of Samuel Johnson, Kirsch suggests that the age of the professional writer may be coming to an end, an ironic three centuries after "the greatest professional writer in English literature" declared that "No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money." Kirsch has a very low opinion of "a future when writing is something done casually, in brief blog bursts in one's spare time" and wonders whether "the kind of professional confidence and expertise that Johnson cultivated over a lifetime of paid work will appear as regrettably obsolete as books and newspapers themselves."

In that vein, it probably says something that Motoko Rich's NYT article doesn't focus on the literary merits of Jonathan Littell's 983-page novel The Kindly Ones - which are presumably great enough to justify "Publisher's Big Gamble on Divisive French Novel" - but rather on how amazing it is that an American publisher would take a risk on publishing a novel not only translated from French but also saddled with the handicap of having won France's most prestigious literary prize. Quel surprise!

In the same issue as it published fragments of the late David Foster Wallace's unfinished novels (and D.T.Max's tremendously sad account of Wallace's "Unifinished"), the New Yorker also had a review of Blake Bailey's new biography of John Cheever, and I couldn't help paying more attention to the by-line (the late John Updike) than to the substance of the review. I did, however, enjoy Bailey's estimation that he was one of possibly ten persons to have read through the the "forty-three hundred pages, mostly typed single-space," of Cheever's private journals, what he calls "a monument of tragicomic solipsism." But as the good people who are blogging Henry David Thoreau's journals (here and here), a sort of "this day in Thoreau's journal," there's nothing wrong with a bit of good old fashioned solipsism every now and again. Read full post....

Worlds of Literature

Every Wednesday, we'll post a round-up of links which may be of interest to the larger Berkeley English community. Let us know if you see anything you think we should pass along!

The great Sudanese writer, Tayeb Salih, passed away late last Tuesday. He's best known for his 1966 novel Season of Migration to the North, which Edward Said called "among the six finest novels to be written in modern Arabic literature." I want to know what the other five on that list were; it's a remarkable novel, and one that only gets better and more interesting with re-readings. Obituaries in the New York Times, the Guardian, and the Sudan Tribune. And Mustapha Marrouchi writes a more personal remembrance in Arab Comment and in a lovely memorial, the editors of AllAfrica hope that Tayeb Salih went "with a heart full of song and a face awash with a huge smile."

Was Dorothy Wordsworth "one of the casualties of 19th-century femininity" or "the most distinguished of English prose writers who never wrote a line for the general public"? In the New York Times, "A Brother's Keeper: The Other Wordsworth," Dwight Garner reviews Frances Wilson's The Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth: A Life.

Janet Maslin, "What Was With the Peacocks and the Gothic Fiction?" reviews Brad Gooch's Flannery: A Life of Flannery O'Connor, noting that "this mystical, ornery, ardently admired Southern writer" has been long overdue for a major new biography like this one.

In "The myths of Gabriel García Márquez," Philip Swanson reviews Gerald Martin's Gabriel García Márquez: A Life, the culmination of seventeen years of research which he predicts will be the authoritative work on what he calls the Nobel Prize winning novelist. Swanson is the author of Latin American Fiction: A short introduction, so presumably he knows what he's talking about, but I'd love to know on what basis he judges Garcia-Marquez to be "Latin America's perhaps only truly global writer."

In the Sunday Times, "Salman's Perfect Safe House," Geoffrey Robertson remembers hiding Salman Rushdie in his home, and how it "brought many of his left-wing friends into a closer and warmer contact with officers of Special Branch than they would have ever thought likely or even healthy."

Claudia Roth Pierpont's "Another Country," in The New Yorker, explores how James Baldwin made Istanbul what she calls his "second or third not-quite-home," during a period she also notes to have been "inescapably Baldwin's American decade." The essay is essentially a very long review of Magdalena J. Zaborowska's new book, James Baldwin's Turkish Decade.

In the Times Literary Supplement, "Amos Oz and Reverie" Anthony Cummins reviews Amos Oz's new novel, Rhyming Life and Death, which Oz has called a challenge to the reader who would rather be "handed a prepared dish" than be "invited into the kitchen." Cummins notes that such "solemn metafictional musing rarely feels like anything more than ballast for the breezy draughtsmanship of the character sketches," and wonders in the end whether "the novel may in the end be too slight to survive its own scrutiny." Read full post....