You know the old joke about the difference between your wife and your dog, right? If you put them both in the trunk of your car and come back in an hour, only your dog is happy to see you. In The Times Literary Supplement, David E. Cooper writes about the “joyousness of dogs”—and what we can learn from it: “The usual utilitarian view that dogs were first put to practical uses – hunting, guarding, pulling – and only later became inserted into family life as pets is implausible. In several modern-day hunter-gatherer tribes, whose form of life is thought to resemble that of our Palaeolithic ancestors, dogs are companions first and workers second. This shouldn’t be surprising. Dogs could never have been properly trained in the intelligent skills required to, say, assist hunters except by people whose empathy with them was acquired through living with these animals . . . The infectious joy of dogs figures large in On Dogs: An Anthology, introduced by the actor and comedian Tracey Ullman. Although she is a devoted dog-lover, who hopes to die ‘covered in cashmere blankets and lots and lots of dogs’, the selections in the anthology are not all feel-good. Several are dark or poignant pieces on a dog’s death; others offer sour or sardonic comments on pet dogs. The collection is an eclectic mixture drawn from fiction, poems, anecdotes, and scientific or philosophical essays.”

Unsurprisingly, the Louvre’s Leonardo 500 show has been a huge success: “The Louvre’s blockbuster Leonardo da Vinci retrospective, timed to the 500th anniversary of the Renaissance master’s death, brought in 1,071,840 visitors over the four months it was on view, easily smashing the previous record of 540,000, held by a 2018 Eugène Delacroix retrospective.”

Tom Shippey on the Staffordshire Hoard: “It represents not the equipment of one man, or one king, as at Sutton Hoo, but the relics of a small army, ‘in excess of a hundred aristocrats’ – sword-wielders not rank and file spear-carriers. All this looks pretty ominous, as do most things about the hoard. It’s plainly the result of deliberate dismantling. Someone collected several man-loads of weapons and took them to pieces. Many items show signs of wear, indicating that they were in use for a long time, and may have been family heirlooms, but there are also tong marks, indicating that pommels were wrenched off forcibly. Clear incisions on some of the pieces suggest that there was no great time gap between the disassembly and the burial, and it’s unlikely that there was much intention to re-use the material directly.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s forgotten priest: “Mostly forgotten by history but unforgettable to those who knew him, Father Cyril Sigourney Fay was an “exceedingly fat” man of great personal charm. He had a buoyant personality and childlike faith beloved of Fitzgerald, Henry Adams, Cardinal Gibbons, and Pope Benedict XV. For Gatsby’s Daisy Fay Buchanan, Fitzgerald borrowed the names of Father Fay and Margaret “Daisy” Chanler, whom Henry James judged the only truly cultivated woman in America. More brazenly, Fitzgerald stole a poem from one of Fay’s letters and inserted it without attribution into his first novel, This Side of Paradise. As penance for his theft, he dedicated the book to his priest-mentor, who appears barely disguised as Monsignor D’Arcy.”

Simon Armitage proposes a National Poetry Center in Leeds: “The art world has the National Gallery; drama has the National Theatre. Now poet laureate Simon Armitage is putting plans in motion for a National Poetry Centre ‘headquarters’ in Leeds. The National Poetry Centre is intended to be a public space with an extensive poetry collection, several rehearsal and performances spaces, and a cafe, where literary events can be held, writers can exchange ideas, and visiting authors can stay. It is backed by Leeds city council, the University of Leeds and Leeds 2023 – a year-long celebration of arts and culture in the city.”

The influence of solar storms on a whale’s sense of direction: “The Earth’s magnetic field is omnipresent, providing a reliable navigational guide even when other cues fail. It’s no coincidence that many of the species known to be magnetically sensitive are also those that undertake long migrations. So it’s easy to think that whales have a compass. It’s just hard to prove it.”

The birth of Europe’s bloodlands: “The Battle of Przemysl, the subject of Alexander Watson’s excellent new book, The Fortress, was one of the major military clashes of the Great War, but it is largely forgotten today. It was the longest siege of the entire war and had a significant influence on the course of the conflict. The fortress blocked the Russians’ path, denying them an early victory over Austria-Hungary and significantly prolonging the war. Watson’s book is much more than an operational history of the battle. Instead, he situates the siege of Przemysl within the broader context of the war on the eastern front, while offering a harrowing account of the effects of total war on the inhabitants of this once-thriving and multicultural city. Within weeks of the beginning of the siege, the garrison, now largely cut off from food supplies, was reduced to eating horse meat and bread adulterated with sawdust, wood shavings, and other substances. Soldiers collapsed from starvation and exhaustion. ‘The fortress garrison became a zombie army,’ Watson writes.”

Essay of the Day:

In The New Criterion, James Panero gives a brief history of the Frick and explains why recent plans to expand the museum have been met with such resistance:

“The Frick Collection will soon be strictly for the birds—or, more strictly, for a goldfinch. It was a goldfinch, or, strictly speaking, the painting The Goldfinch by Carel Fabritius (1654), that so swelled the crowds of this beloved jewel-box institution in 2013. In that year The Goldfinch made a rare migration from its perch at the Royal Picture Gallery Mauritshuis in The Hague. It flew past the typical nesting grounds of blockbuster traveling exhibitions to alight, of all places, on the walls of the house museum of Henry Clay Frick. Sent along for the flight were a few additional birds from the Mauritshuis, then undergoing renovation, including Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring (ca. 1665). In other words, two paintings that were the bases of two separate bestselling books, which were both adapted into Hollywood movies, were making a single stateside stop. The corner of Seventieth Street and Fifth Avenue had never seen so many ruffled feathers. New Yorkers clambered to get a ticket to the show of the season—and maybe even see a painting or two.

“‘Masterpieces of Dutch Painting from the Mauritshuis’ overwhelmed the small institution. Attendance went up by more than a third for the year. Around the brief run of the show, 120,000 more people came to the Frick than ever before. Undoubtedly, these numbers would have been even higher if the collection had more space to handle the crowds. And so, as might be expected in our current arms race over turnstile numbers, no sooner had The Goldfinch flown the coop than did the Frick mount its case for a major expansion. What was clearly not expected, at least by Frick leadership, was just how poorly that case would be received.

“While retaining the feel of a Gilded Age home, The Frick Collection, after all, has seen a century of smart revision. The institution has, until now, been the great beneficiary of sensitive and seamless concatenations that have allowed it to evolve over time into one of America’s finest collections of European painting. It has done this all while standing apart from the expansive mandates of mainstream museum culture. I doubt I am alone in making this my primary recommendation to any out-of-towner visiting New York: be sure to see The Frick Collection.”

Read the rest.

Photos: The “ice volcanoes” of Lake Michigan

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