Good morning. Lili Owen Rowlands reviews Françoise Gilot’s recently reissued Life with Picasso: “First published in 1964 and written with the American critic and curator Carlton Lake, the book is based on conversations he and Gilot had over the course of several years, beginning in 1955. The end result, which Lake cross-referenced with Gilot’s journals and the letters from Picasso she had kept, follows a roughly chronological order, though it loops and repeats as conversations tend to do. It’s a thorough picture of Picasso’s life in the postwar period, at the moment he became a monument: there are those he counted as friends (Gertrude Stein, Jean-Paul Sartre) and those he had little time for (André Gide, Jean Cocteau); there’s his wrangling with dealers and gallerists; there’s his involvement with the Communist Party, which he joined in 1944, because one ‘goes to the fountain’; there’s his wit and acid tongue; there’s his sidestepping of ‘all stereotyped formulas in his human relations just as completely as in his art’ – which made him a thrilling lover and painter, but a monstrous partner and father. More telling, though, is what we learn about Gilot, who came from a rich Parisian family and entered Picasso’s life with the intensity of a ‘little Rimbaud’.”

Shakespeare in America: Emma Smith reviews James Shapiro’s new book. “The book is full of astonishing anecdotes. Who knew that an epicene Ulysses S. Grant, later the 18th president of the US, rehearsed the role of Desdemona for the Army Theater in Corpus Christi, Texas? Or that Fanny Kemble wrote a memoir of her time on a plantation in Georgia? Or that Rep. Henry Cabot Lodge’s claim that American English uniquely preserved the linguistic heritage of Shakespeare leveraged his pursuit of a more restricted immigration policy based on literacy? Or that Monica Lewinsky placed a personal ad in the Washington Post for Valentine’s Day 1998, addressing her White House ‘Handsome’ with lines from Romeo (prompting Shapiro’s inspired reference to ‘Starr-crossed lovers’)? Or that Steve Bannon tried his hand, unsuccessfully, at adapting Shakespeare for the screen, first with a science-fiction version of Titus Andronicus and then a Coriolanus transported to the Los Angeles ganglands during the Rodney King riots of 1992? But Shakespeare in a Divided America is much more than a series of vignettes. Showing how Shakespeare has been deployed by both sides at defining moments of American history, Shapiro reframes specific, closely researched moments into larger cultural questions about politics and nationhood.”

Before there was #MeToo, there was Natalie Wood: “We all know of the tragic end of Natalie Wood’s life. On November 29, 1981, at 7:30 A.M., the body of the beautiful, 43-year-old movie star—whose peak career spanned from her pigtailed child-star turn in Miracle on 34th Street to her portrayal, at 17, of a teenage ‘bad girl’ in Rebel Without a Cause and her aching roles, at 23, in Splendor in the Grass and West Side Story—was found floating in the Pacific Ocean, off the coast of Catalina Island. She was discovered far away from the yacht upon which she and her husband, Robert Wagner, and their friend, Christopher Walken, had been cruising, with stopovers in Avalon and no small amount of drinking and fighting. Within a few days the death was ruled ‘accidental’ by Los Angeles’s then coroner, Thomas Noguchi.”

How the publishing memoir has—and hasn’t—changed: “The old-style publisher’s memoir, which reached its high-water mark between about 1920 and 1950, was a relatively staid affair. The publisher who wrote it – say, Evelyn Waugh’s father, Arthur, author of One Man’s Road (1931), or Grant Richards, who penned Author Hunting (1934) – was usually the sole proprietor of a business he had founded himself, or at the very least the distinguished impresario of a list that reflected his own personal tastes. The signature mark of this apologia pro vita sua was, naturally, praise: praise for the authors whose careers he had boosted and praise for the associates who had helped him on his way, with perhaps a dire warning or two about the likelihood of the modern publishing scene very soon going to hell in a handcart. How odd, then, that Lennie Goodings, longtime chatelaine of Virago, the greatest feminist outfit in the history of British publishing, should have written a book that, once you subtract the feminism, reads as if it could have been put together in the library of the Savile Club about three-quarters of a century ago.”

David Green reviews Celeste Headlee’s new book recommending we work less and relax more: “American culture isn’t terribly supportive of that kind of unstructured mental leisure. Headlee often asks people whether they can simply sit down and watch a movie on Netflix — just watch a movie. ‘I often get the response of, “No, if I’m just sitting there, I feel guilty,”’ Headlee says. Headlee wants to help readers reclaim their relationship with nothing.” Fair enough, but then there’s this: “Headlee believes some of America’s obsession with work can be traced back to Martin Luther and the Protestant Reformation in 16th-century Europe. Ideas about working your way to heaven, Headlee explains, ‘meant that every idle hour was one in which you were not earning your spot with the divine. … It was your work that made you a good person. And therefore, obviously, if you’re not working all the time, you should feel guilty.’” Uh, Protestants were not big on the idea of “working your way to heaven.” Many of them were big on the Sabbath, however. Their understanding of both morality and labor was complex, and people who have only read summaries of Max Weber should probably avoid the topic entirely.

Nick Ripatrazone reviews Christian Wiman’s new collection of poems: “Wiman’s new book makes him the poet that Everson might have become. This is not to devalue Everson’s life and poetry, but to merely suggest that Everson’s religious verse would have likely evolved in the direction of Wiman’s vision. Although the poets differ in generation, subject matter, and influences, Wiman’s poetry demonstrates a similar mixture of sincerity and gentle satire when it comes to matters of faith.”

E.J. Hutchinson asks: “Where have all the great aphorists gone?” “The aphorist is a sage, a shaman, but usually one with a wry smile and a good sense of humor. Both come from a healthy estimate of man’s foolishness and finitude. Humility is its corollary.”

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In his new podcast Café Scholé, Dr. Christopher Perrin contemplates the proper role of leisure in school and learning. It may seem to run counter to the ever-popular notion of “rigorous” education, but “scholé,” the greek word for leisure, is the root of the English word “school,” and in this podcast Dr. Perrin explores whether the two concepts are at odds. Recent topics include scholé in the classical tradition, scholé in the ecclesial tradition, and the role of sabbath in school. Click here to listen and subscribe.

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Essay of the Day:

Do we need to change how we think about growth? Ted Nordhaus argues we do in The New Atlantis:

“Five billion years from now, the Sun will run out of hydrogen. Its core will collapse and its surface will expand to millions of times its present size. As Earth is engulfed in fiery apocalypse, all economic growth will come to an end, fulfilling, at last, the long-standing prophecy of many environmental scientists.

“That endless economic growth on a finite planet is impossible has been a verity passed on from generation to generation of environmentalists as deep insight. Yet it is really little more than a tautology. Given its presuppositions — that growth is ‘endless’ and the planet ‘finite’ — the claim cannot be anything other than true.

“Between now and the end, though, the claim, like most tautologies, is not terribly useful, telling us little about the planet’s finitude or about the actual composition and trajectory of future growth. Forecasts of collapse due to population growth, overconsumption, resource exhaustion, and pollution, dating back to the Reverend Thomas Malthus in the eighteenth century, have consistently missed the mark. In fact, humans have increasingly thrived even as our demands upon the biosphere have grown well beyond anything that early proponents of limits to economic growth could have imagined.

“But the fact that cornucopians have thus far gotten the better of the argument does not mean that future ecological collapse isn’t possible. The human future ultimately hinges upon questions that neither camp can answer in advance. How much more will the human population grow? How much better and more efficient will our technologies become? How quickly will our economies continue to grow and how much additional consumption can the Earth sustain?

“In this way, Malthusian claims are never wrong, only early. The Sun will expand to incinerate the Earth. Economic growth will come to an end. Q.E.D.

“Many of his admirers will be surprised to learn that Vaclav Smil, the renegade environmental scientist and polymath, is something of a Malthusian. Smil has gained a following among conservatives, nuclear advocates, and promoters of various other Promethean solutions to environmental problems largely because he has long been a compelling skeptic of claims that renewable energy can rapidly displace fossil fuels. But Smil is an equal opportunity critic. His skepticism about green energy is more a reflection of his distaste for techno-optimism than it is particular to solar panels or wind turbines.

“In his new book Growth: From Microorganisms to Megacities, Smil lays out the case for limiting economic growth, taking aim at nuclear energy, the Singularity, the growth assumptions of neoclassical economists, and just about every other school of techno-optimistic thought, alongside his familiar dismissals of various Green enthusiasms. The notion that technological innovation might allow for the ‘decoupling’ of economic growth from ecological impacts, Smil tells us, ‘contradicts physical laws.’ He approvingly quotes the economist Kenneth Boulding that ‘anyone who believes in indefinite growth in anything physical, on a physically finite planet, is either mad or an economist.’ The circular economy, the idea that we might continuously recycle water, energy, and other key resources, requires ‘nothing less than abolishing entropy.’”

Read the rest.

Photos: Locusts in Africa

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