Vladimir Nabokov didn’t like television. So how did Bernard Pivot get him to accept an invitation to be interviewed on France’s “prime-time literary talk show” Apostrophes? Whiskey and a promise to send all questions in advance.

The return of witchcraft: “In 1768, John Wesley expressed concern about the decline of popular belief in witchcraft and the supernatural: ‘The English in general, and indeed most of the men of learning in Europe, have given up all accounts of witches and apparitions as mere old wives’ fables. I am sorry for it. . . . They well know (whether Christians know it or not) that the giving up of witchcraft is in effect giving up the Bible. With my latest breath I will bear testimony against giving up to infidels one great proof of the invisible world; I mean that of witchcraft and apparitions, confirmed by the testimony of all ages.’ Actually, Wesley need not have worried. If Europe’s learned had abandoned witchcraft, and most nations accordingly had stopped prosecuting it, a great many ordinary people retained older ideas. In various forms, witchcraft beliefs persisted in the West until quite modern times. And as Christianity has spread around the world over the past century, it often has done so where such beliefs remain strong, above all in Africa; and where churches of necessity devote significant effort to dealing with such manifestations among the faithful. Witchcraft, surprisingly enough, is a pressing global and theological issue of the twenty-first century.”

Bruce Gilden’s lost New York: “Street photography has always been a predatory enterprise. Traditionally, the intrepid photographer sets out on the streets as if on safari, picking off prey with a camera unobtrusive enough to not raise the hackles of the local wildlife. (The 35-mm. Leica, introduced, in 1925, at the Leipzig Spring Fair, practically produced the genre, due to its then-novel portability, low profile, and whisper-quiet shutter.) Bruce Gilden, however, has made a name for himself by getting in people’s faces. When he stalks the streets, it is often with a blinding flash attached to his camera, which he’ll pop off at an arm’s length from his subjects, petrifying them in the glare. To extend the safari metaphor: this is akin to dismounting from your jeep and gambolling over to a lion so you can play a game of amateur animal tamer. Remarkably, he did this in New York in the nineteen-eighties. Gilden certainly had some gall.”

Isaac Bashevis Singer thought that with the increase of information, the popularity of literature—real literature—would decline. “If literary fiction and theater are to continue playing their old role, they would need an audience with a strong interest in human character and individuality, independent of all these other byproducts and external concerns. But the number of such connoisseurs is small. Real and pure connoisseurs of art are nearly as rare as real and pure artists.” Was he right?

James Hankins reviews Noel Malcolm’s On Useful Enemies: Islam and the Ottoman Empire in Western Political Thought, 1450–1750: “Imagine . . . a case in which the West is not dominant, but is itself threatened with domination and conquest by a non-Western power. Imagine if that power was actually defeating the West, taking away massive parts of its territory, conquering its capital cities, enslaving its citizens, undermining its confidence in its own religion and culture. Imagine a West terrified and bewildered by repeated military defeat. In that case, the predicates poco theorists impose on the West’s essence might turn out to be mere accidents of history. The West might turn out to have more complex, self-doubting, even admiring attitudes toward non-Western cultures, and its attitudes might well adapt and change over time. In fact we don’t need to imagine such a case, since that was precisely the historical situation of the West for centuries in the face of an expanding Ottoman Empire. Noel Malcolm’s new book, Useful Enemies: Islam and the Ottoman Empire in Western Political Thought, 1450–1750, provides an indispensable guide to that encounter that combines deep learning, refined historical judgment, and an elegant authorial voice.”

Essay of the Day:

Henrik Ibsen was “the arch-poet of emancipatory liberalism,” Algis Valiunas argues in First Things. And yet, everywhere he looked, he saw tragedy:

“The godless nineteenth century invited those who were strong (or presumptuous) enough to determine life’s meaning for themselves. Ibsen extolled the freedom of each man and woman to defy religious commandment or social convention and live in accordance with his or her own nature. Freedom was the ultimate value—though in his eyes, most people would prove unworthy of the gift. He registered subtle degrees of worthiness and unworthiness. He mourned the unlived life, in which the possibility of genuine love was sacrificed to mingy prudence or self-aggrandizement or religious misgiving or even artistic vocation. And he refused to profess any formula for happiness, whether in personal ethos or in political arrangement; it was up to every individual to fail or succeed by his own lights. Even the Swedish-­Norwegian monarchy was liberal enough for his purposes, allowing a sufficient margin of freedom for persons of sufficient boldness to flourish in their chosen direction.

“Though Ibsen subscribed to the modern artistic slogan épater le bourgeois, to bedazzle or to flummox the stolid citizenry was as far as he was willing to go. He wanted to give the workaday ­householder a chance at a more vivid life, not do away with middling comfort and security. As the Norwegian scholar Ivo de Figueiredo writes in his impressive new biography, Henrik Ibsen: The Man and the Mask, ‘It was never Ibsen’s purpose to wage war against bourgeois society, neither in life nor in literature. In time he certainly became a rebel, but he was and remained a bourgeois rebel. . . . Why abandon the dream of the good life?’

“Yet Ibsen’s vision inclined toward the tragic. He subjected all the good things he praised—freedom, self-fulfillment, love, nobility, happiness—to the acid test, which revealed every flaw and sometimes dissolved every shred of the ideal. Impediments to happy endings abounded.”

Read the rest.

Photo: Aggstein Castle

Poem: Marly Youmans, “An Icon of St. Margaret”

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