I noted the passing of historian and cultural critic Gertrude Himmelfarb a few weeks ago. In Commentary, Bill Kristol remembers her vitality: “My parents, Irving Kristol and Gertrude Himmelfarb, moved to Washington from New York in 1987. My father wrote about their move in the New Republic because, needless to say, if you’re an intellectual, you don’t just move from one city to another, as tens of millions of Americans do each year. You have to analyze and explain the significance of your move. Also needless to say, my father being my father, his article is witty and ironic. He described it as ‘a deep, sociological explanation of why my wife and I have decided to leave New York City and take up residence in Washington, D.C. (no one seems to credit the more obvious reasons; two children and three grandchildren).’ And being from my father, the article is a perceptive and interesting—even deep—piece on New York and Washington, and American politics and culture in 1987. But in fact, my parents said privately at the time that one of the main reasons for the move is that they thought it would help them stay younger and fresher in spirit. And recently, my mother, reflecting on the move, commented on how true that had turned out to be. Of course they enjoyed old friends of their generation, but they also very much appreciated their mostly younger friends in Washington, and they enjoyed making new ones. They treated people 25 or 50 years younger as equals and were happy to talk with them and learn from them.” Read the whole thing. By the way, an interest in and appreciation for younger people is something that is true of Bill, too.

Life at Auschwitz: “It is often said, for example, that Auschwitz was a different planet, so alien that even birds did not sing there. But the camp was all too real, and so was the surrounding countryside. It was so rich in wildlife, in fact, that employees of IG Farben, the German firm that enslaved thousands of prisoners, went birding together, while a trained ornithologist among the SS guards meticulously surveyed the local species – ducks, storks, cuckoos – for scholarly publications.”

In Aeon, Beth Blum writes about the surprising relationship of modernism and self-help. “How-to writers are to other writers as frogs are to mammals; they are not born, they are spawned.’ So jeered the influential New Yorker journalist Dwight Macdonald in a 1954 screed against the self-help guides he worried were taking over the culture. Macdonald voiced the prevailing view that the distinct spheres – or species – of literary author and self-help writer had little, if anything, in common. Serious authors create; self-help writers multiply. But the influence of self-help on prestigious literature is much deeper and more sustained than figures such as Macdonald would have us believe. With the rise of the 20th century, literary authors had a new book genre to reckon with. It might seem anachronistic to picture the French symbolist poet Charles Baudelaire bingeing on ‘how to get rich quick’ books in 1864, or to imagine the late-Victorian aesthete Gustave Flaubert annotating a do-it-yourself manual, or to conceive of the ethereal modernist Virginia Woolf becoming so inflamed by Arnold Bennett’s practical guide How to Live on 24 Hours a Day (1908) that she writes her own time-books Mrs Dalloway (1925) and The Years (1937) in response. But this seems surprising to us only because most scholars – particularly literary scholars – have been so busy ignoring or dismissing self-help that they have failed to recognise its long history and tremendous impact on even the most prestigious literary authors. These authors often made fun of self-help, deriding its crass instrumentalism but also, and more surprising, they learned from its appeal, borrowed its techniques, and coveted its cultural influence.

Reagan Arthur has been named publisher of Knopf: “Gottlieb, who left Knopf to become the editor of The New Yorker, had chosen Mehta as his successor, in 1987, and last fall Mehta had identified Arthur as his first choice to replace him. Arthur said that while she had long admired Mehta’s work, she didn’t know him well personally, and that ‘the opportunity came as a surprise.’” And Mona Simpson is the new publisher of The Paris Review.

Ralph Ellison, Joseph Epstein writes, “may well have been the most subtle, the most sensible, and, alas, the most ignored” writer on race.

In the market for steers and “nuanced” landscape paintings? This is the fair for you.

Could the biggest celestial event of the year happen tonight? “Sometime this week, you might walk outside in broad daylight, look up at the sky, and see a luminous orb as bright as a full moon. Only it wouldn’t be the moon. It would be something far more explosive: the dazzling aftermath of a cataclysm hundreds of light-years away. You’d be seeing the light from a supernova—the final, powerful flash of a dying star.”

Essay of the Day:

In The Kansas City Star, Mike Hendricks writes about one of the biggest farming scandals in the history of American agriculture:

“Like all the best con artists, Randy Constant was a charmer, hard not to like. Big hearted. Good listener. You’d never have guessed that the father of three, grandfather of five was a liar, cheat and serial philanderer who masterminded one of the biggest and longest-running frauds in the history of American agriculture. ‘He was a wonderful person,’ an old friend said. ‘He just had that other side to him.’

“And then some. ‘What he done shocked me to death,’ said Stoutsville, Missouri, farmer John Heinecke, who did business with Constant for years. ‘I didn’t know he was that kind of corrupt.’ Church-going family man. School board president. Agribusiness entrepreneur. That’s the caring, accomplished Randy Constant people knew in Chillicothe, Missouri, which advertises itself on road signs as the ‘Home of Sliced Bread.’

“Until the full story started to emerge last summer, Constant seemed like one of the best things to come out of Chillicothe since those first pre-cut loaves appeared on store shelves 90 years ago. He made a good living buying and selling organic grain. He raised tilapia by the ton inside a former Walmart, shipping the farm-raised fish to Whole Foods and hundreds of other supermarkets nationwide. His reputation earned him prominent mention in Successful Farming magazine’s June 2017 special issue as one of ‘10 Successful Farmers to Watch’ in America.

* * *

“Records showed that in 2016 he sold 7 percent of all the corn labeled organic and 8 percent of all the soybeans carrying that designation. More than $19 million worth that year, $24 million the year before and so on every year before that back to 2010 at least. It was impossible for him to have done that legitimately. He didn’t have access to enough organic crop acres to supply so many bushels.”

Read the rest.

Photo: Aubonne  

Poem: John Linstrom, “Snow-Bound”

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