The big news this weekend was that J. D. Salinger’s son, Matt Salinger, told The Guardian that his late father did indeed write a significant amount of unpublished work and that all of it will be published at some point.

Zadie Smith lashes out at our simplistic and tedious obsession with identity: “Asked how she felt about cultural appropriation, she told an audience of nearly 2,000 at the festival in Colombia on Friday:‘If someone says to me: “A black girl would never say that,” I’m saying: “How can you possibly know?” The problem with that argument is it assumes the possibility of total knowledge of humans. The only thing that identifies people in their entirety is their name: I’m a Zadie.’ She conceded that the assertion of a collective identity was sometimes necessary ‘to demand rights’, but cited the dismay of her husband – the poet and novelist Nick Laird – at finding himself increasingly categorised. ‘He turned to me and said: “I used to be myself and I’m now white guy, white guy.”’”

Benjamin Dreyer writes about three writing rules you should ignore. (The first is that silly rule about never beginning a sentence with “And” or “But.”) His book, Dreyer’s English, is reviewed in The New York Times.

Matthew Walther writes against Marie Kondo’s “mystic mumbo-jumbo” and in defense of clutter: “By all means, don’t be a slob or a hoarder. But don’t pretend that there is something inherently virtuous — or aesthetically pleasing — about making your dwelling look like the set of an old iPod commercial, either.”

Ben Reinhard reviews The Fall of Gondolin: “If Gondolin is indeed the end, it is a fitting send-off: easily the most satisfying of the recent Tolkien editions. I’ve been critical in the past of some of these volumes for inconsistent editing and a baffling refusal to give complete versions of the texts they present. This volume avoids these pitfalls, presenting in their entirety the successive versions of the story, together with a concluding essay on the ‘Evolution of the Story.’”

The experiment in sound that is Roomful of Teeth: “Its eight singers cover a five-octave range, from grunting lows to dog-whistle highs. Three have perfect pitch, all have classical training, and Wells has brought in a succession of experts to teach them a bewildering range of other techniques: alpine yodelling, Bulgarian belting, Persian Tahrir, and Inuit and Tuvan throat singing, among others. Because the group writes or commissions almost all of its pieces, it can create vocal effects that most singers would never attempt. Roomful of Teeth’s first record won the Grammy Award for Best Chamber Music/Small Ensemble Performance in 2013. That same year, one of the group’s two mezzo-sopranos, Caroline Shaw, won the Pulitzer Prize for music for her piece ‘Partita for 8 Voices.’ She was, at thirty, the youngest person ever to win the award.”

Yeats gets the multimedia treatment: “On Thursday, January 24, the venue hosted the second installment of Paul Muldoon’s ‘Against the Grain,’ a literary-music series sponsored by the London Review of Books and loosely centered on the 80th anniversary of Yeats’s death on January 28, 1939. Moderated by Muldoon, poetry editor of The New Yorker, the event featured the poet Jorie Graham, the novelist Colm Toíbín, and the ‘multimedia artist’ Laurie Anderson, who provided the music and a general air of charming eclecticism. Multimedia events like this one are supposed to help audiences make ‘surprising connections’ between art forms, according to the program notes… Yet one wonders if multiplying sensory experiences really cancels out the distractions that (the story goes) keep today’s audiences from paying attention. When Graham read ‘The Second Coming,’ the twenty-something woman to my right added a line to the to-do list on her phone. The center may not be holding, but she needed 250 napkins, cups, and plates by Monday.”

Essay of the Day:

In The New Criterion, John Byron Kuhner writes about the Latin poetry of Fr. Rafael Landívar:

“Looking out through the doorway of the former Jesuit residence in Antigua Guatemala, you notice one thing: the ominous, perfectly framed cone of one of the world’s most intimidating volcanoes, the Volcán de Agua. A row of single-story shops sunk below grade on the other side of the plaza barely registers: all the eye sees is nature’s Sword of Damocles poised over the city. The twelve-thousand-foot stratovolcano first intervened in the history of Spanish Guatemala in 1541, when it destroyed the colony’s first capital, now called Ciudad Vieja, five miles away. The Spaniards built a new city at a slightly greater remove, but not far enough away to make any difference. The view through the doorway looks like a piece of Baroque moralizing, like the grim reaper that holds an hourglass over the heads of the tourists in St. Peter’s in Rome. It is as if the architect wished to say to anyone going through the door: Look here, and notice—here is God’s lovely, terrible, life-giving, destructive beauty.

“The doorway, with its view, looked little different on the twenty-sixth of June 1767, when Father Rafael Landívar, of the Society of Jesus, passed through it for the last time. A troop of Spanish soldiers had encircled the compound in the middle of the previous night and was now removing the Jesuits and placing them under arrest. Their possessions were forfeit to the illustrissimo and Christianissimo King Carlos III, though in his royal generosity he did allow them to bring a prayer book and ‘whatever of clothing they need for their journey.’ The removal was a surprise. Wishing to avoid any wrangling, Carlos had sent sealed orders to the governors of the Spanish Empire, who set out to capture all Jesuits within their provinces by a series of quickly executed clandestine raids. Landívar and his companions did not know precisely what was happening: after the necessary instructions had been given, the operation was conducted in silence. The soldiers had orders to kill any Jesuits who opened their mouths. Even the encyclopedist Jean d’Alembert, no fan of the Catholic Church, was scandalized by the despotism of a European monarch arresting thousands of his subjects without warning or charge, allowing them no opportunity of defense, and expelling them impoverished from their homes. We know less about what Carlos’s subjects thought, because discussion of the expulsion, in public or private, was prohibited by law.

“Landívar was led out with the other Jesuits that morning and marched two hundred and fifty miles to Castillo de San Felipe, on Central America’s malarial east coast, where they were stacked into Spanish warships for the journey to Italy. Due to incompetence, cruelty, delays, and diplomatic wrangling, the refugees did not arrive in the Papal States for almost a year. Of New Spain’s 678 Jesuits, 102 died during the journey; three hundred would be dead within five years.

“Landívar was one of the Jesuits who survived. Considered one of the most brilliant members of the company, he was thirty-six, and had been rector of the Jesuit college in his native Antigua. An academic wunderkind, he entered seminary at the age of seven and took his bachelor’s degree at sixteen. Celebrated for his affability and extraordinary command of Latin, he became Professor of Grammar and Instructor in Rhetoric at the Jesuit college of San Francisco Borja at twenty-four. When Francisco José de Figueredo y Vittoria, the Archbishop of Guatemala and an important patron for the order, died in 1765, it was the young Landívar who was chosen to deliver his eulogy. He had a brilliant career ahead of him in the Society of Jesus.

“Exile, and the ultimate dissolution of the Jesuit order in 1773, changed all that.”

Read the rest.

Photos: Superb Owls

Poem: Richard Kenney, “Numbers”

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