Ishmael Reed writes the NYRB, and he isn’t happy: “Only in the United States is my partner, the distinguished choreographer, author, teacher, and director Carla Blank, referred to as my ‘white wife.’”

A history of the Magdalena: “Loosely divided into three parts, one for each of the river’s three sections – the Alto, Medio and Bajo – Magdalena follows no straightforward course. It rather strings together conversations with characters Davis encountered during his exploration of the river, each of whom has a particular take on the spirit of contemporary Colombia, personal observations and episodes drawn from the rich and often tragic history of a country that has been long ‘overlooked and misunderstood’.”

Recently discovered letters shine new light on Thomas Hardy’s later years: “In a letter written shortly after their wedding, Florence Dugdale portrayed Hardy as ‘one of the kindest, most humane men in the world’ while acknowledging that his fame led to the constant attention of the press in the UK and US. A letter sent after Hardy’s death includes a vivid image of her sitting in the room where she first met her late husband, a French bulldog snoring by the fire as her only companion. Hardy’s first marriage – to Emma Gifford – has tended to garner more attention, partly because so much of his great work, including the elegiac Poems of 1912-13, was inspired by her. Academics believe the three recently found letters are significant because they offer fresh insight into his relationship with Florence, a teacher and author, in his later years.”

Social distancing during the Plague: “Everyone ran in panic from the sick. Neighbors shunned neighbors, relatives relatives. Children abandoned elderly parents and priests their flocks. Incredibly, ‘even fathers and mothers refused to nurse and assist their own children, as though they did not belong to them.’”

The Museum of the Bible to return 11,500 antiquities to Iraq and Egypt: “Green said he acquired the antiquities before the Washington, DC, museum opened in November 2017, when he didn’t understand the importance of proper provenance and trusted the word of unscrupulous dealers. ‘These early mistakes resulted in Museum of the Bible receiving a great deal of criticism over the years,’ Green said last week in an official statement. ‘The criticism resulting from my mistakes was justified.’”

Wordsworth and Coleridge’s annus mirabilis day by day: “A compelling portrait of William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge emerges from Adam Nicolson’s The Making of Poetry: Coleridge, the Wordsworths, and Their Year of Marvels. To be more precise, the poets themselves emerged from that year in the Quantock Hills, Somerset, July 1797–June 1798, with something they did not have before: two unmistakable and distinct imprints of genius. Nicolson presents his case in naked terms: the year ‘has a claim to being the most famous moment in the history of English poetry.’ Rather than pursue a strictly academic study, he embedded himself for a year in the selfsame Quantocks, to observe the landscape in which each of Wordsworth and Coleridge asserted his own poetic voice. Month by month, even day by day, Nicolson sets the conversations had and poems written against the backdrop of the changing seasons.”

In praise of Younghill Kang: “The Penguin edition of East Goes West reminds us of how excellent he really was. Written in the 1930s, set in the 1920s, the book is thrillingly timeless. Kang’s obscurity cannot negate his heroic path to becoming a great American novelist—casting off one tongue to master another. In a 2008 essay in Guernica on Korean-American fiction, Chee aptly calls East Goes West a ‘Nabakovian [sic] tour de force.’ Though Nabokov expressed no interest in “the entire Orient,” he and Kang—poets in their youth—have much in common. Both lived from the turn of the century to the 1970s, and in their late teens fled homelands in upheaval. Both found fame in the US, as stylistically daring novelists for whom English was a second language—in Kang’s case, third or even fourth, as he wrote poetry in Chinese and studied in Japan.”

Essay of the Day:

In Image, Ted Gioia asks if works of art are “part of the gift economy or the transaction economy?” Here’s a snippet:

“One upon a time, I encountered an economist in a most unlikely setting. I had traveled to Assisi in the Umbria region of Italy to attend a global summit devoted to ‘Love and Forgiveness.’ The location could hardly have been more fitting—it was, after all, the same place where Saint Francis had launched a mini-revolution drawing on those same virtues some eight hundred years ago. I had a small role, having been asked to offer a few cogent observations on how musicians can have a positive impact in their communities. But, frankly, I saw my attendance as a break from the here-and-now, a chance to focus on something larger than myself and my everyday concerns.

“We had gathered at the end of the first day, and I was grooving on the mood in the room, which was surprisingly serene, a kind of kumbaya-on-steroids vibe rare in any setting, but especially in large gatherings of professionals from diverse fields. That’s when a young woman introduced herself and told me that she was an economist specializing in gratuitous actions.

“I am rarely left speechless, but I didn’t know how to respond. I had no idea what she was talking about, and my vague, stumbling reply must have made that clear. She tried to help out with a brief description, but her words were more dictionary definition than real explanation. ‘Gratuitous actions are those undertaken without any expectation of financial gain or other advantage, perhaps out of kindness or compassion or charity….’ Well sure, I knew that already. The real mystery was what an economist could possibly study in these actions. Weren’t acts of kindness and compassion the exact opposite of economic behavior; or, more bluntly, didn’t they start at the very place where economics comes to a screeching halt? Was there really room in the dismal science for random acts of kindness?

“But I shouldn’t have been so surprised. Back when I was a graduate student, I had delved into sociologist Marcel Mauss’s 1925 book The Gift, which looked at societies where gift exchanges serve as a robust supplement to economic transactions. Mauss saw that acts of seemingly disinterested generosity provided a social glue that bonded groups together. Gifts might be less efficient than market-driven transactions—where everything gets quantified down to the second decimal point—but they play a similar function, and they have the offsetting advantage of creating goodwill and a sense of responsibility toward others.

“All of us have seen this in our own lives. If your neighbor asks for a stick of butter, you don’t calculate the price. You give without asking for payment and do so wisely, because you may need to ask a favor in return someday. The same is true of holiday gift-giving, which has a much larger signification than can be measured in dollars. If your spouse doesn’t remember to give you a gift, the financial impact is probably the least of your concerns.

“Back when I first studied gift exchange, I dismissed its economic importance—after all, it reflects only a tiny portion of all our transactions. Perhaps it might interest an anthropologist, but only as a kind of curiosity item, a refreshing but impractical alternative to the real substance of economic life. But as I see it now, the gift economy is much larger than I realized—in fact, it’s almost as large as the transaction-based economy. For a start, I’ve seen its predominance in my own life. My wife and I don’t charge my children for their meals or the hours of service we provide them. My friends dealing with elder care or community service or church activities operate off-the-grid, so to speak—at least from a conventional economic perspective. These are gift exchanges, pure and simple, and they are everywhere you look, even in a modern capitalist society.

“But I’m concerned here with a different class of activities, ones that straddle these two spheres—and are hard to classify for that very reason. Artistic or creative pursuits, endeavors that are typically pursued for the intrinsic joy of sharing one’s gifts, are also frequently commoditized and placed on the market. Are they part of the gift economy or the transaction economy?”

Read the rest.

Photos: Wild goats in Wales

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