Lennon’s Legacy

John Lennon was the last global icon. The “passage from industrial society to consumer individualism,” “the collapse of institutional Christianity,” and “the rise of drug-enhanced, pop-Buddhist spiritual seeking” cannot be understood without The Beatles, Dominic Green writes in The Critic. More:

“They became what Elias Canetti called in Crowds and Power a ‘crowd symbol’, the image around which a people’s identity coalesces, the icon that, so long as it retains its power, a people will follow to the ends of the earth. The Beatles were among the first truly global icons – Hitler would have been, had not much of the world been listening to the radio rather than watching the television when the Wehrmacht was on tour – and Lennon, though he was half the face and half the voice of the band, was the ideologist of the connected world for whose symbolic birth, the Our World global satellite broadcast of 25 June 1967, he wrote ‘All You Need is Love’.

“It is a terrible song, asinine in sentiment and plodding in execution. As a historical document, however, it is instructive.”

In other news: Yesterday’s email led with Alexander Larman’s essay on M. R. James. John Wilson called my attention to Matthew Walther’s excellent essay on James in the latest issue of The Lamp in which he reviews a new book on James’s debt to medieval studies: “It is the fundamental unity between James the well-known writer of what we now call “horror” fiction and the reticent Cambridge don that is the starting point of Patrick J. Murphy’s fascinating study. For far too long, scholarship on James has been bifurcated between enthusiasts for all things spooky and professional medievalists and biblical scholars. This is why even in the beautifully produced and immaculately edited selection of his tales from Oxford University Press one searches in vain for the endnote informing the reader that the monster glimpsed by Dennison, first in an illustration and later in the flesh, in ‘Canon Alberic’s Scrapbook’ is not a fanciful product of James’s imagination but a description lifted wholesale from a Zoology of the Invertebrata, a textbook published by his friend and colleague Arthur Shipley, with whom he had actually visited Saint-Bertrand-de-Comminges . . . Murphy reminds us that the author of ‘Casting the Runes’ and the editor of the Latin hagiography of Saint Ethelbert are entirely of a piece.”

James Panero considers the past and the future of the Met: “Unlike any other institution, the Metropolitan is the museum of the metropolis. It is a city in the city, a cosmos for the cosmopolitan, expansive and uncontainable, a home for culture owned by no one person and belonging to all. ‘It feels like New York,’ my young son tells me after a recent visit. ‘It feels like we are back home.’ Not named for a single patron, or place, or style, the Met has achieved, beyond all expectation, the Enlightenment idea of the encyclopedic museum.”

Isaac Newton’s notes that were almost destroyed by his dog have been sold for £380,000: His “occult investigations into the Great Pyramid of Egypt, dating from the 1680s, are believed to have been burned when his dog Diamond upset a candle.”

A concise, expert introduction to Seamus Heaney: “Asked about his astronomical fame in Stepping Stones (2008), Dennis O’Driscoll’s book-length collection of interviews, Seamus Heaney quipped, ‘What I’ve said before, only half in joke, is that everybody in Ireland is famous. Or, maybe better say everyone is familiar’. But how well do we really know Heaney? By now, his story is the stuff of lore: the rural childhood in County Derry; the grammar school education in the city; the move to Belfast for an undergraduate degree at Queen’s University, then on to Wicklow; posts at Harvard and Oxford; eventually a Nobel prize, and with it global prominence and near-global admiration. To O’Driscoll, Heaney admitted to hoping ‘that the carriage I’ve learned stood me in good stead when the spotlight turned on me’. Indeed it did. Lauded in his lifetime, since his death in 2013 he has joined the ranks of Ireland’s cultural icons. He is not only one of the most widely read but one of the most widely written about poets in living memory. In On Seamus Heaney, a slim new volume from Princeton University Press’s Writers on Writers series, R. F. Foster doesn’t seek to radically recast the Heaney narrative, but gives us something of a primer, a ‘Heaney 101’.”

Louise Glück’s literary agent has chosen another Spanish-language publisher for her books after the previous publisher let the rights expire. That previous publisher is not happy: “Pre-Textos, a publisher based in Valencia, Spain, which has translated and released seven of her books, has called on the American poet to intervene in its favor after her literary agent selected another Spanish-language publisher a month after her award. Pre-Textos had let the Spanish rights to Glück’s work expire, but it maintains that it should be rewarded for broadening her readership and publishing, at a loss, her work. ‘We want some kind of justice for 14 years of loyalty to an author who was almost completely unknown’ to Spanish-language readers until the Nobel, Manuel Borrás, the literary director of Pre-Textos, said in a phone interview.”

Photo: The Windmills of Consuegra