The sad but not unexpected news this morning is that the poet Les Murray has died. He was 80 years old. The Sydney Morning Herald re-ups their 2002 profile of the poet. Here is a selection of his work at Poetry Foundation. May he rest in peace.

Simon Heffer on the gentleman officer John Verney: “One of the characteristics for which the English gentleman is famed is his self-deprecation. He is trained in understatement in all things; he has litotes coursing through his veins. The height of vulgarity is to draw attention to oneself, and the more remarkable any of his achievements, the less attention he should draw to them. The cult of the amateur first of all built Britain’s empire, and then managed, by its casualness and determination to avoid confrontation and unpleasantness, to lose it. Perhaps the most famous example of this studied insouciance came at the Battle of Waterloo, when the Earl of Uxbridge had his leg blown off by a cannonball. ‘By God, Sir, I’ve lost my leg!,’ Uxbridge allegedly cried out to the Duke of Wellington, who happened to be near him. ‘By God, Sir, so you have!,’ the Iron Duke is said to have replied. The exchange is almost certainly apocryphal, but the fact that it is so credible to so many people underlines the strength of the cultural idea of the English officer. One who was entirely consistent with the stereotype was John Verney, an Oxford-educated Old Etonian who inherited a baronetcy.”

The New York Times reports that one of “the most widely used screenplay programs in Hollywood,” called Final Draft, has added a tool to evaluate scripts for inclusivity.

A 1615 Geneva Bible that was stolen from a Pittsburgh library has been recovered in the Netherlands.

Joseph Bottum would love to defend Bret Easton Ellis’s provocative collection of essays, but he can’t: “Alas, even perversity won’t carry a reader this far. Try as you can, Ellis’s new book remains just plain bad. In the face of the denunciations, you might find yourself wanting to approve the idea of the book, but you won’t get much help from the book itself.”

Rome is a mess: “Rubbish, potholes and metro closures contribute to anger among visitors and citizens alike.”

Timothy Sandefur recommends Elmer Kelton’s pure Westerns: Good Old Boys, for example, tells the story of Hewey Calloway, an aging (38) cowboy whose brother Walter has given up the saddle for the dreary labor of farming. Dirt-poor, Walter and his wife remind Hewey that at least they own their land, and can leave a legacy to their sons, unlike the unmarried and propertyless Hewey. Hewey rebuffs them, too enamored of his free, itinerant life to settle down. But when Walter is injured, Hewey must substitute for him, and toil behind the plow to save the farm from foreclosure. This premise enables Kelton to tell a universal story about the tension every young bachelor feels between his sweet independence and the knowledge that the longer he avoids stable family life, the more he risks loneliness and oblivion. It’s a simple device, but that simplicity and Kelton’s smooth, laconic prose, play well in the spare Texas setting. Kelton weaves his characters’ conflicting desires and the weightiness of his themes with a sense of humor that makes the novel at once elegiac and comic.”

Essay of the Day:

In Lapham’s Quarterly, Simon Winder praises medieval ingenuity:

“In the High Middle Ages, an era that devotes itself to conjuring up vast churches and palaces and excels at great intellectual and religious movements, it is good to focus first on a couple of small objects. The first is really tiny—a spherical lattice about the size of a Christmas-tree ornament, made in one of the Meuse towns, perhaps Dinant. Made from chiseled brass, it was designed to burn incense. The orb is made up of stylized creatures and foliage, but the note of genius is that there are three tiny people on top, showing eloquent surprise at their situation. These are (in a tumble of charismatic names) Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, the Jewish men whose faith was tested in the fiery furnace by King Nebuchadnezzar. It seems sad that these tiny characters should be trapped in a museum case in Lille and unable to continue to carry out their witty, nine-century-old role of having perfumed smoke pour upward and round them. Perhaps somewhere in Lille there is a secret underground movement to liberate them and return them to their true function.

“The other, only slightly larger object, that I have also kept coming back to just because it is so mysterious, lurks high on a pillar in Freiburg Minster. This must have once been part of a much larger decorative scheme, long since erased but with these figures kept as a reminder, or—more likely—just because they are so wonderful. The carving shows three human figures engaged with three massive, terrible-jawed animals, two of these wearing human clothing. An enormous ram’s head hovers in space, unrelated to the already confused action, and presumably part of a now missing piece of the frieze. Round the corner is a sadly worn—but fabulous—little fragment of Alexander the Great in a griffin-powered flying machine. I have returned to these monsters over the years, not least because of the strange way they echo the animal masks of the Kwakwaka’wakw of the American northwest. I don’t say this as some borderline insane piece of ethnographic showing-off, but because my wife’s family live on the edge of the Salish Sea and most summers I rush off at the first chance to admire examples of this great artistic tradition. The Freiburg monsters also appear strangely Disney—the humans unperturbed by them, despite the way the sculptor has given them a terrible sense of muscular power. I had assumed they were just mysterious grotesques, but this turned out merely to be my own ignorance. When last in Freiburg somewhat to my dismay I was cheerfully informed by an official that the figure on the right, seemingly a woman on a monster, was in fact Samson (the long hair for strength) subduing a lion, while the two cowled men with the two clothed monsters were telling two different ‘frames’ from the story of Wolf Inngrim, in which a monk dresses a wolf up in human clothes and tries to educate him (there is a little book and pen) but he keeps being distracted by a nearby sheep. Unable to deny his wolfish nature, he turns from the monk and leaps on the sheep. A bit upset at this overturning of what I had lazily assumed was an ancient mystery, I quickly realized that it made no difference—these were creatures that conveyed brilliantly a universal human dismay and fascination.

“The wolves were carved around 1200 in the opening phase of the building of Freiburg Minster. It was sponsored by Duke Berthold V, the last of the Zähringer dynasty, fresh from what would prove the equally lasting triumph of founding the city of Bern. These sorts of initiatives are characteristic of what was in many ways one of the most exciting, cheerful, and entertaining periods in all European history. As usual we could tut-tut about life expectancy, poor hygiene, and the relentless grind of agricultural labor, but this is just to buy into the patronizing and intellectually null idea that, in effect, the entire prior sum of human activity across the planet should be pitied and disregarded for not having had access to broadband.

“The founding of Bern is a fine example of medieval mobility and ambition that, so close to old Roman cities such as Basel or Constance, could both build on earlier traditions and also start afresh.”

Read the rest.

Photo: Trinità dei Monti

Poems: Catharine Savage Brosman, “Landscapes”     

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