You probably read over the weekend that W. S. Merwin has died. If not, here’s the sad news. He moved to Hawaii in the 1970s and lived on a “remote former pineapple plantation…in blissful near-solitude…refusing to answer the telephone.” Edward Hirsch remembers visiting him there.

In other news: Nile shipwreck discovery proves Herodotus right. “In the fifth century BC, the Greek historian Herodotus visited Egypt and wrote of unusual river boats on the Nile. Twenty-three lines of his Historia, the ancient world’s first great narrative history, are devoted to the intricate description of the construction of a ‘baris’. For centuries, scholars have argued over his account because there was no archaeological evidence that such ships ever existed. Now there is. A ‘fabulously preserved’ wreck in the waters around the sunken port city of Thonis-Heracleion has revealed just how accurate the historian was.”

Mary Spencer reviews Anders Carlson-Wee’s new poetry collection: “Anders Carlson-Wee, like most poets today, is unknown to many, though to some he is now notorious, a passing oblation to the wrathful mob. A poem of his, ‘How-To,’ published in The Nation in July, provoked those who insisted that Carlson-Wee had no right to write in Black English. But let it not be said that in The Low Passions, Carlson-Wee’s new collection published earlier this month, he is writing of what he does not know. The poems are set in the Midwest — specifically, North Dakota, Nebraska, and Missouri. (Carlson-Wee grew up in North Dakota and now lives in Minnesota.) Each vignette is a passing glimpse of a small corner of America that many would deem ‘nowhere special.’ They are haunts not of those who have a reason to stay but of those who have nowhere else to go.”

Audubon’s Haiti: “Biographers have typically written about Audubon as if he had been—never mind the accident of his foreign birth—the archetypal American: keen-eyed, quick with his gun, a man at home equally in the forests of the American frontier and at his estate in New York, an efficient killer of birds as well as, when his art demanded it, their fervent advocate, a great artist as well as a canny entrepreneur. ‘The Making of an American’ was the subtitle of the last popular recreation of Audubon’s life. John James Audubon was an immigrant, to be sure, but simplified accounts that refer to him merely as French omit a salient detail. Audubon was born Jean Rabin in 1785 in Les Cayes on the southern shore of Haiti, or Saint-Domingue, as that island’s French colony was then called. He was the illegitimate son of the French sea captain and slave trader Jean Audubon and a French chambermaid who died within a year of his birth, Jeanne Rabin. ‘My father had large properties in Santo Domingo’ wrote Audubon later, even as he was trying his best to leave the precise circumstances of his birth unclear — by claiming, for example, that he was actually born during one of his father’s visits to Louisiana.”

Joseph Bottum takes stock of Henrik Ibsen: “Ibsen is something of a curiosity these days. It’s difficult to describe quite what has become of the man over, say, the past 30 years. He bestrode the earth like a colossus until one day we looked up and saw that, without our really noticing, the giant had grown a little pale. A little ghostly. A lot less substantial than he used to be.”

Ben Sixsmith on the late Mark Fisher’s punk philosophy: “In 2013, the British cultural and political theorist Mark Fisher wrote an article called ‘Exiting the Vampire Castle’ in which he took issue with the censorious moralism of much of the online left. ‘Poshleft moralisers,’ he maintained, were enamored of ‘kangaroo courts and character assassinations’ in place of ‘comradeship and solidarity.’ ‘While in theory [this tendency] claims to be in favour of structural critique,’ he wrote, ‘in practice it never focuses on anything except individual behaviour.’ Fisher had struggled for years to inspire and energise an imaginative left. His weblog ‘K-punk’ had been a fascinating mix of thoughts on everything from speculative realism to Girls Aloud, without a trace of knowing postmodern pretension. He was passionate, and curious, and wickedly intelligent, and fiercely devoted to the socialist cause…Fisher’s writing was far more suited to blogs and books than Twitter and Facebook, and his star faded in the social media age. ‘Exiting the Vampire Castle’ brought him a great deal of opprobrium from young, embittered leftists who dismissed him as a ‘middle-aged white dude.’ It took his suicide in 2017 for his work to be reassessed and embraced on the left. A posthumous collection, K-punk, has even been reviewed in the New Yorker, which, one suspects, would have had little time for him if it had not been for the tragic dignity of death.”

Mark Bauerlein writes about a “promising humanities program” at Clemson in City Journal.

Essay of the Day:

In The London Review of Books, Jonathan Parry revisits the life and work of the Victorian mountaineer and scientist John Tyndall:

“On 21 December 1859 John Tyndall, a professor of natural philosophy at the Royal Institution, set out to measure the structure and movements of the Mer de Glace, a glacier above Chamonix. In previous summers he had collected data on several Alpine glaciers, but no one had ever attempted to do so in winter. He got to Folkestone but bad weather meant crossing the Channel was impossible and he returned to London. The next day, confident conditions were improving, he set off again. The snow in France was thick and he didn’t reach Geneva until Christmas Eve. He then took a diligence to Sallanches, at the bottom of the track up to Chamonix, arriving at sunset to find, to his great surprise, that there was no sledge available for the formidable night-time journey. He did manage to hire a carriage, however, whose postilion claimed he could find the way since the snow would illuminate the track. Tyndall, unconvinced by this, refused to sit inside the carriage, and instead took off his bulky clothes and perched nervously on the outside, ready to jump off if they looked likely to hurtle over the edge. Although the horses ended up in a snowdrift at one point, they reached Chamonix and its shuttered hotel late that night.

“This story reveals much about Tyndall, then nearly forty: his solitary determination, his stubborn independence and his indifference to religious conventions (so much for Christmas). Less well known are his cavalier impracticality and his extreme nervousness – unexpected traits in one of the most intrepid Victorian mountaineers. Roland Jackson doesn’t make much of the incident in his recent biography, which is immensely long and devotedly successful at unearthing the facts of Tyndall’s life from the hundred boxes of his private papers, but tone-deaf when it comes to interpreting them, contextualising them or putting them to best effect. Jackson describes the Mer de Glace trip as if it were a straightforward enterprise and omits Tyndall’s terror at the ride up the mountain, though Tyndall himself wrote about it vividly in one of his books.

“Tyndall’s relentless activity grew out of a preoccupation with making his life worthwhile. Born in 1820, he spent his twenties as a surveyor for the Ordnance agency and for railway companies, before teaching surveying and engineering at Queenwood College, a utilitarian school in Hampshire. The 1840s was a decade of economic crisis and uncertainty for most, and spiritual and intellectual turmoil for many, including Tyndall, an Irish loner with a strong Protestant work ethic imbued in him by his Orangeman father. He lost his father’s religious framework as a young man but read avidly in theology, philosophy and self-improving literature, searching for another set of values to shape his existence.”

Read the rest.

Photo: Fichtelberg

Poem: W. S. Merwin, “After the Spring”

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