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Reading Celebrities

Our paper of record asks what (self-consciously arranged) bookshelves behind celebrities in videos recorded in their homes tell us about these same celebrities. Inquiring minds will be disappointed, alas, since the piece simply lists selected books with a brief suggestive description. But don’t worry, cher lecteur, I’ve read between the spines and am here to […]
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Our paper of record asks what (self-consciously arranged) bookshelves behind celebrities in videos recorded in their homes tell us about these same celebrities. Inquiring minds will be disappointed, alas, since the piece simply lists selected books with a brief suggestive description. But don’t worry, cher lecteur, I’ve read between the spines and am here to tell you all (or at least the first three): It may seem that Cate Blanchett is unduly preoccupied with appearing au point with today’s intellectual fads with her copy of Postcapitalism sitting just a few spots away from her Moscow 1937, but she is genuinely interested in how means of exchange encodes certain power relations but undermines others. Her complete set of the Oxford English Dictionary, however, was a gag gift from Geoffrey Rush. Stacey Abrams is clearly planning on either opening a gift shop or starting a new religion. Prince Charles wants us to know he doesn’t give two bits what we think. You do the rest.

In other news: Two of the “Grievance Studies” scientists behind the fake papers that were published in a slew of academic journals focusing on gender and race have written a new book on How to Have Impossible Conversations. Louise Perry reviews: “Although How to Have Impossible Conversations is ostensibly written as a neutral primer on how to engage with ideological opponents, there are both subtle and not-so-subtle references throughout to the issue of social justice activism and the free speech crisis besetting universities in America and elsewhere. But then the authors would be the first to accept that they bring their own biases to any conversation, as we all do. The task, as they see it, is to resist the temptation to dismiss, misrepresent and denigrate our conversation partners if they don’t share these biases . . . The intention of this book is not to advise anyone on ‘winning’ arguments, at least not in a narrow sense. The authors display a laudable passion for truly open-minded questioning, and are impatient with anyone who considers themselves above conversing with their ideological opponents.”

Ted Gioia revisits Erroll Garner’s “magical” 1974 album Magician: “The recordings Garner made for Octave include some of the finest music of his career, with Glaser and Garner becoming innovators within the recording industry by licensing these albums to major labels to supplement the lack of distribution channels available for an independent label at the time. Although these releases saw multiple Grammy nominations and top 20 chart success, they would often go out of print and were seldom heard beyond their initial release. Magician is my favorite of these recordings. It’s an album I have listened to over and over again, and it never loses its freshness and appeal. So much so that it’s now the first record I recommend when people ask me where to start with Erroll Garner. It’s all there — his crazy quilt of piano techniques, his unflagging energy, his grunts and exclamations (always a sign that he is playing at top form), and his larger-than-life personality.”

How to work from home: “I once heard a story from a book agent about an older gentleman who wrote novels for a living, and who did so working from a home office. The man would wake up each morning, go down for breakfast with his wife, and then go through a morning ritual that he had done every single weekday, without fail, for almost five decades. He would shower, shave, and then get dressed in a three-piece suit, replete with a bow tie and matching pocket square, grab his briefcase, and then kiss his wife goodbye, before walking about 10 feet into his home office, where he would close the door, and spend the morning writing. The man, apparently, had deduced that the only way to work from home was to act like he wasn’t actually home. Self-deception is normally considered a psychopathology—but in the case of working from home, it actually might be the only way to maintain mental health, a mind game you have to play against yourself. Science actually seems to back this up.”

Many of John Nash’s landscape paintings have a “melancholic undertow.” Not Harvesting. Michael Prodger explains why.

In The New Criterion, Dick Davis writes about the life and work of Robert Conquest: “Robert Conquest’s considerable reputation rests largely on his works of political history, and in particular on his comprehensive anatomization of the magnitude of the Stalinist purges in his book The Great Terror (1968). But more than a decade before this spectacular act of political unmasking appeared, he had been known, in Britain at least, as a quite different kind of writer: as a poet, an anthologist, and a proselytizer for the poetry of ‘The Movement.’”

Photo: Röbel

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