A recently discovered note, Jane Austen’s family argues, proves that a disputed painting of the novelist as a teenager is authentic.

The man behind Messiah: “The letters he left behind are relatively few, and these are sparing in personal detail. Vigilantly he steered clear of controversy, the better to concentrate on work, his true priority. He seems to have gone from one success to another; when met with setbacks, say an unenthusiastic response to an opera, he trained his resources on new projects, justifiably confident of his ability to succeed again. Succeed he did, driven, as the conductor and musicologist Jane Glover writes, by ‘his own charismatic energy and fierce insistence on the highest possible standards.’ At the time of his death in 1759 at the age of seventy-four, George Frideric Handel was famous throughout Europe.”

What is Reddit exactly? “In We Are the Nerds: The Birth and Tumultuous Life of Reddit, the Internet’s Culture Laboratory, Christine Lagorio-Chafkin tells the story of the rise of a platform that could turn something as silly as pressing a button into something as meaningful as new tribes, complete with their own philosophies centred on The Button. This is the essence of Reddit, a factory for culture that forms and breaks up at breakneck speed online.”

Politics is our religion and Twitter is our daily devotional reading, Michael Brendan Dougherty argues, and that’s terrible.

The poet of many names and many deaths: “In English, in addition to ‘Li Po,’ he once had another pair of names, Li T’ai Po and Rihaku. The first is a phonetic transcription of his original Chinese name, Li Taibai, the name his parents gave him…He also has several deaths ascribed to him. For hundreds of years, some people even maintained that he had never died at all, claiming to encounter him now and then. In truth, we are uncertain about the exact date and cause of his death.”

Why should anyone bother reading Ernest Hemingway, Paul Levy wonders. “He was once considered the master craftsman of American letters, but on close inspection the entire corpus is full of artistic failure.” “Full of artistic failure” seems a tad much, but: “The stories make good movies because he was adept at visual description, not because they have gripping or even strong plots. The baby-talk dialogue of For Whom the Bell Tolls is only echoed in the unsatisfying ending with the inexplicably ambitious, dying Robert Jordan, waiting to commit suicide-by-ambush. And what becomes of Rinaldi in A Farewell to Arms? He’s disposable, like Max, George and the Swede. OK, we’ve disposed of  ‘Papa’ Hemingway as a writer, despite the Nobel, the seven conventional biographies and the 17 or so films made from his books. So you have to sympathise a little with Richard Bradford, whose new book, The Man Who Wasn’t There, begins: ‘Halfway through writing this book a question occurred to me: why bother?’”

Essay of the Day:

In The Atlantic, James Parker writes about the rivalry that gave us the electric guitar:

“At the beginning they were fellow voyagers, companions in obsession. Port conjures the scene at Les Paul’s Hollywood garage in the late 1940s, where Paul, Fender, and like-minded gearheads would mingle with a seasoned crew of country-and-western sidemen, swapping tips and stories. ‘None could have foreseen the arrival of rock ‘n’ roll, but it was clear that music was growing louder and more driving, challenging the limits of acoustic instruments … There was a sense among these men that the potential for electric amplification in music hadn’t yet been realized, that there was still a lot of power waiting to be harnessed, incredible new tools waiting to be built.’ Later they became competitors and rivals in the legend, with different versions of the origin story.

“Les Paul, high-flyer, late-night charmer, is the interesting one. His pursuit of a purely electric guitar sound is more feverish and ego-driven, has more personal velocity than that of the monastic Fender. So it’s Paul, fiddling with guitars and mics in a Queens basement in 1941, who gets the huge electric shock: the divine flick of reprimand. It tears his muscles and takes away the feeling in his hands. ‘Electricity,’ explains Port, ‘the very force Les believed would give him the prominence he so desired, had thrown everything into jeopardy.’

“He recovers, however, and by 1947 he and electricity are ecstatically cooperating. ‘It began with layers of bright electric guitar runs racing over each other,’ writes Port of Paul’s sci-fi instrumental ‘Lover,’ which became a massive hit. ‘Some tracks mechanically sped up, their pitch raised, so that the strings seemed to twinkle.’ Then in 1948, Paul is in a car crash that leaves him with his right arm bent at a permanent 90-degree angle. (‘Just point it toward my belly button,’ he tells the doctors before the final operation, ‘so I can play.’)

“But biography is not the point here. The point is the inevitability—via the spangled accelerations of Les Paul’s studio experiments, and Leo Fender’s selfless mechanical futzing-about, and Muddy Waters, and Buddy Holly, and space-age design, and amplifiers stuffed with newspapers, and a host of other currents and convergences—of the electric guitar.”

Read the rest.

Photos: Frozen Niagara Falls

Receive Prufrock in your inbox every weekday morning. Subscribe here.