Oh dear. Barnes and Noble marks Black History Month by issuing books with “diverse” dust jackets: “Frankenstein’s monster has brown skin, not green, while a kissing Romeo and Juliet have darker skin tones and kinky hair textures. ‘For the first time ever, all parents will be able to pick up a book and see themselves in a story,’ the company explains on the back cover of the books.” First time ever, eh? More: “But prominent authors were quick to lambast the company, saying that simply changing the skin color of characters from Romeo and Juliet or Frankenstein is a superficial fix.” Of course, Barnes and Noble isn’t trying to fix anything. Like everyone else, they are trying to make a buck or score some woke capital, which is what Black History Month is about now.

Did Donald Trump sign a copy of the House Judiciary Committee’s impeachment report? Experts say he did, and bidding for the document has already reached $17,000.

Dominic Green remembers George Steiner: “Steiner was the American critic that Harold Bloom claimed to be but wasn’t.” 

The great Charlemagne: “Janet L. Nelson’s meticulous biography of Charlemagne is as magisterial as the man himself. Writing a book about such a man is certainly a daunting feat. Neither Charlemagne nor any of his family members left any written records. Some (not Nelson) have doubted that he was even literate. We do not even know with certainty what language he spoke. The consensus favors a Charlemagne who was trilingual in an early Germanic dialect, a vulgate Latin ancestor of French, and scholarly Latin, but we will likely never know with certainty. Nelson’s task in laying out a narrative of his life relies on an exhaustive empirical exploration of various sources attesting to his actions and attitudes and the events and personalities he encountered during his reign. Surviving letters from other rulers and potentates figure prominently, as do chronicles and narratives by lesser mortals who knew him, various decrees he issued in his own voice (if not necessarily his own pen), and even courtly poems and other literary forms that told of his deeds. Nelson’s five-decade career studying Carolingian Europe acquainted her as thoroughly as anyone with these sources, and she weaves them together with a level of empirical skill and corroborative persuasion rarely seen in academic writing today . . . A healthy dose of skepticism should underlie any empirical endeavor, but there can be no doubt from Nelson’s deft exploration of the extant record that Charlemagne proved himself “great” in every sense.”

Richard Tempest considers Solzhenitsyn’s “modernist masterpiece”—March 1917: “Like the rest of the saga, March 1917 features reliable and unreliable character voices, graphic descriptions, and hallucinatory reveries, as well as an elaborate hierarchy of metaphors at the apex of which stand the (Christian) Cross and the (satanic) Wheel. Refracted across the epic’s many narrative layers, each glyph generates sometimes explicit and sometimes coded meanings. Thus, the boutonnières worn by the revolutionaries become imaginatively transformed into ‘large, torn red scrap[s], . . .  as shaggy as fire, . . . revolving around the pinning point in angles, tears, and wisps.’ The passage occurs in one of the ‘screens,’ or mock film scripts, the saga’s most conspicuously experimental element, which intertwines its historiographical, symbolic, and surreal strands. Also present in Book 2 are documentary interpolations, mostly extracts from the newspapers of the period, as well as popular proverbs, set in caps and centered at the end of several of the chapters, as punchy commentary on the events described. ‘A hero’s beard, a conscience of clay,’ for example, serves as a folksy assessment of the imperial authorities’ lack of moral courage. In Solzhenitsyn’s book, with its dozens of hirsute generals, politicians, and conspirators, the revolution is a festival of beards.”

Essay of the Day:

In The Hudson Review, David Mason writes about Elizabeth Bishop’s “durable art”:

“Few recent American poets have found readers outside a coterie of like-minded devotees. The good ones attract readers from multiple camps, readers who can’t deny a quality of experience richer than mere identity, better than mere technique or fashion. Perhaps this explains why Elizabeth Bishop’s poems appear to be so enduring, so admirable across a spectrum of readerships.”

Read the rest.

Images: Max Ernst’s collages

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