The town of Celebration—planned and developed by The Walt Disney Company—was sold as the perfect community. Now, it’s falling apart. What happened?

Jane Austen portraiture: “Sorting out which portraits of Austen are authentic and which are not has long been a complicated business.”

It’s never a bad time to talk about baseball. Here’s John Hirschauer defending the minor leagues: “As part of the ongoing negotiations between Major League Baseball (MLB) and the 170 semi-professional clubs that bargain collectively as Minor League Baseball (MiLB), MLB has proposed severing ties with 42 of its currently incorporated minor-league teams as part of the new PBA. The league argues that in an age of analytics and improved statistical tools, there is less of a need for such a delineated system — particularly at the Single-A level, which partitions into so-called ‘High-A,’ ‘Class A,’ various short-season circuits, and two ‘rookie ball’ leagues — than there was 20 years ago. The move would be a financial no-brainer for the majors . . . As for the small towns and cities whose residents publicly financed the stadiums where these 42 teams once played, could take their children to a cheap ballgame, and have, in some cases, supported their team for more than a century? Tough.”

Tony White reviews a new anthology of Oulipo poetry: “The Ouvroir de littérature potentielle (Workshop for Potential Literature) was founded in Paris in 1960 by the writer and publisher Raymond Queneau and the scientist and educator François Le Lionnais. Oulipo set out to formally explore the use of mathematical and other rules – known as ‘constraints’ – in the writing of literature. Its approach was two-pronged. First, what Oulipo called ‘anoulipism’, discovering constraints used by writers from other ages and cultures, wittily referred to as ‘plagiarism by anticipation’: they seized on reversible poems in 3rd-century China and acrostics concealed in the Psalms, as well the bifurcating narratives in Jorge Luis Borges’s 1941 ‘The Garden of Forking Paths’. Second, ‘synthoulipism’, the invention and demonstration of new constraints for any writer who wished to use them . . . So what’s in it for the reader? Lovers of puzzles and word games will relish the many sometimes deceptively simple constraints, such as the ‘snowball’, in which each successive line is one unit (a letter, syllable or word) longer, or the “prisoner’s constraint”, in which letters with ascenders or descenders (b, d, f, g, h, j, k, l, p, q, t and y) cannot be used. For Mathews, though, interviewed in the Paris Review, ‘What distinguishes Oulipo from other language games, is that its methods have to be capable of producing valid literary results.’”

In praise of Metternich: “The Habsburg Empire that dominated Central Europe from the Middle Ages until its collapse after World War I has long been seen as a byword for sclerosis and governmental ineptitude. Yet a recent wave of revisionist scholarship has begun to challenge this consensus. In 2018 alone, A. Weiss Mitchell’s The Grand Strategy of the Habsburg Empire sought to rehabilitate Vienna’s poor military reputation, while Pieter Judson’s The Habsburg Empire stressed the relatively innovative and progressive character of imperial government. The latest Habsburg reappraisal is Wolfram Siemann’s excellent biography of the Austrian diplomat Prince Klemens Von Metternich (1773-1859), often dismissed as the 19th century’s foremost footman for reactionary monarchism. Siemann’s biography, published in German in 2016 and in English this November, is an exhaustive work of scholarship intended to set the historical record straight. Previous biographies of Metternich, even sympathetic ones, have generally relied on the work of authors hostile to his principles. Nationalists have regarded him as a ‘cunning, womanizing, effeminate, and cosmopolitan enemy of the German nation,’ while other historians have criticized his hostility to democracy. Even those who acknowledge his diplomatic skill at the 1814-15 Congress of Vienna, where he helped negotiate an end to the Napoleonic Wars, often reduce that accomplishment to the establishment of an oppressive cabal. In fact, as Siemann shows, Metternich was skeptical about democracy, but not blindly so (he admired constitutional monarchy in the United Kingdom), and his resistance to nationalism was born of a fear of ethnic-based violence that subsequent centuries have more than vindicated.”

Essay of the Day:

In The New York Review of Books, Michael Weiss writes about Russia’s long history of “wet work” abroad:

“The last fortnight has seen new revelations in two separate cases of suspected Russian state murder. In one of these cases, the alleged hit squad was directly a unit of the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence service. In the other, German authorities recently concluded that there is “sufficient evidence” that the Russian state, or its federated southern republic Chechnya, is responsible for the execution-style killing of an ethnic Chechen asylum-seeker; as a result, two officers of the GRU have been expelled from the Russian embassy in Berlin. According to the newspaper Le Monde, citing French intelligence, the GRU has for several years maintained a rear base of operations in the Haute-Savoie region of the French Alps.

“The GRU, also responsible for interfering in the 2016 US presidential election, is now believed to have been liquidating the enemies of President Vladimir Putin throughout Europe, including in NATO countries. The idea of a roving gang of secret-agent assassins gathering at an Alpine retreat to plot the destruction of their sinister leader’s enemies might seem like the premise for Daniel Craig’s latest outing as 007, but this plotline has historical antecedents long predating Ian Fleming.

“A fine and timely new book explores the origins of Moscow’s Murder, Inc.— what is euphemistically known in Russian as mokroye delo, or ‘wet work.’ In The Compatriots: The Brutal and Chaotic History of Russia’s Exiles, Émigrés, and Agents Abroad, authors Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan show that what has become the institutional practice of Moscow’s security organs was honed in the early decades of Soviet government, when it perfected its methods against members of the Russian diaspora.”

Read the rest.

Photo: Christmas market in Frankfurt

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