Was Dresden a war crime? “Dropping bombs on civilians clearly provokes deep and complicated emotions, and a felt need to explain or justify. The sheer number of books bears witness to this. One of the most interesting series is by Martin Middlebrook, who writes about Allied air attacks on individual cities, including Nuremberg, Hamburg, Berlin and the German rocket base on Peenemünde Island. Middlebrook draws on personal accounts by participants, witnesses and survivors from both sides and from as many different kinds of involvement as possible: flight and ground crew, anti-aircraft gunners, radar operators, controllers, air raid wardens, night fighter pilots, civilians. The result is a feeling of wholeness, a deep perspective on everything surviving participants did and suffered and endured, as well as what the aircrew went through and what the raids might or might not have achieved. Now in the spirit of the Middlebrook accounts comes this most comprehensive, revealing and moving book of them all, Sinclair McKay’s Dresden: The Fire and the Darkness.”

Why doesn’t anyone read Walter Pater anymore? “Pater could be an excessively fastidious or finicky writer – one student recalled him saying that he never published anything unless he had rewritten it seven times. It is with something like physical pain that he notes the ‘uneven’ or ‘unequal’ quality of a writer or artist: Botticelli, Wordsworth, Thomas Browne, Measure for Measure (in explicit contrast to the ‘flawless execution’ of Romeo and Juliet). His own prose is often at its best when he is dealing with a writer or artist whose technique he thinks uneven, as though he is making reparation. Gaston, which didn’t go through this sevenfold revision process, is much more difficult reading than other texts by Pater; its fascination is like that of an unfinished painting, where the shapes and colours have been laid on the canvas but not yet blended into a coherent whole. The result of Pater’s perfectionism is a relatively small body of work – ten slim volumes compared to the 39 massive tomes of John Ruskin, his main competitor as a Victorian critic.”

An updated version of the Musical Instrument Digital Interface (MIDI) may change how music sounds. “Though MIDI has done an exceptional job of digitizing music for the last 37 years, it hasn’t been perfect. MIDI quantizes music, meaning it forces music components into a particular value. In MIDI 1.0, all data was in 7-bit values. That means musical qualities were quantized on a scale of 0 to 127. Features like volume, pitch, and how much of the sound should come out of the right or left speaker are all measured on this scale, with 128 possible points. This is not a lot of resolution. For some really sophisticated listeners, they can clearly hear the steps between points.”

Last year was the bicentenary of George Eliot’s birth. What should you read if you haven’t read anything by Eliot? Middlemarch, of course: “Middlemarch . . . remains many people’s favourite Eliot novel. A rich, humorous, moving portrait of provincial life, it begins with two protagonists, Dorothea and Lydgate, on the threshold of matrimony. Dorothea, who wants to be more than a wife and mother in life, mistakes marriage to the scholar Casaubon for a vocation that will open the divine doors of knowledge and culture to her. Lydgate opts for the pretty, mindless and ruthless Rosamund, and suffers the consequences. Both choose blindly, investing their prospective partners with non-existent attributes. Perception—how we see each other— is one of Eliot’s key themes. Or rather, how we don’t see each other.”

Jerry Seinfeld to publish first comedy book in 27 years: “The still-untitled book, expected out October 6th, is the Seinfeld star’s first book about comedy since his 1993 bestseller Seinlanguage.”

Essay of the Day:

In CityLab, Martha Park tells the story of the Great American Pyramid in Memphis:

“The history of the Memphis Pyramid, which is now emblazoned with a massive Bass Pro Shops logo on its side, is as bewildering as its appearance, and as reflective of the people who conceived of it.

“Many Memphians believe the Pyramid is cursed—a belief bolstered not only by the cascade of financial failures it generated, but by the mishaps and oddities that seem to surround it . . . Sidney Shlenker, a businessman and onetime owner of the Denver Nuggets, died in 2003, but he lives on in local infamy for his role managing the facility’s development and construction. Schlenker ran the Houston Astrodome’s parent company and was credited with turning that pioneering domed stadium into a venue for crowd-pleasing spectacles of various kinds—most famously, he arranged to have Billy Jean King take on Bobby Riggs there in the 1973 ‘Battle of the Sexes.’ He had a knack for big ideas: In addition to helping to bring the Pyramid to Memphis, he proposed turning the nearby Mud Island River Park into a $110 million theme park called ‘Rakapolis.’

“‘Shlenker was the salesman, Memphis a captive, eager buyer,’ the Commercial Appeal’s Lewis Graham wrote in his epic 1992 postmortem of the Pyramid’s doomed genesis. ‘For decades the city lusted for a tourism boom, for a professional sports franchise, for a recognized symbol of major league status, anything to catapult it to national prominence. Shlenker promised to deliver on that dream. To do it, though, he needed other people’s money.’

“As this promotional video attests, the planners of the Great American Pyramid did not lack for vision. The building, the video promised, would be a ‘calling card for the best in American civilization,’ equipped with an Egyptian-themed ‘3-D and laser production,’ a computerized ‘ultimate jukebox,’ and a short-wave radio station tucked into the apex.”

Read the rest.

Photos: 1920

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