Let’s start things off this morning with a posthumous John Simon piece on Vladimir Nabokov: “As a lepidopterist, Nabokov rates capturing a rare butterfly a greater thrill perhaps than any literary achievement. Always he writes on index cards whose order can be reshuffled, and always in pencil, which can be erased; he says he uses up the rubber end more than the graphite one. He only wishes that the point could stay continually sharp. The pencil, as over the pen, is like a whisper. The writer must create his own values. Writers are either for perceptive readers, or for boys, like Hemingway and many others, not poets but journalists. He stresses the need for a certain detachment for the artist, who must never be socially, let alone politically, embroiled. The main thrust, other than the autobiographical, is concern for what the true writer is and does differently from his loathed journalist.”

Anthony Paletta writes about New York’s most interesting borough—Brooklyn.

White Christmas as war film: “For all its holly and ivy and hot-buttered rum, White Christmas is as much about World War II as Edward Dmytryk’s The Caine Mutiny (both films were among the five highest grossing movies of 1954) or Casablanca (released in 1942, and which Curtiz also directed).”

A short history of the Russian Santa, Ded Moroz: “There are versions of the character widely known as Santa Claus throughout northern, central, and eastern Europe—all large, bearded men who arrive with winter to bring gifts to children. Russia is not exempt from this, but the Russian version, Ded Moroz, which translates roughly as ‘Grandfather Frost,’ has a particularly strange, convoluted history.”

The restoration of the Van Eyck brothers’ Ghent Altarpiece continues: “Despite the wealth of prior research conducted on the altarpiece, it was only during the KIK-IRPA restoration that scientists made an astonishing discovery: beneath the layers of yellowed and cloudy varnish, around 70% of the outer panels was obscured by 16th-century overpainting. ‘This overpainting had been done so early on, and following the shapes of the original, with very similar pigments that had also aged in a similar way, that it was not actually visible on the technical documentation when the altarpiece first came in for treatment,’ recalls Hélène Dubois, the head of the restoration project. ‘And nothing like this had ever been observed on early Netherlandish painting.’ The discovery came as ‘a shock for everybody—for us, for the church, for all the scholars, for the international committee following this project’, she says . . . These 16th-century additions had covered around half of the panel featuring the sacrificial lamb, the symbol of Christ. Removing a blue hill on the horizon, for instance, revealed a trio of miniature buildings in the style of Medieval Ghent.”

Andrea del Verrocchio reconsidered: “In two sentences, the sixteenth-century biographer Giorgio Vasari demolished the reputation of the man who, a scant century earlier, had been the most sought-after sculptor in Italy. From its high-flying introductory sentence, his life of Andrea del Verrocchio descends instantly into devastating criticism: ‘In his time, Andrea del Verrocchio, a Florentine, was a goldsmith, a master of perspective, a sculptor, engraver, painter, and musician. But the truth is that his style in sculpture and painting was somewhat harsh and unrefined, the product of infinite labor rather than any natural gift or facility.’ Most of Vasari’s readers have been ready to accept this assessment ever since it appeared in print . . . Vasari’s dismissive treatment is not simply a matter of taste; it is also driven by the master narrative he is trying to construct. First published in 1550 and republished in a larger revised edition in 1568, his Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects traces a sweeping, triumphal trajectory of artistic development that begins with Italian masters of the late thirteenth century and culminates in the perfection (his very words) reached in his own time by his mentor and idol, Michelangelo. Verrocchio (1435–1488), born exactly forty years before that ‘spirit able, singlehandedly, to demonstrate, universally and in every profession, what perfection is in art,’ was destined, like John the Baptist, to play the part of forerunner.”

The new Cats movie is terrible: “You’ve heard of the ‘uncanny valley’ effect? The eeriness or revulsion felt when looking at a humanoid figure that’s not quite human? The digital era has given us many examples of the uncanny valley, but Cats is the first movie to entirely set up shop there . . . The effect just doesn’t take. With certain players — Jennifer Hudson as Grizabella, Robbie Fairchild as Munkustrap, even Francesca Hayward of the Royal Ballet as the naïve newcomer Victoria — the faces seem to eerily float atop the faux fur, never quite jelling into one plane of vision. Some cats wear clothes, some don’t; all are, um, neutered. As Macavity the Mystery Cat, Idris Elba has been villainized with green contact lenses and a trench coat; when in one dance number he appears without the coat, it’s like suddenly seeing him naked. Except not. None of this seems conducive to the hoped-for air of whimsy and wonder.”

Essay of the Day:

In The Claremont Review of Books, Mike Gonzalez writes about the invention of Hispanics:

“America’s surging politics of victimhood and identitarian division did not emerge organically or inevitably, as many believe. Nor are these practices the result of irrepressible demands by minorities for recognition, or for redress of past wrongs, as we are constantly told. Those explanations are myths, spread by the activists, intellectuals, and philanthropists who set out deliberately, beginning at mid-century, to redefine our country. Their goal was mass mobilization for political ends, and one of their earliest targets was the Mexican-American community. These activists strived purposefully to turn Americans of this community (who mostly resided in the Southwestern states) against their countrymen, teaching them first to see themselves as a racial minority and then to think of themselves as the core of a pan-ethnic victim group of ‘Hispanics’—a fabricated term with no basis in ethnicity, culture, or race.

“This transformation took effort—because many Mexican Americans had traditionally seen themselves as white. When the 1930 Census classified ‘Mexican American’ as a race, leaders of the community protested vehemently and had the classification changed back to white in the very next census. The most prominent Mexican-American organization at the time—the patriotic, pro-assimilationist League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC)—complained that declassifying Mexicans as white had been an attempt to ‘discriminate between the Mexicans themselves and other members of the white race, when in truth and fact we are not only a part and parcel but as well the sum and substance of the white race.’ Tracing their ancestry in part to the Spanish who conquered South and Central America, they regarded themselves as offshoots of white Europeans.

“Such views may surprise readers today, but this was the way many Mexican Americans saw their race until mid-century. They had the law on their side: a federal district court ruled in In Re Ricardo Rodríguez (1896) that Mexican Americans were to be considered white for the purposes of citizenship concerns. And so as late as 1947, the judge in another federal case (Mendez v. Westminster) ruled that segregating Mexican-American students in remedial schools in Orange County was unconstitutional because it represented social disadvantage, not racial discrimination. At that time Mexican Americans were as white before the law as they were in their own estimation.

“Half a century later, many Mexican Americans had been persuaded of a very different origin story. Among the persuaders-in-chief was Paul Ylvisaker, head of the Public Affairs Program at New York’s wealthy Ford Foundation during the 1950s and ’60s. Though little-known today, he wielded great power and influence to advance a particular vision of social justice inspired partly by socialism and its politics of resentment. Ylvisaker hoped, as he later put it in a 1991 essay, ‘The Future of Hispanic Nonprofits,’ that Mexican Americans could be organized into a ‘united front.’ That concept, formulated in 1922 by the Comintern, implied a union of disparate groups on the Left into what the Comintern’s 4th World Congress called ‘a common struggle to defend the immediate, basic interests of the working class against the bourgeoisie.’

“Ylvisaker, who saw philanthropy as ‘the passing gear’ of social change, set off to find out if something similar was possible with Mexican Americans. In 1968, he poured $2.2 million in seed funding into the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF), a national advocacy conglomerate whose headquarters still buzz with activity in Los Angeles today.”

Read the rest.

Photo: Christmas market in Strasbourg

Poem: Christian Wiman, “A Light Store in the Bowery”

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