Good morning. Let’s get down to business, shall we? In the Times Literary Supplement, Kory Stamper writes about America’s dictionary wars and a bad, error-ridden book that attempts to tell the story.

The Sydney Opera House closes for two years—the first closure in its history—to begin long overdue renovations.

A recently recovered Hafez manuscript to be sold at auction: “A ‘magnificent’ stolen manuscript by the revered 14th-century Persian poet Hafez, which was dramatically discovered earlier this year by a Dutch art sleuth, is set to be sold at auction next month. The gold-illuminated Divan of Hafez is dated to 1462 and is one of the earliest copies of the work of the Persian poet, who died in 1390. Illustrated by the calligrapher Shaykh Mahmud Pir Budaqi, the manuscript was part of the collection of the Islamic art collector Jafar Ghazi, who died in Germany in 2007. After his death, his heirs discovered that many of his manuscripts had been stolen. While 175 items were recovered by police in 2011, the Divan was still missing. When a €50,000 (£43,000) reward was offered by German police, it was tracked down in 2019 by Arthur Brand, a Dutch art detective who has previously found a pair of bronze horses sculpted for Adolf Hitler, and a stolen Picasso.”

Isaac Schultz talks to Giovanni Vale about a new book on the ancient Republic of Venice and his Extinguished Countries project: “I’ve been a journalist and travel writer for the past six years, working in this guidebook universe, and I’ve noticed how it’s changing. Guidebooks [today] have more and more experiences, or interviews with locals, and [fewer] lists of hotels or restaurants. One day I was having a conversation with my girlfriend—now wife—on the Croatian coast. She’s Croatian and I’m Italian. We were discussing local history … meaning the Balkans … There were many extinguished countries [here]—former empires, which had left a visible heritage. We … said ‘Wouldn’t it be nice to have guidebooks of countries that no longer exist?’”

France’s culture minister tests positive for Covid-19: “The culture minister was supposed to meet Tuesday with representatives from the cinema and performing arts industries to assess the impact of new measures taken to counter the Covid-19 epidemic, following Sunday’s decision to ban any public gathering of more than 1,000 people.”

In The American Interest, Iulia-Sabina Joja writes about the evolving relationship of the Russian government and the Russian Orthodox Church—and the patron saint of Russia’s nuclear arms program: “Less than two decades later the Soviets made monumental efforts to erase Saint Seraphim from public memory. The saint’s remains were taken and most likely thrown away by the Soviets. The Sarov monastery built over Seraphim’s cell became first a political prison, then a factory for the production of missiles, later the site of the fabrication of the first Soviet nuclear bomb, and finally the core of what would become the first and most important of the Soviet Union’s top-secret nuclear towns. By 1991, this backbone of the Soviet nuclear capacities, built over the rubble of the Sarov monastery, was itself falling apart. The end of the Cold War brought euphoria in the West but a sense of desperation in Russia, while the poverty and sense of irrelevance hit the nuclear forces perhaps hardest of all. It was at this point that the Church stepped in to save the nukes. Then-Metropolitan, now Patriarch Kirill ‘miraculously’ discovered St. Seraphim’s remains and paraded them through Russia in a series of ‘ecstatic ceremonies’ that resonated in a spectacular way with the public. The pilgrimage of Saint Seraphim ended in the Church’s (carefully preplanned) return to the secret nuclear town. For the public, the Church’s grand entrance into the secret city—once the symbolic heart of the power of the Communist Party and KGB—was nothing short of a miracle. Meanwhile the Church took upon itself the burden of restoring the centrality of Russia’s nuclear weapons community. Saint Seraphim thus became the patron saint of Russia’s nuclear triad. Ever since, his iconography can be found on virtually every office wall, nuclear-tipped missile, nuclear-capable jet, and ballistic missile submarine.”

Essay of the Day:

In The Washington Examiner, Mark Hemingway writes about a visit to “the most interesting man in the world”:

“Ken Schaffer has lived in the same two-bedroom penthouse apartment on West 58th Street in New York for 49 years. A label on the door frame of his building reads, ‘DOORBELL BROKEN. Shout DINGDONG very loudly.’ After I pound on the door for several seconds, Schaffer finally answers, holding his cat, Squeaker: ‘You were supposed to shout “Ding dong!”’

“It’s unlikely he’d have heard me given the window-rattling volume at which he is blaring the Velvet Underground. Schaffer, who still looks boyish despite a little gray threading through his dark hair, isn’t a recluse, but considering that he’s a former rock-and-roll publicist whose clients have included Todd Rundgren, Alice Cooper, and Jimi Hendrix, he’s wary of interviews . . . But even if Schaffer never says a word, his walls talk: I see a framed handwritten note from Arthur C. Clarke, the man who first conceived of using satellites for communications networks, calling Schaffer’s work with satellites ‘fascinating.’ Another wall features a copy of the letter the musician Sting wrote to the editors of Popular Mechanics in 2005, politely chastising them for failing to credit Schaffer with being the real creator of one of their ‘Inventions of the Year.’ Sting’s note reads, in part, ‘Kenny is an old, old friend of mine, a prolific, wildly eccentric, free-thinking inventor whose ideas are sufficiently distanced from consensual reality as to make them both a danger to society as we know it, as well as essential to its further evolution.’

“It’s a tidy bachelor pad, with lots of windows. (Schaffer is divorced from Alla Kliouka, a Russian actress who is best known for her role as Tony’s one-legged mistress, Svetlana, on The Sopranos, as well as a recurring role on The Americans.) The living room is dominated by a long, narrow desk with an elaborate computer set-up where he works. Scattered on flat surfaces throughout the living room are a half-dozen old Morse code keys, and Schaffer has a nervous habit of leaning on the edge of the couch, fluidly tapping out messages on whichever key is at hand. He does this even while engaged in conversation, which is both distracting and mesmerizing.”

Read the rest.

Photo: Larung Gar

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