Good morning. First up, British police thwart an attempted robbery of two Rembrandts in London: “One or more intruders broke in to Dulwich Picture Gallery in south London late on Wednesday and removed two paintings from the Rembrandt’s Light exhibition. Police were called and following a search of the area officers challenged a suspect running from the scene.”

Flooding continues in Venice. “Another exceptional high tide swamped Venice on Sunday, causing the tourist hotspot of St. Mark’s Square to be closed due to the high water as the Italian city marked the worst week of flooding since records started officially being kept.”

Barry Spurr discovers a new kind of censorship after searching for a line by Yeats online: “The ‘offensive’ word had been replaced with asterisks, and—in the process—the reading and appreciation of the lovely poem had been destroyed for anyone, including students, who came across it on the site. This example, as trivial as it is revolting, nonetheless neatly reveals one of the several characteristic elements of the censorious mentality, surprisingly thriving anew in our day: the beady-eyed discovery of slime or offence where it never existed, nor was ever intended.”

A. M. Juster reviews Apple’s biopic Dickinson: “The last line of defense for biographies this dreadful tends to be that, even if they get the details wrong, they stir interest in the main character. In the case of Dickinson, though, the blending of the fictional and the true is so thorough that it may continue to confuse students who want to understand a great national poet . . . Any fair look at the evidence we do have about Emily Dickinson’s personal life suggests that she had the same sort of chronically unresolved internal conflicts that she had in her religious life. For all her feisty resistance to young men who courted her in her teens and twenties, she later encouraged romantic pursuit by a series of older—and mostly literary—men. In some of her surviving correspondence (her sister Lavinia destroyed most of it after Emily’s death), more traditional aspects of her personality emerge, particularly in letters in which she submissively addresses an unknown man as ‘Master.’ If one encounters viewers of Dickinsonfired up to learn more about Emily Dickinson, you can be quick to dismiss Apple TV’s Dickinsonas a Hollywood fever dream. For those in search of the real Emily Dickinson, tell them the best place to start is Sewall’s well-written and meticulous 1974 work, The Life of Emily Dickinson.”

John Wilson writes about what books he’s looking forward to reading in 2020.

What it’s like to record an audiobook: “In the US, 81-year-old actor George Guidall is considered narration’s undisputed heavyweight champion: his baritone voice has graced more than 1,300 audiobook recordings, including works by Dostoevsky, Jonathan Franzen and Stephen King. Some of the biggest British voices in audiobooks belong to faces you might not recognise, but may well have seen – on stage, on Coronation Street, or in any number of Carry On films. Narration may sound like an easy way to make money – you just sit there and read – but I can assure you, it isn’t. I narrated my own audiobook in 2014, an experience that I described at the time as being akin to an exorcism: three long days in a dark room, tripping through the minefield of my own words. All I could think was: if I’d known I was going to have to say this whole book out loud, I would have written a better one. Or maybe I wouldn’t have written one at all.”

Confessions of a former psychic: “Astrology is one big word association game. I loved it, though I was losing interest in other mystical practices. Partly I didn’t have time, because I was now immersed in theatre while working as a temp typist at St Vincent’s, a Catholic hospital. But as I bounced from one department to another, my views changed. I’d understood organised religion to be something between an embarrassment and an evil. Yet as Aids did its dreadful work – this was the 1990s – I watched nuns offer compassionate care to the dying. Christian volunteers checked on derelict men with vomit down their clothes. I became uncomfortably aware that New Agers do not build hospitals or feed alcoholics – they buy self-actualisation at the cash register.” 

Andrew Sullivan reviews Ibram X. Kendi’s How to Be an Antiracist: “[W]hen Kendi’s book becomes a memoir of his own life and comes to terms with his own racism, and then his own cancer, it’s vivid and complicated and nuanced, if a little unfinished. He is alert to ambiguities, paradoxes, and the humanness of it all: ‘When Black people recoil from White racism and concentrate their hatred on everyday White people, as I did freshman year in college, they are not fighting racist power or racist policymakers.’ He sees the complexity of racist views: ‘West Indian immigrants tend to categorize African-Americans as “lazy, unambitious, uneducated, unfriendly, welfare dependent, and lacking in family values.”’ He describes these painful moments of self-recognition in what becomes a kind of secular apology: a life of a sinner striving for sainthood, who, having been saved, wants to save everyone else. He does not shy from the racist violence he saw growing up. He tells an anecdote of a black ‘crew’ targeting an Indian kid for his Walkman (which they steal) on the bus one day . . . And yet all this is deployed to deliver a message of total ideological simplicity. It’s a very strange dynamic: Here is this vivid character, falling in love, facing sickness, finding a voice, discovering authors, exploring cultures and subcultures . . . but who keeps interrupting this story to fit it into a worldview that flattens everything into the crudest binary of oppressor and oppressed. Everything in the world, he argues, is either racist or antiracist.”

Essay of the Day:

In Commentary, Joseph Epstein writes that Susan Sontag was a “savant-idiot”—that is, “a person who is learned, brainy, even brilliant, but gets everything important wrong”:

“Simone Weil, who starved herself for the good of humankind, was a savant-idiot. So was Jean-Paul Sartre, never giving up on revolutionary Communism even in the face of the mass murders of Stalin and Mao. Hannah Arendt, who wrote a significant book on the crushing oppression of totalitarianism and then turned round to argue that Jews faced with the most systematically murderous totalitarian system of all conspired in their own death, was yet a third savant-idiot.

“The classic American savant-idiot was Susan Sontag. This is the Susan Sontag who called white civilization ‘the cancer of human history.’ She it was who, after a trip to Hanoi during the Vietnam War, idealized the North Vietnamese and said, ‘They genuinely believe life is simple . . . full of joy . . . they genuinely love and admire their leaders.’ She claimed that the more than 3,000 innocent people killed on 9/11 in effect had it coming to them, for America, through its imperialist policies, had brought this attack on itself. Sontag waited until 1982 to decide that Communism was little more than ‘fascism with a human face’ (what, one wondered at the time, was the least bit human about it?). Only a savant could be so idiotic.”

Read the rest.

Photo: Nisida

Poem: V. P. Loggins, “Torso”

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