Andrea Lee isn’t trying to be funny, but her piece on why Italian women don’t like Elena Ferrante made me laugh out loud. It starts out interestingly and unhumorously enough. It is a little surprising that Italian women don’t like Ferrante. Lee: “I was so intrigued by this that I began to ask opinions of the author among Italians of different ages and backgrounds. In my informal survey, I found many who admired her books, but many more who did not. Those who did not were almost all female. The reasons were vague: some said the characters were unsympathetic, that the emotions described were overwrought, or that there was too much brutality, or there was something in the writing they ‘just didn’t like.’ The timeworn adage that no one is a prophet in his—or her—own country may be enough to explain this indifference and outright hostility. But I believe there is a deeper reason…”

And what is that deeper reason? My friend, they aren’t American. This really is her answer, though she seems unaware that this is what she’s saying. You see, Italian women don’t like Ferrante because they don’t care about feminism (like American women do). They even make fun of the #MeToo movement (very much unlike American women). If you think about it, even though Italy is a “developed” country, it is very “undeveloped” in other ways (wink, wink, nudge, nudge): “Italians were not ready to see an author soar to prominence by telling the truth of a woman’s life. Such telling is not yet acceptable in a country like Italy, where women’s truths are still held in low esteem, often by women themselves. . .It is no secret that, in the advanced nation of Italy, one of the great unresolved issues is sexism, the position of women. With its patriarchal Catholic underpinnings and its national character still influenced by the misogynistic vulgarity of ex–prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, the country continues to show disturbing trends—nearly 45 percent of Italian women between the ages of 14 and 65 say they have experienced sexual violence in their lifetime. The international #MeToo movement has been treated as more of a joke by Italians. . .These issues have inspired public activism, but the discourse, compared with other countries, is muted.” It is disturbing and sad that so many women have reported experiencing sexual violence, but the rest of the piece is lazy and incurious.

In other news: Who was Saint Patrick? “Patrick is unusual among major-league patron saints in having bequeathed us two records of his authentic writing. One is a testy autobiographical tract known as the Confessio; it provides the narrative of his youth, capture, flight from and return to Ireland, written in a distinctly defensive tone. Even more unbuttoned in crossness is the Letter to Coroticus, a bad Christian ruler of somewhere in Britain, who had among much other naughtiness enslaved fellow Christians. The Letter denounces Coroticus’ wickedness in his slave raids on Ireland, urges the freeing and return of the victims, and calls on all Christians to shun the tyrant and his soldiers until they repent. These texts are astonishingly personal survivals, from an age that has left precious few substantial texts of any sort. They are bright little flashes amid the literary darkness of these islands as the Western Roman Empire crumbled. Yet frustrations quickly mount. When precisely were they written? Fourth, fifth or sixth century CE? And what do they actually mean? Significantly, the cult of Patrick flourished for centuries largely without them: they were forgotten for nearly a millennium until rediscovered in the early 17th century by Patrick’s formidably scholarly Protestant successor in the see of Armagh, James Ussher (1581-1656).”

Danny Heitman reviews Christopher Benfey’s If: The Untold Story of Kipling’s American Years: “Although Kipling was a global celebrity, the Nobel Prize-winning author was intimately connected with the United States. ‘The White Man’s Burden,’ in fact, was not meant as a hymn to the British Empire, but the emerging American one. Kipling, who had married an American woman and lived in Vermont, wrote the poem as ‘an explicit plea for the United States to adopt the Philippines as an American colony.’ Kipling was, for much of his life, a cheerleader of American culture and influence, embracing Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow as early role models. He adored Mark Twain, too, and Benfey’s book begins with an account of young Kipling’s pilgrimage to Elmira, New York, to meet his idol.”

What are the lessons of the Treaty of Versailles? It’s not that it was too harsh. Rather, it was “flawed from the start and never adequately enforced.” Victor Davis Hanson: “The Versailles Treaty was signed months after the armistice of November 1918, rather than after an utter collapse of the German Imperial Army. The exhausted Allies made the mistake of not demanding the unconditional surrender of the defeated German aggressor. That error created the later German myth that its spent army was never really vanquished but had merely given up the offensive in enemy territory. Exhausted German soldiers abroad were supposedly ‘stabbed in the back’ by Jews, Communists, and traitors to the rear.”

Boris Johnson’s Shakespeare book delayed for the “foreseeable future”: “The riddle of Shakespeare’s genius must remain unsolved, for now at least, after Boris Johnson’s publisher said on Wednesday morning that the new prime minister’s ‘simple and readable’ book exploring the ‘true British icon’ had been indefinitely delayed after his victory in the Conservative leadership vote.”

Musical nightmare: Tianxu An “was ready to play the Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto No. 1 at the International Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow in June. When conductor Vasily Petrenko brought in the orchestra for its brief introduction, the sound that came at An was that of Rachmaninoff’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini. ‘I was really surprised,’ said An. ‘The problem was I needed to react in that kind of fast way, so there was no time for me to begin with some kind of emotion.’”

Essay of the Day:

Max Nelson writes about “when mesmerism came to America” in The New York Review of Books:

“Cynthia Gleason, a weaver at a Rhode Island textile mill, went into her first trance in the fall of 1836. According to her mesmerist, a French sugar planter and amateur ‘animal magnetist’ named Charles Poyen, she had been suffering for years from a mysterious illness; he called it ‘a very serious and troublesome complaint of the stomach’ in one account and ‘a complicated nervous and functional disease’ in another. For months Poyen had been giving lectures insisting that mesmerists like himself had mastered a technique for putting people in somnambulistic trances, curing their diseases, and managing their minds. When Gleason’s physician called him in to make magnetic ‘passes’ over her body with his hands, Poyen wrote in his dubiously self-serving memoirs, she said she’d ‘defy anyone to put her to sleep in this manner.’ But after twenty-five minutes, ‘her eyes grew dim and her lids fell heavily down.’

“The next day, he reported, she said she felt better. Her sessions attracted more and more local interest; within a week, Poyen was putting her to sleep in front of groups of ‘distinguished gentlemen’ and challenging the spectators to wake her up. (In Providence, they rang ‘a large tavern bell’ next to her ear, put ‘a bottle of ammoniacal gas’ under her nose, and shot a pistol ‘within five feet of her head.’) By February Poyen and Gleason had gone on tour, giving more private lectures and three public performances. He claimed, unpersuasively, that she refused ‘any pecuniary reward’ except room, board, and ‘the means of satisfying the strict necessities of life.’

“Before long, the mesmerism they exhibited had become the object of fevered speculation and imitation across New England and New York.”

Read the rest. 

Photo: Earth’s shadow on the Moon

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