The latest World Spectator has several nice pieces, which I cannot resist quoting.
Frederic Raphael, novelist and noteworthy screenwriter, published a scintillating letter, simultaneously affectionate and rivalrous, to his (deceased last year) friend the Jewish polymath George Steiner which, at one point, repeats a humorous, self-deprecatory story Steiner used to tell.
[A]t your first dinner in King’s, you had taken a modest seat one place from the end of high table. Your neighbor, an old professor of mathematics, did not return your vespertine greeting. You and he sat with your backs to the serving table, from which college servants brought charged salvers to the Fellows and their guests. At dessert, a heaped silver platter of the first strawberries of spring was carried along to the Provost and then along the far side of high table. You watched the towering treat being sapped by more or less voracious dons. Eventually, the platter came to your elbow, the penultimate diner. Twelve strawberries remained.
‘The question that I posed to myself,’ you told us, ‘and which I now put to the company is, in view of the fact that the senior wrangler on my left was the only fellow to be served after me, how many strawberries should I, a guest of the college, be advised, en bon débutant, to take?’
Playing up, I made the stooge’s choice of six; so, I believe, did the others, except for Beetle, who said, ‘Five?’
You looked at her quickly and then said, ‘Five is precisely the number, after brief reflection, that I myself chose, with due deference to my neighbor.’
‘And?’
‘Indeed. As the waiter switched the salver and its diminished cargo to the one remaining, so to speak, candidate, the old professor looked at me for the first time, eyes brimming with contempt. “You bloody fool,” he said.’
You replied, with properly obsolete courtesy, ‘I beg your pardon?’
‘You bloody fool,’ he repeated.
You said, ‘Might you do me the honor of explaining your sanguine choice of courtesies?’ The old mathematician swiveled round to point at the serving table behind your back. Another wide salver, freighted with glistening strawberries, was even then being removed, unbroached, to the kitchen. ‘Had you but had the audacious intelligence to take all the few remaining berries,’ he said, ‘I should have been free to help myself as copiously as I had looked forward to doing.’
Two locks of hair, one blond, one brown, allegedly from the head of Emily Dickinson are being offered for sale on Ebay for $450,000.
Were they stolen decades ago from The Evergreens by the poet James Merrill? See LithHub.
[A] bit of questionably obtained Dickinson memorabilia has been quietly traded among a group of literary men for years: locks alleged to be the poet’s hair (some of which are now for sale on eBay for the astronomical sum of $450,000).
How the poet—who chose to cloister her living body from all but a few visitors—would feel about pieces of it making the rounds is anybody’s guess. The dead cannot give consent. But the alleged Dickinson hair may have arrived on the market by a type of violation: theft. That’s the theory of Mark Gallagher, the English faculty member at UCLA who’s trying to sell the hair on eBay.
The story goes like this: While an undergraduate at Amherst College in the 1940s, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet James Merrill broke into the home (aka The Evergreens) of Dickinson’s niece, Martha Dickinson Bianchi. Merrill and two friends absconded with personal effects, including a small mirror, “tiny wine glass,” and a manuscript sheet—written by whom, it is unclear. The caper was recounted by Stephen Yenser in a 1995 issue of Poetry magazine dedicated to Merrill, who had died earlier that year. Yenser, Merrill’s literary executor and the now-retired founder of UCLA’s creative writing program, said he heard the tale from Merrill himself. In Poetry, he euphemized what was essentially burglary with terms like “borrowed” and “rescued,” writing that the trio “gained clandestine entry.”
The anecdote has been whispered among Dickinson scholars for years, according to University of Maryland English Prof. Martha Nell Smith, one of the nation’s foremost experts on Dickinson.
“I’ve long been convinced James Merrill did wander off with (steal?) some Dickinson items from the Evergreens, Martha Dickinson Bianchi’s home,” Smith wrote in an email.
Gallagher believes that Merrill must have also taken the hair during the alleged break-in at The Evergreens. Gallagher got his hands on the hair by way of the poet J.D. McClatchy, who, until his death in 2018, shared Merrill’s literary executorship with Yenser. McClatchy’s estate sale, where Gallagher purchased the hair, listed Merrill as the original owner.
Yenser, for his part, denies any nefarious origin for the locks. He says the hair came from an envelope found inside an 1890 edition of Poems by Emily Dickinson that belonged to Merrill, likely purchased from a rare book dealer.
Yet the envelope was labeled in cursive “For Mrs. Dickinson,” and the book in which it was found includes notes from Susan Gilbert Dickinson, according to Yale University, which now holds the volume and provided photos of the artifacts (below). Susan was Martha’s mother, and she and her husband Austin, Emily’s brother, lived at The Evergreens until their respective deaths in 1895 and 1913. Their daughter Martha then moved into the property and “preserved it without change, until her own death in 1943,” according to the Emily Dickinson Museum in Amherst, which controls The Evergreens. As far as Gallagher is concerned it’s quite possible Merrill took the book when he broke into the property.
NEW YORK, NY—On her way back to D.C. from the Met Gala, a young lady named AOC made a powerful statement on equity by directing the pilot of her private jet to write ‘Tax The Rich’ in the sky.
The stunningly brave slogan was seen by thousands of people in the area and inspired dozens.
“AOC is a true socialist hero,” said Comrade Maisley Wiggins of the Socialist Party of America. “We couldn’t agree more with her statement that the rich should be taxed, which they clearly aren’t. Of course, AOC should be the exception, due to her being a socialist hero.”
Speaking to reporters after landing in D.C., AOC said: “I, like, just thought of doing that while sitting all bored and stuff in my jet. Then I commanded my indentured slave pilot to write in the sky about how important it is to tax the rich! Yay socialism!”
Mary Harrington observes that it is very possible that none other than Ayn Rand recently saved Britain from a system of vaccine passports.
Health secretary Sajid Javid announced [9/12] that the much-debated plan to introduce vaccine passports for nightclubs and other venues at the end of September was not going ahead.
Appearing on the Andrew Marr Show, Javid insisted that while the government ‘was right to look at it’ and the plan would be kept ‘in reserve’ he was pleased to say the passports would not be implemented as previously announced, adding that it was ‘a huge intrusion into people’s lives’ and ‘most people instinctively don’t like the idea’.
Javid is widely known as a fan of Ayn Rand’s brand of radical individualism, reportedly once telling Parliament’s Crossbench Film Society that he wooed his future wife by reading her passages from The Fountainhead. So perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised to find him resistant to implementing as national policy a requirement to show medical paperwork in order to do something as everyday as going clubbing.
This is all the more so when growing evidence indicates that vaccination doesn’t in fact put a stop to infection, or even transmission of the virus — it mainly reduces the severity of symptoms. If the aim is not eliminating Covid but simply ensuring healthcare systems aren’t overloaded, then provided vaccine uptake is good (as is the case in England, where 89% of over-16s have now had at least one dose) there’s no need to constrain anyone’s movement.
So this announcement feels like a breakthrough of common sense amid a slew of countries announcing vaccine passport policies.
“ ‘How are we to live in an atomic age?’ I am tempted to reply: Why, as you would have lived in the sixteenth century when the plague visited London almost every year, or as you would have lived in a Viking age when raiders from Scandinavia might land and cut your throat any night; or indeed, as you are already living in an age of cancer, an age of chronic pain, an age of paralysis, an age of air raids, an age of railway accidents, an age of motor accidents.
In other words, do not let us begin by exaggerating the novelty of our situation. Believe me, dear sir or madam, you and all whom you love were already sentenced to death before the atomic bomb was invented: and quite a high percentage of us were going to die in unpleasant ways.
It is perfectly ridiculous to go about whimpering and drawing long faces because the scientists have added one more chance of painful and premature death to a world which already bristled with such chances and in which death itself was not a chance at all, but a certainty.
The first action to be taken is to pull ourselves together. If we are all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human things—praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts—not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about death. They may break our bodies (a microbe can do that) but they need not dominate our minds.”
Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez boasted that she boosted Google searches about ‘our f****d up tax code’ by attending the Met Gala, arguably the most elitist event in American celebrity culture, in a borrowed dress with the words ‘tax the rich’ on them, in what critics are calling yet another example of her unedifying hypocrisy.
The 31-year-old socialist firebrand attended the event with her boyfriend Riley Roberts after getting ready at The Carlyle Hotel on the Upper East Side.
She claims she went for free to the event, where tables can cost upwards of $200,000, and that it was her responsibility to do so as an elected official.
‘The Met Gala is seen as elite and inaccessible…As a working class woman, [I] wanted to enjoy the event but also break the fourth wall and challenge the industry,’ she proudly told Vogue at the event.
On Tuesday morning, AOC boasted about the surge in Google searches for the words ‘tax the rich’.
She wrote on Instagram: ‘Surge in people looking up and discussing our f****d up tax code is and how we fix it so we can fund childcare, healthcare, climate action and student loan forgiveness for all? Aurora James understood the assignment.’
But she has been slammed for supporting the event by many who say she simply wanted to enjoy the limelight while trying to pass it off as a political protest in yet another example of her tone-deaf hypocrisy.
AOC – who previously posed on the cover of Vanity Fair, drives a $35,000 Tesla and claims to be ‘100% grass roots from the Bronx’ despite growing up in a wealthy NYC suburb – wore a borrowed dress from Brooklyn designer Brother Vellies, a celebrity favorite run by Aurora James and had her make-up done beforehand by a Bobbi Brown artist. Her hair was styled by Vogue stylist Eric Williams and her shoes and bag were also from Brother Vellies.
The only jewelry she wore was a pair of $450 gold hoops from Mejuri and a $65 ring from the same brand.
She didn’t wear a mask, like many of the other guests. The event was for fully vaccinated guests only but the celebrities in attendance – who regularly preach online about COVID rules – ignored the guidance of the CDC and liberal states like California, where masks are recommended indoors regardless of vaccination status.
