McKim, Mead & White, Hall of Fame for Great Americans, 1897-1899. Bronx, NY.

 

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This week: Ministers, Man Booker, and McKim, Mead & White.

FictionSwimming Home, by Deborah Levy (Bloomsbury): Last week I discussed the foibles of the Man Booker Prize process in relation to Edward St Aubyn’s Lost For Words. That, and this week’s unbearably muggy weather, reminded me of another recently shortlisted book, Deborah Levy’s 2012 novel Swimming Home. In this slim volume, Levy conveys with spare prose the stifling ennui of an affluent English family’s summer vacation in the south of France. Levy’s skillful, provocative language keeps the reader engaged, overcoming what some might deem a narrow topic. More a sketch of a certain destructive lifestyle than a novel proper, Levy’s book is an absorbing examination of the burdens of choice that we all face. —BR

Nonfiction: Comedy Rules: From the Cambridge Footlights to Yes Prime Minister, by Jonathan Lynn (Faber & Faber): Want some light summer reading? If you are (as I am) a fan of the BBC series Yes Minister and Yes Prime Minster, I suspect you will enjoy Comedy Rules: From the Cambridge Footlights to Yes Prime Minister by one of the series' (and resulting offshoots’) two authors, Jonathan Lynn. (The other was Anthony Jay.) Comedy Rules is half, or maybe five-eighths, memoir, presented in a series of 150 rules for the writing (and reflections on the nature of) comedy. "Rule #1: There are exceptions to every rule in this book. Except this one, of course.” There are longueurs, crotchets, and passages that some readers might wish to preface with the legend “Detour,” but (as cabinet minister Sir Humphrey might put it) on the whole, taking everything into account, balancing this against that, at the end of the day, the book is a charming way to beguile the odd hour. Even some of the quirks are amusing, for example Lynn’s ambition to stage two productions of Macbeth seriatim, same cast (except for the title role), same set, same overall direction, but one would be played straight, as a tragedy (Lynn wanted Brian Cox for this version), the other as a comedy, for which John Cleese was Lynn’s man. He explained his idea to the director Peter Hall. “Peter stared at me for about a minute, in complete silence. Then he simply changed the subject and never referred to the idea again.” Lynn also rehearses that brilliant moment (one of my favorites) in Yes Minister when Jim Hacker, the hapless but (partly) lovable Minister comments that if there were votes to be had by pushing a certain policy, he certainly didn't want to look a gift horse in the mouth.

Tony wrote this line for Humphrey: ‘I put it to you, Minister, that you are looking a Trojan horse in the mouth.’

I then wrote a line for Hacker: “You mean, if we look closely at this gift horse we’ll find it’s full of Trojans?”  I passed the sheet of paper across the desk to Tony [who had, like Sir Humphrey, taken a first in Classics]. “Well, no,” he said. “If one had looked the Trojan horse in the mouth one would have found Greeks inside, because the Greeks gave the horse to the Trojans. So technically it wasn’t a Trojan horse at all, it was a Greek horse. Hence the tag Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes, which is usually and somewhat inaccurately translated as ‘Beware of Greeks bearing gifts.’”

I foolishly asked what a better translation of the Greek tag would be “No,” said Tony patiently, “it’s a Latin tag. It’s obvious really, the Greeks would hardly have advised other people to beware of Greeks. But there’s another way you can tell . . .”

He proceeded to give a little grammatical explanation of the phrase, distinguishing between the use of the “os” ending in Greek from its use in Latin, etc. Lynn digested all this and realized it would be perfect for the third major character of the series, the Minister’s benignly pedantic Principal Private Secretary Bernard Woolly. So they bunged it in. If this is the sort of thing you like, you’ll like Comedy Rules. —RK

Poetry: What Pet Should I Get?, by Dr. Seuss (Random House): Summer calls for a certain lightness in all pursuits: poetry should be no different. It is no time for Eliot’s cold, musty Waste Land; in summer we crave something more buoyant, less serious, as it were. And so this week we highlight the posthumous release of a new book by Dr. Seuss. Though Seuss (the erstwhile Theodor Geisel) may not rank among the great versifiers of our time, there is much joy to be had in his doggerel. His newly released What Pet Should I Get? should pair nicely with a glass of lemonade. —BR

Art: The Hall of Fame for Great Americans and Gould Memorial Library: With the reopening of the High Bridge, now is a great time to explore the beauty of the Bronx. You heard right. The Bronx contains some of the most picturesque, historic, yet overlooked sites in New York. One day recently I biked to the the nearly forgotten architectural wonders of the Hall of Fame for Great Americans and Gould Memorial Library, both designed at the turn of the last century by Stanford White for what was once the uptown campus of New York University. The brainchild of Dr. Henry Mitchell MacCracken, Chancellor of New York University from 1891 to 1910, the Hall of Fame contains the bronze portrait busts of 98 honorees along a 630-foot colonnade that wraps around the back of the Stanford White campus. The building at the center, Gould Memorial Library, is also must-see for its magnificent gold dome, which Christopher Gray has rightfully called "One of New York's most spectacular interiors, just as sumptuous as the New York Public Library and just as dazzling as the Chrysler Building." —JP

Music: Paul Lewis, at Tanglewood: This will be one of the busiest weeks of the summer festival, as the annual "Festival of Contemporary Music" presents concerts with Manny Ax and Nicholas Phan. The highlight of the week, though, is a classic: on Tuesday Paul Lewis will play the last three of Beethoven's piano sonatas. —ECS

From the archive: Building the Gilded Age, by Michael J. Lewis: We revisit McKim, Mead & White in person, while in 2010 Michael J. Lewis revisited their work in our October issue of that year.

From our latest issue: Cuddlers & cutthroats, by James Bowman: As the United Kingdom’s Conservative government attempts to navigate the new political environment, James Bowman dissects the election coverage.

 

 

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