This week: the American Dream, the English imagination, a Saint-Saëns opera, “America’s only newspaper” & more from the world of culture.
Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness: Britain and the American Dream, by Peter Moore (Farrar, Straus and Giroux): A central irony of the American Revolution is that, in breaking away from Mother England, our upstart country was implementing ideas that had been nurtured across the pond for some time. So the historian Peter Moore gives us a heritage of aspirations in his new Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness, a kind of exegesis on that pregnant Jeffersonian phrase. Tracing this “American Dream” through the writings of such English contemporaries as Samuel Johnson, Thomas Paine, the historian Catharine Macaulay, and the politician John Wilkes, Moore reminds us that the ideals embodied in the Declaration of Independence are by no means bounded to our shores. —RE
Imagining England’s Past: Inspiration, Enchantment, Obsession, by Susan Owens (Thames & Hudson): “And did those feet, in ancient time/ Walk upon Englands mountains green . . . ?” asked William Blake in a poem first printed around 1808 and now more familiar as a lyric from Hubert Parry’s 1916 hymn “Jerusalem.” The notion of Jesus’s visit to England is but one of the many tales discussed by Susan Owens in Imagining England’s Past, a fascinating study of the ways various generations of the English have conceived of their nation’s history. With discussions of everything from Stonehenge to the self-conscious medievalism of the pre-Raphaelites, the book ranges widely to show an England that has always had more than a bit of the mystical about it. —BR
Henri VIII, by Camille Saint-Saëns, performed by American Symphony Orchestra at Fisher Center at Bard College (through July 30): Last week I wrote about another forgotten opera with a historical subject, Donizetti’s Poliuto. This week comes Saint-Saëns’s Henri VIII, which features a rogues’ gallery of Tudor characters: the eponymous Henry, Catherine of Aragon, Anne Boleyn, Thomas Cranmer, and the Duke of Norfolk (though More and Cromwell fail to show). In opera, history can often serve merely as a convenient plot device, but to Saint-Saëns’s credit, he researched the music of Henry’s England and included English folk and concert music in his score (you might recognize a flight or two of William Byrd’s). Through July 30, a fully staged performance is on at Bard College’s Fisher Center with the American Symphony Orchestra conducted by Leon Botstein. —IS
County Highway, edited by David Samuels & Walter Kirn, published by Donald Rosenfeld: County Highway is a new magazine with a modest name and a big project. The magazine—which takes the form of a twenty-page broadsheet laid out like a nineteenth-century newspaper—was conceived as a response to the “blob” of content excreted into American culture every day by the soft despots currently tyrannizing said culture. Highway’s approach is bifocal, setting its sights on local stories with national implications and national stories with local implications; one will find in the pulpy pages of its first issue reportage on a Shih Tzu–eating bobcat and wheat-crop failure, an interview with RFK Jr. on falconry, a takedown of Silicon Valley’s totalitarianism, a classifieds section complete with romantic inquiries, and more. And here’s the kicker: County Highway cannot be found online. While one can subscribe online for snail-mail delivery of this first issue, the only way to get a hard copy of it today is to visit one of the independent book or record shops carrying the paper. This Luddite approach is intended to compel the prospective reader into these essential stores. County Highway promises to be vital reading for anyone interested in American life. —LL
By the Editors:
“Jane Clark Scharl delivers artful truths in Sonnez Les Matines”
Robert S. Erickson, The Spectator World.
Podcasts:
“Music for a While #78: Musical moments.” Jay Nordlinger, The New Criterion’s music critic, talks music—but, more important, plays music.
“Roger Kimball & Freddy Gray on Ron DeSantis.” Roger Kimball joins the Americano podcast to discuss what went wrong for the presidential candidate.
From the Archives:
“Kandinsky & the birth of abstraction,” by Hilton Kramer (March 1995). On “Kandinsky: Compositions” at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Dispatch:
“Ruler roulette,” by Warren Frye. On The Ruling Families of Rus: Clan, Family and Kingdom by Christian Raffensperger & Donald Ostrowski.