Recent stories of note:
“The spectre of the past”
J. S. Barnes, The Critic
The literature of the British Isles is populated by a motley crew of ghosts. Consider, for example, Oscar Wilde’s Sir Simon de Canterville: poor Canterville is a melancholic ghoul. He’s an insomniac who hasn’t slept in the three hundred years since he murdered his wife, though he’s dutifully committed to his “work” of haunting the living. He is terrified, however, of Americans. His old tricks don’t work on them. So when the family of the American minister Hiram B. Otis moves into his manor, he is robbed of his purpose. They’re less concerned with his “unearthly screams” than they are with helping his soul move peacefully into the afterlife, and he soon finds himself hiding from them. Sweet Miss Virginia Otis asks him what he has against Americans, to which he responds, “You have your army,” and more importantly, “the way you speak English!” Wilde’s tale suggests a disparity in the way the people of the New World and those of the British Isles have viewed ghosts and ghost stories. J. S. Barnes explores the isles’ unique relationship to the phantasmic in the pages of The Critic. In the isles, “the pressing down of the past upon the present is palpable,” Barnes writes, so apparitions appear in greater number. Read this essay for an eerie trip beyond the grave.
“What were we all doing here? My 600-mile trip to hear an organ play a D natural”
Yoel Noorali, The Spectator
Speaking of the grave—John Cage continues to laugh from his. His chortling can be heard to this day in the little German town of Halberstadt. Installed there is the organ built to perform his ORGAN2/ASLSP (1987), a song written to last for 639 years. Notes are only introduced or dropped every few years. On those occasions a crowd of a few thousand typically converges on the humble village. The Spectator’s Yoel Noorali joined the throng for the most recent novelty: a D natural that the organ began to hum on February 5 and will hold for the next few decades. Noorali describes the experience as something almost hallucinatory, and swears that, if you listened closely enough, you could hear the sound of “Cage laughing.”
“A secret room in Florence boasts drawings by Michelangelo”
The Economist
Florentine tombs provide the setting for this story: hidden away behind a trap door in the Medici Chapels’ mausoleum is a narrow stairway, at the bottom of which is a small room with eggshell walls. Covering those walls, The Economist tells us, are “graceful nude figures, a falling Phaethon . . . a looming horse’s head and several shapely legs drawn in shadowy charcoal.” The various figures, it has long been rumored, were drawn by Michelangelo himself. The story goes that the master holed up in this room after he fell out of the Medicis’ good graces; he is supposed to have drawn the mysterious images covering the walls by candlelight. The verity of this tale remains in question, but the mere possibility of its truth is enough to attract art-loving crowds. The room itself wasn’t discovered until 1975, and it remained closed to the public until last November. Officials have since opened it to just one hundred visitors a week. Fortunately, someone from The Economist secured a viewing. Here is a detailed and evocative description of the strange space, as well as a clear account of its history.