Pioneer-Era Apples, Antonín Dvořák in Iowa, and Sinning against Shakespeare
Good morning. Gary Taylor’s 2016 New Oxford Shakespeare reattributed the authorship of several Shakespeare plays based on the frequency and sequence of select words. A defense of these reattributions was published in the volume Authorship Companion the following year. The problem is the whole thing is a sham, Brian Vickers writes: “Over and above its claimed attributions, the seemingly professional Authorship Companion contains many defects. David Auerbach described it as a ‘shambolic’ collection, an ‘unreliable grab bag’ in which contributors failed explicitly to declare their criteria, borrowed unsuitable methods from other disciplines (machine learning, biochemistry) and violated key principles of statistics. He was particularly scathing about ‘the poverty of the input data. By restricting their analyses to a handful of primitive signals such as word frequency and word succession, many of these researchers end up coating fundamentally simple (and untenable) findings in a statistical glaze’. This Authorship Companion is unfortunate proof that scholars, journal editors and publishers in the Humanities are prone to being abused by pseudo-scientific methods. Returning to the New Oxford Shakespeare map of the canon, those encroaching colours will be permanent stains on the edition, for every attribution is false. Oxford University Press has a proud record as the world’s leading publisher of scholarly editions of English literature. The trust that senior editors placed in Gary Taylor has been repaid with an opportunistic bundle of untested methods set loose on the greatest author in our language. Shakespeare is not just a national, but an international treasure and it is tragic to contemplate the damage done to culture in general by these editions being used to teach students, and being sold in bookshops to unsuspecting laymen. The Press has just commissioned the New Oxford Marlowe. Among its editors are members of Taylor’s editorial team, and rumour suggests that it will include the Henry VI plays. Many people will fervently hope that on reflection the editors will think it enough to have ruined one major author’s canon.”
In Plough, Nathan Beacom writes about Antonín Dvořák in Iowa: “Dvořák was fascinated by New York, but he found it no place to live, and had some difficulty completing his major projects there. Just when he was getting ready to find some way to return to Europe, his student, Josef Kovařík, convinced him to come for a while to the little town of Spillville, Iowa, instead, promising its woods and people would remind him of home. Dvořák accepted the offer with excitement and soon packed his family onto a train (he loved trains) out west. Within days of arriving in Iowa in 1893, two of his most beautiful works, the American Quartet and Quintet, spilled out of him. It was here also that he refined and titled his freshly completed symphony, From the New World.”
Tara Isabella Burton writes about the latest novelistic response to Jane Austen, and she’s not impressed: “The Other Bennet Sister hits every necessary beat. There is polished, historically adjacent prose — redolent of the period without ever slipping into overly mannered Renaissance fair parody. There is a love triangle as our plucky heroine decides which of the several eligible men pursuing her is the right one to marry. And there is, of course, a happy ending. But as a response text to Austen, The Other Bennet Sister has little to offer beyond the expansion of what Marvel fans would call a cinematic universe. One senses this lack of ambition from the first line: a perfunctory but revealing restating of Pride and Prejudice’s now overly familiar opener. ‘It is a sad fact of life that if a young woman is unlucky enough to come into the world without expectations, she had better do all she can to ensure she is born beautiful.’”
John J. Miller revisits Mark Twain’s Innocents Abroad: “During his life, The Innocents Abroad sold more copies than any other book he wrote, which means it outsold the better-known tales about Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. The traits that have made Twain abidingly popular — humor, irreverence, deep thinking about the nature and promise of the United States — shine from its pages. It also reveals what happened when Twain broke the Greek government’s quarantine, evaded the police, and visited the Parthenon by moonlight.”
The pianist who sold his soul: “Cortot was the first artist and only musician to serve in France’s Nazi-sanctioned occupation government during World War II, becoming Marshal Pétain’s high commissioner for fine arts and (as one historian put it) ‘Vichy’s official music czar.’ An energetic and unapologetic collabo, he also performed in Nazi Germany and was friendly with such prominent Nazis as Albert Speer. After the war, he was duly brought before a purge committee that banned him for a year from public performance in France, and the members of the Paris Conservatory Orchestra refused to play for him when he sought to resume concertizing. But Cortot’s disgrace was short-lived. Every French musician who performed other than sporadically during the Occupation had been obliged to collaborate with Vichy to at least some degree, and few were prepared to single out as uniquely guilty so great an artist. Within a few years Cortot had relaunched his career, and most of the people who thereafter wrote about him chose either to ignore his wartime conduct or imply that it was of minor consequence. This helps to explain why there is as yet no primary-source biography of Cortot, whether in French or English. To this day, most of his admirers are reluctant to talk about what he did, why he did it, and why it matters.”
Essay of the Day:
In AP, Gillian Flacus writes about the discovery of ten pioneer-ear apples in the Pacific Northwest and the retirees responsible for the find:
“A team of retirees that scours the remote ravines and windswept plains of the Pacific Northwest for long-forgotten pioneer orchards has rediscovered 10 apple varieties that were believed to be extinct — the largest number ever unearthed in a single season by the nonprofit Lost Apple Project.
“The Vietnam veteran and former FBI agent who make up the nonprofit recently learned of their tally from last fall’s apple sleuthing from expert botanists at the Temperate Orchard Conservancy in Oregon, where all the apples are sent for study and identification. The apples positively identified as previously ‘lost’ were among hundreds of fruits collected in October and November from 140-year-old orchards tucked into small canyons or hidden in forests that have since grown up around them in rural Idaho and Washington state.
“‘It was just one heck of a season. It was almost unbelievable. If we had found one apple or two apples a year in the past, we thought were were doing good. But we were getting one after another after another,’ said EJ Brandt, who hunts for the apples along with fellow amateur botanist David Benscoter. ‘I don’t know how we’re going to keep up with that.’
“Each fall, Brandt and Benscoter spend countless hours and log hundreds of miles searching for ancient — and often dying — apple trees across the Pacific Northwest by truck, all-terrain vehicle and on foot. They collect hundreds of apples from long-abandoned orchards that they find using old maps, county fair records, newspaper clippings and nursery sales ledgers that can tell them which homesteader bought what apple tree and when the purchase happened.
“By matching names from those records with property maps, they can pinpoint where an orchard might have been — and they often find a few specimens still growing there. The pair carefully note the location of each tree using GPS and tag the tree with a plastic band before bagging the apples in zip-close bags and shipping them to the Oregon experts for identification.”
Read the rest. (HT: Richard Starr)
Photos: Colorado
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