Also: Japanese fiction after Haruki Murakami, and more.<\/b>
\nAn inflated art market and new technology lead to more forgeries. It is James Martin\u2019s job to find them. \u201cLike criminals of every stripe, modern forgers have kept easy pace with the techniques that attempt to trap them. The mismatch between the purported age of a painting and the true age of its ingredients is the workhorse of Martin\u2019s technique. So forgers have grown more rigorous in their harvesting of materials, taking the trouble, for instance, to source wooden panels from furniture they know is dateable to the year of the fake they are creating. (The trick isn\u2019t wholly new; Terenzio da Urbino, a 17th-century conman, scrabbled around for filthy old canvases and frames, cleaned them up, and turned them into \u2018Raphaels\u2019.) Forgers also test their own fakes to ensure they\u2019ll pass. Wolfgang Beltracchi, a German artist who served three years in prison for forging paintings worth $45m, surveyed the chemical elements in his works by running them under X-ray fluorescence guns \u2013 the same handheld devices, resembling Star Trek phasers, that many art fairs now train upon their exhibits. Georgina Adam, who wrote Dark Side of the Boom, a book about the art market\u2019s excesses, told me that many forgers are sensibly choosing to falsify 20th-century painters, who used paints and canvases that can still be obtained, and whose abstractions are easier to imitate. \u2018The technical skill needed to forge a Leonardo is colossal, but with someone like Modigliani, it isn\u2019t,\u2019 she said.\u201d
Japanese fiction after Haruki Murakami: \u201cThe American poet Louise Gluck once said that younger writers couldn\u2019t appreciate the shadow cast over her generation by T. S. Eliot. Murakami in Japan is something like that. Yet unlike Eliot in English-speaking nations, Murakami in Japan has been a liberator, casting rays of light instead of a pall, breathing gusts of fresh air into Japan\u2019s literary landscape. Now on the verge of seventy, he generates little of Harold Bloom\u2019s \u2018anxiety of influence\u2019 among his younger peers. For them he has opened three key doors: to licentious play with the Japanese language; to the binary worlds of life in today\u2019s Japanese culture, a hybrid of East and West; and to a mode of personal behaviour \u2013 cool, disciplined, solitary \u2013 in stark contrast to the cliques and clubs of Japan\u2019s past literati.\u201d
How de Gaulle became de Gaulle: \u201cWhen General de Gaulle published the first volume of his war memoirs in 1954, he signed only four presentation copies: for the Pope, the Comte de Paris (France\u2019s royalist pretender), the President of the French Republic and Queen Elizabeth II. One of his associates remarked: \u2018All de Gaulle\u2019 was in that gesture. But what was de Gaulle? Catholic? Conservative? Romantic? Arrogant? All these, surely, and not least ideologically eclectic. His political beliefs were not only enigmatic but were often vague in his own mind. When he took the world stage in June 1940 it was unclear whether he was a royalist, a Christian Democrat or even a proto-fascist.\u201d
M. I. T. has cleared Junot D\u00edaz of sexual misconduct charges .
The Oxford English Dictionary looks for more regional words: \u201cThe OED aims to cover all types of English, including standard English, scientific and technical vocabulary, literary words, slang, and regionalisms. So it\u2019s important to include these words to enable us to present a picture of the English language in all its forms.\u201d
Worcester Art Museum adds signs next to portraits of people who \u201cbenefited\u201d from slavery.
Essay of the Day:
In The New Statesman, Billy Bragg writes about the English folk singer Shirley Collins:
\u201cTraditional folk music has a liminal quality, taking us across the threshold of modernity to a time when songs were handed down through oral transmission. The material lost some of its soul when the Victorian academics who first collected English folk music transcribed the songs for middle-class families to sing around the piano. Further distance was created in the 1960s when the genre was rediscovered by a new generation who reconfigured it for guitar.
\u201cShirley Collins sought to avoid these trappings and return the music to its original setting: \u2018Whenever I sang I felt the old singers standing behind me and I wanted to be the conduit for them, for their spirit, these people who\u2019d kept the songs alive.\u2019
\u201cShe was never closer to those folk than on the recordings she made with her sister Dolly, who accompanied her on the portative pipe organ. It was the ideal backing for Shirley\u2019s unadorned style of singing, the two sisters finding that seamless harmony only attainable by siblings.
\u201cCollins\u2019s first book, America Over the Water, told the story of her 1959 trip to the US with her then lover, the song collector Alan Lomax. Together they travelled through the Appalachian Mountains region, recording material from singers whose voices had been lost amid the cacophony of modern culture. It was during this trip that she found her own voice: \u2018Greatly as I loved the people I met there, deep down I realised that I belonged to England, that I wanted to be an English singer of English songs.\u2019 That sense of belonging resonates throughout this book, along with a fierce determination to represent the working people who sang these songs.\u201d
Read the rest. Why not listen to a recent recording, too.
Photo: Maria Gern
Poem: Scott Cairns, \u201cAdi\u00e1phora\u201d
Forthcoming:
Brian Stanley, Christianity in the Twentieth Century: A World History (Princeton, June 26): \u201c Christianity in the Twentieth Century charts the transformation of one of the world’s great religions during an age marked by world wars, genocide, nationalism, decolonization, and powerful ideological currents, many of them hostile to Christianity. Written by a leading scholar of world Christianity, the book traces how Christianity evolved from a religion defined by the culture and politics of Europe to the expanding polycentric and multicultural faith it is today—one whose growing popular support is strongest in sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, China, and other parts of Asia. Brian Stanley sheds critical light on themes of central importance for understanding the global contours of modern Christianity, illustrating each one with contrasting case studies, usually taken from different parts of the world. Unlike other books on world Christianity, this one is not a regional survey or chronological narrative, nor does it focus on theology or ecclesiastical institutions. Rather, Stanley provides a history of Christianity as a popular faith experienced and lived by its adherents, telling a compelling and multifaceted story of Christendom’s fortunes in Europe, North America, and across the rest of the globe.\u201d
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