Paris: A Short History, by Jeremy Black (Thames & Hudson): All eyes will be on Paris this summer when the globalist circus that is the Olympics comes to town. Whether the city can pull off the daunting task of hosting such a crush of visitors remains to be seen. Expect some amount of chaos in this “metropolis of dress and debauchery.” Those words come from the Scottish poet David Mallet in 1735 and are among the many apt quotations drawn out by the prolific historian Jeremy Black in his recently published Paris: A Short History. Here is a lucid and brisk account refreshingly free of cant. —BR
The Aztec Myths: A Guide to the Ancient Stories and Legends, by Camilla Townsend (Thames & Hudson): Overlooking Mexico City’s southern edge looms Popocatépetl—El Popo, as it is affectionately nicknamed—an active volcano named for a great Aztec warrior. Long ago, Popo was sent to war by his emperor, and in exchange he was promised the ruler’s most beautiful daughter, Iztaccíhuatl. But the emperor had played a trick on Popo: jealous of his daughter’s love for the soldier, he intended to have him killed. The king thus told his daughter that her fiancé had died in battle. In despair, she died of heartbreak. But Popo survived the war. When he returned, he buried her body before flying into a fiery rage. The gods then turned the two of them into neighboring mountains. Today, Popo’s wrath manifests itself in the volcano’s periodic eruptions, and Iztaccíhuatl sleeps just north of him. Such colorful fables, both familiar and foreign to Westerners, are found throughout Aztec mythology. These narratives are rich but often inaccessible to English speakers—fortunately, Camilla Townsend’s The Aztec Myths is dedicated to answering this problem. In this compact effort, Townsend goes a long way in illuminating this tangled and captivating tradition. —LL
“The Wider World & Scrimshaw,” at the New Bedford Whaling Museum, Massachusetts (on view June 14): “The Wider World & Scrimshaw,” opening this week at the New Bedford Whaling Museum, looks to the rich cross-cultural exchange that occurred between Yankee and native whalemen over a period of two hundred fifty years. The exhibition brings together three hundred objects from the museum’s archive of whaling folkcraft, including the largest collection of scrimshaw in the world, and places them in conversation with indigenous whaling art from the Arctic, the Pacific, and Oceania. With materials ranging from coconut shells, whale teeth, walrus ivory, and human hair, the exhibition celebrates the creative ingenuity that connected disparate cultures across the centuries around their common cetaceous pursuit. —JP
Ockeghem Marathon, featuring the Clarion Choir & Orchestra (June 12): From the Belles Heures of Jean de France, Duc de Berry to the Mérode Altarpiece to the Unicorn Tapestries, there are few better places on these shores to experience the art and material culture of fifteenth-century Europe than the Met Cloisters. An extra dimension can be added to that experience this Wednesday at the Cloisters from 3 p.m. to 8 p.m, when the top-flight Clarion Choir will perform a marathon of music by Johannes Ockeghem, in celebration of that pre-eminent Franco-Flemish composer’s six-hundredth (“give or take”) birthday. The marathon is sold out, but tickets are available for a “best of” concert the following day. —IS
Podcasts:
“Jeremy Black & James Panero discuss ‘Britain & the Middle East’”
On who’s to blame for today’s conflict.
By the Editors:
Roger Kimball, The Epoch Times
From the Archives:
“Anti-Communism and the Sontag circle,” by Hilton Kramer (September 1986). On fashionable anti-Communism.