Recent links of note:
“Cold comfort forms—the plein-air painters who braved the winter”
Anthea Callen, Apollo
I’ll be waking up in the small hours tomorrow to venture out ice fishing on an estuary of the White Sea, just beyond the reach of the Arctic Circle. Though I doubt I shall return warm, my hope is at least to come home dry with something to show for the day’s effort. Here is a short history from Anthea Callen in Apollo of the painters, like the irrepressible Claude Monet, who have submitted to this sort of wintery punishment—and those like Renoir, who prefered to stay home by the fire.
“‘The Moth and the Mountain’ Review: The Amateur’s Ascent”
Michael O’Donnell, The Wall Street Journal
Maurice Wilson’s biography reads like something pulled straight from the pages of George MacDonald Fraser’s Flashman novels. In 1933, Wilson, a mystic, adventurer, and veteran of World War I, flew solo all the way from Britain to India and walked three hundred miles—at one point disguised as a Tibetan priest—to reach Mount Everest, all the while attempting to lose the irate British authorities who were hot on his trail. Once there, he made a valiantly quixotic attempt to reach the mountain’s icebound summit by himself, with barely any climbing equipment or experience to his name. Read on for more from Wilson’s swashbuckling, tragic, and touching story in Michael O’Donnell’s review of a new book on his life.
“How Boz got his fizz”
Annette Federico, The Times Literary Supplement
If you’re caught in the middle of the northeast blizzard—or high and dry elsewhere—it’s as fitting a time as any to revisit the works of Charles Dickens. A Christmas Carol, anyone? If you’re lost for a place to start in the Dickens canon, I’d have to make a pitch for my own personal favorite, Bleak House. Let’s hope that the snow of today doesn’t turn into the mud of Dickens’s hellish description of London’s mire from the book’s opening: “As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill.” Once you’re settled in with the book of your choice, have a look at Annette Federico’s survey of a slew of new books on Dickens released this year, the 250th anniversary of his death.
From the Editors:
“An Iconic Beacon Shines Anew.”
By James Panero, The Wall Street Journal
Podcasts:
“Music for a While #38: Bits and pieces”
Jay Nordlinger, The New Criterion’s music critic, talks music—but, more important, plays music.
Dispatch:
“The glorious curmudgeon of Christmas,” by Steve Morris. On C. S. Lewis and Xmas vs. Christmas.